by TylerRose.
His hand went directly to her vagina, phasing through the thin sheet to find her clitoris without error.
“Stop it. Get off me!” she shoved his arm.
His left hand caught her wrists and held them over her head while the right delivered a shockingly hard smack to her left breast. “Be still! You’ve not been with anyone you’ve bonded with…or have you?”
Leg over hers to hold her down, fingers thrust in to invade her and he ignored her cursing squeal. He felt for the energy of a bond low in her belly. Fresh, strong…Tiberius.
“You’ve been in Mexico with Tiberius?” he asked, fingers out but slowly stroking over her clitoris.
“No. Get off me, you fucker!”
He slapped her face hard and gripped his hand painfully around her larynx. “Shut up. Don’t move.”
She tried to teleport away, not going anywhere. Tried to blast him with psychokinesis, to no avail.
“Just stop it. I put a chain around your wrist when I grabbed it. You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to accept that I am the Apogee. You’re going to accept that I am in charge. There will be no going back and fixing anything. Nothing is broken. You’re going to stay right here in this house until you accept the situation and accept me. You’ll stay in this bed, if I have to make you, until you give up this bond with Tiberius and mine replaces it.”
“No,” she growled out, fighting the surge of arousal he was forcing her to.
“Yes,” he insisted, his arm holding her close and in place. “I’m done being nice about it, you obstinate little cunt.”
“I’m done too,” she gasped, and broke an arm out of his hand.
Elbow coming down sharply, she smashed it into his face. An explosion of furious psychokinesis shoved him off the bed and toward the wall. His head went through the window, glass slicing his throat. He died there, unable to act fast enough to get himself out of the window before he bled out down the front of the building.
She was on her feet, ripping the band off her arm. She’d broken through it like it wasn’t even there. She felt four more men arrive in the room, and flipped on the light. They were blinded long enough for her to lay eyes on the unfamiliar face. His thoughts were plain, however. He was Thomas’ son.
Dalton was nearest, lunged for her first. She spun around him, kicked his knees out, and used psychokinesis along with her own hands to twist his head and break his neck.
“For Nails, motherfucker.”
Standing tall, the others coming for her in open space between bed and window, she shot out a single blast of violent energy that all but sheared them in half. Spray of blood and innards splattered across the entire end of the room. Four men dead on the floor, Thomas dead in the window.
Calm as could be in the next breath, she went into the bathroom to look herself over. She was not hurt anywhere she could see, but she needed to shower off the blood. Clean, toweled dry, she dressed in the last pair of pants and shirt she had left in a drawer. A glance over the dead men, one last reminder to trust no one, she focused on a future date. November 11th, just a few months away. She focused on a place. The mall in Billings.
She went to the music store to buy things she’d missed. All three of the prequel Star Wars movies were available on dvd and Episodes 4 through 6 were in a boxed set. She bought them all.
Coming out of the store, she realized she was hungry. To a restaurant, order put in, and she felt another presence she’d not met in a very long time. Her plate laid before her, she looked up to see her father coming into the restaurant, walking directly to her table.
“May I sit?”
She gave no indication, but he took the seat.
“What happened at the hunting lodge, Tyler? We know you were there. Your DNA is all over the place.”
“They wanted to keep me prisoner there. The one in the window sexually assaulted me. I fought back. They died.”
“I need you to come with me,” he said.
“Why? So the local police can arrest me? I’ve done nothing to be arrested for. I acted completely in self-defense.”
“That’s for the DA to decide, Tyler.”
“No, it’s not. No one on this planet can judge me,” she said, her beverage floating through the air to her hand while the salt shaker shook itself over her food.
He glanced around, saw that everyone else was frozen in place. Hands holding forks and sandwiches halfway to mouths, cheeks full of food not being chewed.
“You’re not my father, are you?” she more said than asked. “Mom had sex with someone else, didn’t she?”
“She did, yes. But I have loved you the same as if you were my—“
“Cut the bullshit, David. Knowing I wasn’t yours contributed to your leaving her and I know it. I know every thought you have.”
“Where did Jerome Black go? You were placed at the compound in Mexico and then you were both gone without ever having left. Where is he?”
“A place you could never hope to reach.”
He continued to ask questions and she continued to answer them while she ate. When she was done, she stood up and picked up her shopping bags.
People around them went back into motion.
“Goodbye, Dad.”
She teleported to her room in the Louisiana property, teleported the music and videos to the cave, walked outside to stand looking over the land the other side of the creek. She silently called to Zamren. He appeared next to her.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“So am I.”
Solomon’s voice. Solomon beside her. He grabbed her and she grabbed him and she teleported to her unnamed planet.
The fight was on. He didn’t stop this time. He didn’t run and neither did she. They punched and threw each other all over that slope, cursing and grunting with the effort and their anger. She used her psychokinesis, her teleportation, every dirty trick she’d ever been taught, and pounded the life out of him.
“We should stop them. We can save her,” one of the young monks said, and took that first step.
Jerome stopped him with an iron bar of an arm across his disciple’s chest, still stronger than any other man in the temple even though he was over a hundred years old.
“No. It is what must be.”
Before his last breath, Solomon managed one good shove that sent her reeling backwards. Her head smashed against the tree and she collapsed. She watched him exhale for the last time, knew he was dead. Her last breath followed.
Holding her energy together, she consciously left the dead shell of a body. She remained a cohesive entity, and watched her own body disintegrate to dust at the base of the tree.
Soaring up through the atmosphere, out into space, she decided she wanted to see a great many things before going back into a body. The freedom of a limitless energy being wasn’t something she wanted to give up too quickly. The first thing she did was find her son and watch him grow up. She watched him learn and love and become a governor of one of the largest and most important sectors of Drakkorian space.
With immense satisfaction, though she could not make him hear her, she kissed his cheek and caressed the energy of his children as they were born…and then left him behind.
Chapter Twenty Two
She covered millionsand millions of years with no real sense of the passage of time. Roaming free, seeing whatever she wanted to see in Earth’s history. Fates of dinosaurs, rises and falls of empires, human migration around the planet. Curiosities satisfied, she turned her focus to the mysteries of self she’d tried to solve during life. She could not see anything she did, however, or anything related to her specifically. She could not see her birth, her conception. Could not see her first day of school. Could not see Nails either, which she thought odd.
For some reason she could not see anything on the Congress.
But she could see the battle itself. Only there, on that one day, could she see what everyone was doing. She watched Jerome fall and decided she needed to see more.
Unlimited i
n her reach, she transitioned to timeline after timeline to see what happened during the battle in Toledo. How many times did the almost non-existent resistance fail and Earth was raped and destroyed? Unlike other planets that were conquered and held, Earth was ravaged, people taken to replenish the foot soldier army and Rhutvak, and then it was burned to a cinder.
How many times did Jerome die? How many times was Tyler herself actually there to participate? If she was there and Jerome died, she took on Adamantine to finish him…in her own way. How many times? Nails fell as well in nearly every timeline, always for the same reason. She would deal with that.
Starbird died in nearly all of them, always for the same reason. Tony and Gable were lost in the fighting, when buildings came down into the streets and crushed them.
Fundamental mistakes that could have been prevented with a little knowledge. Not one timeline did they have knowledge of the exact date of the invasion. Jerome was all the way out of town near Davis Besse, running to clear his head after getting a letter from a long-lost sister in nearly all of them. Those in which he’d burned the letter without reading, he was more likely to be successful. If he read and didn’t go for the run, he was more likely to be successful.
If he knew not to go, he would be in the city, at least. Better would be to place themselves downtown. Not once were they in place and ready to receive the invasion.
How many times did Landra Ahr die at Davis Besse? Every time. But his destruction had been necessary to success the few times there was success in repelling the invasion. Sun Oil blew up in every single invasion, burning the East Side and killing thousands to prevent it from falling into the hands of the machines trying to take control of it. She saw who caused it to blow up. It wasn’t the Rhutvak. They wanted the resource of the oil refinery. An employee caused it to blow up.
The carnage was beyond words. What seen, could not be unseen.
Lost among the timelines, unable to go back to where she had started, she did what Jiogaard had told her. She focused hard on finding the one pulse of energy that called her home. That would be the place where she belonged.
An eon of listening and feeling and she found it, followed it, and pulled Julian’s energy with her as she emerged into a universe that felt like home. The energies aligned around her. She belonged.
She found Landra Ahr and the team from Taverages on their long voyage from Taverages to Earth, saw them all in stasis except for Landra Ahr. A team of two hundred. Saw them halfway to Earth and without the daughter of Adamantine that had been on Earth for the battle in numerous times. She was instrumental, taking on her brother in most of them. She needed to be there.
Tyler went back farther and farther in time, until she found the daughter of Adamantine as a young teen about to meet her father for the first time.
With hints and quiet voices, she prodded Starbird into joining her father’s army and learning the truth about the man. He was no great conqueror to be revered and celebrated. He was a murderer, a rapist, a tyrant of immense power and even deeper evil who required his soldiers to rape, murder and destroy everyone and everything until he told them to stop.
She quietly coaxed Starbird into leaving her father’s army and seeking out Landra Ahr. She was Starbird’s inner strength as Starbird repeatedly voiced her vehement disapprovals of her father’s actions. Landra Ahr eventually agreed to let her come on the trip to follow the sacred staff and retrieve it.
The ship, cloaked and invisible to sensors, crashed onto the back side of Earth’s moon. Everyone died except for himself, Starbird and the High Priestess. L’Roc-ai. Roc had developed stasis leukemia and he had to start treatments immediately in the small section of the ship he had stabilized.
She watched Landra Ahr find and approach Jerome in the woods and convince him what was going to happen. Knowing about the staff of crystal across Jerome’s back had helped. How to make it work, what he could do with it. Video footage of Taverages being ravaged helped. But he could no longer take the staff and go back to Taverages. The ship was damaged beyond repair and he could keep it viable for only a few more days. He needed to bring Starbird and Roc to Earth to live. Jerome offered his warehouse apartment.
Tyler had seen that in the other timelines, that they’d all lived together. That was why he couldn’t take her back to his place on their night together. Aside from the fact that she’d been underage and he could have gotten into legal trouble for giving her a place to live. Just like Kevin.
How had Jerome gotten his endurance and strength? How had Gable gotten his superhuman speed? Genetic alterations. She watched as they and Tony received injections of their human DNA altered with Taveragian enhancements. She watched as they endured painful transformations, Jerome more than the other two because everything was enhanced. His strength, lung capacity, hearing, vision, speed of reflexes.
She went back to the planet on which she had died. Calling Jiogaard to the spot, she watched him and a team of scientists scan the area to find and collect her DNA. She went with them back to Sanctuary and watched and waited. They prepared the artificial womb and introduced her DNA into the emptied egg they’d already collected from a willing Sistarian woman. The cell began to divide. When the heart fluttered for the first time, Tyler entered the tiny embryo.
Immense energy restrained in that spectacularly tiny space, she rested while the body developed. There was no sound around her. No voice. No heartbeat of mother. Perfect, claustrophobic silence. When the tightly confining womb was finally opened, arms reached in for her and she looked into the face of Sifu Chen.
At her request, he had been brought to be her father. He raised her as his own in a small village of little dwellings, gave her the love and devotion, the safe place to grow, that she’d not had with her Earth parents. He began to teach her Kung Fu as soon as she could stand.
Her intellect came out as soon as she could get the muscles of her mouth and throat to form words and her brain to make the necessary connections between thought and speech. Not fully formed, of course, but she expressed herself as her brain was able to convey. The brain still had to develop at its normal, natural pace, which limited her ability to express herself verbally. Telepathy was not there yet, so she couldn’t think her full thoughts to him.
He had to learn to deal with her lack of fear, her lack of doubt and regret. She picked up snakes with impunity, dove into the pond without a thought to her safety, climbed trees to the highest branches.
All the love he could provide couldn’t make her be happy. With her lack of fear, she often felt anger first. An unintended side effect of ridding herself of these most fundamental emotions, and one he could do nothing about. He taught her to work it out through sparring. The more she thought on her puzzles, the angrier she became. She was dark and moody, crouched on a large rock to stare into the pond for hours at a time. Thinking. Planning.
They weren’t alone on the this planet. It wasn’t Sanctuary, as she had thought it was in her earliest years. The weather and the sky were very different. When she was eight, she asked.
“It is the place you died,” Chen told her. “The Sanctarians and I made a village for you to grow up with other people.”
And men in uniforms like the ghi Chen always wore greeted him as Sifu Chen, revered him.
About the age of ten, she began to talk about going to Earth and what had to be done. She talked with him over and over and over about the invasion. There were things she didn’t remember. She knew she didn’t remember them. They were locked away deep inside her mind.
“Can you be there? Are you from before that battle?” she asked.
“I will go with you and you can stay in my Kwoon as long as you need to. Jerome never goes up into the living quarters.”
One day when she was fifteen, he found her sitting on her rock and looking up the mountain face to the cathedral-like rock formation at the top.
“Who is up there?” she asked.
“Men preparing for you. If you are fully successfu
l, you will end up there. Will you please not go there now?”
“Are you forbidding me?” she asked.
“I don’t think I have ever forbidden you from doing anything,” he replied. “I am asking, as your father whom you respect, that you please not go there. When the time is right, you will find yourself there. To go before risks ruining all you have worked for.”
She said no more, and she never went there.
When she turned eighteen,Jerome came to see her. Not the Jerome she had left here, however. This one was…different. He said nothing as they stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment.
“I remember you,” he finally said.
“How long ago did you meet me?” she asked.
He smiled that expression she had seen several times during the time she’d spent with his counterpart. This was not the angry man who had nearly assaulted her outside a gate in Mexico. That version of things had not happened for him. Right now, this moment, everything was as it was to be. She only had to keep it that way.
“Long enough that we can’t talk about anything,” he said.
“If you could tell me one thing, what would it be?”
He thought about that few seconds before choosing. “Don’t hesitate to make the difficult decisions, regardless who doesn’t like it. Even me. Do what you know is right and all will be well in the end.”
She nodded her acknowledgement. “Did I leave a book for you?”
“No.”
That part had not happened yet. She’d not done it before.
“Did Landra Ahr pack in the genetic alterations?” she asked.
“He pushed it, but not as much as he could have. Tell him I can take it and to give me every damn ounce he can.”
She smiled. “I will.”
Arm around her back, he pulled her against him for a staff-power infused kiss she took a little too greedily. The energy in him thrust down her throat and into her every organ, sparking a particular reaction inside her brain. Two fingers of his other hand thrust upward under the short skirt and into her vagina to awaken the body. One route charged her brain and the other seared itself onto her soul to keep out those who did not belong.
