“Did you hear that?” she asked.
Pyra nodded. One of the voices had called his name. They continued moving up the stairs and the pounding continued, seeming to grow louder the further they moved toward the main building. Pyra rushed up to the wall at the next landing and pounded his hands against it. He shouted, yelling anything to get the attention of whoever had called his name. For a brief moment he considered that it might be the hybrids taunting them and trying to lure them out, but he pushed the thought aside. Ryan hadn’t bred them to be clever, he had bred them to destroy. It was far more likely that whoever was pounding on the wall was calling to him specifically, and if they were being that loud, they might not understand the danger that they were facing. He needed to get to them.
There was a beat of silence after he stopped yelling and then the pounding on the wall resumed. Pyra responded to it as he traveled up the next set of stairs trying to find it. Suddenly it seemed that they had met. The voice cried out to him again and he heard it distinctly, the tone clear and firm. It sounded like Zuri.
“Gyyx, Ero, Ty,” he called down the steps toward the men, “have you connected with your mates?”
“No,” Gyyx responded as he approached. “I closed off communications with her right after we left. I didn’t know what we were going to face here, and I didn’t want her to sense any of it.”
“Connect with her now,” Pyra commanded. “All of you. Reach out to your mates. Find out where they are.”
The three men each turned slightly away as they focused in on connecting their thoughts with their mates. If it was Zuri that he heard calling to him, Ero would be able to connect with her and confirm that the women were there. If it was a hybrid somehow mimicking her voice to get his attention, she would tell Ero that they were still at the house.
“It’s me, Pyra,” Zuri’s voice shouted through the wall.
“It’s her,” Ero confirmed. “They’re all here. They came to find us.”
“They don’t know about the hybrids,” Pyra said. “They don’t know that they’re in danger.”
“They must be in one of the closets,” Eden said. “If they break through the wall, we’ll all be able to get out.”
“Tell them,” Pyra said to the men. “Tell them to pick up the heaviest things that they can find and smash into the wall where they can hear my voice.”
A few seconds later there was a dull crashing sound and then another. Soon the wall ahead of him looked like it was starting to crumble.
“Step back,” Pyra shouted.
He waited a moment and then kicked at the weakened section of the wall. It splintered beneath his foot and a large piece gave way. As it crumbled to the ground he could see through the resulting gap to the women and just beyond them, standing like a figment of his imagination in the shadows, was Jem.
The others standing with the women barely registered to Pyra as he scrambled through the broken wall toward the brother he thought he had lost. Jem laughed as they embraced and he held the younger warrior tightly to him. He pulled back and grasped Jem’s face in his hands, holding his head still so that he could look at him. Some of the carefree softness that his face had once held was gone and he looked older, more weathered than when he had disappeared from that tree limb. As he stared at him longer, he realized that his eyes were now orange, the sign that he had found his mate.
“How are you here?” he asked. “Have you been here the whole time?”
“I’ll explain everything,” Jem said, “but not right now. Why are you here?”
The question broke Pyra out of the joy that he had felt at seeing Jem alive, and reminded him of the danger that they were all still in.
“Ryan captured Zsilvia and her mate George, then kidnapped Lysander. When we came here to free them he told us that he has been breeding hybrids to use as weapons.”
“Hybrids?” Jem asked
“Yes,” Pyra said. “He’s been breeding and splicing together different species to try to create the ultimate military race so that he can take over the Universe, and he’s starting with us. There are others on another planet, a planet called Penthos, and Ryan has sent some of his hybrid army there to eliminate them. The others are here, in the laboratory. We have to get past them or we won’t survive.”
“How many of you are here?” Jem asked.
Pyra stepped out of the way and allowed the rest of the group to stream out of the wall. He could see Jem’s eyes widen as he saw Azrael and Ariella. Suddenly his expression grew dark and his hand moved to his hip the way that it had when they fought in battle.
“Get back,” Jem commanded.
Pyra looked toward the wall and saw Aegeus climbing through. He held up an arm to block Jem from running toward him.
“No,” Pyra said. “He’s one of us. He’s an ally.”
“That is a Klimnu!” Jem growled.
“I know,” Pyra said. “His name is Aegeus. He’s been held captive by Ryan for years. He wasn’t always this way. Ryan forced him to become Klimnu. He is our friend, Jem.”
They heard a crash from behind Jem, followed by another, and then another. Pyra realized that all the doors along the hallway were opening and as they did, shrouded creatures stepped out of them. Pyra stiffened. Without looking away from the creatures, he tilted his head toward Eden.
“Go back down the stairwell,” he said. “Get into the emergency chamber with the others and shut the door. Don’t open it until you hear my voice.” She hesitated and he pressed her backwards. “Go!”
Chapter Fourteen
Eden scrambled backwards through the broken wall into the stairwell again. She ran with Ariella, Elianna, and Zsilvia until they made it back to the emergency chamber. She turned and waited for Zuri, Samira, and Leia to come, and was surprised to see two other women along with them. One she recognized as Samira’s mother, but the other she didn’t know. They came into the room and Eden closed the door behind them.
She tried not to think of what was happening above them. She struggled to keep her mind away from the number of hybrids that could be swarming the building and whether the men would be able to fight them off. To distract herself, she turned to the unknown woman.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m Eden.”
The woman gave a tremulous smile.
“Jem has told me about you,” she said. “I’m Angela.”
“You’re Jem’s mate,” Eden said.
Angela nodded. There were tears starting to build in her eyes and it was evident that she was overwhelmed by what was happening. Whatever she thought she was getting herself into when she came here with Jem, this was far more and she didn’t know how to handle it. Suddenly Eden went from wanting to distract herself from the fear that she was feeling, to wanting to protect and surround this woman. She stepped up beside her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.
“Come here,” she said.
She guided Angela over to the side of the room where they had slept the night before and lowered her down to the makeshift bed. Zuri had found two more lanterns and hung them from the wall, providing enough light to help them see around them. Eden searched the nearby shelf of emergency rations and found coffee. She twisted the container to activate the automatic heating mechanism inside and handed it to Angela.
“Drink this,” she said.
Angela held the container up to her nose and drew in a breath. Her shoulders relaxed as she filled her lungs with the rich aroma of the coffee. She took a sip and Eden heard the soft groan of someone who hadn’t tasted coffee in quite some time.
“Where are you from, Angela?” Eden asked carefully.
She didn’t want to push her overwrought emotions even further, but she couldn’t deny her curiosity. She needed to understand what happened to Jem.
“Earth,” Angela told her. She took another sip of the coffee and then shook her head. “Originally, anyway.”
“Me, too,” Eden said. “But you haven’t been on Earth in a while, have you?”
Angela shook her head again.
“No,” she said. “It’s been five years since I’ve spent any time here.”
“So, you didn’t meet Jem on Earth?”
“No,” Angela said.
She was starting to sound irritated and Eden settled down onto the floor beside her.
“I’m sorry,” Eden said. “I don’t mean to bombard you with questions. It’s just…you’ve got to understand. We thought Jem was dead. We haven’t heard anything from him since that day. He just…”
“I know,” Angela said, cutting Eden off.
It wasn’t a rude or aggressive gesture. Instead it felt like a desperate one, as if she couldn’t bear the thought of hearing about Jem’s disappearance. It was clear that she had heard the story before and it was painful to think of it again. Eden could understand. The story was only a reminder of how close Angela had come to never meeting Jem. Eden would never have wanted to think about it if Pyra had ever faced something like that.
“But where…” Zuri asked carefully, not finishing the thought as if she wanted to give Angela as much space as she could.
Angela took a final sip of coffee and rested the container on her lap. She took a breath and looked around at the women.
“Do any of you know about the HM-1313 wall?” she asked.
The women shook their heads. Angela looked down at the container in her lap and nodded. The expression on her face was pained.
“I’ve already been forgotten,” she murmured.
“The excavation,” Valerie said from behind them. She stepped up closer to the rest of the women and crouched down to look at Angela. “I remember watching about it on the news. It was a few years back. There was a research team that went into the desert across the country to do an excavation.”
“Right,” Angela said. “And a few of the researchers left from that project and joined other excavations around the world.”
“I think I remember hearing about that,” Eden said. “It seemed really strange to me that some of the team would get reassigned right in the field and wouldn’t even get a chance to come back and debrief.”
Angela nodded.
“That’s because it is strange. Something like that would never happen, but because the investors and heads of the excavation presented a united front about it and had all the answers to all the questions, people just believed it. They went along with it rather than realizing how ridiculous that really was and demanding to find out the truth.”
“What is the truth?” Valerie asked.
“We didn’t go to another excavation. We went to another world.”
“What do you mean?” Eden asked.
“Exactly what I said. We stepped into a cavern to explore it and in the next moment we were on a desolate, frozen planet.”
“You went through a portal,” Eden said in surprise.
“Yes,” Angela said. “There were five of us when we went. Jacob and I are the only ones who stayed together. We haven’t seen the others since just a short time after we arrived.”
“Why didn’t you come back?” Leia asked.
“We didn’t know what had happened,” Angela said. “We had no idea that we went through a portal or how to go back. It is not so simple as to just move through the same portal to go back and forth. The portal in the cavern brought us to another cavern on the frozen planet. That portal didn’t connect directly back to Earth, though. The portals cross different locations and different times. When we finally found our way back to the frozen planet where we started, we stayed. It was difficult, but it was what we knew.”
“How did you find Jem?” Eden asked.
“Others found us first. Galadriel and Vyker. They were traveling the streams and they found Jacob and me. They offered to bring us along with them, possibly even getting us back to Earth. We went with them, but we lost them along the way. They found another planet and Jem was there. He traveled back with them and discovered that he had a portal that brought them back to Earth. From there, they made it back to the original stream and to Vyker. That’s when I met Jem. After that we figured out the path that connected Vyker and Galadriel’s planet and the one where Jem had been living. His planet was so beautiful. Warm and untouched. I chose to go live there with him.”
Angela was breathless when she finished and Eden felt the same way. It was a complex and overpowering story, difficult to even fathom, but she knew that Angela was telling her the truth. Jem’s reappearance proved that there was so much that Eden didn’t understand, so much that was still unknown about the world.
“We’re very happy that you’re here now,” Eden said. “Both of you.”
Angela tried to offer a smile, but the tears had built in her eyes again. She hung her head and ran one of her fingertips along the rim of the container of coffee in her lap.
“We were just trying to get back to Uoria,” she said weakly. “Jem wanted to get home, even for a time. When we got here, we found Rilex and he told us that there were problems on Uoria.”
Eden felt a heaviness in her chest. She nodded. She wished that she could explain everything to Angela, but there was just too much. For now, she was going to have to trust in them. As Jem’s mate, she was bound to him for life. It would be her decision if she would follow that bond and stay with Jem or if she would turn her back on him. Knowing her own devotion to Pyra and the unbreakable tie that she felt to him, she knew how unlikely it would be that Angela would be able to walk away from her mate. She was one of them now, part of this, another piece of the resistance they were building against an enemy that was seeming larger and more oppressive with each passing moment.
“What’s happening up there?” Angela asked.
Eden lifted her eyes to the ceiling of the emergency chamber.
“The hybrid army,” Eden said. “The men are fighting them. We have to get through them before we can get out of the lab and back to our vehicles to travel to the others.”
Angela’s eyes suddenly went clear.
“Why are we sitting here?” she asked. “If they are up there fighting, why are we down here?”
“Pyra told us to stay here until he came for us.”
“And we are all just supposed to listen to him?”
“He’s Eden’s mate and the leader of the Denynso warriors, which makes him the leader for the rest of us.”
Angela set the container to the side and stood.
“He’s neither to me,” she said.
She stalked to a shelf along the wall and took up a long metal pole with a sharpened blade on the end. Eden watched her cross to the door.
“What are you doing?” Eden asked.
“I survived for five years with nothing. I came up against creatures that I had never seen and conditions that seemed completely insurmountable, but I survived. I didn’t do that by hiding. I don’t know what’s up there, but I do know that I’m not going to let Jem face it alone. If there is someone who is trying to take over the Universe, I’m not just going to let it happen. He’s going to have to get through my mate, and he’s going to have to get through me.”
Angela’s words reawakened the fire that had burned within Eden. She had fought alongside the Denynso before. She had stood up and refused to give Ryan the satisfaction of knowing that he was still controlling her, that he was succeeding in the plan that he had manipulated her into being a part of long before she even left Earth for Uoria. Now she had been weakened and broken down, and instead of reaching within her to find the Denynso that dwelled there and letting it power her through as it had when she faced off against Ryan in the lab, she had hidden. Not anymore. She stood and nodded.
“She’s right,” Eden said. “What happened to us? Why are we here with our men? Because we fought to be here. We stood by their sides and fought to get here, and I’m not going to stop fighting. Ryan started this with me, and I’m going to be a part of ending it. I don’t know where he is right now. For all I know he could be watching every move, delighting in us running
through this place like mice and hiding from the creatures that he designed for this very purpose. He wants Pyra’s blood. He wants to be able to take out the Denynso and turn all of us and all of our allies into slaves to help him conquer the Universe. I am not going to just let that happen.”
“What about Lysander?” Valerie asked.
Eden leaned down and touched a kiss to her son’s head.
“Lysander is Pyra’s blood. He has the soul of a Denynso warrior. He was born for battle. When he’s grown and has taken his father’s place as the leader, he will know that he is the strongest and most powerful Denynso warrior that has ever been because he was conceived against adversity, carried through battle, born into conflict, and raised in war. He will never back down.” She used a blanket to tighten the sling around the baby, crossing it over like armor. “And neither will I.” ‘
A few minutes later the women marched up the stairs, each bearing a weapon they had scavenged from the emergency chambers. They could hear the grunts and crashes of the conflict going on above them and the sounds fueled them forward. The door to the closet concealing the sealed stairwell had been closed, but Eden forced it open. The corridor that stretched in front of her was strewn with bodies, the walls splattered with blood. The rest of the space was filled with figures tangled in combat and Eden scanned them to find Pyra. When she did, her heart steeled even further and she lifted the sharpened blade above her head.
The women streamed into the corridor and instantly Eden’s mind was clouded by the compulsion for battle given to her by the Denynso DNA now in her cells. She clashed against the impending enemies with everything in her, using her incredible strength and the skills that she had learned from watching her mate. She fought nearly blindly, keeping her back to those that she fought against to protect Lysander from their weapons. Around her she could see the others engaged in their own battles against the tremendous array of hybrids that confronted them. Some fought independently against the smaller creatures, while others teamed up against the larger ones. Blood streaked against their skin and clothes hung in tatters, but they kept going.
The Alien's Return (Uoria Mates IV Book 1) Page 11
