Alana met his eyes. So brave. We’ll find a way.
Stay close to me, k’taama.
As close as your heart, k’taam.
The Thrane laughed. “Very touching. Don’t die too quickly, brother. I have plans for you and your lovely bondmate.”
And then, without another word, Kinnian disappeared with the woman Gabriel had pledged his life to protect.
Trin, Minertsa, Sector 10
Sennik could not contain his excitement. His aura flamed with the bright aquamarine, the brilliant gold, even the deeply sexual blue of his emotions as he completed the routine tasks of his last segments as a lowly government minister. When Minertsa had completed its rotation this cycle and he greeted the star of his birth once more, Ren Sennik would be ruler of the Consortium Entire. His aura flared white-hot in triumph.
The Savagnoir had not let him down. Several million credits had changed hands and Xe had delivered the device on time as promised. Sennik had not even bothered to have it brought down to the planet surface. He’d merely had it transferred to another ship’s hold in stationary orbit around Minertsa. He would activate the device from his own computer—through an impossibly complex tangle of intermediaries, of course—and sit back and watch the results. If anyone got close to discovering the source of the EM pulses that were causing the chaos throughout the Consortium, the drone ship would be ordered to leave the system and self-destruct.
Sennik had to admit this backup plan was almost better than his original scheme, despite the expense. Of course, there was no telling what the boy would have been capable of over the long term. But, then, the child was human and inherently unreliable.
The segments seemed to crawl by. How had he survived so long in this sulfurous mud flat of an existence? His new life awaited him—the recognition and power he deserved, the order and respect Minertsa deserved. Of course, he would not be leaving everything behind. A man of his stature required a consort of beauty and intelligence. Someone discreet. Someone to enhance his prestige, to demonstrate his status. He had decided Ardis would make a suitable companion, at least temporarily. The bright blue in his aura deepened into an unmistakable azure.
Unable to contain himself any longer, Sennik left his work and strode out of the office. The object of his thoughts was bent over her own computer screen at her desk outside his door.
Ardis, my love. I am much too harsh a taskmaster to keep you so hard at work at this late segment.
The female looked up at him with a start. Her aura flashed a quick yellow/green before returning to her usual calm lavender. Then she blushed with a very attractive midnight blue. He was surprised to find his own color grew more intense in response. What an extraordinary female!
It is still early, Director Prime. I have those reports to complete for the Ministerial meeting in the morning. You wish me to be thorough.
Yes. Thorough is what he wished her to be in her attention to his sex, which even now was swelling and leaving its sheath. He slipped into her mind, flowing past her barriers as easily as water over a streambed, and stroked with teasing pressure at her pleasure center.
She hissed, back arching, as her aura bled midnight blue and deepest purple. Ren!
My love? He stroked again, ruthless, unrelenting. He took her hand and wrapped it around his sex, forcing her to his will.
We cannot do this here! Her breath heaved in her chest.
She was coming, he saw it in her mind. The white-gold of triumph flashed through his aura. He thrust himself into her sweet mouth and pushed further into her mind until he felt her shatter around him. Only then did he let go, the force of his release shaking him, shaking her. Ah, yes. This was good, so good! To have her like this, so completely at his feet.
Like the world. Like the many worlds of the Consortium. Soon now.
In the mindfield, no physical coordinates
Something was wrong.
Lana knew it as soon as her foot hit the first rotting step up to the back porch. Her legs grew heavy and didn’t want to carry her the rest of the way up to where the battered aluminum storm door sagged in its loose hinges, failing to keep the cold out of the kitchen. She’d been so happy on the bus. She held the spelling test in her hand. An A. It had been a good day, for once.
It wasn’t going to stay that way.
“Mom?” Silence answered. She stood on the porch, shaking, wanting to run. The inner door was open, gaping like a slack jaw. In the kitchen a glass had shattered. Shards sprayed across the linoleum of the kitchen floor, met and mixed with the blood. Jesus, so much blood. A sea of it under her mother’s lifeless body. Red rivers of it running down the uneven floor to the grimy baseboards.
She tried to scream. Nothing would find its way from her constricted lungs but a breathy, keening moan. She tried to look away. Nothing could keep her from staring at the horror that would haunt her for the rest of her life. She tried to move. She trembled and shook, but she could not take a step away from her mother’s murdered body.
Murdered? She gasped, staggered. Murdered! She took a step into the kitchen, no longer seeing with the eyes of a terrified nine-year-old. And what she saw was a revelation.
The blood. There was too much of it. It couldn’t all be her mother’s. She’d fought before they’d shot her in the head. She’d wounded, perhaps killed, one of her attackers. Maybe the black ops team had killed her in self-defense; maybe she’d simply refused to be taken alive. Lana could see it now, but the evidence would have been easy to miss in the days before DNA testing. The Nashville cops had no reason to think murder when suicide was the logical call. She didn’t blame them.
But Gabriel had been right.
“Thinking of Gabriel so soon, my sweet Alana?” The growl was close to her ear, borne on a yeasty exhalation of warm air. “I’d hoped to have more fun here at the scene of this whore’s suicide.”
She dropped a fist back and down, aiming for Kinnian’s groin. He was standing so close behind her she couldn’t have missed, but his mind was quicker and in a heartbeat the scene changed. Her fist flailed at the empty air, her momentum causing her to stumble, and when she looked up again, Kinnian was straddling a woman, one hand wrenching her head back by the hair to expose her throat to his dagger.
Before she could help herself, Lana screamed and lunged forward.
“Careful!” Kinnian laughed and flourished the knife. Blood welled on the skin under the blade. “You have so much to say to your mother, don’t you, my love? So much to tell her, now that you have the chance?” He jerked at her hair, and the woman—her mother, she saw that now—whimpered.
Another step. “You bastard!”
The knife sliced deep, and her mother screamed. “You are slow to learn, woman! Very slow to learn. And your mother will pay the price. I will make her suffer in ways you cannot yet imagine. Until you lose that arrogant pose.”
Lana breathed deep and thought of her mother, lying in a pool of blood and shattered glass on a floor in a house in Nashville, Tennessee on a winter afternoon long ago. That was the reality she knew, the reality she had lived for more than twenty years. She felt it. She believed it. And in an instant, she made it happen.
“My mother is dead, you bastard. You can’t touch her anymore.” She reached out her hand and blasted the man standing before her. He flew backwards . . .
. . . but Lana landed with a jolt on her back, her hands and feet strapped to a table in a hall of stone—dark, dank, lit with candles and torches and warmed only by the cheerless fire in a hearth at one end of the cavernous room.
Kinnian loomed over her and smiled. “Nicely played. But as you see . . .”
Lana surveyed the room and made a point to laugh, though her temples throbbed with the effort. “You’ve got to be kidding. What is this, Dungeons and Dragons? Or is this your throne room, your freaking majesty? Have you thought of moving out of the twelfth century? You know, central heat is nice.”
“I prefer this sort of . . . arena . . . for some activities.
The stone absorbs both blood and screams quite well.”
“Yeah, well. Absorb this, asshole.” Lana imagined herself on her feet with a sword in her hands and found herself facing him. The look of surprise on the Thrane’s face was worth everything she owned.
She pressed her advantage with a swipe at his neck, but he manifested his own sword with blinding speed and blocked hard enough to bring her teeth together with a snap. Before she could strike again, he’d knocked the sword out of her hands. He backed her against the table and pushed his own blade against her throat to hold her in place.
He grinned at her, a horrible parody of Gabriel’s smile on his lips. “By the gods, you are full of Marala’s own fire! No wonder Gabriel burns for you. And I’m going to experience all of that time of Forging Fire between you, my little dragon’s cunt. Every secret shared, every shattering orgasm. I’m going to dig deep and take it all. Why not just give in and enjoy our time together, eh? Gabriel will never have to know how you begged for me, how you came for me.”
She struggled, even though the blade ate at her skin. “I’ll never give in. You’ll have to kill me.”
“Oh, I won’t have to kill you, but you will give in. I’m so much stronger than you are, Alana. My body, my mind, trained and honed for battle, just like your lover’s. I’ll be inside you in every way possible, and you can’t stop me.”
Though the effort sent sharp spikes of pain through her skull, she manifested a gun in her hand. Pointed it at his gut. Pulled the trigger.
He laughed and backhanded her across the room. Her vision blanked, the ceiling spun over her head and the taste of metal was thick in her mouth. She tried, and failed, to get to her feet before he found her again.
“You see now what I mean about the stone and the blood?” He stood just far enough from her that she couldn’t take him down with her legs. “You should know your mind is far too weak to attack me with a handgun, even at close range. If we had more time, I’d explain why, since my brother was too busy fucking you to properly train you. But then, I’d rather fuck you than train you, myself!”
“Yeah, since I’d just use that training to kill you, you bastard.”
With a swiftness that gave her no warning, Kinnian stepped in and delivered a vicious kick to her midsection. Ribs gave under the assault, leaving her curled in on herself in crushing agony.
“You have quite a mouth on you, I’ll admit. I intend to put it to better uses.”
Lana closed her eyes on Kinnian’s gloating face. Closed her mind to the pain that slashed through her body. Focused all her thought and energy on the grove of aspen and pine where she’d last seen Gabriel, on every detail of color and light and smell and sound. For a split-second she was there—my God, what was that roaring?—then her head shattered into jagged fragments of unbearable pain, and she was back in Kinnian’s hall.
The Thrane had her pinned to the stone floor. The unyielding ridge of his erection ground into her hips. “Oh, yes, my darling Alana. I will break you into tiny pieces. And Gabriel will find nothing left to save.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Lana was gone and Gabriel’s only thought was to follow her. If it was into Death he would follow her without a breath of hesitation. She was his bondmate, his heart, his life, and there was no other choice for him. He stilled, tracing the thread of their connection in his soul, readying himself for the projection that would take him to her. For an agonizing time he could feel her terror and her rage, then, all at once, he could feel nothing but his own despair. Their link had been blocked. All he knew was that Lana was still alive. Her death would have stopped his own heartbeat.
--Gabriel! Help me! I can’t get to my Mom and Dad! He’s almost here!
The cry dragged him back into his body and his own danger. Gabriel scanned the grove, but couldn’t see the boy. Stay down! I’ll find you!
As big as a freighter, the monster towered above the quaking aspens and bellowed in fury. Its massive head swung from side to side, searching for prey, jaws opened wide to reveal rows of dagger-like teeth. With each step the VRadkrystion took, the ground thundered and shook, trees and brush splintering to dust beneath the beast’s feet.
For one more precious second Gabriel could not move, could not think, could not act to save himself or the humans whose lives depended on him. He was paralyzed, twisted with fear for Lana. Kinnian had her, and it was too late—too late, God damn it!—to follow them. Hell was on top of him, and he had to protect the boy, though it ate like acid at his soul to think of Lana . . . no, he couldn’t. He wouldn’t.
“Here! Jack! Ethan!” He ran toward where he’d last seen them in the grove, though none of them were anywhere visible now. “Asia! Where are you?”
The beast roared and turned toward him at the first sound. He almost didn’t hear Jack’s thin shout from the rocks to his left. He scrambled up to the boy just as the World Eater screamed and crashed through the stand of trees in front of them, whirling in place to destroy with its tail what was left of the grove and any cover they might have taken in it. Fractured pine and splintered aspen rained over their shoulders as the creature rampaged through the trees, seeking the source of their scent.
“Where are your parents, Jack?”
The boy, pale and trembling, pointed. Barely concealed behind a fall of rock twenty meters away lay two bodies, dead or unconscious, Gabriel could not tell. “Ah, Jesus.” He glanced up at the ravening monster. There was no hope of getting to them unseen.
“Okay. Step one. Defense.” Gabriel envisioned a heavy palisade of thick oak logs surrounding the rock outcropping where the couple lay, with a bristly outer fortification of sharpened thick metal stakes erupting in all directions. As it sprang into being, the beast whirled and surged in that direction with the speed of a starfighter.
“Christ, no, not yet!” Gabriel threw out a hand and hit the beast in the flank with a blast of energy. The thing slowed, turned . . .
“Run!” He grabbed Jack and pelted for the defenses, pulling the boy into his arms to carry him when he wasn’t fast enough. But the VRadkrystion was faster, thundering up behind them like an avalanche. Gabriel cast a high wall in the beast’s path. The creature roared and crashed through it, leaving the wall in shattered fragments.
Gabriel fell to his knees, releasing Jack. “Run, boy! Get behind those walls!” Jack hesitated, so Gabriel pushed him, propelling him in the direction of his parents. It wasn’t far—only a few meters now—maybe he could hold off the beast that long.
The thing bellowed and reared over him—so close he could see the coarse fur rippling over the muscles of its massive chest, so close he could see the dirt under each of its sword-length claws. He dropped and rolled to the right. A tree-sized forelimb swept by him, the claws inches from his face. He reached up and scorched the thing’s belly with a stream of fire from his fingertips, releasing a stench of burning fur. The beast screamed and curled in on itself, clawing at its wound in pain.
Gabriel ran.
The breastworks that protected his people loomed high before him, looking secure enough to stop an army. Legs pumping, lungs burning, he scrambled up the steep face, not daring to look back.
Above him through a gap in the palisade, he caught a glimpse of Jack’s horrified face. “Hurry, Gabriel! He’s right behind you!”
His fingers and toes scrabbled for purchase while the ground shook beneath him. He tried imagining himself behind the palisade walls, but the beast bore down on him with more than the terror of size and gnashing teeth. All of Kinnian’s evil, all of the power of the Blood Legion filled the VRadkrystion, damping Gabriel’s life force, slowing him down. He climbed, but the top of the earthworks got no closer. He fled, but the beast kept getting nearer. He was losing this fight.
A heartbeat later, a fistful of hot blades raked through his back as the beast’s claws caught him. Blood gushed, soaking his thighs. A scream erupted from his throat; he lost his grip on the loose, scattering rock of the slope, and slid downw
ard.
Then the landscape exploded with blue-white light. The VRadkrystiron howled in outraged anguish and fell back. And when Gabriel opened his eyes, he was behind the barrier.
Jack stared down at him. “Your back is bleeding.”
Gabriel groaned and rolled to his knees. He tried to focus, but his thoughts refused to align. Pain and despair were overwhelming him. He stared up through a bleary fog at the boy.
“We need help. Where are your parents?”
Jack turned his head. Asia had an arm around Ethan’s shoulders, helping him sit up. Both of them looked as if they had been drugged. Gabriel crawled the few feet it took to get to them.
“What happened?”
Asia glanced up at him. “I was back in the mines of Gallodon IV, but it wasn’t a place I wanted to visit a second time. I followed Jack’s . . . pathway back here.”
Gabriel nodded. “You have a strong connection. And he’s powerful for one so young.”
Ethan was shaking, his reactions just short of clinical shock. “My leg—it was as if the accident was happening all over again. It was like a nightmare, and I couldn’t . . . I couldn’t wake up.”
Sharing Ethan’s mind told Gabriel just how badly that accident four years earlier had traumatized him—how it had scarred him body and soul until Asia’s love had healed him.
“Kinnian has access to our deepest fears through the power of the VRadkrystrion. You have no shields to fight him.”
The beast roared and ripped at the fortifications, sending earth and metal flying. His quarry hunkered down as best they could and endured a pummeling hail of debris.
Asia gasped as she raised her head. “My God, Gabriel! Your back!”
The agony ran too deep for control, and he had no energy to spare for healing. He shook his head.
“No time to worry about that now. We have to send out a call to the others. It will take all of us to fight this thing.”
He clasped hands with Jack and the others and focused one part of his mind on a call to the Dineh for help. His link with Lana was still blocked, but he went deeper into his mind, behind the most secret protections he possessed.
Trouble In Mind (Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2) Page 33
