Chapter Fifteen

Outer Reaches. Geonate New Time, Year 2402

“Tell me, space-waste, are there any phoenix on board the Stealth?” Piotr resisted the urge, again, to punctuate his question with a fist to the shorter man’s gut. His arms shook with the restraint to control his physical impulses to exact revenge for every atrocity, every indignity, every true-death of one of his people, but this creature had more information to be gathered. “I’ll spare your life as long as you talk. So spit it out.”

After hours of silence from the prisoner, the door of the cargo bay whooshed open, and the man’s slouch straightened as he eyed the newcomer.

Piotr didn’t need to see who’d entered the room. Her presence announced itself with a sizzling current zapping over him in a wave. She didn’t speak, but the prisoner did, after clearing his throat and climbing to his feet with an audible creak.

“The only remaining phoenix on board the hospital ship is my mother. And I’ll tell you all you need to know. Codes for communications, plans for raids, and I can get you the genetic markers for the virus. I have an inside source to get vials of the serum as well. I just need your word that you’ll take care of my mother. Can you assure her rebirth?”

Piotr’s lungs halted, and his chest expanded with hot, sweltering rage. Undeniable pent-up need for vengeance, long denied, swelled from the long buried depths. This man’s people had robbed his own mother of rebirth. The strong compulsion for revenge made him strike out. An evil worm of hate threaded through him as he planted his fist in the man’s face. The smaller man flew back and crashed against the cargo bay wall with a loud crash.

The creature didn’t put up a fight and stayed down.

Anna pushed past Piotr, muttering, “Barbarian.”

When she reached to touch the bundle of filth on the floor, Piotr’s chest vibrated with a ferocious growl.

“Space that attitude.” She shot a look of contempt over her shoulder before helping the prisoner sit back against the wall.

An angry red bruise rose on the man’s cheekbone, and that small victory ceased the grumbling from Piotr’s chest, but his body tensed to jump if Koschei’s man so much as breathed on Anna. She was his mate, no matter the cause, reason, or her own arguments otherwise.

While she looked hard at the prisoner, Piotr nudged gently against the mental barrier she’d built between them, but she’d not eased her guard. He wouldn’t push. Yet.

“Ritter, you can get the serum? How about a cure? A reversal,” she asked.

The nervous twitch through the seasoned soldier on the floor answered the question. Anna may not like the truth, but Piotr had to suppress the urge to sing, to open his mouth and cry out his exaltation.

There was no reversal. The victory soured when her shoulders slumped. Koschei’s sick experiment coursed through her veins. His own veins turned to ice in reproach for his momentary happiness over her infection.

“My source didn’t speak of a cure, but I know I can get the serum and the research data. I would have brought them with me, but I didn’t know if the serum would survive the trip through cold space.”

He’d backed off the answer, but Piotr sensed it, and if Anna’s defiant posture indicated her thoughts, then she knew it too. Though it proved nearly impossible to remain behind Anna and let her interrogate, he understood that was the best course of action. Clearly Ritter came to confess to the humans and not to the phoenix.

Anna didn’t face Piotr when she asked her question but continued to kneel with one knee on the floor, the other bent for her to rest her arms in a forced relaxed posture. “Can his mother be brought home? Can she be reborn?”

“If we had her, we would certainly take her home to rest, but if her mate died at the end of a disruptor, then no matter her present mental circumstances, when she goes home, she’ll end. The peace of Sirin will lull her to the abyss, but she’ll not come back without her mate. It’s impossible.”

A tight sound of grief choked from the prisoner, and a small spark of pity chipped against the long, high cliff of Piotr’s hatred. Ritter couldn’t hide his intentions. He didn’t come here to spy, but Piotr could not overlook the hands that had surely held a disruptor and used it.

“We’ll get her home,” Anna promised, and her determination rolled across the room in a small prod, a little crack in her wall opened for him to sense her intent.

“No,” he roared. Fear clouded everything else from his mind.

He crossed the room and gripped her shoulders to pull her up and around to face him. Her fiery eyes looked at him with a coldness that nevertheless didn’t halt his tirade.

“You will not attempt her rescue. She’s a phoenix. She deserves her freedom. But none of my people would ever risk a bond for a broken maven. She has no future. Only true-death.”

Anna seemed unmoved, and the look in her eyes turned even colder, the bright red circle flashing at him in her ire.

“No person deserves to be held against her will.” The statement made her eyes glow, and the beauty of her full emotions, there in her eyes, took his breath away. “I have a duty to help her, but I also have a duty to my crew. A duty to me.” She thumped her chest, and her impassioned speech rose. “I will not leave any woman sitting in a cage. And if there is a chance to understand the virus, I have to risk everything to get it. Everything. My crew is my responsibility.”

“You are my responsibility,” Piotr spoke evenly, enunciating each word. He glanced behind Anna. Ritter remained motionless, his face impassive as he watched the two of them argue. Damn the man. Piotr was back to wanting to strangle him.

“Then I think you’ll understand why I will do everything in my power to protect my crew.”

“Everything but get yourself killed,” Piotr shook his head, and though he struggled to keep his responses level, he blinked against the bright shimmering in his own eyes.

Anna stared at him for long moments, and Piotr thought surely they were a sight for an optical etching, two strong warriors, eyes blazing, nose to nose, arguing with words, bodies, and tingling electrical static. He didn’t want to argue with his mate. He wanted to put the fire in her eyes with his kisses, not his anger.

The hair on his nape crackled when he stepped back.

“We’ll speak more on this later, but it seems as if the prisoner will talk to you. Perhaps he thinks he’ll gain your pity since you’re a woman, but he has my pity if he thinks you’ll bow to any but your own decision.”

Anna blinked. The staring contest ended.

As if Piotr were no longer in the room, she knelt again and spoke to the prisoner. “Your mother is there. Are there any other prisoners, or a human patient in the hospital?”

Piotr grew even more tense. She’d learned something. He prodded, but the wall was back in place, impenetrable.

“No.” Ritter shook his head. “Besides the mimics and hybrids, my mother is the only other person there. No other phoenix. No humans.”

“You’re sure? I have reason to believe a man is infected with the virus and aboard the hospital ship.”

Ritter’s brows drew together in concentration. “I would have noticed a human on board, unless he’s been in stasis.”

“You have stasis? What other technologies are on the Stealth?” Piotr asked, but the prisoner did not answer.

Piotr. Ivan’s call halted Piotr mid-stride, the urgency to throttle Ritter replaced with dread over the tone and anxiety-riddled word. One word, and Piotr knew the war had begun.

Prepare the others. Piotr responded and glared at Ritter, the symbol of all Piotr wanted gone from existence.

The look on his face froze the enemy hiding behind Anna.

Anna. The word, so small and innocent a name, curled around him and squeezed.

Piotr must go to his warriors, lead them to a fight that may well end their lives, true-death, but he wanted to throw his woman over his shoulder, catch the next shuttle back to Sirin, and build his own Aerie. She’d be queen and mother to a horde of his children. His mouth watered, and he swallowed hard. He turned his back, unable to meet the quizzical expression she shot over his shoulder at his abrupt silence.

He strode to the door, each step weighing down as if the grav levels had spiked to suffocating levels and his every cell screamed, “Stay. Protect.”

Static danced around him, creating zips of charged ions arcing between him and the portal before it slid open.

“Where are you going?” Anna asked. He sensed her acceptance of their ability to feel each other through their connection, but the knowledge that she sensed the truth from his aura did not relieve him. It only tore into him further. The connection that grew more potent each passing moment would come to naught.

At any moment in this battle, he could be torn apart, ripped apart, cell to cell, at the end of a disruptor.

“To end this, mate. I go to end this.”

He paused at the door, and the block she’d held in place slipped a little. Her concern and worry bombarded him, and he gripped the open door frame when his knees weakened. Unable to turn, because he may never leave if he did, he sent her a plea, an image of Sirin and the happiness he wanted there. With her, for as many days as they had together. Impossible though it was, the dream lodged inside, taking root.

It was impossible.  He’d never bond with her, and the battle he must meet now underlined the importance of rebirth. How many would die in the next hour? The next days?

“Be safe,” she breathed in a shaky murmur.

Worry, frustration, need, revenge, all twisted inside him with no outlet, so he replied more harshly than he wanted, but he meant it. Oh, he meant it so much, he pushed a small compulsion with his command and hoped it would find a fissure in her defenses.

“Stay here. No going on crazy missions. I don’t need to worry about you while I’m trying to keep my people safe. When I get back, we’ll deal with the prisoner, and we’ll deal with what’s between us.”

To Piotr’s bitter disappointment, the barrier between them slammed back up. If they’d been bonded, she would never have kept him out. For a split second, he closed his eyes tightly against the flare in his eyes. He could linger no longer. As he stepped out, and the door began to close, she called after him.

“There is nothing between us but a virus. Go, do your duty. I’ll do mine. That’s all we need to deal with.”

Duty. Another small word, perhaps with more power over him than the woman who would surely bring him to his knees.

Over the link, he called his people to vengeance.

We will end it. Now. Today.

In a flash, he changed, and the energy flowing through him took the edge of his torment away. He soared through the ship, his cry cut short as he dissolved through the hull into the vacuum of space.

Outside the Venture, amidst the remnants of the supernova, the battle already raged. His unit gathered around him, and as they’d done for years, they seamlessly formed a wedge and dove into the fray.

When a dully-lit mimic, smaller and more compact than a phoenix, flew toward him, Piotr lunged with his beak. Striking with precision, he ripped through the mimic. The creature bowed in a backward curve as his rent stomach leaked energy.

Revenge never tasted so thick with power. The hunt upon him, Piotr forgot the man inside him. He forgot his human needs and instincts.

He embraced the battle-lust and dove for his next kill.

The small call inside him, the need to protect his mate, grew silent beneath his driven need to tear apart the enemy, but a small worry remained there, lodged in a pit in his center.

Mate plans danger.

The thought slipped his grasp as his talons tore into the next mimic in his path.