Seduce Me in Flames

by Jacquelyn Frank

  “You screwed up!” Eirie accused her sharply.

  “I?” Curta raised a glittering brow, her expression completely unchanged by the flare of Eirie’s temper. She moved out of the sitting room with even, graceful steps, the beads of the belt tied around her waist clacking together as the long ends bounced off her skirt at her knees. There were other things tied to her belt at various intervals. Strange things. Runes with old symbols carved into them, a small doll made of sticks with a wreath of tiny flowers around its head, something that looked like a dried-up finger. “The boy is dead and there is no trace of foul play that could lead to you or your lover. I call that perfection,” said Curta.

  She moved into her workroom, a lightless cell dominated by tables full of cups and bowls, beakers and flasks. One table held a soldering iron, wires of all sorts, and the cannibalized bits of any number of tech. A burner was lit beneath something on the far table, the dark liquid moving in a slow, rolling boil. The smell of it was everywhere, sickly sweet and yet tempting. Eirie could not help but sniff and sniff again, taking in the scent of it over and over. Her temper soothed inexplicably. She sighed.

  “Yes, Grandmother Great. This is true. But what of the princess? She was supposed to be dead before the prince.”

  “I thought she was. Rumor is that she died in an attempt at escape,” the older woman said with archness to her tone that made it clear she put little stock in palace rumor.

  “Perhaps so. Perhaps not. There is no body. It was important that there be a body, visible proof. A thing for the commoners to walk past in mourning lines and stare at, shaking their heads at the misfortune of it all. Without a body there will be doubt. It will leave open for rumors that she yet lives. It will be a point of unrest. I want Balkin to be emperor free and clear. I want what you promised me!”

  “I promised you nothing,” Curta replied mildly. “I said only that I could craft the tools you could use and that they would work flawlessly. The boy clearly proves the potency of my tools. If the princess yet lives, it is because the tool has not yet been used.”

  Eirie paced the room impatiently, picking things up and inspecting them before putting them back down. “So we must hope that your tool is still within reach of the princess. That makes me very nervous. I don’t like to be left unsure.”

  Curta reached to take from Eirie’s hands the gourd that she had just picked up, placing it back very precisely on the table. “It is not wise for you to touch things on these tables. It would be most unfortunate if you were to make yourself ill when you are so close to attaining your victory. But,” she smiled, “if you like I can consult the stones and see what fate has planned.”

  Eirie nodded, wiping her hands against the skirt of her dress. Unlike the priestesses of the Great Being, the Farma conjurer did not trust the uncertainty of prayer and did not blindly trust in leaving things to the Great Will. No more than Eirie would sit by and watch her youth fade as she waited for Balkin’s tenure as emperor to begin. As it looked right now, that tenure was starting. But then perhaps not. It was impossible to know without knowing if the princess yet lived.

  Curta moved to her casting table, sweeping her hands three times over the violet velveteen fabric that covered it before picking up the mother-of-pearl bowl at its edge and throwing the stones within it into the center circle that had been painted in platinum on the fabric. The round and oval stones scattered, some rolling completely off the table, some settling in the circle, some outside of it. Curta peered at the results for a long moment, toying absently with the shell bracelet on her wrist.

  “It is true, the princess lives,” she stated definitively.

  “Cursed shit!” Eirie swore. “How does she do it? How does she skirt death at every turn?”

  Curta held up a hand to silence the other woman.

  “The stones say my tool is still close at hand. It lies like a viper, waiting to strike. So all is not lost.” Curta’s face then creased with puzzlement.

  “What is it? What do you see?” Eirie demanded to know.

  “There is … an uncertainty. This is so strange.” She walked around the table slowly, peering at the stones from all directions. “She is near a danger that threatens to consume her. A viper not of my making. And yet the wall stone touches the heart stone, indicating a protector. A loyal protector.”

  “Wonderful,” Eirie scoffed. “The beauty of her life thus far was that she lacked any and all protection, making her vulnerable. If someone has taken up her cause—”

  “Worry not,” Curta said dismissively. “Her protector is powerless against my tool. All it will take is a single instant and it will all be over.”

  “Do you promise me this? It is a certainty?”

  “Tsk. You well know there are no certainties in the ways of fate. However, I have never seen such clarity in the stones before. Dangers consume the princess from all sides. She will not be able to survive them all. The stones say it clearly. Before three days have passed, the Princess of Allay will cease to be.”

  Rush reacted without thinking. Or perhaps with more thought than he would like to admit. Present danger aside, the whole lot of them and their conversation, which was no doubt reflective of many conversations taking place all over Allay, just rubbed him the wrong way. Perhaps it had something to do with the raw flush of emotional color he’d seen creeping over the princess’s face.

  No matter. The guard took one look up at Rush before his attention jolted toward the princess. The muzzle of the gun came up, strands of her red-gold hair floating on the breeze wrapped around it and the guard’s wrist, and the soldier’s hand tightened on the trigger of his weapon. That brutal, deadly weapon. Rush grabbed the thing by the muzzle and slammed the entire gun up into the Imperial Guard’s face, smashing his nose and teeth with a resounding crack. A second guard fired wildly, the 240 shot hitting his own man. The hapless Imperial Guard’s shock vest defrayed some of the blast, but just the same the man screamed horrifically, the smell of flesh cooking filling the air. The guard spewed up blood and fell to his knees, exposing Rush to the pack of guards surging up behind him.

  There was an explosive, searing sound, and Rush felt heat flashing through him. He was aware of the other guards falling on the rest of the team, but he immediately turned to protect the well-being of their precious cargo. He leapt past the dying soldier, punched the next nearest man square up under his chin, and then grabbed the stunned guard by the hair, jerking him around and shoving him into the next one who was right behind him. Gunfire erupted everywhere, and the princess cried out.

  “Don’t hurt them!” she exclaimed.

  Don’t hurt them? And what the hell was he supposed to do? Play gammon with them? Didn’t she get it? Didn’t she understand that sometimes it was kill or be killed?

  Rush ignored her command. His orders didn’t come from her. His orders were to protect her life at all costs. If he could keep his damage path to a minimum, so much the better, but her life superseded all these others. Even his own. That was his mission. That was what he had signed on for.

  “Ender, get her out of here!”

  Rush reacted to the order instantly, years of serving under Bronse Chapel making it a reflex. Rush toppled the oncoming guard with a flat-footed kick square in his breastbone, sending him flying back as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. Then he grabbed the girl, hauling her into his side protectively, and pulled a “sticker” off the munitions belt hiding under his jacket. He threw the sticker upward, a loud thunk telling him it had struck hard against the tree above them. He braced his feet hard apart.

  One … two … three …

  Boom.

  The explosion was loud and percussive, jarring everyone off their feet except for him. Wood sprayed in a violent array above them, raining splinters down in raw yellow-white chunks. By then he was already running. Within two steps he’d swung Ambrea into his arms, clasping her to his chest and forcing her along for the ride. Not that she was kicking or screaming. He had to give he
r credit for that. She kept a cool head under some pretty wild circumstances. It was a mark of a good, strong leader. She may be unsure of herself, she may be green and a little hung up on her morals, but she showed strong signs of being what it would take to bring Allay under her control, to make Allay powerful without being brutal.

  Not that it mattered to him, he reminded himself sternly. He wasn’t interested in the political structure on any of the lands of the Three Worlds. Not even those on Tari. He was interested in the mission. And right now the mission was to save her ass.

  The forest was in his favor. In mere steps he was around the next massive tree trunk, and a few strides later it was the next. Even with her added weight he ate up ground fast enough to put the team’s track stars, Chapel and Lasher, to shame. Then again, he was motivated. The last thing he wanted was her pretty red head on his conscience. Granted, he’d failed a mission before, lost someone he was supposed to protect, seen casualties he felt he could have saved if only he’d been faster … stronger … smarter … or less of a coward. Those people had faded from his nightmares over time. But there was something about her—maybe it was knowing she had been betrayed by her own people at such a tender age, maybe it was the earnestness in her water-blue eyes. Regardless, instinct told him he wouldn’t be able to shake it so easily if something were to happen to her while he was on watch.

  “Stop! Please! I think you can stop!”

  Rush would be the judge of that. Gunfire and explosions were loud. They attracted attention. Reinforcements could be coming from any quarter.

  Which made it wise to stop. To hunker down and quiet themselves. Bull-rushing through the bracken was only making them easier to follow. So he heeded her suggestion, swung them behind a quoia tree, and lowered them beneath the wide spade-shaped leaves of a copse of fan ferns. The ferns liked to grow in the shade of the quoias, feeding off the rich black earth around its thick, protruding roots. It made for perfect cover.

  He set her down in the soil and leaves and motioned her into silence. She was quick to obey, curling her knees into her chest and pressing her face against them to conceal her hurried breathing. She had not been the one to exert herself, but her adrenaline must be running pretty damn high. That gun muzzle had come so close to her face just before he had grabbed it that he found himself double-checking to make sure she hadn’t been accidentally hit. She was still all big blue eyes and slightly paler skin, but no worse for the event other than looking somewhat disheveled. Then again, she hadn’t started out looking like some of those sculpted beauties from the VidMag society pages. He had to admit he found her simple, clean prettiness far more appealing than any of that high-maintenance bullshit. He preferred a girl who could get dirty and wouldn’t squawk about it.

  Not that he was thinking of her like that. She was a principal. He was assigned to protect her. It was as simple as that. Anything else made for undue complications, and he had no interest in complications.

  Then, things got complicated.

  “You’ve been shot!”

  She was on him before he could react, grasping at the wide burn hole in his Skintex shirt near his lower left abdomen. He reacted, grabbing her hands an instant after he felt her fingertips sliding over his smooth, unblemished skin.

  “B-but I heard the weapon go off. There’s a burn in your shirt the size of my fist. Why …?”

  “Never mind,” he said gruffly. “The gun must have misfired.”

  “MX’s don’t misfire,” she said flatly. “But let’s say I believe that, how does Skintex burn through, yet your skin isn’t even so much as blistered? Not even reddened!”

  “Will you hush?” he hissed at her. “Why don’t you just jump up and down and start screaming ‘Here we are!’?”

  “Don’t try to change the subject by yelling at me, thinking fear will shut me up!”

  “I’m not changing the subject. I’m telling you there isn’t any subject to discuss. And if we’re not quiet, some other contingent of guards will find us. We got away because we had the whole team with us before. We’re on our own for the time being, so maybe we won’t be so lucky in another attack.”

  Ambrea wasn’t fooled. He was still trying to deflect her interest in a wound that wasn’t. She recalled him jerking the gun muzzle out of her face and pointing it toward his own body, and then hearing that loud perfunctory searing of the air that signified gunfire. He’d taken a shot directly in the gut, yet it hadn’t touched him. Or so it seemed. She knew that soldiers wore Skintex to protect their skin, but it wasn’t like a shock vest that could defray the power of a blaster strike. There was no way that Skintex was strong enough to account for what she wasn’t seeing.

  Still, she decided to keep quiet. It was true they were vulnerable, and chitchat wasn’t wise. But she kept her eyes on him steadily, trying to see in his face some clue as to what was going on. His expression was implacable, however; just by the way he studiously ignored her focus, he was giving himself away.

  “I—”

  “Look, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll make like none of this ever happened, like you never saw anything,” he snapped suddenly, grabbing her face in his large hand and pushing himself nose to nose with her so she could feel the anger radiating off him and through his russet eyes. “And if I think you’re going to whisper a single word of this to any of my friends, I’ll cut your throat right here and now and your ass will never touch your precious throne of Allay. You got me, Princess?”

  She blinked slowly and drew in a long, unsteady breath.

  “I was just going to say I think we lost our pursuers,” she said softly.

  “Oh.”

  Ender slowly relaxed, the tension in his big shoulders releasing in tiny increments, his grip on her face becoming less cruel.

  “Have you done that before?” she couldn’t help but ask. “Killed someone to keep them quiet about … this?”

  “I told you to drop it. Damn, woman, are you really this dense, or are you just bound and determined to test my resolve?”

  “Oh, I believe you’ll do what you say,” she assured him. “I believe you’d plunge Allay into a lifetime of continued cruelty at the hands of my uncle by killing me just to … I guess to keep a secret. This … strange secret.” She blinked. “But humor me a minute. I am forbidden to speak of it on pain of death, and it’s likely you will kill me anyway. So why not tell me what it is I am bound to lose my life over?”

  He growled under his breath, pushing her away. A nerve ticked in his jaw as he spent a moment checking his belt to make sure his munitions were pinned and secure before fastening an exterior communications device into his ear.

  “You don’t understand,” he ground out. “I’ve been in the IM for almost fifteen cycles, and never once … not once …” He made a sound of frustration, running a hand through the short, crisp ends of his hair. “So I’m a freak, all right?” he spat out. “Some kind of mutation or something. And people don’t take kindly to freaks. They’re afraid of them. Even friends, even family, even my team wouldn’t understand.”

  “More like they’d feel hurt that you didn’t trust them,” she said quietly.

  “There are things you can trust people with, and things you can’t.”

  She tilted her head, studying the hard lines of tension in his face. There had been no mistaking the camaraderie amongst the IM teammates. There had been efficiency and professionalism, yes, but it had been clear as day that they were good friends as well. Especially the two Tarians in the group.

  “So you … have really tough skin or something?” She couldn’t help reaching out to touch the back of his hand. It was warm, smooth, and soft just like skin ought to be. The sparse hairs were slightly coarse and as blond as the hair on his head.

  “Or something,” he agreed. It didn’t seem as though he was going to elaborate any further, but then he looked at her, his opposite hand gripping the trunk of the tree, bits of bark flaking off under his powerful fingers. “I just haven’t
spoken about it since before my mother died when I was fifteen. She told me never to speak of it. Never to show it. She said it was a curse, an aberration that would make people want to hurt me. I disobeyed her directive only once in my life, and I paid the price. People I grew up with, people who knew me and supposedly loved me, turned on me in an instant. I never made that mistake again. And now you—”

  Ambrea could see that he was afraid. This tough, stalwart warrior who faced down weapons and danger and drowning without so much as a rise in blood pressure was very much afraid of being exposed for being—as he put it—a freak. And perhaps not because of what they might try to do to him, but because he feared being betrayed by those he trusted and cared about. He feared them rejecting him, casting him out of the position in life that he now maintained. That loss, to him, would be far more damaging than any physical wounds he might suffer should they try to hurt him.

  “Do I look like I want to hurt you?” she asked quietly, lifting her gaze to his so he could see deeply into hers. “Do you think someone like me, someone who has been persecuted just because of the blood in her veins, could ever find it in herself to see another be hurt because of the blood in his?”

  Seconds ticked past as their gazes held, his breath quick and noisy between them. Whether it was from running moments earlier or from that genuine fear, she couldn’t tell. He reached up suddenly, swallowing the entire right side of her face in the span of his hand, holding her tightly in his fingers. She felt a strong flash of fear then, the understanding that he was so physically superior to her in strength, size, and skill. She sensed that he wasn’t the sort of man who would harm an innocent for his own gain, but fear made people do things that they would not normally do. If his fear of exposure was truly that strong, there was no telling what he might be pushed to.