Relief filled her for a handful of moments when she felt Zavier’s touch vanish as abruptly as he’d joined her on the bed. Still completely dazed, she wilted onto one hip and glanced around the room.
Zavier and Legion had faced off again, glaring at one another.
Zavier lifted one imperious hand and pointed his finger at her. She felt as if a bolt of lightning had passed through her. Her body convulsed, wracked with such intense pleasure that for several moments she couldn’t catch her breath at all. She thought she might have blacked out briefly. She struggled toward consciousness as she felt a hand beneath her chin, tipping her head up. Opening her eyes with an effort, she stared dazedly at the two men crouched by the edge of the bed, studying her.
“Do you think you can do better than that?” Zavier demanded mockingly.
“With my eyes closed!” Legion ground out.
Their taunting, or rather Zavier’s taunts and Legion’s arrogance, finally pierced Anya’s fogged mind sufficiently to give rise to a healthy dose of anger—either that or it was the fear that they would continue trying to outdo each other by making her come harder—with less effort—until she expired. “If you two want to fight, leave me out of it!” she gasped drunkenly, slapping Zavier’s hand away and struggling to sit up. “You obviously don’t need me as an excuse!”
Zavier bent close and gnawed her ear, making gooseflesh erupt all over her. She shuddered as it set off more aftershocks inside of her. “I am convinced that you are worth fighting over, my sweet Anya. Do not worry yourself! I always win.”
Anya elbowed him, discovering with a touch surprise that even though his skin appeared metallic, it felt like flesh, warm, pliable—except that his muscles were as hard as Legion’s. Pain shot through her elbow, which made it hard to enjoy the gratifying grunt he made when she slammed the point of her elbow into his ribs.
Chuckling, he released her and straightened to face Legion. “Shall we, brother?”
“Not here,” Legion said grimly. “She is fragile. I will not risk harming her.”
Zavier’s face hardened. “I did not suggest that we would. I will shield our fragile little darling.”
“She is not ‘ours’, damn you! She is mine!”
Zavier grinned at him tauntingly, but she thought he was as angry with himself. “We are only two halves of a whole, though, are we not? If she is in truth the one—and we both know now that she is—then you have no more right to her than I have.”
“And as much,” Legion snarled. “More. I found her. She is mine.”
“I don’t belong to either of you!” Anya snapped, reviving sufficiently to feel real anger. “I don’t give a damn how wonderful you both think you are! I’m not a … pet you think you can just decide whether you want to take home or not!”
Both men surveyed her with almost identical expressions of speculation and resolve. “But you will,” they both said almost at the same time, and then turned to glare at one another.
Neither man seemed to move, and yet a wall of flames sprang up between then, rushing toward Legion. It stopped about a foot from him, wavered for a moment, and then rushed back toward Zavier. It vanished as it reached him as if it had never existed at all. Zavier lifted a hand. Instantly, a globe of writhing energy filled his palm. He hurled it at Legion, who threw up a hand to ward it off. It bounced off his palm and ricocheted directly toward her.
Anya screamed, or tried. It was the struggle to force sound from her frozen vocal chords that jolted her wide awake as if she’d suddenly fallen. She jerked all over as if she’d made impact with the bed. Struggling, she managed to suck in a pained breath as she opened her eyes. A flicker of relief went through her when she recognized her surroundings and realized she really was awake.
It was fleeting.
Legion, she discovered was striding toward the door of her quarters. Questions crowded her mind, so many she wasn’t certain what to ask.
“What happened?” she gasped finally, thoroughly confused now, wondering if everything she’d just thought she’d experienced had actually been a dream and nothing more.
He stopped and turned to look at her. The fury in his expression was very real and withered her hopefulness to dust.
“You said there were no others …?”
His lips tightened. “I thought he had been destroyed when ….” He shook his head. “It does not matter. He has followed me here.”
“What are you going to do?” Anya cried out when he turned to stalk purposefully toward the door again.
“Finish what I started long ago!”
“He’s your brother!” Anya gasped, scrambling from the bed to intercept him. He halted when she grasped his arm to stop him, turning to look down at her angrily. “I don’t understand any of this, but he’s your brother. You can’t really and truly want to hurt him!”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “What is he to you?”
Anya released his arm at the accusation in his voice. A mixture of fear and anger warred within her. “You’re angry with me because I thought it was you! You might have warned me! If you’d given me any warning I would have known it wasn’t you. He’s nothing like you!”
His gaze grew tumultuous with fury and she realized instantly that she’d taken the wrong tact in trying to defend an indefensible position—in his mind at least. Worse, she’d confirmed Zavier’s taunts.
Resentment warred within her. She hadn’t fallen deliberately into Zavier’s deception, but she’d been well within her rights even if she’d known it wasn’t Legion. He was the one who’d claimed her. Just because it was so in his mind didn’t make it so.
She didn’t want either of them to be hurt because of her, though, regardless of her anger with both of them for using her in what seemed painfully obvious was their own private battle and had very little to do with her at all. “He’s your brother—more than just ‘a’ brother, your twin, a part of you. And, unless you lied to me, the only other of your kind. How could you set out to … destroy one another, whatever your differences?”
“You know nothing of the matter!” he growled furiously.
His anger notched her fear up a little higher. It would have if he’d only been a man. Considering what he was, what he was capable of, she felt faint that she’d even approached him to try to reason with him. Her fear seemed to tamp his anger, though, when an attempt to reason with him had failed. He made a sound of irritation.
“You have no reason to fear me, Anya. I would never harm you.”
She took a step back. “Unless I angered you.”
He followed her, grasping her arms and pulling her against his length almost roughly. “Not even then. I swear it on the soul of my mother. I would never hurt you, beloved.”
He believed it. Unfortunately, she didn’t. “If blood can’t bind you, then lust certainly can’t,” she whispered in a suffocated voice, and she didn’t delude herself into thinking he felt any more than that.
Frustration flickered in his eyes when he pulled away to look at her. “You do not believe that is all that this is?” he said angrily. “You have felt what I do, whether you will acknowledge it or not.”
He was right. She wasn’t about to acknowledge, to herself or to him, that the desire he made her feel was more than that … because she didn’t believe it was. She didn’t trust him enough to believe anything he made her feel—and certainly not Zavier—who claimed the same on even less acquaintance than Legion.
He shook his head at her in frustration. “The moment of knowing is never more than that. It takes no more than that to feel it and know the truth of it. You do not see it because you refuse to look, refuse to allow yourself to identify it as what it is, but that does not mean it is not there. I will not share only because of the accident of birth.”
Anya had felt herself wavering right up until then. “You don’t want to share anything with your brother simply because you resent his existence … just as he resents yours! Don’t use me as an excuse for something tha
t has nothing to do with me!”
His expression tautened with frustration and anger.
“What does niuta mean?” she asked quietly.
He stiffened, setting her away from him. “Where did you …?” His lips tightened. Abruptly, he turned, striding away from her. “Freak,” he growled tautly.
She stared at his back as he disappeared—literally. When his image began to waver, she suspected her eyes, blinking them rapidly to try to adjust her vision, but he’d vanished completely within a single blink. Coldness washed over her. She couldn’t convince herself that he’d been any less angry when he left than he had been before.
The images she’d seen of them as children filled her mind. “My god!”
They couldn’t have been more than five or six then—at least, as far as she could tell, they’d appeared very much like a five year old human child.
What havoc might they wreak now in their sibling rivalry?
Chapter Ten
Galvanized by that horrific thought, Anya whirled to look around the room and finally dashed on wobbly legs to her locker to retrieve a suit. Unfortunately, unlike Legion, she had to manually clothe herself. She couldn’t just snap her fingers—or whatever—and have clothes appear on her. Worse, her agitation made her clumsy. Even though she hadn’t bothered to find under things to put on, it took what seemed an eternity to figure out how to get into the one piece suit and fasten it up. She didn’t bother with footwear, but dashed out of her quarters before she’d even finished fastening the closure.
The corridor outside was in an uproar, flooded with people running in every direction at once. The computer cut loose with an alarm almost in sync with her door opening and her heart clenched painfully in her chest.
“Please follow the corridor to the lifts to perform an orderly evac of the facility,” the computer intoned in a bored voice.
“What’s happening?” Anya called out in a voice hoarse with dread.
No one so much as glanced in her direction.
She grabbed the arm of a passing woman, pulling her to a halt. “What’s happening?”
“Attack! I don’t know! Explosions!”
“Oh god!” Anya exclaimed, releasing her grip on the woman as she jerked away and ran. Glancing up and down the corridor, she saw that each end was clogged with the people waiting for the cubicles to carry them down. Scanning her memory for the layout of the facility, she recalled the position of the stairwell and headed toward it. She saw the moment the door opened that the stairwell was as clogged with people as the corridor had been, all of them pushing and shoving and trying to race down the stairs when they were too tightly packed to manage more than a shuffle.
Without stopping to consider it, Anya plowed through, heading for the roof. A man grabbed her arm. “There’s no evac from the roof!”
She jerked her arm free and kept going, fighting against the tide of humanity until she finally reached the egress to the roof four flights up. The door wouldn’t open. She stared at it blankly for a moment before she realized it would have a manual override. The moment she managed to shove the door open by dint of sheer determination and fear, a pall of smoke greeted her. Coughing, waving her hand ineffectually in front of her face, she broke from the building and looked around.
The city surrounding her looked like a war zone—which it was.
For several moments, she couldn’t seem to move from the spot just beyond the door where she’d frozen in place, swiveling her head on her neck to view the destruction. The tops of a half a dozen buildings within her view were gone—proof positive that she’d lost her mind in heading to the roof instead of trying to reach the ground floor.
Instead of turning around and racing back down the stairs she’d just fought her way up, however, she forced herself to move toward the edge of the roof, wondering even as she did if she was too high up to have any hope of spotting either of the two men—beings. She realized, though, that, in the back of her mind, she’d convinced herself the view from the roof would allow her to see further, might give her a vantage where she had some hope of spotting them.
Her belly went weightless as she reached the low wall that edged the roof, but she steeled herself and looked down. Below her, the people racing along the streets looked like little more than ants. A nearly overwhelming sense of hopelessness flooded her.
However striking they might be, there was no way she could discern the pair from the throng of humanity below.
They weren’t on the ground, she discovered as she lifted her head.
She felt her jaw go slack. A wave of shock washed over her, chilling her to the bone. Both of them were flying—or levitating. They were airborne, in any case, hovering above the ground nearly on a level with her, slinging jagged bolts of lightning at one another and enormous, glowing balls of energy that made her skin prickle even at this distance. Each time either of them encountered a blast the other had flung, however, the auras they’d surrounded themselves with—invisible until that moment—glowed and diverted the force from them and into the tall buildings surrounding them—or the dome protecting the city.
She discovered to her horror when she looked up at it that it was cracked. Fractures zigzagged across the nearly indestructible material the dome had been constructed of.
Like a swarm of furious bees, police and military craft circled the pair, who seemed almost completely oblivious to the bombs and laser blasts cutting through the air around them.
And small wonder since not a single shot touched either one of them.
They found targets in the buildings surrounding them, however, blasting away chunks of concrete that rained down on the people below and Anya wasn’t certain if it was the combatants or the ‘protectors’ of the city who’d destroyed more.
Apparently tiring of slinging the force of their anger at one another, they ceased abruptly, almost simultaneously, and flew at one another. Landing amidst the crumbled remains of the top of a building about a quarter of a block from where she stood frozen in horror, Legion and Zavier collided bodily with one another. Seizing one another by the throat, they began trying to exert a superior physical strength, swaying first one way and then another. Finally, they broke free of each other and began slinging their balled fists at face, chest, or belly, rocking back at each blow and retaliating.
The crafts zoomed in on the two of them, firing down on the building where they struggled, cutting away even more debris. Anya sucked in a harsh, frightened breath as the floor beneath them gave way abruptly and the two men disappeared briefly beneath an avalanche of debris. Before she could even fully grasp the fact that they’d been buried beneath tons of steel and concrete, the rubble exploded outward and she could see Legion and Zavier, still completely focused on trying to pound each other into mud, on the floor below.
“Stop it!” she croaked. “For god’s sake! Stop before you destroy the city and kill everyone!”
To her stunned surprise, the two men did stop. Backing away from one another, they glanced around them and then both men turned and looked directly at her.
She knew it wasn’t merely her imagination.
Anger abruptly replaced the terror that had gripped her from the moment she’d discovered what they were doing. “Look at the mess you’ve made! The people you’ve hurt—probably killed, you lunatics! What the hell made you think you could … brawl with one another like this? Don’t you two ever think about anyone or anything but your damned selves?”
Whirling abruptly away from the wall, Anya stalked back across the roof to the access door and re-entered the building. The upper stairwell had cleared in the time she’d stood on the roof. A tangle of humanity was still struggling to flee far below her, but she had no trouble negotiating the stairs back to her own level.
She was shaking like a leaf in a strong wind by the time she’d returned to her quarters. Too shocked to untangle and sort the chaotic thoughts and emotions filling her, she stood in the center of the main room for a moment and finall
y moved to her bunk, dropping onto the mattress weakly.
She knew she was a complete fool, and that she should be ashamed of herself, but she realized she was far more concerned about the two idiots who’d wrecked half the city than she was about the strangers they might have hurt or even killed in their horrific battle. Shivering with sudden cold, she scooted further onto the bunk to brace her back against the wall. Drawing her knees up close to her body, she sat for a moment, trying to gather warmth and finally pulled her covers up around her shoulders.
She had no idea how long she sat staring at nothing in particular, waiting. She didn’t even have a clear idea of what she was waiting for until Legion appeared in her quarters as suddenly as he’d vanished. She stared at him, trying to ignore the gladness she felt that he seemed to be alright.
Her belly tightened when Zavier stepped through the wall on the opposite side of the room, but aside from exchanging a hard look, they seemed more focused on her than each other.
She pushed the covers away. “You get right back out there right now,” she growled, “and clean up the mess you made! And help those people you hurt, damn you!”
Both men looked at her in surprise and then exchanged a look with one another.
“We have done that,” Legion said a little sheepishly.
Surprised but vaguely mollified, Anya studied him suspiciously for a moment and finally turned to study Zavier. “You fixed everything? Helped everyone that was hurt?” she demanded.
Amusement gleamed in Zavier’s eyes. “We did.”
Anya let out a shaky breath of relief and turned to look at Legion again just in time to see him waver where he stood. He dropped abruptly to his knees and fell face first on the floor hard enough to rattle everything in the room. Sucking in a sharp breath, Anya bounded from the bed and raced to him, struggling to push him over onto his side.
When she saw she couldn’t, she turned to look at Zavier. “Help me!”
He shook his head, wavered, and finally moved toward the two of them. Dropping heavily to his knees, he grasped Legion’s shoulder and shoved at him, collapsing on top of him even as Legion rolled over.
Lords of Mayhem Page 14
