“You’re being tolerant because you’ve seen only a little piece of it. If you saw it all—”
“Why are you so determined to frighten me?” she asked, drawing up all of her courage and going with her instincts. She had faith that he would not hurt her. “Why are you trying to provoke the very reaction you are dreading?”
He was so close to her, his heated breath cascading over her face again and again, his thumb rubbing almost harshly at the corner of her lips. She could feel the energy of his need, his need to believe that maybe he was wrong to make a blanket judgment against her, just as others would be wrong to make a blanket judgment against him. She asked herself if this unknown power he harbored frightened her, honestly asked herself if it was wise to keep pushing like this. She imagined he was asking himself the very same thing.
“Perhaps if a stranger is willing to be accepting of you, then maybe you should have more faith in those who know you. I will not say you shouldn’t be cautious. There is always danger. Those who are supposed to love you can and sometimes will turn on you, but I can’t believe there is no one worthy of faith and trust in all of these Three Worlds.”
“Knowing who you are, knowing what you’ve been through, I can’t decide if you are really stupid for believing that, or really quite beautiful.”
Ambrea felt a peculiar warmth infusing her face and neck, a tightening around her ribs. How strange it was for her to realize right then that she thought him to be quite attractive as well. At first she had been overwhelmed by his size, his roaring presence, the dramatic, sweeping ink on his skin, but when taken along with this more vulnerable aspect, the intensity of his brow and the glimmer of his fair hair … not to mention the depth of pain and emotion she could see in his eyes, she thought he was really quite beautiful too.
“Perhaps I am a little bit of both,” she confessed. “I too find it very difficult to trust others. But we need to have faith in our long-standing relationships. Otherwise we will be forever on the outside looking in. I don’t wish to be on the outside, in exile. I have been there all my life. It’s time it came to an end.”
He moved away from her a little, taking a moment to look beyond their hiding spot, moving with an impressive silence for someone so big. Ambrea felt as though she were making too much noise just sitting there. But she felt safe just the same. Or perhaps it was more that she wasn’t worried about dying anymore. She would live or she would die. The close call of minutes ago had made that very clear. She had stared down the barrel of that vicious gun, smelled the ozone of the power pack that charged it. It had been just that close. But if it was the “freak” part of Ender that had allowed him to move so fast in that moment, that had allowed him to take a violent hit in her stead, she couldn’t see anything bad about it.
When he was settled down beside her again, she resumed her slow study of him. This time he smiled under her scrutiny.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s rude to stare?”
“Generally, not for me. The royalty are encouraged to inspect the details of those around them, to seek out strengths and flaws. If it makes you uncomfortable, however, I will stop.”
“Not uncomfortable. Just not used to it. I prefer to blend in. Not be noticed.”
She covered a short laugh with fingers against her lips.
“What?” he demanded with a frown.
“Yes, not noticed. That’s why you carry around all those loud explosive things. So you won’t be noticed.”
That made him grin. “All right, you might have a point,” he acceded. He touched the communication device in his ear. It was clear he was worried about the well-being of the rest of the team, but he didn’t try to contact them. He was following some sort of protocol.
“What’s your real name?” she asked him suddenly. “I know you prefer other soldiers to use this soldier’s nickname you’ve been given, but if you don’t mind, I’d like to know your real name. I am not a soldier, and a soldier is not all that you are.”
He looked at her, clearly thinking about it for a second or two.
“Rush. My name is Rush.”
“Will you mind if I call you Rush? I like it much better than Ender.”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.
Ambrea let a full minute go by before she spoke up again.
“I’m sorry. I know I’m supposed to be quiet, but I confess I’m dying of curiosity. Just what is it that makes you so different? Are you impervious to injury? Or is it some things that can’t hurt you as opposed to others?”
He sighed noisily, leaning back against the tree. He propped up a knee and rested his wrist on it. “You really aren’t going to let this go, are you?”
She replied with a one-shouldered shrug and a little smile she couldn’t seem to help.
“I asked, didn’t I?”
He seemed to think hard about it for several beats. “This is a bad idea,” he said aloud, more in a lecture to himself than to her, she supposed. “Truth is, I don’t know the full extent of what I can do anymore. I just pretend it isn’t there. Except to avoid accidental exposure like what happened with you. I’ve gotten so used to tamping down everything.” He sighed with feeling. “When I was younger, it was connected hard to my emotions. When I got upset or angry, when I became excited …” The big man colored, and Ambrea hid a smile behind her fingers. It was obvious by the stilted manner of his speech that he wasn’t used to talking about himself. She didn’t want him to think she was laughing at him. In truth, she found it endearing.
“It?” she prompted.
“Yeah. It.” He studied her for a moment and then seemed to make his choice. He lifted his hand and stared at his palm for a long, steady span of seconds.
Slowly, almost like a trick of her eyes, a wobbly effect bent the air around his hand, like what you might see when looking down a long, heat-baked road.
There was a startling popping sound and his hand burst into flames.
She squeaked in surprise, watching with wide eyes as he spread his fingers, showing her that they were all fully involved, golden orange flames curling and licking at them, the fire swirling over his skin as if it loved him, as if it had missed him and needed to embrace him any way it could. His response to seeing it was visceral as well. His eyes became hooded with a distinctive sense of pleasure. He drew the fire close as though to smell it, taking in a long, slow breath. She didn’t think he even realized what he was doing. It was as if he had become instantly spellbound. Whatever he thought of his abilities, whatever the trauma he had suffered because of them, it was instantly clear to her that this was more than a natural part of him. It was a passionate part of him.
Ambrea was also fascinated. Thousands of questions filled her head. And like a child who didn’t know better, who could appreciate fire just for the beauty of it and without the fearful respect she ought to have for it, she reached out to touch his fingers with hers. She wanted to know if the fire was real or just a visual effect. Was it hot? Would it burn? It wasn’t burning him, but would it burn her?
Luckily he became aware of her movement and jerked his hand away, the action dousing the fire and leaving the tips of his fingers smoking in small, curling white tendrils. She reached to grab his hand, lacing her fingers through his. Before he had pulled away, she had felt the incredible concentrated heat of the flames and had known they were as real as could be. Now she gripped him and she felt how hot he was. She suddenly recalled how incredibly warm he had felt in that icy cold water, how he had not suffered from hypothermia at all. She also recalled the streak of light in the overwhelming darkness of the aqueduct water and realized that he had used his ability to generate light to find her, whether he realized it or not. Whether he wanted to admit to it or not. He may have distanced himself from it as much as he could distance himself from something that was in the very heart of him, but it would always be at the edge of his reflexes. Literally at the tips of his fingers.
“Oh, Rush,” she
breathed. “That was amazing. It was beautiful!” She took in a breath and could detect the odor of burnt wood. “Surely the Great Being has given you an astounding gift. How can you think this to be a curse?”
She exhaled, and smoke blew lightly out of her nostrils and between her lips. When she had breathed in, she had drawn it in from his smoking hand. Rush watched with an almost speechless fascination as she turned up his hand in both of hers, pulling his palm open and drawing it against her face. She nuzzled against its warmth like an eager, affection-starved kitten, drawing in another deeply pleasured breath. He sat frozen for a moment as she did this, stunned by her reaction and even more stunned by his own. Raw, unchecked delight flooded his big body, a sensation akin to sexual stimulation, but in no way that base. Yet he was very much aroused. The muscles in his body tightened in a clenching cascade, rather like when he was on the very edge of danger. And everything about this, he knew, was dangerous. He tried to pull free of her, but she held on. All he managed to do was jerk her onto his body, their chests colliding. Rush felt the weight of her, her warmth and softness wrapped up with her eagerness and vitality.
He balked at what she was saying with every inch of his psyche; his memory of that charred field, and a village of superstitious fools who would rather destroy themselves in a screaming conflagration than find it in themselves to understand a boy they professed to love as blood seeming so much more powerful with the passing of time than the traumatic moment it had happened. She hadn’t heard the voices, voices that had once been warm and familiar to him, that had even idolized him, suddenly jeering and yelling for his head. She hadn’t felt the caustic fever of the mob mentality that had quickly developed as they had staked him out in a field, nearly drowned him in fuel, then situated an explosive to set it all off.
“You just don’t understand,” he said quietly, unable to find the heart to be angry with her. After all, she was the first person to express some eagerness and a positive attitude as far as this thing was concerned. Perhaps, too, it had something to do with how close and warm she felt, how long and delicious her body was as it lay tangled onto his.
“I understand that something about a person can sometimes be perceived one way or another way depending on how the person himself feels about it.”
Maybe there was some truth in that, but he wasn’t willing to test the theory. Things had gone pretty well for him as long as he forced himself to keep this thing inside of him dormant. He didn’t want to change the status quo.
And in the moment, the way she was making him feel was very much in danger of changing the status quo. In more ways than she could possibly realize. He had to get a better grip on himself, on the entire situation. When he lost control, things tended to spin into bad directions.
“Anyway, we have more important things to worry about for the moment,” he told her. He reached up with his free hand, using two fingers to brush back some of that flyaway hair of hers. His initial intention was, of course, to dump her off of himself, put her at a safe distance, but instead he found himself noticing that before he had cut her hair, the sheer weight of it had kept it in place, made it an almost perfect sheet. Now that half of its weight was gone, it was clear there was body to it, that it was actually quite fine and soft. Rush had to confess to himself that because he didn’t have much occasion in his lifestyle for soft and delicate things, he was significantly attracted to her. Perhaps just because of the novelty of it. Oh, he spent a lot of time with delicate, feminine women these days. The Chosen Ones.
The Chosen Ones.
Those priests and priestesses of a temple in the wilds of the planet Ebbany were gifted with extraordinary powers, from the ability to heal with a touch to the ability to see into the future. Abilities that no one in the Three Worlds had ever seen before. Abilities that Rush had never seen manifested in anyone other than himself. The Chosen Ones had since been forced to leave their wilderness temple and were now members of the Special Active team that had been created just to utilize their capabilities distinctive to each mission, as they had on this mission using Fallon to help psychically guide Rush through the aqueduct tunnels and to the point of extraction. The team was half Chosen Ones and half First Active soldiers, the elite of the IM’s training and experience.
Rush had to confess that his experiences with meeting the Chosen Ones, training with them, and watching how everyone interacted with them and treated them had greatly softened his fears of ever being exposed to his team for what he was. He had been very reserved about the whole thing, watching quietly and pondering the results. But the problem still remained—his team would not look kindly on him having kept this secret from them all these years. There was also a huge difference between the Chosen Ones’ abilities and the sheer destructive force that he was able to conjure up with just a moment’s concentration. It was like the difference between a stunner and an MX-240. The Chosen Ones could stun and amaze; as such, they were a useful, benign tool, for the most part. He was a 240, savage and brutal, and could cook a person from the inside out and the outside in on a whim. The IM might feel that he was far too dangerous to be running loose and uncontrolled.
Then again, every last one of the former First Actives, now Special Actives, was a dangerous weapon. But they were completely controlled by the IM. As were the Chosen Ones. He had gone over this in his head time and again these past two cycles since they had been integrated into a team with the Chosen Ones. If ever there had been a time for him to come clean about who and what he really was, it had been two cycles ago when the Ebbanite priests and priestesses had first come on the scene. Now the window of opportunity had faded and was most likely gone.
No. He had made a choice and he was better off sticking to it.
It was via the female Chosen Ones that he had gotten more used to the delicate femininity that Ambrea represented. Still, he wasn’t at all hands-on with any of those women, unlike Commander Chapel, who shared the bed of the head priestess, Ravenna. Truthfully, Rush shouldn’t be hands-on with Ambrea either. Certainly not in this situation of high-intensity danger and pinpoint politics, and probably not under any circumstances. But she seemed so strangely compelling to him. All that strong, beautiful bone structure and pretty paleness, those enormous teal blue eyes. The counterpoint of her gold and red hair. Her golden lashes.
Most of all, she had seen his darkest, most dangerous secret and had not run screaming in fear, had not called him an abomination, a freak of nature. Quite the opposite, and nothing could have been more compelling to Rush’s soul just then. He believed, then, that she would not betray his secret. That she did understand the fickle nature of people and that they could just as easily turn on you as not.
“What will we do now?” she asked softly, her lashes lowering halfway over her eyes.
“What we were going to do before. Make our way to the docking port that abuts the southwestern boundary of the preserve.”
“But we’ll never get past the guards—”
“I meant through the boundary itself. We’ll cut through straight to where we have a ship ported on the tarmac.”
“Won’t a breach in the boundary set off an alarm?”
“Aye, it will. But we’ll be airborne and at the outer rim before they even get to examine the breach. And the rest of the team will be waiting there for us. We have to start thinking about getting mobile again.”
Although he was thinking about it, for some reason he wasn’t feeling that he ought to be in such an all-fired hurry to push her off and away, to put distance between them either physically or personally. Rush had to admit that it was the closest he’d felt to a moment of true intimacy in as long as he could remember. There was something infinitely comforting about it. Welcoming in a way he wasn’t used to. Sure, his friends were warm to him and welcoming, but there was always that distance between them, a distance created by the secret he harbored from them so zealously.
“We should go,” he said quietly, his eyes fixating on the pale pink of her l
ips.
“Whenever you like,” she said. “And Rush, I know you don’t know me well or even have any cause to trust me, but I won’t deliberately betray you. You don’t need to threaten me or—”
“I know. I’m sorry I did that,” he said with feeling, guilt tripping over itself inside of him. “I didn’t … I wouldn’t. Hurt you, I mean.”
“You might,” she countered, “if you were given good enough cause or if I threatened you and everything you hold dear. I can see that you are the sort of man to protect himself and what he loves at any cost. I see that because, perhaps, there is something similar inside of me.”
Rush frowned. Yes, he would protect what he held dear, that much was very true. It was unnerving that he couldn’t tell himself truthfully what he would do or what motivation would affect him the strongest. If he had to choose between saving himself or saving those he loved, he would sacrifice his life every single time, but if he had to choose between saving those he loved over exposing himself as a freak, he honestly couldn’t say which would win out. There had been a time when the answer had been easy. He had chosen to save the life of a girl over a lifetime of silence. The result had been disastrous. Everyone, including that ungrateful girl, had turned on him like a nest of angry vipers. And every day he forced himself to remember that, to remember the easy changeability of people’s natures.
“Come on, Princess,” he said with a sigh, reaching to move her to the side so he could sit up.
Once again she resisted, staying his attempts at pushing her away. Funny thought, that. For all her long, lean stature, she was still hardly able to be any challenge to his size and strength. He could easily overpower her at any given moment. In any given way.
Seduce Me in Flames Page 11
