Seduce Me in Flames

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “Well, where exactly are we supposed to go? It’s not like I see an exit sign,” Suna said with a sarcasm that even overreached what she was usually capable of.

  “In lieu of that, will you accept this?”

  He calmly pointed to a shadow in the upper curve of the tunnel. At this level the tunnels were untouched by man. They were purely part of the aqueduct system that nature had wrought. What he was pointing to looked like a hole, a smaller tunnel perhaps that had once fed water into the one they were in. The duct had since gone dry, or at least as dry as anything down there could get. As she looked up, Ambrea could feel heavy drops like rain falling onto her from the tunnel above them.

  “And how are we supposed to get up there?” Suna wanted to know, her tone surly and tired all at once.

  Ender didn’t take it personally from what Ambrea could see. She watched as he closed his eyes again and tilted his head, as if he were listening to his own thoughts for a moment.

  “Step back,” he instructed Ambrea a moment later, laying a hand on her chest and guiding her gently back a few steps.

  There was a sudden explosion of sparks, and then light from the tunnel. A heavy ladder made of rope unfurled and dropped into the water in front of the would-be empress of Allay.

  Rush “Ender” Blakely handed the heir of Allay up to his commander, Bronse Chapel. He didn’t let go of her until he was certain she was settled snugly in the belay harness they were going to use to pull her up and out of the long tunnel to the surface. He yanked the straps up tight, making sure they fit snugly to her backside and kept her fastened in at the crotch. Bronse worked from his position above to tighten a chest strap around her so she wouldn’t turn or flip over once she was in the process of being hauled to the surface. There wasn’t much room to move in there, and even a skinny little thing like Ambrea could become jammed if she didn’t head up straight and steady.

  They had used a sonic worm to bore a connecting tunnel from the surface, a campsite they had specifically chosen in the deep forested preserve that ran completely around the walls of Blossom City. Using geo sonar to map through the solid bedrock, they had found this unused aqueduct and tracked exactly how to connect from the deep tunnels to the surface and what it would take to make an exit route out of them. A fast exit at that. And a relatively hastily put together plan.

  The sonic worm they’d used had been blessedly silent, devouring all the rock and silt and using the minerals found within to power itself as it dug a hole just wide enough to lower a large man down, or to pull a very important woman up.

  Rush backtracked down the ladder and waited in the water with the other girl, the annoying one with the big mouth. Actually, he could appreciate her need to question everything, perhaps even more than the princess’s lack of confrontation. But he made no snap judgments about the heiress of Allay. She had found herself in dire circumstances, even more dire than she had realized, he was sure, and after being locked down in the dark like this she was surely not functioning at her stellar best.

  He was impressed with her calm, however. She had truly been stoic, no complaints and no shrill, squealing behaviors as he had anticipated from her before this mission had begun. Rush had had his doubts about being the one to go into the prison, but his commander, as usual, had been right. His size had made a good deal of difference in the operation. As had his heritage. Outside of the differences in his bone structure and the lighter touches of racial coloring that could be easily dismissed as being from anywhere here or there in the Three Worlds, the tribal tattoo on his arm had been easily recognizable for what it was. Which, he supposed, was the whole point of getting it in the first place. He wasn’t ashamed to let everyone know he was from Tari. In fact, bring it on. And as Commander Chapel had anticipated, within five minutes of rolling up his sleeve in the Allay marketplace, Rush had had two city guards on his ass. Within ten minutes the count had tripled. By the time he’d reached the space dock, there’d been very obvious bait walking up to him. A woman trying to look like an average space shipper had played damsel in distress, using winning, flirtatious smiles to get herself onto his ship. Which, coincidentally, was exactly what they had wanted. When she’d snuck a peek at his illegal cargo, he had been swarmed and arrested.

  The trick had been getting them to throw him in a cell on the same level as the princess, or somehow being able to quickly locate her even if they didn’t. Commander Chapel had planned a tremendous distraction that would keep the exterior guards from entering again once they exited the catacombs, leaving Rush to deal with those left inside.

  Fortune had also smiled on him. They’d actually tossed him in a cell across from his target. Frankly, he’d never had such a seat-of-the-pants mission go so smoothly. The only snafu had been when he’d almost lost the princess downriver. That would have sucked. Literally. The suction force of the current had almost yanked her into the aqueduct tunnel that the water was rushing into. He’d grabbed her in the nick of time. It had been a bitch fighting back against that current, though. She’d wiggled and slipped against him as if she didn’t know how to hold on. He had taken it at face value and shown her how, and from then on it had been better.

  Now all they had to do was complete the tricky part of the mission.

  After Suna was aboveground, it was his turn to follow. He wasn’t a great fan of dark, underground places, but his job seemed to take him into them a great deal lately. Still, he supposed it wasn’t very different from living enclosed in a military spaceport for months at a time or even on an interplanetary flyer. Truth was, he hadn’t spent much continuous time out of doors since his adolescence.

  At first the lowest part of the naturally formed tunnel was plenty big enough for him to scale the walls using the crampons that Chapel had handed down to him, but the hole that the sonic borer had created was a different story. It was going to be an incredibly tight squeeze for a man his size. He trusted his team but it was unnerving to scrape so close to the walls. He envisioned himself getting stuck tightly at any moment like a cork being pushed the wrong way through the neck of a bottle.

  Then he could hear the mechanical whine of the lift that they had suspended over the hole, heard it straining under his weight. They’d had to carry in equipment that broke down into camping gear, or what looked like it anyway, in order to get past the rangers at the park preserve without raising any eyebrows, and that meant the motor and braces had to be light. Light didn’t translate into being recommended for his weight capacity. So they were stretching their equipment a little.

  When Rush came over the lip of the hole, he wasted no time putting his hands on the edge and hoisting himself out. Good thing, too. He could smell ozone all around him, indicating that the motor of the overworked lift was burning out. He sat on the edge of the hole and looked up at his team. This part of it anyway.

  He saw a mix of smiles and tension. He knew where to look, though, for a real read of the situation. That was at Chapel. The commander was tight and tense, his attention on the wooded park around them. It was true that the team and their royal prize wouldn’t be safe until they were all a good long distance away. With the prison having been so obviously breached, whether or not the city guards believed them to have survived the tunnels, it wouldn’t take long for the guards to start beating the bushes looking for either the princess or the group of strangers who had started the disturbance outside the guardhouse. Rush did a head count and saw that everyone who had dispatched to this stage of the mission was there. Commander Chapel; Captain Justice Muleterre, their resident pilot and a fellow Tarian; and Fallon, one of the very special Chosen Ones handpicked for this mission. Satisfied that none of them was worse for wear and there had been no casualties while he’d been off playing knight-errant, Rush stood up and wasted no time shucking off the lift harness and helping Justice and Fallon begin to break down the equipment.

  As Rush threw the bits and pieces down the hole he’d just come up, he traded his attention between the forest surroundin
g them and the small tent tucked under the trees. He knew that was where his two charges had been brought so they could change quickly out of their sodden clothes and into something that would hopefully blend in to the Allayan mainstream. It was a minuscule help, he was sure, in the warming up that they needed, but it was the best they could do under the circumstances.

  “Not too much trouble, was she?”

  Rush looked over to Fallon when the notoriously silent Chosen One attempted small talk of a sort. Of all the Chosen Ones, a special group of young men and women from the wilds of Ebbany who had extraordinary powers, Fallon made him the most uncomfortable. Rush didn’t like the idea that the boy could traipse around inside his thoughts at will. Rush usually did all he could to avoid him. But that had not been possible on this particular mission. It had been Fallon’s powerful mind connected to his that had helped lead him through the tunnels below. Because Rush had been stripped of anything and everything that could have identified him as the soldier he was, he had been left without exterior communication and no way to find the bored-out hole they would escape through.

  Except for Fallon. The young telepath, who normally despised the use of his own abilities, had proven just how valuable a team member he could be by making certain that Rush hadn’t gotten lost with his charges. And now here they were, relatively safe and sound, and it hadn’t been so bad after all.

  “Easy enough,” Rush replied gruffly. He eyed the young man with suspicion, unable to help himself. What exactly had Fallon come across while he’d been tiptoeing through his brain?

  Fallon seemed to take the hint, a frown touching his lips as he moved away from Rush under the guise of busywork.

  “Hey! Let’s go! This isn’t a fashion expo,” Justice snapped out to the women in the changing tent. Clearly she didn’t feel like going in there herself and preferred to harass them through the sheetlite walls. The feather-light fabric, which was dyed to match the strange blue-green foliage of the Allayan forest, weighed close to nothing and was dark enough for utter privacy from the outside world. It was also strong enough to withstand most wild animal attacks. Although it was a fabric, when an electrical current was run through it, the fabric became stiff and impenetrable. The frame supporting the sheetlite was Delran platinum, a highly conductive metal, and it was connected to a control panel that allowed just such a current to run safely through the sheetlite but not anyone who might touch it. Whether the walls were platinum hard or fabric soft, they could be heard through easily enough, and Justice’s barking command had its desired effect. The imperial companion stumbled out first, followed less haphazardly by her mistress.

  It amused Rush how, no matter what was thrown at her, she always seemed to radiate perfect decorum and grace. The trousers and wrapped shirt she wore were probably unlike anything she’d ever found herself in before, the clothing being the fashion of a commoner. Even imprisoned, she had been in a long, simple, elegant dress shot through with beautiful rays of Delran. Her bare feet had boasted delicately painted nails and foot jewelry, albeit they were a bit dirty from walking the unkempt floors of her catacomb cell.

  He watched her struggle to tie back her hair within itself. He remembered that hair as a phenomenal, rich red when dry, with shining gold and copper penny highlights streaked through the long, easy tendrils that reached nearly to her feet.

  Shame, he thought.

  Rush made his way over to her, watching her eyes go wide, like two big blue gems, as he loomed over her with his significant height. Then he reached out to grip hold of her heavy, wet hair at the midpoint and unsheathed the knife he’d brought with him. In a single stroke he ripped the blade through the mass, shearing it off. He ignored her shocked cry and walked away, tying the tail he’d retrieved into a knot and dumping it down the hole with the rest of the now-useless equipment.

  “How dare you!” the one called Suna squawked, rushing up to him and having the audacity to smack him on the arm. He had no doubt she would have hit him in the face had she been tall enough. “How dare you lay violent hands on her most imperial majesty, you brutish pig! No one touches her without an express permission that I daresay you will never earn! Do you have any idea what you’ve just done? You’ve assaulted her crowning glory! The one thing that outwardly marks her for who she is! No one in Allay may grow their hair longer than the princess!”

  “It was in the way,” he said with a shrug, the whole thing very obvious to him. “And if you hadn’t noticed, the idea is to keep anyone from identifying her for who she is. For the time being anyway. One look at all that hair on her head and, like you said, everyone will know exactly who she is, and that she’s alive. That she needs to be hunted down and gutted publicly so there will be no doubt that Ambrea Vas Allay is as dead as it gets.”

  The princess came around from behind her furious servant, again with all the pride and dignity she could muster settled on her long frame. Rush hadn’t realized it in the press of their short acquaintance, but though the princess was a long, lean thing, she had quite the girlish curves that her court dress had done little to flatter. Come to think of it, it wasn’t as though that dress had been the height of fashion. Allayan fashion was often the center of all fashion on the planet Ulrike. What the aristocracy wore in Allay set the tone for the entire world. Even over those who were famous or in power in the larger continent that Allay stood in the shadow of, also named Ulrike. But now that her majesty was in snug, comfortable, casual clothes, she looked far more the woman than she had before, in his opinion.

  She looked up at him with those eyes, the ones he found to be far too big for her face and an uncanny sort of teal blue. He waited for her to throw a tantrum like Suna was doing, but instead she laid a hand on her companion’s arm. It had an immediate calming effect, the servant clearly trained over many years to respond to even the smallest silent request.

  “But majesty,” Suna did protest quietly. But she turned her eyes down, lowering her head and making certain that her mistress knew it was an emotional protest and not a direct flouting of her mistress’s command.

  “Suna, he speaks the truth. This glory will pin a target on me. I have no majesty if I don’t make it to my throne alive.” She turned her attention back to him. “I have been fairly acquiescent so far, doing everything you’ve asked of me. Now you don’t even ask? You just do? As if I am a creature of no intelligence, as if I can’t be reasoned with or have logic wasted on me? Or is it just that you despise any authority and feel it necessary to literally cut it off at the knees to make yourself feel the better for it?”

  Rush felt a chill of discomfort walk down his spine, the sensation alien and awkward for him, so he busied himself with sheathing his knife before he looked back into those extraordinarily big eyes.

  “Not at all. I’m a soldier. Efficiency is only my nature.”

  “A soldier?” She turned to assess the group with sharp eyes. “Is that what you all are? Soldiers? From what army?”

  “The IM,” Bronse spoke up, castigating Rush with a hard look. “Didn’t he tell you anything about what’s going on here?”

  “Wasn’t any time,” Rush excused himself with a shrug.

  Ambrea watched the big Tarian throw off the matter as easily as he was throwing debris from the camp down the hole they had come up. She had to admit, though, she was incredibly relieved to hear they were from the Interplanetary Militia. It changed the face of everything. Until now she had thought him some kind of mercenary for hire, someone engaged by a powerful Allayan noble, perhaps, who wished to fetch the power of the throne by using her.

  “So you’re with the IM,” she said with a breathless sort of relief. “But I don’t understand. What does the IM want with me?”

  The Tarian named Ender’s static answer seemed to be to simply shrug one of those big shoulders of his. But she did not mistake him for being as clueless as he would have her believe. For all that brawn, there was great intelligence beneath. But he wasn’t interested in answering her question, so h
e blocked her focused attention on him by grabbing a shirt and working it over his head. The Skintex fabric was tight and clung comfortably to every contour of his chest. Somehow seeing him clothed accentuated all those muscular hills and valleys even better than seeing him barechested.

  “I apologize,” said the man whom Ambrea recognized as the group leader simply by his mannerisms and bearing. She recognized it in him because she had it within herself. He was tall, though still quite shy of the Tarian, and well built in his own right. The most unusual thing about him, though, was his eyes. They were a soft periwinkle color, too pretty by far to belong to a hardened military man. “I thought Lieutenant Blakely would have explained things to you a bit more. I’m sorry for the deficit in information. My name is Commander Bronse Chapel. This is Special Agent Fallon, and this is Captain Justice Muleterre,” he said, pointing to the tough little Tarian female. “We’re part of a Special Active team for the Interplanetary Militia. We’re here to … well—”

  “Stage a coup,” Justice said with a grin of irreverence that lit up her entire face. “I love staging a coup.”

  “You love fucking up the works,” Ender rejoined with a roll of his eyes.

  “Anyway, as per our charter with the Three Worlds, we’re here to see you take your rightful place as heir to the Allay throne,” Commander Chapel said.

  Ambrea should have known. She should have realized they were a military outfit the instant they surrounded her. Even everything about Ender’s rescue had shouted a sharp, methodical efficiency that the military was famous for. But she had been thrown off by his savage Tarian act when she’d first seen him. Now, watching him gird himself to fit in with the normal Allay populace and also hide a significant number of arms on his person, she realized just how disciplined he really was. There was a quiet, deadly strength to him that was probably far more dangerous than any visual prejudice anyone could have about Tarian savagery.