Chapter 10

 

A gentle hand on her shoulder shocked Lishelle awake.

Except for her one night with Tynan, she’d slept—and awakened—alone for so long now that her skin prickled in warning. She almost tipped herself off the benched seats where she’d retreated to get away from her abductor, her one-night stand, a god…

“Easy,” he murmured, steadying her on the bench. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

Sitting up, she pushed back his hand and the thin but warm cover over her. Where had that come from? From him, of course. There was a small open box—an emergency kit, she guessed—next to the bench; he must’ve gotten the coverlet from there.

She knuckled at her eyes. “How long did I sleep?”

“Long enough to get to the inner habitable planet.” He stepped back. “I want you to buckle in. The winds on approach can be tricky.”

She wanted to be cranky that he’d poked her awake. Hell, she had a right to be cranky about so many things. But curiosity lured her back to the cockpit to peer out the viewport. It was incredible to think that when he’d been a warlord and the Thorkons already had spaceflight, humans on Earth hadn’t quite gotten around to writing down Christianity yet. Her aunties would’ve been very disapproving, saying he was much too old for her.

She’d seen the ducal estate planet of Azthronos from above and been impressed by its well-tended cities and landmasses sculpted over long eras of habitation, looking very much like the Thorkon aesthetic of geometric patterns. On this smaller inner planet, though, the continental coastlines were ragged, the lighted areas of cities smaller and separate. Their trajectory quickly carried them around the planet. To darkness.

Her spine prickled. “This part looks empty.”

“I haven’t been here in awhile,” he murmured.

Oh right. Like not in millennia.

Why did it have to be night? As he eased the shuttle toward the planet, the projected view didn’t show anything beside a rapidly approaching mountain range. No artificial lighting at all.

The shuttle bucked, and she gripped the harness over her shoulders reflexively. “I didn’t know you lived in the middle of nowhere.”

“I didn’t.” His tone was clipped. “I had an army, a town, a kingdom…”

None of that seemed left.

When he finally toggled the view to a true exterior scan, rain lashed the shuttle, swirling with a force that sent them jolting sideways.

Lishelle swallowed back a gasp. He’d survived such trips in more primitive shuttles, right?

Of course, he’d ended up dead eventually. But not from crashing.

And now he was back, and so was she, in the hands of the alien who had abducted her. Even if the heart and mind were different.

How could she believe him? Her aunties would be muttering right now.

The shuttle hopped in the air like a frantic mishkeet, as if acting out—or mocking—her inner turmoil. Too late anyway. They were going to land, one way or another.

His expression tight, Tynan eased the shuttle between the mountain peaks indicated on the nav map. The landing lights picked out only the silvery fog of heavy rain, blown into fitful white-out curlicues by the wind. She shivered, already feeling that chill biting at her skin.

“Almost there,” he murmured, as if he’d noticed her apprehension even while battling the elements outside their little ship.

The shuttle bounced hard one more time, and with a defiant shriek of its engine—which fortunately muffled the gasp she couldn’t quite contain—they landed.

He powered down, his hands steady, although it seemed to her he lingered just a little longer than really necessary. Then, letting out a short grunt, he stood.

“It’s storming,” he said, like she couldn’t see that. “You wait here while I take a look around.”

Her lingering doubts about whether he was Blackworm evaporated. A bad guy wouldn’t leave her in charge of the blaster and the shuttle on this dark mountain.

As he strode toward the hatch, she scrambled after him. “I want to go too,” she said. “Just wait a sec.”

If anything, his expression was more grim than when he’d wrestled down the buffeted shuffle. “I don’t know what’s out there,” he said curtly. “I don’t remember it like this.”

“All the more reason for me to come,” she said. “And I’ll bring the blaster.”

He flashed her half a smile, and she thought it looked almost grateful.

When she and the other Black Hole Brides had been rescued from the space station, she decided not to go back to Earth because being gone for three years had been like a lifetime. He had been gone for a lifetime. Several lives. She wasn’t going to say he was brave, but she wouldn’t have done it herself.

He waited at the hatch, shifting from foot to foot, while she scrounged through the crew area and found one of the light EVA suits meant for questionable environments. She pulled on the long jacket over her robe and clumped over to him in the bulky boots. “If you can’t wait till morning, let’s do this thing.”

He palmed the patch controls, and though she stilled herself for a rush of freezing air, the rain-scented wind that swirled in was only cool. She inhaled deeply, not realizing how the atmosphere of the station had been blunted, even with the profusion of plantings meant to purify and enliven the canned air.

“It smells like spring,” she mused.

“It is,” Tynan said. “On this side of the planet.”

It was so easy to forget, and so crazy to remember, that in her life now, it was always spring and winter, night and day, starting and ending, somewhere in this vast universe.

They stepped out into the small clearing where they’d landed. Tynan had taken the shuttle’s dat-pad, now he aimed the illuminating beam in a slow arc across their surroundings. “This landing zone used to hold a dozen ships,” he murmured. He redirected the beam of light upward to capture the swaying branches of the trees overhead.

The jungle—for that was what it was—had overtaken everything. Just as much as she’d grown used to the canned air on the space station, her eye had gotten familiar with the formal shapes favored by the Thorkons. To see this lush and wild spread reminded her of the strange sunflowers that had bloomed in the nexus atrium under the black hole.

And for once, the wildness didn’t scare her.

She took a few steps beyond the shelter of the hatch, exclaiming to herself at the lighter gravity that made her steps a little too big, even for her.

“Lishelle, don’t go far,” he warned.

“Oh, just as far as a different galaxy,” she muttered to herself. To him, she called back, “I have the blaster.” As if that was everything she needed.

But it did give her steps a spring of confidence, more than the lighter gravity even, as she prowled around the edge of the clearing. After a moment, Tynan followed her. She felt as if she was the one leading this adventure.

“The roots have busted up right through the plascrete,” she marveled. “I thought the stuff was unbreakable.”

“Nothing is unbreakable,” he grumbled. “The roots go deep, and time and water and inevitability have their way with us all.”

She grimaced. “You came back,” she pointed out.

“True. This is all my fault. Look, here’s a bit of the path to the stronghold.”

She hadn’t meant that it was his fault… But he wasn’t entirely wrong. She fell into step behind as he stalked down the path.

The trees arching overhead blocked most of the rain, but the understory crowded close enough to wet her skirt. The brush of the plantings released the fragrance of green growing things, and she took another happy breath. “It reminds me of the storms at home,” she said.

“The ancient progenitors who seeded the universe used many of the same building blocks,” he said. “None of us are so different.”

She wasn’t sure she could ever believe that. But she had fucked an alien, sooooo…

While she kept waiting for lights to appear in the darkness beside their own, the path twisted onward and upward at a sharper angle until she was huffing a little despite the gravity difference. Teaching the Azthronos cook the recipe for Earther biscuits and gravy maybe hadn’t been the best idea ever. “How much farther?”

“This used to be a covered moving walkway.” His voice was far away even if his body wasn’t. “I had it installed so visitors would be treated to a small tour of my holdings.”

“Vain warlord,” she murmured.

He glanced back, and a faint grin flickered across his lips. “Yes. But I’m being taken down a notch in front of you now.”

The darkness and the storm made the path seem longer than it really was, she realized when they popped out of the forest to stare up at the castle.

Or what had been a castle. It was ruins now.

At the sight, Tynan recoiled, his shoulder bumping her.

She reached out a steadying hand to his elbow. “It’s…big.”

“It’s destroyed,” he said flatly.

In the crumbled remains, the outlines of archetypal Thorkon architecture were still visible, maybe with a few more primitive decorative flourishes than the ducal estate where Raz and Rayna lived on Azthronos Prime. The towers were asymmetrical, one shattered in half, one missing entirely, and the surrounding wall gaped with holes. If it had ever had a protective shield as the ducal estate did, that technology had long ago failed.

“We should go back to the shuttle,” Tynan said.

When he whirled around to leave, she stopped him, tugging at his elbow. “We came this far.” With his dat-pad light pointed away from the ruins, her eyes picked out a faint glow. “Look. There’s a light inside.”

“Probably the goddesses, lurking, waiting to see if I came back after they razed the place.”

“It’s not razed,” Lishelle protested. “It’s just…distressed.”

From the tension in his arm as she tugged again, she knew he was distressed. But he yielded to her lesser weight.

Whether it was vengeful divinities or just the ravages of time, the castle had definitely seen better days. Better aeons, actually. They passed through the open gate—open because the gate was long gone—and as they entered the courtyard, the rain stopped.

Lishelle glanced up as the light of three moons peeked between the clouds, casting shadows in all directions. “The storm’s over.”

“The goddesses,” Tynan said tersely. “Wanting me to see the ruin they left for me.”

She held back her opinion that, goddesses or no, if there’d been no one to take care of the castle and property, it would’ve decayed. The jungle on this warm, wet planet seemed hungry indeed. She gave him another tug. Between the coffee and the nap, she was wide awake and ready to explore.

“C’mon. Let’s see what’s inside.”

Maybe seeing inside the castle would tell her a little more about what was inside him…

Wait, she didn’t need insights into the God of Beloveds. Where would that get her? It had gotten her abducted to this little inward world on a stormy night, is where it had gotten her.

She snorted, although maybe that was the dust as they shouldered through the huge front portal and stepped inside the castle.

The great hall where they entered was in better shape than the outside implied. The plastcrete walls arched upward to transparent steel diamond panes overhead. Most of those windows had held up, although one empty frame had allowed the jungle to send questing viney fingers inside. Leaves had blown in on this and other blustery nights, sorting themselves into various sized drifts in the corners and gathering at the bases of the towering columns that marched deeper into the hall to frame an elevated dais.

“That is where I held court,” Tynan said.

Moonlight and three shadows each followed them across the floor while they walked toward the dais. As they approached, the shadows fell away, and the glow she’d seen from outside overtook the light of the three moons.

“Someone has been here.” She nudged the blaster into his hand. “Maybe you should carry this.”

“Whoever came here wasn’t looking for trouble.” He holstered the weapon at his thigh. “It’s a shrine.”

Small solar lanterns were dotted around the giant seat carved from stone and metal—throne, there was no other word for it. Overflowing the curving seat and arms and spilling across the dais was an abundance of gifts: food pouches, large bottles of Thorkon liquor and smaller bottles and jars of unknown substances, statuettes of humanoid figures and more animalistic shapes, including a mishkeet or two, and many, many data cubes.

They walked along the lower step of the dais, peering at the offerings. Finally, Tynan knelt at the edge and tapped one of the cubes.

“Hear me, God of Beloveds. I have found my heart…”

The speaker never said his name or the name of his heart, but his yearning poured from the cube, filling the silence of the great hall with emotion like the reflected light of another moon. When the recording ended, Tynan touched another cube.

“Thank you, Lord Tynan. My wedding is tomorrow…” Pure joy.

Another cube played only sorrow. “How do I live without him…”

Lishelle watched while he activated them all. Some of the more expensive models projected holo-vids, showing couples dancing or laughing or, sometimes, doing more intimate things that probably even a god didn’t need to witness. Some messages were decidedly old-school, written out in blocky Thorkon calligraphy. One was even carved on what looked like a block of marble. Her universal translator provided the meaning of the word etched into the stone and highlighted by little flecks of moss and lichens—

Love.

Her eyes prickled at the overwhelming flood of need, desire, happiness, contentment, longing, loss—all the endless cycles and individual trajectories that had ended up in this one place.

She grabbed one of the bottles of ghost-mead and popped the seal to take a swig, washing down her urge to bawl.

Tynan, sitting on a beautifully embroidered shawl next to the throne with his elbow on the seat, gave her a slightly scandalized look that she was stealing from the offerings.

She shrugged. “I don’t think the god will mind.”

He held out one hand imperiously.

Picking her way between the gifts up the shallow stairs to his side, she passed over the bottle. He tipped it back for a long moment, his throat working. When he finally lowered it, letting out a gasp, she smelled the burn of the alcohol on his breath.

His eyes watered as he spun the bottle in his hand to read the label. “Last century was a good year, apparently.”

She swallowed, tasting the fire that hadn’t been extinguished despite the passage of time. “Very good.”

He gazed around them at the gifts, then lifted his eyes higher to the hall itself. “I can’t believe they come here, to this abandoned place.”

“Love is strange.” She perched on the edge of the step, one down from him. “It’s pretty far out of the way, but it has a certain…mystique to it.”

He quirked one eyebrow at her. “I think you mean musty, not mystique.”

“No. That hole in the ceiling keeps the fresh air coming.” She leaned back on her elbow and gestured at the bottle he was still clutching.

Handing it over, he revealed one last data cube in his lap. “This one is too old and won’t play.” He rolled the small device between his fingers, his expression pensive.

She took another drink to drown the desire to console him. “It’s probably just more of the same.”

“And yet every one is different.” Setting the cube aside, he held up a small trio of dolls, linked by their arms into a set, and grimaced. “The goddesses who smote me must be laughing to see how far I’ve fallen.”

“Or maybe they wanted you to see that your fate wasn’t for nothing.” She gestured with the bottle. “All these people find their way here to celebrate or mourn their beloveds, seeking hope that this one is the right one, whatever. As legacies go, it’s not bad.”

Tynan set aside the goddess dolls, staring at her. “Since when is the blaster-stealing Lady Lishelle a romantic?”

She flushed; probably just the heat of the ghost-mead in her cheeks. “A girl can be a dreamer and deadly.”

Leaning forward, he plucked the bottle from her slack fingers and waggled it at her. The much reduced level gurgled like a laugh. “What do you dream of?”

She wanted to grab the bottle back from him again, but that might look desperate. Instead, she picked up the dolls and combed her fingers through their artificial hair. The alternating textures—one silky, one curly, one coarse—took the edge off her agitation. “I had the dream. The perfect husband, the perfect job, the perfect life. Everything they tell you to dream of.”

“That was before,” he pointed out gently.

And over even before that. Somehow, between then and now, she’d forgotten how to dream. She looked down at her clenched fingers in her lap, even more entangled than the goddess dolls’ looped arms. “I was the first one Rayna woke on the station. That’s why I’ll become primary holder of the station salvage rights after she marries her duke. But sometimes…”

He waited, but when she didn’t go on, he prodded, “Sometimes?”

“Maybe it would’ve been easier to stay asleep,” she blurted. “In the stasis pod, I didn’t have to dream.”

She flinched at her own words. How weak was she to admit how tired she’d been—tired of showing how she’d worked so hard to “make something” of herself. As if she hadn’t already been something. Getting divorced and then having her colleagues and friends shrug because everybody got divorced eventually had been the wake-up call she’d needed that she needed something else. She’d gone to Sunset Falls hoping it would be a reset button. Ha!

When Tynan curled his hand at her nape under the silk scarf around her hair, she stiffened for a heartbeat, then sighed and yielded to his grip, tilting her head back to meet his gaze.

“You can’t live asleep,” he pointed out, his fingers flexing gently.

“Says the guy who was some sort of incorporeal interdimensional divine being on the other end of a wormhole,” she grumbled.

His lips curled, not so much beatific as impish. “And even I was summoned forth by the power of love gathering just beyond my event horizon.”

Part of her—the tough part that she’d showed the world, meaning Earth, when her career and marriage faltered—wanted to scoff at the notion. Love wasn’t a force like gravity or electromagnetism. And yet… She remembered when every new book she read felt like an opening door, and every dorm-room argument seemed fresh and brilliant and life-altering.

Maybe she didn’t need a new dream; she just had to remember the excited girl she’d been.

She gazed at him. “You were trapped the same way I was.”

He kneaded the base of her skull idly, as if he was taking comfort in the touch. “I didn’t ‘wake up’ until I found myself in that little garden, looking at the black hole with you beside me.”

“You were pretty out of it.” She tilted her head into his caress. “I thought you were a poet.”

He chuckled. “Warlords of my time were expected to recite tales of our own mighty exploits. I suppose I was overcome by the beauty of the singularity and the flowers.” His smile dropped away. “And you, my lady.”

Her pulse thudded hard at the way his voice lowered. “I’m not a lady yet,” she reminded him. “Not until the wedding is over.”

“They are bound in their hearts,” he said. “And you’ve been mine twice already.”

Oh no, she didn’t need that reminder. A tingle spread from his touch at her nape down her spine to pool softly in her core. “That was before I knew you were…” She gestured at the bribes arrayed around them. “A god.”

His dark eyes were somber. “You’ve found out terrible things about me. But none of it changes who I am.”

Desperation—and desire—made her heart beat faster. “I don’t really know you still. God, warlord, poet, alien, in the body of a felon. Which one is it?”

“Does it matter, compared to this?”

His position on the step above her gave him the high ground, but he descended slowly enough that she had plenty of time to evade him. If she’d chosen.

But she thought maybe she’d chosen from the moment she’d opened the door of her suite and saw him standing there.

Leaning her head back into the cradle of his big hand, she let his mouth land lightly on hers.

The rasping release of his breath over her lips hinted at his precarious grasp on his control even as his hand held her steady and his tongue traced a slow, sensuous path around hers. She wrapped her arm behind his neck—just in case his control broke. Or worse yet, he regained it. Because she was definitely making this choice.

His hair, still damp from the rain, was like cool waves under her restless fingers. But the storm inside her was heating up. With a huff of impatience, she shoved away the coat she’d taken from the shuttle so she could press herself into his wide chest with only her thin night robe between them.

He groaned hoarsely and pulled her up against him, knocking loose the silky headscarf she’d wrapped around her hair before going to bed in her lonely suite on that far-away space station. She didn’t even care that his hungry groping would make her hair wild; it was already too wet from the rain anyway.

And she was wetter and more wild.

The kiss went on and on, their hands roaming desperately, until they were sprawled on the steps in awkward abandon. He bumped his elbow and winced. She cracked her knee trying to wrap one leg around his hips.

With a guttural oath, he lifted her—oh, it was so wrong that she’d never get tired of that effortless strength and the way he handled her as if she was precious—and turned toward the throne. With a reckless sweep of his forearm, he knocked away the centuries of tokens and draped her across the wide seat with its splayed arms.

One of the data cubes rolled down the steps, and when it landed at the bottom, it started to play a song, something rhythmic and tribal, a reminder that before Thorkons got all noble and proper, they’d been a galaxy of fierce warriors. And she had one of them at her fingertips…

She kicked off the oversized boots she’d taken from the shuttle, and they hit the floor with echoed thumps. “Enough room for two,” she purred, holding her hand out to him.

Staring down at her with a hot, hungry gaze, he reached over his head and yanked his tunic over his head. Behind him, rain started to fall again, sifting through the cracks in the arched ceiling in silvery veils. But the dais was protected. And she was protected as he closed the short step of distance between them and knelt beside the throne, reaching out to tangle his fingers through hers.

Water droplets in his black hair and scattered across his bare shoulder glimmered in the multicolored lantern light like opals. “I don’t want it to be only the burn of the ghost-mead that brings us together,” he murmured.

“It’s not,” she assured him. It wasn’t mead, but need, and if there were ghosts of their pasts lurking… Well, let them burn too.

She drew him inexorably toward her, and he surrendered, pulling himself up to prop his hip on the edge of the seat beside her. He leaned down for another endless kiss, and she murmured in pleasure as she lounged back, caught between the wide arms of the throne and his brawny embrace.

The kisses made her feel like a goddess, worshipped and adored…

Then his lips dropped lower and everything turned to carnal ecstasy.

Her night robe had been shielded from the rain, but as he unfastened the front seal, laying her bare, the damp heat of his mouth teasing across her skin made her wet inside. She moaned and arched up, as if she needed to reach the veils of rain to calm the fire in her veins. But Tynan was there first, stoking the flames higher.

“I love the sounds you make,” he murmured against her throat where her pulse pounded. “Sweet as a prayer.”

“You heathen,” she whispered. “But I’ll give you my blessing anyway. Kiss me. Touch me. Make me come…”

He licked a tight circle around her breast and drew the peaked nipple between his teeth. She gasped and clutched at his shoulders. When she closed her eyes to concentrate on the sensations rippling through her, the pretty opalescent lights of the lanterns turned to lush, dark pulses of rushing blood and desire hidden behind her trembling lashes.

But he wouldn’t let it stay hidden. His long fingers delved between her legs, finding the slick pool of need and spreading the welcoming wetness over her cleft. She moaned and twisted on his sensually torturing hand while he switched his attention to her other breast, licking and sucking until her nipple was an ignition button to her whole body throbbing with demand.

She was so close…and he went lower yet.

His tongue against her clit drove the throbbing into a tympani drumbeat, and she cried out at the intensity of the sensation. She braced her heels against the hard edge of the throne to drive her hips up into his mouth. He hummed low in his throat, and the vibrations tingled through her until she was almost sobbing.

When he finally stood to shed his trousers, she dragged her lashes apart to stare at him greedily. He was so big, everywhere, and he was hers in this moment. The lanterns highlighted the sheen of his skin, but their gleam was swallowed by the hungry blackness of his eyes.

For a heartbeat, her breath stoppered in her throat. A warning from deep in her bones told her he was a danger to her. And not because he was an alien god given the flesh of a madman. No, the peril went deeper than skin, deeper than bone. It went to her core.

It went to her heart…

But then he was nudging up between her knees, his lean hips widening the spread of her legs, and she brought him closer with her ankles locked behind his thighs. Because she wanted more than she feared. It had been so long since she felt this way, that reaching for what she wanted, with excitement and a glad heart, would be its own reward.

He would be her reward.