Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

sentence—but he was shirtless and dirty, his flesh caked with dried blood from head to toe, his dark fatigues and boots obscuring his lower wounds. He looked tired, yet still menacing enough to cause even the surviving human sentries to grant him a wide berth. Jon looked over them with his head drooping low, his eyes peering up from under his brow.

“It worked, Jon. It worked.” Ratt sounded more surprised than happy. Jon glanced at him and saw that he had been wounded badly in the shoulder and ankle. The kid's jacket was torn, and half his torso was wet with dark blood. He stood mostly on one foot, the other held up like a cat’s paw.

“Lucy,” Jon muttered.

Ratt swallowed hard and nodded, half shuffling, half jumping over to the fallen warrior’s body. Jon dropped the handle of his hammer and fell to his knees. He reached down and gathered Maya into his arms. In his embrace, she looked like no more than a sleeping child, at peace. A fear deeper than that he had experienced in the dungeons of the palace penetrated his heart.

Please, no.

Jon held his breath, choking back the flood of emotion threatening to drown him.

Then, appearing to him like a lighthouse beacon to a lost and storm-harried ship, Jon saw Maya’s eyelids flutter to life.

He raised her small frame closer to his massive one, crushing her in an embrace. Through a few tears of joy, he smiled over to Ratt and saw the boy had opened a storage compartment in Lucy’s thigh and was injecting himself with a hypodermic shot of medical nanobots.

The surviving citizens of New Puebla, who had either not been in the plaza or had run from it when the shit hit the fan, began to return out of curiosity and concern, and soon a crowd had gathered around the goddess and her guardians.

A couple of brave ones had stepped in a little closer than the others with the clear intent of approaching Jon and Maya, when Lucy came alive and sprang to her feet. Ratt smiled and leaned back on his haunches, satisfied that he had executed a successful full reboot of the ninja girl, and shut down the dreadful sequence she had been running out of desperation.

“Not a step closer, hombre,” Lucy menaced.

Even without her Macuahuitls or pistol, she was an intimidating figure. Many of the gathered humans present, including the two currently probing the strangers’ personal space, had seen what the cyborg had done, what she could do, and with Sofia and Don Fernando gone, they wanted no part of that. Nevertheless, she quickly located and picked up her BFG and then strode into the gathered crowd. With each step forward she took, the crowd took two back. Within seconds, she had found the resting place of her sword-club, picked it up, and sheathed it.

Maya was regaining consciousness and groaned into Jon’s chest. He relaxed his grip and smiled down at her. She blinked her eyes open, saw him, and frowned a little.

“Did it work?” she asked cautiously.

“Yeah, it worked. The serum worked its magic right after the thing began drinking my blood. I guess we were right about the vampires’ hyper-metabolism. The same power that allowed them to regenerate from our attacks caused the serum to work a hell of a lot faster than a year. The whole cycle from ingestion to ‘flame-on’ took less than a minute.”

Maya smiled. “And our theory about the demon had been right too.”

Jon nodded. Don Luis had inadvertently revealed his greatest weakness to Maya when he had slipped up and said that he “couldn’t kill” the demon-urchin. Later that night, after hearing the horrors that Ratt had witnessed, Maya had decided that they needed to do something about the evil that ruled New Puebla. Jon and Carbine had suffered through a grueling one-way conversation, listening to Maya, Ratt, and Lucy hypothesize as to what Don Luis Fernando had meant by his slip-up.

Did it mean the creature was literally and truly immortal? Or did it mean what they’d ended up gambling on: that the Drop-Beastie was the progenitor of the tainted line of victims, conveniently referred to as vampires, and that, if destroyed, then all those who carried its taint would also be destroyed?

It had been a heated discussion and Jon had been beyond frustrated that he couldn’t offer his opinion. What would it have mattered anyway? Deep down, he’d suspected that Ratt, the one who had made the first stab at what turned out to be the correct guess, was right. He hadn’t liked the plan because Maya would be, essentially, bait. But somehow, she’d survived; they had all survived, and the gambit had paid off.

Lucy snapped him out of his reverie when she placed her hand on his naked shoulder.

“The crowd is getting restless. It’s time.”

“Do you see Eduardo?” Maya asked.

“No, not yet,” Lucy replied.

Jon’s gaze left Maya’s smiling countenance and scanned the gathered crowd. They were anxious, yes, but not in a dangerous way. Some stared questioningly at him and his companions; some muttered to each other behind raised hands, obscuring their mouths. Some stood on tiptoes, trying to see what was going on. Some frowned. Some cried. Most looked confused and scared, like children, lost without their mothers and fathers.

“It’s okay. I’m okay,” Maya said quietly to Jon. “Help me up, please.”

He hesitated for a second, looked back down to her face, and, seeing all he needed there, nodded. He stood up, lifting her with him and releasing her once she was on her feet. She began to brush herself off. Jon reached a hand out to Ratt and helped him get to his feet as well.

“Come on,” Maya said to her guardians and began to slowly walk toward the ruined stage, still towering above the rest of the plaza. The sea of onlookers parted for them easily enough. Maya reached for and squeezed Jon’s hand before letting go of it. “It’s good to see you again.” She looked back