“I know, I think it followed me.”
He shook his head, the theory so strange he could barely believe it himself, but he knew it was the truth.
“During the final battle for Naith, I was rendered unconscious, and that was the last thing I remember. Someone, my wife, one of my brothers, must have put me in the escape pod and sent me here. I know this. Not long after, the fallen angels destroyed my planet, and I think, somehow, the light of Naith followed me here. To Earth, to Colossal City.”
Bellaron sighed. “To a young woman named Apple Muldoon, who was in art school at the time. Can you imagine what that must have been like, to be a student happily studying along to be an artist and then to have the grief and terror of a dying planet stuck in your head? It ruined her life for a few years, but it is within her still.”
Lynxonna turned to the book, new reverence in her eyes. “Then it would transform you again...”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “No. It needs her to do this. It needs to be her hand that turns the page, that concentrates the light within her to change me. And I will not ask her.”
Lynxonna's fist thumped the bar so hard that Bellaron was vaguely surprised that it didn't leave cracks.
“What are you saying?” she demanded. “You have the sacred weapon of your ancestors in this tome, and you shy away from using it? What kind of warrior heart beats in your chest?
“I'm saying that I have harmed a young woman enough,” he snapped. “Did you not hear a word I said? My planet's last gasp for life nearly ruined her. She spoke of terrible dreams, of a life ripped apart. There's more that she won't tell me, that she swears to never speak of again, and by the great old gods above, I will not trouble her again!”
The last was uttered as a shout, and now he was standing, towering over the seated woman. The brave few who were left in the bar scurried out, and the bartender had mysteriously ducked into the back room. For a moment, Bellaron stared at Lynxonna, eyes harsh with fury. He could have attacked her, he knew that, and a part of him would have welcomed that battle.
Instead, Lynxonna only reached one long arm behind the bar and snagged one of the red candied cherries from an open jar.
“You know my husband reads to me,” she said, seemingly out of nowhere, and when Bellaron could see that she would not rise to meet him in battle, he sat back down.
“Does he?”
“He does. I can read English, of course I can, but I like the sound of his voice, especially when he does different ones, as he did when he read me a play not long ago. It was ever so funny, with elves in the forests, and lovers who chased each other round and round, and a weaver who was given the head of a donkey and wooed a queen.”
Lynxonna smiled at him, and there was something so gentle there that for a moment, Bellaron could see why the mayor of the city had fallen in love with her in a single night.
“And the lovers meet and are reconciled, and things are very well indeed, but during the play, one very wise and funny spirit says something that has stuck with me ever since. He says 'Lord, what fools these mortals be.'”
Belleron tried to find the energy to be angry with her again, but there was simply too much truth to it for him to fight. He finished his drink, and gestured to the bartender, who had ventured back out.
“If you bring me another and quickly, I'll make sure to tip you well enough that we make up for your lost business,” he promised.
“You're right,” he said to Lynxonna, his voice quiet and defeated. “You are right. I am a fool, and I do not know what to do. I would… I think I would welcome a fight right now, something that I could just pound and pound until things made sense.”
Almost as if his words had summoned it, there was a loud crash from outside, a screech of metal and a dozen car horns blaring. People started to shout, and as one, Lynxonna and Bellaron leaped for the door.
The night sky above Colossal City was always orange with light pollution, but to the west, they could already see a thick plume of smoke rise up from a nearby location, though they could not yet see what was there.
“I think,” Lynxonna said calmly, “you are about to get your wish.”
Chapter Five
Apple didn't drink. She had tried years ago, when the dreams got so bad, and she kept hearing those terrible cries and the terrible hum of ships that dropped down through a crystal violet sky. All of the alcohol she drank only made her terribly sick, and she supposed that that was a good thing. She never became addicted to alcohol, but one of the things that she had found during that dark time was something that probably counted at least as a mild addiction.
The Albrecht Memorial Museum was a tiny place, tucked in a corner of a neighborhood where she had once worked as a shop girl. She found it one night when she could not sleep, and she was shocked to see that it was open twenty-four hours a day due to the terms of a very specific grant. She wandered in and immediately found herself in a place of peace. There were only a few dozen paintings in the gallery, the work of a long dead man who had lived in Colossal City his whole life, but Apple saw something familiar in his vivid landscapes, the purple sky, the seven-pointed flowers, and the distant horizons where enormous animals seemed to graze.
The paintings soothed the jagged edges in her, and when she was disturbed, she came there to bask in the beauty of those alien landscapes. She had been there for hours now, but instead of feeling soothed, she only grew more and more fraught. Tears threatened at the back of her throat, and when a young man tried to ask her name, she nearly snarled at him.
She could still feel Bellaron's touch on her body, the heat of his mouth on hers, and to think that she had lost it forever filled her with a kind of despair that she had never known before. It was terrible, and as she stared at the landscapes around her, she only wanted to weep.
At first, she thought that the shouting was from a rowdy celebrating crowd, but after a moment, she realized that she was listening to shouts of fear. She wavered, knowing that it was always safer to stay inside when shouts started sounding like that, but then she heard one particularly helpless scream, and she lunged out.
She didn't have her trusted sculpting tools with her, which were sharp enough to cut anyone foolish enough to stand in her way, but there was a slat of wood left leaning against the inside of the door, and she figured that it would have to serve well enough.
Apple lunged out into a scene of frenzy.
There were people running everywhere, and there was enough smoke and sediment in the air that she coughed violently. When one woman fell, Apple rushed to her side to help her up.
“What is it, what's going on?” Apple asked.
Shaking, the woman pointed behind her.
Apple followed her shaking finger, and what she saw made her jaw drop.
Floating above the city was a crescent-shaped ship, one lit with lights in a pattern of blue and violet that was terribly, terribly familiar.
“No...” she whispered. “Oh god no...”
It was her nightmare come to life, and almost as if it had been waiting for her to realize it, she heard the deep thrum that told her it was getting ready to shoot those lasers, the ones that could cut through buildings, and trees, and of course flesh as if it were butter. She could imagine the cool green light of those lasers, almost beautiful in their power, and she could hear them, and soon, oh god, she would be able to smell the burning wood and the dead bodies...
Instead, what looked like a bolt of gold flashed through the sky and shattered one of the lights, turning the ship's hum into a shriek.
Apple gasped, and she turned her head just in time to see a tall handsome man with a bow and arrow howl victoriously from the top of a building. He shot another arrow and another at the ship, his bolts traveling impossibly far to reach it and doing more damage than any real human being could do.
It's the Archer, Apple thought in wonder. He was the newest of the superheroes of the city, and she could imagine why he had earned his place.
“Hi!” he said, smiling as brightly as he had when they met at her gallery. There was a smudge of dirt on his cheek and his lip was split, spilling red blood down his chin, but his suit was somehow still impeccably sharp. “You're Apple Muldoon, aren't you?”
“Yes...”
“Awesome. My wife would like a word with you. Honey?”
“Yes, thank you, my love. She is the one I am seeking. Go now. Protect your people and bring them to a place of safety.”
She leaned into the cab of the truck to give him a kiss through the window, something so passionate that Apple wondered if she should be seeing it, but then Lynxonna tore away, her eyes so full of fury that Apple had no time to register the truck's departure or Mayor McIntyre's cheerful, “Hope to see you at the polls next month, Ms. Muldoon!”
“I...”
“You are a coward!” Lynxonna shouted. “Here you stand, while people are fighting and taking wounds, among them your lover!”
“What... what do you mean?” she stuttered. “He's not... I'm not...”
Lynxonna thrust the leather book at her face, making Apple fall back, afraid she was going to get smacked with it. Instead, Lynxonna only shook the book at her.
“You can use this to transform Bellaron into something that can defeat these terrible beings,” she cried. “You have the power, woman, you are the light of Naith!”
The moment Lynxonna said it, it was as if something inside her finally became unstuck. Apple could have cried, but she laughed instead, and almost carelessly, she took the book from Lynxonna's hands. She could feel it now, not just the pain, but the joy of a planet that had once sang with life. It was in her. It was a part of her, and she knew how to use it.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am. Come on now. We need to end this conflict now.”
Lynxonna nodded, grinning. “Yes, there is the warrior I thought I saw at your showing. Come now, we must run.”
The alien woman stopped when Apple laughed again, restraining her with one hand on her shoulder. “No, I know a quicker way...”
She opened the book, she met Lynxonna's eyes, and Lynxonna felt her bones stretch and the itchy prickle of fur grow on her skin.
Chapter Six
Bellaron could have tilted his head back and howled, but he didn't have time. In his beast form, he was attacking an angel, not a poor burned thing like the scout he had killed the day before, but an angel in its prime, a creature that looked like a handsome human man except for the wings on its back and the dreadful cold of its eyes.
“Where is the book, beast prince?” the thing hissed. “We will not leave without it.”
Instead of bothering to respond, Bellaron lunged for it again, his teeth bared. He could force it back, he could kill it, but there were others, and out of the corners of his eyes, he could see the other superheroes fighting them as well. Archer fended off an angel flapping around his head high up on the building, and nearby two angels got in each other's way as they tried to fight an enemy that they couldn't see. That enemy was none other than Bryan Hillman, millionaire turned invisible superhero, and Bellaron knew that the Ghost would lead those angels on a merry chase indeed.
Above the city, the alien ship hovered. Archer had removed its ability to fire, but it was menacingly still present, carrying gods only knew what.
A roar to his right, and he saw Lynxar beating back another angel, and he felt a pang in his heart. He resolved that if he lived through this, he would apologize to the man.
The moment of distraction cost him dearly, and the angel's fist caught him a stunning blow behind the ear. It laid him out flat, limbs sprawling, and the angel loomed over him.
“Now die, little beast prince,” it hissed, and as he braced himself for a death blow, it was suddenly bowled to one side by a flash of purple fur.
He sat up, staring in surprise. He wasn't sure what was more shocking, that an animal that looked like an enormous bobcat with a scorpion's tail had saved him or that Apple was riding it.
As he watched, she slid off the cat's back and approached him. Her eyes were full of love, and as he watched, dumbfounded, she opened the Psalms of Istarte.
She didn't speak, but he could feel a light and a power enter his bones as he grew... and grew... and grew.
Chapter Seven
Where there had been a dying wolf, now there was a powerful black dragon with long flickering catfish like whiskers and enormous claws and teeth. It was a lithe snakelike thing, and though it had no wings, it spiraled into the sky, and its target was the ship.
The dragon's deafening roar shook the buildings, and with a lash of its tail, it circled the ship. Apple wondered what it intended to do, but then, as the seams of the ship bowed and deformed, she saw that the dragon meant to crush it and everything inside. The shriek of metal being reduced to a sliver was terrible, and when the dragon let it thump harmlessly to the park below, there could have been nothing alive inside.
Then it turned to deal with the stragglers, and though Apple averted her eyes from the carnage, a small part of her was glad.
The dragon screamed its triumph to the sky, and then it spiraled down to where Apple stood. It gazed at her with eyes that were the green of the forest, and she smiled.
A single thought, and it was Bellaron who stood before her again, naked, unhurt and with a luminous wondering smile on his face.
“You are...”
“I carry the light of Naith,” she said softly. She reached out her hand, and he took it, holding it to his heart.
“You... will you be mine?” he asked, and there was a trembling in his voice that she had never heard before. She wondered if anyone had.
“Bellaron, I always was,” she whispered, and he wrapped her in his arms.
TO BE CONTINUED IN BOOK SEVENTEEN: The Storm to Come - Volume 17
***
The Storm to Come
***
Chapter One
Apple's studio was organized, with all of her tools and all of the scrap metal she used to make her sculptures kept in their own spaces, but there was a certain amount of grunge, soot and dirt that was simply inescapable when you welded enormous sculptures for a living. Apple herself certainly didn't mind, as she was dressed for a day of work, but as things got more and more heated between her and her husband, she found herself more worried about his outfit.
“Bellaron, you're going to get filthy,” she protested, as he pulled her against him. She was in jeans and a rather ancient protective shirt, and he was dressed in a nice pair of slacks and the expensive button-downs he preferred.
“Do you think I care even a little?” he asked, amused. “Do you think I'm really thinking about how clean my damned clothing is going to stay when you look like that right in front of me?”
“I look like a chimney sweep,” she retorted, trying to pull away while not getting her sooty hands on his clothing.
“You smell like heaven,” he said, putting his face to her neck and inhaling deeply. “You smell like a woman who makes art that enlightens the world, like a woman who works hard for her living. You smell like a woman carrying my child.”
From another man, it would have been sheer flattery, but Apple knew that from Bellaron, it was nothing but the truth. The people of his home planet of Naith were not werewolves, but they were something similar. In the heat of battle, he could transform into something like an enormous wolf, and Apple, the inheritor of the light of Naith, his destroyed planet, could use a s
acred book known as the Psalms of Istarte to transform him into other fighting beasts as well.
It came as no surprise to her that with his alien senses, he could detect things like her work, her sweat, even the child inside her. For a moment, she lovingly cupped her hands over her stomach, where her child was just beginning to show. She had never thought of becoming a mother, and in fact, when she had realized she was going to be, her first thought was panic. Over the past three months, though, she had come around, and now she couldn't wait to meet her baby.
Her head was full of tender thoughts, and that was when Bellaron took advantage of her distraction to lift her away from the metal and tools that she had been working with.
“Bellaron!”
“I don't care about these clothes,” he said, enunciating carefully. “I don't give a damn about them, and if I need to prove it, I will strip them from my body and use your torch to set them alight. Do you need me to do that?”
Apple's mouth watered at the thought of him completely naked, and she abruptly decided that if he didn't care, neither did she.
“All right then,” she said, stepping back from him and putting her hands on her hips. “Show me what you like, my prince.”
The bright gleam in his eyes was all the warning she got, and then he was on her, kissing her mouth with an almost fevered insistence.
“I don't care if I never wear clothes again,” he promised in her ear. “Though I would much prefer it if you didn't”
She giggled as he stripped her shirt over her head and removed her bra soon after. She stood still, allowing him to worship every inch of her, from the nipples of her large breasts to the generous curve of her belly. She was not a small woman, and he loved every curve of her, from the soft flesh of her flanks and her back to the swell of her hips, and he took his time, biting and squeezing until her sighs turned hot and fevered.
Lynxar Series: Boxed Set (Books 14-19) (Superhero Romance - Werewolf Romance) Page 7
