“That was–”
“–inspirational?”
She laughed. “A first.”
Their foreheads touched and he laid down next to her. Norah moved and curled into his side, her head on his shoulder. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was what she needed.
“A first for me too.” Stryker pulled her against him.
“The snake, the sex, or someone like me?”
“The snake, the blowjob, and you.”
She smiled and trailed her fingers over his chest. “I once heard an old saying, that once you go black, you don’t go back.”
“Could I say the same about thing about going snake?” he asked, teasingly. Norah closed her eyes.
“No.”No one gets to have you but me.“But you can say, Cyborg? I don’t want anyone else to have you,” she admitted.
“I guess I could say that.”
Norah let her remaining energy seep out of her, let the aches and pains of her body disappear from her mind, and gave in to her exhaustion. She tried not to dwell in the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, she was afraid, now that she had nothing to distract her, that the monsters would come back. She cuddled closer to Stryker’s side.
“We’re safe now, right? It really is over?”
“Yeah, babe, it’s over.”
Norah latched onto his words as she latched onto his body.
And after some time she was finally able to find true oblivion.
Chapter Twenty-Four:
***
Norah stood before the mid-sized glass enclosure that held their prisoner. She knew it for what it was without having to read the stats on the console beside it. Stryker and Matt stood next to her. They stared at the beast together; no one spoke, but each of them fidgeted.
Maybe because it stared straight back at them.
All three of them at once with eyes that had the illusion of always looking at you no matter where you stood. Where you moved. Even if you crept around it in the dark.
She felt a knock on her arm and looked down to find Matt offering her his flask. She knew it now to be one of many. Norah took it and downed a big swig. She had never been a drinker before now, but things had changed. She wasn’t the same person anymore and the effects of thisGunner’sbrew not only made her feel numb, it also made her feel normal.
She passed it back to Matt.
“I thought it was dead,” she said at last, a whisper; she felt she couldn’t speak normally in front of the monster.
“It is. At least the Wieraptor is. What that thing is now is something completely different.”
Norah held in the shiver that wanted to freeze her spine.
She glanced at a sealed glass case off to the side, finding her spare frozen sample behind it. The creature seemed to follow her gaze with a twitch but otherwise didn’t move.I need another drink.
“I say we jettison the fucker and be done with it,” Matt said as he leaned back against the wall. “I don’t like its eyes.”
“The eyes are…” Norah trailed off. “Disturbing.” Sunken, pale and pasty, hiding behind the loose flaps of hide that used to be the Wieraptor’s lids. They didn’t fit, too large for the eye holes but not big enough to expand outward. It was crouched within the confined space. There was no place for it to move besides to spin around in a circle and even then it would have to go slowly.
Stryker didn’t have another cage for it.
