Arcan stood up slowly, Max's anger not seeming to bother him in the least. "She is who she is, brother. I know what she means to you. I know what she means to all of the Ursallin, too. You have no more claim on her than I do."
"Yes," Max growled, "I do."
"Because you've had her sex?" Arcan asked bluntly.
"Because we have mated!" Max snapped. "We are mated for life!"
Every time Max spoke he yanked on the chain twisted around Nikki's neck. She thought she might orgasm from the pressure and the pain alone. "Please," she croaked, "pull…harder."
Max stopped with his mouth open. Angry words died with a squeak on his tongue. He loosened his hold on the chains and they slipped away from Nikki. With a gasp she fell to her knees, her hands going to her throat. For just a moment, she realized that she was scared. More scared than she should ever have to be of Max. No. It wasn't him she was scared of. It was someone else. Someone else was here and it terrified her.
Coughing, hacking, she sucked in a long breath and spoke to herself. "Shut up, you weak, simpering bitch."
She was aware of the two men watching her. All of them, naked in this endless space where pale light shone like glittering stars, shared a silent moment where all that could be heard was Nikki's harsh breathing.
"Do you see now?" Arcan asked. He wasn't talking to Nikki, she realized. He was looking at her, but he was talking to Max. "Do you see what he did to her?"
"Shut up, Arcan," Nikki growled at him, her own voice buzzing across the landscape to reach her ears. Was that her? Why did she sound like that?
Questions folded on top of questions in her mind and she felt like she was being split in two from crotch to scalp. This was not right. None of this was right.
Was it?
Quietly, she began to retch. Nothing came out at first, just her stomach folding in on itself and trying to push up through her throat. Then a little bit of green bile followed.
On the next convulsion, blood streaked the bile.
Max was at her side instantly, his hands on her bare shoulders, trying to comfort her. "It's okay Nikki. It will be okay."
She wanted to believe him but it felt like there were two armies waging full out war in her insides. Two sides, battling for dominance. How that was possible she didn't know, but she knew what she was feeling. She was being ripped apart and the victor would get the spoils.
Her.
"You see?" Arcan repeated.
Although she could tell it killed him to do it, Max nodded and stepped away from her. "Yes, Arcan. I know what's been done to her. So now what?"
"We leave her here."
"What?" Max exclaimed. "You can't be serious. You can't leave her here on the Plains of Never. This world served as our prison for generations! There's nothing here. She'll die!"
"I know," was the simple answer. "There can be no other way. She would kill us all if we brought her to Gallandrian, and you can't save her."
"No," Nikki heard herself say. Another round of retching kept her from saying anything else. Something black came out in it this time.
"I won't abandon her!" Max was saying.
"There is no choice, brother. Leave her here and let's go back to the Council. Maybe they'll know a different way."
"We could take her there now," Max said, insistently.
"No," Nikki said again, and again, and again, as more vile and nasty liquid poured out of her. Suddenly she was vomiting so hard her toes curled and her throat burned and still she kept repeating that one, single word.
No.
"I won't let you take her there," Arcan argued with Max. "Not like this."
Why were they ignoring her, she wondered. Couldn't they see she was in distress?
There was no way that much liquid could come out of her, yet it did. Black, oily, viscous liquid that hung from her mouth in stringers even as she continued to retch it up.
Her mind cleared in that moment. She remembered everything she had done since she had been inside Donovan's office. A dream. It had to have been a dream. She knew better, though. It had been real. It was still real. She was vomiting out the poison that Donovan had put into her.
The poison that was making Arcan and Max so nervous.
She wanted to scream. To scream and never stop.
The liquid pouring out of her wouldn't let her. It was draining from every part of her. Every organ, every muscle, every vein. She felt it leeching from her and she knew what it was and it made her feel dirty to know it had been inside of her.
The Primus Secor. The Shift. Donovan had hitched a ride in her body, hoping that the werebears would give it an easy passage into Gallandrian.
Now that it had been foiled in that goal, it was planning on killing them all. That thought was cemented in her mind, the last thing that Donovan had been thinking about before evacuating itself from her.
"Max." She tried to call to him, only to have it come out as a garbled mess. "Run. Please. Run."
He looked at her, and she thought she saw something in his eyes that meant he understood, but then he looked away again and continued his argument with Arcan.
When the last of Donovan pulled itself out of her, Nikki couldn't do anything but slump onto her side and shake violently. Every ounce of her energy was gone. She managed to lift a trembling hand up off the cold dark ground for a brief second before it crashed heavily back down. That was it. She was wholly spent, and completely defenseless.
Arcan and Max broke off their argument in an instant like it had never happened. Max ran to her, grabbing her up into his strong arms and pulling her away from the roiling, bubbling mess that was the Shift reforming itself. Arcan had spun with his back to everything, his hands coming up and morphing into bear's paws with the claws extended and a serious expression on his face. His hands slashed at the air and a portal was made.
It shone so brightly in this dark place that Nikki had to close her eyes. Carried in Max's arms, held against his chest, she didn't see Donovan rear up in his bizzaro nightmare form and scream vengeance at them.
She felt it. Inside of her, she felt everything he was doing.
"Run," she said to Max again, weakly. "Please God, run."
He held her tighter, and she felt him leap forward and she knew he was taking them through the portal and away from here.
Away from the Primus Secor.
***
Great, Nikki thought. Back into the land of full frontal nudity.
Gallandrian was a beautiful place, full of green growing things and gentle breezes and warm sunshine. She never thought, being from the city, that she could ever be comfortable in someplace like this. Being here, though, she actually felt safe. Maybe it was because she knew the monsters couldn't get through to Gallandrian unless someone else opened the door for them. Like an Ursallin.
Or her.
It still freaked her out to think that the Donovan-Shift had been inside of her. He—it, whatever—had taken her over completely. She had been completely helpless to do anything except whatever Donovan wanted her to. Ever move, every word, had been his. While he luxuriated in the feel of her very human reactions to things like the caress of Max's skin or how wide he was inside of her, she had no choice but to stand there and let it happen. To experience everything he did and not be able to stop it.
What scared her most of all was that there were times when she hadn't wanted him to stop.
Every thought that Donovan had put into her brain was tinged with darkness. Evil, filthy thoughts that had been hers but not hers. Helpless. That's what she had been. Completely, utterly helpless.
"You need to forget about it," was Max's advice. They stood together, very close to each other, outside of the wooden stick and thatch-roofed Council Hall of the Ursallin here on Gallandrian. "None of that was your fault."
"I very nearly killed both of you," she said, miserably.
"You wouldn't have gotten to that part until after you had sexed me into oblivion."
She shrugged a
slim shoulder, no longer even caring that she stood there in just her skin. Her breasts moved with that motion and she actually felt a sort of freedom for letting them loose like this. "Actually his plan was to make me work you both over…into oblivion, as you say. Then kill you."
"Oh," Max said softly. "Well. At least I would have died with a smile on my face."
He stepped closer to her and she shifted her weight away from him. She had been careful not to touch him since crossing over into Gallandrian. All the times that she had touched him when Donovan had control of her, the electric shocks had been missing. Skin to skin contact with the werebears was supposed to feel like holding a live wire, at least for her. It hadn't when the Shift had control of her body and that scared her to death. What if having that damned thing in her had changed her for good? Forever?
"What do we do now?" she asked Max. She'd been holding that question in since they'd arrived here. There had to be something they could do. "I mean, Donovan is still out there, right? In that world of midnight or whatever it was where you left him?"
"Jakal. That's the name of that world. And he can't leave there," Max told her. "You're safe."
Then he reached out for her hand.
She drew it back.
He looked at her, puzzled, and slowly brought his hand back to his thigh. She didn't want to hurt him, or bruise his feelings, or anything. She was just scared. Hopefully he understood that she needed time after what she had gone through.
"So what do you think the Council will do?" she asked, to keep the conversation going.
He shrugged. "We have the Primus Secor trapped in a world where nothing else exists. He can't make his own portal to anywhere. That's what he needed your body for. If he hadn't been so intent on torturing me and Arcan first and using you to do it, then he could have made you open a rift to anywhere."
"Max," she said sourly, "I don't know how to do that."
"You didn't know how to fight a Shift just a month ago, either, but suddenly you're this bad-ass Black woman who can rip through two or three of them without breaking a sweat. I'm betting you can do the portals just as easily as we can. Maybe easier."
She smirked at him. "Bad-ass Black woman?"
He echoed her smile. "Too much?"
Her heart softened. Somehow hearing this big White boy call her that felt so right. It made her feel all right again. "No, it's not too much. It's exactly what I wanted to hear." She held his eyes for a moment, until the desire to hold him and do things to him was starting to overwhelm her. "Wait, so that's what he wanted me for? To make a bridge to here?"
"That's why." Max crossed his arms and toed the dirt at his feet. "Lucky for you, Arcan and I figured it out. We knew what he wanted from you. That's why Arcan brought us to Jakal. The, uh, midnight world where we were. We weren't going to risk bringing him right where he wanted to go. We were distracting him with all that stuff we were saying. The real things we had to say we did silently."
"With your bear speak," she said. That damned communication they could do by reading each other's faces. Of course. "So then why did he vomit himself out of me if I could make a bridge myself?"
The taste of him in her mouth was still there. Not that she wasn't glad he was gone, but the question was…why?
Max blinked as he thought about it and then simply shook his head. "I don't know. He had you. He could have used you at any point to tear into Gallandrian and he didn't. Back on your Earth I could understand it. He was waiting to torment us. But on Jakal? I don't know. Maybe you were fighting him too hard. Maybe he was losing control of you. Or maybe there's something else going on that we don't know about. All I know is, this is our chance."
"Huh? What chance?"
"Don't you see?" He stepped into her personal space, and this time she didn't move away. She could feel the heat of his body radiating against hers, and she liked the way it felt. "He's trapped in a space where no one else lives. Nothing exists in Jakal. We have the Primus Secor trapped. Completely trapped. We've never had this chance before. We can take the war to him on our terms now. We can end this."
"By killing him," she said flatly.
The look on his face would have been the same if she had hit him between the eyes with a two-by-four. "Of course, by killing him, Nikki. He needs to die."
"But didn't you tell me that the Primus Secor and the Ursallin are linked? If one of your races is destroyed, both of them are destroyed, or whatever? Mutually assured destruction? DefCon Five and the nuclear solution?"
"I, uh, really don't understand most of that but if you're talking about the ancestral link between us and the Shifts, then yes, there will be consequences. We'll deal with them. Whatever comes of it, this will be worth it. To stop the one being in the universe that will never stop until each and every Ursallin is dead? How can we not take that chance?"
She heard what he was saying, and she knew he was right. Of course he was right. This whole mess had started because of an attempt to exterminate the Ursallin. Death on the scale of genocide. If they had the chance to end their war, today, why shouldn't they be allowed to protect themselves? "I get all that, Max, I really do. But, still—"
"It doesn't matter now," Arcan's smooth and deep voice broke in. He was walking across the open space around the meeting hall toward them. His face was darker than usual, his naked ebony skin flushed, his eyes angry. "None of it matters."
"What are you talking about?" Max demanded, fisting his hands at his sides. "What did the Council say? What is our direction?"
Arcan stopped in front of them, his face set in stone. He turned to Nikki for just a few seconds and then looked back to Max. "Our direction is to sit still and do nothing. Those are the orders of the Council."
"What?" Max roared. He strode forward like he was intent on breaking into the Council's Meeting Hall all by himself and bashing their heads together until they saw reason.
Arcan caught him by the arm, and Nikki would have been willing to lay money down that there was no way for Arcan to restrain Max, but somehow the leaner man managed to do just that. "Stay your hand, Maximillian," he said. "The Council has spoken. We must follow the word of the Council."
"My baby bear tooth we do!" Max growled, pulling away from Arcan's grip finally. "I will not sit here and let that evil continue to live! What was the Council thinking?"
With a flash, Arcan's arm swept around, catching Max in the side of the head with a hard strike that sent him tumbling to the ground. Standing over him, Arcan bent down at the waist and jabbed his finger into Max's face. "You will not disobey the Council! Their word is law, and they have spoken!"
Then he stood back up straight and turned away, his set expression slipping for just a moment before he schooled it back into place. "The Council has spoken," he repeated. "It's over."
Chapter 15
Later that night, in the guest hut that she and Max had been put in, Nikki lay on his bed. She had to wonder what the mattress was stuffed with, since the Ursallin shunned using any part of any animal in their things. No goose feathers here. They couldn't even make clothes out of animal skins. They sure weren't going to strip a few dozen geese or ducks to stuff a bed.
"You should stop pacing before you wear a path into that floor," she told Max.
He looked over at her, his eyes flashing at her just like an animal's, like his bear eyes did when they caught the sunlight. Then he turned back to his pacing across the packed dirt floor.
"Max, seriously. Come lay down with me. I need to sleep but I can't do it if you keep marching like that."
"I can't help it!" he told her. "This isn't right. We've been fighting for our survival for generations. Since before my great-grandfather's time and longer. Now we have the chance to end it all and the Council says no? They wouldn't even give me an audience when I asked to discuss it with them."
Nikki rolled over onto her side, her legs folded over themselves, her hand draped across her hip. She so wished that he would pay attention to the way her nipples
had peaked and her full, round breasts were begging to be manhandled. She'd been dropping hints for him to get into bed with her for over an hour now and the only ploy she had left was to jump on him and start dry humping his leg to get his attention.
She was willing to find out if she was still herself, after what Donovan had done to her. She needed Max's help to do that. Sex would make everything all right again. Wouldn't it?
"I can't just stay here and do nothing!" he said, for like the tenth time. "I have to make sure Donovan is stopped for good. Forever."
"But, isn't he kind of stopped right where he is?" she asked.
He spun on his heel. "What do you mean?"
"Well," she said, "Donovan is stuck in Hyena, right?"
"Jakal," Max corrected with a little smile.
"Right. That. He's stuck in that Jakal world with no way to get out. If no one else lives there and no one has any reason to go there can't you just…I don't know. Block the place off or something? Put up a big no-trespassing sign? Just keep everyone out and keep him there? Problem solved, sounds like to me. Isn't that just as good as him being dead?"
Max was already shaking his head back and forth, his eyes troubled. "No. If we leave him there, no matter how long it takes, he'll find a way out again. He'll find a way to come back and start killing us. Only then, his hatred will be stronger. This needs to end. Now."
"Well, it’s not like you can go there and kill him yourself."
Max stopped his pacing so quickly that he stumbled and had to catch himself. He blinked and rubbed his chin with one hand. Then he nodded to himself like someone had just given him the answer to some impossible question.
"You, Nikki Bryant," he said to her, "are a genius."
"Well now I know that," she said, straightening her shoulders and lifting her head up higher. "Um, but why don't you tell me why you think I'm a genius so we're both on the same page and all."
He rushed over to her in three long steps and kissed the top of her head. "Because you understand me. That was a great idea. Stay here and I'll be right back."
"You'll be back? Where are you going?" she called after him. He was already out the door, his tight ass flexing with each powerful stride.
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