Chapter 10

 

Luc’s shoulders stung from the raw aquari scrapes, but the gleam of elation in Amy’s dark eyes when she looked down at the map and then back at him was worth any amount of pain.

As if he’d found something much more impressive than a legendary gemstone.

The old tunnel as it plunged deep into the ground was tighter than the main shaft they’d followed and they twisted between more stony formations, but at least he didn’t need to crash through the crystals to be with her. A gust of air suddenly wafted past him, laden with the scent of Amy’s overheated skin and the tang of blood from her wounded hand. A glow flared, and he paused, thinking she had brightened her light band, but her gasp had him pounding forward again.

He stepped up beside her as the tunnel abruptly opened wide to a vast chamber. All around the rough walls, shattered ends of stalagmites and stalactites glittered in the illumination she cast. He flicked on his light band as well, and the doubled brightness amplified the glassy shimmer all around them.

“Oh wow,” Amy whispered. “It’s like stars, underground.”

The low-quality aquari crystal lacked the striking blue tone of the best gemstones, but the randomly faceted fractures still cast myriad sparkles around them, twinkling across his chest and in Amy’s wide, dark eyes.

Entranced by her wonder, he stared deep into her eyes.

And caught a wink of fire.

The drakling spirit inside him stirred, rising. He turned, following the direction of her gaze, and the twinkle, flame-red, caught his eye. “That’s it.” He choked back the urge to roar. “Amy, there it is. The Heart’s Flame.”

It was just a replica, of course. Made for the race. He knew that. And yet… The gleam of the rare stone that had once graced a drakling queen’s crown had his treasure-seeking soul in a knot of exhilaration and longing.

Side by side, they crept toward the stone. It was perched atop one of the shattered pillars of lesser aquari crystal, and he realized the damage in the cavern radiated out from that center point as if the Heart’s Flame itself had caused the damage. Impossible, of course. The stone, which would nestle tidily in the center of his palm, was a teardrop shape, beautiful but roughly finished, as if by a careless or uncontrolled hand. But as they moved closer, he saw that each chip to the stone must have been precisely calibrated to maximize the light living within it. As he and Amy got closer, their twin lights echoed in thrown sparks twinkling from the Heart’s Flame.

The broken aquari crystal pillar was still taller than him, and they craned their necks as they stood beneath the gem. Though all his attention was focused on the gem, he glanced down when Amy threaded her fingers between his.

“Do we just…take it?” She glanced up at him. This close, the reflected light from the Heart’s Flame blazed in her black eyes.

“I’m a treasure-starved drakling, and you’re an infamous interstellar explorer, and we’re Great Space Racers,” he said. “Which means…we just take it.”

But he understood her hesitation. The gemstone looked glorious set in its crystal cave. But also…alone. Could a rock look lonely? If he and Amy withdrew their light, the Heart’s Flame would gutter out, lost again in the darkness.

“Take it,” he urged.

She wrapped her arms around herself. “Oh. I shouldn’t. It belongs to your people.”

“Together then. It’ll make a great promo shot.”

She grinned at him giddily, and they both reached up for the stone, though she had to reach well above her head.

“Watch out for the sharp edges of the pillar,” he reminded her.

Carefully, they lifted the stone from its perch and settled back on their heels, staring down at their linked hands.

For all its flickering scarlet light, the Heart’s Flame was cool against his skin, unlike Amy’s fingers that brushed his own. His pulse sped as she let out a little sigh then peeked up at him with that wide grin.

“I thought there’d be, like, a serenade of rock guitars,” she said, “or someone jumping out with confetti and congratulations, you know?”

“Then we’ll have to find a way to celebrate on our own.” His voice sounded husky in his own ears, suggestive.

Another hot flicker in her eyes—not the Heart’s Flame this time—told him she’d heard it too. “How about a kiss—?”

A bone-deep rumbling interrupted her. At first he thought it was the drakling in him growling its approval. The shattering peal of breaking crystal jarred them, knocking them apart. Amy bobbled the crystal for a heart-stopping moment before her fingers clenched around it.

“Earthquake,” she gasped. “We have to get out of here.”

He was already ahead of her. With a grip around her wrist, he yanked her toward the tunnel they’d followed. By the Shining Lady, he’d known this planet was geologically unstable—that was how the crystal veins formed through the stone—but what were the chances a faultline would slip while they were buried underground?

“Larfing unlucky,” he snarled.

The earth shook again, and air rushed around them, as if the tunnel was the throat of a beast ready to swallow them down. Ricocheting against the walls, Luc pulled Amy to his chest to protect her from the splintering rock. She staggered into him, her fist tight around the rock pressed between them. He swore he felt her frantic heartbeat transmitted through the stone.

His jaw tightened as the thin crystal veins tore at his back. Even a drakling wouldn’t survive a collapsing cavern, and wings were useless in a grave. “Run,” he said grimly. “As fast as you can.”

He hurtled her onward, her smaller size twisting between the fallen rocks. If too much had fallen and blocked the tunnel… No, they could not be that unlucky.

When they burst out into the five-way confluence, she paused. “Luc, I can’t remember—”

The earthquake had damaged the other entrances, and nothing looked familiar. He checked the dat-pad. “The seismic activity is interfering with the sensor.”

To his shock, she laughed. “Of course it is.” She put her hands on her hips, the Heart’s Flame gleaming through the gap where her missing finger wasn’t. She spun on her heel. “Now, which tunnel makes for the most dramatic shot…”

He gawped at her. “You think they did this on purpose?”

“Of course. It’s not real, but we have to pretend it is.” She pointed. “That one. That’s our way out.”

He clenched his jaw. “That tunnel is going to collapse at any moment.”

She nodded. “Exactly. That’s why I picked it. Excellent footage.”

“Amy…”

She pelted forward, her laughter trailing behind her like a comet’s bright wake.

He shook his head in disbelief. Had she gone insane? Had the realities of space travel and aliens finally broken her?

Except…this wasn’t real anyway, none of it. So what was he fretting for?

With a laugh—maybe a little forced, but still a laugh—he ran after her.

The tunnel was disintegrating around them. Or so it seemed. The shards of splintering crystals certainly stung like they were larfing real enough.

They burst out of the airshaft opening on a roar of dust as the tunnel collapsed behind them. The scintillating crystal particles hung in the air like silver fog under the light of Am-syx’s four moons strung across the sky. They stumbled a few steps farther, then Amy swung toward him, the Heart’s Flame hefted high in her bandaged hand. It blazed in the bright moonlight, though to his eye it was not as striking as a certain infamous interstellar explorer poised triumphant with four shadows streaming out from her braced boots.

She let out a whoop. “We did it! We found the queen’s prism!”

“Just the first stone,” he cautioned. “There’re two more.”

She laughed again—a wild, joyous sound—and jumped at him.

He caught her easily, ignoring the sting of his back and shoulders. Ignored everything as she wrapped her legs behind his backside and pressed her mouth to his.

The Heart’s Flame seemed to pulse against his jaw as she framed her hands around his face, tilting her head to deepen the kiss. Their tongues twined, and their breaths puffed out in tiny clouds on the rapidly cooling air. He held her tight, pulling her thighs wide around his middle, his hands linked under her backside. She shivered against him.

“Are you cold?” he murmured when she raised her head.

She looked down at him with luminous dark eyes. “Not even a little. Maybe cuz I have the Heart’s Flame in my hand.” She tipped forward again, her lips hovering above his. “Or maybe it’s you—”

A faint clacking noise intruded on his pleasurable anticipation. He planned to ignore it as he was doing the pain in his back and shoulders, but it was getting louder. “Do you hear that? I think the tunnel might be collapsing the rest of the way.”

“Let it,” she murmured. “Let everything fall.”

While that sentiment was very much appropriate to a search for the Firestorm Queen’s ecstatically abandoned gemstones, his senses quivered on full alert. Escaping the dramatically collapsing cavern apparently wasn’t enough for the Octiron Corp.

Slowly, he let Amy slide down his hip, though he kept her close.

She made a soft sound of disappointment but stayed at his side. “What’s got you spooked?”

“Listen…”

She tilted her head. “I don’t… That clicking?” She grimaced. “More teeth?”

“Claws.” He grabbed her wrist again. “Back to the ship. Now.”

“But what about our celebration? Don’t they want to see us kiss again?”

“I think they sent mites after us.”

“Well, that’s not anywhere near as fun as kissing.”

He was starting to wonder what Octiron really wanted from them. Of course the race needed to be a challenge, but malfunctioning trans-dimensional transfers? Collapsing tunnels? Hive-mites? What else would they face? His back and shoulders burned from the crystal cuts, but suspicion burned deeper.

They ran.

His longer legs stirred up dust that enveloped them and left an obvious trail under the moonlight. Shorter though she was, Amy stuck doggedly right off his flank.

As they topped a shallow rise, he caught a glimpse of the Blissed not far ahead. But when he caught a breath to call over to her, the mite hit him from behind.

Amy screamed, but the shrill sound abruptly cut off. Had another mite—

He didn’t have time to panic. The mite rolled him hard, but he tucked into the momentum, aiming toward where she had been.

He held his breath against the dust and rampaging fear when he didn’t immediately see her. But he saw the mite. It was larfing huge, blocking his view of everything. Everything except for the alarming sight of more mites boiling out of the earth.

He scrabbled for the blaster in its hip holster. The grip felt small and useless in his hand, and the muzzle looked even smaller as he brought it to bear on the nearest mite. Not knowing where Amy was, he squeezed off a stun-only shot. The orange beam of low-intensity energy hit the bug’s carapace and spattered everywhere in orange sparks, only partially penetrating. The mite reared back, six legs spread wide as if in surprise. Then it came crashing toward him.

He threw himself to one side, rolling again. All his efforts just kicked up more blinding dust, choking him as he called out her name.

A garbled cry responded somewhere off to one side. He came to his knees in a firing stance. He took a steadying breath, coughed anyway, and fired.

A stronger concentrated beam of orange smashed into the mite. Its high-pitched scream told him he’d hit dead on. Or not quite dead. The mite burrowed back into the dust, heaving earth behind it, but three more of the bugs were right behind.

And in between them and him was Amy.

She zigzagged toward him, the ground heaving under her feet. From another tremor or more bugs he didn’t know. And didn’t care to stay to find out. He reached out to grab her extended hand, ignoring the Heart’s Flame in her fist, wrapping his long fingers around her wrist. Her pulse screamed in terror under his fingertips but her eyes were fierce.

He whirled savagely and with his momentum hurled her on the downhill slide toward the Blissed, then flung himself after her.

She stumbled but quickly found her footing and used the downward slope to put on an impressive burst of speed with her churning little legs, arms pumping hard. He spun back toward the bugs and fired again, a weak but widespread defensive beam of pale yellow that turned the churning dust to a wall of flame.

As quickly as the particulates in the air ignited, they guttered out. But the bugs had already retreated underground.

He wheeled back around to follow Amy only to hear her cry of warning. He glanced over his shoulder at the biggest mite yet rising out of the dust, close enough to touch.

Eyes widening, blaster overheating in his hand, he fired. The beam, still on wide dispersal, hit the bug mid-carapace between its front mandibles. The creature exploded like an overripe pixberry.

He ducked, but the acid that fueled its underground excavations—and that the Yestria had genetically modified for attack purposes—splattered him. With a hissing curse, he stumbled away.

By the Shining Lady, it hurt. His skin where the droplets had landed blistered, and the streaks of acid were eating through his tough ships fatigues. He stripped off the vest as he ran, still clutching the overheated grip of the blaster.

He and Amy reached the Blissed at the same moment and crammed through the still-opening hatch that had unsealed helpfully in response to the automatic query from the dat-pad. Luc slammed the portal shut before it had even finished widening.

The ship’s comm chirped, “Welcome back, Great Space Rac—”

Amy turned to him, her eyes blazing. “They hurt you—”

The fury in her voice—on his behalf—warmed him deeper and much more gently than the acid, but he shouldered past her with care. “We have to get out of here. The mites’ acid won’t penetrate the hull immediately but repeated doses could make returning to space…problematic.”

She hustled beside him to the cockpit. “You get us up in the air, and I’ll take care of your burns.”

He wanted to demur, pretend that he could tough it out, but the muscles around the wounds were going numb in shock and he didn’t think they could afford—not even with the riches of the queen’s gemstone—to be slowed down.

Grimly, he launched the Blissed skyward. The light of the moons flowed into the cockpit, pastel and dreamy, perfect for a honeymoon pleasure cruise.

Which a glimpse in the ship’s rear viewer with its swarm of mites showed this wasn’t.

As if the moonlight had beamed into the cockpit, a cooling sensation spread across his bare shoulders. Amy stood behind him with the cleansing spray. He couldn’t hold back a relieved breath.

“Where is the gem?”

She opened her other hand, revealing the faceted crystal. The indentations in the flesh of her palm were almost as red as the stone itself. She handed it to him and then opened the tube of healing ointment. While he rotated the teardrop crystal in his fingers, she spread the ointment over the cuts he’d taken from the collapsing tunnel and the blisters from the mite’s acid.

“It’s real,” she murmured.

He studied the ersatz Heart’s Flame. “Octiron wouldn’t hide a real gemstone of this worth. It must be a replica.” But…the pulse of light in its depths was undeniably beautiful.

“I meant these wounds are real,” she said. “Not stage makeup. Just like your scales are real, like spaceships are real. Like monsters are real.”

“Mites,” he corrected absently, distracted by the delicate stroke of her fingers tracing his skin. “Not monsters, just mites.” The nerves that had numbed from pain and the cleansing spray woke up, painful, tingling, but he wanted it, wanted to feel her touch.

They zoomed past Am-Syx’s moons, only the darkness of the Paragon Galaxy ahead of them. She looked at him, her mouth set in a straight line. “The dangers are real.”

He’d figured that out for himself, what with his skin burning off. “I always thought it was just for ratings. But now…”

“There was no one to save us,” she said. “We were on our own.”

His heart sank, but he nodded. “We have to stop the race.” It was one thing to risk humiliation for himself, a drakling with no treasure of his own. But he wouldn’t risk her life.

“Are the riches real?”

He hesitated. “As far as I can tell. The pre-race signing bonus in my account spent like actual credits.”

She let out a sharp breath. “And the adventure is definitely real.” Her jaw shifted to one side. “What’s the next line of the queen’s poem? What’s the next clue?”

“Amy—”

She swung around to sit on the arm of his chair. Bracing one hand on his thigh, she stared down at him implacably. “Do you want to stop?”

He’d have nothing to show his brothers except his weakness. His standing professionally might be undermined as well.

And she’d be on the first trans-dimensional tranference back to her closed world.

Slowly, he shook his head. “I do not want to stop. I want to win.”

Her smile returned, not the giddy silliness of before, but a determination as fierce as any ancient drakling queen. “Then we keep going.”

He reached up to wrap his fingers in the silky strands of her black hair. “When did you become so bold?”

“Faking it,” she confessed.

“Are you faking it when I touch you and your pulse races?”

Her breath hitched, and he was close enough to see her pupils dilate, a soft, slow, subtle explosion of black over black. “No,” she whispered. “That’s the most real of all.”

Easing one arm around her waist, he slid her off the arm of his chair and into his lap. With boneless grace, she sprawled across his thighs, one hand centered in the middle of his naked chest. She reached around him to snag the Heart’s Flame off the console where he’d left it making their escape from the planet.

She held it up between them, the gem flashing with firelight. “Will it all be worth the risk?”

He didn’t even look at the stone, his gaze fixed on her pensive expression. “It already is.”

He rose to his feet, easily lifting her and the fake Heart’s Flame that had almost gotten them killed. She looped her arm behind his neck and held tight as he strode down the short corridor to the bedroom.

When he twisted his shoulders to guide her legs through the doorway, she kicked a little. “Keep going.”

His stomach tightened. “Do you not want—?”

“I want,” she said in a husky voice. “After a bath. I’m sweaty and dusty, and you’re covered in blood and acid.”

“Oh, that.”

“Also, I’ve been dying to try that waterfall.”

“I turned it on the first night I got the ship,” he admitted. “But it seemed…wrong to use it by myself.”

“As an infamous interstellar explorer, I feel qualified to lead you into temptation.” She wriggled against him until he let her down to the deck. Taking a step back, she eyed him through her short lashes, her fingers toying with the closures of her long tunic. “Is there…anything I should know about alien sex?”

“I don’t know about other aliens.” He took the gemstone from her hand and tossed it toward the bed. “Sex with me, though…”

The golden flush over her wide cheeks delighted him. As did the speed of her fingers unsealing the tunic. He forced himself to lean back in the doorway, arms clenched over his chest to stop himself from grabbing her. She wasn’t some automated sexbot or virtual pleasure performer or even one of his attempted yet ineffectual relationships. She was a closed-worlder, young, innocent…

Pausing with her fists clenched in the lapels of the tunic, holding it closed, she stared up at him, her lower lip caught between her teeth almost as tightly as her fists on the fabric.

The vulnerability in her gaze stabbed him, burned him, scarred him. “If you don’t want this—”

“I do want,” she whispered. “So much more than I can say, in English, in Mandarin, in whatever language a universal translator comes up with. But…what if I’m not enough? Not what you wanted?”

He forced himself not to move, not to howl at the thought of other people who had made her doubt herself.

“You came from so far away, and you’ve kept the pace, side by side with me, every step,” he reminded her. “You ask if you’re what I want? You are what I’ve dreamed of. Now show me.”

Hands and breaths shaking, she let the tunic slide from her shoulders into a pool of fabric at her feet and stood before him only in the leggings and arm coverings that had protected her from the worst of their day’s adventure.

Nothing would keep her from the beast inside him.

He hissed out a breath and straightened. Fumbling over his shoulder, he clicked the light control panel to set the mood before he stalked slowly across the small room.

The faceted fixture above the bed began to rotate, throwing sparkles across the walls, the red bed, and their bodies, as if they’d fallen into the heart of the Heart’s Flame.

She tilted her head. “A disco ball in a spaceship. How weird.”

“It’s a disco pyramid.”

“You have disco?” Her eyes widened. “In space?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” He stopped with the toes of his boots nudged up against hers. “I want to see you, all of you. May I remove these?”

“Please. And yours.”

Torturing himself, he kept his hands off her gleaming skin as he unbound her from the arm and leg coverings. She wasn’t a treasure he’d stolen—she was a gift he was unwrapping, a gift she’d given him. When he knelt in front of her to unfasten her boots, she balanced herself with one hand on his shoulder, and when he straightened again, her fingertips skipped downward to land on his bare chest. His heart thudded strongly under her palm, as if he was freeing it too from some strictures he hadn’t even realized were constraining him.

He stripped out of his own clothes so fast he suspected he’d be hard pressed to find his boots later. But every quivering sense in his drakling soul was attuned to her, the way her fingers traced up his arms and over his shoulders then up high to cup his jaw.

“Oh, Luc,” she breathed. “I can’t believe…”

He stilled. “I can show you the Intergalactic Dating Agency manuals that show our species are reasonably compatible.”

She brushed her thumb over his lower lip. “I know that already. I just can’t believe I’ve come so far, to be here, with you.”

“Come a little farther,” he cajoled as he took a step backward toward the bathroom. “With me.”

Her delighted giggle danced over his skin like the disco lights made tangible. Since the pyramid was shining into the bathing area, he didn’t bother with more lights, just palmed the controls for the shower. Instead of the quick, efficient blast of the cleansing sonics, a cascade of hydrogen and oxygen—refreshingly combined as water—poured into the large unit. Before he’d learned that the Blissed was a reclaimed honeymoon cruiser, he’d been baffled by the excessive cleaning room. But as Amy joined him, he finally understood the need for the ship’s augmented water-reclamation system. Watching her glide toward him through the red sparkles and the mist of the waterfall…he might never want to leave.

If he wasn’t careful, he might never want her to leave.