It seemed unavoidable that the guys were trapped on Earth with her and equally undeniable that they were going to be hounded to death.
It didn’t matter that they hadn’t done a damned thing.
If it was the military that had brought their ship down, they hadn’t even breached American airspace. They couldn’t have because they’d still been virtually at the edge of space when they were hit.
She wasn’t even sure that they’d been over the U.S. when it happened.
But it was whatever they said it was.
She was pretty damned sure, though, that they’d figured out by now that the guys weren’t human, weren’t from Earth.
The first thing they would have done was to order them to strip.
She didn’t know if the guys would understand that order, or agree with it, but if they had they would’ve simply shifted forms and that would have made the soldiers shit their drawers right then and there.
* * * *
“Amber is not in danger of harm and I want to keep it that way,” Alaric finally growled in response to repeated demands from both Luki and Serge to do something beside sitting around stewing over the situation.
Chastened, Luki and Serge glared accusingly at one another and found a place to perch.
“We have a mighty problem here,” Alaric added after a few moments, “that I am trying to figure out.”
“Like the fact that our ship is lying in pieces, with all of our treasure, at the bottom of the sea?” Luki muttered angrily.
Alaric stared at him for several moments. “That also.”
Luki gaped at him. “Also? That is the biggest part of the problem to my mind.”
“No,” Serge disagreed. “The biggest part of the problem is that we have, somehow, stirred things up and now we will be asked to leave and not come back and Amber wanted to stay here.”
Luki surged to his feet. “Well! She cannot stay now! She is breeding our young! You saw how they reacted to us! They will certainly not welcome our off-spring!”
“As I said,” Alaric said dryly. “We have a huge problem.”
Luki paced the tiny cell until Alaric was on the point of beating the fuck out of him and finally flopped on the edge of a bunk again. “We could send out ‘the call’. I have to say that is not something I want to do … or would under any other circumstance.”
Alaric gave him a look of disgust. “You think calling the clans to make war on her people to get us out will help the situation?”
Luki blinked at him, clearly going over the scenario in his head. “But … our ship is trashed! And they did that! And we cannot leave without a pick up!”
Serge frowned. “I am not so certain. Something very strange happened just before the ship broke apart.”
“There is nothing strange about being hit with a fucking missile! They shot us down!”
Serge glared at him. “But the thing that hit the ship came from space—not from the planet, not from below. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
Luki gaped at him in disbelief. “So … you want us to believe it wasn’t her people that did it? That it was … a space bomb?”
Serge shrugged. “Just saying ….”
“Well shut the fuck up!” Luki snarled. “You are always contributing shit to the conversation! The point is we have no fucking ship and no fucking way to leave! It is for certain we could not fly away in anything like the thing we found Amber in!”
“They have sky-ships,” Alaric said pointedly. “We do not know that they do not have a ship that we could steal and leave in.
“In any case, we did not totally destroy the Basinini base on that rock. I think we might find something there. And clearly they have no problem getting that far. Not saying it is not a big part of our problem, but it can be resolved, I believe, fairly simply.”
Luki thought that over for some moments. “Yes. I see your point. Well! I am relieved about that! Because there is that ship we followed here from that other place—not nearly as grand as what we had, but it will do for now.”
“Except that we were to leave Amber and go to help the Dragon clan,” Alaric said. “And now we cannot leave Amber even for that length of time and be certain that she will be safe. In point of fact I am convinced it will not be safe to leave her on her home world at all. I am not certain what we did to stir them up, but they seem very disturbed by our arrival and not likely to settle again anytime soon. And we cannot take our mate into what is likely to be a battle situation—not when she is breeding, certainly.”
Luki stared at him open mouthed with stunned surprise. “Our … mate? You said we were taking her to her home.”
“Yes. Because she has a home and we had some idea of where it was. I did not say we would leave her here! At least, I would have explained it if you could have shut your mouth long enough to listen! We have no home ourselves. It only makes sense to stay with her here when it’s what she wants, the only thing likely to make her happy.
“We are mated. That cannot be undone even if I desired to undo it! And I will tell you now that I have no such desire!”
Chapter Thirteen
Amber had plenty of time for calm reflection after she was taken to a cell. It really sucked that that was so unhelpful.
It would be an understatement to say that Amber hadn’t anticipated any of the events that had actually occurred and, therefore, had not had any opportunity beforehand to figure out what she might do. In her imagination, though, the guys had been so obliging as to set her down in her capsule within walking distance of the moon base and she’d made her way there and explained that she’d had trouble on takeoff and had to come back.
Of course that would mean that NASA engineers would go over everything with a fine toothed comb and not find anything to explain the problem, but they’d have to accept that she’d had one of some kind.
And then she would probably have been booted off the team and never get the chance to go to space again much less become a Mars colonist.
Well, she’d been toying with the idea for a while—knew she was going to get grounded eventually. It had seemed like the best ‘next’ step for her.
None of that would be happening, unfortunately, because the rosy picture she’d manufactured in her mind hadn’t happened.
They hadn’t even managed to stealthily deliver her back to Earth!
That would have made life difficult enough—trying to explain something nobody would believe—but this ….
She covered her face with her hands, trying to shake off her anxieties and think. Her mind kept running in circles, though, like a hamster on a wheel, replaying what actually had happened interspersed with regret that she’d been so damned selfish that she’d gotten the guys in a terrible fix.
A prickling of her senses broke the hold that had on her thought processes and she jerked her hands down just in time to see Alaric step through the wall as if it was nothing more substantial than air.
A jolt went through her, but she sprang to her feet and ran to him, slamming against him hard enough he fell back a step.
But he caught her in a tight embrace. “My poor baby,” he murmured.
Amber struggled with the instantaneous urge to burst into tears at the note of sympathy in his voice.
And the guilt that inundated her almost as instantly.
“I’m so sorry! I never meant to get you guys in such a mess!”
“Dis no you fault!” Alaric said firmly, almost angrily. “We screw up.”
Sniffing, Amber pulled away far enough to look up at him. “Oh Alaric! That is so not true! I screwed up.”
He shook his head. “Dis bad place. Need leeb.”
She knew that was the worst mistake they could make and yet her heart leapt instantly at the possibility. “You can do that? Get us out?”
“Yes.”
She was torn for a handful of seconds, but she knew in her heart that there was no way in hell that she was
going to talk her way, or their way, out of the situation. It just wasn’t doable.
Dismissing her qualms, she nodded. “Yes. We can go home—to the house where I grew up. Nobody is there and it’s pretty secluded. We can hold up there until we can figure out what to do.”
She barely managed to get the speech said before his grip tightened and he moved—with her—through the wall—the walls. She felt the same sickening sense of motion, saw light and shadows and blurs of color and then darkness. It took her a few moments to realize she could hear the night creatures—the rustle of leaves, the chirping of crickets and the call of night birds, the wind sawing through the trees and shrubs.
They were outside the facility.
Directly outside.
All of them.
She didn’t know when Serge and Luki had joined them, but four was a crowd, especially as big as they were. “We have to get out of here,” she said in a low voice.
Alaric nodded. Before she could figure out which way to run, the guys had shifted into their beast form. Alaric grabbed her and shot skyward.
She thought she might have left her stomach on the ground.
She felt like puking for a handful of moments.
It was way worse than being shot toward space in a damned rocket!
Something tickled at her mind.
She knew it was Alaric.
“I’m ok.”
It was hard to get her bearings so high and in darkness, but she’d discovered they were in Texas and knew they had to head east. By the time the moon rose to give them a little light, she could see they were over the Mississippi. They reached her grandmother’s house well before dawn.
There were lights on inside.
Amber’s heart skipped several beats.
There shouldn’t have been any lights. No one should be there.
Had her bastard uncles sold the house after she went missing?
After a brief debate, she managed to convince the guys to wait in the shadows while she discovered who was in the house.
She almost had heart failure when she got close enough to peer through the kitchen window.
There was a woman at the stove making coffee.
From the back, she looked just like ….
The woman turned and she found herself looking at a young version of her grandmother. She didn’t faint, but it was a damned near thing.
Especially when a young girl appeared in the doorway.
Because it was her.
She was shaking like a leaf when she got back to the guys, felt as if she was going to faint despite every effort to fight off the darkness threatening to swallow her.
“What?” Alaric demanded, grabbing her and helping her to sit.
Amber stared at him and then glanced at Luki and Serge. Her lips felt numb. Actually, she felt numb all over. And cold. “This isn’t Earth,” she managed finally. “At least, not my Earth. Or maybe not my time. I don’t know.” She shook her head, as if she could shake off the hallucination, but she knew it wasn’t all in her mind. Everything clicked abruptly—the strange looking jets, the way people were dressed, the fact that she didn’t exist as a soldier in the Air Force—and they’d looked at her like she was insane when she’d said she was working on the moon base mission. Because it hadn’t happened yet! She was still a little girl. “My god! What happened? I don’t understand this. I don’t understand it at all.”
* * * *
Alaric still didn’t completely understand Amber one hundred percent of the time, but he’d reached a point where he generally had a good grasp of what she was trying to say.
And the gist of that speech was that they’d screwed up—somehow. Right place, wrong time.
Inwardly, he shrugged. Wormholes were tricky like that. It was, to all intents and purposes, a time portal—not that that actually mattered to them. They could follow one another or in fact pretty much anyone they wanted to track and that was all that was of any importance to them.
Well, had been.
It was important to Amber and that made it important to him.
The problem at the moment, though, was that they were stuck—to all intents and purposes.
They could transport themselves. They could even transport Amber.
But there were limitations.
The little hops they took on occasion weren’t particularly draining for them. They were used to it.
But the longer they were in transit, the more energy it took and the less likely they were to have a happy outcome.
He wasn’t willing to risk the danger of it with Amber in tow.
And that left summoning help.
It was not something any of them did unless the situation was dire and they couldn’t figure out any other solution.
He realized fairly quickly that he was at that door.
Their ship was in pieces on the bottom of the sea.
They might be able to reassemble it, but he thought it was beyond that.
And, even if they could manage it before they were all half dead with old age, he didn’t think he wanted to trust it to safely carry their woman.
When Amber settled dispiritedly on the ground, therefore, pulling herself into a tight little ball, he summoned Luki and Serge.
They stood shoulder to shoulder, touching, sharing their energy, combining their telepathic ‘voice’ into a shout. “To us, Ator! To us!” They waited several minutes and called out to the clans again. When they’d called the third time, they heard a distant response. “We come!”
He crouched beside Amber and discovered she’d gone to sleep.
She had to be truly exhausted to sleep under the circumstances, he thought grimly. Stretching to his full height, he shifted. Luki and Serge were in mid-shift when he stopped them. “Guard our woman. I will find a place of some comfort to stay while we wait.”
* * * *
Alaric was drawn by the fire. After circling the area long enough to get a good view of the situation, he flew off a short distance and settled to the ground. He was tempted to assume the form of the space suit, because he liked it, but the men who’d taken them had certainly not liked it and he recalled that the people they had seen along the street had seemed—startled and perhaps a little scared.
With some reluctance, he pulled to mind the image of the clothing the men had been wearing and selected those he preferred.
It was disconcerting considering how much difficulty he’d gone to to make them feel at ease that all three men leapt to their feet and pointed weapons at him when he walked up on them.
Perhaps they didn’t like that he was just across the fire from them before they saw him?
“What the fuck?”
“Where the hell did you come from, mister?”
“You a cop?”
Alaric glanced from one to the next as they spoke on top of each other—exclaimed, he decided, noting the thread of hysteria in their voices.
That meant he had startled them.
And they weren’t happy about it.
He struggled to dredge up something that would make them feel less threatened. “No harm,” he managed after a few moments.
The three men gaped at him.
“Need dat,” he said, pointing to the small hut on wheels behind them. He considered how long it might take for the clans to respond to their call for aid and held up three fingers. “Tree day, or week, or mont.”
The three men glanced at one another, seemed to communicate telepathically, and then raised their weapons threateningly.
“Get the fuck out of here!” the biggest of the three bellowed.
Alaric blinked at him, wondering at the depth of hostility they were displaying. But he wasn’t there to make friends. He just needed the ugly hut thing for shelter for Amber. “Take dat?”
“I’ll blow your head off, motherfucker!” the skinny one that looked to be the youngest bellowed at him.
Really! He was not deaf!
And he was standing no more than three arm lengths from them. He shook his head, revolted at the accusation. “No fuck mother.” He thought about that for a moment and it occurred to him that they must mean Amber, not his mother but the mother of his children. “Oh. Yes. Fuck mother.”
“Are you retarded?”
“I think he’s a foreigner,” the first man said. “He don’t speak English too good.”
“I’m still gonna shoot the motherfucker if he doesn’t get the hell out of here.”
Inwardly, Alaric shrugged. Clearly they wanted to fight over possession of the thing, but he needed it for Amber. They could have it back when he didn’t need it anymore. It wasn’t something he thought was worth taking.
Releasing a pent up breath of exasperation, he shifted—not into his totem beast, the phoenix, but the totem of his brother clan—the Safat.
As he had suspected, the beast totem—the two headed, flying serpent—was far more frightening to them.
Two of the men screamed and tore off through the woods. He heavy one apparently decided he couldn’t run fast enough. He fired both barrels of the weapon at Alaric, peppering him with the damn projectiles.
“Ow! Gods damn it! That fucking hurt,” he snarled.
The man gaped at him then threw his weapon down and took off behind the others.
Groaning at the pain, Alaric focused on thrusting the pellets from his body and when they had dropped to the ground, he strode over to the strange little hut he’d negotiated for.
The smell inside was nearly overpoweringly repellent, but he saw that it was bigger than he’d first thought. It was equipped with several cots, a walled off waste/wash facility that seemed to encompass waste and wash together in a space not even big enough to turn around. And a food preparation area of about the same size.
It even had a vehicle attached with an engine.
Shifting to his true form, he settled in the tiny ‘bridge’ and studied the mechanics of the thing.
It had wheels, but he had not seen anything that looked remotely like a flight engine.
It must move along the ground.
He tried every button and lever and finally managed to get the thing started and moving.
Alien Touch Page 14
