Miscreants: Next Generation by Natalie Bennett (essential reading .txt) 📗

“I don’t want to hear any of that sympathetic make-the-world-a-better-place bullshit. It was a figure of speech. Look around you. Does this look like a nice place, Dawn? Is it somewhere you’d go to live the glory days?”

Cheeks turning red, she blinked and looked down, mumbling something unintelligible before putting some space between us.

“Samael,” Rory sighed.

“You just hurt her feelings,” Amo mused, staring after her.

I knew that. Couldn’t bring myself to care, either. “If you plan on using your dick to make her feel better, you’ll have to do it later.”

“You become a bigger asshole every day. It’s fucking great.” He laughed.

“I’m glad I have the approval I wasn’t seeking.”

“You’ve always had my approval,” he stated, suddenly serious.

I knew that too.

Amo was the brother I never had. The two of us had been introduced through a third party years ago, before the Lazarus or Stags existed. We immediately fell into an easy companionship, communicating through a hidden grapevine.

He, Brody, and Aurora had stood by me for every step of this crazy-ass expedition. As for Dawn…she was nothing and no one. A failure of a distraction. That coupled with the fact that she tended to never shut the fuck up had me regretting letting her come along with us.

She reminded me of an old cartoon Lilith used to watch when we were younger. It was about these colorful teddy bears that ran around shooting feelings out of their stomachs. Honestly, one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen.

As such, Dawn’s heart of gold wasn’t something I found remotely attractive.

It clashed with my dark one on a consistent basis. If not for her having become a friend to Rory, I’d have gotten rid of her a long time ago.

Despite what I allowed Lilith to believe, Dawn and I weren’t a thing. She made my dick softer than pudding.

Amo, on the other hand, put his dick in every one of her holes whenever he felt like it. Who he chose to be with, why, and where, wasn’t anything I cared to keep track of. I merely encouraged him to wrap his dick, so it didn’t rot off. He was a prime example of why I made sure our faction had contraceptives.

The proselytes were human, and humans liked to fuck.

I wasn’t excluding myself from that equation. I could get pussy whenever, from whomever, but I hadn’t taken advantage of that perk since I’d left the Savages. Back then, my body was a tool to further my agenda. I’d obviously come a long way since.

I wasn’t going to give a single woman the power to hurt Lilith just because I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants. There wasn’t enough ass in the world to make me risk the one girl I’d been strengthening an empire for. That would be like eating shit when you could have the finest fucking chocolate that ever existed, crafted from everything you desired.

Celibacy wasn’t too difficult of a task to undertake. The hardest part about it was restraining the animalistic urge to pin Lilith down and fuck her into submission. I’d been inside her more than a dozen times since being her first, and it still wasn’t close to enough.

I had a lot of ideas for when I got my hands on her again.

All I needed to do was figure out who had her. Then I’d make them sorry for daring to touch what was mine.

I leaned against one of our Brabuses and

looked from the lag huddled in a ball on the ground to Brody. He and the two proselytes standing partially behind him had discovered the guy during another sweep.

“Where did you get this thing from?” Amo asked, staring at the man without bothering to hide his disgust.

“He’s been squatting in another one of the houses. Tried to run out the back door when we came through the front,” Leo, the proselyte on the left, answered.

Tapping my fingers against my chin, I stared down at the man, debating if he was a reliable source or not. His face was skeletal. The cheekbones stuck out so far they could be used as handles. Wearing nothing but layers of rags, his skin was so covered in grime it was hard to decipher what he truly looked like. His hair hung in a tangled mop of blackish grey.

“How did you make it to Phobos alone?”

“I ran,” came his muffled response. Dull, hollow eyes continuing to stare straight ahead.

“Do you think we can get anything useful out of him?” Aurora asked.

“I might be able to get him to talk if you can give me a few minutes,” Dawn said, now having rejoined us.

“By doing what?” Amo challenged.

“Being—”

“We don’t have time to waste on potentially senile old men. Get him up.”

The proselytes flew into action, each grabbing one of the man’s arms and forcing him to his feet.

“I didn’t do anything,” he yelled, spittle flying and landing in his ragged beard. Pupils dilated and nostrils flaring, it was apparent this man wasn’t worth the air the trees gave him to breathe.

His obvious instability answered the question of how he’d made it all the way to Phobos in one piece. He was of no use to anyone dead or alive. His existence wasn’t even a blip on the Badlands’ radar.

“He smells like a whole barrel of shit,” Amo remarked.

“There were a few piles of that in the house, along with raw animal carcasses. He’s been eating whatever he can get his hands on. Rodents…bugs…trash,” Brody explained.

That gave me an idea.

I turned around and went to the back of the Brabus. Reaching into the bed of the boxy SUV, I dug through one of our duffels until I found what I’d come to get. Returning to my prior position, I held