by Ros Baxter
“Nah, Tabysha,” he said. “They don’t.”
The arrogance of this man. He had always been this way. So freakin’ sure of himself. So long-legged and honey-voiced and bad, bad, bad.
“I’ve had enough of this game,” she said. “And we should stop talking now. They’re close.” Tabi picked up the scope Asha had placed back in the pack and trained it on the scene outside. She lay flat on her stomach, poking the scope out delicately.
The swarm was rising out of the snow, right below the broken ship.
Snake-like bodies wound around its carcass – first dozens, then hundreds, then, within seconds, thousands. Pouring from the snow like a plague, covering the craft with the writhing mass of their bodies. The sound of them, which had been at first a low hum, rose to a frenetic buzz as they slid in and out of the wrecked dome, seeking and not finding. They spread out over the snow and ice, covering the distance across the powder to Tabi’s ship and again raking it for clues. The sight of the swarm would have been impressive enough. But tonight it was all lit up by the firefight going on above. The Avenger ships were locked in a brutal dance with the Tyverian Warlords.
“Is it bad up there?” Tabi pointed at the sky as an explosion streaked flames across the horizon.
“Yep,” he nodded. “Worst I’ve ever been in.”
“Will they get to Earth Five?”
He shook his head. “I sure hope not,” he said. “That would make for a pretty lousy Christmas.”
Asha wriggled close to her to watch the show on the ground. The swarm had edged closer to the cliff, a seething mass of hunger and intelligence. “Will they find us up here?”
She wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Maybe,” she said. “But we’re clean out of other options.”
Except one.
Tabi wriggled to the back wall of the cave on her stomach, and Asha followed. They sat up almost as one. She motioned at his chest. “How’s the Narcan holding up? Do you have any pain?”
“None,” he confirmed. “It sure is a miracle drug,” he said. “I feel like I could run the Sancerei Circuit.”
“A temporary miracle,” Tabi reminded him. “If we don’t get out of here in a couple of hours, you’ll meet your maker.”
“Please try not to sound so disappointed,” he said, his beautiful mouth a wry line. “I’m thinking we’re gonna be fine. I’ve got no intention of going anywhere in a hurry, thanks all the same.”
“First time for everything,” she said, and immediately regretted the words.
“What’s that mean?” His brown eyes glowed intently as another fireball lit up the sky. For the first time she noticed a small, jagged scar running down one cheek, parallel to his right eye. It hinted at his dangerous job, and she had to give her heart a solid talking-to as it wilted in fear for him. After all, what she did was dangerous too. She’d never expected her little Explorer pod to get caught up in a bloody battle on its way home from basic reconnaissance, for example. And, let’s face it, no situation either of them had been in had ever been as dangerous as this one.
She eyeballed him. “It means you sure were in a hurry ten years ago. Remember? When you climbed out of my bed and ran away to join the circus?”
Asha’s mouth opened at her words, and his eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?” The way he lingered on the last word, that trace of the South digging its heels in a little more firmly, almost undid her.
“Deadly serious,” Tabi said. “I was seventeen. You broke my… ” She shrugged. Who cares if he knew? He deserved to know. “You broke me.”
He shook his head, frowning and running dirty hands through thick, black hair. “You don’t know, do you?” He lifted his head but shook it again. “Fucking hell, Tabi. You’re Admiral-class and you don’t know.”
“What?” Tabi registered the rising buzz of the Tyverian Hunters, locking on their scent, but the look on Asha’s face was more compelling.
“They take us,” he hissed. “On the Christmas we turn eighteen. They take us and make us Avengers. The ones who pass their freakin’ test.”
“What?” Tabi felt her stomach free-fall as all the sad certainties of the last ten years slipped away. “What do you mean they take you? Who take you?”
“The Grand Masters,” Asha said. He shook his head again. “I thought you must have known. Your father…”
Frayed pieces of memory and fact jiggled and realigned themselves in Tabi’s brain. “My father knew?” Her voice sounded small and reedy. “My father knew they took you?”
“Tabysha.” Asha reached out to her, but suddenly the cold was everywhere. She had been holding it at bay, but now it reached silken tentacles right through her blood and sang into her brain. They took him from her. And her father knew. She blocked him with her arm.
“Yes, he knew,” Asha nodded. “Of course he knew. He was the one who took me.” He tried again, reaching out a hand to her. “He never told you?”
“He died soon after,” Tabi said, the cold tunnelling through her veins like a diamond-headed drill. Her father. Her father had taken Asha, the beautiful eighteen-year-old boy she had loved. She had to know more. “Why? Why would he have done that? To me?”
Asha looked at her carefully. “He was on the frontline during the Apocalypse. He was one of the original Avengers. A true believer, I guess.”
She nodded. “Tough times call for tough measures.” She could almost hear her father saying it.
“Was it bad?” There were rumours, about Avenger training. The brutality of it. But it was so cloaked in secrecy that it was hard to know what was real.
He closed his eyes, and nodded. “It has to be, I guess,” he said. “To make you into what you need to be.” He ran his hands through his hair. “But it’s hard to understand that when you’re eighteen.” He paused, touching her hand. “And all you want is to touch your girlfriend one more time.”
In the silence, the buzz from the plains below could no longer be ignored. It had grown to an incendiary frenzy. Tabi could hear the creatures spreading out, the swarm on reconnaissance, unwilling to be cheated a second time, looking for its prey. And then the buzzing took on a more urgent edge. They had reached the mountain.
“Asha,” she said quickly. “Do you trust me?”
He looked at her carefully, narrowing his eyes. “Yes,” he said.
This bit was going to be harder. “And do you…” She swallowed and thought about what she knew, her recent discovery. She could do this. “Do you still desire me?”
He closed his eyes and Tabi saw that look. The one she would have known across all the reaches of space and time. The heavy-lidded, drowsy slide into light and heat. “Yes,” he said. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”
She took a breath. “You need to take your clothes off.”
Her words broke the spell and Asha’s eyes snapped open. “If this is some dying wish thing, you could maybe romance a guy a little first.”
Tabi laughed, not sure if it was mounting hysteria. “Asha, listen to me very carefully,” she said. “You need to take off your clothes, and I’m going to take mine off too. Then we need to make the hottest, heaviest love you can dream up right here on this cave floor.”
He studied her carefully, but they could both hear the whining buzz building as the creatures outside began their ascent. They would be at the cave mouth in moments. “I thought warm was bad?”
“It is,” she nodded. “But the thing… the thing I discovered, the thing I was testing…” She gestured at the admiral insignia on her backpack. “There is a particular pheromone, secreted during human mating, that repels them. Disgusts them.”
Asha smiled. “Bit like your kid brother that time he found us?”
Tabi grinned back at him. “Worse,” she said. “If we secrete it, they would no more feed upon us than a predator would consume decaying meat.”
He nodded calmly, like he was told to fuck for his life every day of the week.
“You say you were testing this theory?” H
e started to strip off his suit, tearing it from his arms and down his chest, revealing familiar long muscles and an unfamiliar smattering of scars. Tabi’s heart hiccoughed in her chest at the wounds on him. “How sure are you?” He began to pull at his boots.
“Pretty sure,” she said, stripping off her own suit in one fluid movement and standing before him in functional black underpants. “And if I’m wrong–”
“It’s a helluva way to go,” Asha laughed, throwing his boots towards the floor and stepping out of the lower half of his suit and his underwear.
Oh, but he was beautiful.
She was colder than death and she could hear the swarm scaling the cliff under them. But she had to say one more thing before they began. She stepped towards him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Asha,” she whispered, her body forgetting that this was a survival strategy as it melted against him. “You’re going to need to stay in the moment. This needs to be…very real. You can’t fool pheromones.”
“Oh darl’n,” Asha breathed in her ear as he picked her up under her thighs and lifted her onto his hips, pushing her against the back wall of the cave. “It’s not gonna be hard at all. It’s gonna be the easiest thing I’ve done in ten years.”
She felt the truth of his words as his firm length pushed against her. He let her down carefully onto her feet, bending at the knees to yank her underwear down her legs. Then he stood up slowly, trailing one hand up her inner leg, beside her knee, up her inner thigh, across her sex, over her stomach, across her breast, and to her face. His touch laced sparkles all over her and turned her stomach to water. He cupped her chin roughly with one hand and, with his other, stretched her hands high above her head, pushed hard against the ice wall of the cave.
The he stepped back, holding her in place with his hands. “Let me look at you,” he said, his voice molasses and granite. “It’s been too long.”
She stood before his appraisal and watched as he began at her face, roving and considering, before moving down to drink in her breasts, high and jutting with cold and arousal, then settled on the arc of flesh at her sex.
He seemed undisturbed by the climbing crescendo of the predators outside, the firefight lighting up the sky, or the uncertainty of their future. He was utterly absorbed in his appraisal. A smile lit up his face.
Tabi blinked. He was enjoying himself.
“Delicious,” he purred. “Now turn around.”
“What?” Wasn’t this taking things a little far? Shouldn’t they just get on with it?
“You want me to do this right, right?”
“Right,” she agreed.
“Well,” he said. “If you want my pheromones to really kick off, I want to look at you. All of you. Now turn around.” He stepped closer to her and twisted her hands so her body twisted with them. Her breasts pressed against the ice wall and her hips bumped up hard, pushing cold into the softest parts of her. It felt cruel and delicious, and it lit her up like a Christmas tree.
She felt him step back again, then reach out and run one hand slowly over her buttocks.
“You’ve still got the best ass I’ve ever seen,” he drawled. She felt both his hands cup her buttocks, and then slide onto the back of her thighs as he knelt behind her. Before she knew what he was doing, he licked first one buttock then the other. Then he used his big hands to ease her thighs apart and open her buttocks further, tipping her forward onto the ice wall a little so her sex jutted forward into his face.
He made a strangled noise and drew the soft folds of her into his mouth. Her knees buckled, but he planted his hands on either side of her waist and pinned her in place as he sucked and licked at her. The sensation was unlike anything Tabi had ever experienced, the vicious press of ice against her sensitised nipples, and the warm suck and drag of his mouth at her core.
She didn’t need her instruments to measure the Pheromone Quotient. She could almost taste the lust, hanging thick and purple in the air. The angry whine of the Tyverian Hunters had levelled. But they were still very close.
“You taste like honey,” he moaned, pulling away and leaving her cranky with impatience. She wondered if it would be a breach of protocol to ram herself back onto his face.
But he had his own ideas.
He stood again and turned her to him, grasping the back of her head with his hand and lowering his mouth to hers so she could taste herself on his lips. “See what I mean?”
She didn’t. Not really. But she didn’t care. Kissing him like this, after all these years, was wreaking havoc on her biochemistry. His tongue licked and lapped at her lips, then pushed insistently into her mouth. He thrust first one finger, then another, into the space where his tongue had been a moment before. Her insides clenched around his fingers as they began an insistent stroking, and her skin crackled and burned where moments before it had been ice.
His thumb circled deliciously around the outside of her sex, grazing and brushing the place she wanted it to land.
“Not so fast,” he murmured. “You need to earn it first.”
He pushed his fingers deeper inside her and the world began to speed up. She wanted it all, like she used to have it. She wanted his hands on her breasts, his mouth on hers, him inside her. And she wanted it all now. She bucked her hips against his thumb and moaned.
“That’s better,” he said. “Once more with feeling.” He pressed lightly with his thumb on that most sensitive place, and then began his circling dance again.
“Asha,” she begged.
“Mmmm?” He pulled his mouth from hers and bent his head to her breast. “You want some of this, darl’n?” He bit lightly at her nipple and her tummy pirouetted neatly. Then he pulled the nipple into his mouth and sucked hard.
A sudden noise from the cave mouth startled them both. They turned, hot and panting, pressed against each other.
“Fuck,” Asha said, taking in the writhing creature hissing and chattering at the entrance.
Tabi could see it was giddy and confused. It spun fidgety circles in place, making to lurch for them in one instant, then recoiling to the cave mouth the next. She could see every violet sucker pulsing with hungerlust, but the usually pale eyes were a sick green.
“Look at its eyes,” Tabi whispered against Asha’s shoulder. “We’re ruining its pleasure.”
“I know how it feels,” Asha sighed.
As they stood locked in place, the thing seemed to settle, hissing more purposefully in place. It made a low, ululating call and two other Hunters joined it on the lip of the cave.
“Talk about a passion killer,” Asha muttered, his eyes darting to his suit. She could see him mentally calculating whether he could reach his vientamite sabre. And whether it would do any good against these armoured ice vampires, and the swarm they could call down.
Tabi felt brittle fear lodge itself in her throat. There was nothing they could do about Tyverian Hunters this close and this hungry.
Except one thing.
Tabi dropped to her knees on the floor of the ice cave and grasped Asha’s cock. “Don’t think about them,” she said. “Think about me. Think about how you loved this ten years ago, and how much you’re going to love it again right now.”
Asha nodded and closed his eyes.
At first, Tabi was working to restart his pheromones. She grasped him firmly, looking up the full, hard length of his beautiful body as she took him slowly in her mouth. But within seconds, the pleasure overtook the fear.
She loved watching him like this – focused on his pleasure, holding her head and swaying back into his locked legs. She drank him in deeper, sucking and tonguing him, remembering the taste of his sex and his skin, feeling her own sex respond as his cock grew larger and harder in her mouth.
“Is it making you wet, baby?” Asha’s groaned question almost tipped her over. “You like that, don’t you?”
She nodded, sucking him stronger and faster, wondering if he would let her take him this way.
She didn’t wonder for long.
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He reached down for her arms and pulled her to her feet, picking her up under her thighs again and pushing her back against the ice wall. This time the ice against her back and her buttocks was almost comforting. It cooled the fireball that raged on her skin.
Asha pressed his chest against hers, using his thumbs to spread her thighs a little and open her to him before plunging inside.
As she cried out, the murderous Hunters at the cave mouth began a shrill cry of their own. Tabi couldn’t see them through the drunk fog of lust, but she could hear their movements, clacking and skittering on the ice. They were frantic with confusion and disgust, and the high-pitched sound almost punctured her eardrums.
“They want us to stop,” she said.
“No. Fuckin’. Way” Asha grunted, driving more deeply into her and making every scientific thought she’d ever had turn tail and run.
Finally, finally, his thumb found her sweet spot and she opened to him, pushing back against the pressure as she felt the walls of her sex begin to clench.
“You ready to be fucked like you’ve never been fucked in your life?” Asha drove into her one last time before he pulled out and turned her around again, pressing her breasts hard against the ice so they stung and ached with wanting.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He dragged her back, away from the wall a little, and then tipped her forward, so her back was horizontal and her hands were pressing against the ice for purchase. He spread her buttocks roughly and drove into her, reaching forward to grab both breasts in his hands, twisting the nipples with his fingers.
She cried out at his second thrust, just as the screeching of the creatures at the mouth of the cave also reached a crescendo and they fell away from the cave.
Asha continued to thrust into her, long strokes she met eagerly. He abandoned her nipples and held tight to her back, building to a wild rhythm that shook her to the core. Darkness fell around them as he began to moan low in his throat.
Holy fuck. The firefight had stopped. Had they won?
As Tabi tried hard to hold on to the edges of control, she heard Symon’s voice bleat into the icy darkness.
