Shutting my eyes, I tugged at the hem of his shirt, sliding it over his head. The warm material dropped from my fingers and dripped beside my waist like melted butter.
I ran my hands along the back of his shoulders, envisioning the deep scars left from the scourge. Not ugly, but beautiful—a tangible sign of his love for me—a constant reminder that he was willing to die to keep me safe.
I settled my mouth over his, and the heat of his tongue overcame me. A gentle suction gave him what he wanted and a low moan tickled my lips. Sparks burst and fluttered down my throat, into my chest, and exploded out to worship every inch of me. I cried out, and he eased me closer, shaking.
His hands glided beneath my shirt and smoothed up my sides as he rested his cheek against my chest. “I could stay like this forever,” he said.
I kissed the top of his hair. “No one’s stopping you.”
David’s smile emblazoned my soul as he parted my lips with another kiss. Deep, driving need coursed through our bond. Pounding, demanding.
My arms quaked, my skin seethed, writhing with this flood of new, intoxicating energy. His muscles tensed, drawing me closer. I rocked my hips, driving myself against him. He growled and spoke several Erescopian words through clenched teeth. The beauty of his language withered into a desperate, staccato phrase. I slipped my hands across his chest. His muscles flexed, twinged, and rolled beneath my fingers, as if his body reached for me—yearned as much as I did. My fingers passed his ribs, and I sketched a line with my thumb across his—
I gasped and leaned away.
David cried out.
“What is … ” I brought my hands back to his abs and drew my fingers along a ridge of bony protrusions running down the left side of his stomach.
Sweat glistened on David’s chest. He winced as another row appeared on his right side.
His breathing came in short gasps. “I’m sorry, I’m trying to force it back.”
“Force it back? What is it?”
David hunched his shoulders. “When you wrapped around me, it was too much.” He gulped and pressed his arms to his stomach. “My body tried to engage you. I’m sorry.”
The two bumpy ridges grew beneath his grasp, spiking along the sides of his abdomen.
“I don’t know what that means. What are those?”
He turned his face away. A blue tinge flared across his cheek.
Why did he seem so ashamed? I pushed his arm away and ran my hand over his navel, between the two protrusions. “Is this where your sexual organs are?”
David turned away as he nodded. “You, the pheromones; it was just too much.” He took in a deep breath, quivering like it hurt. “Just give me a second.” He wrapped both his arms around his stomach again, covering himself.
Wow.
I knew he was different. I guess I just didn’t expect the alien side of him to be so—alien. I moved alongside him and ran my fingers across his cheek. “Never be ashamed of who you are.”
A half-hearted laugh puffed from his lips. “I could have hurt you.” He ran his left hand over my stomach. “Your skin is so soft, so fragile.”
The fear in his gaze sent a dull ache down to my heart. I stroked the arm still clinging to his stomach. “What do those bumps do?”
“My people aren’t intimate for the sake of intimacy. We only embrace like this when we mate.” He shivered. “It’s not like it was in the woods. I’m older now, and my body is built to react. I don’t even want to think about … ”
His silence cast a deafening shroud through the air between us. “What would have happened?”
His gaze returned to mine. “Our bodies attach while mating.” He massaged the ridges in his abdomen. “My human covering stopped them from manifesting. We got lucky.” He sighed. “Your frame isn’t built for this. It would have been horrible.”
Sweat beaded my brow. “Attach?”
“As in impossible to separate until the act is done.”
My hands twitched. “The act?”
He closed his eyes and turned away.
Oh. That act.
David grabbed his shirt and pulled it back over his head. “I think I better keep this on from now on.”
Ice ran through my veins as the white fabric skated over the bumpy protrusions.
So, we couldn’t hold each other anymore?
His eyes saddened as he slid his hands over my cheeks. “You’ve opened me to sensations I never knew existed. I don’t want to stop touching you. Ever.” He traced his thumb over my bottom lip: tentative, unsure. “We just need to be careful. I’m not human, no matter what I look like. And I would die if I ever hurt you by accident.”
I nodded, choking back a sob. David kissed me—a normal, human-like kiss. No jolt of electricity, no insane injection of sensations that melted every bone inside me.
How awful was it that the alien energy that gave me so much pleasure could also fuel something in David that could hurt me.
For the first time, I actually feared our differences.
David flinched.
Crap. He’s empathic, you idiot. “I’m sorry. It was just a stray thought. We need to be careful. I understand.”
He brushed his brow to mine. “Please don’t be afraid of me. Never be afraid of me.”
“But she should be afraid.” The corner of the mattress shifted as a mop of golden curls leaned into the light.
“Maggie?”
12
Maggie blinked twice. “Why didn’t you finish what you started? We were quite interested in the outcome.”
David skidded me across the sheets, gripping my shoulder as he moved between us. “Who are you?”
“We do not designate ourselves like air-breathers.”
Holy cow. First Matt, and now Maggie? Her golden curls sparkled, almost like they were made of water.
“What do you want with us?” I asked.
“Want? We want you to finish procreating. You accomplished nothing.”
David’s grip on me tightened. “I won’t hurt her.”
“Which is why we were interested. Every scenario we came up with left you undamaged, but her dead. We’ve seen many females destroy males while mating, but not the other way around.”
Destroy? Could it have come down to that? Were we really so different that he could kill me just by being so close? I shivered. Even though the Erescopians had been in our solar system for more than two years now, we hardly knew anything about them.
I knew I loved David, no matter how hard I tried not to. But maybe she was right. Maybe they were all right. No matter how hard we wanted to ignore the truth, we were from different planets. Different species.
The realization cut a deep gash in my chest, spilling my little girl fantasies onto the floor. It was time to grow up. Time to face the facts. “I’m not his mate,” I admitted.
And I never would be.
Not-Maggie narrowed her eyes. “Was that not a mating entanglement you just instigated?”
“We were just fooling around.”
One of her perfectly plucked eyebrows rose. “Interesting. Very, very interesting.” Her gaze trailed back to David, her eyes unnaturally wide. She blinked and returned her attention to me. “I am unfamiliar with these kinds of games, but you should take caution. The male is very young and does not have the control you think he does. In time, your fooling around may leave you unnaturally compromised.”
Unnaturally compromised … as in ripped apart. Bleeding. Dead. David hadn’t come out and said it, but his reaction told the story. Humans weren’t built to be engaged—or whatever he called it. I wouldn’t survive. Period.
“The male knows coupling would harm you, yet he continued. You should consider the possibility he is not as trustworthy as your simple mind believes he is.”
My hands fisted. “You don’t know anything about us.”
“Untrue. We know a great deal about land dwellers. We have gathered knowledge on you
r kind for centuries. In fact, we’ve become quite bored with the pursuit.” She perused the nails on her right hand. “There was mild interest in the male’s new species, but after initial examination, our only question was how two incompatible species would circumvent the coupling incongruity.”
I cringed. Incongruity as in wrong, not meant to be.
David’s grip on me tightened. “We have some questions of our own.”
He hadn’t flinched while my thoughts centered on our incompatibility. Either he was giving me the privacy he promised, or he had come to the same conclusion. I’d have felt better if he’d appeared upset, but the set of his jaw and the furrow in his brow screamed determination, and that resolve had nothing to do with our relationship. He didn’t even look at me.
It was better this way, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear.
I dug my nails into my palms, hoping they’d bleed and distract from the lances thrashing through my heart. When it didn’t work I dug harder.
Not-Maggie rested her hands on her lap. “Questions are to be expected.”
“Where are we, really?” David asked.
“We created this space to simulate the gaseous atmosphere and sparse pressure on the surface. You are approximately forty-one pulls below where we found your ship lodged in our cavern ceiling.”
David wove his fingers into mine, his stare fixed on the Maggie-clone. “There was another creature in our ship. Dark. Ten legs. Where are you holding him?”
She tilted her head to the side. “We have no knowledge of the creature you speak of.”
“Liar!” I yanked out of David’s grasp. “What did you do to him?”
David drew me back. “There’s no sense of dishonesty. I think she’s telling the truth.”
She shrugged. “I have no reason to lie to you.”
So they hadn’t found Edgar. Maybe that was our ace in the hole. “Is our ship still okay?”
“It is as we left it.”
“Filled with water?” David asked.
“Of course. Water overtakes all here. To get you out, we had to let the water in.”
So it was flooded? I pawed David’s shoulder. “How long can Edgar go without breathing?”
“A long time if he’s prepared, but I don’t know if he filled his oxygen pouches recently.” David turned to Not-Maggie. “You’re sure there was no one else in the ship?”
Her expression didn’t change. “There were no other life forms when we extracted you.”
Those lances cutting into me broke in two and shredded what was left of my chest. It wasn’t possible. Grassen could swim in outer space. Water should be no problem for them. He had to be somewhere.
Not-Maggie settled further on the bed, crossing her legs. Well, she didn’t actually cross them. All of a sudden, they were just crossed—like her body oozed from one position into the next.
“How many of your kind are watching us?” David asked.
“The others have lost interest,” she said.
David glanced about the room. “I doubt that. If they are scientist-types I’m sure they have more poking and prodding to do.”
“Do not overestimate how curious your two species might be to us. You were interesting only because we could not figure out how you would attempt to mate. Now that you have disengaged the copulation, there is nothing more we can learn from you.”
“We only stopped a few minutes ago. You’re not going to make me believe that they are all gone but you.”
“Then you think too highly of yourself. There are many things to do in the ocean. Wasting time is not one of them.” She blinked twice. It seemed almost robotic. “If they are discussing you at all, it is probably whether or not to jettison you into the sea.”
A blue sheen tainted David’s cheek. “You can’t do that.”
“They can, and they most likely will. As I said, you have no value to us.”
“But we have value to each other,” David said. “You are a sentient race, maybe even more so than the air-breathers. I can feel your respect for life—for this planet and everything on it.”
“But you are not from this planet, are you? You are an outsider. Worse than she is. Both of you are meaningless in the depths.”
David leaned toward her. “You’re lying. In fact, you’re not even really here. You’re behind me, aren’t you?” He jumped off the bed and walked to my window. “You’re on the other side of this wall, watching us. Your emotions are flooding through this partition. What’s out there? You? The ocean? How many of you are watching?”
She lowered her gaze. “At the moment, only me. As I said, the others have lost interest, and I fear we are losing time before they allow the sea to flood this compartment.”
His eyes flared as he walked toward Not-Maggie. “But you don’t want that. I can feel it. And you’re afraid. Do the others even know you’re here?”
She shifted her weight. “I led them to believe I left the area when they did.”
My mind swirled, lost. I couldn’t feel a darn thing. Was David right? Was she some kind of projection? Was she really swimming around outside and watching us like fish in a tank, but in reverse?
“Show yourself,” David said.
Not-Maggie nodded. The wall and window behind David rolled as the colors faded and disappeared. The sea hung before us like a shifting liquid curtain. My equilibrium waggled, and I caught the edge of the bed.
You were supposed to gaze down into a pool, not have one hanging like a giant mural on your wall. I turned away to steady myself. When I returned my attention to the oddity, a sheen of bubbles flowed from the floor to the ceiling before dissipating, just like peering through the glass at the aquarium. But in this case, I knew there was no glass.
David stepped back as a red radiance filled the sea. I gasped and shielded my eyes from the brilliance. Thousands of red, glowing, worm-like protrusions twice the length of my legs waved in the gentle current, cradling thicker, suction-cupped, octopus-like arms. Each tendril trailed to a round center bob the size of the Baker’s picnic table before bursting out the opposite side, shedding blinding red opalescence through the ocean and my room. The creature resembled a sun drifting in the sea. Breathtaking, yet terrible all at the same time.
“Bio-luminescence.” David squinted. “That would make sense at these depths. I wonder if this is the one that ramrodded a hole into our ship.”
“That was not me,” Not-Maggie said, standing beside me. “I came only when I heard of your existence. By that time, you were already in these alcoves.”
“Can you tone down the lights?” David asked.
The wall reappeared. I turned to the girl that looked so much like Maggie. “You’re beautiful. Absolutely amazing, like a sparkling ruby necklace floating in the sea.”
“Thank you. I’ve been told so before. Reds are coveted here.”
“Your voice sounds sad when you say that,” I said.
“Being red is not always an amicable classification.” She stepped toward the window. “From the day I was born, I’ve had my every move watched. I’ve been treated like a delicate shell waiting to be broken. It is only recently that I’ve been able to swim on my own, to see some of the wonders our world holds.”
Wow. It sounded a lot like growing up on a military base.
“They don’t watch you anymore?”
“Not if I stay within our borders. They don’t allow anyone to venture outside.”
“Why not?”
“They fear those above us.”
“Humans?”
She snorted out a sound that may have been a laugh. “No. Humanity is barely recognized as a species. They are so few, and clustered on the landmasses like barnacles on the hide of a host. And I suppose fear is not the correct word. My people despise those above.”
“Are you talking about the round bodied creatures? The beings living above the rift we fell through?” David asked.
“The Up
tiders. The separation between us and our dull, symmetrical neighbors has been going on longer than our oldest can remember. They are forbidden to come here. Abominations. Weak. Small.”
“You don’t like them because they are smaller than you?” I asked.
“Uptiders are considered vile. Plain. Non-luminary. Any creature that cannot create light is considered secondary to those that can. They are treated like lower beings, even though they carry almost every attribute we do.”
David stepped closer. “You say they are considered vile and secondary, but from the tone of your voice, it seems you don’t agree.”
His eyes narrowed, and a slight tingle prickled across our bond. David turned and faced the window, his concentration focused not on the simulated glass, but on the spectacular red creature hidden on the other side.
Not-Maggie raised her chin as David approached the window.
“You need something from us,” he said. “Your mind is whirling in fear and anticipation. What is it? What do you want?”
The apparition faded, folding its arms and rubbing its shoulders. “I can give you the source you seek.”
David and I straightened at the same time. “What?”
“I’ve been told that you can pressurize your ship, that you can carry large amounts of water.”
“Theoretically,” David said. “How did you know that?”
The walls around us faded as if erased, then reappeared.
A disembodied voice echoed through the cavern. “I told her.”
13
I stood as the sheetrock beside my window waved like a flag in the breeze, pinching out and forming a long, vertical tube. The manifestation rolled and swirled, forming two legs, two arms, and a head before the color settled into a shiny, metallic gray.
How was that even possible? “Silver?”
His pupil-less eyes turned toward me and nodded.
“But you’re one of those Uptiders,” David said. “I thought it was forbidden for your kind to be here.”
“It is.” Silver stepped beside Not-Maggie. “Some time ago, I saw a bright red glow deep in the chasm below. When the seniors weren’t watching, I drifted down further than I have ever been, and found an incredible creature wedged in a rift in the ocean floor.”
Embers in the Sea Page 11
