Too Long a Soldier (Kingdom Key Book 3)

by TylerRose.

  She gave in, turning to stretch out her full length. He went to his side next to her, left hand continuing the massage in long, even strokes up and down. He felt little buzzes of electricity when he passed over that tension spot under her right shoulder blade. The little boulder that would never go away…was not merely a tension spot, he realized. It was something more, something that reacted to his Staff Power.

  Patience and persistence paid off. She fell asleep under his hand. He gave her another ten minutes to be well and truly out before leaving the bed to continue packing. He kept his Staff Power aura around her while he worked and she remained asleep. Her phone rang suddenly. One leap and he was at the bedside table to answer. Gable was on the other end, letting her know he’d finished his packing.

  “She’s asleep. We’ll pack the van in the morning.”

  “She’s awake and will do it now,” she said, sitting up, and teleported before he could tell her no.

  She was in Gable’s doorway. With a thought, she teleported the boxes down to the empty space next to the van. She went to Roc’s room and teleported her three boxes. Star had already carried hers down. A pause in her own room, Tyler teleported her boxes along with herself, then brought the kitchen boxes with her tea set and some other things. Coffee sacks and roaster would wait until they were where they were going to be, she decided.

  Telekinesis in full swing, she moved box after box into place, packing the van tight as it could be. Teleporting back to Jerome’s room, his boxes and two suitcases were ready to go. With those into place, the van was ready. Their travel suitcases would be to the rear for easy access, brought down last thing before driving to the battleground.

  She closed the rear doors of the van and Jerome was standing there.

  “What’s next?” she asked.

  “There’s nothing more to do, babe. Come back to bed.”

  “There’s always something more to do.”

  “Not tonight,” he said in as gentle a tone as he’d ever used. “It’s time to go to bed and stay there.”

  “You’re starting to take this Keeper thing very seriously,” she noted, walking with him out of the garage.

  “Yes, I am, and I will only get more and more serious about it as the years pass. Get used to it.”

  Chapter Forty One

  Tyler turned to Jeromein the driver’s seat, knowing he saw her far more plainly than she saw him. “We stick to the plan no matter what. You do your job. I’ll do mine. We’ll compare injuries and fuck each other’s brains out later.”

  “Deal.”

  Their fists hit harder than he expected, knuckle to knuckle. No kiss, no hug, no emotional bullshit. They had agreed on that earlier.

  Before he could get out and close the door, she was atop the small hill that shrouded the compound from the lonely country road. He glanced left in the grey of pre-dawn, seeing the cat-like Voranians jogging in to line up some twenty feet apart. Their ship had come in low and slow to land in a field the next road down to the south.

  He glanced right, seeing another line of men. The Voranians ringed the compound along the four roads, out of sight. Their arms were in constant motion, swinging in circles at the elbow before their chests, hands beginning to glow. Gathering their energies, keeping the flow going, they prepared for the extended use of their Staff Power. Jerome would have to discuss the technique with them as soon as he got the chance.

  The men Jerome would fight with ran in next. They all remained at this end, to concentrate their fight in one area for as long as possible. They stood on the other side of the ditch, ready to go over the rise on the signal. Not a one held a weapon, the K’Tran custom when fighting each other being strictly unarmed hand to hand combat. Any of the enemy who broke that rule would be taken out by one of two Voranians specifically assigned the task.

  Their ship had come in to land one road to the West. They were rock solid, watching, waiting calmly for the cue to show themselves and do their job. No one had been told what the sign was going to be, but Jerome knew he’d know it when he saw it. Tyler was going to do something and it would be big or drastic enough to be an obvious sign to converge.

  “You are Jerome. I am Gar Mankell of K’Tran VI.”

  Jerome grasped the offered arm. “Nice to meet you. Won’t be long now.”

  “We are ready.”

  No one else spoke. No one glanced about, all eyes trained on Tyler. Everyone had a specific role to play in this, the last battle they would fight on Earth. This was about the most organized fight Jerome had ever been in and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He liked unplanned chaos.

  Behind him, in the cloaked Voranian ship, Roc was safely hidden away with Starbird and Gable, ready to flee to the Celestial Congress if things went wrong. Tyler had teleported the three of them, along with the van, into the ship while it was in orbit early this morning. She had placed them directly under Shestna’s protection. A necessary precaution given how quickly one of the Warriors was likely to try to offer Roc or Starbird a Psala blossom.

  Jerome wasn’t sure how he felt about them being closed away on a ship for this; but that hadn’t been his call either. None of this had been his call.

  “Sometimes, in order to be an effective leader, one must know when to let others do the leading,” Chen had said the previous night before supper, when Jerome expressed his irritation. Chen’s words were always too true.

  He looked up to Tyler atop the hill. Except for her hair in the breeze and a barely perceptible tremor in her right hand, she may as well have been a statue. He knew she was waiting for Solomon to see her in the brightening dawn.

  Not able to stand it anymore, he crawled up the back side of the hill to see for himself as things happened. Mankell went with him, looking out over the ridge from the other side of her boots. They both remained out of sight, able to see just enough of the compound to jump up and assist the instant she needed it.

  At the opposite corner, behind the hidden pirate vessel, Shestna also waited. Cameras had been taken out on the approach and guards rendered blind to the presence of the allied forces. Tyler’s oppressive mental domination techniques could rival Obi Wan’s any day of the week.

  Shestna felt her appear on top of the small hill, knew it would begin very soon. His inner turmoil faded with the imminent onset of an intense battle. He sensed her own calm even while seeing the growing anticipation of his troops. Everyone had their orders. These were all seasoned soldiers, his own and the K’Tran. Though expected to be a small and brief skirmish, this was not a fight for green troops. Victory was too important. He blew out a breath, expelling the last remnants of his nervous belly.

  Many were the times when Tyler hated how much she could hear, when her mind would not be silent for the smallest split of a second. She knew it was the price paid for moments like this, when being aware of the tiniest change in the energies around her was of vital importance. A price paid for times when she had to know absolutely everything going on around her.

  She could live with her price. After this day, she somehow knew, the hurricane inside her head would diminish. At least for a time. The hurricane meant something was happening, was supposed to happen, needed to happen, and she needed to make it happen. She perceived so much now, since the Rovan-induced Widening. Her mind, her thought process, was as clear as the day was becoming bright. Everything was falling into the places she had always known they were supposed to go.

  A liberating thing, truth.

  She felt Jerome and Mankell slink up the back of the hill like soldiers under wire. Neither was going to try to take over. She knew they were positioning themselves to have her back, to take action if needed. Jerome was as calm as she while she stared at the invisible ship across the compound.

  Several K’Tran crossed from one building to another in the breaking dawn, two seeing her. One stopped on her silent command to see her, stood as motionless as she and stared back. He recognized her from the night of the fires. She had not killed him whe
n she set fire to the barracks. She knew him from her time on K’Tran in the other timeline.

  Ch’Wik was relieved to see her, knew what it meant and was prepared to cooperate. He sent his companion to get Solomon.

  The burned out buildings had been razed for the most part, but debris remained. The field was a bit more clear for battle than she had expected.

  Right on schedule, Solomon came out from the ship. Instead of teleporting to her, he walked. He tried to invade her mind. She shut him out easily but was still able to read his thoughts. He had no clue how weak he was compared to her. He had no idea how much he was about to underestimate her. He couldn’t comprehend what was going to happen to him in the next few minutes.

  Many times over her eons as a free spirit she had envisioned this moment. Many more times during this new life, as she listened to song after song after song and thought of beating the piss out of him until he died a bloody pulp at her feet. So many words from so many songs and now she heard not a one. She couldn’t even think of a title. She heard nothing but the wind. No hard, driving beats or darkly prophetic words.

  Silence.

  Her mind was silent.

  Her blood was still. Even the tremor in her right arm vanished as he crossed the compound in a steady but unhurried gait. She kept her eyes on him every second, sensed the ring of Staff Power as it went around on the roads and then up to seal them inside. He was unaware of the barrier. There was no escape for any of them now. Solomon might be able to teleport around within the compound; but he would not get outside the shield of energy.

  When he was about half way, having passed the crewman who sent for him, she walked down the front of the hill to meet him near the bottom. He stopped a good ten feet back, what he perceived to be a safe distance.

  “Does your dog know you are here?” he asked pointedly.

  “I know Earnol hired you to kill me,” she replied, ignoring his barb.

  He cracked a grin. “About time you figured that out.”

  “You’re going to regret not killing me.”

  “Naaaaaah. I like playing with you. Eventually I’ll get you in a place where you have no one to protect you and I’ll never let you loose ever again. I’ll keep you as my slave for the rest of your life.”

  “I’d outlive you by three thousand years.”

  She thrust out her right arm, shoving him back a good five feet with her energy, and stalked him down.

  “Play time is over,” she said, and thrust him back again. “I don’t need anyone to protect me.”

  Solomon’s surprise was palpable as he tried to recover from the force of her shoves. In the center of the compound she stopped him. K’Tran poured out from his ship and the Inferior house. She paid no attention as they surrounded her and Solomon. Her left arm thrust out to the side and a column of fire streaked from her hand to the front façade of the house. Windows shattered inward and the structure burst into flames, the roof flying straight up some sixty feet.

  Yup, that’s a sign, Jerome thought. “Go! Go! Go!” he shouted.

  Rising to stand tall on top of the hill, he was joined by two hundred K’Tran warriors. They ran down the side to engage the men running toward them. The two forces met about halfway between the hill and where Tyler and Solomon were squaring off in the center of the compound. She did not turn to look. She heard them, felt them. Solomon gaped.

  “To answer your question…Yes, Jerome knows I’m here.”

  A second wave came forward. Only thirty men. Voranians. They stalked through the fray of hand to hand combat, using Staff Power to block strikes and deflect flying bodies. They would not be distracted from their task, swiftly surrounding the woman and her opponent. Before the man could use his teleportive ability, they linked energies in a smaller version of the shield around the compound.

  “So does the AASTT. Earnol is dead. I already confronted him,” she said.

  Finally, the Voranians making up the perimeter climbed up the ring of hills. They would see the fight, gauge where they needed to strengthen their resolve. Shestna, however, did not expect they would have to do anything other than maintain the perimeter.

  Jerome and the K’Tran were an effective force, disabling men in record time. If this was how Tyler’s lover fought when he wasn’t allowed to kill, Shestna did not want to see his ferocity when he needed to end a life. His efficiency was as startling as it was effective as he moved from man to man in a dance of his own and dispatched each opponent with a minimum of strikes.

  From his starting point to his ending was all of twenty feet. Turning about, Jerome looked for his next opponent. There were none left. He and the K’Tran brought by Mankell, who stood an arm’s length away, wild-eyed and heaving for breath and annoyed the rampage was over, had mowed through Solomon’s pirates like a harvester through a cornfield. Already the captives were being bound for transport to the ship coming in for a landing in the field across from the main entrance.

  Two minutes, perhaps?

  One of the shortest fights he had ever been in. More K’Tran troops came jogging down the ramp of the ship that had revealed itself. They would begin the evacuation the instant the Emperor’s Warriors let down their shield.

  “I do not see Osan,” Mankell said in Earth English.

  “He’s the Captain, right? He’s probably on the ship,” Jerome said, and pointed to the now visible ship Solomon had come out of.

  It was trying to lift off, but bumped into the shield of Staff Power and fell like a rock to the ground, its power disrupted enough to temporarily disable it. Mankell spewed a string of words Jerome readily understood to be curses, and shouted over his shoulder. A group ran with him across the compound. The ramp hatch had not been closed, a fatal mistake on Osan’s part. Landra Ahr was already flying into the ship, his task to assist in the capture of the crew and get the vessel ready for flight.

  Tyler watched as Mankell and his elite soldiers boarded, slid her eyes over to see Solomon try to break through the wall of Staff Power. Her eyes followed him from spot to spot as he attempted to strike the Voranians but got a nasty static shock instead.

  Trapped.

  “How does it feel, slave?”

  “What are you playing at, bitch?!” he roared, stomping toward her.

  She held her ground, didn’t flinch as he tried to hit her with a punch of psychokinesis. She absorbed the energy.

  “I told you playtime is over. I told you you’d regret not killing me,” she said.

  “You have no right to hold me like this.”

  She laughed at him. “Well isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black.”

  She glanced around to the Voranians standing two arm lengths apart, left arm out to the side and right arm up.

  “They’re not here to keep you from running away. They’re here to prevent me from blowing up the planet when I kill you.”

  “Now you’re delusional,” he sneered.

  She gave a double shove that sent him flying into the wall of Staff Power. “You have no idea what I’m about to do to you.”

  He recovered and ran toward her. She side-stepped and stuck out a foot to trip him up, bringing him face first to the hard ground. Backing off a few steps, she waited for him to get up again. She used no stance, but Jerome easily recognized her Chi Kung techniques. The same ones Chen had taught him for using Staff Power.

  Solomon got to his feet, shook off some dirt and turned on her. “I know exactly what you’re going to do. You’re going to crumple to the ground, petrified for what I intend to do to you once I have my hands on you.”

  “You’re the delusional one. The Tyler who feared you is long gone. Come closer so I can hit you harder.”

  Her right fist came up, hitting him across the face with her chi where he stood five feet away. The same arm returned in a back fist that sent him reeling to one knee. Two steps and she had him by the flesh of his cheeks just below the eye sockets. She pinched the skin hard, her energy shoving downward to pin him in place on hi
s knees before her.

  “I have a secret,” she smiled into his eyes, and bent low until hers were just inside of his focus. “I gave birth to your son during that time I spent with the Drakkorians. His name is Taylor Xavier. He has many of my abilities. He became Governor of a sector of Delta Quadrant when he was thirty years old. He succeeded where you have always failed: He ruled a piece of the galaxy for the rest of his life and died one of the richest men in Delta Quadrant. He hates you for forcing me to be away from him.”

  She watched his eyes darken with comprehension, pulled back to see his whole face, smiled with more satisfaction.

  “I wanted you to know that before you die.”

  Her hands slipped down to seize him by both sides of the head, and she let loose her every fury. The blast was instant, with an intensity five times that of a nuclear bomb. His mostly liquid body disintegrated to ash in her hands and blew away with the hurricanes of fire sweeping around and around inside the floored dome of Staff Power.

  So intense was her fire that it ripped his Life Force to shreds and absorbed the bits in a flash of cyclones overhead. Everything that had ever been Solomon of Deek’Trai IV was gone forever, her energy reaching through the expanse of parallel universes to destroy him everywhere, as the Sanctarians had destroyed Earnol.

  Her goal attained, she tried to pull it in, unable to stop the storm of destruction she had unleashed. She tried calming herself, calming her blood, clearing her mind.

  But her mind was clear. The chaos had all come out in the blast, was all swirling around her with the same passion with which it whirled inside her head. The Emperor’s Warriors were containing it perfectly, as she knew they would. She couldn’t stay here forever, though. The men would eventually weaken and their shield would fall apart. How could she get the hurricane back into herself? She found the center of the dome and tried again to pull it all in, straining to leash the beast rampaging around her.