Before the most cowardly merc we'd met so far had the chance to wake up, I moved closer to him so I'd be taking up most of his vision. After all, we were testing for a specific reaction there.

His awakening was just as swift and orderly as the others had been. The difference was his reaction to the sight of me. Instantly, his expression slackened. His eyes went glassy. His posture became unnaturally stiff.

Then he was in front of me, moving so fast that you'd never guess his body had just been beat up, stuffed in a crate, and drugged.

"My King," he rasped, his voice almost breaking from misuse. Then he caught sight of Amelia from the corner of his eye and pivoted slightly so he was facing both of us. "My Queen."

I sighed. "You made him call us that on purpose, didn't you?"

"Maaaaybe." She looked altogether too pleased with herself.

A menace indeed.

"You know, if you want to marry me so badly, you can just ask. No need for all the constant hints." I smirked at the way her eyes widened.

"I don't want to marry you!"

"Oooof, now that hurts." I gasped dramatically. "After everything we've been through? The experiments, the escape, the stalking? Offering to marry me for the citizenship? And now these nicknames?"

"Shut up!" She looked caught between mortification and the desire to hit me repeatedly. "Just — shut up!"

I laughed louder, glad to see the delicious cocktail of emotions on her face rather than worry. That tension in her shoulders was slowly fading. The longer we went without her accidentally experimenting on me in my sleep, the fainter the fear became. But it was still there.

"Ugh, you're the worst. Going to test the stuff on him now or what? We pretty much got confirmation of my test, but there's still a few things we need to try before you melt his brain."

She was deflecting, but she also wasn't wrong. We got to work.

Amelia had done her best to key her newly made 'zombie' to both herself and to me, shifting her 'Mender' designation to 'Queen' when she did so. As 'King', I was meant to be able to give them absolute orders too, as well as warrant the same degree of instinctual protection as Amelia did.

Honestly, the entire experiment was a huge success. The newly mind-controlled monster in human skin obeyed my every word, even when I told him to shift between his 'regular' and 'obedient' behaviors.

Then Amelia decided to get creative.

"Tell him to sit down and not stand up, okay?" she requested, and so I did. Then she turned to her thrall with an intrigued look on her face. "Stand up."

The ex-merc's body jerked, almost obeying her on instinct. Then he froze. His distant gaze locked onto a point somewhere past Amelia's left shoulder. A few seconds went by before he started visibly shaking. His face twitched while his eyes grew red. I could swear foam was forming at his mouth.

"Stop! You can obey her," I commanded in a hurry.

He practically catapulted himself to his feet.

"Okay, so, that could be an issue." I stared at the ex-merc uneasily. Even through his empty expression, he looked like an immense weight had been lifted from his shoulders. "He can't handle opposing orders from us."

"No, he really can't." Amelia looked more intrigued than disturbed.

Honestly? Fair. He deserved no consideration from us. Not after all he'd done throughout his miserable life.

Still, a thought occurred to me that I would gladly take to my grave: at that moment, with that small, almost mischievous smile and gleam in her eyes, Amelia's expression reminded me of her father. Particularly the way the man had looked at me when he'd had me on an operating table.

"Maybe give them a hierarchy to follow?" I suggested, burying that thought way down deep. "Your orders are always at the top, then mine are under that? It would stop their brains from leaking out their ears if we make a mistake and tell them to do two opposing things. Actually… what happens if we just order him to do two different things? Not even opposed, I mean."

"Great question!" my lover exclaimed, smile still in place. "Let's find out? On three, two, one…"

We gave our orders at the same time, speaking over each other, and then got to witness the hilarious sight of our victim trying to dance his life away while fetching a towel for me at the same time. It wasn't pretty. But only because he wasn't a very good dancer, despite how hard he was clearly trying.

"Okay, so that works," I muttered. "But he'll hobble himself trying to do two things at once. Yeah, love, you definitely need to install a hierarchy when you next work on them."

Taking the towel gingerly, I flung it into a corner with a grimace.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

It may not have been logical, but I wasn't any more comfortable than Amelia was around the ex-mercenary. I guess disgust had affected me as well.

Then again, I was about to do a lot more than just handle a towel he had touched.

"You think he'll just keep dancing till he dies? I never specified how long he had to do it," Amelia asked wonderingly, making me chuckle and shoot her a look.

"Even if he would, you need to get him to stop. You know what we're testing here today."

"Yes, yes. Oi, stop that shit and go sit back down on the table," she snapped.

The thrall, predictably, obeyed. Then, no matter how much I didn't want to, I steeled myself and stepped up.

For a moment, I kind of… flailed, not sure how to start. But then I realized it was best to just copy the last time I had used the ability and go from there.

My hands landed on the man's cheeks, and I guided his head until he was looking me straight in the eye. Then I triggered my skill.

Assault, fed by Essence, lashed out of me and into the thrall, biting deep.

It was an odd sensation, like I'd scooped out a piece of me and flung it into him, yet it remained connected to me by a rubber line that wanted desperately to snap back. It was Essence that forced it out. Essence that acted like a spike, sinking deep into the ex-merc's mind. Essence that stopped the process from failing.

The effects were far more devastating than I had expected.

The time I'd stalked Rafe and Oliwia and tried to turn the latter was kind of fuzzy in my mind. Still, I was pretty sure that I had triggered Assault when I was desperate to stop her from turning for real. Oliwia had resisted, however briefly. She'd wanted to live. To fight back.

There was no such urge left in this nameless asshole. His mind just crumbled in the face of Assault. Vaguely, I noted the experience alerts for the skill pinging in the back of my brain.

When there was nothing of his mind left to ravage, I let the flow of Essence cut out. Then I snapped back into my body. Full awareness returned to me all at once, and I cringed at the sight of his face, letting my hands fall away.

If the look in his eyes had been empty before, it was just dead now. Nothing sparked there, not even obedience or reverence or whatever it was thralls felt when Amelia was done with them. He was still breathing, but only barely. A little drool dripped out of the corner of his mouth, and…

I blinked, quickly shoving my hand in front of his mouth before relaxing a smidge.

"Oh, wow, you really did a number on this guy." Amelia whistled, wide-eyed. "I gather it worked?"

"Yep. As long as I can gaze into our enemies' eyes soulfully while caressing their cheeks, then I can take them out. No problem."

I couldn't deny that I was pleased. Sure, it was highly situational. I'd need to experiment with it a little. But that was right now. With practice, I was pretty sure I could reduce the skill use requirements to mere touch.

Still not ideal. Still not easy to pull off while fighting for your life. But could work, and it would be one hell of a card to keep up my sleeve.

Amelia cackled. "Should I be worried about all this 'soulful staring'? That's the kind of stuff you should only be doing with your girlfriend, you know."

"I thought we were engaged?" I teased right back, ignoring her indignant squawks as I returned my attention to the merc.

One final test. One final hypothesis to prove.

And, potentially, a most displeasing snack.

"I'm going in for the final thing. Wish me luck."

She did, but I was barely listening as I placed my hands back on the man's face, carefully avoiding the drool.

One more glance at Amelia to confirm she'd stepped back and put on noise-cancelling headphones. Then I let eldritch words slip off my tongue and sent them worming into what was left of the thrall's psyche.

It wasn't pretty. He thrashed, much like they all did. There was no begging or anything like that, though. Just a lot of slobber.

I could also feel things were different right from the start. Oh, the change had triggered alright. But it felt like the Essence I was spending, which was dripping out of my eyes like free-flowing tears, was failing to sink its hooks into something. The ex-merc's mind, most likely.

By the time he was a blackened, twisted corpse in a pool of tar blood, I had confirmed two things. First , I didn't need to be looming over someone to turn them. I just needed eye contact. For now, at least. And second, you couldn't turn someone into a shadow if their mind was shattered.

Actually, I was pretty sure that was the reason why some people failed to turn to begin with. Their minds just broke halfway through the process. But if they wanted to live badly enough, if they fought back like Oliwia, then a new Shadow Runner would be born.

It was an ironic requirement, considering they'd still be subsumed by an eldritch consciousness, but there it was.

"Going to chow down, oooooor…?" Amelia drawled. I scowled at her, and she blinked innocently. "What? I saw you do it during my father's experiment. I watched you do it through your own eyes. I'm not gonna get disgusted and break off our relationship now. I only have one question." She motioned at the corpse. "You gonna need cutlery for that?"

Feeling petty, I stared at her as my claws slipped out and my hand flashed down to grip the guy's arm. Then, still holding her gaze, I broke the arm off like the puny stick it now was.

She won, though. I couldn't quite force myself to maintain eye contact while partaking in willful cannibalism.

My macabre meal was accompanied by her snickering.

—

Over the next two weeks, we got four more moles inside the mercenary company. Our drones were doing amazing work, and everything was developing apace!

That, of course, was when the universe decided to throw a wrench at the back of our heads.

We were relaxing and watching some trashy movie on Amelia's scroll when it happened. The broadcast was interrupted by an 'emergency news' announcement, and then a typical newscast reporter popped up on screen: 'young', 'pretty', and featuring way too much synth skin for any piece of her to be natural.

"We apologize for this interruption, but we've just received breaking news from one of our informants! You will be pleased and relieved to hear that the lockdown, which has been plaguing our city for a while now, has been lifted. You will be even more pleased to hear that, after months of public outcry, we finally have news on what happened inside the Micog district! To the shock and horror of everyone, here's what our news station was able to uncover!"

The longer the reporter spoke, the colder I felt.

Infection. A district-wide plague, triggered by 'unknown terrorists believed to have perished due to their own act of terror.' The reported number of the dead…

All of them. Every last member of the district was dead and gone, along with anyone who had tried to slip inside. Due to 'the highly contagious nature of the plague', they were saying.

That wasn't right, though. It couldn't be. I had ordered the shadows to stick to that building, and I knew they had obeyed me.

So what the fuck was going on?!

I looked at Amelia. She was even more grim-faced than I was.

"The lockdown's gone," she said flatly. "That means they're going to start moving again."

My eyes widened.

The mercs. With the lockdown gone, they had no reason not to pick up their business once more.

Well, fuck.

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