Shark Bite (Cyborg Shifters Book 3) Page 5

  A hand came around her forearm and she jolted around to face her sister, a finger over her lips. Janet dragged her into their room, shared for now, with both bunks descended from the wall panels. Her sister closed the door behind them and Rylie tossed her bag on her bed.

  “What’s with the shush?”

  “They can hear,” Janet whispered, turning to face her. “Keep your voice down.”

  Rylie’s eyes shifted to the closed door before going back to her sister. “What do you mean they can hear?”

  “Because they can. I looked it up on the network last night. They can also see much farther than we can, especially at night.”

  “Do you think they can hear us in here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sighed and opened her bag, quickly changing into her swimwear and grunge clothes, feeling moderately more presentable and less bedraggled.

  “I don’t like this,” Janet said.

  “I don’t either but it’s already done. Netto promised he could fix whatever juju is happening. We can at least give them a chance.”

  “So you spoke to him alone?”

  She willed herself not to blush. “Last night. He was by the beach when I left the docks.”

  Janet laughed under her breath, “But those teeth... I’m surprised you didn’t run away. You know what they say about sharp teeth.”

  “What?” Was there a saying about sharp teeth?

  “They’re that way to tear through meat.”

  Rylie flashed her sister a deadpan expression. “I don’t see you running away from them. Anyway,” she moved to change the subject, “We’re here now and onboard. Da would have to forcibly remove us if he doesn’t want us to come along if he changed his mind. I’m surprised he didn’t wake us.”

  “Or he’d have the Cyborgs do it for him.”

  Rylie watched as her sister tied up her hair and applied gloss to her lips. The faint hint of lavender reached her nose and she narrowed her eyes, studying Janet’s getup. “You need to promise me something...”

  “What?”

  “You won’t sleep with them,” Rylie leveled. “Please, Janet. Please promise me!”

  Her sister pursed her lips. “You think they’ll be that easy?”

  Rylie grabbed Janet’s hand and begged. “Please. I don’t want to see you get hurt. They’re not normal.” The thought of her sister with Netto sparked a twinge of jealousy. She’ll use him. And Zeph. Rylie forced Janet to meet her eyes. Then leave him. Leave both of them. “They won’t be manipulated,” she said under her breath. “Promise me.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to try.”

  “There’s no information you could possibly glean from them. They’ve probably encountered a hundred women like you in their life.”

  “Harsh,” Janet tugged her hand away. “You don’t have to be such a bitch. It’s not like I haven’t protected our family. I just go about it my own way. And unlike yours, my way works.” She placed her hand on the doorknob. “Anyways, maybe it’ll be fun. All men are willing to talk if you ply them with enough spirit and the promise of a fuck.” She shrugged again, “I wonder which one I can get in bed first. Wanna make a bet?”

  Rylie looked away. Her sister had always been a siren, or at least that was what her parents called her. A witch of the waters. One who wouldn’t be silenced and gleefully led men to their deaths. More like to their beds. She had read about them on the network: beauty beyond compare, voices that could seduce, deadly in their intentions. Apparently, they were ancient myths, but whenever she looked at Janet with her current victim, she believed there was some truth in those myths.

  Calling her a siren was right.

  She sighed and let her misgivings pass. “I won’t wager with you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “That’s too bad,” Janet laughed. “I would’ve put my money on Zeph.”

  Rylie ran her fingers through her long, tangled hair. “I would put my money on him too. Just, please, be careful.”

  Her sister winked. “Trust me, I always am.” Janet leaned forward and whispered, “They’ll spill all their secrets.” She twisted the knob and walked out the door. Rylie followed shortly after, only to stop at the open doorway of the Cyborg’s quarters, her eyes landing back onto the open duffle.

  Weapons. It repeated in her head. She lowered her breath and tiptoed in, boosted on by the loud music from above and opened the bag further. The dull sheen of metal, mixed with powered-off electronics became a jumble under her gaze.

  She licked her lips and checked the corridor, finding it empty, before she displaced the top tech. Her fingers shook as she lifted the largest piece, a long cylindrical tube with a connector at one end and glass at the other to find something utterly familiar.

  A stockpile of guns.

  A wave of heat hit her back.

  She pulled her hand away but knew it was too late.

  “Need something?” Netto’s deep voice sounded directly behind her. She turned around, wincing, and willing away the immediate perspiration of sweat on her brow.

  “No.” She met his grey eyes above her, his head bent down awkwardly, his frame too large for the space. The Cyborg filled up the doorframe, and part of the quarters, as well as the area beyond in the hallway. I’m not only caught, I’m trapped. When he didn’t say anything and didn’t move, she continued, “Can I go?”

  His heat filled the small space and made it hard to breathe.

  “What are you doing then?” Netto didn’t move, instead, remained a barrier. She saw the sharp edges of his teeth as he spoke.

  “Looking in the bag.”

  “Why?”

  Rylie licked her dry lips. “Curiosity,” she admitted. Snooping, she said to herself.

  “They’re weapons.”

  “I figured that out,” she snapped, and for a brief moment, she thought she saw a smile flash over his lips. “Why do you have them?”

  Netto looked down at the bag, unpinning her once again. “Protection.”

  “Protection... From what?” Rylie followed his eyes back to the bag. She vaguely realized that the music had died above deck.

  “From anything that would hurt you.”

  Rylie didn’t know what to say, only that she all at once felt a strong wave of comfort wash over her. His proximity had gone from unnerving to nice in the beat of a second. She had the urge to burrow into his chest and wrap her arms around him, to soak up all the protection he was willing to give. She looked back at the Cyborg to search his face but it remained devoid of any emotion.

  She liked protection. And safety. The homestead made her feel safe and so did the watership.

  “Thank...you,” she choked out.

  Rylie held her breath as he reached around her and pulled out a small sheathed knife from the bag. His frame twisted to accommodate his size in the small space. He offered it to her.

  “Take it.”

  Their fingers touched as she relieved him of the weapon. It was light in her grip. “I have weapons to protect myself.” Rylie unsheathed the dagger and twisted the blade around, finding it unusual compared to the knives she wielded to skin swimmers. Her finger caught a hook on the side and pressed it. A red laser shot out to surround the edges of the blade.

  “A laser dagger,” he said, his voice above her ear, “will penetrate anything with enough force.”

  Her hair shifted against her scalp. The Cyborg’s mouth inches away from her head. Goosebumps prickled over her skin.

  The glow from the dagger cast everything in a blood-red light, muddying Netto’s blueish skin into a brown. It also made his proximity more intimate. She clicked the dagger off just as the buzz of the watership turning on vibrated the walls.

  “Will it burn the case?”

  “No.”

  Rylie sheathed the weapon and held it against her chest. She moved to escape the room. “Thank you. I’ll keep it with me.” Her fingers tightened their grasp. She couldn’t bring herself to meet Netto’s eyes. “I think
we should head back up.”

  Netto hunched lower and turned, backing up into the hallway, slowly freeing her as he maneuvered in an awkward angle. She scurried past him but stopped at the stairs, turning back to look at him.

  “I forgot your jacket!”

  “I won’t need it.” His whole frame moved and collided with the wall as he shrugged.

  “It gets cold at night, and I have a feeling you won’t fit on that bunk.” Rylie smiled at the image, feeling the sway of the ship pulling away from the dock beneath her. Netto grunted and she took it as assent.

  She coughed, realizing what she had said could be portrayed as flirting, and went up the stairs now being the one to free her previous captor. Regardless of his size, she heard him following her. Rylie didn’t want him to be another notch on the bed for her sister.

  The glass enclosure came into view, still clouded by the thick morning fog. If she wasn’t aware of every shuffle and buzz of the ship, it would appear as if they were still docked.

  Da sat glumly on the captain’s seat staring at a large hologram radar. He didn’t look up when she peered over his shoulder, watching the steady increase of distance grow between them and the shore. Netto passed behind her and up through onto the top deck.

  “What is it, Buggy?”

  Rylie waited until she was sure Netto was gone before leaning down to answer.

  “They have guns. Lots of them.”

  Quinten Montihan, her mentor and sire, the head of the Montihan Settlement and owner of its agri-lots, looked away from the controls and caught her eyes.

  “Good. We may need them.”

  It was enough for her stomach to ball up into a fist, hollow and hard. Rylie stepped away from him and looked out the window toward the water she could barely see. The sheath of the dagger rested firmly in her grip.

  Chapter Seven

  Netto overlooked the agri-lot. It was the nearest to the settlement and had only taken twenty minutes of travel by watership. They never fully left the shallows and not much but schools of fish passed beneath the boat.

  The mist dispersed as the morning sun came out. He rubbed his hands together, waiting for the ship to slow down. They approached a barricade of rocks that lined the agri-lot. The water within the lot was shielded by those rocks and it gave it a mirrored effect. He could see everything, straight down to the sand and nuggets at the bottom, and the abundant, undisturbed wildlife throughout.

  Zeph hunched over their personal sensory system that fed them continuous updates.

  “You smell like her.”

  Netto looked back to see his partner wearing a lopsided smirk. He did smell like Rylie but had filtered it out. It was safer that way. “Not for long.”

  Zeph’s smirk widened. “There’s not much out here. Should we be on the lookout for anything...monstrous below the waters?”

  “We should always be on the lookout,” Netto replied, checking his own gear as the glass enclosure lifted away from the boat and pulled back into its panels. It went down in threes: the top deck lowered first, followed by the stern, and once that had peeled back from the seal, the doors dropped straight into the ship. What had looked like a bullet now appeared as a high-tech tugboat.

  “You’ve been in these waters before,” Zeph stated more than asked.

  “The oceanic survey was never completed.”

  Zeph chuckled, then leaned back into a huff of full-on laughter. The noise of his sardonic snigger had Janet appearing from the steps, and it died away into a smile.

  “Leave it to the government to lie.” Zeph’s eyes never left the girl as she came forward. “Good morning, beautiful.”

  Netto tuned them out. The ship came to a smooth stop beneath them and when he looked over the side, the water was visible under the mist. He linked with Zeph’s readings and found nothing unusual within the vicinity. Do I even know what unusual would be?

  He peeled off his shirt and flexed, running diagnostics on his internal metalloid structure. There was one thing he and Zeph had in common, that nearly all other Cyborgs couldn’t relate to: salt-water shifters had to constantly maintain themselves from the deterioration that water brought.

  The need to be in it, constantly. An obsession.

  The allure of an endless ocean, to which outer space could never compare, was heady. Especially to a shark.

  Netto looked up when his systems finished, his nanobots at the ready to wear off the worst of it, to Janet staring at him. He couldn’t discern the look in her eye so he ignored it and prepared to jump overboard.

  Montihan joined them, followed by Rylie—who looked at everything but him.

  “This is our closest lot and one of the last ones to be affected. The stones here are our most viable this season,” Montihan said as he lowered a drop-off platform. “The outer lots aren’t in season.”

  “Nothing is in season,” Janet murmured under her breath. She tugged off her shirt, revealing a wetsuit underneath that left nothing to the imagination. For a moment, a plume of lavender breezed by before it vanished into the fog. His nose twitched as his systems dispersed it. The smell of Earth on an alien planet, countless miles away, was strange to him.

  “Why do you say that?” Zeph asked, his eyes narrowing on the blonde but her gaze was still on his partner. Netto tensed under her blatant perusal and felt relief when the girl looked away. He glanced at Rylie who seemed even more tense, her movements stiff as she pulled on a pair of water shoes.

  “The swimmers have yet to arrive. They lay eggs in the jetties that pollinate the nuggets. There have been some, but not the enormous groups we usually expect. If their mating cycles are disrupted, it would affect our crops. And even if it did, if we have a rather stormy season, they move onto one of the other lots farther out. Our lots cycle with their cycle. Maybe someone is breaking the cycle?” Her question came out thoughtfully.

  “I take it they cycle through all the lots up and down the coast?”

  Montihan nodded.

  “Has been that way since the EPED set up Kepler for colonization. There have been fewer groups throughout but we still get’em coming through. It would be a gargantuan effort for someone to harvest enough swimmers to hurt us, and I think we’d have heard about it by now. That amount of fish on the local market wouldn’t go unnoticed, not with how small our community is and not with how often my wife goes to the colony.”

  The brume began to clear around them as broken rays of Kepler’s sun threaded through the mist. Their insular circle widened and as Netto looked around, he could see out into the water, beyond the rocks that encircled the inlet. He ran his tongue across his teeth, eager to transform within the waves.

  “They’re good eating?” Zeph inquired, pooling information between them. They kept their wireless connection up.

  “No. Not unless you like a lot of bones in your fish. The effort that goes into preparing ‘em isn’t worth the outcome.” Montihan sat down beside Netto. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Check your lots and look for disparities. If the results are inconclusive, we’ll head out to the other settlements and find out what they know,” Zeph said. It was brief and vague. Netto nodded in agreement.

  “So, nothing we can’t do ourselves.” Janet stood up and smiled, feigning sweetness with her blatant taunt.

  Everyone looked at her. He even noticed Rylie’s head lift in his periphery. Janet walked over to her sister before descending the stairs to the lower deck; Rylie quickly disrobed down to her wetsuit and followed her.

  Something shifted inside of him and it wasn’t his metal plating. A voracious need bloomed from his chest that affected every muscle, every fiber of his crafted being. It was more than the need to protect, though he couldn’t quite place what it was. But as his eyes drifted across the slim lines of her toned body, her skin bronzed to perfection under the ocean’s sun, he wanted to exert himself over her.

  Netto’s heart pounded. It was primitive and visceral, consuming and dangerous. He pictured himself sinki
ng his teeth into Rylie’s perfect skin, her blood flooding his mouth, as he claimed what he wanted.

  Her.

  The breathy, beach smell that she emitted called to his baser instincts. Both of his hands clenched into fists at his sides. An erotic image of her small body, exposed to his beast and under his command, flooded his eyes with red.

  He heard the splash of water as the girls entered the ocean. He was barely aware of Montihan popping open a beer, ignorant of the danger both of his daughters were in.

  It wasn’t until Zeph clasped his shoulder that brought him back to the present.

  “You need to calm down.”

  “She’s mine.” The words were a low but audible hiss through his teeth. Netto didn’t care if Montihan heard him.

  “You’re going to kill her if you don’t find control.” Zeph’s hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. The words burned through his thoughts. The raw tension slowly eased. His partner’s hand lifted away.

  When the red vanished from his eyes, apprehension took its place as Zeph came into view. “Thank you,” he grunted, glancing at their host, who was busy poring over his wristcon and a hologram of data.

  “You’re welcome,” Zeph lowered his voice just enough for only him to hear. “If this was any other mission, I would encourage you to take her, but this isn’t. It’s diplomatic. And her father is sitting not twelve feet away. Fuck, Netto.”

  “How do you control yourself?” Netto asked.

  “Are you asking me for advice?” He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t tell me you’re a...virgin,” Zeph guffawed, and leaned forward, eyes searching him. “And here I was, about to rip you to shreds and plant your twisted head on a spike.”

  The statement caught Netto off-guard. In fact, everything about the last several minutes unnerved him, from his loss of control to Zeph's amused rage.

  Netto bared his teeth at the Cyborg. "You'll be dead before you land your first blow." The plating in his back shifted, ready to expand out and attach itself to his head, to his legs, to every mechanical part of him.