Ultimate Weapon Read Online Free PDF Page A

nuts. Their very femaleness grated on her, unfair though that was. Estrogen overload. She could only take so much. She was a solitary creature. Atypical, asexual, asocial. Royally screwed up, yes. She had no illusions about that, and she made no apologies for it. She was what she was, and if someone didn’t like it, tough shit for him. Or her.
    Not that their men were much better than the women. The McCloud Crowd menfolk were relatively intelligent, as men went, but they were all alpha dogs to the last woof, and as such, they all had that fog of testosterone obscuring their brains. Which made them prone to the usual arrogant, posturing male bullshit, for which she had no time or patience.
    And yet, there they were. Underfoot all the fucking time. She couldn’t get rid of them. They felt protective of her, of all crazy things. Nick, too, now. After the organ pirate adventure, he’d landed himself squarely on that short list of people with controlled permission to annoy the living shit out of her without getting killed for it. Maimed, maybe, but not killed.
    Their efforts to be her friends were puppyish and earnest. She was charmed by it—sometimes. Amused, even, when she was in the mood. Which hadn’t been lately, with all these nightmares she’d been having. They were way too much like the stress flashbacks she’d suffered back in her younger days. Before she’d turned herself into a human icicle. Robot Bitch, her alter ego.
    She wasn’t an icicle now. Particularly not when she pictured Margot, Erin, Liv or Raine parenting Rachel. A jealous, vengeful and totally disproportionate rage blazed up inside her when she pictured one of those women sweetly, gracefully, effortlessly being a better mother to Rachel than she could ever be. Fuck that.
    It wasn’t their fault. There was nothing wrong with those women. Oh, no. That was the exact problem. Everything was right with them. Damn them to hell. She would have laughed at herself for being so silly and crazy, if she were not mortally afraid that it would start her up crying again. Only in these naked moments in the wee hours before dawn did she let herself acknowledge humiliating truths like this. She was a jealous bitch. Bitterly envious. Not of their men, God forbid. The last thing she wanted was to be bothered with their silly, pointless, attention-hungry men, although all of those women had relatively good ones—insofar as any man could be called good. That being, after all, a blatant contradiction in terms.
    No, it was because their lives made sense. They were hooked into the world, they functioned well, they thrummed, they glowed. They threw out vibes of sexual fulfillment strong enough to knock a celibate like herself back on her scrawny ass at fifty meters.
    And they were so unafraid of motherhood. At least the ones that were well into it, and she had no doubt it would be the same for the others when their time came—Liv, and Becca, Nick’s fiancée, soon to be wife. All of them had that feminine, motherly vibe, just like Margot and Raine and Erin. Moo.
    For them, motherhood was all joyous cuddling, spiritual fulfilment. Wallowing in bliss with a proud daddy looking on. Glowing at baby’s amazing progress and sparkling genius. Raine was almost due, and glowing like a full moon. Erin’s boy was a year old and Margot’s little redheaded girl was seven months old. Fat, uncomplicated babies, rolling on the rug, gurgling and laughing. In the top percentile for height, weight, good looks, intelligence and happiness. Tra la la.
    Not like Tam’s intense, clinging Rachel with the fits of rage, the screaming nightmares, the developmental delays. Bone malformations in her ankles and hips, eye problems caused by months of confinement in artificial light with nothing to focus on farther away than a concrete wall in front of her face. The doctors were always muttering about possible brain damage from abuse, neglect and malnutrition, but Tam was privately convinced that it