A pale, diffuse light opened up in front of her, as if she simply willed her path to be lit, and the darkness fell in step behind her. Though the passage twisted and turned like the gut of a snake, she had no trouble following the sound of the battle raging ahead. The metal rang louder than a blacksmith’s forge, and beneath the clanging Gabriel grunted and cursed. She ran, reaching automatically for a gun that was no longer there. Shit! What were the rules in this place? She could have light, but no weapons?
Lana turned a corner, and where the tunnel widened, two men armed with heavy swords faced each other across the rocky cavern floor. Gabriel looked like she had never seen him—taller, more muscular, his face and body like that of an ancient gladiator, rather than the more modern man she’d known. He was wounded, bleeding from his thigh and sword arm, bearing what looked like burns on his chest and back. His opponent wore the face she had seen in her visions, and now that she saw him, she knew. Kinnian was evil, as evil as any murderer or rapist or kidnapper she had ever encountered on the job.
And he was winning this fight.
The Thrane leapt onto a rock to take the height advantage from Gabriel and grinned. “You surprise me, brother. I had no idea that slave who taught you gave you the secret of reanimation. I could have sworn you were dead—how did you break that chokehold?”
He gripped his sword with two hands and sliced down toward Gabriel’s neck. Gabriel sidestepped and parried with his own, smaller curved broadsword, then changed directions and swung at Kinnian’s feet. The Thrane was forced to jump at Gabriel and just missed impaling himself on the long dirk Gabriel carried in his left hand. He deflected it in time and swung again at Gabriel’s head, only to find the blow blocked again. The two men backed off.
“You have little idea of what I can do, Kinnian.” Lightning struck at the Thrane’s feet, forcing him backwards. Gabriel pressed his advantage, attacking in a flurry of blows with the lighter sword. Kinnian was hard put to deflect them. But he was bigger, stronger. When he recovered his composure he came back, and every blow with his heavier sword beat Gabriel further down. Once or twice Gabriel got in under Kinnian’s guard for a quick swipe with the dirk, drawing blood and bringing a sharp hiss of pain from his opponent. But Lana could see he was tiring, his sword arm quivering with fatigue. He couldn’t last much longer.
Kinnian could see it, too. His grin was savage as he raised his sword over his shoulder and came in for the kill. Lana couldn’t help it, a gasp escaped her, echoing off the fractured cave walls. For a single instant, the Thrane’s black, hate-filled eyes were turned in her direction. Lightning flashed—had Gabriel merely raised his hand?—and Kinnian flew backward into the wall.
Growling, his face a mask of rage, Kinnian threw out an arm. A bolt of white-hot energy disintegrated the cavern wall, and reality rearranged itself.
Lana found herself exposed and vulnerable on a windswept crag overhanging a roiling black ocean. Kinnian and Gabriel were gone. She fought to look around, but rain slashed into her face, stealing her sight. Day or night? It was impossible to tell. A storm was piled high and thick against the broken bluff where she maintained a slim hold, and clouds shut out the light. A long fall below, waves boomed and crashed against a solid wall of rock. There was no beach on which to land a boat, only an outlying comb of rock erupting from the ocean bed a short distance from the cliff that frayed the incoming waves into leaping flumes.
Shivering, she moved her feet on the slippery rock, step by careful step, lowering herself over the splintered surface until she could squeeze between the overhanging cliff and an abrupt outcropping of rock. She heard voices. She lay on her belly to look.
Through a gaping crevice in the rock below her face she could see Gabriel had only just survived the explosion that had brought them to this new battleground. He was battered, bleeding.
And though Gabriel held the higher ground, Kinnian laughed. “Shall I just cut your legs out from under you, half-breed? I don’t really feel like chasing you to gut you.”
He took a swipe at Gabriel’s knee, Gabriel stretched to deflect it and Kinnian grabbed the back of his neck to pull him off the rock. Gabriel missed a fall to the ocean below by inches, but lost his sword, sacrificing the weapon to clutch the cliff face and save his life.
Above them, Lana watched in horror as Gabriel struggled to pull a knee up and lift his body over the rim of rock, only to have Kinnian roll him over and straddle his chest. The Thrane pinned Gabriel’s arms under his knees and put the edge of his sword to Gabriel’s throat. She watched a thin line of red blood well up under the blade and her heartbeat machine-gunned in her chest; she couldn’t breathe. Christ!—that bloodsucker was going to kill Gabriel and here she sat doing nothing!
She could hear him. How could she hear him? The wind was roaring, the waves destroying themselves against the uncaring rock. But she heard every word.
“Oh, yes. I’m going to kill you, brother. But first I want to know all about her. Her name. Her face. How she smells, how she tastes. How she feels all snug and tight and hot around your dick. Because before you die you’re going to see me ruin your little human in every way possible. First she’s going to beg me to fuck her. Then she’s going to beg me to kill her. And believe me, my brother. I’m going to do what she begs me to do.”
Gabriel struggled, his hips bucking, his chest twisting, but it did no good. The sword didn’t move. Lightning flashed all around them, but it was as if some invisible force deflected the current. Lana could see there was another battle going on, a war of wills, a murderous, underhanded street fight between sharp-edged minds. She didn’t know whether Gabriel was strong enough to win that battle. She only knew she had to help him.
Her hand closed on a fist-sized piece of black rock, its edges so rough they tore at her skin. She got to her knees, then to her feet, and raised her head over the outcropping. It would be a tough shot, the angle not straight down, but coming back in toward the cliff face. She lay out almost upside down over the wet, canted slab, her legs dangling behind her just enough to balance the weight in front, her head swimming as gravity tugged at her inner ear. She slipped—and caught herself by the skin of her forearms spread over the rock in front of her. The weight of the back half of her body was losing ground to the front half, and the tops of her thighs were scraping the edge of the slab as she slid further out.
Adrenaline flooded her system, her blood roared in her ears, her heart thudded under her ribs. Her right hand shook and dripped blood as it clutched the missile. She rose up on her left, aimed and caught Gabriel’s horrified expression, gazing up at her as she let fly with the rock.
“You fucking sonofabitch!”
The rock bashed Kinnian in the back of the head. He flinched, a split-second’s movement, and Gabriel freed his dirk to stick it in the bastard’s neck. Blood sprayed. The big body rolled over and down, falling toward the madly-leaping ocean.
She grinned, wanting to shout in triumph, but the simple act of drawing breath was enough to tip the balance toward disaster. She slithered down the face of the rock, thighs and forearms scraping without hope for purchase on the wet, smooth surface. Too late she found the breath to scream and fell, hurtling toward the black maw of the ocean, blind and flailing with terror. Lightning flashed and she was swallowed up . . .
. . . but not by the unforgiving waves. Time and space, instead, had turned inside out.
“I’ve got you, Lana.” A voice murmured in her ear. “Just breathe, querida, it’s okay. I’ve got you.”
Strong arms were wrapped around her, holding her close to a hammering heart. She could just move her lips to whisper his name.
“Gabriel.”
“Yeah, it’s me, baby.”
She sat up, rocking back on his hips to look around in wonder. The storm-swept sky, the slick, jagged rock, the thunderous, reaching waves—all gone. And in their place, only the frantic beating of her heart and the solid strength of his chest under her hands.
“Sweet Je
sus.” She struggled for breath. “It felt so real.”
He met her eyes, but could not hold her gaze. Fear and blazing emotion were quickly hidden behind his dark lashes.
“Your mind is more powerful than you know; even more powerful than I suspected.”
Her hands gripped his shirt. “I was falling . . .”
“If I hadn’t brought us out of it, the shock would have killed you.”
She began to shake, unable to control the tremors. Her body had reacted as if the situation had been real, pumping her full of adrenaline. Now she suffered as the chemical leached from her cells, leaving her empty and cold.
Gabriel pulled her back down again and held her tight, one hand tunneling roughly in her hair. “Whatever possessed you to come after me, Lana? What the hell were you thinking?”
She raised her head. “I wasn’t thinking. It just happened. You stopped breathing. I did CPR to get you started again. Then all at once I was there.”
He touched her face, his jaw clenched. “I’ve done this to you.”
She shook her head, confused by his reaction. “But this is good, right? Kinnian is gone.”
“No. We won this battle. But he escaped the way we did. He’ll be back.”
Ice crept along her spine at the thought of meeting Kinnian again, but she refused to back down. “Maybe we were meant to fight him together, Gabriel.”
Anger sparked in the black depths of his eyes. “I’ll never let him near you.”
She saw the possessiveness in him and desire leapt up to meet it with a suddenness that took her breath. Her focus narrowed to his scent, the rise and fall of his chest, the heat of his skin under her hands. A fever rose in her blood that threatened to overwhelm all rational thought. She was drawn to this man like no other, by a force she could no longer resist. She burned too much to deny it now.
Gabriel reached up to take her mouth, and the hot, velvet slide of his kiss set her blood on fire. Her breasts ached for his touch, the nipples tightening to stiff points beneath her thin shirt. Her core exploded with need as his hands kneaded her buttocks and pressed her into the hot ridge of his growing erection.
His hands slipped under her shirt, found the catch of her bra. In seconds the shirt was over her head and his mouth was at her naked breast. His tongue circled her nipple. Drew it into the warm, wet cavern of his mouth. Suckled. Nipped. She felt every tug and pull as a pulse of liquid heat between her legs.
He lifted his gaze to hers. “I won’t wait any longer for you, querida.” He moved beneath her. “Tell me you want this.”
Her belly clenched as she ground against him, aching for him. “Yes. God, yes.”
Outside the storm had broken over them, thunder drumming over the mountain, rain coming down in sheets. The windows of the car had fogged, enclosing them in a private world of passion. Lana moved off of Gabriel’s chest long enough to strip out of the rest of her clothes, then she straddled him again. Her breasts brushed his chest as she paused, heart bursting, pulse pounding in sweet anticipation.
Gabriel’s expression was dark with hunger, bright with a kind of wild, predatory desire. Lana could see he was maintaining control by the sheerest margin, his chest heaving as he dragged in breath, sweat pouring off his skin. Knowing that he was so close to some kind of madness nearly sent her over the edge. She did that to him. That untamed need she read in his eyes, in his body, was for her. And something primal in her threw off all its chains and roared in response.
His hand moved to her belly . . . lower, to the center of her desire. His thumb circled the tender nub, making her gasp. She didn’t need his petting. She was ready for him, had been ready for him for days. She wanted him inside now. He centered himself at her entrance and arched upward to join them and oh, God!
His arms encircled her hips, holding her in place for his thrusts, and Jesus! it was just the right place; he was sliding in deep and finding her with every stroke. His mouth wandered over her neck, his teeth scraping and biting at the tendons, his tongue soothing the tiny hurts, and every sharp delight ended in a flood of molten fire between her thighs. She moaned his name, feeling the spiral of her climax begin to spin higher . . . and higher . . . out of her control toward a place where ecstasy overcame fear, where passion overturned reason.
She screamed as the orgasm tore into her with the force of a hurricane, pleasure wracking her from the inside out. She sobbed his name as wave after wave rolled through her core and her sheath clutched at his thick shaft. She heard him curse, the sound a breathless groan. His pounding strokes became brutal, relentless. Her fingers bit into his shoulders, and she held on as his body went taut and he found his release at last.
She rode it out with him, the pleasure so intense she could only give in to it and pray she survived. It was a force of nature she could not control. And in the end it left her devastated. Ripped apart. Wide open and vulnerable.
She collapsed against Gabriel’s chest, tears running down her face, unable to keep herself from crying. She couldn’t have told anyone why she was crying except to say that the experience of sex with Gabriel had affected her nearly as much as her fall from the cliff.
But Gabriel didn’t ask why. He just wrapped his arms around her and murmured softly to her—words she didn’t recognize or understand, sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in languages no one on this Earth had ever heard. All she knew was that the things he said and the way he held her made her feel safe like no man had ever done before. Gabriel Cruz made her feel loved. And that just made her want to cry a flood.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Trin, Minertsa, Sector 10
Ardis sat in her usual seat in the great hall and let the sights and sounds of the Venue flow around her. The Venue itself was unchanged, its graceful architecture as appealing to the senses as ever. But the atmosphere in the hall—the emotional tenor of the place—had undergone a profound change from a typical night ten solar cycles ago. From any night before Zalin.
Before the incident on a minor planet of the Consortium, it was possible to think of an empire built on something other than slavery. Factories might be run by robots, farms tilled by androids, transportation and mining and shipping and sanitation scutwork performed by ranks of mindless drones. It was not such a stretch of the imagination to think that civilization might proceed without the need for the enslavement of lesser species.
But that was before Zalin, before “reliable” machines had run amok, murdering and destroying everything in their paths. What happened at Zalin had been pure, uncontrolled slaughter—and who knew when or where it might happen again. The factory owner and his poor family had paid the price of his experimentation. With human slaves you could rely on time-tested mind-control techniques. They had been proven over centuries of use. Tradition had its benefits.
Zalin had destroyed not only the manufacturing base for an android workforce but the idea of an android workforce. Ardis had only to look around the Venue to see the results. Humans no longer sat among the Minertsans and representatives of a half-dozen other races in the galleries of the Venue. The Venue, like the streets of the capital city, like every other gathering place in every other city on every other planet in the Consortium, had become a hostile, dangerous place for humans.
No matter what their “legal” status, humans were no longer free in the Minertsan Consortium. They were slaves, whether anyone currently owned them or not. It was already common practice to take them into custody on the slimmest of pretenses. Curfews and segregation laws set them apart. Ardis knew that it was only a matter of time before the sweeps began, arresting and deporting whoever was left to the labor camps or the mining planets. It was all part of Sennik’s plan.
The only question was how long Sennik would wait before he implemented it. The hunt for the one who was the key to his plan had dragged on too long. He was growing impatient; Ardis could sense it in him. And public reaction to events on Zalin had been so gratifying, he’d said.
She shuddered despite the swampy
warmth of the Venue’s sensory backdrop. The setting of the piece was to be a primordial salt ooze before the rise of the Consortium. Her aura flared with just the briefest hint of deep purple and black before she could call it back. In the days when they were just beginning their lives together, these pieces, with their clever heroes and their clear depictions of good and evil, had been her young husband’s favorites. He had been an idealist, her Slindar. In the end he became the hero of his own story, though few knew it.
The house lights went down. The music went up. The spectral vibrations began. Ardis waited, and within seconds a human male slipped into the seat beside her.
She turned to him, but before she could speak, hands like steel claws gripped her arms, lights blinded her and she was pulled from her seat. The man next to her was snatched up, too, but with brutal efficiency. The Thranes in the uniform of Consortium Military Security snarled and beat him, even though he offered little resistance. Those that surrounded her merely maintained an unbreakable hold on her elbows as they escorted her out of the great hall.
Ardis couldn’t help herself. Her aura flashed the greens and yellows of her fear as they led her out, the the pale orange of her embarrassment as all turned to look at her. She was terrified, but that she dared not show. It was reasonable that she would be confused. But her true emotion—her horror at the thought that they had been discovered—could not be betrayed. She fought for control, knowing her reaction would mean life or death, not only for herself, but for dozens of others.
Soon enough they reached the outer atrium of the Venue, and as the doors sighed shut behind her, Ardis’s courage drained from her like the tide from the shore. For waiting in the lobby was the Director Prime of Consortium Military Security herself. The First General’s aura was the bright gold of satisfaction.
Trouble In Mind (Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2) Page 27
