“You’re coming home with me.”
Chapter Fourteen
Elizabeth
“Reven, I lo—” Loud clanging interrupted her. “What’s that?”
He sat at the console. An image of the barn’s interior filled the front. Gilbert pounded on the door with a rock. “Fools.”
Reven grabbed the stunning pistol and stood.
“No, don’t,” she said.
“They injured you, tried to terminate you, and lack the intelligence to run and hide. I would do these Terrans a favor by ending their lives,” he growled.
“They’re not worth it,” she said, realizing it was true. No sudden impulse for compassion and mercy had not taken root. She was just tired. “Can we just leave? Let’s leave.”
He huffed and sat back down. “If you are able, take a seat. This will not take long.”
She made her way to the front with one hand on the wall for support.
His fingers tapped a command on the panel. For a moment, the shuttle hummed. A bright flash of light replaced the image of Gilbert and Felicity. When the light faded, they were lying on the ground.
“You didn’t kill them?”
“The idiots have been stunned. They will wake in a few hours with an unfortunate headache.” He grinned. “Is that satisfactory?”
“Very.”
Glowing amber symbols replaced the image of the unconscious Stearne siblings. Reven frowned at whatever he read. “We should leave now, before they incite a mob. It is short notice. Do you require any possessions?” he asked.
“Everything I need is here,” she said.
His eyes gleamed. “I should ask you if you are certain about leaving with me, but I do not want to give you the opportunity to doubt. I am selfish.”
“You said it yourself—it’s too dangerous here.”
“I could take you to your brother. Or another location far from here.”
Elizabeth shook her head at the mention of her brother. He enjoyed the decadent artist’s life far too much for her tastes. While she needed stability and quiet to create, he thrived on chaos. They were too different. “Australia?” she asked.
He hesitated but nodded. “If that is your desire.”
She gave his hand a squeeze. The warmth of him soaked into her. Reven was her desire, always. “I don’t suppose we have time to say goodbye to my brother.”
Tossing a glance to the console, “No.” Then, “One moment.” He opened the ramp and dashed out, quickly returning with her sketchbook.
“How thoughtful!” She took the book and pulled him down for a kiss as a reward.
“Yes, I retrieved it because I am thoughtful and not because it is visual evidence.”
“You’re still thoughtful.” She hugged the book to her chest. “Take me to the moon, Mr. Perra.”
Delight rumbled in his chest, and he claimed her lips once more. Breaking for air, he helped her into the harness on the seat.
“Are you ready to leave?”
She nodded.
The shuttle lifted off the ground with a lurch.
Her stomach rolled unpleasantly. This did not feel like the flight they took on Christmas Eve. She felt nauseous.
The stone walls of the barn sank below the screen, replaced with an aerial vista of Sweecombe, then the moor. Finally, gray mist replaced the landscape. They were in the clouds.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said. “Navigation systems will take over once I reach the correct altitude.”
“Is it a better pilot than you?”
He barked with amusement. “I would say no because it made me crash here, but it also brought me to you, so yes. A much better pilot. Sit and relax. We’re nearly there.”
The ship broke through the clouds, and the ride became instantly smoother. The blue sky faded to black.
Reven pulled up the hood on her suit, covering her head, and handed her a mask. “If we lose oxygen, put this on.”
She examined the mask, finding the points near the temple for a hook and latch. “How do I use this?”
“It is automatic. If you have a hard time breathing, just push it to your face like this.” He demonstrated with his own mask. It sealed instantly.
“How curious,” she marveled.
“Well, if that impressed you, how about that?” He redirected her attention to the screen.
The moon appeared in the distance, growing large. Craters were visible, as were the shadows cast by rocks and the uneven landscape. A golden overlay of numbers and letters flashed in what, she presumed, was calculations.
The view tilted up, towards the stars, just before the angle of the shuttle adjusted.
“Entering the wormhole in three… two…”
Reven
The shuttle lurched and jolted, but held.
Static buzzed in the back of his head. Fortunately, he did not need to concentrate. The shuttle’s navigation pulled the craft through the wormhole. Calculations and redirects scrolled too quickly on the screen to follow.
The images on the screen distorted, the only visual indication that they were inside the wormhole.
The lights dimmed to conserve energy and an alarm sounded. The propulsion system strained and the engines whined. The patches held with minimal drops to the breathable atmosphere.
Elizabeth’s breath caught in her throat. Face pale, she clutched at the arms of the chair.
“This is acceptable.” Hopefully. His words came out slurred together. “Wormholes are… strange.” He only had experience with the artificially created ones that lasted a moment. Long-standing ones existed, but he had no experience with how it felt to journey through one. Saying as much would not ease her panic.
He pushed the oxygen mask to her face. The seals were holding but her emotional distress restricted her breathing.
The lights flickered twice before vanishing altogether. The fuzzing static in his head left.
They drifted for a moment in silence.
“Is this still acceptable?” she asked.
Reven unbuckled his safety harness and reached for the console, turning off the auto navigation. “The engine is dead.”
“Dead,” she squeaked.
He could tell she fought with all her will to not panic and he admired that. “A poor choice of words,” he said. “Momentarily offline. Life support is still functioning. Navigation is functioning. This is acceptable.”
Reading the system logs, he determined that a power spike in the engines caused an automatic shutdown, as was the protocol; otherwise, the engine would overload and either explode or combust. Neither were recommended during space travel. It was a good protocol. He’d tell the engineer who designed the shuttle just that if he ever had the chance.
“Engine reboot in thirty seconds,” he said. A countdown started on the screen.
The distorted stars on the screen shifted, coming sharply into focus, and the shuttle lurched.
“What’s happening?”
“Mask. Face,” Reven snapped. Elizabeth pressed the mask back to her mouth but her eyes demanded answers. “The wormhole closed and spat us out. I am ascertaining our location.”
The shuttle’s communication system detected several satellites. For a brief moment, triumph swelled in his chest. It worked. The computer finished the scan. All of the satellites were pre-Mahdfel.
Elizabeth unfastened her safety harness. He swallowed the urge to scold her to remained seated but welcomed her hand on his shoulder. “What is it?”
“We are early.”
“Can we go back in?”
“No. Wormhole is gone. The engine’s power surge may have triggered an early collapse, or my calculations were incorrect.” The latter was likely the case. He had been injured and tired when he ran the initial estimate. He should have run the figures again. He should have been certain.
“So we go with the backup plan,” she said blithely, as if it were not a ludicrously dangerous plan. He downplayed the risk when he explained it originally but the s
imple fact was that the stasis chambers were not designed for prolonged use. The equipment would fail.
He kept his worry to himself because they both knew the risks before they left 1894.
The engine came online, restoring the lighting. Elizabeth looked up at the ceiling but her frown remained.
“Let’s find a place to land,” he said.
Elizabeth
“Is that where we’re going?” she asked.
“Shackleton Crater. I’ll set down in the crater, where the shadows will hide us.”
“And we wait?”
“Yes. I have a distress signal program to go off when I left my timeline.”
“And no one will notice our ship? We’ll be undisturbed for centuries?” She found that hard to believe.
Reven scratched at the base of his horn. “How to say… Terrans never explored the bottom of the crater on their own. After my people arrived, several ships had already crashed on the moon and are left abandoned. Without an active signal, the shuttle will look like any number of derelict vessels.”
“A ship graveyard.”
He nodded.
She marveled as the lunar landscape rolled by, too awed to say anything. She was the first human on the moon. Her, the daughter of a miniature portrait painter and certainly no one special.
“This is unreal,” she eventually said. Her fingers twitched, eager for a pencil or charcoal. She flipped open the sketchbook and worked the pencil stub against the page. The lead was too hard for as fast as she needed to work. “I wish I had charcoal or a better pencil.”
“I am sorry. There was no time.”
She needed to commit all the details to memory, to capture them later on paper: the texture of the surface, the shadows, and the stars. “Is space silent? It looks desolate.”
“There is no atmosphere to transmit sound waves, so yes, space is silent,” Reven said.
“You’d think it’s just black and gray, but there’s such subtlety. It’s beautiful. Can we see Earth?”
Reven issued a command, and the image on the display changed.
Earth glowed blue and white, the top half illuminated by the sun, and the bottom cradled in darkness.
Tears pricked at her eyes. It is so much lovelier than the facsimile Reven created in her home. “How is that real? How can it be?”
The ship landed with a small jolt.
“It is time,” he said.
“Is this where your domed city will be?”
“One day.”
He led her to the back of the vessel. The hatch opened on the pod. She stepped in and leaned back. With care, almost reverence, he attached wires and pads to her suit and exposed skin. Once he completed his task, he brushed his knuckles down the side of her face.
“Can we see the Earth?” she asked.
“No, not from this location. The rim of the crater is blocking the view currently. When we wake,” he promised.
“When we wake, like Rip Van Winkle.” She reached for his hand and gave a tug. “I love you, Reven. I think I have for some time now.”
His eyes brightened. “Do you know the moment I knew that I had fallen for you? We were in my shuttle, when you made that first terrible joke.”
She made so many, it was impossible to know which one he meant. “That soon?”
“Instantly. I love the way your mind works,” he said.
“Which joke was it again? I find them quite delightful myself, so I really don’t know.”
“I’ll tell you when you wake.” His lips claimed hers again, at first soft and then growing in intensity. It lasted forever, a wondrous, perfect moment, that stretched across the centuries.
David wanted this for her, to live a life full of color. She put her own life and desires on hold to give David the support he needed. Now she would once again put her life on hold to truly live, for herself and the man she loved.
Her fingers skated across the planes of his face, tracing his jawline and the curve of his lips—her heart’s desire. The visible edges of his tattoos sparked with silvery light. “I need to remember this moment. I need to paint this. You’re glowing.”
His eyes softened. “I only reflect your light. You’re my beacon in the dark, calling to me with the spark of life.”
He was wrong. She was half-alive when they met. He carried the spark, and now they both glowed.
Chapter Fifteen
Reven
His feet moved the dense foam floor, sticky with sweat. Muscles burned and ached in a way that deeply satisfied him.
It felt good to hit something. Reven had never been one to be idle. He kept his hands occupied with small gadgets. If his hands were ever empty, he occupied himself with thinking. Planning.
In the days since his retrieval from stasis, he could do nothing but wait. After a brief report to his warlord, with a dressing down for the many, many protocols he violated, he had been relieved of his normal duties in part as punishment but also to recover. His body moved sluggishly as it recovered from the long exposure to the chemicals used in the stasis process.
He had an abundance of time--ha--and little to occupy himself, so he waited with Elizabeth. Still in her stasis chamber, being near her soothed his worry but also inspired a daily barrage of demands to revive her. She could not be revived until a Terran specialist--a female--arrived. The specialist had to be female because Reven growled and threatened all male medics who dared to venture too close to Elizabeth’s slumbering form. The delay was his fault, necessitated by his own poor behavior.
Sparring in the training arena worked out his aggression and was the only productive use of his time. As he sweated out the stasis chemicals, his mind grew clearer. Soon the sluggishness would be gone and his dexterity returned.
Until then, Michael took every opportunity to land a blow on him and whooped in victory.
“Do not gloat. It is unbecoming a warrior,” Reven said, rubbing his shoulder.
Michael laughed and danced away, holding onto the carbon composite staff. Even with Reven’s torpid reaction times, the playing field was not quite even when they spared. He went barehanded and Michael used a lightweight, highly durable staff. Even with the weapon advantage, Reven had to control the force of his blows. A strike with his full strength in a critical spot could severely injure Michael. Forcing his body to submit to his will and hold back was good training.
“You’re not one to lecture me about what’s becoming to a warrior,” he said.
Reven lunged to grapple but Michael spun away, swinging the staff in an arc. The two males stared at each other, circling, looking for an opening.
“Tearing a hole in space and time? Blundering about in 19th century England?”
“I did not blunder.” He didn’t.
“People saw you, Rev. You’re an urban legend.”
Reven knew all that. He had hoped that he had faded in the memories of the few Terrans who saw him, but that was not to be. The Stearne siblings made a huge fuss about the Demon of Exmoor. Crude renditions of his likeness surfaced in contemporary newspapers. His myth even graced the cover of a penny dreadful.
“Those drawings look nothing like me,” he said.
The timeline had changed because of his actions and that wasn’t even his greatest concern. As long as Elizabeth remained in the stasis chamber, he was stuck in a nightmare, helpless to wake her.
“Plus, the whole abducting a woman thing. Doesn’t look good, man. He lunged again. This time he deflected the staff and managed to get close enough to tag Michael. He avoided the blow, his movements sloppy, but managed to swing low with the staff and knock Reven’s feet from underneath him.
He landed with a solid thud on his back.
Michael leaned over him. “You must be really messed up. That should have never worked.”
Staring up at the lights, it felt easier to acknowledge that his opponent found his weakness than unburden his soul. Still, he chose the difficult path. “I did not abduct Elizabeth,” he said. “She is my hea
rt.”
“Shit, man. Sorry. The situation sucks.” Michael didn’t have to say more. He understood the torment Reven felt, the helplessness, as he waited and waited for her to be revived.
Michael held out a hand to help him up.
Reven took the offered hand and yanked him down, using his foot to flip Michael. The male tucked his shoulders and rolled, landing in a heap next to Reven.
He laughed. “I haven’t tumbled like that in years. Good to know I still got it.”
For a moment they were youths again, untroubled by duty and responsibilities.
Michael sat up slowly, flinching. A hand went to his lower back, rubbing. “I am going to feel this tomorrow. God, I’m not twenty any more. I have to stop acting like it.”
Reven frowned. Silver hairs had begun appearing at Michael’s temples and the lines around his eyes deepened. He did not appreciate the visible signs that Michael’s Terran biology would fail and age would take his friend from him. “You are advancing in age. My apologies. This activity is no longer appropriate.”
The male laughed. “I’m 38, not exactly decrepit yet. Chill.”
Reven grunted. He saw no point in chilling. “Terran lifespans are too short.”
“I got a plan. I’ll be 100 and you’ll still be in your prime, yeah?”
Reven nodded, unsure of this plan’s destination. “Go on.”
“I’m going to use your muscle to carry me around. I’ll have a saddle made and ride on your back.”
“You will not.”
“And the best part? Other Mahdfel with their pet humans will have saddles, too. We’ll have competitions. Jousting. Maybe set up a system to control your movements like a puppet and have fights.” He jerked his arms in a badly done imitation of boxing, laughing with glee. “The look on your face! You love it but you don’t want to admit it. That’s okay, Rev. I’ll keep your secret.”
“I am not a toy and you are not my pet.” He did like the idea, though, but would never admit it.
“Look, the saddle is happening. Either I’m a cherished pet that you carry everywhere or you’re my servant. Pick your poison.”
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