Emerald Twilight: Bundled Edition

by Ashley, Celia

  She felt them coming before the burning light of the crystals made their presence evident. Glancing back, she witnessed a tide of blackness surge over the wall, obliterating the wall’s gray shadow and a good deal of the darker landing strip in front of it. So many more than had been in the clearing with Burke. Forget expendability. If they couldn’t outrun the creatures the battle was already lost.

  So far, though, her head remained clear. Stealing a sidelong glance at Emil, she saw he, too, remained focused on the ship and had not faltered. Calypso, light-footed, graceful, and leading the way, showed no signs of confusion. Neither did Burke. If only they could stay lucid and swift and nothing happened to cause anyone to stumble…

  Hallie!

  Hallie swore, sounding more like Burke than herself in the vibrant use of profanity. Beside her Burke laughed in slanted amusement, echoed by Emil on his other side.

  Almost there, almost there, almost there, she chanted silently, gaze fixed on the looming body of the ship as she refused to look back toward the creatures. Almost there.

  “What is that?”

  The question rushed from her mouth before her mind had time to register what lay on the ground ahead. Calypso veered away with a little shriek. Burke gripped her arm as she hurried back in his direction. He turned her away, directing Hallie and Emil to follow.

  “That not—”

  “Never mind. I warned all of you not to look at anything up here. Just go. Go!”

  Breathing labored, Hallie clutched her bruised ribs with one hand, her weapon in the other, eyes averted from the mangled horror on the ground as they hurried around toward the far side of the cargo transport. It appeared sealed tight with no way to gain entrance.

  “Burke?”

  “Here,” he said, urging them to a closed portal. “I watched it unload and witnessed the automated sequence.”

  As Burke worked his way through the code, Hallie turned to face the black tide flowing toward them. The ends of the raised lathesa burned in a heatless white lambency in the darkened atmosphere. Hallie felt her consciousness drift and recalled herself with fierce will. Behind her Burke swore as he lost his concentration and returned to the code entry. Emil had started to hum a disjointed tune under his breath that sounded like a remnant of childhood. Calypso stayed silent, even her respiration subdued. Hallie began to pray.

  Gaze fixed firmly on the concerted approach of humanoid beasts, she realized she had possibly not given enough credence to intelligence. Animals in a pack would scatter and the remnants return to band together. What she viewed was now far more than the dozen or so who had held Burke captive. A number countless in the twilight had assembled like a contingent of an advancing army. Even so, they moved without form, slowly, eerily silent, perhaps cautious of the glowing weapon in her hand, but sheer numbers would win the day if the creatures overran them.

  “Please hurry, Burke,” she ground out through clenched teeth.

  “Nearly have it.”

  She perceived the eyes of the foremost now, palely luminous and as blue-green as her own. Why hadn’t she noticed that? The eyes were familiar in shape, in expression, not frightening at all. Even the faces she recalled as being so horribly formed were merely child-like and…different. She took a step forward, lowering her weapon to waist level.

  Don’t do it, a voice inside her head said. Someone will die here.

  “Skelly?” she asked aloud, disoriented. She was dreaming. Dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. The word visibly spiraled away in her head, into the darkness, into starless space.

  “Hallie!”

  Hallie, Hallie, Hallie!

  Suddenly she was off of her feet, hurtling through the air, breathless, erupting in pain and terror and confusion. Breath forced from her lungs as she struck a hard surface. She rolled away, the lathesa broken in two and clutched in her hands. A rumbling beneath her head caused her skull to vibrate. And then there was light, momentarily blinding, followed by Burke’s face leaning close over her own.

  She sat up and backed her hips to the wall. “Are you real?”

  He lurched closer, kissing her briefly but powerfully on the mouth. “You bet I am. We’re inside, Hallie. Sit a moment while I see what I can do to get this baby going.”

  Sucking in her breath, Hallie stared at the hatch door as Burke darted away. She heard the sounds of large alien bodies hurtling against the metal, dulled by the thickness of the ship’s construction. To her right Emil and Calypso stood clutching one another, wide-eyed. In her hands the broken lathesa glowed still, but with decreasing intensity.

  “Help me up,” she directed Emil. “I have to see what Burke needs.”

  They all huddled aft into the cabin, Hallie holding the other two back with her stance to give Burke room. He sat in the pilot’s seat, hunched over in study of the control panel, his face, his hands, his uniform crusted with soil and dried blood.

  “You’re a mess,” she said.

  He shot her a sidelong glance, refraining from comment.

  “If this thing is programmed to run a certain route, can you override the system to get it to take off now?” Emil said behind her. “Also, there’s going to be security clearance to plug, flight plans to alter, any number of issues to be addressed to just get us off this damned planet. If you need help, I can give it.”

  Hallie turned to gape at him in surprise.

  “Have you some experience in this area?” Burke asked, expression quite clearly saying, why are you just telling me this now?

  “I was a jeweler, yes, but the crime that landed me in here was a bit of piracy having to do with systems such as these.” Emil jerked his fleshy chin at the panel.

  “You said you were innocent of any crime,” Hallie accused him without heat. “That we were all innocent.”

  “You are innocent, girlie,” Emil drawled, “if you believed that.”

  “Forget it,” Burke interrupted. “Emil, get over here and give me a hand. Hallie, I’m going to have to ask you and Calypso to keep an eye on that hatch to make sure there’s no breach.”

  Hallie nodded, turning to head back. Outside the thick, reinforced vitrine shield something flew up and landed on the panel, then shuddered along the incline leaving a trail of what appeared to be blood and debris.

  “No look, Hallie,” Calypso said suddenly and took her arm, steering her away. Hallie had already observed the remnants of a face and knew exactly who she had seen. Her gut clenched. She swallowed back the bile of her twisting empty stomach.

  “Skelly,” she whispered.

  “Not him,” Calypso stated flatly. “You wrong, Hallie. Go. Go now. Do what Burke say.”

  With the noise of attack still evident, the hatch held. So far. Hallie tried not to think of the creatures outside and what they had done to Skelly. It didn’t matter what he had effected against her, or attempted to carry out against Burke. Death was one thing, what she had just witnessed quite another.

  “Hallie all right?”

  “Hallie fine.” Hallie slid wearily to the floor with the broken halves of the lathesa held in one hand. “How about you Calypso? How are you holding up?”

  A faint yellow color returned to the dancer’s eyes. “Holding.” She dropped down with undiminished grace to sit beside Hallie and took one half of the sundered weapon from her. Calypso laid it across her knees, holding it tightly.

  The massive sounds of bumping and scrabbling over metal filled the area, but the voices on the edge of thought were distant now, perhaps shielded from deep penetration by the ship’s exterior. Calypso seemed no longer affected at all by them. The crystals continued their modest but steady radiance. Hallie would never be able to ask her eldest brother where the transparent sound globe and come from, but was infinitely grateful he’d given the trinket to her. The material, its properties, had saved them more than once.

  The ship erupted into life with a thin but powerful whine. Hallie and Calypso leapt to their feet together as Emil appeared in the narrow corridor.

>   “Conlan says to latch onto something fast and hold tight. We’re getting the hell out of here.”

  EMERALD TWILIGHT – SEASON FIVE

  SOAR FROM DARKNESS

  I.

  ONE MOMENT TO BREATHE

  The ship, outfitted for use with a crew, possessed six tiny chambers, a galley and hygienic facilities. The galley had been empty of sustenance, but at least there had been water on the ship, and plenty of it, recycled and potable. They had eaten the last of their rations which Calypso, with immense foresight, had removed from Hallie’s abandoned carrysack and shoved into her pockets. After, Hallie and Calypso had each taken a turn in the shower, standing in their clothes until a great deal of the filth had run down the drain. After bodies were also clean, they’d hung their uniforms to dry and retired to separate chambers. Huddled naked, battered and sore on the berth beneath an insulating sheet, Hallie gazed at the metal-ribbed ceiling in the subdued illumination of a series of lumi-discs.

  Alive. All of them alive and thus far free.

  Tears of relief ran down the sides of her face and into her damp hair. No use thinking past the next few days of space flight to what awaited them all upon landing on Citadel. There’d be time enough to deal with those events upon their occurrence.

  At a light tapping on the sheeted metal of the door Hallie sat up, wiping the tears from her face and tucking the sheet beneath her arms. Calypso.

  “Come in.”

  The door slid open, revealing not Calypso but Burke, skin still damp from the hygienic, his toweling cloth wrapped around his waist. Blushing, Hallie dropped her lashes, peering through them at his chest matted with damp curling hair, his long, lean legs, his bare feet, his strong, muscled arms. A rush of heat warmed her skin.

  “Who’s flying this thing?” she asked.

  “For the moment, we’re on auto pilot, although I left Emil keeping an eye on the panel and read-outs.”

  “Emil? Do you—”

  “I trust him, Hallie. Sometimes in life, whether by necessity or choice, decisions are made and actions are taken that aren’t necessarily on the up-and-up. It doesn’t mean we’re bad people, most of us.”

  If he hadn’t uttered his statement so softly, Hallie would have been stung by Burke’s words. “I wasn’t implying anything about trust. I only have concerns about his health.” She shrugged. “I guess the fact he came through the past two days without an episode is a good thing. And I know you’re not ‘bad people’, Burke. You’ve shown me that.”

  He held his dark gaze steady on hers. “Have I?”

  “You know you have.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know any such thing. I have a lot to make up for. Not just to you, but mostly to you. Besides the fact you never should have been incarcerated in Zebulon in the first place, you could have been killed at any point during our escape. In retrospect, I should have left you behind when I fled rather than risk your life.”

  “As I recall, you seriously considered it. I might point out, though, that if you had done so you would likely be dead. Even if you weren’t, you’d be on this transport and I would still be inside the prison with no guarantee of ever getting out.”

  “Good point.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Something dark and hungry and unsettling moved in his eyes. “I’m not here with the best of intentions, Hallie.”

  “I know why you’re here. And your intentions are fine.”

  “You’re injured.”

  “So are you.”

  “At least I’m clean now.”

  “So am I.”

  He took another stride into the chamber. “I’m afraid I might hurt you.”

  “Then be careful.”

  “I don’t only mean right this moment.”

  “Neither do I,” she said.

  He drew a deep, lungful of air that expanded the firm contours of his chest. “And you’re willing to take that risk?”

  “It can’t be any worse than the ones I’ve taken to get where I am, can it?”

  His lips curled. “It might be.”

  “Close the door, Burke.”

  With a fractional hesitation he did so and she stood up, dropping the sheet to the berth. She had never been ashamed of her body, even when Arad had been inclined to point out that she did not possess the Talian ideal of remarkably long limbs, triangular hips, high, round breasts. A result, no doubt, of her mixed blood, but no matter. Even now, marked with bruises and welts and lacerations, she was not ashamed, not of how she looked, not of what she was. When Burke turned from closing the door his gaze moved over her in the soft illumination, holding her, touching her like a caress. Extending her arm, she pulled the towel from around his waist and let it fall.

  She had never seen any man naked but Arad. Despite the fact it was not only a lawful practice but socially encouraged, she had not taken any lovers before her binding ceremony. Kissing, fondling, playing had been the extent of her experience before the night of physical sealing of the bond. She had years of experience in marriage, but none outside of it. And she suddenly was glad of that fact. She wanted Burke to be the only other man in her life, the only man in her life. The knowledge this could possibly be so made her stomach churn with warm confusion.

  “You’re beautiful,” she murmured.

  “Isn’t that my line?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “It should be,” he countered, “because you are.”

  She smiled at him with an odd shyness, head down as she lifted her fingers to slip them into the silky, black hair on his chest, avoiding those places where his flesh had been ravaged. Flesh and muscle and bone delineated beneath the searching caress of her hand. A subterranean rumble of arousal rolled in his chest. When she had removed the towel he already possessed the beginning of an erection, but now he stood as hard as stone. Briefly, and unavoidably, she thought of the last years of her marriage and felt her own muscles tense in involuntary rejection of what she knew she wanted from Burke.

  Arad’s cruelties had been deliberate. Burke was not that man.

  In deliberate exorcism she closed her fingers around him, feeling the pulse of his excitement beneath her hand. The heated, secret places of her body yearned for him, moist and ready, despite her fleeting vacillation. She wanted this, wanted Burke, wanted comfort and satiation, release and closeness, affirmation of herself as a woman, affirmation of Burke’s desire of her as a man.

  “Burke.”

  “Take your time, sweetheart. I don’t expect any trouble with Emil in the cockpit. We have however long you need.”

  She nodded, moving close to him, pressing her forehead against his chest. She stroked him, gaze fixed on the machinations of her hand, his body’s reaction to it, and her knees trembled. His fingers cupped the back of her head.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  He lifted his other hand then, brushing the hair away from her shoulders, trailing his fingers down her back to her hip. With his thumb he followed the downward curve of the arch of bone, pressing lightly into the flesh where her thigh met her abdomen. He pulled her forward. Releasing him, she slid both arms behind his back.

  “Hallie, look at me.”

  She did, expectant, still, breath held.

  “Ninety-nine percent of the time, I don’t care about anything or anyone. I have my daughter. Once I had a wife and a grandmother and a long time ago, too long ago for my memories, I had parents. One percent isn’t enough to include you.”

  She looked at him, at the soft but concentrated focus of his dark eyes. “No room for me in your life, you mean?”

  “No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that one percent can’t possibly encompass what I want of you in my life. Do you understand? I need…I need to expand. I need to feel as much as you do, to have the ability to care for others that you do, or at least some portion of it. Even a small portion of what you are could make me a stronger man, a better man, than I am.”

>   Rising onto her toes Hallie pushed her fingers into the hair at Burke’s nape and pulled his head down. He willingly obliged, opening his mouth across her own, his heated breath filling the space formed between them as he kissed her, hands on her waist, walking her very gently across the floor towards the berth. As her knees came in contact with the edge she sat down. He knelt in front of her.

  His mouth was warm, his hands warmer, caressing the slightly chilled and stippled flesh of her body. Brushing his palms across her nipples, he cupped her breasts in his hands, studying them with his head cocked slightly to the side, then he leaned forward and began to lightly lick the stiffened peak of the right one in a soft, repetitive manner that made Hallie squirm. No force, no demand, just an infinite pleasure made finite at the place where his tongue met her flesh. With a moan she arched her back and thrust her breasts forward in her own silent demand and he buried his stubbled jaw between them, turning his head to encircle her nipple with his tongue and draw it into his mouth, where he held her flesh captive with his teeth as his tongue continued its torment.

  Hallie closed her eyes, hips moving in a rhythm of longing. In a few moments his mouth was there also, kissing the inside of her thigh, the ridge of her pelvic bone, the slope of her belly, passing with searing intensity across the intricate contours of the flesh between her legs. When she moaned again, dropping back onto her elbows and showing no signs of rejecting his intimacy, he settled down to an obvious enjoyment of the task at hand, if the noises issuing from low in his throat were any indication.

  “Hallie,” he breathed against her, licking, probing, circling, “I don’t know how long I can hold out with you making sounds like that.”

  “Then stop and come up here.”

  “I don’t want to stop,” he said. And to prove it, he didn’t, his large hands encircling her thighs and holding her accessible and undefendable. She came, shuddering explosively. He didn’t wait for her to finish, but rose from his knees and drove himself deep and hard into the heat of her as she continued to climax. She felt the chamber reel around her, not realizing until Burke scrambled up off the berth that it had, in point of fact, done just that.