Chapter 13

 

Vaughn bit back a shocked gasp—not quite a scream, but close—of surprise as Henson slumped to the concrete floor of the cell.

Dejo took a step forward, but Giles already had the gun aimed at him.

It was only in that frozen moment that Vaughn realized there’d been no explosive concussion from the shot. No blood either. And the beam that hit Henson had been orange.

The sheriff had an off-world stunner.

Giles smoothed her thumb over the small weapon, resetting the dial.

For the worse.

Vaughn swallowed. “What are—?”

“Uh uh, girl,” Giles said. “Questions are all mine or I’ll shoot you right now.” She kept her gaze on Dejo the whole time but abruptly swung the business end of the alien gun to Vaughn. “Just to be perfectly clear, I’ll shoot her.” She smirked at the narrowing of Dejo’s eyes. “Yeah, I figured that’d be the key. Annoying as Henson is, he’ll wake up with a little more of a headache than usual and no memory of the last few minutes. Or even if he does, he won’t believe it. Or even if he believes it, no one will believe him.” Her smirk vanished. “But if I have to shoot again, girl here will die with a smoking black hole between her eyes. Since I missed her the first time.”

Considering Vaughn could almost feel the laser light, she didn’t doubt Giles would do exactly that.

Dejo didn’t seem inclined to question the sheriff either. He kept his hands empty at his sides.

Empty… What had he done with his tablet and the drones?

“Blackworm has been caught and imprisoned,” he said. “You won’t be getting paid.”

The sheriff’s pale eyes glinted like quicksilver. “Well, I am right sorry to hear that,” she drawled. “Suppose all good things come to a middleman and then end.”

Vaughn let out a slow breath. “It’s over. But I still want to find my sister. I can pay…” The offer stuck in her throat, but she forced it out. “I will pay you for any information you can give me.”

Giles snorted. “Pay? Checked out what was left of your car. And your life. You got shit, girl. You should’ve taken my laser in the heart when you had the chance. Woulda kept you out of trouble.” She smirked. “Like your sister.”

Vaughn rocked forward, only the tiny black hole of the stun gun muzzle holding her back. “What about Rayna?”

“Took me a second to recognize her after you showed me her photo, she was just that forgettable. Like all those girls who want to be alien brides.” Giles shook her head. “Idiots, all of ‘em. Think they’ll find something better out there? Not likely. Better off on your own. Keep all the profit.”

Vaughn growled under her breath.

“All we want to know is where you were receiving payments from,” Dejo said with a shrug. “Blackworm has declined to reveal his base of operations, physical or financial, to the council, so it’s possible we could free up some of those funds for anyone who assists us.”

“Us?” Giles narrowed her strangely silver eyes. “You’re not with any intergalactic council. I can smell them a dozen parsecs away.”

“Smells like the bottom of a prison planet,” he agreed. His expression hardened. “And they don’t take kindly to those who break closed-world protections.”

She sneered back. “Those like you?” One of her silvery eyes swiveled to glare at Vaughn, who had been slowly inching out of the line of fire. “Stay right there, girl. I hate to waste resources, and Earther girls are valued for a good bit in decent condition.”

For a split second, she thought it might be worth it. If Giles sent her wherever Rayna was…

Maybe Dejo sensed her reckless consideration because he took a step forward, bringing the attention of both Giles’s eyes—what the fuck was up with that anyway?—back to him. “I’ve already called the local galactic authorities,” he said. “This is your one chance for clemency. Give us the signal signature for Blackworm’s payments.”

Giles laughed. “You didn’t contact—”

A strange noise cut her off. Somehow familiar, like the plasma array warning buzz outside the compound but in triplicate and much louder.

“Larf it,” Giles snarled. “You called them?”

Vaughn tensed. If these galactic authorities had a plasma beam that much more powerful… She swung to Dejo. “We have to get out of here. If they catch you—”

Giles hissed. “They’ll take you too, girl. Wipe your mind for their own convenience and you won’t remember a thing about this fine-looking thief. No money, no memories, no mates.” She spun toward the door. “Well, you’ll have no me either.”

Vaughn nailed her right between the shoulder blades.

The afterimage of the orange light seemed to linger in Vaughn’s vision as she lowered the stunner, but she was peripherally aware of Dejo sidelonging her a disbelieving glance.

“I’ve never actually shot anyone before,” she muttered.

He jumped forward, reaching for the sheriff.

Vaughn took a hesitant step forward. “Is she—?”

“Stay back. You might have to shoot it again. Gnathas are notoriously hard to keep stunned.” He rifled the pockets of the sheriff’s coat. Not a sheriff, apparently, but a—gnatha, apparently. He lifted a device a little smaller than his tablet, and the drone circling his head chirped as if to a friend. At the almost cheerful noise, Vaughn realized the plasma weapon warning had cut out. “Got it,” Dejo said triumphantly. “Same signature.”

Vaughn’s hands shook around the tiny stun gun. A pinpoint on Blackworm that would lead to Rayna?

A derisive squawk made her jump. “Sheriff Giles?” The querulous voice came from the cell room intercom. “Deputy Henson?” Vaughn recognized the kindly clerk she’d spoken to before. “Bob finally got a look at that car you brought in. Said it looks deliberate. I got worried and tried to reach you on the radio, but… Sheriff? I’m going to send Bob down—”

Dejo grabbed her wrist behind the gun and pushed it down. “Put that away and let’s go.”

She stared at the sheriff. “Shouldn’t we wait until the authorities arrive?”

“Who? Bob?”

She scowled at him. “Intergalactic authorities.”

“They aren’t coming. The drones are good at auditory illusions too.” He hefted Giles’s device. “We have what we need.”

She glared at the sheriff. “She—it—needs to go to prison along with Blackworm.”

“Probably. But who are we going to explain that to? Giles was right that no one here will believe us. And the authorities…” He laced his fingers through hers, taking her thumb off the trigger. “They don’t come, Vaughn. But if we send them this intel, share it with the intergalactic community, they’ll act.”

She whispered hoarsely, “Like they acted to save the iomales from genocide?”

He froze then slowly lifted his hand from hers. “True. Shoot her.” He spun the stunner dial under her thumb. “That’ll make it right.”

Remembering the smoking hole in his chest, her stomach heaved. “Larf it. Let’s go get my sister.”

 

***

 

The fury in her storm cloud eyes had terrified him. He’d seen that darkness in the harpies as they came at him. And he’d never wanted to face that again.

But she hadn’t fired. She took his hand and they ran out into the night.

She stopped there, tugging at him. “This way.”

He swung around to look at her.

She dangled the primitive keys between her fingers. “I didn’t shoot anybody—not to kill, anyway—but I did steal the keys to the police cruiser.”

His lips twitched. “It seems you have taken to this life of crime.”

“Thank you,” she said demurely.

She drove while he went through the sheriff’s vehicle. Other than some chocolate chip breakfast bars and the shotgun in the rack, he found nothing of interest, nothing alien. He left the gun and took the bars.

“What is she—it?” Vaughn asked.

“Gnatha. Just…people. Galactic citizens. Some good, some bad.” He hooked her device to his tablet. “This one was more bad. Been here a long time, though, judging from its command of the local language. I’ve never heard a translator that conversational.”

“Not to mention it was a county sheriff,” Vaughn pointed out.

“An excellent cover for its vile work.” He glared at the device in his hand. “Trafficking in data is wrong. Trafficking in living beings is evil.”

“Do you think…” Her voice cracked and she tried again. “Giles said that the women had value in good condition. Do you think that means Rayna and the others might be safe?”

The gnatha had actually said decent condition, and that could mean many things among many different sentient races. But Dejo was not going to tell her that. “We have the closest link to Blackworm that we’ve ever had. The IDA and the galactic council will be forced to do something. I think that’s all good.”

She slanted a glance at him, as if she heard everything he didn’t say.

They parked the cruiser far enough from the Onoffon to not be obvious, and he disabled the GPS unit and a gnathan tracker he found. That would gain them some time.

Trekking the rest of the way to his ship, Vaughn stumbled against him. She immediately righted herself with a mumbled curse.

“Don’t mean to be wimpy,” she said.

He thought he knew what she really meant. “Because you didn’t shoot the gnatha?”

“I just wanted to make a difference. Like my father did for this country. Like Rayna did for me.” She leaned into his shoulder. “I’ve failed on all counts.”

“You’re not done yet,” he reminded her, lifting the device he’d taken from Giles.

She gazed at him, her eyes shadowed. “If you weren’t here, I’d have actually, literally nothing.”

“You’d have a stolen police cruiser,” he pointed out.

“Not even that.” She flushed, looking chagrined as only someone could who had never stolen anything and now counted that lack as another failure. “Without you, I wouldn’t have any clue what had happened to Rayna. Probably I’d’ve been toasted by the IDA’s plasma array.”

The thought turned his blood to slush, and he put his arm over her shoulders. “In all fairness, the distressors would’ve likely fried your brain first.”

She was silent a moment, then huffed out a laugh. “Okay, well, still not a point in my favor.”

He reeled her to his side, even though it interfered with their walking. But he needed her close. “It’s all just data points, Vaughn. You can’t always mark it good and bad. It just…is.”

She shook her head, the chin-length strands lashing. “But that’s who I am. Good and bad. Black and white. Right and wrong. Or who I have been. Without that…”

“Without that, you still are.” His voice deepened with insistence. “The harpies tried to convince me otherwise. They branded those like me”—he put his hand over his chest—“as a reminder always of what we weren’t, what we lost when we fell out of the sky. But I still am.”

As they stepped into the clearing, the Onoffon responded to the port-link in his hand and dropped its disguising shroud with a welcoming soft gleam of running lights up the hatch.

He stared at the ship and then at Vaughn. “Maybe those brides took a terrible risk, reaching out to a universe they’d never known. And maybe just a few day/night-cycles ago, I would’ve mocked them for falling for the fantasy. But I see it now.”

She gazed up at him. “I can’t,” she said miserably. “It’s just an illusion, like those pretty 3D posters, like the drones lying about what’s real.”

“Let me show you.”

For a heartbeat, she resisted him, but then she fell into his arms.

He left the gnathan device connected to the gels and took her to his nest. No illusions, just the round bed and too many pillows piled up against the bulkhead.

They stripped each other, as if the clothes too were illusion. Skin to skin, they kissed, limbs entwined.

She rolled him so she was on top, her knees framing his flanks, the hot, slick center of her body flush against the downy fluff from which his third wing sprang.

“You feel so good,” she murmured. She placed her hands over the brand on his chest, aligning her fingers with the spread feathers.

And for the first time, a touch there did not send a sick shudder through him.

As he’d told her, the mark didn’t need to have power over him, neither for good nor evil. It just was, another part of him, like the feathers in his hair, his eyes, his affinity for otherwise lost data.

He lifted his hips, lifting her too and jolting a little squeal of surprise from her. Her fingers curved downward to wrap around his cock, and though she held him fast, his heartbeat soared.

“Make me fly,” she whispered as she pierced him into her body.

“Don’t let go.” He sank his fingers into the lush curves of her backside, fitting her closer, and her eyes half closed in ecstasy as she writhed. He watched, eyes wide open, drinking her in, feeling each of her gasps as another breath of wind lifting him higher.

She grasped his wrists and angled his hands over her breasts, a wordless demand. He pinched lightly, teasing the soft flesh into swollen points. With each pluck, she moaned, and her inner muscles clenched around him, urging his third wing ever higher until he too was moaning.

He pushed himself up on his elbows to capture one stiff nipple in his mouth and she clutched his head to her breast, grinding down on him. The taste of her burned like starlight in his mind, something brilliant and forever—or so close to forever as made no difference to him—something that would guide him in the darkness.

When her gasps turned to something almost like a sob, he reached down between their bodies and found the burning point of nerves that pulsed against his down. Like the final keycode in a particularly opaque encryption, he passed his fingertip over her in a swirl…and she convulsed with a strangled scream.

 

***

 

He held her hard against him as she came until Vaughn thought the rapturous quivers would shake her apart. Her vision spun dizzily as he rolled her into the pillows.

With pillows piled high under her ass, he pounded into her, each thrust an ecstatic slide of his hard cock against her satiny, wet flesh that ended in the powder-puff softness of the feathers at the base of his shaft. But the tickle became a torture of pleasure as her orgasm spiraled upward again.

She anchored her heels behind his ass, plunging him deep, and arched her back to take him even farther.

He gazed down at her, his eyes shining sunlight-yellow and fierce. And his expression—intense and profound in a way she’d never sought from her lovers before—caught at something hidden inside her, lifting it up to the light.

But when he bowed into her with an ecstatic crow, his crown of feathers bristling, she forgot the almost-enlightenment and came again, her vision going dark and laced with stars.

They collapsed together, the hard pounding of her heart in her chest seeming to call to the pounding of his in his belly. His breath gusted hard through her hair where he’d tucked her head under his chin.

Though he was still on top, she held him tight, not wanting to let go.

Maybe ever.

A soft ding—as if the universe was giving her the lightbulb-moment sound—interrupted their huffing.

Dejo lifted his head. “The data is finished.”

Just like she was.

Though her body and soul cried out against separating, he lifted himself and she let him go. Data was what she’d wanted from him, so why did the oncoming answer feel so hollow now?

He rolled away from her toward the edge of the nest and grabbed his tablet. “I initially chose to go after the IDA data trove because I’d heard that Blackworm had tried to destroy the core to cover his tracks and the council thought he’d been successful. I knew no one with such reported criminal exploits and legitimate business ventures would be able to erase himself entirely. And sure enough…” He displayed the tablet to her. “The messages, the payments, everything came from here. I would bet the Onoffon that this is his stronghold.”

He gazed at her triumphantly and she forced out some sound of amazement as she stared at the star map that by now should be fairly familiar, shouldn’t it? Instead, it seemed ridiculously random.

Dejo muttered to himself. “Let me see if I can find—ah. Here. From the registry associated with the signature.”

It wasn’t a planet or even a ship like the Onoffon. “What is it?”

“A space station. Looks to be in orbit around a black hole.”

She blinked. “A real black hole?”

He frowned. “A precarious choice under most circumstances, but this seems to be stable enough. Although it’s on the very farther reaches of traveled space, quite out of the way.”

She felt as if all her emotions had been sucked out of her. “I can’t get to a black hole, out of the way or not. I can’t even get to Sunset Falls.”

Dejo looked from the projection to her and back again, his brow furrowed. Then he put aside the tablet and cupped his hand at her chin, nudging her face up to meet his gaze. “We’re closer yet,” he murmured.

Her stomach churned with doubt, but she nodded almost imperceptibly into his palm. “So close.”

With brown furrowed, he pulled back. “I’ll give you this device. It has all the data on Blackworm’s stronghold and also the information on Giles.” He pursed his lips. “And also all the data we pulled from the IDA outpost.”

She blinked. “But…”

“I don’t need it.” His shrug was a little too lopsided. Like he was lying to her. “And if I give it back, maybe they won’t bother coming after me.”

Coming after him.

Because he was leaving.

“You’re leaving me with the data.” She said it aloud, just to be sure, as sure as black and white, good and bad.

He nodded, his expression tight. “Even if the galactic council forgives my scavenging on this job, I’ve had…too many others they could prosecute me for and win and throw away all versions of the key, primitive or cutting edge.”

She bit hard on the inner curve of her lip to stop herself from arguing. But the espresso taste of him bittered to burnt and screamed at her to say something.

She said nothing.

From the time her mother had abandoned their family until her father had died in service and her sister had delayed her own life to raise Vaughn, she’d tried to always do the right thing—and encourage (or enforce) others to do the same. But she would rather watch Dejo fly away than be incarcerated, not after he’d escaped such a terrible life. And maybe she could finally have a little more empathy for whatever choice her mother had felt compelled to make.

Into her silence, Dejo added, “I’ll include a beacon that will summon the authorities. It’ll send a simultaneous message to the Jaxian metal-lord who first identified Blackworm. He has a personal stake in the outcome, and he’ll not let our intel be swept away. The signal will initiate as soon as you get outside the range of the IDA’s signal suppression. The repulsors are focused around Sunset Falls, so you shouldn’t have to go far to be beyond their reach.”

Unlike him. He’d be in another galaxy.

Where was the justice in that? If only she really was a scavenging thief. She’d steal him away and nothing in the universe would stop her.