Retribution: Book Four of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  He put on his best indignant face. “Hey, who do you think I am?”

  She shifted to shoot him a dubious look.

  Seized by the motion of her bare breasts against his abdomen and another surge of mad, overwhelming emotion, he hooked a hand behind her neck and pulled her mouth to his.

  The kiss lingered, deep and tantalizing, with none of the reservation he’d felt the first time (and the second) he’d ever kissed her.

  “That’s better,” she whispered when they came apart for breath, her lips tickling his as they moved. “No cheese required. No need to—”

  He couldn’t help himself.

  “Yay and though we lie here on the bathroom floor,” he declared in a crummy approximation of Shakespearean lyric, “amid soiled rags and the drying stains of our own copious and passionate squalor, I doth admit, my lady, that never such a beauty have I dreamed to lay eyes on.”

  She tried to glare at him but ended up snorting into a breathy chuckle before she managed to get there.

  “You done?” she finally asked.

  “Only if you’re done—”

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t.”

  “—being such an adorable—”

  “You’re the worst.”

  “—little energy-bending cutie p—”

  “Oh, it’s just like the nightmares,” she groaned, laying her head back down on his chest.

  “There, there,” he said, patting the soft, lovely curve of her backside. “It could be worse.”

  She didn’t say anything when she looked up at him, but she didn’t really need to. The worry in her eyes brought them both back to reality.

  It was worse. About as worse as worse could get.

  But for a comfortable little while, they simply allowed themselves to lie there, wrapped in their own thoughts, Jarek tracing the lines of her smooth back over and over again with idle fingertips.

  He wanted to tell her … something. Everything. Yet the words hung in his chest.

  It was almost laughable, the thought that they could lie here, on the post end of what he was reasonably certain had been mutually world-rocking sex, having waded through death to be here—and with plenty more circling around—and yet he could still be hesitant to open his mouth and let the words out.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he finally said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Back in Pittsburgh, when we found the hotel, and again in Columbus. Before that, even. I …”

  She found his free hand with hers and planted a warm kiss on his knuckles before pressing his hand to her cheek.

  Straight-up heart gravy.

  With her touch melting away the consternation in his gut, the words came more readily.

  “The thought of finding you … it was the only thing that kept me going out there, through the Net going down, and the hordes and the fights and …” He closed his eyes, took a breath, and forced the words out. “And everything with Mosen.”

  He felt her shifting, felt her desire to ask about Mosen, but she remained silent, waiting for him to speak his mind.

  “If you hadn’t told me to keep going … If I hadn’t had those words to hold onto …” He shook his head. “I think I would’ve given up out there.”

  She looked up at him then, weighing his words with a worried expression. “But you didn’t.” She squeezed his hand. “And now we’re here. Together.”

  He dropped her gaze. “Not all of us.”

  “Jarek …”

  “I know,” he murmured, pointedly staring at the tiled wall.

  He shouldn’t blame himself for the men who’d died today. Not when he’d fought to what should have been his death trying to defend them. Not when following Rachel and the others west had clearly been the best of their crappy bunch of decisions.

  And Mosen …

  Mosen had been a grown-ass man. He’d known exactly what he’d been doing when he’d decided to run off and go rogue martyr.

  But at the end of the day, no matter how many times he repeated these logical mantras internally …

  How couldn’t he blame himself?

  Best move or no, the decisions that had led them to that farmhouse had been his, and—

  “Do you wanna talk about it?” Rachel asked quietly.

  He honestly didn’t know.

  “Alaric should be the one to hear it,” he finally said.

  Rachel didn’t argue—just laid quietly on his chest, running her fingers along his scars and bruises.

  Jarek was caught in his ruminations, floating midway between the feeling that they should vacate the showers and the desire to drift back off to sleep, when Rachel spoke.

  “I was afraid too, you know.”

  He looked down at the top of her tousled golden head.

  “Just for the record,” she added with a small shrug, too pointedly absorbed in her study of his torso to look up.

  “Right,” Jarek said. “Well, let the record show that I’m not letting your ass out of my sight again”—he glanced down along the curve of her back—“so to speak.”

  She looked up in time to catch him staring and gave him a grin that set his pulse to pounding.

  “No?” she asked softly, inching her way up his torso. She slid her left leg across his lap, hovering just above him. “Not even if you can see my front?”

  “Front’s, uh—”

  She descended on him, pulling his mouth to hers.

  “Front’s good,” he breathed when they broke apart, sliding his hands over her bare hips. “Front’s definitely—Agh!”

  He whipped his gaze around to the sharp sound of something slamming into the door, body tensed, combat reflexes kicking into gear.

  It came again. Three pounds this time.

  Definitely a human fist.

  “Dammit,” Jarek muttered, some of the tension bleeding out of him.

  Just someone in need of the facilities they’d admittedly been hogging, though Rachel had been convinced no one would wander over this way.

  “These facilities are currently in use for, uh, important debriefing operations,” Jarek cried.

  “What?” came a male voice, muffled through the door but clearly disgruntled.

  “What?” Jarek called back. “It’s a shower debrief. You’ve never heard of a sh—”

  Rachel clamped a hand over his mouth. “Could you just use another—”

  “They’re all full!” the guy cried, pounding on the door again. “Please!”

  “Well,” Jarek murmured, “you know what they say about all good things …”

  Rachel arched a brow. “You call that good?”

  “Aww c’mon now. Don’t do that. Don’t do that to a guy.”

  She just kissed his cheek and rose from their nest of clothes in a most alluring fashion to start getting dressed. “I doth admit that you were perfectly satisfactory, my shining knight, but I think the time has come to don thine pan—”

  “Guys, please!” the voice groaned outside the door. “I think I’m gonna hurl!”

  Rachel winced. “Oh, shit.”

  She yanked her jeans the rest of the way up, waving for Jarek to hurry up himself, then extended a hand toward the door to undo whatever she’d done to jam up the lock.

  “Satisfactory,” Jarek grumbled under his breath, rolling one of their towels around his waist and tucking it snug.

  Rachel must’ve either telekinetically opened the door or unlocked it at the exact right moment, because the guy burst through so aggressively he nearly fell over.

  He looked like hell—pale, sweaty, and trembling—and he barely had time to moan half an apology before diving for the showers and letting loose.

  “Oh, shit,” Rachel said again, clutching at her stomach with one hand, her face contorted in squeamish discomfort as she snagged her boots and scrambled for the door.

  Jarek watched it all unfold before picking himself up from the floor, towel wrapped firmly at his waist. “Man, I didn’t think we were that nauseating.”

&nbs
p; “Ugh,” the Resistance soldier groaned between wretches. “Goddamn expired canned goods.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Jarek nodded. “We’ve all been there, man.”

  He was pretty sure the guy was one of the soldiers who’d come in with Alaric and Krogoth’s group. Whatever else they’d been through in the past weeks, it clearly went without saying that the guy was having a rough day.

  So Jarek padded over and gave the heaving man a supportive pat on the back. “There, there, buddy. That’s it. Get it all out.”

  He half-expected the guy to tell him to F off, but instead, the guy just bobbed his head appreciatively.

  “Hey,” he said weakly when he finally had a chance to glance back between heaves, “you’re Jarek Slater.”

  Jarek nodded. “It’s not as impressive as it sounds, trust me.”

  “But you’re the one who—who—”

  The rest of the thought was lost to a violent wretch and the wet smack of vomit striking tile.

  “I might—hrnghh—be a few minutes,” the guy grunted, wiping at his mouth with the back of one hand. “Thanks. And, uh, sorry I interrupted …”

  That made two of them. But Jarek just patted the guy’s back.

  “You got this under control?”

  He bobbed his head. “I got this.”

  “Hell yeah you do, man,” Jarek said with one last pat before turning for Fela’s waiting form. “You’re on Team Earth. Those canned goods aren’t gonna know what hit ’em.”

  Once the soldier had finished and gone to find something with which to clean his mess, the showers were quiet but for the faint pitter-patter of dripping water slowly carrying his pile of sick down the gunky drain.

  Drip. Drip. Drip.

  Then something else. The wet slurp of something shifting near the drain, right in the middle of the watery mess.

  A swollen, wriggling shape emerged from the watery puddle and began slithering its way across the tiles, inch by inch. It was already several feet from the drain when the tremors began. Shakes and convulsions, as if the thing had been gripped by some manner of seizure.

  A faint line began to form along the length of the bulging organism, pale and growing in opacity and depth until it almost looked to bisect the creature. Until, finally, with a jerky shudder and a wet ripping sound, the wriggling thing split in two and ceased its trembling.

  For a long handful of seconds, there was nothing but the dripping of water and vomit in the shower drain.

  Then the two little bits of Kul’Vermaga roused wearily from their exertions and began scaling their slimy way up the wall to the ventilation shaft.

  26

  “What happened to a month?” Jarek asked, staring at Rachel with just enough surprise to tell her that he, like her, had been letting hope ride on their Enochian saviors, even if he hadn’t quite admitted it to himself. “I thought that was the ETA on the wonder twins saving our asses,” he added quietly, his gaze shifting worriedly to the bustle of activity ahead where the wide tunnel was quickly morphing to a functioning barracks. “Shouldn’t we be about set?”

  “Yeah …” Rachel said. “Well, that was the original estimation. It’s been kinda hard to get straight answers out of the comatose merging alien lifeforms, if I’m gonna be honest with you.”

  “Huh,” Jarek said. “Go figure.”

  Rachel wasn’t particularly looking forward to another round of trying to touch base with their transitioning friends. Not after the last psychedelic trip she’d made into raknoth-human-hybrid dreamland.

  But that had been back on the Enochians’ ship, before Pittsburgh. She needed to get back in there and do everything she could to kick their merging asses into gear. Time was short, and they needed all the allies they could get. Especially those of the arcane-alien-super-soldier variety.

  “I probably should’ve gone straight to them when we got back,” Rachel said, speaking quietly now as they reached the edge of the tunnel barracks crowd, “instead of slumming it in the showers with unsavory sorts.”

  “Unsavory, I’ll give you,” Jarek said, sliding into the throng beside her. “But I submit that the shower debriefing was crucial to our success. Very important for morale.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Plus, we don’t have to die with blue balls now.”

  She frowned. “Are you referring to yourself collectively, or …?”

  “What? You’re telling me you don’t believe in lady blue balls?”

  She shook her head. “You really know how to make a girl feel special, you know that?”

  He stopped to help a few soldiers scoot a big storage crate over to the wall, then return to her palms held up. “What? Guy doesn’t get any credit for watching you sleep and writing you some touching bathroom-floor poetry?”

  A smile pulled across her mouth. “Okay. Maybe a few points.”

  Jarek made a victorious gesture with an upheld fist.

  “Like two points,” she added. “Maybe. Slumdog Romeo.”

  Jarek shrugged off the clarification as they pushed their way back into the crowd, bound for the Enochians’ barracks.

  His good mood was a welcome sight, even if she could still feel the weight of Mosen and everything else ghosting along not so far behind him.

  That good mood was also a bit contagious, it seemed. Or maybe it was just that her own good mood had decided to make a rare appearance. Either way, it was probably more than just a transient shot of the smilies riding through her.

  No matter what superficial shenanigans Jarek might play at with his mouth, his eyes seemed to have abandoned any attempt at downplaying how he really felt about her. And the things he’d told her back there, before they’d been so abruptly interrupted …

  She wasn’t used to this. And she certainly wasn’t sure what to do with the feelings roiling through her own head and heart.

  Part of her, and not a small part, was reticent to even acknowledge it—to believe that anyone could ever feel so strongly about her. But she’d seen it right there in his eyes.

  For some reason that was frankly beyond easy comprehension, Jarek loved her.

  It wasn’t such a bad realization to come to.

  The smile pulling at her lips only widened when she noticed Pryce ahead, talking some poor Resistance soldier’s ear off about the functions of the thick springs visible under the adjacent building and the flexible connectors on some of the nearby pipes.

  Jarek, seeing the same, shot her a knowing grin that only stirred the odd swirl of excited emotions in her chest.

  If only for a moment, Rachel actually felt happy. Truly happy, despite the doom hanging over their heads. Felt for the first time, in fact, like they might even have half a shot at pulling through this thing.

  But maybe that was the endorphins talking. God knew it had been long enough since she’d had any kind of sexual release. And never one so deeply meaningful and satisfying, despite what teasing jabs she might make at Jarek.

  Or maybe it was simply her mind pulling magic tricks to keep her from collapsing under the weight of despair.

  Either way, she was glad to roll with it for the time being.

  Pryce caught sight of them and hurried over with an excited wave. He drew up just short of them, his excitement shifting to thoughtful observation as he looked back and forth between them.

  “Ah,” he finally said.

  “Ah, what, you old kook?” Jarek asked, though the meaning of the single syllable had somehow been as transparent as Jarek’s uncharacteristically shifty expression currently was.

  “Ah, nothing.” Pryce shook his head, looking sheepish. “Nothing at all.”

  “Ah, Jesus,” Rachel sighed. “I’m going to check on the Enochians. You children can stay here and fist bump if you want.”

  “But mooomm,” Jarek said, hurrying after her, “I wanna see the Enochians too!”

  “And I despise fist bumps,” Pryce added indignantly, falling in on their heels.

  “Ugh.” Rachel shook her head and f
rowned at Jarek. “Please never call me that again, by the way.”

  Jarek nodded thoughtfully, looking less than pleased with his own choice of words. “Yeah, that’s fair enough.”

  When they reached their destination, the Enochians were glad to see them.

  A little too glad.

  With the exceptions of Franco, who sat at Elise’s cot, Phineas, who lounged in the nearby corner, and a few of Krogoth’s raknoth, who conversed quietly in their own corner, most of the eyes in the room seemed to be shifting back and forth between her and Jarek in a way that made her want to hit them all with a cold blast of air, just to change the topic.

  “Hey, mazel tov!” Johnny finally cried, breaking the silence.

  “’Bout time,” Phineas rumbled from his corner without looking up.

  Rachel swore she heard a muttered, “Hear, hear,” from Pryce behind them.

  She didn’t dignify them all with an eye roll.

  Jarek looked around the room. “Christ, what are you all, sex hounds?”

  “Fiends, maybe,” Johnny said, shrugging when Lea, who sat beside him on a supply crate, shot him a dubious look.

  “Mostly, they just have eyes,” Franco said.

  “We’ve had a little bet going on for a while now,” Johnny said, pointing back and forth between himself and Lea. “Pretty much since I first met you guys and a certain shining angel tended to my raknoth-pummeled ribs,” he added, patting Lea’s thigh. “Looks like someone owes me a hundred fortune cookies.”

  Lea nodded her apologetic admission of Johnny’s claim.

  “Yeah?” Jarek jabbed a finger to where Johnny’s hand lingered on Lea’s leg. “And who’s betting on you two, fire-crotch?”

  Johnny’s hand slipped from Lea’s leg as if he’d only just realized he’d rested it on a stove top, and both of them blushed and looked away.

  “Delightful as this is,” Rachel said, “we should probably move on to the fact that there are still at least two rakul on our doorstep, and probably a shitload more by now. Just in case anyone forgot.”

  “An astute point, I think,” Franco said, finally looking up from Elise’s peaceful face. “Welcome back, by the way, Jarek. Glad to see you kept your wits about you out there.”