Beautiful Corpse (A Jubal Van Zandt Novel Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Summary

  You love it like this,

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Contents

  Summary

  You love it like this,

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  Books, Mailing List, and Reviews

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Summary

  The best thief in the history of the Revived Earth is back, and this time it's personal.

  A deadly plague is ravaging the world's population and threatening to kill the only person Jubal Van Zandt cares about—himself. If he doesn't find a cure soon, he's dead.

  The most promising lead is buried in the ruins of an ancient sunken city stalked by savage predators, cunning parasites, and the twisted souls of long-dead mages. It would take an army to get Jubal inside ... or just one of the most renowned knights in Guild history. The one Jubal betrayed and left for dead eighteen months ago.

  First Jubal has to convince her not to kill him. Then he has to convince her to help save him.

  ***

  “Jubal Van Zandt is a terrible person—dark, arrogant, and narcissistic to his soul—yet you also can’t help but love him. And likewise, his story is a dark and often painful thing, but sprinkled with occasional glimpses of hope and maybe even redemption.” –James A. Hunter, Author of the Yancy Lazarus Series and Viridian Gate Online

  You love it like this,

  But what will you do at the end of it?

  ONE

  I motored the Mangshan between a pair of thorny locust trees that served as the end posts for the fence marking the southern boundary of the Xiao family’s ancestral holdings. Carina thought she could avoid me by ignoring my messages and staying holed up out here in the middle of nowhere. Pretty ridiculous considering how well she knew me.

  At the end of the driveway, the trees pulled back to reveal a traditional wet-country house—long and low, enclosed by a weathered wooden porch complete with steel sliding-panel storm walls. Today the storm walls had been thrown open wide, letting the meager sunlight shine onto the house’s creamy parchglass and wood exterior walls.

  I parked the ’Shan at the end of an ancient stone walkway that had been buckled by the unpredictable water table, and hooked my helmet and ventilator over the handlebars. It had taken me almost an hour to get way the hell out here from Taern—and that was running the ’Shan wide open, without any traffic. Why Carina would want to live so far out in the soggies that she could smell the fishshit, I couldn’t fathom.

  Fire threw open blast doors all through my body. Heat, the most perfect heat, swirled in my veins, warming me inside out. There was even a taste, sweet and spicy and a little ashy, like ember dust mixed with wrackrath smoke.

  My eyes flew open and I sucked in a damp lungful of country air, trying to catch up on the oxygen I’d missed while I was out. I checked my wristpiece. The attack had only lasted a few seconds. Less than a minute, definitely. The PCM fits were getting more frequent, but they weren’t getting longer. Yet. If Carina had been watching me out one of her windows or via a security feed, she would think I’d just been taking in the scenery.

  I headed up the walk, careful not to trip over the uneven stones, and stepped onto the porch. One very handsome devil with sculpted stubble, perfect skin, and dark, piercing eyes looked back at me from the reflection in the house’s parchglass walls. I admired his striking features as I knocked.

  Not that I needed to knock with the number of early warning systems Carina probably had set up around her house. But I’m nothing if not polite. Especially when I want something.

  From inside came the unmistakable sound of someone kicking something heavy across the room.

  “You better pray to God I never make it to this door, Van Zandt,” Carina yelled from inside.

  Paperinas flitted around my stomach, and a crazy grin stretched across my face. I hadn’t felt much of anything but the PCM attacks in such a long time that the excitement was making me giddy.

  “Are you seriously still mad?” I’m not always great with time, but it felt like centuries had passed since I’d last seen Carina. I took a guess. “Soam was like…a year ago?”

  There was another crash inside. Then the house’s door roared open on its track and I was staring down the business end of Carina’s well-worn knuckgun. She grabbed me by the jacket collar and slammed me against one of the porch’s thick wooden columns, then jammed the knuckgun up under my jaw.

  “Eighteen months,” she said. A muscle in her mahogany-colored cheek ticked. If the symmetrical muscle under her other cheek hadn’t been trapped in all that shiny pink scar tissue, it probably would’ve tocked.

  Our time apart had not been good to Carina. Since the last time I’d seen her, crow’s feet had etched themselves into the dark skin at the outside corners of her green eyes. She’d been athletic and sleek before, a very successful feline predator. Now shadows stood out below her high cheekbones. Where her long sleeves rode up, I could see the veins in her wrists and thin straps of muscle in her forearms. The past eighteen months had whittled her curves and soft places down to hard angles and razorblades. She looked sharp. Painfully so.

  Apparently, in spite of Soam’s nationwide obesity epidemic, good eats were not a part of their prison system.

  “It took you eighteen months to break out of a prison pit?” I squinted at her in disbelief. “In Soam?”

  “My femur was shattered,” she said. “Two of my vertebra had to be replaced.”

  “Pretty convenient excuses,” I said.

  Carina thumbed the knuckgun’s switch from SAFETY to BURST, effectively changing its purpose from SCARE JUBAL to TURN JUBAL’S SKULL INTO A BRAIN GEYSER.

  I tried to jerk away from the deadly weapon—I love myself and I don’t fucking like anything that has the potential to kill that self—but Carina’s grip on my collar just tightened. She had me pinned to the column.

  I grunted. “You’re awfully strong for a stick figure.”

  “It was a miracle I wasn’t killed on impact.”

  “Exactly, so what are you yelling at me for?” I said. “It’s not like you didn’t know what you were getting into ahead of time, hiring me. You’re just mad that I saw through your manipulation in time to save my own skin.”

  Carina’s dark eyebrows twitched together, and her head cocked a fraction of a fraction. “Manipulation?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Bloodslinger, it looks terrible on you.” I tried again to squirm away from the knuckgun. “Will you put that piece away already? We both know you’re not going to use it on me. It’s served its purpose—I’m very intimidated and a little bit arou
sed.”

  Carina made a disgusted sound in her throat and shoved away from me, lowering the knuckgun to her side. “What are you doing here, Van Zandt?”

  “What kind of stupid question is that?” I straightened my jacket. “You know why I’m here. You’ve opened every message I sent you since you got back to Emden.”

  “You hacked my wristpiece?!”

  “Hey, I’m the one who should be mad at you. You’re the little brat who’s been too busy pouting to send a simple reply.”

  “You hacked my wristpiece and read my messages.” She shook her head. “And I was thinking you couldn’t stoop any lower.”

  I shot her a wink and a finger gun. “That’s your fault for underestimating me.”

  Carina’s green eyes locked onto my left brow. “Is your scar smaller?”

  “I’ve been using this new moisturizer. Supposed to reduce the appearance of scarring. You should look into—”

  “Your jaw is squarer. And your nose is smaller.” Her gaze jumped around my face, the Guild hyperfocus upgrade allowing her to catalogue my devilishly handsome features faster than a regular human eye could observe them, then skipped down to my body.

  She reached for my bicep.

  I took the opportunity to slide out from between her and the column. “Look, Carina, any other day of the week I would love to discuss in depth how gorgeous we both think I am, but like my as of yet unanswered messages said, I have a time-sensitive business proposition to discuss with you.”

  “You’ve got PCM,” she said, making a wild leap to the right conclusion. “You’re losing weight, your looks are improving—”

  “Now, wait just a damn minute,” I snapped. “What exactly is there to improve upon?”

  She crossed her arms, resting her knuckgun in the crook of her elbow. “Don’t even try to tell me you’re having plasties done. You think you’re too attractive for that. How long do you have?”

  “Carina.” I gestured at myself. “Look at this face. Look at this skin. My eyes are universes within universes. Angels weep at my genetic code. Just what the hell do you think there is in this celebration of aesthetic beauty to do a plasty on?”

  Her eyes settled on my waist.

  “Oh, just…fuck you, Carina. So I store a couple extra orders of biscuits and gravy around the tummy to keep my abs from getting lonely. Maybe if you’d been smart enough to do the same, you wouldn’t look like you’d just crawled out of a Feed the War Orphans holoposter right now.”

  The unscarred corner of Carina’s lips twisted upward. “Have fun dying of the plague, Van Zandt.”

  Without even looking back, she headed for the sliding front door.

  “Wait!” I grabbed her arm.

  The knuckgun kissed my temple this time. Carina didn’t put any force behind it, just rested it lightly against my braincase and waited. Her dark brows rose, and her green eyes bored into mine.

  Goosebumps prickled down the back of my neck. I giggled. She wasn’t going to shoot me, but she could sure as hell put on one convincing bluff.

  I let go of her arm, but didn’t back up. “We both know I wouldn’t have lasted a week in a Soam prison pit. And given the choice between me and you, you would’ve pulled a Jesus to protect me, anyway. That’s what you’re all about—nobility, service, sacrifice. Except I was the one who had to choose, so I did what your noble soldier syndrome would’ve done if you’d had the chance. The only reason you’re mad is—”

  “Reasons I’m mad,” Carina said in an eerily calm voice, putting the tiniest amount of pressure on the knuckgun for emphasis, “is not a river of piranhas you want to dive into right now, Van Zandt.”

  “So, what you’re saying is we’ll talk that out later.”

  Not even a flicker of a smile.

  I sighed. “I’m dying, Carina. Okay? Are you happy? I’m dying. According to every damn specialist I’ve been to, I’ve got three to six months before the PCM eats me alive. There’s no one else I can turn to. If you’re not going to help me, then I might as well give up right now and buy a glass-front coffin.”

  “There’s no cure for beautiful corpse, magic or medicine,” she said. But that eerie calm was gone. I had her hooked.

  “What I’m after is better than medicine,” I said. “Better than magic, too.”

  From the way she hesitated, I could tell she didn’t want to ask.

  I waited.

  Finally, she stopped fighting herself. “What is it?”

  “More time,” I said.

  ***

  Inside, Carina’s house smelled like coffee and cardboard. But with all the boxes stacked around, it would’ve been strange if it had smelled like anything else. The place looked like a storage unit that someone kept piling boxes into because they were determined to get their money’s worth. The reed mat floors only peeked through the clutter on what I assumed were Carina’s most commonly traveled routes, where the boxes had been kicked or shoved out of the way. In some places, the stacks scraped the exposed ceiling beams.

  Carina led me through the maze, limping slightly every time she put weight on her left leg.

  I turned sideways and sucked in my gut to squeeze through a particularly tight spot. “So, the boxes…”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I just never pictured you as the hoarder type. I would’ve guessed extreme minimalist. Are you moving or—”

  “I’m serious, Van Zandt. I’m not doing this with you right now.”

  “I didn’t even know they still made cardboard,” I said, tipping my head back to get a better view of a six-box stack. The top box was dented in and wedged against the ceiling. “That can’t be good out here with all this dampness. Do you even own a dehumidifier? I feel like I should put my ventilator back on.”

  “Really starting to miss the quiet of that prison pit,” she grumbled.

  “Mildew is a very real health concern, Carina.”

  Grunting with effort, she pushed a tall stack of boxes out of a doorway to reveal a kitchen. Set into the floor was a fire pit with a low stone counter surrounding it. A huge copper ventilation hood hung overhead, sucking the smoke outside. In the embers, a little burner stand had been set up with a percolator on top.

  Carina opened her sanitizer cabinet and pulled out a coffee mug. She filled it from the percolator, then lowered herself carefully to the floor and pressed her left thigh against the stone counter.

  “Looks like a major fire hazard.” I seated myself at the adjacent counter. The fire pit tile and the floor surrounding it was hot, but not scorching. I wondered if the heat helped ease the pain in her leg. “One of these boxes gets knocked in and your whole house goes up. That parchglass is pre-700s, right? It’s going to flashburn the second a spark touches it.”

  “If you’re here to propose a job, then propose it,” Carina said, adjusting her hold on her cup.

  “First of all, I want to make this clear up front.” I pointed at the percolator. “If you’re offering coffee, I accept. That smells like a decent caramel roast. Is it Old Castle?”

  Carina rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll ask the questions. How long did you say you had?”

  “All day, so if you want to make some fresh, I can wait. And if—”

  “To live, Van Zandt. How long do you have to live?”

  Checking my story. She’d called the PCM herself, but she still didn’t believe me.

  “A few months,” I said. “Six, tops.”

  Her dark eyebrows twitched together with what might’ve been genuine concern.

  “Right?” I said. “If I’d known how quickly this plague shit escalates, I would’ve taken worse care of myself. Maybe being ugly would’ve bought me a little more time.”

  Carina’s full lips etched into a hard line as she pushed herself back to her feet. She got another cup from her sanitizer and filled it with coffee, too.

  “I’d say I’m sorry, but…” She shrugged and handed the cup to me.

  I forced a laugh. “I didn’t
think you would be. Anyway, if I had to pick a way to go…”

  “Yeah, seems appropriate,” she said, lowering herself back down to the spot she’d been in against the fire pit. Some of the tightness in her shoulders relaxed when she pressed her left leg to the stone.

  For a few seconds, Carina acted like she wasn’t going to say anything else. I was used to the long pauses she pulled when she was thinking and the wordless shrugs when she didn’t think she needed to argue with me. This silence was new and unfamiliar. A blank. Void of feeling and impossible to discern meaning from.

  I didn’t like it, but I was sure as hell not going to be the first one to break the silence.

  She took a sip of her coffee, cradling the cup in her hands as if she couldn’t get warm enough. “Is it painful?”

  I considered lying, which was a stupid impulse. You couldn’t check your wristpiece these days without seeing ten new articles and interviews with victims of the beautiful corpse plague—the name the news blogs had given PCM to capitalize on how sexy and scary it was.

  So I told her the truth instead. “No. It feels incredible. Better than chocolate-covered sex in a hot caramel fountain. It’s a wonder I don’t jizz my shorts every time I have an attack.”

  A Carina-pause. Then, “Are you going to sell your body to a viewing gallery?”

  “I don’t know.” PCM eats your body from the inside out, destroying everything ugly or incorrect, replacing everything temporary with jewel-like calcifications, until there was nothing left but a gorgeous shell that never decomposed. The plague and infectious disease specialists hadn’t figured out yet how beautiful corpse spread, where it had originated, or what to do about it, but everyone agreed that the bodies it left behind were really something worth looking at. “I haven’t thought about it. Yeah, I probably will if I can’t find a cure.”

  Carina nodded.

  Since she obviously wasn’t going to say it, I did—“It’d be a shame to deprive the world of this face.”

  She drank her coffee and continued not to comment.

  I took a sip, letting the caramel roast scald my throat on the way down. It wasn’t Old Castle, but it struck a perfect balance between savory and sweet with a hidden buttery note. The heat wasn’t the same as the PCM fits. It wasn’t powerful enough, didn’t burn pleasantly enough, didn’t linger on and on and then disappear too quickly. And even as rich as Carina’s coffee was, the taste was all wrong. Everything hot should taste the way the PCM fire tastes.