by dark wind
Cree opened his eyes. His gaze slid over the rotting bodies and he looked away from the torn and ravaged flesh he had attacked during Transition. “There’s enough,” he lied. “But I am thirsty.” She watched as he moved away from the bodies and stretched out on the floor, turning his back to her.
As he drew his legs up into a fetal position, she felt a stab of pity settle in her heart.
“How far will your chains reach?” she asked then repeated the question when he did not immediately reply. “Cree?”
“I can not reach the door, Major, if that’s what concerns you.”
“I will have water brought to you, then,” she said, thinking it would be another three months before he Transitioned again. By that time, he would be back in the E.S.U. and on his way to the guillotine.
“Thank you.”
Kahmal blinked. That was twice the Reaper had acted completely contrary to nature. From all she had learned of his kind, gratitude, even common courtesy, was not part of his genetic makeup. The inconsistency with the way he should react unsettled her.
“You are going to your death. You know that do you not?” she asked, wondering why she felt the need to remind him.
“I know. I am looking forward to it.”
The Major frowned. “Why?”
He looked over his shoulder, his amber eyes so full of agony she felt it to the pit of her gut.
“Because I have no desire to live without Bridget. I have no life without her.” With that said, he lay down again and buried his face in the crook of his arm, dismissing her.
When he heard the peephole cover shut, Kamerone Cree opened his eyes and stared at the mutilated bodies across the room. His stomach revolted at the sight, but he would not look away from the carnage.
During Transition, he knew little of what he was doing or was capable of doing, but once the blood hunger receded, full realization returned. He often shocked himself with the savagery of what he had done during his cycle. This time, the gory evidence of his beastliness shamed him as much as it hurt him.
In the past, his consumption of bodies had been either Empire mandated as when he was ordered to terminate rogue personnel without a trace or else a matter of self-preservation. There had been a few notable exceptions like Deon Inse and Konnor Rhye who had either tortured him or taken something that belonged to Kamerone Cree or the truck driver who had almost killed Dorrie. Devouring his enemies was a given and he took delight in doing so.
But fresh kills were one thing; carrion was quite another. Never mind the vile taste of the decaying corpses. Had he not been in Transition, he would not have bothered with the corpses.
The thought of making a meal again of innocents such as the Terran men lying across the room sickened Cree. It had been bad enough forcing himself to eat the dead on board the Vortex in route to Terra. He had done that to live so he could be with Bridget. The thought of desecrating the dead filled the Reaper with loathing. Not even the terrible hunger boiling in his veins could force him to touch the bodies again.
He wouldn’t die. His parasite would not allow it. He would, however, grow weak and unable to protect himself from the viciousness he knew Sejm had in store for him. His only chance to exist on a halfway tolerable plane without the added misery of having Sejm attempting to break him was to gain the grudging protection of the Amazeen Major.
And he knew of only one way to do that.
Kamerone Cree closed his eyes, willed his blood pressure to lower, and began to expand his consciousness. Through the stone corridors, he tracked Akkadia Kahmal until he found her sitting by herself in a far section of the cave. He could see her as she sat staring at the dirt beneath her feet, her chin propped in her hand. He could hear her conflicting thoughts and smiled when he realized her mind was fully on him.
It would not be hard to invade her, but he would wait until she had bedded down for the night and her mind opened to the psychic rape he intended to perform.
Chapter Twenty-Four
In her dreams, Akkadia Kahmal was a battalion commander in Perse. The time was a thousand years earlier, right after the Massacre at Cinerary, one of the last battles between Amazeen and Rysalia, and she stood on the battlefield surveying the horrific destruction.
The air was filled with the coppery scent of blood and the onset of decay. Around her, the bodies of her fallen sisters were scattered like a child’s broken toys. Overhead, the last of the rockets were streaking toward their destinations, the deadly payloads carrying the incendiaries that would destroy the enemy positions on the rise above Migrecent Point.
She closed her dark green eyes for a moment as the rumble of machinery shook the ground under her feet. The clink of the scoop’s tracks set her teeth on edge.
“Captain Kahmal?” the young ensign questioned.
Kahmal opened her eyes, surprised to see her friend ‘Khoia. The scoops were paused a few hundred yards away, the stench of fuel thick and cloying in the air.
“Ma’am?” the ensign pressed. “What are your orders, Captain?” Kahmal sighed deeply. “Give the signal,” she replied and turned away, having no desire to see the bodies of women she’d fought alongside pushed into their mass grave.
Ensign Melankhoia Chanz raised her hand and then lowered it as the bulldozer operators revved their engines. She armed the sweat from her brow as the machines began rolling onto the battlefield.
“Commander,” Kahmal’s field advisor said, “we have to leave, Ma’am.” Kahmal shook her head. “Not until the dead are buried.”
The advisor frowned. “Ma’am, that is not a good idea. It could take-”
“Not until my dead are buried,” Kahmal interrupted her advisor. She turned a hard-as-nails stare on the other woman. “If you’re that anxious to get your ass on the ship, then hike it up there. I am staying until these women are properly laid to rest!”
“There isn’t anything proper about this,” the advisor declared. “There is no honor in being shoved into a hole and covered with a thousand other bodies.”
“It is the best we can do under the circumstances!” Lt. Chanz grated. “If you’ve a better way of getting rid of...”
“Getting rid of?” Kahmal exploded, turning her fierce eyes to her childhood friend. The wrath on the Captain’s lean face was awesome to behold. “Getting rid of? ”
“Ma’am, that is not what I meant,” Chanz was quick to deny.
“Get the hell out of my sight, Khoia!” Kahmal snarled. “I’ve had about all I can take of this for a gods-be-damned lifetime!”
Chanz nodded and executed a crisp salute before pivoting away.
Kahmal kicked at the light blanket covering her long legs and turned over in her uneasy sleep. She whimpered as her memories took her deeper into the agony of that long-ago day.
Her dream brought sweat to her brow and underarms.
Though their troops had won the day, Kahmal’s hard-won accomplishments had been at the expense of over a thousand warrioresses. Her company had saved the day and routed the enemy, but many women had died in the process...including three of her younger sisters and their mother, General Azulene.
“I hate the Rysalians!” Kahmal called out in her dreaming. “May the Goddess damn their black hearts to the Abyss!”
She hunkered down beside the mass grave as the scoops began pushing bodies into the deep hole on the other side. She beat her breast and began reciting the litany for the dead.
“Lady...”
At first the voice was a gentle soughing of the wind blowing across the harsh plains of the killing field.
She shook it away as though it was an irritating insect buzzing about her head.
“Forgive me!” Kahmal cried to her dead as the bloody bodies fell into the gaping hole. “I tried to protect you! I failed. Forgive me!”
“There is someone else who needs your protection, milady,” the wind whispered.
Kahmal tossed restlessly in her sleep. She clutched the rough fabric of the blanket tightly in her fist.<
br />
“Only you can protect him, Akkadia. Only you,” the wind sighed.
The only sound the Amazeen Major made to that statement was the harsh grinding of her teeth.
“Help him, Lady. You are sworn to keep him safe.”
“He killed my sister!”
“She would have killed his lady-love. He could not allow that.” The wind blew harsher across the plain.
“He would not allow that.”
“He is my enemy,” she muttered, dragging at the covers clutched over her shoulders.
“He has done no harm to you.”
“He is Rysalian!”
“Only half Rysalian,” the wind corrected. “He was conceived in rape. His mother knew the heavy boot of the Rysalians just as you have known it.”
“It matters not,” she answered the wind in her dream. “He is my enemy.”
“Look at him, Lady,” came the command and the horizon took on a soft ianthine hue.
Kahmal lifted her gaze to the horizon where smoke still wafted over the battleground. She came to her feet as images formed in the purple sky. She wondered who this prisoner was who sat so still in his loathsome cell. Then he turned his face toward her.
It was the Reaper.
She growled in her sleep, her body jerking.
“Can you see his tears, Lady?” the wind asked.
Kahmal waved the smoke from her vision and looked closely at the image hovering on the horizon.
She frowned.
There were tears streaking the lean cheeks of Kamerone Cree. She saw the intense misery in his eyes.
“Why does he cry?”
“He is hurting, Lady,”
“Reapers are trained to ignore pain.”
“Aye, but not pain such as this,” said the wind.
“Reapers have no emotions.”
“This one does and his heart is breaking.”
Kahmal came awake with a jolt and sat bolt upright. She was aware of her heart pounding and sweat glistening on her upper lip. She swiped at the moisture and looked about her, wondering what dream had chased her so violently from her sleep.
“He needs you,” she thought she heard someone whisper and jerked around, seeking the intruder.
But there was no one there.
“Go to him, Kahmal. You are all he has now. You are all that stands between him and the evil of Sejm.” Flinging the covers aside, the Amazeen Major got unsteadily to her feet. She felt numb, trapped still in her strange dream of the battlefield at Cinerary. Though the massacre was long in the past-fifteen cycles ago-it seemed as though only that night had she sat hunkered on the rim of the mass grave and stared at the ghastly face of her beloved mother.
“He, too, lost a mother at the hands of the Rysalians.”
Where had that thought come from?
Running a shaking hand through her long titian tresses,she slumped against the cave wall and squeezed her eyes shut. It was unseemly to dream of her prisoner. Even more unseemly to have feelings of compassion toward him. For a long while she leaned there, angry with her wayward emotions and angrier at him for instilling the forbidden feelings.
Intent on pushing the strange undercurrents from her mind, she started down the corridor to his cell, her hands curled into fists at her side.
The guards to either side of the cell door snapped to attention as the Major walked toward them.
“At ease.” Kahmal snatched open the peephole.
The cell was black as pitch, the light from the phospho lantern left inside having been allowed to die.
“I can’t see anything. Get a phospho lantern lit, now, and open this door!” The guard on the right side of the door whirled around and plucked the phospho light which swung from a hook embedded into the rock. The guard on the left leaned her pike against the wall and lifted the heavy beam from the braces and pulled the door open.
He was sitting with his legs drawn up, his wrists resting on his knees. The thick manacle links were pooled around his bare feet, the neck band seeming to drag his head down for his chin was lowered to his chest.
“Wake up, Cree!”
“I wasn’t sleeping, Lady,” he replied and raised his head, squinting against the harsh light of the phospho lanterns. He half-turned his face from the bright intrusion, but not before the three women saw the chatoyance that turned his amber eyes a milky green like those of a cat.
“Look at me!”
He did as he was told.
The misery was there for each of the women to see in the Reaper’s handsome face before he dropped a mask of indifference over that telling façade.
“The ship has been repaired and we will be leaving as soon as the solar storm clears. That should be within the next three or four days.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You will never see her again.”
He nodded and his eyes filled with an unmistakable brightness. “I know this, Lady,” he said softly.
“Bridget is better off without me.”
“And you?” Kahmal prodded. “Is Kamerone better off without her?”
“There is no Kamerone without Bridget,” he answered. “There is only Cree, the Reaper, who sits before you awaiting his execution and what other punishments you wish to give him.” Kahmal took a step toward him, ignoring the warning of the guard on her left. “Are you telling me you go willingly to your death, Cree? I find that hard to believe.”
“I have no life without my lady. I have no desire to live without her, so do whatever you want with me.
Turn me over to Sejm if that is your desire. She can hurt me no more than I am hurting now.” Frustrated at the Reaper’s defeated words, Kahmal came within two feet of him. Despite the agitated warnings of the guards, she hunkered down in front of him.
“Have you any notion what agony that bitch can inflict on you, Cree? She knows as much about Reaper anatomy as do I and what she knows could turn you into a jibbering fool!”
“Then let her,” he said, his voice breaking. “What do I care what she does to me? I am a dead man.
Without my lady, I am a walking corpse.” His gaze drilled into hers. “Put me out of my misery, woman, or let Sejm. Either way, it matters not.”
“Major, please move back,” one of the guards advised. She lifted her laser pike, aiming it at Cree’s chest.
“The Major is safe with me.” The Reaper lifted his manacled hands from his knees and turned them palm up toward Kahmal. “I am hers to do with as she pleases.”
Kahmal stared into Kamerone Cree’s wounded eyes and felt like weeping. The man was lost inside that agonized gaze. Odd sensations flitted through her heart and fluttered in her belly. She found herself wanting to reach out, take him in her arms and smooth the dirty limp hair from his forehead. Her lips ached to know the salt of his brow and the feel of his lips on hers. Her body strained toward him like a magnet to iron filings. She wanted to assure him all would be well and that she would do everything necessary to see he reached Rysalia safely.
As he stared into the Amazeen’s deep green eyes, Kamerone Cree was hard pressed to keep the telling smile from pulling at his lips. He had her in his hand and he knew it. He had been able to reach out and stroke her mind like a lover caresses his lady’s body. His psychic emanations had bored deeply into her subconscious and placed subliminal messages there that would take months-if not years-to fade. He could see her full capitulation in the way she licked her lips and the soft undulation of her body as she knelt before him. Had he desired it, he could-with one thought-have her naked and open to him.
Kahmal shivered, experiencing a heat in her lower body that was unlike anything she had ever experienced. She was unable to tear her attention from the Reaper’s sad face and wanted nothing more than to throw herself on him and take him there on the dirt floor.
“My lady has green eyes like yours,” Cree said softly and forced a single tear down his cheek. “It was her eyes that soothed my pain in the Behavior Modification Unit.” The women sighed i
n unison upon seeing that crystal descent.
Clamping down on the whoop of victory that sigh elicited in him, Cree had to lower his head before the women saw the triumph blazing in his eyes. Despite the fact they were hardened warrioresses, they were still women. He had taken a chance they would react as Bridget often had when he spouted such foolishness and he had been proven right.
“I am not your lady, Cree,” said the Major, “but I will protect you as she did.” He was about to raise his head, to look longingly into her eyes, but a movement near her foot caught his attention. His eyes flared and he moved so fast the three women had no time to react as he lunged at the Major’s leg.
The guard on Kahmal’s left shrieked and triggered her laser pike. The force of the blast caught Cree in the chest and flung him back against the wall. The guard on the right grabbed the Major’s arm and jerked her toward the door, her own pike pointed at the Reaper and firing before Kahmal could order the assault stopped. The second blast hit Cree in the left side and propelled him sideways and along the floor where he landed in an unconscious heap.
The sound of running footsteps scuffled to a halt outside the containment cell as alarmed voices began firing questions.
“What happened?”
“What did he try to do?”
“Is he dead?”
Kahmal was shivering, her gaze locked on the still Reaper. She had come so close to him killing her.
Had the guard not reacted so quickly, the Major knew she might not be standing where she was at that moment.
Captain Chakai pushed her way into the cell. “What happened here?” she demanded, her scrutiny flicking over Cree to settle on Kahmal.
“He...he tried to grab me,” Kahmal stuttered.
“Fool! What were you doing in here in the first place?”
Sejm came into the cell and walked cautiously to the unconscious Reaper. She was about to poke him with her foot when she saw something clutched tightly in his hand. Her eyes went wide and she leapt back, knocking a guard down in the process.
“Kill it!” the Chalean scientist screeched. “Kill it!”
The guards aimed their weapons at the Reaper, but Sejm pointed at his right hand. “The ghoret!” she shouted. “Kill the ghoret!”
