by Elsa Jade
But she wasn’t going anywhere without Coriolis.
On both sides of her the gun turrets swiveled into defensive positions, aimed at the skies.
But where was he?
A black mark high against the livid clouds made her heart soar, and she spun to pinpoint the shadow of a wing—
Too large, too hard, even for her Tritonyri commander.
A trio of Cretarni ships screamed down from the storm.
Chapter 18
The discordant shriek of Axis engines strained in the storm clouds that were half ocean with enough rain to make breaking waves across the sky. Compared to them, his wing was just a scrap on the wind, all but invisible.
So he took aim, dialed the rifle to max expenditure, and sent an arc of plasma burning through the storm.
A meaningless taunt. Exactly the sort of goading the Cretarni could never abide.
In case they’d learned any discretion in their short time off Tritona, he caught an updraft, swooped past them, and seared a rough depiction of the slanting W frequency across the fuselage, before diving away.
They screamed after him.
He had no true speed besides gravity and the angle of his wing. Closing it tight around him, he dropped, only flaring it wide again to flatten out over the plastcrete runway.
The chance of catching another updraft here…
Two of the Axis howled in pursuit.
This had been their spaceport on their continent. Their troops had been on the ground for a few hours. And yet foolishly, too vengeful for their own good, they followed him.
Right between the guns.
Both turrets opened fire—huh, they’d have to work on discharge patterns and firing efficiencies—drilling the ships into the recently repaired plascrete.
But the third Axis rocketed straight up and swung around. It wouldn’t make the same mistake as its smoking sister ships. Already Tritonyri were overrunning the downed vessels. Parts and prisoners.
Coriolis sped past them, seeking any rising air to lift him again. This low, he had all the disadvantages of a foot soldier’s speed and a ship’s visibility—
Strafing fire burst in front of him, forcing him to swerve or be hit.
Now who was taunting who?
Gritting his teeth, he scanned for options. He hadn’t believed Cretarni command would risk the ships. No doubt they regretted it now, but he was about to regret it too.
The third ship stayed too high for the anti-aircraft guns and at that altitude was too small to do much damage to the port. But to him…
Another rain of strafing forced him closer to the line of buildings. He’d have even less room to maneuver.
At a flash of silver, he craned his neck to look back. Marisol…
She was on foot, in the formerly enemy stronghold once again half overrun by the enemy. And from his dubious vantage point, he saw a line of Cretarni soldiers hunting through the half-ruined warehouses. On their current course, they’d intercept with Marisol. Either they’d see her battle skin and shoot her on sight, or they’d assume she was Tritonesse and do worse. The Cretarni knew how precious the Tritonesse were to the Tritonyri.
His fury was so pure and hot it should’ve lifted the wing right into orbit. Except physics didn’t care about his feeling, did it?
But…it did listen to Marisol.
First he had to lose the third Axis before he could go after her. The relentless thrash of the storm had shifted as the winds cleaved tighter to the mountains, losing some of the furious energy from the Sea but dumping more rain. Gusts still blasted between the buildings, so he sped over them, desperately trying to gain enough height to circle back to her.
With nowhere else to go, he dropped what was left of his altitude toward the balcony of the main port building just beyond the broken railing where Dami had admitted the Abyssa might be dead. As he landed, shock jarred up both his legs. One trip on the Bathyal did not make him an expert on flight.
Collapsing the wing over his shoulders, he wedged himself through the balcony doors like a hectopi trying to stuff all its arms into a sunseeker shell. Outside, the Axis zoomed past, the wail of its engine sounding particularly aggrieved.
They could just go home if they didn’t like this game. Which home, he didn’t care, so long as it wasn’t this one.
When he launched from the balcony again, he knew he was out of time.
He spotted Marisol immediately. She’d been following him, he realized, or homing in on him, the same way he knew where she was.
His heart rose—and fell—with the wing. Because the line of Cretarni was right behind her, hunting her through the rain. Even with the multitude of concealment options provided by the bombarded facilities, there was no real place for her to hide.
Maybe that was true for both of them. She’d wanted to hold onto everything she’d had, even as the reality of what she was meant something more. And after a lifetime of not having enough, he’d been too weary to go after anything else.
He was going after her now.
Dropping out of the stormy sky behind them, he sped down the narrow corridor between the buildings where she was running. The Cretarni spotted him and there was plenty of the shouting he’d heard for so long. But he kept the rifle at his back.
It wasn’t enough anymore to shoot his enemies down. He needed to claim his love and rise.
After one last dangerous descent…
He fell hard, his boots never quite touching the plascrete, though the wing tip might’ve dragged for a heartbeat.
“Marisol!”
She glanced back over her shoulder, her pale hair streaming behind her, her dark eyes wild. When her gaze angled up to him, her smile was fierce. She reached up for him as if she’d only been waiting for his dive.
The Cretarni were mere steps behind him. But they were bound to the ground, and he and his love could fly.
With a boost.
“Need your little water trick,” he called as her palm slapped into his and slid upward, wrist to wrist, her fingers wrapping tight around his forearm.
As he hefted her, her eyes half closed, never quite losing connection with him. The sonorous chime of that bond—sweeter than any song across the deeps—balanced him, and somehow gave the wing a bit of lift even before the torrent of water rushed down the street toward them.
“Ah, Marisol?”
“Hold on,” she murmured.
He snatched her up to his chest, letting the rain sweep the streets free of shouting Cretarni—just as the wind behind the water caught the wing and snatched him, hurling them skyward.
His grip was locked tight, never letting go. But as he arced them wide, the shriek of an Axis engine made him curse.
Marisol clung to him as he banked and curved with the Axis in pursuit, but there was nowhere to go in the open sky, nowhere to hide, nothing to say except—
“I claim you,” she cried. “I know what I want, Coriolis Kelyre, and I’ll fight for you.”
Desperate, he spun them in the air, as she’d done before her plummeting fall, to face the Axis.
They both had their weapons in hand, ready to fight to the end. Their joined barrage sizzled through the rain, not enough—
Just as another bolt of fire seared past them and blew the Axis from the air.
Marisol shouted in shock and victory as the Diatom blasted past them, plasma cannon cycling for another round. But the Cretarni ship spiraled down to carve a burned channel in the plascrete just beyond the gun turrets.
Coriolis sighed.
Through the Diatom viewport, Maelstrom lifted his hands in an incredulous gesture before the ship veered away, circling protectively overhead as Tritonyri took to the streets, the flood clearing ahead of them, washing rubble into the craters.
“Is that you?” Coriolis jerked his chin at the swirling waters.
She shook her head. “Just the way the water flows.”
With the Diatom patrolling, he felt they had coverage enough to return to the bal
cony. He settled lighter this time, putting her on her feet without a bump.
And still she held to him.
With a few tugs at the wing yoke, he shed the harness and drew her in tight. The restive wind swirled around them once more, wrapping the cloak of her battle skin around them both, staving off the patter of rain.
“I was following you,” she muttered against his chest. “When you disappeared, I thought…”
He leaned back just enough to look down at her, tipping her head to force her to look at him. “You didn’t think I’d leave you.”
Her dark eyes shimmered. “Only because you’d die without me. Like I’d die without Tritona.”
“Seems fair.”
Furrowing her brow, she wrapped her fingers around his chest straps, pulling him close again. “How is that fair?”
He rested his cheek against her hair for a moment before combing back the soaked, silken spindrift and weaving the pale locks between his fingers. “The braid doesn’t work with only one strand.”
She frowned. “The wind pulled it loose.”
“The wind has nothing to show for itself without the water.”
As she nibbled at her lip, her bewilderment cleared. “It’s a bond.”
“And a balance. Which Tritona has lost, and I want to return. With your help. But not because you feel trapped.” He wriggled his fingers out of her hair, and the plait he’d been weaving fell apart. “Because you want to be here.”
“But how do I know?” she whispered. “What if I’m just afraid of shriveling up?”
“Was that so different from before your Wavercrest syndrome?”
Eyes widening and mouth too, she gaped at him. “Commander, how rude.”
He grinned. “You’re a fighter. You can take it.”
When she leaned back, her battle skin tightened around them. “Like I claimed you.”
Slowly, his grin faded, spiraling into something deeper and hungrier. “We were about to die then too.”
“Seems to be a thing with us.”
“Not just us. This world. This universe.” He tilted his forehead into hers and closed his eyes. “We have to keep fighting. We have to choose, again and again, to rise. Or we fall into the deeps, never to be heard from again.”
“I fell for you,” she whispered.
“And I rise for you.”
As he kissed her, the storm finished dashing itself against the mountains, and the clouds came undone like her pale braid.
She was still kissing him when the sun angled down—for the first time since she’d arrived—as if to peek at them, and the rays broke apart on the retreating raindrops into a rainbow across the sky.
“On Earth, there are legends about rainbows and treasures at the end,” she told him when his kisses began to wander across her face to her ear to her neck to make her tremble.
“On Tritona, the imaginary treasure is at the top.”
A look of startlement flashed across her face. “How odd.”
He shrugged. “It’s always the part you can’t actually reach, isn’t it? So you keep searching. But it’s the pleasure in the sun and the storm that is the treasure.”
She laughed. “Only a Tritonan would take pleasure in the storm.”
“Don’t you?” He reeled her up against his chest so there was no room left between them.
“Yes, because I’m Tritonan now.” With one fingertip, she traced the gill lines at his neck, and he shivered at the sensation. “Because you’re my storm, and I claim you.”
***
They met with Maelstrom and Ridley later that night after the Tritonyri and some of the Tritonesse that Damiara had summoned from the citadel spent the day tracking down a few Cretarni still wandering the port and imprisoning the survivors.
“Let them explain this attack on a sovereign world to the council rep,” Dami said. “Although I’ll interrogate them first.”
Coriolis and Mael exchanged glances, but there were more changes ahead than the Tritonesse leaving their halls. And they still needed to learn if anyone among the Tritonesse and Tritonyri had been involved in Ariab’s betrayal.
While they ate ebb porridge, Marisol pushed for a mating storms celebration for the council rep’s visit. “The storms are one of Tritona’s treasures.”
“You are my treasure,” he told her.
The others groaned, but she kissed him, because she knew how much he needed her.
She and Ridley talked quietly about Lana, still in orbit on the Bathyal to keep her away from Tritona’s dangerous waters. They knew they needed to talk to her first, and they also had concerns about other women on Earth suffering from Wavercrest syndrome but not knowing of their alien heritage. Coriolis ached for their concern because he knew loss. But now, for the first time, his losses were balanced by love.
When Mael and Ridley went back to the Diatom, calling it their honeymoon cruiser, Coriolis led Marisol through the quiet corridors of the spaceport. But instead of taking her back to their rooms, he took her up to the control tower that served the port.
It was empty. “Not enough ships yet to need a control tower,” he told her. “But maybe someday.”
She went to the panoramic viewport windows and made a soft sound of delight. “I can see the light of the harbor from here.” She peered out the other windows too. “Not a lot else.” When he tensed, she turned to him. “Because so much is hidden deep.” Sauntering back to him, she traced a finger down the V of his mantle, sending a soft ping into his heart. “As a pirate mermaid, I love digging for buried treasure.”
He placed his hand over hers, wanting her to feel the pulse of his heart answering hers. “As I love you.”
She caught her breath. “When you say it, I feel it all the way down.”
With a wicked smile, he dropped his mantle. “Feel me all the way down.”
“Here?” she squeaked.
“I took this place as ours, for now, to oversee Tritona coming back to life.”
She let out a languorous sigh, like the spring winds when they might release the Atlantyri’s precious seeds to the world. “I feel you coming to life.”
“Will you claim me again?”
“Always.”
When her mantle joined his, he led her to the sleeping area he’d arranged next to a more private section of the view with a bigger, better bed. She laughed. “Water bed?”
“Like floating. Or flying.” He spread her out wide on the bed in the light of the rising moons. “Whichever you want.”
“I want it all with you.”
Kneeling over her, he kissed her mouth, her nipples, the palms of her hands—breathing sparkles across the W of her ring—and the soles of her feet, the gates of her chasm until she moaned, and then he connected those points with kisses and caresses on all the arcs between. He doubled back to his favorites, tripled back to hers, and when she was trembling on the verge, he delved deep, moving slow.
He swallowed the lingering taste of the storm, the spice from dinner, the salty musk, intimate and oceanic, that was only hers but seemed now imprinted in his cells, a treasure never to be forgotten.
She gazed up at him, her dark eyes luminous with the stars shining where the gale had been. When she wrapped her legs around his hips, drawing him deeper yet, she whispered, “Give it to me.”
“La’ah-wy?” The breath of rising was brighter than the moons in his throat, sweeter than the treats she called chocolates, but he wanted her to want it too.
She nodded shyly. “That and…your love.”
“You have it. I think you took it when you walked onto a spaceship for the first time and called it small.”
Her laugh clamped all her muscles delightfully around him. “I love that what you have you share—from your small ship to your mountain spice to Tritona itself. I should probably warn you, though, that I’m never sharing you. I claim you.” Her voice rang, echoing in his heart in a place he’d once thought would stand empty.
But he’d found his silverwing
, his silver queen, and now they would fly.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elsa Jade, author of sexy shapeshifting romances, also writes paranormal romance, urban fantasy romance, and science fiction romance as Jessa Slade and sexy contemporary romance as Jenna Dales. In all her incarnations, she believes in the transformational power of love and is thrilled to share her stories with like-minded readers.
More from Elsa Jade
Paranormal Romance
Mating Season: Wolves of Angels Rest
(Wolf shifters)
Hero
Joker
Rogue
Warrior
Lost Wolf
Ghost Wolf
Cry Wolf
Fighter
Wish Upon a Werewolf
Beast
Coyote’s Christmas Kiss
Dreaming of a Wolf Christmas
Shifters in Love: Fun & Flirty
(Bear shifters)
Bear and Baby
Bachelor Bear
Barely Bear
Mating Fever: Masters of the Flame
(Dragon shifters)
Dragon Fever
Dragon Fate
Dragon Fall
Science Fiction Romance
(Sexy aliens and Earther girls!)
Intergalactic Dating Agency: Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides
Alpha Star
Red Shift
Dark Matter
After Burn
Freefall: Team Prism (The Great Space Race)
Intergalactic Dating Agency: Black Hole Brides
The Intergalactic Duke's Inconvenient Engagement
The Interstellar Rake's Irresistible Kiss
The Interdimensional Lord's Earthly Delight
Intergalactic Dating Agency: Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County
Mach One
Delta V
Big Bang
Theta
Intergalactic Dating Agency: Mermaids of Montana
Maelstrom
Coriolis
Fathom
