Clamping both hands to his groin, he managed to gain his feet and stagger to the doorway before his legs lost feeling. He propped against the doorframe and watched the mek leave. Bloody mounds littered the hall. Vermillion streaked the pale walls like gruesome abstract art. Did anyone still live?
Those monsters had Angelica. He didn’t know if she was alive or dead. He’d failed to protect her. He’d fucked up. I wonder what Hel will say when he hears? Tris looked down at the blood oozing between the fingers of the hands he clenched against his gut. Red dripped from his knuckles and pooled on the safe room floor. Ah… not good. He slumped against the doorframe and fought the darkness clouding his vision. I should have told her I loved her.
***
“Tristan! Angelica!” Mage shouted down the medcenter hallway. The aftereffects of expended Razar 88Ks hazed the air. Blood spatter and lazer burns decorated the walls as if an inkblot psych-test. Bodies of Blue Daggers littered the hall. Some lay motionless in pools of viscous red. Others propped against the walls in tight-lipped silence. Ramsey DeKieran, his face painted red by blood streaming from a gash at his hairline, cradled his equally bloody wife in his arms. She looked too limp to be conscious. Medics scurried between the living, all of whom bore injuries. Where was Tris? Where was Angelica? Mage screamed their names again.
“Mage.” Tristan slumped in the doorway of what looked like a fortified room. A thick metal door lay some feet away, ripped from its hinges. Tris sank to his knees… then sat… and then folded to the ground. Mage scrambled to Tristan’s side. Blood welled from his lower body.
“I need medical help!” He ripped open Tristan’s body armor and swore at the mutilation of flesh. Half the man’s internal organs were threatening to escape from the gaping slash in his abdomen. To staunch the flow, Mage rapidly closed Tristan’s body armor as snugly as possible and held it pressed to the wound.
“It’s bad.” Tristan opened his eyes briefly before closing them again.
Yeah, it’s bad. “Yeah, it’s going to leave a hellacious scar.” Mage’s throat closed and tears threatened to cloud his vision. “Fuck, Tris. Hang in there, you bastard. Don’t you dare die on me.”
Tristan tried to laugh but stopped with an agonized gasp. “’fraid…I’m going to… disappoint, princess.” His gray eyes found Mage. “Meks took Angelica,” he gasped. “Couldn’t stop them.”
“Don’t take all the credit. You and forty heavily-armed Daggers couldn’t stop them.” Mage shook his head. “It’s okay. We’ll get her back.” Grief closed his throat, and tears he couldn’t hold back flooded his vision. His right arm felt as if it were on fire and blood dripped from his fingertips. His thigh screamed in protest at any movement and his blood-soaked pants flapped against his leg wetly. Both injuries were souvenirs from his utterly futile attempt to prevent the meks from entering Angelica’s apartment. He’d never before felt so impotent. The meks had paid him scant attention, simply swatting him away as if a minor irritant. He almost welcomed the physical pain, but it didn’t distract from the emotional agony tearing him two.
In the next moment, multiple medical personnel surrounded Tris. They lifted him onto a broad, hovering gurney.
“You, too, sir,” a medic ordered.
Mage climbed onto the floating conveyance next to Tris and gritted his teeth against the pain, as medical personnel began to cut his and Tristan’s clothing away to evaluate their injuries. Mage waved them off with a curt, “See to him first.”
When they opened Tristan’s body armor, after a moment’s observation, the medics grimly did the same as Mage had done. They snugged it tightly closed. Tris remained silent, his full lips pressed into a thin line. His eyes fluttered open and found Mage. A ghost of his normal mocking grin stretched his lips and then faded as if it was too much effort to sustain even that small movement. “Love you, princess,” he rasped. “Love her, too. Tell her. Tell her I said…” His voice faltered and wetness trickled from the corners of his eyes.
Tristan’s tears gutted him. He’d never seen the man cry. Mage pressed two fingers to Tristan’s mouth and nodded. He pushed the words, “Yeah, I’ll tell her,” through heartache so heavy it was hard to breathe and scrubbed his eyes on his sleeve.
Tristan nodded. Then his eyes closed, and no matter how Mage begged, he never opened them again.
It seemed like hours but it couldn’t have been more than a scattering of minutes before orderlies maneuvered their gurney through the wide doors of the trauma center. In a flurry of activity, the medical staff moved the heavens to save Tristan and the other Daggers gravely injured in the conflict with the meks. Mage collapsed on the floor in a corner, forgotten. He watched—and prayed.
“We’re losing him. Push more fluids. He’s crashing.”
Mage lost count of the number of times he heard those awful words spoken by anonymous voices. He witnessed technicians attach life-sustaining machines to Tristan’s body and force more liquids into his veins. He sat unnoticed and a numb sort of grayness surrounded him while others fought for the life of his lover. He couldn’t even address the thought that the meks had Angelica. He dropped his head into his bloody hands and shook with repressed grief.
A hand rested on his shoulder. “Sir? Captain DeLan? You should have your wounds looked at. From the puddle you’re sitting in, you’ve lost a lot of blood. Prince DeHelios is receiving the best care we can provide. It won’t help matters if you collapse also.” The kind voice of a female med-tech roused him. She stretched an arm down to help him rise. “Come on. I’ll help you to a treatment room.” He passed out trying to stand.
***
Angelica awoke terrified and disoriented, wrists and ankles bound to a metal chair affixed to the floor. The stench of decaying fruit identified her location as part of a warehouse structure. Stygian black encased her, and she had no concept of how long she’d been unconscious. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. Grief slammed her. She suspected Tris had a mortal wound. He might be dead by now. Ramsey and Steffania had lain in the hall, bloody and unmoving, surrounded by inert Blue Daggers. Were they dead also? She didn’t know what had happened to Mage. A silent sob grew in her chest, and she choked on the pain of it.I did this to them. I brought this evil here.
Three sets of luminous blue orbs hovering in the blackness were the only reference points in the vast nothingness that surrounded her… but the message they conveyed chilled her more thoroughly than the rank air surrounding her. A spot of light above her grew in strength until she sat in a circle of dim illumination. It did nothing to break the total darkness further than an arm’s length beyond her.
“If you are going to kill me, do it quickly.” She was proud of the steadiness of her voice.
One of the entities—she supposed she was going to have to start thinking of them as “meks,” for her captors met all the descriptions she’d ever heard of a mekanikos—entered the circle of light and clamped a hand on the nape of her neck. A finger and thumb pressed into the base of her skull with painful force. Her agonized scream rang in the emptiness of the warehouse.
An alien strangeness invaded her mind and with frightening ease broke down every mental barrier she frantically erected to prevent a total rape of her consciousness. In stunning clarity, she relived the emotions and events of her capture and slavery on Vxloncia as if watching an entertainment vid on fast-forward. Her memory slowed to real time as the memory of a particular event looped over and over again—as if the mek examined each millisecond minutely…
The stainless lid of hercerebral probe unit lifted, and the bright ceiling lights of the laboratory blinded her. Ungovernable fear overwhelmed her.
What have they done to my brain? How long have I been here?
Unfamiliar hands unhooked the catheters and intravenous tubes that connected her to the probe bed. Disoriented and dizzy, she was lifted and placed on her feet.
“Stand up, Pansy.”
No. That’s not right? My name is Angelica. I am Dr. An
gelica Giverny! She lacked the capacity to speak, so she screamed it in her mind.
Rough hands, invasive hands, draped a pale pink gown over her nude body. An unfamiliar male voice ordered, “Follow that technician, Pansy.”A whimper of horror lodged in her throat.
She shuffled out of the white room with the rest of the mind-wiped and reconditioned women kidnapped to fill the ranks of submissive sex slaves on Vxloncia.
As she moved down the hall at the prompting of the white-coated technicians, she passed two men talking. One she recognized as Vittal Lontz. She saw only the back of the other man. As her group hobbled by, a woman stumbled and Angelica fell bodily into the two men. Disoriented and unsteady on her feet, Angelica grabbed at Lontz’s companion before she landed on the hard floor. Lontz barked his displeasure and technicians immediately swooped in to jerk her to her feet.
“Not so rough, gentlemen,” a deep masculine voice admonished. Lontz’s companion leaned down and offered his hand to her. After assisting Angelica to her feet, he caressed her cheek. “Something so delicate and beautiful deserves gentle treatment.” Angelica gazed at his striking features and wondered how a man so physically arresting could embody such evil.
The technicians surrounded her and hustled her back to the rest of the group. She regarded him over her shoulder as the technicians shoved her down the hall.
“You, Jewel, help Pansy,” one of the techs ordered, and pushed a woman toward her. The woman reached out and steadied her as they moved down the long bright corridor…
“Gaah!” Angelica threw her head back on a stifled scream, gasping as the alien being released its contact and withdrew from her mind. A throbbing pain from the nape of her neck worked its way to her temples and agony split her skull. I’m Angelica Giverny. I’m on Verdantia. I’m Angelica Giverny. I’m on Verdantia.I have to hold on. Someone will come. She whimpered softly and steeled herself to resist the terror that threatened to turn her into an incoherent sniveling mess. With painstaking discipline, she relaxed her muscles and controlled her irregular gasps. Someone will come. They will. She didn’t want to examine the memory of her seemingly invincible bodyguard being tossed aside like a piece of refuse. He and Mage had to be okay. She couldn’t face a life without them. Someone will come. She chanted those words to drown out the part of her that screamed in hopeless despair.
The mek who examined her stood in the dim puddle of light around her chair and gazed into the blackness toward the two pairs of blue orbs seemingly suspended in the lightless expanse of the warehouse. “This organic is the one we seek. Prepare our transport off-planet.”
A sibilant hiss echoed in the vast warehouse. As if out of nowhere, dozens ofred pinpoints glowed in the surrounding blackness. A gigantic monster launched itself from the black and with saw-toothed jaws clamped onto the mek’s elbow. A fell wolf! From the dark, five more beasts leapt onto the mek, biting deep into its shoulders, thighs, ankles and buttocks and tearing chunks of matter from its body that hit the floor of the warehouse with a liquid “splat.” The mek assaulted the wolves with its skeletal hands, ripping and shredding. Gray fur and bloody bits of wolf flew, but in the fell wolves’ mindless blood lust, not even injury or dismemberment discouraged their attack. The four-legged genetic monsters more than matched the physical strength of a cyborg in their ravening ferocity. In body size and weight the fell wolves appeared equal to the meks. The mekanikos nearest her swiveled and reached for her, a wolf hanging from its elbow. Three more wolvesleapt out of the dark to hang off its wrist and forearm. The mek morphed from humanoid into a snakelike creature that oozed to the floor and appeared to vanish—at least she could no longer see it.
Momentarily flummoxed as the flesh between their jaws shrank away and seemingly disappeared into thin air, the predators paused and sniffed—and attacked the thin air a stone’s throw away. To Angelica it appeared a battle done in mime. They hung off something invisible that tossed their bodies back and forth as if flags whipping in a strong wind. She couldn’t see what the wolves attacked, but the results of their ripping and tearing became obvious as silvery pieces of the cyborg began to appear, littering the floor of the warehouse.
Angelica heard a resounding “klack.” Intense white lights flooded the building’s cavernous interior and blinded her momentarily. Squinting against the light, for a moment she saw the other two mekanikos blanketed in a gray swarm of fell wolves. Each entity had at least a dozen of the genetic monsters hanging from it. Even the impossibly strong meks staggered under the weight and ferocity of the perversions attacking them. Vicious growls and agonized snarls filled the air as the meks grabbed the warped anomalies of giant lizard spliced with wolf and attempted to rip them in half. It didn’t matter what shape the mekanikos morphed into or if they disappeared entirely, the wolves continued their rending and tearing until only small bits of each entity remained—and three skulls. Angelica couldn’t stop looking at the horrific carnage. The viciousness of the fell wolves as they tore these seemingly invincible cyborgs into small pieces riveted her attention. Her brain refused to acknowledge the creatures that stepped into the edge of her field of vision—genetically enhanced lizard-men, Haarb. Of course. Who better to control these genetic monsters than the abominations that created them?
Two of the wolves that had torn asunder the first mek paused in their destruction and swung their red-eyed gaze to her. Bound to the chair, she could not move. Lowering into a crouch, they slunk toward her, caustic drool dripping from bared fangs, a constant menacing growl filling the air. The fell wolves were going to rip her into pieces. She laughed hysterically then bit it off. That’s not helping! She closed her eyes and waited for the rending of her flesh by razor-edged teeth. She felt the rumble of their snarls in her abdomen. Their hot breath gusted on her face. Their acidic saliva dropped in burning splats on her exposed skin. I hope they kill me quickly. I hope there isn’t too much pain. Her bladder loosed and she sat in a warm puddle of urine.
“Nysss! Nysss! Ousss!” Her eyes flew open. The barked command registered dimly. With snarls and yelps as the control collars on each wolf flared amber and then red, the monsters retreated one and then two steps, biting and snapping at each other. Their Haarb handler stepped in and clipped chains to their collars and dragged the snarling mass away. The immense form of Tok emerged from behind her, followed by Eva Sweet. Angelica stared at them dumbly.
“Dr. Angel. Are you hurt?” The Khlossian began to free her while Eva Sweet stood, legs braced, Razar 88K in hand, and glared at the rest of the Haarb until, with hisses that sounded like laughter, they leashed their foul pets.
“I wet myself.” Angelica dissolved into tears of hysteria.
***
“What are you doing out of your bed, Captain DeLan?”
Mage leaned against the hospital wall waiting for the dizziness to fade. He’d almost made it from his bed to the critical care center where he’d last seen Tris.
He turned and faced the beefy male nurse who had tended him with great compassion for the last day. Mage began to sag.
“Let me help you, sir. You shouldn’t be doing this.” The man shrugged under his shoulder and bore some of his weight.
“I wanted to check on…”
A shriek split the air and a small body slammed into the middle of his back. But for the nurse, he would have gone down.
“Mage, oh my gods, Mage. You’re hurt.” Angelica released him gingerly and slid around to face him. Eva Sweet stood back and watched them. “What are his injuries?” Angelica snapped. As the nurse assisting him spouted all sorts of medical jargon, Mage simply stared at the incomprehensible sight of Angelica Giverny barking orders. His gaze swung to Eva.
“How…I mean…I know I’ve been out of it, but?”
“With some ‘help,’ we rescued Dr. Giverny from the warehouse where the meks were holding her,” said Eva. “I brought her here to be treated for trauma. She insisted on seeing you and Prince DeHelios first.”
Eva put her hand on Angel
ica’s shoulder and interrupted the nurse’s recount of the injuries Mage sustained. “A moment, if you would.” When the man fell silent, Eva turned to Angelica. “I must leave you here, Dr. Angel. I need return to the warehouse and help Tok make sure your rescuers don’t linger on Verdantia.”
Angelica attempted to wrap the huge Dagger in a hug. “Thank you, Eva.” The woman stood motionless for a moment, and then awkwardly put her arms around Angelica. Angelica hugged her harder. “Thank you. You and Tok saved my life. I will never forget.”
Eva smiled. “I will see you again, Dr. Angel. As soon as I help Tok run the Haarb off Verdantia, I’ll be back—though I doubt the Khlossian will come with me. He said something about giving Verdantian tempers time to cool. It’s just as well that Lord Ramsey and Lt. Colonel DeKieran are not fighting fit; otherwise, I think Tok would be running for his life.” With a nod that included Mage, Eva left.
Angelica lifted a beautiful, worried face to Mage. “Where is our Tristan?”
Mage gazed at her lovely features and his face crumpled. He couldn’t speak. Devastation swept her expression and she turned again to the nurse. “What is the status of Prince DeHelios?”
Hers to Captivate Page 19
