It was sad but true.
The contact sent a mild thrill running through him all the way down to his balls. He swallowed. How right this seemed. Surely his commanders would see this was more than usual and let them remain together?
“I match you somewhere else? Where would that be? Oh.” She bit her lower lip. “I can guess.” A blush spread across her cheeks.
“Yes, down there.” His lips twitched as he held back a smirk.
“Oh my.” With her eyebrows slightly raised, she studied him. The budding amazement on her face mirrored his own. “Really?”
“Really.”
She was so perfect. He could imagine her with him, greeting him each day. Them making love, talking about so many things – their upbringings were worlds apart, and yet they matched each other. If only he could be certain of their future.
Chapter 6
“Undo your coat? Please?” Brittany watched as he did so, then she wrapped both arms around him beneath the coat, her forearms bumping on the butts of the weapons at his waist. Just touching Jadd like this – with him all warm and big and masculine – it calmed her. Especially when he combed through her hair with his fingers, over and over. Her eyes would roll up any time soon and she’d turn into mush.
She could tell though, that he was worried. They were walking on quicksand. She’d never have contemplated anything like this a few days ago. Not surprising really – falling in love with an alien…an alien soldier man. The man part was obligatory, but he felt and smelled so good.
She sighed and held him tighter, snuggled in, his chin tucked on her head, them breathing together. Funny, but she was sure she could tell what part of her was responding to him due to this nano drug and what part of her simply loved him for who he was. Her eyes stung. Because, yes, she did. He was a good man, and for the first time in forever she saw herself for who she had been.
She’d been going nowhere for a long time. If only things were less…nasty. There was a man, dead, at the bottom of the building’s garden.
She scrunched her brow. “I wish you didn’t have to kill, and that he hadn’t wanted me dead.”
No point asking Jadd what to tell the cops. She’d work it out if they asked her, and her apartment would be straight up from where the body lay. Say he’d attacked her and she pushed him over? Wait. They’d want to know why she hadn’t called them. She squeezed her eyes shut.
There was an obvious solution, once she let herself go there. Everything seemed to click into place. She wanted this. Courage.
Her pulse upped, thumped. Shut up, heart.
“Can I come with you to wherever you go? Now that he’s gone?” Her fingers clenched just a little, holding onto his shirt.
His reply was soft. She felt his chin move on her hair. “Brittany. I wish I could say yes. It’s not for me to decide.”
“To hell with punishment.” She sniffed. “I want to be with you. It’s insane but I do.”
No matter how dumb it seemed, she was like a dog who’d found its master, like a butterfly alighting on that perfect flower…like a woman with a world of grief inside her who’d at last found sanctuary. If it was the drug, damn, she still wanted it so much it hurt to think of being parted from him.
“I need you,” she whispered, attempting to graft herself onto him. But he only breathed with her some more. She heard his throat working as if he didn’t know what to say.
“There’s a chance, a small one, if I put my case right. Bonding, even with a pet, is revered among my people. If you were fully mine, it would mean more.”
She angled up her head to see his face. “You can’t make that happen?”
“No. I can’t change chemistry. Though you’re already becoming my pet.” That measured reply, the sorrow in his eyes, made her hurt for him more than herself. He played with her hair.
After letting him go and taking step back, she tugged the other strap off her shoulder and let the dress slither to the floor. She slipped off her panties.
He cocked his head.
“You need to look at me. Down there. Maybe the change shows more there? I mean the more I’ve changed, the better?” She raised her eyebrows. His only reply was a twitch of his lips. To check he followed her, she walked backward for a moment then she padded across the soft carpet to her bedroom. She climbed up and lay on her back on the bed with her knees bent and her feet on the edge. Waiting for him to look.
He drew closer, his expression guarded for once. What was wrong? Lips trembling, worried she’d done some major mistake in etiquette, she opened her legs.
“Please?”
The rapt look that swept his face settled her fears. He wanted her still.
“Why were you afraid to look, Jadd?”
“Afraid?” he growled out. “That’s not a word in an Igrakk warrior’s vocabulary. But…” He grunted. “Maybe I was. I was afraid you wouldn’t be marked.”
“And I am?” Wow.
He placed his hands on her knees, looking down at her, his lips curving upward triumphantly. “Yes. You are. Brittany, the more you have changed, the better the chance that your people can adapt to the starfaring virus, and the less chance Earth will be demolished. But it also means it’ll become a Hunting Ground for some years.”
He waited as if to let her think.
She swallowed and made a desperate search for some functioning brain cells. Shit, shit, shit.
He was being so understanding. She raged against her mad need to fuck and thought. He was an alien. Check. Did not care. He had so far not grown eight legs. Big plus. And he was so nice, sexy, so right for her. Next point? Earth was going to be demolished if she didn’t become, like, his pet? Ugh. She ran her tongue over her lips. And that was a problem? How?
“I got all that. None of it bothers me.”
Jadd rocked her knees with his hands, grinned. “I should take a closer look.”
“Mmm.” Riveted by what he was doing, she barely understood the meaning of his words.
He went to his knees, never wavering in his focus on her intimate female anatomy. A tingle of desire electrified her body. It plumped her lower lips, made her nipples ache and tighten to hard points, made her quiver to feel him touch her. Fuck. Yes. She huffed and tensed. Even his breath galvanized her.
He placed his palms on her inner thighs to push her open.
Oh. She let her legs fall open as far as they would go.
“Good, pet,” he murmured distractedly.
Tears leaked and she shivered. The word “pet” had shuddered into her very bones, occupying every romantic cell in her body.
She shifted her heels a miniscule amount, getting used to the throb in her pussy he’d conjured. “I want…I want to be yours, always, Jadd.”
He glanced up. His eyes tightened to a predator’s demeanor. “Master. Say Master.”
What was this? Before her mind could trip her up she said it. “I want to be yours, Master.”
What the hell?
For a few seconds, his chest heaved, he breathed so deeply. “I’m going to try hard to make it so. You’re so close.” He let go of one thigh so he could trace along her slit. “So close to being fully red.”
“Oh fuck.” Gasping, she arched up her pelvis, so her pussy rose and his finger slipped a little inside her. At that exquisite sensation, she couldn’t help tilting her head back.
That moan was surely not her?
“Naughty thing.” He chuckled. “You want me?” His whole hand warmly cupped her mound as the bed dipped and he half-slid, half-fell, onto the bed.
“Oh yes, I do. I do.” She squeezed her thighs together over his hand. The impossibly urgent need for sex overcame whatever objections she might have thought up if she could have thought right then. “Please?” she breathed.
When his hand didn’t move and she saw the shadow of him through her eyelids, she looked. “Gorgeous man, alien soldier. Say I’m yours.”
He didn’t reply, only moved the hand that heated her pussy in a slow ex
ploring path up her body. Over belly, then belly button, across one breast, and to her throat, which he circled. He stopped there, his grip firm enough that her swallow pushed on his hand.
“What do you call me?”
She blinked, wet her lips. Not saying it tempted her, but the pull to repeat the word was magnetic, disconnecting tongue from brain. She gulped, then blurted it out, “Master.” The next time was easier. “Am I yours, Master?”
A taboo word, but her pussy had clenched in as she’d said it. Seemed like it appreciated her being his pet. Happiness shimmied through her.
He shifted even closer until he was inches away, his breath quiet yet caressing her as much as his fingers did her throat. His gaze, his presence, the thigh he settled over her stomach and hips and used to press her down onto the mattress – all these possessed her.
“Do you feel you’re mine, pet?”
She was paralyzed by an awareness of every place on her he touched and held her. His. Her reply was soft. “Yes.”
He nodded. “If you’re willing, I can give you something. It’s simply words. It won’t physically do anything except that, to me, it will mean you’re mine. Up here.” He tapped his head. “I want that. Okay?”
She bit her lip, teary-eyed. “Yes.”
“Nothing more is guaranteed. Others might deny what I have done but this is what I give to you. Me. It’s a ritual of claiming. Are you willing, even though it could mean more pain if we are parted?”
Her answer arrived like clockwork. “Yes.”
He nodded. “To do this properly, I will have you on your knees before me.”
Then he slipped from the bed. Jadd took off his coat slowly, as if the slip of a finger would doom them. He tossed it away. With her elbows propping her off the bed, she observed, wide-eyed. He beckoned to her as he went into the larger living room.
This was a man who’d come from another world. She was about to make a vow to be an alien’s pet. This should have had her running away screaming.
But, it was so right.
She didn’t hesitate further, and went over to kneel before him naked. The sparrow that often followed her because she fed it, as she had so many of its cousins in the past, flew in and alighted on the dining table chair. Maybe it wanted to watch. Silly little thing.
She waited, looking up at him, at peace yet also ready for whatever would come next. She felt on the verge of some cataclysmic event, as if the entire world waited and watched. He put out his hand for her and she placed hers in his.
“Say this after me. ‘I, Brittany, accept that you are my Master, from this day onward, in charge of my future, my health, my well-being in every way. You are my protector and my commander, my lover and my other half. I will never forsake you. I will obey you to my last breath.’”
She swallowed once then, without wavering, she repeated the words.
“Thank you, my pet.” He placed his other hand on her head. “I, Jadd Tekk, avow that I am your Master and I will fulfill my duties to you as I see fit. I will always be your protector. I will never forsake you.” He bent and with his hand under her chin, encouraged her to raise her head. “And now for the sealing kiss. Clasp your hands together at your back. Do not move them.”
She did so, wondering at the knowledge that had just arrived. Crazy knowledge.
This was a pivotal moment. Tension clawed at her. On one side of this was normality. On the other side was something that might crack her universe wide open. The kiss was the lever that would create the crack. From that would spill something both good and bad.
I’m imagining. It’s only a kiss.
She opened her mouth as his lips met hers, and welcomed him in. Their breaths merged, their tongues played, dueling, erotic, stirring her body more than any kiss should. She whimpered as he sucked at her tongue, squeaked and writhed on her knees as he wrapped both his hands around her throat. The tide shuddered up her and took her away into an effortless orgasm. Her moans echoed in her head.
Her mind saw. Everywhere, everywhere she looked, were particles of wrongness. She sensed them, felt them, made them whole. Her Master. The dog. The dying creature in the garden. The thing down the street – she touched that and recoiled. As the last spasm rippled hotly down to her toes, she fainted into blackness.
Chapter 7
Jadd lurched, overcome by a sudden sense of something hard to understand. He knelt beside Brittany, where she’d collapsed, and he felt nothing. An absence. No pain in his leg. His thigh had seemed close to healed earlier in the day. Now though, it was perfect. Even the vaguely sore throat had gone – the one he’d acquired from some minor Earth virus that had escaped the viral shielding vaccine. The itchy nose too. And the spot where he’d dropped something heavy on his foot. All were gone.
What had just happened? The claiming ceremony was a traditional rite, nothing more.
The sparrow that followed her was here. He frowned. It lay lifeless under the dining table. It shriveled, crackling, turning into black fragments that crumbled to a scrunched ball of charcoal. Then, step by step, elegant origami in reverse, it unwrinkled and unfolded, puffing out into a sparrow shape. Iridescent feathers burned into being across the surface of its body. Bright metallic blue, red, and orange that hurt the eyes. The bird popped upright, shivered through a last burst of flame that made its feathers look completely alight then launched into the air, and flew out the window.
What? He needed his eyes checked, or his mind. That had not happened. Maybe that Earth virus caused hallucinations.
Maybe it was real. He sat, unmoving, and tried to understand. If that was real, her sparrow had died then had been reborn. If what his eyes insisted had happened was true, did it have something to do with Brittany?
And his leg had healed…and it had improved suddenly yesterday also. Was it her? Magic? Except, there was no such thing.
He shook his head. Stupid. It didn’t add up at all.
What mattered was this woman in his arms. He had to convince everyone else it was best they stay together. If he failed, he’d leave her with memories only. And possibly a stronger bond than before. He had to sort out how to do this, what to say. They’d be monitoring the killer. They’d monitor this apartment. Her. Him. There was little time.
The door burst open and heavy boots tromped in.
Or no time at all. His stomach became as heavy as lead.
A flare of a peculiar shade of citrine light from the balcony warned an Ascend had arrived. Which meant he’d really stirred them up. Kak.
As he straightened, the Ascend pushed through the daisy motif curtains. So incongruous. A bronzed and scaled Ascend draped in floral.
Then Brask and two of his soldier brothers stomped in from the entrance hallway, clad in coats, bedecked in weapons.
He stood, slow, palms out then looked down when Brittany gasped.
She rose to hands and knees, her red-tipped breasts swaying, her eyes dazed. With her lips seared from his kisses. Her cheeks were flushed and blotched as if she had a fever. Vulnerable. His girl.
He assessed the Ascend and his soldier brothers but made sure not to stray from her side. “Tell me why you’re here.”
Brask shifted the heavy Berskald rifle that rested in his hands. Things had escalated. Off-world weapons. Why?
“We’re here to stabilize the situation, to retrieve you, to decide what to do with her, and primarily, to eliminate one…” Brask’s green eyes dead-stared at him, pinpoint focus.
Oh fuck. “One what?” Brittany? Him?
“To eliminate multiple Bak-lal killer clones that have appeared.”
“Holy Ascendants.” Oops. “Where?” He put his hand on the butt of the sawn-off shotgun in his waist holster. He could probably take down one with this primitive thing.
The Ascend crunched forward, the timber floor creaking and bowing. “You eliminated one already. Over the side of this building. These are obsolete conversions. With the death of the one below, and identical men appearing on the streets,
the computations popped up. A man must have been taken in the past and cloned. Possibly hard-wired for faster reactions but not much more. These are old-style clones. There may be a Bak-lal factory queen nearby – an old one in hiding.”
He thought fast. “They’re coming here?” He pictured them, a small army of cloned killers, circling, closing in. They hadn’t found a factory queen yet, but that was the most likely cause.
“Yes. Here.” The Ascend crouched before him, hands clasped on knee, and he studied Brittany. “This one is interesting.” He stretched out his hand and adjusted her head to see her better.
The Ascend touched her. His pet. Jadd clenched and unclenched his fists, snarling inside his head, but striving not to interfere. Brittany was still not recovered. That was obvious.
“Jadd. Attend me!” Brask was a yard distant. “You’re to accompany the Ascend to the ship.” His voice lowered. “I’ll take care of her. I’ll keep her safe.”
“You want me to leave her?” That was intolerable. He needed to cradle her until she was okay. But he was a soldier too. This…sucked. “With a factory queen nearby, and clone killers homing in? I don’t care how kakking obsolete they are –”
“Come.” The Ascend rose and grasped his forearm, steel strength in the grip. “I promise you, I will allow you to see her again. You will be absolved of your crimes if you do your duty. There’s no time for your protests.”
Before he could summon more arguments, the Ascend whisked him across the room, through the curtains, and sped into the sky. The transition was so abrupt he gaped, and got a mouthful of bug. He spat out pieces of wriggling insect. Wind roared in his ears. The sky rushed past.
He glanced down, twisting to see, and was struck by the barrage of color from the blossoms of vegetation surrounding the building she inhabited – in parks, on ledges and balconies. Flowers. Thousands of them.
Precious Sacrifice Page 6
