Chapter 12:
Blade’s hands ran over her skin, starting up desire. Tara caught her breath, her body arcing upward slightly as his mouth fastened to her nipples and tugged them gently into his mouth. His tongue ran across the surfaces of her nipples as they tightened to a pebble-hard texture under his not too gentle ministrations.
The feel of his body on top of hers, one of his tightly muscled thighs pressed up against her crotch, and his free hand tangled deeply into her hair, all mingled together to create desire so heated it felt like she was being dipped in fire.
Her legs spread a little further, and her lower body moved, her bottom leaving the grass and dirt and her pussy pressing against that thigh of his. She rubbed against it, moving up and down in long slow strokes that made her clit tingle and her breath catch.
Blade’s mouth left her nipples and captured her lips in a kiss so demanding that she could barely breathe and didn’t care if she never did again.
He positioned himself above her, his hand guiding his swollen member to her slippery outer lips. He rubbed the head of his cock into the slick oils there and then used those oils to lubricate the hard and fast thrust of his prick into her tight tunnel.
The feel of him, hot and hard thick long, filled her senses. His mouth was still on hers, and his fingernails left small, burning trails in her scalp as he tugged her head upward so that he could ravish her lips further.
Passion exploded through her body as his hips worked, thrusting him deeper within her dripping inner folds. He withdrew, and she felt an immediate sense of loss. Then he pistoned his hips forward again and that sense of being filled until she could not be filled anymore came back, titillating her senses and making low moans break from her lips.
Her legs wrapped around his waist, her heels locking tightly together as she sought to keep him closer to her. The smell of their sex and sweat met her nostrils, an aphrodisiac that was so heady it edged her closer to an orgasm with every second. Blade slid his fingers between their bodies and manipulated her clit, adding a fresh layer of sensation to their lovemaking that tipped her right into climax.
Her cry rose and rose again as the first waves of fluid gushed from her body, covering his cock as he pushed past her constricting and loosening walls to the very end of her ability to contain his enormous girth and length. Aftershocks came hard on the heels of that orgasm, sending shivers all up and down her spine and making her cry out yet again.
She felt the jerking of his member inside her swollen walls, a signal he was close to his own climax. His head burrowed into the hollow between her neck and shoulder. His breath came in hard and ragged gasps as he moved faster still, pinning her to the ground with his weight as he rode out his own need to the very end.
He braced himself above her with one hand as his body went rigid. His organ pulsed and throbbed inside her and his sticky, heated seed splashed over her walls and mingled with her own juices.
They lay there like that, neither of them speaking for long moments. Blade withdrew from her slowly, his member flaccid now. He left a thin dribble of fluid across her upper thigh as he rolled carefully away from her and then pulled her into the shelter of his strong arms. He spoke into her hair. “How did you know?”
She let her fingers rest against the perspiration-damp skin of his broad chest. “I didn’t really. I just… Promise me you won’t laugh?”
His fingers tilted her chin so that she was looking into his eyes. His face wore a serious expression. “I would never laugh at you.”
She said, “I used to pilfer the standing library. I know it was wrong. The books there are sacred. They are made of paper, you know.”
Blade dragged in a breath. “The Newport library is among the finest in the universe. And yes, the books are sacred because paper does not exist like that anymore. What do you mean you pilfered them?”
Her face burned. “I would not have you think me a thief.”
The expression on his face turned to one of amusement. “You steal priceless books, and you would not be called a thief?”
Her defenses came up, and she spoke tartly. “I always put them back.”
The look of shock and awe on his face made giggles erupt from her lips. “You don’t have to look at me like that!”
He shook his head as if to clear it. “Let me get this right. First, you stole priceless books from the Newport freestanding library, one of the most heavily guarded places in the universe, and then you put them back?”
She nodded. “I only wanted to read them.”
He said, “I would never call you a thief. That’s a skill that goes beyond simple thievery. I know people who would give anything to have the kind of skill it takes just to be able to remove one from the library, much less the skill it must’ve taken to put it back without it being noticed. How did you manage that?”
She snuggled in closer. “I always took them at the end of the day and I always returned them at opening. Before they had a chance to check every exhibit. I read them in a single night.”
His laughter was both hearty and free. “Every time I think I know you well, and every time I think I know everything about you, you tell me something new. But that doesn’t explain how you knew about all of us sort of being fated to be together.”
She traced the shape of his nipples with one finger. To her delight, his nipples tightened and hardened beneath her touch. “The library had these books, very ancient. They spoke of the old days. Or maybe they were just books that people from the old days wrote about days even older. I’m not sure. But in those books, people always had to go on some sort of quest to find things. And somehow or another, the people who were necessary for that quest to succeed always just seemed to turn up.”
“I see. Actually, I don’t see, but I can see how you would’ve said that now.” His hand captured her fingers but didn’t move them away from his nipple. “I’m afraid that this is just some foolish errand that will do nothing but take us away from where we are needed most.”
She shook her head. “We all know that the Federation is currently firing upon other planets. They’ve been beaten here and they’re in full retreat. Even if they do return here to fight, there are plenty of ground troops and aircraft troops here. They can make do without us for a little while.”
His hand stroked across the top of her head, smoothing her hair. “We?”
“Where you go, I go.”
He said, “The general consensus is that we will all die.”
She nodded. “The general consensus is that we will all die in this war. Might as well go on a quest. Either way, we will probably die. The quest might just help us save some that we might not have saved otherwise.”
His tone turned gentle. “You are a remarkable woman. Do you know that?”
She sighed and rested her cheek against his chest. The sound of his heartbeat, steady and comforting, filled her ear. “I don’t. And I don’t think I’m that remarkable either. I just want to live. Everything I do is just so I can live. But I don’t want to just live. I want to be alive and with you. I want us to have something beyond this war, but I’m horribly afraid this is all that we will ever have of time together. War.”
He spoke softly. “I seem to recall Talon saying something similar not so long ago during the conversation that I had with him. It seems that we all want more than this and the only thing standing in our way is the Federation. Even after the Federation falls, there will probably still be civil war among planets as people try to take power. We may never know a time of actual peace.”
Her chest rose and fell, meeting his as he breathed in tandem with her. “I know. And I wonder, will we have children? If we do, will they survive long enough to see peace? Will we survive long enough to see peace? It scares me, thinking that we might not.”
“It scares me too.”
The words startled her. She looked at him again, trying to read his face, but it had gone impassive and unreadable. “I would not believe you are frightened of anything.”
He said, “At one point, that was probably true. At one point, I did not care at all if I lived or if I died. But then you came along and healed my heart. My broken heart was the largest wound I had ever sustained it in my entire life. You made me want to live. You made me want to love. Made me feel alive again and I’m grateful for that, but along with that comes the knowledge that the life I had before you, after her death, was meaningless. I was only living to die and now that I want to live, it seems like there’s not enough time. So yes, that frightens me.”
The words made her heart ache, but they also reassured her. They had avoided death the day before when the bombs were raining down, but all death was inevitable. Every being and every single thing died eventually. There was nothing they could do about that.
But to live having known love?
That would make it all worthwhile.
She said, “You do not trust your brother, do you?”
“Half brother.” The terse words were followed by even harsher ones. “No, I don’t. I don’t trust his motivations and I don’t trust his agenda. Drake has always had his own agenda. He’s always worked well within other’s agendas but only so that he can direct them toward his own. So no, I don’t trust him.”
She considered those words. “You don’t like him either.”
His sigh was heartfelt. “It’s hard to like him. His mother was not mine. My mother was not dead, nor was she divorced from my father. They were together when he strayed. For some reason, he always preferred Drake. I know, because I’m an adult now and I can see things differently, that that was mostly due to the fact that my mother insisted that I was a sickly child and kept me in bed or in the hospital and he was a healthy boy, and one whose mother encouraged him to fight and take up training even as a toddler. I believe our father saw me as weak and him a strong, and strength is something that my father always admired.”
Those words made her hurt all over again for him. “I see. I knew a girl whose mother insisted that she was sick. She actually broke her child’s legs to keep her from being able to walk so that people would believe that the girl couldn’t walk. There’s a name for that kind of disease, but I don’t know what it is.”
His fingers traced over her cheeks, his fingertips rough against her soft skin. “I don’t either. My mother never went that far but probably only because she didn’t think of it.”
They lay there in silence. They would leave in the morning, and whatever else they had to say to each other they would say it simply by holding each other in this moment of peace and quiet. Their hearts beat against each other’s chest. Tara could feel the warmth of his skin, proof that blood still flowed freely in his veins and that he was alive, and she could smell his unique and masculine scent as she pressed her face into his chest and closed her eyes.
Whatever lay beyond the Speakers door, it was something that they would face together. Stand or fall, they would be together.
Fear was there, right at the edges of her mind and heart, but she ignored it, settling herself deeper against his body and listening to his breathing as he drifted into sleep. She studied his face, doing her best to memorize every inch of that beloved visage in case something happened to take him away from her.
Tralam.
The Speakers door and the universe that lay beyond it. The universe that the Federation coveted so much that they were willing to ruin the universe which they already ruled to have it.
All the pieces of the puzzle were together now, and all that there was left to do was to seek out the door and cross its threshold.
Stand or fall.
The halls were quiet. The sound of machinery whirring and chirping to itself sounded through the empty corridors of Tralam. The wind blew in through shattered windows and heaps of leaves and other debris rustled together, lending a ghostly sighing noise to the tune played out by the machinery and the wind.
The sound of footsteps, soft and muted, moving along the old and broken floors sent tiny vermin scattering away from their nests within the piles of debris and toward the shelter of deeper shadows and cracks within the walls and floors.
A sour smell rose heavily from outside and blew in through the window, which rattled brokenly within a frame that held ancient writing in a language long since forgotten. The wind picked up, and its mournful wail grew louder as it careened into blind intersections and found itself trapped there.
They came: the weapon, the assassin, the thief, the healer, the warrior, the captain, and the one whose mind could turn the machine on full tilt again for the first time in untold ages. The wind beat harder against the windows and walls and roof, as if it sought to break through and level warning upon those that lay waiting.
Leading them all forward was the betrayer, his footsteps steady and certain as he led his accomplices toward their fate.
And last but certainly not least, and still a babe in the making, was the half-human creature whose voice would tell its mother what to do when they breached the sacred inner chamber that would be either the tomb for all of them or the crucible for a dead universe.
Tara sat up, one hand clutching at her throat as the dream shredded and broke all around her. Her hands flew out and banged into empty space. She blinked, letting her eyes adjust to the dimness as she looked around for Blade, but he was gone. She stood, her naked body glowing in the dimness. She hastily donned her clothes and made her way to the small doorway of the shelter. She pulled it open and peered outside. Blade stood under the moon, his head tilted back in his hair blowing slightly around his face. She walked up behind him and placed one hand on his shoulder. The dream had left her feeling sick and dazed, and she wasn’t sure if it had been just a dream or something else. The solid contact of his skin under her hand helped her to ground herself into reality again.
The night lay soft and gentle; the wind bore a faint floral scent now that all of the pyres had finally stopped burning and the rubble below the city had caved in over the fires burning below it and trapped the fire there.
She asked, “Can’t sleep?”
His smile was rueful. “It seems you cannot either.”
She wanted to tell him about the dream because it felt important, but at the same time, it was just a dream. Her imagination had always been overeager. She had been thinking of those books that she had pilfered and read from the library, and many of them had the same eerie setting as the one she had just dreamed up.
It would do no good to tell them about it. It meant nothing. She cleared her throat, “It’s hard to sleep knowing that tomorrow we go to find a place that people say doesn’t exist, but somehow does.”
His laugh was real. “True. But I was just too hungry to sleep.”
She sighed. “There’s not enough food. I don’t know how the people are going to survive without some assistance.”
He said, “They are coming in from the places that escaped being bombed so terribly and still have food; they are bringing with them supplies. They should arrive tomorrow. And the ships still have printers. They’re able to put out just enough to keep people from starving until they can have better.”
She said, “What will we do for food on the journey?”
He tilted his chin toward the sky. “There are planets outside the fight zone who are well-equipped to supply the ship. We will stop by a few of them, I’m sure.”
There were too few outside the fighting zone now. The Federation, like an animal cornered and trapped, had begun killing off planets it thought might hold alliance with the rebels. It was the worst thing that they could have done because now planets and systems who had sworn to stand with them found themselves outraged and horrified and afraid that they would be next. Their only protection had been to join with the rebels, and so they had.
The Federation, the dictatorship that was so willing to kill everything rather than lose its hold, was the one thing that could not be allowed to stand. If that meant going to a place shrouded in myth and secrecy, if it meant dying while trying to use whatever was there that might stop the Federation, then that was what they would do.
There was no choice at all, and maybe there never had been a choice.
Maybe fate was real, and maybe fate had put all of them in each other’s path just so they could go to Tralam and find whatever was there.
So be it.
The dream came back to her, and she shook it off again, telling herself it was just her imagination running wild on her and that now was not the time to let that happen.
She wound her fingers into his, and they leaned together, shoulder to shoulder and their heads meeting. Overhead the sky was prickled with stars and the full moon. The silence, still as the grave she was sure she would soon find herself in, became too much to bear. She said, “Do you know what I was just thinking?”
He said, “No. Tell me.”
She said, “I was just thinking that until I met you, my life was flat and stale. I had no idea that I wasn’t even alive. Oh, I was drawing breath, and I was eating and sleeping going about my job as was my duty. I was enjoying what I had, but what I had wasn’t real life. It was just a shadow of it.”
He turned to her, and his hands rested on her shoulders as he turned her to face him. His lips came down on hers, and he gave her a soft short kiss that he broke off far too soon.
He said, “I would die for you. If it comes down to it, I will die for you, and I would hope that you would have enough sense to go if we find ourselves in a situation where only one of us can survive. I can die knowing that I saved your life but I can’t die knowing that you died because you would not leave me. Swear to me that if we find ourselves in a situation where only one of us can live, you will go.”
No. She could not do that. She could not live without him. She searched his face. His expression told her that he needed this promise to be made. That this promise was what would bolster him. She said, “I swear.”
Not to leave you. To be there with you in your final moments. To love you forever even if it means I die beside you. That’s what I swear to.
Overhead, the sun began to peek above the horizon, casting a golden nimbus of light along the outer edges of the world. Morning had come, and with it had come the burden that was the quest they had agreed to take on.
Birds began to sing. They stood there not moving as the others slowly made their way out of their shelters and stepped up beside them. None of them spoke. There was no need to. The ship was a hundred yards to the right, and their duty also lay in that direction.
Tara realized then that Blade wore the same skin-hugging suit that he had worn the first time she had met him. That he wore his armor told her everything she needed to know about just how dangerous this thing that they were going up against was.
Sun broke and spilled sunlight tinged with an ominous red light across the people who gathered there. Shivers broke out and ran up and down Tara’s skin at the sight.
As one, they turned and began walking toward the ship, still silent. Margie held Jeval’s hand tightly. Talon and Jessica checked each other’s weapons. Marik and Jenny carried bags filled with medicines and as Tara watched Marik lifted a hand and placed it on the back of Jenny’s neck for just a brief second.
Renall had stayed behind in order to help get the city’s shattered systems backup in place so that the survival of its citizens would be more assured. Drake was there, though. He strode directly ahead of all of them. Tara studied him covertly. He was taller than Blade, and slightly less broad of shoulder and chest, but equally lean of hip and waist. His hair was the same jet-black color, and his face bore a striking resemblance to Blade’s, but there was a sense of aloofness and reserve about Drake that was not present in Blade.
Blade did not trust his brother.
Drake trusted none of them.
How she knew that, she was not sure, but every instinct told her that this was a thing that was not based on trust, but on duty, and that if anyone was the betrayer she had dreamed of, it would be Drake.
That made her shiver again, and she swore a silent vow. If Drake did anything to harm Blade, she would kill him herself and do it without a shred of guilt.
They reached the ship. They walked up the short steps through the bay doors. Tara paused and turned around. Death and destruction was everywhere, but there were also survivors there, all of them eager and willing to continue the fight. All of them eager and willing to rebuild the city and to make it into something better than what it had been before. That gave her hope and a determination that she had not known she could have. She would not fail these people. She could not fail them.
The bay doors closed and the ship shuddered and then began to lift upward off the ground, its engines vibrating and its outer walls tightening into place as the shields went up.
Blade’s arm went around her waist and pulled her closer. They stood there together at the windows watching as the planet fell away into the distance and the darkness of space surrounded them.
The ship zoomed into the first of a series of wormholes as it headed toward its uncertain destination.