Gone. Even if her uncertainty lingered, her energies not quite yet under her own control.
She could have used that light to hunt for her clothes, but she couldn’t bring herself to care that they were askew or missing. Not with the lingering sensation of Trevarr’s newly bright energies imprinted on her being. “You taste different.”
“No longer shackled.”
They both knew he didn’t mean the glyphed metal cuffs from Ghehera. Older constraints, just as cruel.
She ran a hand over the dip beneath his collarbone, touching warm, smooth skin that didn’t flinch so much as shiver beneath her fingertips. “They were afraid of you from the start.” She looked up to his face, finding his expression unreadable. “So they made you into something that they farking well ought to be afraid of.”
“Just so.” A quick tension passed through his shoulders—breath caught and held, jaw briefly set. And then he exhaled again. “Luckily for them, I have other things to do.”
“For now.” She said it when he didn’t. Going home. Stopping the creature that had turned into a carnivorous mountain.
But she wasn’t ready yet. Wasn’t settled in herself, wasn’t stabilized. And Trevarr had just escaped a tortuous prison and then...
Evolved.
“We can’t go yet, can we?” she asked it a little brokenly, already knowing the answer. Not yet. Not if they wanted to live through the journey. Not if they wanted to be any good when they got there.
He answered with silence, holding her face between his hands. His thumbs followed the slant of her cheekbones, and he looked at her as if from entirely new eyes—and maybe they were, for all she knew. He cupped her shoulders and stroked down her sides, offering a warmth that reached through the thin ribbed tank shirt she somehow still wore. A firm touch, and a possessive one. Entirely physical, as if the other in him had been sated. Down over her stomach, as if marking every inch of her. Down past her waist, where his thumbs rested over the crest of her hips and closed tightly enough to give a sudden tug. One leg fell off the bed and he nudged it aside, his expression grown darker. “She showed you what the gauntlet holds of me.”
She didn’t have to ask who. Anjhela. Of course, Anjhela.
“I saw...” she started, and then shook her head. “I saw what she showed me—something she thought she could use against me. It didn’t work that way.”
“Atreya,” he said, his voice so low she barely heard it, “she has had me across days—across your weeks and months. She has—”
“Hey,” Garrie said, sudden anger rising—not at him. For him. “I know what she did. I felt what she did. That’s on her, not you. I don’t even know how you’re still alive, never mind still sane—”
“I live because of you,” he said, and his hold went tight enough to hurt—if only for a moment, until he realized and softened his hands. “I live for you. But those days with Anjhela...I need them gone.”
She got it, then. She gave him a small, fierce grin. “Then let’s make them gone.”
“Yes,” he said, and breathed on her again, all damp warmth and tingling energy, before kissing her belly through the shirt.
“Right,” she squeaked. “Good start.” She squirmed, breathing in energy, breathing out pleasure. “You just go...right...ahead...”
By then he’d pushed her shirt up, feeding her the particular new flavor of his energies, rousing hot sensation along every nerve, fluttering along her spine to gather in her chest and right up into the center of her being.
“Give me that.” She barely found breath to say the words. “Give me—”
He gave. All of himself, with a satisfying growl. She met him with enthusiasm, wrenching away the fraying vestiges of his control, and he bared his teeth, briefly wrestling to regain it. Briefly. She gave a little twist down along the energies that connected them.
Then he gasped and gave way to frenzy, reaching for the wild ecstasy between them—he with snarling intensity, she with demanding cries, wanting—needing—and caught up in something bigger than she’d ever been.
She trembled on that edge, filled with almost, and cried disbelief when he somehow stilled himself, the effort of it written in every muscle and in the clench of his jaw and the flare of nostril and the imprint of his fingers at her waist. “Atreya,” he said, and his whole body shook. “Atreya, look at me. Look.”
She did it with a snarl. Looking.
And found herself encompassed in wings and feathers and wreathed in ethereal smoke. A glimpse of fang, a bristle of eyelash, of tidy ears flattened to a streamlined skull and eyes of wondrous silver and thin cat’s eye pupils. The ethereal imprint of a being far too large for this space, full of muscle and sinew, shades of black and charcoal and silver.
For that moment she froze. Her voice barely made it to a breathless whisper. “I see you. I see you.”
And the energies that were his again became theirs. He poured himself into her, touching her everywhere and anywhere until she overflowed into an arching completion, the beauty of his soul imprinted forever upon her.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 36
To an Alien World
Trevarr sat beside the cot, pulling Garrie into his lap. Smoothing her untamable hair, kissing her eyelids...letting sensations subside.
As if they ever would.
She stirred, feeling her own readiness. Her solidity. Her balance regained, her depletions renewed, her grasp on her energies restored. “We have to—”
“We will.”
Something about the ragged edge of his voice reminded her that this man had been used and tortured for months...that he had only just found the hidden part of himself. Kyrokha, a thing of power and beauty and...well.
Dragon.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “Because I’m okay. I mean, I’m more than okay. Those new energies...why didn’t you tell me?”
“About the glyph-taint?” He’d turned his head, pensive. A profile of hard beauty with strong, defined features, hardly softened by the tangled fall of his hair—a glimpse of tiny braids amidst a fresh gleam of silver, foremost locks cut short to brush the edge of his brow, his cheek, his jaw. Hacked short, more like it. He shifted in an obscure, impatient gesture. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I was young when they took me. I never knew adult normal.”
She made an angry sound, thinking of it, but he was already lost in some other thought. Their imminent return to the mountain, their flight from Ghehera, perhaps the fate of his people...
He glanced her way and said the thing she expected least. “I would not be free, but for your Rhonda Rose.”
She blinked. “Rhonda Rose?”
He stood, lifting her in the same motion—as if just anyone could do that, or set her on the cot so lightly. “When she came to my home—the cave you have seen—I met more than just her spirit. I met you.”
“Me,” Garrie said flatly, reaching for the nearest scrap of clothing—feeling a frisson of anticipation. Well and strong and ready to head back into the waiting fray. Home.
He bent, moving with everything of his normal power and grace—and then a bit more. Brisk, as though he, too, felt the urgency. “I was there, in a bed just like this one. Dying.” He handed over her pants and underwear. “I had tried to defeat the glyphs.”
Garrie took her clothes. “Rhonda Rose?”
“She helped heal me. It...took a long time.”
By which he meant a very long time, and by which she understood the strength of the glyphs they’d just broken. The courage it had taken to try again. But...
“Rhonda Rose?”
He fastened his pants. “She was new to this place. She needed safety.”
“She left me to...come here?” Garrie stood on the bed and wriggled her clothes on, zipping and buttoning and hopping down to find her shoes. And still...not quite fathoming it all, no matter how she’d already known of their connection. “In some massive, cosmic coincidence, she came here?”
He picked up the satchel, pulling out
the shirt to tug over his head—tucking it in, and then finding the belt he’d been missing all this time. For the first time she understood the abstract design of the buckle—the sweeping impression of wing and fang and claw. “She kept me company. She taught me your language. She told me stories.”
“Stories,” Garrie said, suddenly flipping things into place in her mind. “About me.”
“Among other things.” He said it as casually as if he wasn’t filling in some massive missing link—a missing piece of her life, and the once-living woman she’d loved. “I made many trips to your world after that—refining language, hunting runaways for Ghehera—but on that day, in that park...”
“You were looking for me.” She said it partly in wonder and partly through gritted teeth. Not that he realized it yet. Too busy with his things, now pulling out the oskhila. “Not just any old reckoner, but me in particular. How could you not mention that?”
The oskhila went into a coat pocket. “How did it matter?”
Garrie made a sound of pure exasperation. “You really didn’t know her at all, did you?”
He turned the oskhila in his hand, frowning at her, and she laughed, closing on him to straighten the shirt, clearing his hair from the collar. “She wouldn’t have told you about me if she hadn’t trusted you. And if I’d known she trusted you, then it would have been easier for me to trust you, back when you got here. Easier for my crew, too.” She shook her head. “But you know what it really means, don’t you?”
This time he just looked at her, and she understood that one well enough. He wasn’t even going to guess. She managed a laugh. “She wanted you to look for me.” As Trevarr’s eyes narrowed slightly, Garrie tossed back her head and shouted, “I hope you’re happy, Rhonda Rose!” She dropped her voice to a mutter. “Wherever the hell you are.”
Trevarr was quick enough to grasp her chin, holding her face to the diffuse lumelight. “Is this crying? Because there is no time for such things.” She gathered herself to snarl at him, only to be cut short when he bent to take a kiss from her. “Later. We will talk of her.”
She still glared, nonetheless conceding the point. Another internal once-over told her what she already knew—not quite herself any longer, but no whirling. No faltering. Solid.
She gave him the same once over and found she wasn’t as certain. She’d seen the vague lump on his arm, broken bone that that hadn’t healed quite cleanly; his pants were split above the knee, the terrible lerkhet wound still markedly evident. Both injuries had been well on their way to healing, helped along by Sklayne, when Ghehera had taken him from Sedona—but Anjhela hadn’t hesitated to use those injuries to her advantage. I owe her one.
He ignored her scrutiny, rummaging in a storage drawer next to pull out a braided leather tie. Wrapped just below his knee, it pinned the pants in place. Poking in another corner netted him a pair of boots—just over ankle high, perhaps not as large in the foot as the ones she was used to. He stomped them into place, shrugged the duster on, dropped the satchel over his shoulder, and nodded toward what she presumed to be the cave exit.
“Okay then,” she said. “Discussion time must be over. Action Reckoner and Bounty Hunter to the rescue!”
“Sometimes,” he said, leading the way, “I have no understanding of you at all.”
“Good,” she muttered. “Turnabout is totally fair play.” And followed him out to an alien world.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 37
The Stirrings of Dissent
Rhonda Rose
Yes, I had left her—my student, my protege, the closest thing I would ever have to a daughter.
But in a way, I had done nothing of the sort. I had left so much of myself behind with her, whether she knew it or not. And I had left so much of myself behind with him. Deliberately, pushing it onto him and into him in a way that made his bright companion more than curious. “She will not welcome you,” I had told him in the end. “But if ever there is a thing you cannot handle, she is the only one who can help.”
It had been past time to leave her, little as I had seen it in the moment. Lisa had become strong—so strong. Stronger than me, and that was a thing I could never let her know. And I could see the bigger picture now—how the skills I learned in my physical life had prepared me for my role with young Lisa, and how the skills she would push me into learning would prepare me for this new existence—a role in which I could now reach the worlds closest to my own in this layered ethereal existence, glimpsing the stirrings of dissent and trouble that will soon reach out to trouble mine.
A role in which I might also glimpse the one who, with Garrie, might well make the difference in the struggles to follow.
Or perhaps not. That, I have feared, I will never have the privilege to know.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 38
No Longer an Option
They emerged from the little storage cellar into an early dawn where the world was wreathed in a black fog breathing with unearthly tides, ebbing and flowing and currently crawling through thick forests of dark, drooping pine. Unfamiliar rustlings and bird song surrounded them but did not intrude into the razed earth where Solchran had once stood.
Garrie couldn’t help herself. Even knowing this was a null zone, she reached for silence—hiding herself, and cloaking Trevarr while she was at it.
Ghehera would be looking for them. Always looking for them.
“Steady,” Trevarr said, although she hadn’t said anything. Just the tiniest squeak. He tucked her up against his chest, resting an arm around her like a bandolier—just as he’d done the first time he’d brought her to this world. “Your hand,” he requested of her, and held out the oskhila, his fingers falling more naturally into place than hers ever would. She, after all, was the one who knew their destination.
She placed her hand over his. A brief stutter of awareness tripped her heart into gear; an awareness of what she’d done in bringing herself here and the stakes resting on her ability to take them back.
His fingers overlapped hers from beneath the device before he released it to her. Absurdly, the touch steadied her. “I will provide the push.” His arm tightened briefly across her shoulder—a warning. “Atreya. No matter your silence—they may well follow us. They will most certainly be looking for oskhila activity.”
“Let them follow,” she snapped, quite suddenly sick of the Ghehera tribunal. Bullies, all of them, these unseen humans who had so controlled her recent life and who had always controlled Trevarr’s. Slavers and bigots and despots. “I’ll feed them to the mountain.”
He laughed, short and silent, and she snapped at him, too. “You see if I don’t!”
“Think of the destination,” he reminded her, his breath stirring her hair. She was pretty sure she heard a smile in those words. Well, fine. Action Reckoner was ready.
She turned her thoughts to the shelter area—outside the shelter, where the mountain entity hadn’t yet claimed the ground.
At least, not when she’d left it.
She thought of the gritty earth, the clumpy bunchgrasses, the chamisa just coming into bloom. She remembered the scent of needle-covered ground and the pines themselves, and the startling bright scarlet penstemons claiming the understory edges.
His tightened grasp was her only warning. Rainbow intensity washed the forest away, and the no-longer-quite-so-startling curtain of darkness dripped down to extinguish light and sound and sensation.
She remembered not to scream.
And because she wasn’t screaming, she was perfectly able to hear the commotion when her feet pressed against gritty earth and the scent of hot, high pine filled her nose. She opened her eyes to see the shelter and the ugly bulge of broken kyrokha energies around it—and for the first time she truly understood how beautiful the entity had once been, and felt compassion for it.
“Unicorn farts!” Drew said. “That rainbow thing is exactly what they would look like!” He stood a little farther downhill from the shelt
er than she and Trevarr, although he took a hasty step back upon sighting them. “Trevarr,” he said, amidst welcoming cries from the shelter and Lucia’s voice crying out Garrie’s name in relief and welcome. “Oh. Nice to see you?”
Garrie’s heart surged at the sight of Lucia—still safe, if still trapped—and she waved back, squelching the startling urge to run in for a tremendous hug because oh, right, that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? The thing she’d come here to fix.
She ducked out from under Trevarr’s arm, turning a three-sixty to assess the situation—late afternoon in the shadow of the mountain, the kyrokha energies more or less as she’d left them, the sheltered group still safe but several hours along into their fear, disbelief, and emotional limits—and yes, Drew had arrived. He wore a US Forest Service ball cap, likely pulled from Rick’s service vehicle—which, it seemed, had been hotwired and pulled across the parking lot entrance to reinforce the closed gate.
Farking good idea.
*Treyyyyyyyyyyy!* Sklayne spurted out from beneath the entity, taking advantage of the Secret Recipe-soaked ground—ground that would be no more welcoming to Sklayne, should he actually make contact, than to the entity. *TREYYYYYYY!*
Sparkling energy wound itself around Trevarr, spiraling up and then down, pinballing off a nearby tree and then back again to coalesce into not-cat only an instant before reaching Trevarr again. A leg-stropping, tail-quivering, whisker-bristling not-cat with sparks running all the way down his spine and flicking off the end of that tail.
“Did you miss me, little brother?” Trevarr bent, scooped up the cat and knuckled the top of that big-eared, wedge-shaped head.
Sklayne purred in wild abandon, eyes squinched closed—but only until he realized what he was doing. Then he sprang from Trevarr’s loose grasp and landed on all fours to flatten his ears and crouch with his eyes narrowed to slits of annoyance. “Sktt!” he said. *Not little. MIGHTY.*
“Wait,” said the young guy from the shelter. “Where did that cat come from? And why the fuck are you petting it instead of doing something about us?”
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