Oath Forger (Book 5)

by Nia Mars

  “Can you really smite people?”

  He makes a pouty face, which looks ridiculous on him. “No.” He pauses. “But you can. You are a first-level mystic.”

  “You still control your powers better than I do.”

  “I’ve had a lifetime of practice.” He kisses me again, with intent. “And we’ll have a lifetime of practice together.”

  “I don’t think the difference between a first-level and a seventh-level is as big as you make it sound.”

  He shakes his head, resigned. “It hurts me to see you belittle your power. The difference between the levels is vast, and some mystics wish desperately for more than what they have.” He pauses. Then he shakes his head. “My father went power-mad around the time I was born. He had to face the fact that I’ll be the last with power in the family. It would all end with his son.”

  “So?”

  “He came up with the crazy idea that if he took my power, he’d somehow become a fifth-level mystic. Go back up the ladder.”

  “Took it how?”

  “He tried to eat me when I was a newborn.”

  A quick laugh escapes me, but Uthan’s face shows no humor. Oh my God. He isn’t joking.

  I’m horrified. “What happened?”

  “My mother stopped him before he slit my neck. He made up some ritual that was supposed to start with my blood.”

  I stare.

  Uthan rubs his thumb over my collarbone. “There are some seriously screwed up mystics out there. Everybody isn’t as great as I am. So you should appreciate that you have me, and kiss me right now instead of looking so stricken.”

  I raise my head and press my lips to his. I do appreciate him. And more. I love this man.

  His hands caress my jawline, then my neck, my shoulders, then move to cup my breasts. They linger there as we kiss. Then his fingers trail down my ribcage and his hands tighten on my hips next as he grinds his hard cock against me.

  I whimper into his mouth, wanting more.

  His hands glide lower and catch me under my thighs, then he’s lifting me up and wrapping my legs around his waist. I steady myself by putting my arms around his neck.

  “I claim you for my own, Ava Smith of Earth,” he announces as he slides inside me in one stretching thrust that sends sharp pleasure through my body and a fog of sex-haze to my brain.

  He is inside me so fully, fills me so tightly, I think he’s not going to be able to move at all, but then he does. He rocks into me, then pulls almost entirely out before plunging back in. The drag of his hard cock against my slick inner walls is maddening in its intensity. Every nerve ending I have down there is doing a wild, sensual dance, spiraling out of control. I lose the ability to think.

  Minutes pass before I realize that instead of the soft mist of the shower, we’re standing waist-deep in the lapping waves of a blue lagoon—his mystical space.

  “Here, you’ll always be just mine,” he says with masculine satisfaction. “The others can never come after us.”

  My back is to the ocean. I can see his island over his shoulder. I’ve seen the island nearly destroyed. Now it’s a sprawling jungle once again, an orgy of green, teeming with life. I can feel the primal life energy that pulses through it all. The pulsing pleasure between my legs moves to the same rhythm.

  I close my eyes against the onslaught of sensations and let my head drop back. “I like it here.”

  “You haven’t seen everything yet.”

  I’m not aware that we’re moving, but when I open my eyes, we are in the top of a tree. Like a hundred feet off the ground, at least!

  Uthan is sitting with his back braced against the trunk, straddling a thick branch, while I’m straddling him. And his thick branch. Not that I can appreciate it at the moment. Because...holy hell...we’re about to fall to our deaths!

  I grab onto him like a spider monkey with attachment issues and scream.

  He has the gall to laugh. “Look around, my Ava.”

  “No thanks.” I squeeze my eyes shut instead. If I look around, I might look down. I really don’t want to look down.

  “You’re on the top of my world.”

  I open one eye, but only so I can glare at him. Except, the vista that spreads before me makes the other eye pop open. Okay, so we’re not falling. From our perch, I can see the jungle from above, the entire emerald island, and the golden ocean that surrounds us. I lose my breath.

  I feel like I’m floating on the beauty of life. It’s like floating on the warm waves of Uthan’s ocean. In his ocean, Uthan is usually under me, supporting me. He’s doing that now, too, but at the moment he is also inside me. He’s holding still, but he is as hard as I’ve ever felt him.

  His hands tighten on my hips and he moves me up, then back down, slowly, experimentally. When a low moan escapes my lips, he pushes up and grinds himself into me.

  I hold onto his wide shoulders as if they are my lifeline. “You can’t be serious.” I gasp at the insistent licks of the fire that he’s relit inside me. “We can’t have sex at the top of a tree. This is not normal.”

  “Has anything been normal since we met, my Ava?”

  He has a point there.

  I could demand that he return me to the ground. Or that we go all the way back to his spaceship and his shower. But I realize that maybe we are here in the treetop for a reason. Because he does have to share me with the others.

  Maybe he wants to make our joinings memorable.

  This one certainly is.

  “Thank you.” I kiss him. “This is breathtaking.”

  I kiss him again and linger this time. We lose ourselves in each other.

  When our climax shakes us, we cling to each other as leaves cling to their branches in a storm.

  We recover on the beach, lying in each other’s arms in the soft sand, bathing in sunshine and the sounds of the ocean. For a while, I watch the friendly waves lapping at our toes. Then I look up at Uthan. He is asleep.

  He doesn’t wake up, even when I gasp, startled by the figure appearing at the edge of the jungle.

  My heart races. No, no, no. Our enemies can’t attack us here, can they? “Uthan!”

  But Uthan won’t wake. He’s lost to the world.

  With a start, I recognize the stranger.

  Tib.

  He gestures with his head, down the beach.

  Seriously? He wants me to walk with him, now? I try to melt into the sand. I’m naked!

  Before I could blink, I’m standing—against my will—and then I’m clothed, in a white robe that covers me to my ankles.

  Tib is in his handsome-man-in-his-fifties imaginary body. His robe is the same color and material as mine, but richly embroidered and decorated with gems. It’s clear he’d amused himself with its creation. Today, he looks like a mythical king. All he is missing is the crown.

  “You share something with him,” he says, without looking at Uthan.

  “Yes.”

  “Love?”

  “Yes.” I pause. I have so many questions for Tib, but what if I open up a can of worms I won’t be able to handle? I ask anyway. “Did you love my mother? You are my father, right?”

  It’s Uthan’s theory. I’m not entirely convinced.

  “Love is not an emotion my kind experiences.”

  “What do you experience?”

  “For people? Interest. Your kind can be amusing.”

  “If you don’t experience love, then what drives you?” I ask him.

  “Power. And the satisfaction of having it.”

  Careful, the voice of instinct says somewhere deep inside me.

  “You have power,” he says as we walk on a stretch of deserted beach. The forest is much farther back here.

  “I can blow things up. Thanks to you.”

  His gaze is unnerving. “That’s not a mystical power.”

  “Am I really a mystic?”

  “I did care for your mother.”

  Okay, so he is admitting to be my father. I stumble on the
sand.

  I clear my throat. “Why did you pick her? Why did you leave her?”

  He looks out at the ocean as we walk. “She was wandering in the wilderness after her people rejected her. She battled the elements and the wild animals. She nearly died, more than once. But through sheer will, she clawed herself back to life. Her strength was her power. She was wild and free, out in the open while others hid in tunnels. Her courage drew me.”

  “And then?”

  “Then she reached others of her kind. She became one of them. Just like them.”

  If she conformed, it was because of me. She’d been pregnant with me. She needed a community to help us survive. She couldn’t wander the wilderness and battle the elements and wild animals with a baby on her hip.

  “I think of her sometimes,” Tib says, as if doing her, and me, some great honor.

  Screw him. I turn on my heel. “I’m going back to Uthan.”

  Tib stops, and I find that I can’t move. My feet are glued to the sand.

  “When you begged me for his life, I granted your wish,” my ‘father’ says.

  Never ask a spirit for a favor, Uthan once told me. I have a feeling I’m about to find out why. The short hairs rise at the back of my neck.

  “You have your mother’s strength,” Tib says. “Walk the wilderness with me.”

  When I look for Uthan, I can no longer see him. Panic constricts my throat. I whip my head around, but I can no longer see the jungle either, or the ocean, just endless sand. Are we even still on the island?

  My heart gives a hard lurch. My stomach drops.

  Have I been just kidnapped by my father?

  Chapter Four

  MY HEART IS TRYING TO BREAK OUT OF MY CHEST. Seriously, I feel like it has a chisel and a hammer. Bam, bam, bam. I’m not sure what to do if Tib decides to keep me with him. How do you fight a spirit? The very real possibility that I can’t fight him and he can just snatch me away tightens my throat.

  “I’d like to go back.” I hold my breath for his answer.

  “For love?” he asks after a long moment.

  “Yes.”

  “I can give you the endlessness of the universe.”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to have that. I’m just an ordinary human being.”

  “Not ordinary.”

  “Okay, slightly weird.”

  He smiles, and I can see in that smile why my mother fell for him. He has a vastness to him, an endlessness, as if his gaze can see galaxies. He is cloaked in power.

  In some small way, he and Uthan are alike. It’s the mystic power in Uthan, I think. Except of course, it’s amplified a million times in Tib. He is a spirit.

  While I’m thinking about that, he’s pondering a different subject, because he asks, “Your mother loved me, do you think?”

  His expression is nonchalant, but his sudden stillness gives me the impression that my answer is important to him.

  “Yes.” She wouldn’t have slept with him if she didn’t.

  He smiles again. “She was special. Walking through the desert alone.” He holds my gaze. “You don’t have to walk alone.”

  “I won’t. I have my kreks. I’d like to return to them.”

  Even as I plead, I know my fate depends on nothing but his whim. I’m not sure that my human existence is entirely real to him. I must seem to him like a fruit fly seems to me. I might be his fruit fly, but still. My entire existence is a blink to Tib.

  “You could come and visit me from time to time,” I offer. “I promise to keep things interesting. We are about to have a full-out space war with pirates.”

  His gaze turns speculative. “Do you wish for my help?”

  “No!” I’ve learned my lesson. “Thank you. I think we can handle it.”

  He watches me in silence as seconds tick by. His next smile is approving. “You are very much like your mother.”

  And, just like that, I’m lying naked on the sand next to Uthan.

  He opens his eyes, blinks as he yawns. “Would you like to return to the ship?”

  I’m on my feet before his last word is out. “Yes, please.”

  WE REACH MERIM the following evening, a little later than anticipated because Uthan decided to stop mid-flight to check out some space debris. The debris field was large enough to hide a pirate ship. He let me vaporize it as practice, because I told him about my meeting with Tib, and Uthan wanted to see whether another close-encounter with the spirit improved my control.

  It did.

  I’ve done well with smaller targets before, individual trees. But that was like taking a bucket of water from the ocean and throwing it at a specific, close target. This time, I was throwing the entire ocean, so to speak, across space.

  “Tib’s power brushing up against my power seems to have a positive effect each time,” I tell Uthan as we land. My next thought makes me frown. “Or did my control get better because I slept with you. Fully accepted you?” I’m not a fan of the thought. “My power shouldn’t come from whether or not I sleep with men.”

  “Accepting your kreks,” Uthan tells me, nothing if not patient, “means you’re accepting that you’re the Oath Forger. You are accepting yourself. You are accepting your power. I think that makes it easier to control. Resistance and doubt took up too much of your energy before, my Ava. As you give that up, you’re becoming more focused. You are seeing yourself more clearly, so you’re also seeing everything else more clearly.”

  He might be just a seventh-level mystic, but he’s still the wisest person I know. I appreciate the breadth of his knowledge, his kindness, his open-mindedness, that he will answer any question. He has a mystic sanctuary, and so do I, but in a sense, he himself is a sanctuary for me too.

  “Do you feel different after discharging all that power?” he asks. “Can you tell if it’s lessening?”

  At first, we’ve all assumed that my power is like a muscle, the more I use it, the stronger it gets. But Uthan has cautioned me to watch it, to make sure it’s not a diminishing resource.

  “The power is still there. All of it.” I can feel it roiling under the surface.

  He nods his relief.

  On the way to the palace, I thank him for the trip again. He promises to take me again anytime I want to go. And then he kisses me, and keeps kissing me until our pod lands.

  Koah, Tiam, Dason, and Roax join us for dinner. Then they join us in bed. Uthan gets pushed to the edge. The others demand their share of contact.

  While I found their possessiveness troubling in the beginning, now I find that I, too, need this, need them around me.

  Roax and Dason lie closest to me. There’s an extra tension there. I haven’t formally ‘accepted’ them yet. The suspense is getting to me. I know I’ll do it and soon, and I’m nervous about how it’ll go.

  Roax pulls me closer to him in the middle of the night, his hard cock nestling against my butt, his teeth scraping the spot where my neck meets my shoulder. I think he might demand to claim me right then and there, with the others in the bed with us.

  But he only chuckles at my sharp intake of breath, and then settles back into sleep one breast cupped in his hand.

  Sadist.

  When I wake in the morning, he is gone, and so is Dason, along with Koah and Uthan. Only Tiam is with me. I’m wrapped in his arms now. I slept through the ‘changing of the guards.’

  I smile up into Tiam’s beautiful gray eyes, and he smiles down at me, his silver hair spread on the pillow around us. “My Ava.”

  I snuggle into his heat and into the peace of the morning. I love waking up with my kreks, whether one or many. When I wake up a little more, I realize that Tiam is fully clothed, which he wasn’t when he went to bed. This means he’s been up already.

  “Any new developments?” I ask him.

  “Not enough.” Impatience creeps into his tone. “But I narrowed things down a little. I’ve been able to account for the time and movements of the Interstellar Environmental Pre-conference meeting
members. Which means, our pirate captain went to the Onyx Tower either to talk to someone on the Tax Committee or the Trade Alliance. But we don’t know which one. We haven’t the first clue who, in particular, the man was meeting. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility of the Tax Committee, just because we’ve been focusing on the Trade Alliance.”

  “If we’re right, and Olipha’s kidnapping, the murder of the unionist senators, and the attempt on my life are all connected, what would be the Tax Committee’s motive?”

  Lying with him like this feels cozy and comfortable. I hope someday we can put all these puzzles and troubles behind us and have pillow-talks about things other than murder and political intrigue.

  Tiam brushes my hair out of my eyes. “The Tax Committee allocates immense amounts of money across the Federation. With the five kreks at war, the oversight has been minimal. If funds have been mishandled, they might not want you to look at them too closely.”

  “Do I have any kind of oversight? I guess that’s the word?”

  “Technically, you can ask for an audit. Your role is protecting the Federation.”

  While I’m processing that, Tiam kisses me and almost manages to distract me.

  Almost.

  “The Trade Alliance wants a weak Federation too,” I tell him.

  Roax explained this to me a while back. “The weaker the Federation, the fewer regulations, the more the Trade Alliance can exploit the smaller planets.” They’re all for strip-mining new planets on the frontier—as bad as the pirates.

  Tiam nods then kisses me again. “I missed you, my Ava.”

  When his comm unit beeps, he ignores it, then turns it off altogether.

  He keeps kissing me and kissing me. He might be just a big nerd inside, but there’s nothing nerdy in the way he kisses. He is all heat, and desire, and passion. His seduction of my body is thorough and systematic.

  I’m reaching for his shirt when Dason bursts in, gasping for air, as if he’d been running. “Pirates have surrounded Merim!” His face is red with fury. “They’ve just decloaked.” His fingers curl into fists as he stops to glance at his comm unit and reads something. “Actually, they’re still decloaking.”