and the EPED, and no longer selling his services to the richest crime lord on Elyria. Raphael hadn’t been thrilled to lose him, but there was nothing his ex-boss could do to make him stay and Raphael knew it.
There was nothing Hysterian cared about enough for Raphael to use against him.
And they had come together more as friends and less as boss and subordinate. Hysterian often refused to do Raphael’s bidding, and Raphael dealt with it because he enjoyed the bragging rights of having a Cyborg bodyguard.
If it weren’t for Zeph and his misadventure in Hysterian’s neck of the universe, then Hysterian wouldn’t be here now, feeling a modicum of hope.
Nightheart promised me warmth, contact.
He promised a cure. He has money.
More money than anyone else as far as Hysterian suspected.
Raphael promised the same thing when Hysterian first entered into Raphael’s employment, and he delivered, but not in the way Hysterian needed.
His ex-boss used his connections to look into a drug or a cure, but when all avenues failed, the inquiries stopped, and the encounters with random humans picked up instead. It’d been the only way for Raphael to pay him…
Raphael delivered to Hysterian victims, drug addicts who were just as desperate for a fix as he was. His ex-boss gave him the warmth he craved in small fucked-up doses. For a while, Hysterian took them willingly, killing and doping up whoever Raphael wanted him to.
Hysterian crouched, pressed his head between his knees, and wrapped his arms around his body.
Glazed eyes, raspy coughs, pale spotted skin flickered through his mind. Stringy hair, urine-stained clothes, bulging purple blood vessels. Hundreds of faces flashed behind his eyes. Ghosts. Demons. They were always there.
Did they matter? Back then, he would have said no. If these people ended up in his space, they got there because they were stupid. Anyone who came to Raphael for help was an idiot… Killing was second nature to a Cyborg made for war, but cold-blooded killing was something else entirely…
Everything had slowly changed. It was like a genetic code rewrote itself within him. What made him so good as to be dubbed the name Tormentor no longer computed.
Hysterian had started to care.
When? He had no idea. It no longer mattered because any warmth he’d stolen from these idiot humans diminished, and he was jonesing for a new fix. He couldn’t turn to tranqs or hallucinogens because of his mecha nature and the nanocells that were like a disease throughout his whole body. They’d nullify the effects as soon as they entered his body. He’d need a great deal of alcohol to get any effect from it.
Hysterian hated and envied the druggies he had spent so much time with.
The pulsing bass of the music at Dimes rang in his ears. Hysterian hissed through his teeth.
He remembered everyone he touched. He wouldn’t allow himself to forget. Wiping his mind clean of the memories would be cowardly. His jaw locked. He was far from a coward.
But then Zeph ended up at Dimes, and Nightheart made contact with Hysterian to take him out. Was it fate? Probably not. Fate didn’t factor into Cyborg coding.
Nightheart made him an offer Hysterian couldn’t refuse.
“I’ll find a way to cure you, to stop your body’s reaction to contact, but in return, you’ll work for me. You’ll contract as a new retriever for the EPED. You’ll stop working for that fat fuck and get some fucking dignity back.”
Hysterian had laughed at the time.
Raphael hated being called fat.
Unlike most Cyborgs who saw humans as inferior—especially human males—Hysterian saw them as useful. Their randomness and lack of calculation made them fun. Their ability to touch and hold everything—to feel everything—made him envious. And they were warm. Always warm.
He had always been this way, but it wasn’t until the war ended that it became an issue.
Perhaps being an interrogator and executioner for the military had something to do with it. They spliced his human DNA with an unusual creature for that very purpose.
The cybernetic doctors spliced him and then didn’t give him the ability to shift.
Raul had the right of it.
Hysterian was defective.
He rose to his feet and stretched. Though he couldn’t fully shift, he hadn’t lost all parts of his other half. The cybernetic doctors had given him some quirks that they thought could be useful.
Thank the devil they gave me my tongue. Hysterian rolled his eyes.
Self-pitying piece of shit. He strode to his lavatory and turned on his bathing unit. He may not have had an animal he could