The Black Rider Read online

We were all naked in the shower, and he wanted to eat? Silly angel. Suddenly, it was like the bottom of my stomach dropped out, and I remembered all I had eaten was questionable jerky. My stomach let out this tremendous growl. Leif turned the water off in an instance.

  “More on this later. Speedy needs to eat.”

  Having to choose between two hot naked angels and eating was super unfair, but nothing about this was fair. Leif said to be continued, but we were on limited time. I’d never met Dice. I had no idea what he could and couldn’t do with a radio show. We had our own work to do here. I still needed to go through that flash drive to see if Doctor X found a way to infect the rest of the world, and Leif promised a vaccine to a good portion of the border wall.

  We had shit to do, but for now, I needed to stuff my face because everyone was right. I’d withered down to practically nothing, and I needed to put more weight on if I would be smashing skulls with Smurfette.

  Chapter 24

  I

  didn’t realize how truly exhausted I was until I woke up the next morning. I had a feeling I passed out in my pork, and Aeron and Leif had to carry me to bed. I didn’t wake up with food on me. I hope they didn’t have to wipe food off my face. I didn’t move until the sun was up the next morning.

  We were back in our usual positions. I slept too late, and Aeron and Leif were going through flash drives. Breakfast was waiting like it always was, so I sat down and started eating.

  “Anything good?”

  “It was a brilliant idea to label these flash drives. I’ve been focusing on the research files. It’s pretty horrific. Just as bad as the original Rage Head mutation where they were kidnapping kids off the street and injecting them until they got the results they wanted. The soldiers guarding the place were finding survivors and promising them food if they took part in a vaccine trial. They kept doing it even as people were dying. They’d just toss them in the incinerator and find more,” Leif said.

  “So, he did find a way to make things worse.”

  I felt my stomach drop, and I lost my appetite. We still didn’t have a vaccine or a way to fix this. If I hadn’t lost my shit in Los Angeles, maybe we would have made it to San Quintin sooner. Perhaps it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I could have gotten us more time.

  “I don’t think he did. Remember, Ariel. He had limited supplies of Patient Q’s blood. He couldn’t do anything with it until he figured out how to tweak your blood to get rid of the immunity. He was doing all kinds of things to your blood and injecting it into people. That’s what killed them. Your blood, by itself, is harmless. Mixed with dangerous chemicals or demon blood is what hurts people.”

  “But you don’t know for sure.”

  “I’m still going through the research, but if he had managed it, it would have been done by now. As I said, the first trials took several decades to get the Rage Mutation.”

  “Then, don’t we need several decades to wipe them all out?”

  Aeron just leaned back on the sofa and smirked.

  “Doctor X needed several decades. Leif is not a fucked up mad scientist human. He probably has several theories, now that he’s looked at your blood.”

  “I actually do, Speedy. When you’re done eating, I plan on testing a few. Did you want to go through the flash drive again, or did you want to go kill things with Aeron?”

  “I need to go through that flash drive. Sorry, Aeron. We can kill things together later.”

  “I totally get it, Speedy. If I were any good in that lab, I’d be in there with you. My specialty is death, not science.”

  “I know. And we need to thin the Rage Head population as much as we can. I’m done eating. Let’s get to the lab.”

  Leif and I walked side by side to the lab. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s because even if I couldn’t remember everything, I was just comfortable around him. I could feel that I knew him at one point, and I trusted him. The memories I could remember were all excellent. I slipped my hand into his and held it on the way to the lab.

  Leif looked surprised, but he said nothing. He gave my hand a comforting squeeze as we walked in silence. That was one thing I liked about Leif. He talked a lot. He gave me a lot of information about myself that Aeron was too scared to. He joked all the time, but he also knew when to shut the fuck up and just have a moment of silence.

  Going into his lab always set me on edge. It wasn’t just my history of getting experimented on, and at any time, he could want another blood sample. The answers to ending all this would happen in this lab, and we didn’t have decades for him to figure it out. The answers to what they did to me while I was in that coma were on the flash drive I was going through. I couldn’t take back the years that were stolen from me, but I could find out everything I could so I could fight back.

  As soon as we set foot in the lab, Leif pulled me into a hug and squeezed me so tightly I could hardly breathe.

  “I know this is hard on you. I’m sorry we didn’t find you sooner.”

  “You were dealing with war, Leif. You did find me in the end.”

  He sighed and rested his forehead on mine.

  “We never wanted you to end up in one of his labs again. If it were up to me, I’d spare you from being in my lab. If you want to take the laptop back to my apartments, you might be more comfortable.”

  I nuzzled my face in his chest. Leif was so sweet. His lab wasn’t like the other labs I ended up in. I felt safe here, even if he needed to draw blood. It wasn’t that his lab had motivational posters or pictures of fluffy animals on the wall like a pediatrician’s office. It was the fact that Leif was in there with me.

  I didn’t feel safe anymore unless I had Smurfette with me, and Aeron or Leif was in the room. I’d gotten settled in California when I ran away from my father. I eventually stopped looking over my shoulder. I knew he was planning something big that involved inserting himself as president, but I never drew the Rage Mutation, and I thought he was done with me.

  If I hadn’t stopped looking over my shoulder and been more careful when I met up with Aeron, I might not be missing my memories right now. If I hadn’t insisted on taking Aeron to my favorite place to eat before we left and had him meet me at my apartment, maybe he would have been there and could have stopped them when they snatched me. I couldn’t even remember what happened that day and how it went down. I would have fought; I knew that much.

  “No, Leif. I want to be here with you. I feel safer here with you, and I enjoy talking to you. I think the more we talk, the more I’ll remember. I want to remember everything we all talked about.”

  “It’ll come back. You’re already making progress. It just takes time. We’ll stop your father, and you’ll get your memories back.”

  “You seem pretty sure we will beat him.”

  “He got pretty far this time. None of us will deny that. But all four Horsemen are here now, and we have a Harbinger working with us now. We’ll beat him.”

  “If I’m a Harbinger, why didn’t I see the Rage Mutation so I could warn you?”

  “Harbingers don’t see everything. It would be too much to process. You might not have seen it, but another Harbinger probably did. All they would have seen was the first person turning. They may not get involved, but they wouldn’t have known the history of how it was created and by whom. You’ve still seen a lot that has helped.”

  “Can I control it? I’ve never been able to before, but I never knew why I could do it. Is there a way to force it so we can prepare better?”

  “I don’t think so, Ariel. Most Harbingers have it pretty rough. It’s never-ending visions of disaster that they have to witness, and they can’t get involved. Aside from the massive amount of Grigori who fell when they sired an entire army of Nephilim, Harbingers are usually the ones that fall now. It’s hard to see that and not try to help constantly. It’s different for you because you have human blood. You get a break from the visions, and you can operate by different rules.”

  “Still, it would help
if I could just sit down and predict what his next move will be.”

  “Ariel, you just saved a ton of lives in Mexico. You aren’t in this alone. Let Dice and Asher do their thing while we do ours. They were created just for this. We all have a purpose.”

  Why did he have to say that? He was right there at making me feel better, and then he had to ruin it.

  “My purpose was to create the Rage Mutation,” I pointed out.

  “Someone used you to create the Rage Mutation, but they can’t take away your choices or the fact that you’ve got Harbinger blood. You have choices angels don’t have. You are more than what they created you for. You left and joined us. You’re helping end things. You do realize you could be right by his side right now, helping him end the world, correct?”

  “Why would I be by his side? He was an abusive shit stain and a totally rotten father.”

  Leif just shrugged.

  “You could be some confused girl wanting his approval. Instead, you chose not to be. You became a badass instead.”

  Okay, that was the right thing to say. I felt much better now. I also totally wanted to kiss Leif. I craned my head up at him and gave him my best bedroom eyes. Leif’s pupils dilated, and his sexy black eyes became hooded. I wrapped my hand around the back of his neck and pulled him down to me.

  “Kiss me, Leif.”

  He didn’t hesitate. He went straight for it. Leif kissed differently that Aeron. It was playful and sensual. Aeron kissed like we were both about to die. Leif took his time like we had an eternity to do this. I grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer. I had this kinky idea of him sweeping all his lab equipment off the table and taking me right there. That would be so fucking hot.

  He didn’t. He pulled away and kissed the tip of my nose.

  “As much as I want to continue this, we do still need to save the world. Later?”

  I touched his cheek.

  “I’m holding you to that, Leif.”

  The apocalypse had turned me into a polyamorous, horny minx, but it was also continually cockblocking me. It was probably some sort of karmic backlash for my dad being the Antichrist. Sure, I got away from him, and I was trying to stop him, but something in the cosmos had to be working against me for the sperm he donated to my DNA.

  Leif slipped his lab coat and goggles on. It should be illegal to look that sexy in big safety goggles. I needed to focus. It was less important to get laid and more critical to stop my father and find out what was on that flash drive.

  I slid into my seat and plugged in the flash drive I labeled with the emails on it. I shouldn’t be smiling while I read these horrible emails, but Leif was adorable when he worked. I could hear him muttering to himself from my table. It was like he thought if he talked to my blood, he could get it to cooperate with him. Fuck, he was the Horseman of Pestilence. For all I knew, that was exactly how his angel superpower worked.

  Plus, I was just enjoying reading Doctor X squirm over email. He was clearly afraid of my father. He didn’t seem to be fearful of making zombies or mass genocide. The only thing that mad man seemed to be scared of was not being able to kill the rest of the world for my father. Doctor X was probably one of those brilliant kids in college who were ahead of everyone else but failed all his ethics classes. He probably had two extensive files on his laptop—one for research and one for a really bizarre porn collection involving feet and poop.

  Going through these emails would take forever. My father requested daily progress updates like Doctor X could fix the whole immunity problem overnight. Isaiah had him working on two issues. He had to produce a new mutation, but he also had to find a way to get it to the rest of the world that was still alive in a way that people would line up to get it, and no one would be left out this time.

  I was pretty sure even with zombie cannibals running around, there were still anti-vaxxers around who would refuse the vaccine. Aeron had already spread the word about water. Doctor X had all these grand plans of bombs and bioweapons. Maybe I was fucked up, but I saw a straightforward solution that wasn’t bombing an already bombed-out world.

  People needed food. They had picked most of the shelves clean, and you had to live in an area the bombs didn’t hit to be able to grow your own food. Stick it in a protein bar or make more MREs. No one would turn that down. Everyone needed to eat.

  I was awful at math, and I wouldn’t have known the first thing about what went on in any of these labs playing around with my blood, but I wasn’t stupid, even if I had to repeat algebra in college. I never used it again, and sometimes, the simplest solution was the one that worked. Then again, I wasn’t plotting mass genocide.

  “I need your help, Ariel,” Leif said.

  “Another blood sample?”

  “Yes, but not from you. I have a little zombie patient in the back and getting blood from him is an enormous pain in the ass.”

  “You do not have a pet zombie in here. Why can’t I hear it? They always make that awful, wailing noise.”

  “Well, I don’t know what happens when one of those things bites an angel, nor a Nephilim. Even if it doesn’t infect us, I only like love bites, not zombie bites. I cut Jose’s jaw off so he can’t bite.”

  “You named your pet zombie? You didn’t get him some lab nerd name like Patient 3445?”

  “His real name was Jose Gomez. Aeron and a team went out to find me a Rage Head and found him locked in his car on the freeway. That was the name on his driver’s license. Giving test subjects random names is supposed to make you impartial. Still, it also dehumanizes people and gives unethical scientists the ability to abuse them without calling them by their first name.

  “All the Rage Heads were people once. Jose probably had a job and friends he cared about. He had a totally normal life until this happened to him. Rage Heads are already dead, so the only thing we can do with them is killing the brain, so they die for good. I have Jose here for the greater good. He might be a walking corpse now, but at least this didn’t happen to him for nothing. Studying him will be how we end this.

  “He might be reduced to just the urge to eat people now, and I might have taken some precautions to make him less dangerous, but I won’t strip him of his name. All of my notes on you have your name on them, too, instead of some lab nickname. They gave you a patient number when you were a child, and I’m sure you’ve seen even your father calls you that in emails. I’m not taking your name from you either.”

  “That’s sweet, Leif. Do you expect me to hold Jose down while you take his blood?”

  “Oh, god no. His fingernails are out of control, and I don’t want him scratching you. I’ve got a pole I use to take blood. I just need you to keep him distracted so I can stick him.”

  “Did you just ask me to play zombie bait? What kind of online boyfriend are you?”

  “The kind that knows if I asked anyone who didn’t name a blue baseball bat Smurfette to do this, they’d run screaming from the room.”

  I shrugged. I mean, he wasn’t wrong. If it meant beating my father, I was totally dumb enough to play zombie bait. And I was pretty sure Aeron had done this before because he probably thought distracting zombies was fun and games. I didn’t even have to ask. Aeron was perhaps the one that cut off poor Jose’s jaw so he wouldn’t bite.

  “Let’s go get zombie blood.”

  “I’ll grab my pokey stick.”

  “You need a better name for it than pokey stick.”

  “Weapons get names. Medical tools do not.”

  Leif went and got his pokey stick, and it certainly looked like a weapon to me. You could take someone’s eye out with that thing. We went all the way back to the lab, and I realized why I never heard Jose before. There was a massive metal door in front of his cell. We had to open the door to get to his glass cage.

  The scene in the cage was pretty fucking gross. Zombie Jose had tried to break out by flinging himself against the walls, and he was pretty ripe. There were little bits of Jose dried on the glass, and some of it was fre
sh. It probably stunk worse than I did after we took down all those Rage Heads at the border because this was such an enclosed space.

  “Please tell me you can do this quickly.”

  “I ask people to bring back air freshener if they find it, and some people make scented candles with things that grow here, but this won’t take long. Zombies aren’t intelligent, and I’ve gotten taking his blood down to an art. It’s much quicker when I have someone to distract him. Can you go open that little door and let him smell you?”

  “I suppose it’s only polite. I can’t get away from his stench right now. I should introduce him to my smell.”

  I opened the glass door. Were you supposed to introduce yourself to a Rage Head like you did a new dog? Hold out your fist and make slow movements? I held out my fist like a total idiot. Jose definitely wasn’t some cute Pitbull with a wagging tail and that smile only Pitbulls had. He charged at the glass so hard, he just kind of splatted against it and left some of his face behind. Was that a tooth sliding down the wall? What I wouldn’t give for a wriggle butt Pitbull right now.

  Jose’s arm shot out the glass, and he kept trying to grab me. He was so rotten I could see bones in his arm. I was trying to distract myself with cute puppies instead of the long, yellow fingernails that were trying to rip into my flesh. If I weren’t thinking about something cuddly, I would have noped right out of that room.

  Zombie Jose was gross and stinky. I didn’t want those fingernails anywhere near me. But he was also pretty stupid. He was so intent on getting at me, and he didn’t even react when Leif jabbed him with his pokey stick. He was right. Leif did have stealing blood from his zombie pet down to an art. He was standing by my side pretty quickly.

  “Got the blood. We can shut the glass when he gets bored and goes back to his corner. They don’t really sleep, but they go into a sort of stasis every few days. I can’t explain it. They just stand in place and don’t blink. It’s kind of creepy. Jose always goes down for his every three days and snaps out of it about twelve hours later. He’s due for his stasis tomorrow. We can close the glass then. Shall we?” he said, offering me his arm like we were going on a pleasant stroll instead of him asking me to be zombie bait.