Metal Angels - Part One: (A Supernatural Thriller Serial) Read online

  Contents

  Also by this author

  Metal Angels

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Kira - 1

  Eron - 2

  Tamas - 3

  Kira - 4

  Eron - 5

  Blake - 6

  Tamas - 7

  Kira - 8

  Blake - 9

  Kira - 10

  Kira - 11

  Blake - 12

  Eron - 13

  Kira - 14

  Blake - 15

  Kira - 16

  Tamas - 17

  Blake - 18

  Eron - 19

  Kira - 20

  Exclusive Sneak Peek!

  What next?

  Also by this author

  YA Paranormal/Scifi - written as Danielle K Girl

  ExtraOrdinary

  ExtraLimital

  ExtraImperial

  Urban Fantasy

  Metal Angels - Part One

  Metal Angels - Part Two

  Metal Angels - Part Three

  Metal Angels - Part Four (Finale)

  Metal angels

  Part One

  By

  D K Girl

  Metal Angels by Danielle K Girl

  © 2018 by Danielle K Girl. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.

  Cover Design: Jake Clark

  Editor: Inspired Ink Editing

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9981427-6-0

  for Mikie.

  You should be here.

  Kira - 1

  Kira raised her metal fist and sang her booze-soaked heart out to the ceiling. The music blaring in the pub downstairs made the whole room vibrate. She hit the high note. God damn nailed it.

  ‘Christ almighty.’ The guy beside her rolled his generous package away, and grunted out of bed. ‘You could kill small animals with that voice, K.’

  ‘I don’t pay you to talk, Liam.’ Kira tossed a pillow at his smirking, pudgy face, and the room spun. ‘Be gone. I’m done with your dimpled ass.’

  She was up for a lot of things, but her rent-a-fuck seeing her puke wasn’t one of them, and any second now a bolt to the bathroom would be compulsory.

  Liam pulled on his pants, gave her the finger, and launched that smile. Honey on warm toast. He may have a gut you could eat breakfast off, but damn, that grin. It made his grey eyes gleam, and wrenched ridiculously high tips from her blacker-than-black credit card.

  ‘Till next time.’ He stepped into the hall, the blast of music deafening before he pulled the door closed.

  Kira sighed. Her nipples were on full alert under the touch of the breeze coming through the wide-open windows. She arched her back, sending her boobs skyward, but even that small movement made her gut twist. She jerked upright, swallowing hard.

  ‘Fuck. Nope, no way. Stay down. Sangria and whisky you need to be better friends.’ She reached for her underwear, slivers of sapphire-red material lying on the timber floor. Carefully, super carefully, she pulled the delicate g-string up over her thighs. Satin bra next. She’d learned a lesson early on about the metal prosthetic she called a right arm. It didn’t think much of Victoria’s Secrets. The ‘armadillo’—what Kira called the intricate folds of hard metal that moved with the smoothness of oil on skin— existed on a diet of lace and satin, always managing to catch threads between its layers and refusing to let go. The bastard thing had cost her a fortune in the beginning, but three years on Kira had it under control. Even at times like now, when her vision was blurry, and the room tilted and lurched like a motherfucker.

  She stood up, defying gravity. Jeans on, zip done. A god-damn dressing genius. Shirt proved an issue. Whose fucking idea had it been to buy something with more holes than material? It took three tries to find the armholes; two of those attempts ending up with her flat on her back. Sangria and whisky held hands, waiting patiently at the base of her throat.

  ‘Jesus. Perry’s going to kill me.’

  Nothing new there. It was pretty much his permanent state. And yet the crazy son of a bitch had agreed to partner with her in the Wheel and Barrow. She was supposed to be downstairs right now, behind the bar. She’d promised Perry she’d cover the midnight-till-three shift, but her promises were as empty as the fishtank in their musty back office. Thankfully, the guy was practically some kind of Sri Lankan saint. Never bitched at her when she ditched the whole damn town of Pryden on a whim and flew off to Greece, or somewhere equally stupidly beautiful, just because she was Kira Beckworth and she could. And his lips remained sealed on nights like this. When she drank too much of the stock and decided small talk with drunk-ass customers was overrated, and she had better people to do.

  Liam didn’t cost top dollar for nothing; but damn, it made the room stink. She sniffed her armpits. Sweet Jesus, the room wasn’t the only thing. Kira focused on the door like a magnifying glass on an ant and found her way out into the hall, up the short flight of stairs to the fire exit, and out onto the rooftop. The night sky was velvet black, dotted with hundreds of diamonds, and the breeze coming in off the desert pushed goosebumps to attention across every centimetre of her skin.

  Kira raised her arms to the view. ‘Fuck yes.’

  The town of Pryden was a small blob of light in the wide expanse of curving, undulating sand hills that spread out forever around it. Somewhere off to the east, and hidden in the crux of a mountain range, was the Facility. And in that sterile, high-tech, boring-as-bat-shit place sat Kira’s sister, Blake.

  The great and wondrous Blake Beckworth. The goddess of bioengineering. The reason anyone paid Kira two shits of attention. The gossip mags had fallen in love with the idea that nothing about Kira was real. That her grief-stricken genius sister Blake had created a masterpiece in her biotech nirvana after the accident: building an android version of her dead sis to dull the pain of her loss.

  Yeah, right. The sisters both knew Kira wasn’t the one Blake would have resurrected if the aliens had actually said yes to using a shitload of their precious, funky metal to play ‘build a likeness.’ Dear old Dad would have been walking the halls again instead. No question. But the world didn’t know that. And apparently it was a thing now, trying to get into Kira’s pants to see if she had a robo-muff. Kira flashed her lady garden on a regular basis to prove she didn’t. She was a real girl, god-damn it. But her plan had backfired. The press loved a crazy rich bitch. Especially one whose rarely-sighted, brainiac sister was holed up in a place whose security and secrecy were whispered about on a regular basis. No one gave a shit about Area 51 anymore; it was all about the Facility.

  ‘And sometimes conspiracy theory nutcases are right,’ Kira told the night sky.

  She tilted her prosthetic back and forth. The moon was a giant half-ball of silver light, but the armadillo didn’t give a fuck. When light hit the metal it kind of soaked in, dulling down to something insipid and barely there at all. Like a five-fingered black hole. Her heart was made of the same stuff. The chunk of metal in her chest didn’t beat, didn’t flutter, didn’t race. Brilliant as they all may be—Blake and her little extra-terrestrial friends—they were also assholes. They had tech that had guided them all the way from their universe to this pissy one, yet they couldn’t come up with a way to make her heart beat? Even if it was pretend? And what was with the no fingernails on the armadillo? Smooth nubs. Just bloody
creepy.

  Sure, Blake had put fingernails into the faux skin she wanted Kira to wear over the prosthetic, but there was as much chance of Kira wearing that fucking awful sheath as there was of her getting to the gym this week. Or of Blake actually calling to see how the hell her sister was.

  Kira fixed her eyes on the stars overhead. One in particular, a bright little splat directly above them. The rest of the universe rotated around it in a slow, torturous circle. She braced against the back of a faded chaise lounge, determined to keep looking. Something about the wide-open space, the endlessness overhead, never failed to give her the feels. If she could, she’d jump into that nothingness and let it take her. Let it swamp her, suck her down into the black hole that was already a part of her. The one she should have stayed in after the car crash.

  Sangria and whisky hit the back of her throat in treacherous unison, and there was no stopping the evacuation this time. Deep red vomit made preschooler paintings on the concrete. Wiping her mouth, Kira sighed.

  ‘Such a waste.’ She straightened, throat tingling with the sting of bile. ‘Okay, let’s do this. Perry is going to shit kittens if I don’t help out. K, you’ve totes got this.’

  And after three attempts at the door-handle, she did. Stairs were trickier. Who the fuck put oil on these bastards? The music from the pub made the wooden stairwell vibrate, meaning no one heard her screech when the third step from the bottom rose up and slapped her on the ass. Kira punched it, metal on wood. No contest. The step suffered the loss of a chunk, splinters spiking out like broken bone. With the pain receptors on her prosthetic set to their lowest level, Kira grinned and gave the nasty woodwork a one-fingered salute. The music shut off at the same moment.

  ‘Kira, are you okay? Where are your shoes?’

  Kira jerked, her spine slamming against the next step up. ‘Fuck, Perry, you trying to make me piss my pants?’

  The man standing over her rolled his eyes. ‘You handle that quite well on your own. Thanks for covering the shift for me, silly cow.’

  His accent was god damn heavenly, rising up and down like one of those pretty wooden ponies on a carousel.

  ‘I was just coming to take over,’ she said.

  ‘The bar just closed.’

  ‘Why did you close it so early?’

  ‘Oh bloody hell, Kira.’ Perry sighed, but there was a flash of pearly whites. Kira pursed her lips, moved in for a kiss, but Perry screwed up his face. ‘Shit, you stink. Kira, listen to me.’

  ‘No. I own more shares in this place than you do, so shut your pretty mouth.’

  ‘Bitch.’ More pearly whites, bright as a damn supernova. The dude needed to ease up on the whitening treatments.

  ‘Don’t you forget it,’ Kira said. ‘Talk to me, P-man. Tell me about rainbows and kittens.’

  Sweetness and light were good. They chased back the darkness. Darkness sucked balls. Way down here, at the bottom of the bottle, it had a harder time reaching her, but she wasn’t always as invisible as she’d like. Perry gripped her hands, his slender fingers making hers look like chunky sausages.

  ‘K, I’ve got to tell you something and I don’t think you’re going to love it,’ Perry said.

  Kira touched her flesh fingers to his sculpted beard. Jet-black bristles against fawn skin. Match made in heaven. ‘You’re pretty. I’m going to buy you a boyfriend.’

  ‘I know, you keep saying, but I can find my own. Thanks anyway.’ Perry swiped away another attempt to touch him. ‘K, focus. Rossiter called.’

  This was one of those times when a heart would thump. ‘Why the fuck would He-Man do that?’

  Built like a brick shithouse, Rossiter was Blake’s not-so-friendly bodyguard. Admittedly, the man was an impressive chunk of Samoan Canadian manhood, with an impossibly shiny bald head.

  ‘Blake wants you at the Facility,’ Perry said.

  Wasted to sober in warp speed. She slumped against Perry, and her cheek found the solid warmth of his chest. Being a short-ass had its advantages sometimes. A resting place where she could gather thoughts that had just scattered like dropped marbles. Never huge on conversations, Blake had offered her nothing but a rare hello for near on twelve months, dropping even that for absolute silence since the whole Eron thing.

  The Eron thing.

  Seriously, what the hell was the big deal with taking an alien off-site? The dude was bored shitless in that place. If everyone wondered why it hadn’t taken much for Kira to persuade Eron to go against his precious captain’s orders and sneak out, management needed to take a good look at the entertainment line-up for the Facility. Once upon a time the aliens had been hired out as some kind of crack SWAT team. The occasional ‘mission impossible’. Sold as fucking super-soldiers. It gave the ETs something to do, and people paid top dollar for ‘genetically-enhanced humans’ to clean up their shit. But that hadn’t happened in a year or so. And polishing your own armour got real boring. Real fast. And, oh man, Eron had such nice pieces of armour.

  Shit. Kira ground her forehead into Perry’s chest. Don’t go there. No. Nope.

  ‘Kira, did you hear me?’ Perry cradled her tight against his body, lifting her off the ground and moving them both down the hall. The guy was slender as a reed, but strong as a fucking ox. Kira was also practically an Oompa-Loompa which made things easier.

  ‘Your words don’t compute,’ she told his chest hair. This part sucked harder than a Dyson. Not being able to tell Perry about the shit that went on behind the very, very high gates of the Facility. Even her best buddy thought the place did just what it said on the label, ‘engineering and robotics design’. Perry had no idea that willowy guy with the impossible-to-look-away-from lips she’d brought in a couple of times was even more out of this world then he appeared.

  ‘This is a good thing right? Blake wants to see you.’ Perry grunted his way through a couple of doorways and the smell of stale liquor hit Kira square in the nostrils, making an unstable belly even more so.

  ‘Probably just to ream me for maxing out the credit cards.’ She shrugged.

  But Blake wasn’t calling her in at four in the morning to chat about credit cards. Kira had been fastidiously spending her share of Facility profits since the moment she’d woken up with a prosthetic arm, unbeating artificial heart, and irreparably guilty conscience; and her sister never said a word. Blake grabbed at any opportunity to keep Kira out of her hair, out of her life.

  ‘Jesus, K.’ A lock of Perry’s product-laden hair slipped over his forehead. ‘Help me a little here. Walk.’

  Somehow she did. One bare foot in front of the other. Where the hell were her shoes?

  Perry did not lie. In the alleyway beside the pub sat a sleek white vehicle, one gull-wing door raised for her arrival. Giving her no time to escape, Perry shoved one of his favoured jackets at her - a glorious vinyl I’m-trying-to-be-badass creation with studs and all. He tapped the gull-wing and waved at her as it slid down and locked her in a sweet-smelling, beige leather prison.

  ‘Asshole!’ she shouted at the closed window. Something burned deep in her belly. This hangover was going to suck on a monstrous scale.

  The automated vehicle rolled forward, taking a left out of the alleyway and heading out of town. Pryden was barely fit to be called a town, just a single main street with a sprinkling of suburbs around it, and by the time Kira had hauled herself upright again they’d hit the outer limits and cruised into the desert. A liquorice strip of road ran ahead, disappearing into the burnt-orange bumps of the desert. The road would take a couple of twists and turns, then run dead straight for twenty kilometres, all the way to the first security gate of the Facility. The faintest hint of powder-pink blush stained the horizon. Time for vampires to be heading indoors. Kira opened the window, ignoring the posh English-accented voice that advised her not to, so as to retain optimised conditions within the vehicle.

  ‘Fuck you, car lady.’ Kira hung her head out the window and the knots in her already mussed-up hair had triplets. The chill f
rom earlier had disappeared under the more familiar heavy warmth of the approaching day. Car lady was right, it wasn’t optimal out here but Kira would be damned if she’d admit defeat to an autonomous vehicle. She narrowed her eyes against the blast of rushing air. Rossiter had the car set to a nice little pace. Whatever Blake wanted, she wanted it in a hurry. For ten minutes Kira enjoyed being pummelled by the wind.

  A tinkling of bells announced the rise of a screen on the dashboard.

  ‘Answer.’ Her every wish was the car’s command. And every wish could be uttered without going anywhere near the steering wheel. Kira and driving were not good friends. Not anymore. Last time she drove, someone died.

  A familiar face filled the screen. Rossiter, the incredibly annoying hulk. Kira tucked her feet up on the seat and nodded to him over the top of her knees. The dude had an enviable talent of raising one dark eyebrow, a talent he was showing off to full effect right now.

  ‘Kira.’

  ‘Good morning, Rossiter, you beautiful slab of man.’ Spittle flew from her mouth, onto the screen. Right over Rossiter’s left eye. She laughed and instantly regretted not taking a bathroom break before leaving the bar.

  ‘You’re still drunk.’ Rossiter regarded her with stony hazel eyes, and the eyebrow danced.

  ‘It’s four on a Saturday morning, what the hell else would I be?’ Kira dragged her gaze from the gymnastic disapproval of the eyebrow and glanced outside. Up ahead loomed the low mountain range that ringed the Facility. ‘What the fuck is going on? Why is Queen B summoning me? I’m busy as shit.’

  ‘I don’t question Blake’s requests.’ Rossiter lifted his planet-wide shoulders in a surprisingly delicate shrug. ‘I just follow them.’

  ‘Okay, whoa, I don’t need to know about your special, private body-guarding stuff. Keep that in the bedroom.’