Shadows of Mallachrom, Book 1: Blue Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  "The drugs are given on a specific schedule to avoid toxic shock. They don't want the prisoners to die before they get all the information they can. By tomorrow afternoon, he'll be paralyzed from the neck down and talking about anything and everything. Whatever comes to his mind. We have until around midnight tonight before it's gone too far."

  "As it is," Gan put in, his voice soft with resignation, "Petroc will remember every sensation, thought and word. He'll have nightmares about this for months. He might not thank us, if we get him out."

  "When we get him out," Rhianni said. She looked around the wrecked cabin that had been chosen as their meeting site, lit by handlights, daring the others to deny Petroc hope. "I'm not giving up on him."

  "And you think we are?" a woman blurted from the shadowy corner where she sat. "Do you think we want to lose him? Do you think we don't care?"

  "I don't know what to think!" She stood up. "All I hear from you people is doom. You talk about what can't be done, but I don't hear anybody offering suggestions for what can be done. This is Petroc Ash we're talking about. He'd risk his life for every one of you, but I don't see anyone taking risks for him."

  "What do you think you can do?" A man, silent until then, sneered. "You're not one of us."

  "Yes, she is." Gan yanked Rhianni down into the seat next to him. "She's as deep into this planning as Petroc."

  "She's an outsider."

  "I was born here. My mother was adopted by a Shadow and so was I." She waited for them to disagree, but they watched her like people waiting for a bomb to go off. "Most important, I'm a Rover." She almost laughed at the disbelief on most of those faces. "I have three squadrons waiting to act, and every single one of my men knows how important Petroc is to the entire planet. They'll fight to save him. I don't have to order it. Just ask."

  "Easier said than done," the woman in the corner muttered, but Rhianni dared to believe she saw hope in her eyes.

  "We have to do this. Petroc is too important to leave him there or let him suffer." She took a deep breath. "If we can't break him out, I'll be the one to kill him."

  Petroc's lucid moments grew further apart. He lay on the bare plastic slab that passed for a bed in the vomit-stinking cell and followed the movement of light across the wall--his only proof time passed. His legs had gone numb hours ago. Now the lack of sensation, the heaviness worked past his hips and up his rib cage like clutching roots. He had given up pacing the tiny cell even before the poison had made it impossible. Exercise spread the poison through his tissues.

  He hoped he was deathly allergic. Thinking of the damage he could do when he lost control of his thoughts made him panic. He had read the reports, had talked with the Taken who had survived such drugged interrogation, and with their words had proven themselves innocent, much to the disgust of the authorities. By the time he was fully helpless, he would not be able to smell anything, feel or taste. Only his sense of hearing would remain. He wouldn't even be able to feel his mouth moving as he babbled everything that came to his mind. He hated the thought of anyone he knew seeing him in that state.

  His thoughts turned to Rhianni. There was nothing to do but wait for the next injection and feel his body stolen slowly away from him. For a short while, though, his thoughts and dreams were still his.

  He concentrated on the soft, warm, alive scent of her, the way her eyes sparkled with life and intelligence. Petroc let himself remember the few times he had held her or touched her hand, how it felt to hold her tight and comfort her fear, the warmth and weight of her in his arms. The silk of her hair under his hands became real in his imagination.

  As he retreated deeper into his mind, away from the numbing of his body, Petroc relived the burning, hungry dreams. Of Rhianni coming to him, hot and breathless, clinging to him, both of them tearing their clothes in their eagerness to touch and be touched with nothing separating them. The damp silk of her skin, the spicy taste of her mouth, her breath sweet in his mouth as he kissed her until neither of them could breathe.

  Petroc tried to imagine her reaction if he told her that he loved her. He swore he would tell her, if he got free of this pit. He would make her his mate. He'd carry her off into the deepest untamed heart of the planet, where no one could ever find her. Not even Rovers. Rhianni wasn't ever getting away from him. Not now. He'd sacrificed too much for the Taken and for Mallachrom, and it was time he finally had something of his own. Rhianni was his. Forever. Hadn't she sworn she would come home and nothing would ever come between them again? He smiled at the warmth that flooded him at that resolve.

  He drew a fantasy life in his imagination, where he and Rhianni built a homestead in the middle of Shadow territory. A place where the Black Pit could never intrude. They would hide there with Danil and have children of their own. At least a half dozen. With the Shadows to protect them, they could live in safety.

  He should have stayed with the Shadows when the Liberation came. He should have led the Taken deeper into the wilderness and never let anyone, ever, go back to Core.

  Petroc. We're coming. Hold on. Fight.

  Blue sparkles of energy flickered at the edges of the dizzy blackness that clawed at his mind. He had been trying to enter the Merger since the first injection and couldn't. Why did it work now? And how? And why did the voice that reached him sound like Rhianni's?

  He was just dreaming it all.

  Other Taken had been blocked from the Merger when they were arrested and drugged for interrogation. Either the energy fields around the holding cells blocked the linking of minds, or the drugs shut down the necessary brain centers. Or their enemy could block the Merger.

  Petroc prayed that last option was wrong. An enemy who could block the Merger could eventually enter it, find and identify them all, and maybe destroy them through their dreams.

  Just like the Taken were meant to ultimately join minds and destroy the Black Pit.

  Don't give up on me. I'll die if you--

  The mental voice broke with a choked sob. For a moment, Petroc had the strangest impression Rhianni was there in the room with him.

  He opened his eyes to the empty cell. The sun had set, leaving him nothing but the dim overhead lights. Had he slept? The door rattled and clicked as the guard outside used his key card. Petroc swallowed a groan. Time for another injection. He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. It wasn't hard, when every attempt to move took more effort, exhausting him and making his head pound and spin. From the stronger, dirty, more bitter scent that rolled into the room, the technician giving the shot was a new man. That was one blessing. The last one had amused himself by slapping Petroc's legs to determine the sensory loss.

  The sound of the door shutting startled him. He opened his eyes and looked at his arm. The rolled sleeve and spot of blood gave proof of the injection, but he had felt nothing. A single tear stinking of poisons slipped from his eye.

  He drifted. Petroc had been out on boats on his few visits to the coast. He had never been seasick. Now he understood the sensation. If he had anything in his stomach, he would have lost it as dry heaves worked through his body. He was almost afraid when the clenching in his stomach faded away into emptiness.

  The bed twisted and turned underneath him, spinning him up to the ceiling and around the room.

  The rumbling in his ears grew louder. Petroc listened for a few minutes before he realized the sound didn't come from his staggering heartbeats.

  He opened his eyes. The lights were off. That made no sense. If not for the streak of pale moonlight coming through the tiny slit of window, he would have thought he was going blind from the drugs now.

  Maybe he was, and the moonlight was actually a last bit of warped vision? Maybe he was allergic? He didn't want to die, but why live if he betrayed all Taken?

  What if he betrayed Rhianni and her Rovers? That was worse than dying. It was good he had never told her he wanted her. Their childhood vow had meant everything to him, and if she never knew how he wanted to center his world on her
, the depths of his betrayal wouldn't hurt so badly.

  The room shook. Petroc gagged when his stomach tried to come up his throat. He tried to look around the room and only succeeded in cramping his neck muscles.

  The room shook again, but now he knew it wasn't from the drugs. The walls vibrated.

  An explosion?

  No. He was hallucinating. A bad dream.

  He bit his lips, just to feel something, and tasted salty blood bitter with the poisons that filled his flesh. He closed his eyes and gave in to the drifting sensation that tugged at his mind. It would all be over soon. He tried to imagine the trouble for the technicians when his interrogators found him dead in his cell.

  Voices called his name. Hallucination? He heard flesh hitting flesh, felt dull pressure on his face. Someone slapped him? He kept his eyes closed, so they would think he slept.

  Was it too much to wish they would think him dead? What happened to dead bodies? Were they thrown outside or taken apart for study? Petroc didn't care--he just wanted to be left alone.

  "Petroc, please!" Rhianni's voice startled him. His heart jolted. "You can't leave me."

  She kissed him, hard enough to penetrate the thick, dull sensation in his lips. Their teeth clashed. He tasted blood.

  Rhianni had never kissed him like that in his dreams.

  Gasping, feeling his lungs had frozen, Petroc opened his eyes. He tried to sit up. A terrible empty sensation washed over his body. His vision was fading, his eyes thick with mucous, swollen from the drugs, refusing to focus properly.

  Rhianni's face hovered over him, blurred, floating in a sea of gray. Her mouth worked, but he couldn't hear her. Then her voice flooded his ears and his ears felt like they ruptured. He screamed and pain tore through the thin strand of life in the core of his body.

  "He's awake, now leave him alone!" someone shouted from a long, long way off.

  "Roc, I'm sorry. You had me so scared." Rhianni's face came closer. She brushed hair out of his eyes. She was dressed in sleek, matte black with her long hair pulled back tight from her pale face. Black streaks smeared her cheeks, forehead and nose.

  "Anni?" His throat hurt at the effort to speak. "Get out."

  "We're getting you out." She slid her hands under his shoulders and started to lift him upright.

  The world spun and tilted crazily. Petroc couldn't breathe. He thought he saw Gan's face half a second before the blackness swallowed Rhianni, the gray light and the cell and him.

  You're safe. Hold onto that, Petroc Ash. You're never leaving me, do you hear? I don't care if you think our vow was a stupid game. I'm holding to it. Nothing and no one is ever coming between us again. Do you hear me?

  The fury, the hurt, the tears in Rhianni's voice cut through the dizzy, drowning sensation, like brilliant light and a rope that began to pull him free. Petroc held on with every particle of his will.

  Rhianni watched as the medic, Elgin Clay, nearly yanked Petroc from Gan and Burkan when they carried him out of the remains of the detention cells. Rovers in black night gear ghosted through the darkness of a convenient power outage, weaving around the piles of rubble and gaping holes in pavement and walls. Shifting pillars of smoke still rose from the sites of small, carefully placed explosions.

  They had maybe five more minutes of safe chaos before the Council's elite Enforcers descended on the scene. Rhianni stood guard with her back to Elgin and Petroc and walked a tight circle of protection around them. The Rovers knew what to do. They didn't need her herding them through clean-up and the planned retreat of their raid.

  She was only a medic, after all. A coordinator. The person who bridged the gaps between them and the Taken. Let the experts handle this raid. Her single job was to make sure Elgin could do his job and start healing Petroc.

  Right on time, down to the second, the secondary team fled through a hole in the wall, carrying the security files. Anything remaining in the building was just so much slag and shattered plastic and crystal. Destruction and theft of the files was a diversionary tactic, to cover the real reason for the raid. The other prisoners in detention had been taken away in the nearly three dozen high-powered, sensor-null stealth sleds the Rovers had smuggled planetside. By now, they were all safely away. Petroc was the only one so badly drugged they couldn't move him immediately.

  "That's it." The medic reached back and slapped Rhianni's calf. "Let's move him." He slid his hands under Petroc's arms.

  She took Petroc's feet, keeping her gun tucked into her belt for easy drawing. Her sled waited a few meters away. They reached it without enemies leaping from the darkness. Elgin slid Petroc in and secured him against a bumpy ride while Rhianni took her seat and started the engine.

  An alarm sounded, the first since they had blown the first hole in the detention wing wall fifteen minutes before. Someone had finally jury-rigged power lines to compensate. Security breaches were probably showing up on screens all over the complex now. Rhianni estimated Enforcers would come pouring down the steps from all sides in another minute.

  "Tell everyone--" she began.

  Everywhere she looked, sleek black-clad forms scattered into the darkness around the detention wing.

  "Good raid, Captain. It's been an honor." Elgin saluted her, winked, and darted past the sled.

  He had trained with her father. Rhianni hoped his words were what her father would have said, too.

  No daydreaming allowed, now. She hit the control for the sled door and the lever for the lifters with the same movement. Time to fly. Back to QSE and the safety of her house. To protect Petroc.

  Rhianni learned how to hold a spoon full of water to Petroc's lips so it trickled into his mouth and down his throat. Enough to trigger swallowing, but not so much he would choke. Petroc had to take in water to flush his system. She wiped his face, chest and arms all through that first long day, to remove the sweat that stank of drugs. Despite what anyone said, Rhianni knew he could smell the stink on his body.

  Whether she hallucinated because of her inability to sleep or her concern for him, she knew what he suffered. Every time she turned around, when she least expected it, she had ghost impressions--numb legs, aching head, nauseating smells. Rather than chafe under the discomfort, she welcomed it. Empathy or something else, she didn't care where it came from. It helped her tend to Petroc and remove anything that distressed him.

  She held him close when delirium made him cry out, his head thrashing but the rest of his body heavy with paralysis. When he fell into a natural sleep early that afternoon, she slipped to the floor, held his hand and let her head rest on the mattress.

  Sleep would not come. Rhianni wished it would, so she could avoid the thoughts that work had driven away.

  "I'm not a good Rover," she told the quiet room. Petroc didn't react to the sound of her voice. "I think we're too much alike in some things." She heard the wind grow stronger, bringing the storm that had threatened all day.

  She stiffened when a moan escaped Petroc, sounding like a word. She held still, waiting, listening to his breathing. After ten minutes with no change, she relaxed and eased her body into waiting.

  The quiet reminded her of those hours she had battled to keep her father alive. While he still lived, there was always the chance of a miracle.

  The miracle had been that Joras had a few lucid hours to say good-bye before he slipped into his dying coma. He had told her to go home, marry Petroc and give him lots of grandchildren. Had her father known where her heart would lead? Did death give the dying a tiny glimpse of the future?

  For the first time in her life, she knew what she wanted.

  Petroc. She wanted to be joined so tightly to him physically, mentally, emotionally, neither of them could tell where one stopped and the other started. She wanted the rest of the world to go away, so they could be together with no interference, no emergencies, no danger.

  They would just have to recreate their world to suit them, wouldn't they?

  "It hurts too much," she told him. "Burk
an says I'm special to you. Now was the wrong time to tell me, because this mission isn't over. How can I concentrate on my duty when I can't stop thinking about you?"

  Rhianni held Petroc's wrist, then touched his throat to check his pulse. He twisted his head away from her touch and opened his eyes.

  She stilled, locked into his gaze. She waited for the delirious raving to start. Petroc looked at her, his face blank. Then he blinked and yawned. A weak grin twisted his mouth.

  "What's going on?" he whispered. His eyes closed as if those few words had taken everything out of him.

  "Petroc, are you really awake?" Rhianni knelt on the floor next to his head.

  "Awake. What happened?"

  "You don't remember?" A thread of panic ran through her. Gan told her the drugs would warp Petroc's memories, but not wipe them. Had he been damaged by the drugs?

  "Crystal clear until the fifth injection." Petroc opened his eyes again. "How did I get out in one piece?"

  She squeezed his hand. "Can you feel this?"

  "Nothing. Rhianni, how did I get out of there?"

  "I decided to give my Rovers a practice run."

  "You didn't."

  "Not a hitch. Cae and Cianna are downstairs monitoring the communication bands. No hint that Core suspects who pulled the raid. They think anti-Taken bombed the detention center because all the prisoners were Taken. All presumed dead." She snorted. "The prisoners are presumed dead because there's a heap of rubble where the cells used to be, and it'll take them weeks and manpower they don't have to dig to find the bodies and make sure they really are dead."

  "They won't do anything about it, then."

  "They're terrified. They created a monster and lost control of it."

  He tried to smile, but his mouth trembled. "Shouldn't have risked it." Beads of sweat glistened on his forehead and cheeks.