Chapter 731 | Thermal Survival and Left Shoes

Chapter 731: 731 | Thermal Survival and Left Shoes

"The hero code does not cover piggyback rides for girls who just tried to rob a cold storage plant."

"This isn’t a piggyback ride, I’m on the front," she pointed out, muffled and entirely unrepentant, and wiggled her rear into my palms to get comfortable. The neoprene let out an obscene squeak against my trousers. "It’s a tactical extraction of an injured informant. You’re welcome for the extra credit."

I looked down at the top of her head, where the cheap aviator goggles had tangled in her glossy black hair, and then at my watch. Six thirty-eight. If I walked at a normal human pace carrying a hundred and thirty pounds of shivering snake girl, we’d miss the Route 31 transfer at the foot of the bridge, and I wouldn’t hit Halverson Avenue until after seven-fifteen. That meant missing the first Route 14 up the hill, which meant walking into Room 214 at nine-ten with Imara Steele at the podium holding a stopwatch and a grudge.

On the other hand, if I dropped her in the alley, she’d slide home on her hands and knees like a greased hockey puck and probably have pneumonia by Tuesday.

"Hold onto my shoulders," I said, and moved my hands from the backs of her thighs to cup the full curve of her rear so I could hike her up another two inches. My fingers sank into firm muscle right where the neoprene ended and the scales began, the line between warm skin and cool emerald armor sitting under my thumbs. "And if you turn your frictionless thing on while I’m running and make me drop you into traffic, I’m telling Dralun you cried about the rat."

"I didn’t cry, I yelped, and your hands are on my butt," she squeaked. Her head snapped up so fast her goggles whacked me in the chin. A bright pink flush was fighting its way through the chill on her cheeks, her vertical pupils blown wide behind wet lashes as she stared at me from four inches away. "That’s my actual butt, Belmont. Not the belt."

"You’re the one who cut the pants out of your suit." I was already turning toward the service alley that led back to the rail sidings. "Either put your legs down and walk, or shut up and let me carry you before my teacher puts me in a body bag."

She opened her mouth. Her fangs caught the grey light while she hunted for a femme fatale line that worked when you were being held like a toddler at Disneyland. Nothing came out. Her lower lip wobbled, her fang nicked the skin, and she made a tiny defeated noise in the back of her throat before slamming her face back into my neck hard enough to bruise a baseline human.

"This is purely for thermal survival," she hissed into my collar, thighs clamping down on my waist as her arms locked behind my head. "And if you tell anybody on the block you carried me like a baby, I’ll slip into your dorm room and steal all your left shoes."

"Deal," I said, and kicked off the wet asphalt.

I skipped the rooftop line this time. Jumping forty-foot gaps while wearing a girl on your chest like a tactical vest was a great way to test the structural limits of her spine on the landing. I took the service road behind the container stacks instead, at a loping run of about twenty-five miles an hour. That was way faster than any normal kid should move carrying dead weight, especially in borrowed steel-toed boots, but just before seven in the morning on the industrial west side, the only witnesses were a guy pressure-washing fish guts off a loading dock and two stray dogs fighting over a bagel.

Lami yelped into my collar for the first ten strides as the wind whipped her hair back, and her grip on my neck went from clinging to full strangulation. Then she figured out my footing was solid and I wasn’t going to trip over the railway tracks, and she went limp against me, her weight settling warm against my front.

Every stride bounced her chest against mine. The thin neoprene of her plunging neckline did nothing to hide what the cold harbor air had done to her nipples, and they dragged pebble-hard across the front of my Halloran shirt with every step, a steady friction my brain tracked with the same annoying clarity it used for counting exit doors and reading Aspect signatures. Her breath hit my collarbone in hot little puffs that smelled like cheap strawberry lip gloss and the rain we’d been lying in. Where the cutout panels gapped against my ribs, her scaled hips were slowly warming up off my body heat.

?Heroine Update: ALYA NAGINI | Temptation Gauge: 19%. Stage: NEUTRAL.?

?System Note: The Host is currently functioning as an Uber with a pulse. While undignified from a protagonist standpoint, the physical contact metrics are performing above projections.?

I took the pedestrian walkway on the lower level of the Fourth Street Bridge and kept to the shadow of the upper deck, where the morning commuters were already grinding to a halt in a cloud of exhaust and wet brake pads. Halfway across the river, Lami shifted in my arms. Her chin rubbed my shoulder as she peeked one green eye open to watch the black water sliding past below the iron railing.

"You’re really fast," she mumbled. Her voice had gone sleepy now that the shaking had mostly stopped. The theatrical purr was gone, and so was the frantic Eastside speed-talk. She sounded like a nineteen-year-old who’d been up since midnight and was finally getting warm. "Like, stupid fast. I thought you were just a ghost-hands guy."

"I do a lot of cardio," I said. My boots thudded over the expansion joints in the concrete, and my breathing never left a normal conversational rhythm. Demigod was eating the lactic acid before it could even form in my quads. "My teacher is a sadist."