by Elana Brooks
Adrian was waiting outside the room. “Everything all right?” he asked anxiously, looking back and forth between them.
“Fine,” Rosalia said curtly. “Angel made a few more attacks, but we dealt with them.”
“Maybe the two of you should spend the night at LA Headquarters. They can call in guardians to be on duty all night. You won’t be able to get warnings while you sleep.”
“Good idea,” Steve cut in, before Rosalia could reply. “We probably will. After we stop by our hotels to change and get something to eat.”
Adrian put a hand on his arm. “You’ve talked to Rabbi Sensei about this, haven’t you? I’m surprised he hasn’t sent someone to help you yet. Beverly’s off on a raid, but when she gets back I’m sure—“
“She’s got her own duties to worry about. And I expect she needs to spend every spare moment getting up to speed on all the things Keiko was going to handle. The last thing the rest of the Eight need is a distraction when they’re dealing with half the planet panicking about the aliens and the other half panicking about us.”
“Maybe, but we can’t afford to lose you. Either of you,” he amended, giving Rosalia a strained grin.
“You won’t. We’ve got the situation under control.” He waved away what he could tell was going to be a further protest. “What about the sessions here? I’m going to postpone the raid I was scheduled to go on tomorrow, but I can’t stay for more than a day or two longer.”
“We’ve got a few more instructors en route. One just finished her training, and two are coming out of retirement and only need a refresher. We’ll be fine.”
“Good.” It sounded like they could handle the recruiting sessions, even if Rosalia wasn’t available. If things went the way he anticipated tonight, she probably wouldn’t be.
His heart heavy at the thought, he took Rosalia’s arm. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your room and wait while you change. See you tomorrow,” he told Adrian.
His friend waved as Steve steered Rosalia from the building. She must have been even more tired than he thought, because she went along without resistance.
They made it through the stop at Rosalia’s hotel and the cab ride to his without an attack. Steve was grateful, even though the constant dread of a vision seizing Rosalia while he waited helplessly to know what they were dealing with wore on his nerves to the point where an actual fight would have been a relief. Please, let Angel take just a little longer licking their wounds and regrouping while he and Rosalia did what must be done.
When they reached his room, he held the door open. “Come in. We can order something from room service.”
Rosalia eyed the door warily, though with a touch of longing. “Why?”
“We need to talk,” he said again. “I think you know what about.” Not out loud, though. In case Angel is eavesdropping.
She grimaced but went in. He handed her the room service menu and took a clean pair of jeans and a t-shirt into the bathroom. By the time he finished shedding his sweaty workout clothes and grabbing a quick shower, she was ready to order. While they waited for their food to come, he flipped on the TV and they watched the ongoing news reports. The Covenant had managed to keep worldwide chaos to a minimum, but there was footage from every continent of cars choking roads leading into mountains, and riots were raging in a few cities.
Steve gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. This would be going far more smoothly if it were happening five years from now, when he’d told them to expect the Seraphim’s arrival, the time all their plans had been designed to come to completion. Or eight, as his final vision had indicated, the unexpected reprieve giving everyone a brief, false sense of security and an excuse to slack off during the last, crucial days of peace. Every death happening now that might have been prevented with more thorough preparation was his fault, no matter what Solomon said. If he hadn’t been so eager to believe his visions, or if he’d never joined the Covenant in the first place, they would have planned to be ready at any time. They’d trusted him, and he’d failed them.
Now he was going to fail them again. But he didn’t have any other choice.
Finally their meal arrived. Steve tipped the hotel employee and took the tray to the small round table. Rosalia sat across from him and attacked her pizza with gusto. Steve hadn’t felt hungry, but the rich scent of his cheeseburger triggered a ravenous appetite. Neither of them had eaten anything but quickly grabbed vending machine snacks all day.
He wished for a beer or a glass of wine to relax his tense muscles and ease the knot of anticipation in his stomach, but neither of them had ordered anything alcoholic. He needed his head to be completely clear for this. Rosalia must have felt the same way.
He swallowed the last bite of his burger and took a swig of soda. Rosalia’s thoughts slipped into his mind, tightly focused so no one could overhear. You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you?
He picked up a napkin and wiped his fingers, rubbing until the paper shredded. I still think a soul bond will kill us. But not having one will kill us sooner.
She nodded. Angel’s going to attack while we’re asleep. If we’re bonded, I’ll be able to get warning visions even then.
If we don’t, we’ll be lucky to make it through the night. We could have guardians watch us, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be enough. And it would tax the Covenant’s resources right when they need them the most. He dropped his shields and opened his mind as wide as it would go, exposing all his love and fear, his heart and soul naked to her view. I don’t want to hurt you, Rosalia. Please, if you can see any other way, tell me.
She shook her head. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She reached for his hands, mind open in return, holding nothing back. I love you, Steve. I always have, and I always will. I want to join my soul to yours. Even if it kills me.
He wrapped his fingers around hers and returned their fierce pressure, staring at their linked hands as he blinked away his own tears. You’re sure? There’s no going back.
I’m sure. Are you?
Deep in his belly, a spark of reckless joy ignited. It rose and filled his chest until he felt he might burst from the rich, wild surge. His pulse hammered in his ears. Yeah. I’m sure.
She swallowed and nodded. He took a deep breath and raised his eyes to meet hers.
They opened before him. He fell into their depths.
Rosalia was there, the pure essence of her, as he’d never completely experienced before and yet knew with profound intimacy. She came to him, joyous and bright and unafraid. He accepted her into himself and gave himself into her. She was him, and he was her, and they were one.
She raised a trembling hand to stroke his temple. What were we afraid of?
I don’t know. He leaned in to meet her kiss. I love you. The words came easily, naturally, the truth at the foundation of the universe.
I love you. He heard her with clear, simple acceptance. Their love was. As plain and profound as that.
They kissed for a long time, then moved to the bed. Their bodies came together, echoing the union of their souls. Pleasure flowed back and forth between them, reverberating into rich, multilayered harmony. For an endless, timeless interval they loved each other. All creation rejoiced with them, a celebration as old as the first stars and as new as each new breath.
Steve held Rosalia, experiencing her fading orgasm both telepathically and through some new sense deeper than the mere meeting of minds. There was no sense of bittersweet parting, as he’d always before felt at the end of lovemaking. Nothing was ending. For the rest of their lives they’d be engaged in one long act of lovemaking, whether their bodies happened to be joined at any particular moment or not.
She propped herself up on her elbows and grinned at him. “I feel great.”
He returned a wide, lazy smile. “Me, too.”
She quirked a wry eyebrow at him, knowing she was shifting the mood out of their transcendent idyll, back toward the real world. “Just let Angel try to tackle us now. We’ll blow them
away.”
Strangely, he didn’t mind her injection of reality. The real world was a more wondrous place than it had ever been before, because now their bond was part of it. “Should I tell Solomon now, or wait until morning? He’s probably asleep.”
A shadow crossed her face. “Let him sleep. Morning will be soon enough for him to deal with it. He’ll be happy for us, but at the same time this is going to be hard for him to hear.”
Empathy twisted in Steve’s gut. He’d known how Solomon’s separation from Keiko was affecting him, but he hadn’t known. Now he did. The thought of leaving Rosalia trapped on the Seraphim ship while he remained free felt like a knife sawing through his heart. He didn’t understand how Solomon was still alive. The agony should have killed him.
He nodded and gathered her closer. “I’m going to have to thank Adrian tomorrow for getting himself bonded to Beverly. If we hadn’t suddenly needed another yoga instructor, I would never have dared get back in contact with you after the way you broke things off with me.”
“I’m so sorry.” She buried her face in his chest. “I was terrified.”
He hadn’t really understood the first time she’d apologized, but he did now. He felt her memory of that fear as if it were his own. And he felt, too, how it had evaporated, just as his own had. He smoothed her hair. “It’s all right. We’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
“It is.” She sighed and relaxed. He closed his eyes and drifted toward sleep.
Colored lights swirled before his eyes. They coalesced into images. Happy villagers in bright folk costumes danced on a starlit lawn, moving in circles around a central bonfire. For a long time their pattern revolved, perfect and unbroken.
A stranger approached from the road, the odd style of his clothes announcing that he’d journeyed from a distant land. He cut through the dancers, who continued their steps without pausing. In the midst of the concentric circles, he passed near the biggest of the men, a laughing, bearded giant. Abruptly the stranger made a sharp swerve, grabbed the giant’s hands, and swung around him. The giant nodded and smiled and kept dancing. The stranger continued toward the center of the dance at a much slower pace, heading for a couple who revolved around each other in the third circle out from the fire.
The images faded into darkness, leaving only a distinct feeling that what he’d seen would happen soon, but not immediately. About two weeks from now.
Steve gasped and his eyes flew open. “That was a vision. A real one.”
Rosalia nodded. She sat up, her breasts bouncing with the motion. Steve enjoyed the sight, but it didn’t distract him from her words. “Not of Angel, though.”
“Of the Seraphim.” The stranger must have symbolized their ship. Which made the dancers— “Moving through the solar system.”
“And spinning around… Jupiter, I guess.”
“A gravitational braking maneuver. He was going slower afterwards. And heading straight for Earth.” Steve scowled. “But we’re monitoring their trajectory. The astronomers would have realized by now if they were on the right course for that kind of thing.”
“But didn’t you see? He swerved. They’re going to make a last-minute change of direction.”
“I guess they can do that.” He thought of what he’d seen on his trips to the Seraphim ship, and what Adrian had learned and reported to the Eight. “The millions of lower-caste Seraphim who push are split into three shifts. Usually only one shift is on duty at a time. If they put all three shifts to work at once, as well as everyone else on board…”
“They could turn even that huge mass pretty quickly,” she finished. “By the time we realized what they were doing, it would be too late to interfere.”
“Except now we know.” His pulse quickened. “If we can stop them from making the turn somehow, they won’t get the deceleration they’re counting on. They’ll reach Earth going too fast to orbit. They’ll overshoot and have to swing around and come back. It could buy us months.”
“It won’t be easy,” she pointed out. “How are we supposed to stop millions of them? And we don’t have long. They’re going to make the swerve in about two weeks.”
“I don’t know, but maybe the rest of the Eight and the Covenant can figure something out.” He drew a deep, wondering breath. “This is what they didn’t want us to see. This is why Angel is trying to kill us.”
“But now we have.” Rosalia exchanged a look with him, grim but hopeful. “Go ahead and wake Solomon up. This is worth it.”
Chapter 20
Six weeks ago
Solomon surveyed the members of the Eight seated around the conference table. “As welcome as this development is, it leaves us with a quandary. Adrian will be coming to New York to work with Beverly. Steve, I need you to go through the Covenant’s rolls and find someone who can take his place in the recruiting program. They’ll need to be at least somewhat familiar with yoga already, because there won’t be time for them to learn the necessary skills from scratch. I’ll need you to spend a few weeks traveling with the new instructor, teaching them what they need to know to run the program, and backing them up during sessions until you’re comfortable with them handling anything they might encounter on their own.”
Steve opened his mouth, then shut it. Solomon couldn’t ask this of him. There was one member of the Covenant who would be perfect for the job, but he couldn’t face her again.
He’d considered contacting Rosalia and asking her to lead the yoga portion of the recruiting drive back when the long-range planning committee had been putting it together. But Adrian had been able and willing, and their break-up had been recent, the pain fresh. Even after a couple of years to cool down, the thought of interacting with her again was too humiliating to contemplate.
Solomon didn’t know any of that, though. Steve had never told the rest of the Eight about Rosalia. There’d been no reason to. She’d been nothing but a minor blip in his life. A single day ten years ago, a single week two years ago. A brief relationship that hadn’t worked out. Someday some other woman would capture his heart and soul and drive the memory of Rosalia out of them.
Everyone was looking at him. He nodded curtly. The recruiting drive was crucial to the future of the Covenant. They only had five short years to prepare for the Seraphim’s arrival. Beverly was exactly the sort of person the drive had been designed to discover. How many more strong talents like her remained out there, waiting to be found? The sessions had to continue. Surely Steve could locate some other member of the Covenant who could take them over just as well as Rosalia.
Relieved by the thought, he nodded with more assurance at Solomon, grinned around the table, and bent to make a show of scrawling notes in the planner open on the table before him. Never mind that it was only an extension of his astral flesh. The act of writing would fix the necessary qualifications in his memory so he’d have them when he got back to his body and could fire up his computer to scour the Covenant’s records for someone suitable.
Steve scowled at the name displayed on his vibrating phone. Solomon had progressed from polite e-mails, to texts, and now to a call. Telepathic contact would be next.
He ignored the buzzing until it stopped and the notification of a new voice-mail when it appeared. But he had to give Solomon some word of his progress before the leader of the Eight reached out to his mind. There was too much chance his turbulent emotions would leak through the thickest shield he could erect and become evident to Solomon’s sensitive perceptions.
He pulled up Solomon’s first e-mail, typed a terse reply, and hit send before he could chicken out. There. Now he had no choice. He was thirty-six years old, goddamn it. An adult, not a teenager. He could hold a simple business conversation with an ex-lover without crapping his pants.
The phone number in Rosalia’s Covenant file was the same one he’d never forgotten, though he’d deleted her information from his phone when he’d given up on her ever making an apologetic call. He stabbed the digits on the virtual keypad. N
ow that he’d decided, he wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible.
Her voice sliced through the time and space between them as if they didn’t exist. “Hello?”
He gulped. “Rosalia? This is Steve.”
A long pause. Finally, “What do you want?”
He tried to persuade himself that her tone was only flat, not hostile. “A special Covenant assignment has just come open. You’re much better qualified for the position than any other Covenant member. Believe me, I’ve looked.”
She didn’t respond to his lame attempt at levity. In the same emotionless voice, she asked, “What would it involve?”
He explained, striving to match her impassivity. She listened, then asked a few questions, which he answered. Finally, she fell silent again.
Damn it, don’t make me beg. He hoped the thought hadn’t escaped the tight rein he was keeping on his mind. Seconds passed. He was steeling his courage to do just that when she answered. “All right. Give me three days to make the arrangements. Where should I meet you?”
His heart pounding, he checked Adrian’s schedule and read her the address and number of the hotel in Chicago where he’d be staying. “Once you’ve booked your flight, let me know the details. I’ll be coming in from New York. If it’s convenient, we can share a cab from O’Hare.”
“I’ll do that.” Still no trace of feeling, good or bad. He would have preferred her to yell at him than to maintain this cold formality. She’d probably look up all the flights from New York to ensure she chose one from LA that didn’t coincide with any of them.
“Well. Okay. I’ll see you then, I guess. Bye.” He dropped the phone from his ear and prepared to hang up, both immensely relieved and oddly disappointed.
Her voice came tinny from the speaker. “Steve?”
He snatched the phone back to his ear. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.” Finally there was something besides bland professionalism in her voice, although he couldn’t be sure what it was. “For the way I handled things. I couldn’t continue our relationship, but I should have ended it a lot more gracefully.”
