by Tamara Hogan
First a beacon with the Arkapaedis’s signature, and now a cryotube? No need to see the ship’s physical wreckage; he’d found the Arkapaedis’s final resting place.
Had Captain Noah Pritchard breached the ’tube? Did it still contain the captain’s own genetic material? Did his descendents, and the descendents of his command crew, walk this tiny, backwater planet? Beddoe swallowed hard. If he was clever—if he handled things very carefully indeed—he could be rich beyond measure.
Questioning Paige Scott was more important than ever.
Reaching to the waistband of her pants, he slipped the closure open, lowered the metal fastener, and delved his hand under the layers to touch her slippery, intimate heat. As she writhed, he gave a tiny mental push: What is this place? What do you seek here?
Paige reared up, scrabbling at the fabric covering her head.
Distract. “You like being teased,” he purred, cupping her mound. “You’re burning up.”
She pushed the garment back down so she could see, blocking her precious breasts and all that fine-grained skin hidden from his view. In the dim light of the room, her sunset-colored eyes looked nearly black.
She nipped at the point of his chin with her tiny white teeth, a surprising sting that shrilled all the way down his spine. Why do you want to know? She punctuated her mental question with a lithe stretch of her neck.
Nothing she could do would affect him more, and her low, knowing laugh meant the little witch knew it. He latched his lips onto that tender juncture where neck met shoulder.
Her throat vibrated against his mouth as she spoke. “I’ll answer a question if you do.” She snaked her hands under his upper body garment, stroking up his abdomen, his chest—“What’s this?” Her nimble fingers traced the barely discernible outline of his plant.
Dia. He shouldn’t have allowed her to touch his body so freely. How could he explain? So far, he hadn’t seen any evidence of even the most rudimentary comporganic intelligence. “What a waste of a question,” he responded, scratching his teeth against her neck to distract her.
Plucking his hand out of her pants, Paige pushed him back so she could look at his face. “Do you have heart problems?”
“I’ve had it so long I hardly notice it anymore,” he replied truthfully. Her conclusion, though incorrect, was better than any that he could come up with on such short notice.
“A vamp with circulatory problems? That can be life-threatening.” She frowned, stroking the skin over the plant.
Vamp. Vampyr. There it was again—confirmation that she knew what he was, if not from where. He glanced at the ancient cryotube, gleaming in the rough wooden box not two feet away. How much did she know?
Beddoe stared at Paige, her eyes narrowed in worry, her pale hair snarled with passion, her lips glowing, pink and puffy, against her skin. Her hand rested over his beating heart.
His strain floated away under her talented fingers. “How do you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Ease me so easily.”
Her smile was full of secrets. “We all have our skills.”
Dia, he wanted her.
“Feed, Robert.”
Though she whispered her demand, the need in her voice ignited a conflagration. Bloodlust sparked quickly, threatening to blaze out of control. Pushing her body back so she rested against the table again, he tugged at her unfastened pants, baring her lower torso to his gaze.
Under the tiny divot of her umbilicus, the tender curve of her stomach quickly rose and fell. Gleaming between her hip bones was soft body hair the color of flax. Tender arteries branched at each side of her private adornment.
As he lowered his head, her scent deepened, intensified: iron-rich blood, pulsing under tissue-thin skin. Her light floral perfume. The salty tang of the desire he’d called from her body with his touch. She groaned when his tongue traced the juncture where her leg joined her torso. Her outstretched hands clutched at nothing, nails scratching against the hard table as he suckled, drawing her rich blood to the surface—and marking her in the process.
As he swirled his tongue over the spot he’d chosen, she straightened her legs in a luxurious, sensual stretch, and then twined them around his body, bumping her hand against the shallow box holding the cryotube again. Lifting his head, he examined his mark. Gave it a final, prideful lick. And drove his teeth deep.
She cried out at the momentary pain, but her moans quickly changed tone as the transcendent effects of his bite buffeted her system. She vised her legs around his shoulders, clasping him tighter and tighter in a restless, shifting embrace. His knees nearly buckled when she grabbed his hair and yanked, trying to pull his head even closer to her body. As he scrambled to regain his footing, finally propping his elbows on the edge of the table to support his weight, her tiny fingernails bit into his skull.
Witch.
For long, timeless moments, he mindlessly drank her rich red nectar.
When his frantic suckling finally slowed, he had no idea how much time had passed—but her pulse still ticked reassuringly against his lips. Gently removing his teeth, he shifted to slow, luxurious licks, swirling his saliva into the wound to start the healing process.
Paige lay still under his mouth, gazing at him with an expression as deep as space. And… there it was again, that soft, narcotic calm. Was this peace? Contentment? Closing his eyes, Beddoe rested his cheek against her stomach and simply savored.
Until he heard a creak—right outside the door.
Paige pushed him away from her body, shoved off the table, and dropped to her feet, lithe as a feline. “Someone’s checking the cookhouse,” she whispered, jerking her pants up over her oozing bite. She pointed to a closed door on the other side of the room. “Hide. Quick.”
No other option. He did as she asked, hearing a clatter and a rustle behind him as he struggled with the mechanical knob. As he pulled the door closed behind him, the last thing he saw was Paige sitting at the desk, her hands poised over the keys of her machine.
The outer door opened with a squeak. “Oh, it’s you.”
Male voice—and a big male, if the heavy footfalls were any indication. Beddoe cocked his head in the dark, straining to hear.
“Hi, Mike,” Paige responded casually, a tone that he filed away for future reference. His little witch had shaken off the aftereffects of his bite very quickly indeed. “Locking up for the night?”
“Yeah, just making a last check of the buildings before going to bed.” More rustles and footfalls. Clacking sounds. “What are you doing? Are you going to be here much longer?”
“Do you think I need an escort back to the bunkhouse? I think I’m capable of making it across the clearing.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I’m working.” Silence. “I’m trying to concentrate here,” Paige snapped. “Go back to the bunkhouse and watch some Skinemax.”
“Are you okay?”
“What?”
A pause. “I smell blood.”
Her wound. Beddoe tensed.
Rather than answering, his little witch let the question twist in the wind. “Mike. Just go,” she finally said.
“Paige…”
“Please leave. Just leave me alone.” Her voice was barely audible.
There were a couple of beats of silence, and then the sound of heavy footsteps as the deep-voiced man did as she asked. The outer door opened and closed with matching soft squeals.
Finally, he heard Paige approach. When she opened the door, the dim light made him blink.
“You have to get out of here,” she whispered urgently. “Go.”
Beddoe nodded. Approaching the door, he snatched a kiss—and one last look at the cryotube, lying serenely in its shallow bed on the table.
He’d be back. For the ’tube, and for the woman.
***
Dawn was just brightening the horizon as Lorin’s headlights swept across the dig’s dark parking lot. Braking to a stop with a soft crun
ch of tires against gravel, she wrestled the truck’s sticky gearshift into park, turned off the ignition, and—ignoring her screaming bladder—closed her eyes and dropped her head back against the top of the seat.
Though she’d stopped at her townhouse to try to catch some sleep before making the drive up north, her treasonous body hadn’t cooperated, so she’d hit the road. She had an itch that only Gabe could scratch, but instead of picking up where she and Gabe had left off when her mother had so rudely interrupted them, she’d driven nearly three hundred miles to retrieve a dildo. Damn Nathan for planting that incendiary word in her head. Every other option she could think of to call it—a package? A unit?—made her inner twelve-year-old snicker. She had phallic euphemisms on the brain.
Someone tapped on her window.
She slapped down the driver’s side door lock and was diving for the other door when she recognized the muffled voice.
“Lorin. It’s me.”
She raised a hand to her racing heart. “Mike, you scared the crap out of me!”
“Sorry. When you pulled into the lot and didn’t get out of the truck, I thought something might be wrong. Why are you just sitting out here in the dark?”
Lorin unlocked the door and opened it. Blessedly cool air wafted over her cheeks and into the open flaps of her jean jacket. “Just trying to find the energy to move,” she responded with a sigh, unfolding her body from behind the wheel. She eyed the sky. “Sun’s rising.”
Mike indicated the bag of blood in his hand. “I’m good.”
Though a fresh infusion of blood temporarily jacked a vampire’s immune system into overdrive, reducing the effects of UV damage, they didn’t have an unlimited supply of blood up here at the dig. She glanced at the bunkhouse, where a light burned at the window nearest Paige’s bed, and then back to Mike. He looked tired. “How have things been going?”
“Pretty well.”
Yeah, right. She reached back into the truck cab, snagging the strap of her messenger bag. “Give me five minutes to drop this off, get a cup of coffee”—and pee—“and I’ll meet you in the workroom. You can bring me up to speed.”
“Ditto. Because that thing”—he jerked a thumb toward the workroom—“is not a dildo.”
“Let’s take a look, and I’ll tell you what I can.” Which wouldn’t be much.
By the time she arrived at the workroom carrying a thermal mug of freshly brewed Crackhouse Blend, Mike had company: Paige and Nathan had joined him.
“Hi, Lorin,” Nathan said around a jaw-cracking yawn. “Heard your truck pull in. Muffler trouble?”
“Yeah.” She hadn’t thought about the broken tailpipe since she’d temporarily fixed it in Tobies’ parking lot.
“I’ll take a look at it before you leave.”
“Better work fast,” she said. “I’m picking up your find, and then turning right back around.”
“I’ll set up the pictures,” Paige said, walking over to the desk and firing up a laptop.
Stepping over to the table, Mike picked up a shallow tray lined with puffy synthetic quilt batting. Lying nestled in the stuff, tucked into a clear, labeled specimen bag, was an oblong capsule, about two feet long and six inches wide, with a blocky extension on one end, its metal the same color as the box Gabe was testing in Sebastiani Labs’ basement. Sleek, aerodynamic, the capsule shrieked high-tech—and if their working hypothesis was anywhere near accurate, the thing had been buried in the ground for at least a millennia. While she’d been brought up on stories about their ancestors, and had spent countless hours staring at the petroglyphs in the nearby cave, actually finding a second physical artifact that might support the hypothesis packed a wallop.
“The metal’s… odd,” Paige said as she set the laptop down on the table, quickly displaying the familiar-looking sequence of pictures they’d taken of the capsule in situ. “The color is unusual, and the dirt brushed away so easily.”
Lorin nodded noncommittally. Gabe’s preliminary tests on the box had confirmed that the metal’s surface tension was almost zero. He wasn’t quite ready to say that the metal was completely unfamiliar because he didn’t have most of the test results back yet. Gabe hadn’t been willing to play “what if?” or even propose theories about the origins of the box until he had more hard data to work with.
While Nathan described the excavation—in typical Nathan fashion, the edge of the capsule had been exposed when he’d stumbled against the edge of the pit in the area Lorin had just gridded out—Lorin listened with half an ear. Sipping her coffee and supplying a nod or a “mmm hmm” here and there, she tried to assess Paige’s condition as the younger woman clicked through the photos on the laptop. She was pale, so very pale—or maybe it was the turtleneck she wore, in uncharacteristic black. With the sun barely up, she was, logically, covered from chin to toes against the morning chill. If Paige had a fresh vamp bite, she couldn’t tell.
Mike, standing back with arms crossed, finally spoke. “What do you think it is, Lorin?”
Finally, a question she could answer truthfully. “I have no idea.”
“I know we’re not supposed to make assumptions or draw conclusions on such sketchy data, but”—Paige indicated the capsule with her head—“that’s some advanced freaking manufacturing.”
“Yeah.” Mike picked up the bag containing the capsule, neatly labeled with his own precise printing, and held it in both hands. “The Woodland peoples made pottery, had bows and arrows,” he mused. “We know they used copper for making tools and for personal ornamentation, but—”
“—but not tools like that, and that ain’t copper,” Nathan said.
Lorin silently agreed. They definitely weren’t looking at an artifact that could have been made by the Archaic peoples, or the Woodland peoples who came after them. “Well, I’ll bring it down to Gabe and see what he makes of it.”
Mike eyed her. “How are your meetings going? When are you and Gabe coming back?”
I don’t know if Gabe is coming back. She shrugged. “You know how it is with meetings.” They didn’t ask any more questions. Sometimes being the Valkyrie Second really came in handy.
“Well, at least stay long enough to eat,” Mike said. “Gretchen’s making breakfast burritos this morning.”
Lorin nodded. “Sounds good.” Paige didn’t flinch or roll her eyes as Mike mentioned Gretchen. Maybe things were settling down with Paige.
“Seems like an awful waste of gas to drive up and turn right back around,” Nathan said. “We could have overnighted the thing to you—”
“—and gotten a personal visit from a very nice government agent after the container was X-rayed?” Paige shook her head in exasperation. “Please.”
Lorin put a hand on Nathan’s arm. “Could you wrap the capsule in bubble wrap for me?”
“Sure.” Nathan stopped. “A capsule. That’s a good thing to call it.”
“Better than a dildo, that’s for sure,” Paige muttered.
Lorin chatted with Paige while Nathan and Mike wrapped the capsule. It was nice to catch up on what was happening at the dig, but Paige didn’t mention anything about her hot vamp, and Lorin didn’t ask. Before long, Nathan handed her the capsule, its glowing metal obscured by a layer of small bubbles and clear packing tape.
As she tucked it into her messenger bag, the smell of grilled breakfast meat wafted in from the kitchen next door. Her stomach growled loudly, making Paige giggle. The smaller woman tucked her arm through Lorin’s. “Let’s get you fed.”
They walked to the noisy dining hall, and after a round of hugs and hellos from the rest of the crew, she and Paige finally sat down. Gretchen brought over a platter of breakfast burritos bursting with eggs, bacon, and a pepper/onion mix that made Lorin’s mouth water.
“Wow. These look fabulous.”
“Thanks, Gretchen,” Paige said with a smile.
Gretchen smiled back.
Hmm, interesting. Lorin listened as Paige chattered about events at the dig with no trace o
f her previous sarcasm or sullenness. Maybe she was worrying about nothing.
But she’d talk to Mike before she left and find out what was what.
Chapter 13
Much later that day, Lorin was back at her desk in Sebastiani Labs’ subterranean workroom, scrolling through another set of pictures—of the command box’s contents—even though the objects themselves now lay in individual shallow trays on an adjacent table just across the room. She replayed the slideshow from the beginning once again, gazing at the first shot: the contents of the box in situ. Even though the box had been transported, shifted, and jostled many, many times since she’d dug it out of the ground, she’d followed proper procedure anyway, documenting and measuring the position of each of the objects relative to each other immediately after she and Gabe had opened it.
Several hours had passed since then, hours during which she’d tried to throttle back a clawing, growing hunger that food wouldn’t satisfy. Gabe, scribbling on a clipboard behind her, apparently had no such problem.
She zoomed in on a fragile curl of birch bark, the dozen or so kernels of what looked like wild rice, the doll—or perhaps it was a spiritual totem—lying next to two locks of hair, one black and fine, the other curly platinum blond, lashed together at one end with a near-translucent polymer that looked a lot like fishing line. And there, at the back, lay the tech unit—nearly invisible because the metal it was made from was a visual match to the box itself—looking like something she could buy from the freaking Apple Store. Handheld, maybe three inches by six, it was sleek and slick.
She glared at the device’s tiny glowing light. Bailey had hovered so much during Lorin’s initial documentation, and had been such an epic pain in her ass, she’d given the unit to the other woman as soon as she’d finished with individual pictures and measurements. Bailey had immediately absconded with it, disappearing into the adjacent computer lab, her face glowing like a child who’d seen Santa Claus’s boots drop down the chimney on Christmas morning.
