“How the hell did she do that?” Gray murmured while rubbing a hand across the hard line of his whiskery jaw.
Jed shook his head while thunder rumbled in the distance. “Some kind of giant streaming electron-field magnet would be my guess.”
“Electron-field magnet? There’s no such thing.”
“There is now,” Jed drawled, a satisfied smile curving his wide mouth as they considered the craft into which Lacey and Jason had disappeared.
“Commander Owens is going to be in fucking raptures,” Gray pointed out with a hard chuckle.
“No kidding.”
“He’ll probably insist Lacey return to Earth Base Ten immediately.”
Jed gave him a long look. “Maybe you could delay informing Regional Command until after the wedding,” he suggested, motioning to the three people who had just climbed from the rental craft. “Because it looks to me like they got those ‘details’ worked out.”
“They do look a bit tight,” Gray admitted with a grunt. “I guess we could give them a few days to throw together a simple ceremony.”
Jed made a strange choking sound and Gray turned his head to make sure he wasn’t dying. There was the strangest damn look on Jed’s face. “I don’t think Junkie’s family is going to settle for a small wedding.”
Gray flicked his gaze at Jed, feeling like he was being set up. He took the bait anyway. “Why not?”
“Because of the prince.”
“What prince?”
“The queen’s oldest brother. The one the Taurans were looking for. The one down there in the yard with his arm around Lacey.”
Despite himself, Gray’s head whipped around to stare down at the tall leather-clad man in the yard. A prince? “Junkie is a prince? Don’t you think you should have mentioned that little fact to me a bit earlier?”
Jed shrugged. “He doesn’t like people to know. The title doesn’t mean that much in our culture since the crown passes from the mother to the firstborn daughter.”
“Wait a minute,” Gray interrupted him. “If that’s the case, then why would anyone try to capture a prince?”
“The queen is fond of her older brother. She’d ransom her life to protect him.”
Thoroughly miffed, Gray narrowed his gaze on his friend. “So why didn’t you clue me in, you sneaky bastard? You kept me in the dark over a matter which turned out to be a pretty high security concern.”
Jed motioned toward the window. “He doesn’t like people to know. He doesn’t like the title or his name. His real name. You wouldn’t either, if your name was Jonquille.”
“Jonquille?” Gray exclaimed on a sharp bark of laughter. His gaze zeroed in on the dark eYonan below, his arm around Lacey while Jason stood in front of her, his hands resting on her hips as he kissed her. “His name is Jonquille? You can’t be fucking serious!”
“The name might sound flowery to an Earther. But, in our language, it means hero.”
“Hero!”
“How would you like to be named Hero?” Jed asked, his smile turning wry at the edges.
“I’d like it better than Jonquille,” he muttered on a deep note of amusement.
Jed’s gaze softened. “The queen’s going to be pretty proud of her brother and what he did.”
Gray looked at Jed then back at the people on the ground. Jason’s hand was on the back of Junkie’s neck, pulling his face so close their foreheads touched. An awkward lump of emotion lodged in his throat at the sight of his old friend, finally freed from the demons that had haunted his past. “Hell,” he rumbled after clearing his throat, “I feel pretty proud of him, myself. They did good. All of them. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all heroes.”
About the Author
I slung the heavy battery pack around my hips and cinched it tight—or tried to.
“Damn.” Brian grabbed an awl. Leaning over me, he forged a new hole in the loose belt looped around my waist.
“Any advice?” I asked him as I pulled the belt tight.
“Yeah. Don’t reach for the ore cart until it starts moving, then jump on the back and immediately duck your head. The voltage in the overhead cable won’t just kill you. It’ll blow you apart.”
That was my first day on my first job. Employed as an engineer, I’ve worked in an underground mine that went up—inside a mountain. I’ve swung over the Ohio River in a tiny cage suspended from a crane in the middle of an electrical storm. I’ve hung 30 feet in the air over the Hudson River at midnight in an aluminum boat—suspended from a floating barge at the height of a blizzard, while snowplows on the bridge overhead rained slush and salt down on my shoulders. You can’t do this sort of work without developing a sense of humor, and a sense of adventure.
New to publishing, both my reading and writing habits are subject to mood and I usually have several stories going at once. When I need a really good idea for a story, I clean toilets. Now there’s an activity that engenders escapism.
I was surveying when I met my husband. He was my ‘rod man’. While I was trying to get my crosshairs on his stadia rod, he dropped his pants and mooned me. Next thing I know, I’ve got the backside of paradise in my viewfinder. So I grabbed the walkie-talkie. “That’s real nice,” I told him, “but would you please turn around? I’d rather see the other side.”
…it was love at first sight.
Madison welcomes comments from readers. You can find her website and email address on her author bio page at www.ellorascave.com.
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Enter the Dragon anthology
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Kingdom of Yute: Tor’s Betrayal
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