From the Noblest Motives Read online

  FROM THE NOBLEST MOTIVES

  Variant Configurations 2

  ANGEL MARTINEZ

  Edited by

  JUDE DUNN

  COPYRIGHT

  About the Book You Have Purchased:

  This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this book ONLY. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from the authors. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  * * *

  Cover Design @ Natasha Snow Designs 2022

  Editor: Jude Dunn

  * * *

  First Edition

  FROM THE NOBLEST MOTIVES: VARIANT CONFIGURATIONS 2 © 2022 Angel Martinez

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * *

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: From the Noblest Motives is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are fictionalized. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The story contains explicit sexual content and is intended for adult readers.

  Any person depicted in the Licensed Art Material is a model and is being used solely for illustrative purposes.

  PUBLISHER

  Mischief Corner Books, LLC

  BLURB

  The Fredamine Project was just the beginning. Shadow dealings and conspiracies regarding variants intertwine until Damien and his cohorts can no longer tell who the bad guys are.

  * * *

  Several months have passed since Blaze and the infamous Variant activist Shudder McKenzie helped Damien rescue the captives of the sinister Fredamine Project. Professionally, everything's great. He's back to working with Damien again and they have a new lead on the three kids who are still missing. Personally, not so much. Blaze has made his peace with Shudder, though nothing between them has even been easy, but his relationship with Damien has taken several steps back. Blaze no longer has any idea where he stands. Adding to the tense atmosphere are the anti-Variant members of legislature who have been slowly gaining popular approval, and the cryptic messages Damien receives from an unknown source.

  * * *

  Shudder's back to his old haunts and his old tricks, trying to raise public awareness of imperiled Variant rights—such as the draconic Horace Act that strips due process during Variant trials—and to rescue Variant kids in trouble. His almost mythical luck runs out though when he's arrested for murder only three days after the passage of the Horace Act and a whirlwind trial and sentencing lands him in the most notorious maximum security facility for Variants—San Judas Tadeo.

  * * *

  With too many conspirators on both sides of the aisle, Damien, Blaze and Shudder no longer know whom to trust. Peeling through the layers of deceit and half-truths puts them on shakier ground with every discovery and in greater danger than ever before.

  * * *

  Variant Configurations takes place in a future Earth where humanity is reclaiming its spot in a gradually healing world. This book contains mentions of past abuse, action-adventure style mayhem, and the sparks of a slow burn, series-spanning relationship.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Vanishing Point

  2. The White Prison

  3. Flickers in the Rain

  4. Fire and Earth

  5. Cyril

  6. Over the River and Through the Woods

  7. Of Reptiles and Amphibians

  8. A Strange and Private Place

  9. Necessary Clarity

  10. Unexpected Developments

  11. Judicious Chaos

  12. Variants of the Mind

  13. Blaze's Stand

  14. Redoubt Redux

  15. Shudder, When He's At Home

  Variant Configurations Appendix

  Places

  Organizations

  People

  Variant Categorization

  Thank you Readers!

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  About Angel Martinez

  Also by Angel Martinez

  About Mischief Corner Books

  DEDICATION

  For all the passionate, goodhearted people trying their best for a better world—I see you. Thank you.

  1

  VANISHING POINT

  The Wind River Range dominated the view through the windshield, a series of blunt teeth from this direction, like the lower jawbone of an impossibly huge, extinct herbivore. The evening sun tinged otherwise forbidding gray stone with carnation pink and brightened the last bits of snow on early summer peaks. Damien mentally traced the edges of pink along the western edges, snow to stone. Pink icing on pink cake.

  His thoughts snagged and he frowned. Most of the cakes in his limited experience—provided by Dr. Parma who had fostered him from age ten—had been yellow with chocolate icing. He'd loved those, so that's what she gave him, and he hadn't paid much attention to baked goods past that. "Are cakes ever pink?"

  Beside him in the driver's seat, Blaze snorted, the sun raising sparks of gold in his red hair. "Every time I think I'm starting to figure out how your twitchy brain works."

  Damien tried to smooth his frown, certain it hadn't worked. "Are they?"

  "Sure. Cake could be any color you want. Pink. Blue. Black. Some chartreuse hideosity."

  One corner of Damien's mouth tugged up as he slid into Blaze's favorite game of obsolete words. "Gingerline."

  "Sinoper."

  "Incarnadine."

  "Egregious."

  Damien slid his eyes toward the left without turning his head. "That's not a color. Or even an obscure word."

  Blaze nodded, far too serious. "I know. Just like the way it sounds. Like some big, long-legged water bird."

  "That's an egret."

  "Like some fucker who thinks too much of himself."

  "Egotist?"

  "Like that weird cream thing people pour alcohol into for the holidays."

  A choking laugh got away from Damien before he could catch it. "You mean eggnog?"

  "Ha." Blaze's grin rivaled sun on snow. "A laugh. One that sounded like the air being let out of a tire, but I'll take it."

  The warmth spreading out from under Damien's heart was familiar. Both comforting and distressing. This, driving with Blaze, the effortless give and take, was too easy to slide back into. He'd missed it with a heart-constricting ache, and he'd told himself for the past three months that he shouldn't, could not, miss it.

  And still, here we are again.

  Three months alone at his isolated cabin in Vermont. Three months to think, to process, to try to smooth out the desperate mess of his thoughts. Through the slow melting of winter and the first tentative green of spring, though, he hadn't untangled himself from the previous job—from Blaze, from Shudder, from the exhausting and knotted-up search for forty missing variant children. Physically, he had recovered. His mind hadn't managed to stop picking at all of it for more than a handful of minutes at a time.

  Not that three months was nearly enough time to forget, but he'd hoped for some distance, some clarity. One thing had become painfully clear, though— how deeply the job had affected him and disturbed his peace. Before, settling back into the rhythms of life alone had been easy, but after his last return from Raleigh, he'd been restless, both melancholy and agitated. He told himself again and again that his retreat had been for the best, but he'd no longer found any peace in solitude.
r />   He'd… missed things he never had before. Conversation. Touch. Companionship.

  Blaze. He'd missed Blaze and on nights when he was brutally honest with himself, Shudder, too. He'd retreated to his cabin to let go, to be sure Blaze would be able to let go, and for his part, Damien had done an absolutely terrible job, the complete opposite of letting go.

  When Dr. Parma had sent for him, he hadn't hesitated. It only made sense to have him continue the job he'd started rather than bring in someone new—and when he'd reached the conference room, there was Blaze. Big, beautiful Blaze with his cocky smile and his boots up on the table just like the first time they'd met. For three stuttering heartbeats, Damien had frozen while part of his brain tried to convince him to run away, scrabbling in the corners like a terrified rodent.

  That smile, the easy way Blaze had called him by that once-hated nickname—those had flung up an invisible barrier and prevented his flight. His heart had swelled and shattered and skittered back together in a lumpy mess of anxious flailing, and instead of running, he'd returned the smile.

  Something slid back into place that had been askew, a gear tapped back into alignment, and they'd simply started over as if they'd just said goodnight in a friendly fashion the previous evening, rather than the tense, charged farewell of three months before.

  So here we are again, though we've somehow agreed without saying so that we're being cordial but careful. He's not asking why I wasn't waiting for him in Raleigh, and I'm not asking how he's been. Quite a bit of not asking going on.

  There had been no hug in greeting, no kiss before they got on the plane to Salt Lake City, no acknowledgment of past physical closeness. Which was… good? Exactly what Damien had wanted, to end the relationship before it became any more serious. For Blaze. To protect Blaze. Though this too-careful distance made him worry over how badly Blaze still hurt or if he'd simply been angry and had already moved past it.

  Blaze startled Damien out of his thought circles. "Seems a little convenient, don't you think?"

  "The cake colors?"

  "Ah, no." The twitch at one corner of Blaze's mouth was almost a smile. "Not the cakes. The bracelet."

  "Yes."

  Blaze nodded, obviously accustomed to Damien's reversion to single-word answers. "No trails, no hint of those four kids we couldn't find, and out of the clear blue fucking sky, some informant dances into Guild Center with Hillary's bracelet."

  "Unnamed informant."

  "Right. Who just happens to know the coordinates where they found it. Pretty good odds this is a trap, Twitch."

  Damien gave half a shrug. "Maybe. We still have to look."

  "No arguments there. But if it's not a trap, I can't figure how to put the pieces together so they make sense." Blaze flicked him a look, concern lurking in his eyes. "You sure I can't give you a firearm? Something small?"

  "I'm sure. I have my shovel."

  It was a dark joke and a terrible one, but Blaze snorted in amusement. He might have been the only person alive who understood it.

  "How close?"

  Damien consulted the readout on the dash. "A little to the right. Should be just past that stand of scrub over there."

  While Damien had been born with an unusual variant talent that allowed him to track people's trails, he needed a starting point. For the first part of this job, most of the trails had started at the Western Academy, a school specifically for variant children. The kids who were still missing—Hillary, Deshaun, Maia, and Danilo—hadn't crossed or paralleled any of the other trails Damien had been able to follow. He suspected they had been heading to school and never made it there.

  If the bracelet, confirmed as Hillary's by her mother, had been found at the coordinates up ahead, there was a good chance Damien could pick up her trail. Unless someone stole it from her and lost it there.

  Unless it was planted there by a third party for some reason I can't puzzle out. Unless a crow picked it up and carried it an unknown distance from Hillary's last actual location. Unless… Stop it. Right now.

  "Twitch? You getting anything?"

  "Just an itch so far." Damien flapped a hand toward Blaze. "Slower. Slower. Wait… stop. Let me out."

  Blaze whipped his head around as he eased them to a stop. "You okay? Did somebody die here?"

  "No." Damien slid from the vehicle, realizing the answer had been too short and sharp. "Nothing like that."

  Fingers tingling, the energy of human life signatures humming in his brain, Damien hurried to the spot where the paths called to him. The sun made the day too warm for a jacket, and in only a T-shirt, he didn't need to strip down to read the trails. Hillary, yes, but the other three students as well—they'd all been there.

  "Hey?" Blaze called softly, and Damien realized he'd been standing frozen with his eyes squeezed shut for too long.

  Damien pulled in a trembling breath and eased back from the trails enough to answer as he pointed toward the west. "They came from that direction." Then toward the northeast. "And all four continue this way. If they were looking for Shade, they came too far east."

  "All right. Hell of a lot more than we had before. You need a hand?"

  Do I? While Damien's vision had blurred and his knees didn't feel reliable, he knew saying yes would be self-indulgent. Yes, he wanted Blaze to touch him. Yes, he wanted the support of those strong hands. But once he started down that road… Damien shook his head. "I'm fine."

  "Uh-huh."

  Blaze gave one of those snorts that was more exasperated than amused and stomped back to the vehicle. He didn't, Damien noted, slam the door. The anger was there, without a doubt, but muted and scrupulously reined in. In a way, he wished Blaze would stop being so careful and yell at him.

  After a few minutes silent driving in the direction Damien had indicated, he blurted out, "No Dryad."

  Anyone else would've answered with confusion or even derision. Blaze nodded, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. "Makes sense. They didn't hook up with her, so they didn't have a guide, just a rumor about a direction. Way off course to run into any of Shudder's hooligans, too."

  That Blaze hadn't said something sarcastic about stating the obvious should've been a relief. Instead it hurt. He was censoring himself, being so careful of Damien's feelings. The tiny bit of warmth from the cake discussion evaporated, replaced by frustration. Not that he had the first idea what to do about the divide between them, nor was he sure that he should.

  "At least they were together." Damien leaned his head against the window, letting the trails spool out ahead of them.

  "You can tell that? Not that they just all came this way?"

  "Yes."

  Blaze stared out the windshield, fingers still tapping. Finally, he let out a sigh. "Never mind. Maybe if Shudder was here, you'd explain. You liked talking to him."

  "I…" Now what was that supposed to mean? "I can't always explain. Not well." Damien shrugged when Blaze glanced over at him. "There are layers to things, I guess would be closest."

  "Like chronological layers? Like looking-at-rock layers?"

  "Sort of." Damien shifted, half turning toward Blaze. The trails weren't actual layers like geological strata, though. "More like carbon-dating fossils, maybe? Except I just… know when one trail is concurrent with another."

  A tiny smile tugged at the corner of Blaze's mouth. "Now there's a good word. Concurrent."

  "It's useful." Damien pointed to the right, correcting Blaze's course a few degrees along the trails.

  The rest of the day, communication pared down to immediate trail concerns— course corrections as the maglev truck whisked along over sand reed and bottlebrush, warnings about clumps of woody brush coming up, and occasional stops to avoid hitting larger wildlife, like pronghorn and buffalo. Avoidance didn't make anything less tense between them, but the longer Damien put off saying anything, the harder it became to say it.

  When they stopped for the evening, Damien slid out of the truck and wandered off to watch the moonrise
from a nearby hummock that barely cleared the prairie grasses. He was being a coward. He knew it, and knowing it just tied extra knots in his stomach.

  "Come eat something," Blaze called from where he'd opened the back of the truck and was rummaging in their supplies. "I'm not picking your ass up when you pass out."

  Though you have before. He kept that to himself, letting the memory merge with the rest of the pain in his gut. One foot at a time, Damien turned and forced himself back to the truck. He clambered up next to Blaze on the tailgate, accepted a pop meal, and forced himself to eat.

  Blaze occupied a good portion of his anxious thoughts—hard for him not to, since he sat a mere six inches away—but not all of them. The missing kids occupied the rest. Were they alive? Were they safe? Too many horrible possibilities had occurred to Damien, wandering through his thoughts in an endless loop.

  They got through dinner watching a pair of jackrabbit bucks fighting, presumably over a female sensibly hidden in the grass. They stood tall on their hind legs, hopping about and smacking at each other with their forepaws like manic prizefighters. Neither wanted to admit defeat.

  "She must be a special rabbit," Blaze murmured around a bite of stew.

  "I guess she can't just say she wants them both."