by Kate Rudolph
PEYTON WOKE WITH A gasp, snapping out of the darkness of the teleport and into the light of Earth. She heaved, her lungs aching as they rematerialized millions of kilometers away from where they’d been a second ago. Her fingers tingled and she curled her toes to make sure she still had them all. A head to toe check assured her that everything was there, but her heart still pounded madly as her body decided that now was the perfect time to panic about everything that had just happened.
Space.
Self-destruct.
Enemy aliens.
Dryce.
Where was he? Before that panic could double down, she heard a groan and saw her mate lying on the ground at her feet. Crisp brown leaves stuck to his hands, which had just been coated in alien blood. It looked like the sun was setting and he was getting harder to see. But her heart could feel him and the more he moved the more the tension gathering in her chest eased. He might be in a bit of pain from all the fighting, which the teleport only compounded, but he was alive and well enough to make noise.
So where were they?
She crouched down to sit by her mate and take in their surroundings. Her survival suit crinkled around her and made it hard to move. Peyton struggled, curling around to unfasten the hard to reach buttons and cast off the helmet. Only when she sucked in the fresh air of Earth could she breathe easy. Sweat had soaked through her thin shirt underneath and made the air around her chilly, but she didn’t care. Not now that she was home. There were lots of trees and the sounds of owls hooting and wind whistling through the branches. They could have been in any of a million places on the planet, but at least she was fairly certain that they were on Earth. Brown bark on the trees, green leaves just now turning to reds and yellows and golds, brown dirt, and the scent of nature that had to be unique to the planet.
Holy shit, she’d gone off planet!
She’d been so focused on getting them off of the Oscavian ship that she hadn’t taken the time to panic about being separated from eternity by only a thin layer of metal. Now that she thought of it, her hands shook and if someone needed her to rewire another teleporter it wasn’t happening unless they could hand her a stiff drink or three to steady her nerves.
No, two emergency teleporter re-wirings was her limit for one day.
After another minute of moaning, Dryce pushed himself up and rubbed his head, cringing as whatever sticky remnants of blood mixed with the dirt on his hands to make a particularly gross version of mud. Then he tipped his head back and got a good look around. “We’re alive!” he whooped, as if daring the world to contradict him.
“We’re alive,” Peyton echoed. She hadn’t for a moment let herself believe that they wouldn’t get off the ship, but now that they were back on solid ground the realization crashed into her. They’d been two minutes away from dying. If the teleporter hadn’t been functioning, they would both be dead now. “Holy shit, we’re alive.”
She threw herself at Dryce, uncaring of the mess of muck on his hands. The solid presence of his body against her grounded her more than the earth beneath her feet. She could feel his chest rise and fall with every breath, the warm heat of his skin burning through her shirt. She reached for the buttons of his survival suit and had them unfastened in no time, exposing Dryce to the clean air of Earth. The suits were great for offering protections from the dangers of a ship with no functioning life support, but they were bulky on Earth and too much to bear. But she was careful when she folded up the jacket of his suit, mindful that they were in the middle of the woods with no supplies, possibly a very long way from civilization. If worst came to worst, at least the suits would keep them warm.
“Where are we?” Dryce asked. His fingers traced over her spine, the soft movement enough to make her shiver.
She wanted to capture his lips and kiss any questions away, but they had too much to do right now. But the second they had the tiniest scrap of safety she was tearing off his clothes and having her way with him. For days. No, weeks.
Months? She wasn’t about to rule that possibility out yet.
Dryce’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You’ve got a look.”
“A look?” Peyton did her best to school her expression, banishing thoughts of what she and Dryce would do together once they were safe. “There’s no look.”
He grinned. “You think I don’t know what that look means?” He leaned in and swiped a quick kiss against her lips, the contact fleeting and nowhere close to satisfying.
Peyton leaned in, trying to chase the kiss, but Dryce kept his distance. She pouted and when she realized she was doing it, her face went scarlet. Pouting? Because a man wouldn’t kiss her? She was glad they were in the middle of the forest, otherwise she’d launch herself back into space.
But Dryce nuzzled his cheek against her, keeping his hands away since they were so dirty. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he assured her.
“I’m not usually like this,” Peyton reasoned. “Especially not in the middle of life or death situations. There are more important things than sex.”
“I knew you were thinking about sex!” He laughed, and then pressed close again, the intimate embrace more about staying close than igniting passion. “It makes me glad to hear it, denya. And you’ve more than shown yourself capable in a dangerous situation.”
Her heart flipped when he called her denya and she wondered if she’d ever get tired of it. Probably not. She hoped not. “I’m not sure where we are.” She’d answered the question he’d asked before she got distracted. “I keyed in the coordinates for one of the central teleporters at my lab with a fallback scenario that dumped us on solid ground within a hundred kilometers of the lab. I can’t say I’m shocked we didn’t make it back home. Security is ramped up so tightly that there’s no way an unsecured port would be allowed open.”
“So why did you—” He cut himself off before he could finish the question.
Under other circumstances Peyton might have been offended, but she was still pressed up tight against Dryce and so thankful that they were alive that she didn’t have it in her to be upset. “They were the only safe coordinates I could remember off the top of my head.”
A loud crack of a branch made them both jump and after she realized what it was Peyton wanted to slump down and laugh, but Dryce held his hand up for silence. His brow furrowed as he peered into the crowding darkness of the world around them and when he looked back to her, he was still tense as hell.
“What is it?” Peyton whispered, her lips practically brushing against his ear.
Dryce took a deep breath and spoke just as quietly. “I don’t think we’re alone.”
Chapter Twenty-One
After a lifetime spent on the barren, icy wasteland that the Detyen Legion had called home for decades, Dryce was surprised to find out how tired of forest he was. It went on as far as the eye could see, obstructing his lines of sight and hiding dangers that could cut his denya down before either of them realized they were being hunted.
The wolves had been bad enough, an unexpected threat that could have turned deadly if they hadn’t kept their calm. But even then he’d known that they were the ones encroaching on the wolves’ territory and the animals had only been defending themselves.
This was something different entirely. He could feel it in his blood.
“That wasn’t any soldier who tried to stop us,” he told Peyton, his whisper still too loud in the suddenly quiet forest. “I think that was Yormas of Wreet.”
Peyton’s jaw dropped and he could tell she was about to say something, but Dryce covered her mouth to make sure she wasn’t too loud, and then they both winced at the gross mess that was covering his hand. He yanked it away and gave her an apologetic look while Peyton scraped away a bit of the dirt that had transferred.
He didn’t need to hear the question to know what she was going to ask. “Yes, that Yormas. The one who started this all.”
Another branch cracked and they looked into the darkness. Dryce had lost his blas
ter at some point in the teleport, leaving them with nothing but their wits and his claws for defense. He’d take Peyton’s brain over many weapons—after all, she’d just saved them from two impossible situations—but he didn’t know if Yormas was armed or what he would do when he found them.
“Could he have followed us through the teleport?” Maybe Dryce was getting ahead of himself. They could only hear whoever was out there, and it was more likely to be a human than anyone else.
But in his soul he knew it wasn’t.
Peyton nodded, face pinched. “There might have been enough time. Given the rotation of the Earth and the movement of the ship, it makes sense we would land near each other but not in the same place. Someone could have followed us.”
The next sound that came towards them seemed further away, like the danger was moving. Like whoever was out there didn’t know where they were.
“I have to see,” Dryce said. “I have to know.”
Peyton looked ready to object, her face pale with terror, but she closed her eyes, resigned to his decision, and nodded once. “I’ll stay put, but if you’re not back in a few minutes, I’m raising hell.”
Dryce kissed her forehead. “I wouldn’t expect anything less, denya.”
He melted into the forest and headed towards the sound. Whoever was out there wasn’t trying for stealth, sending up Wreetan curses and moaning in pain every time he moved. The language was enough of a hint to satisfy Dryce that the person wasn’t human, but he needed to see.
Yormas of Wreet had destroyed Dryce’s planet decades before Dryce had been born. He’d stolen his home away for reasons Dryce still didn’t quite understand, and doubted he ever would. The kind of evil that had to live in a person to do that was unfathomable.
But what he saw when he got close enough to his quarry to see him almost made Dryce feel pity. Almost. If he’d been anyone else, even an Oscavian or Wreetan soldier who’d been hired to destroy Earth, Dryce would have felt for the broken creature stumbling around in the woods and wailing.
If he’d been anyone else, Dryce might have left him there to survive or perish on his own. But Yormas of Wreet owed a debt to the Detyen people and justice would be served.
A dark temptation tickled at the edge of his conscience. He could take care of it once and for all here, avenge his people for the harm done to them and avenge his new home for the terrors that Yormas had tried to inflict. He’d already injured the man on the ship, and from the way he was listing to one side, he was in no condition to fight. It wouldn’t take much. And if there was any sort of last minute escape plan, any plot to save Yormas of Wreet from the consequences of his actions, Dryce could put a stop to that now.
His claws slid out, a silent promise of violence. If he did it now, he wouldn’t even feel bad about it. There would be no nightmare, no worrying about whether or not he was the kind of monster who could kill an injured man.
But with a deep breath, Dryce pulled himself back from the edge. His people deserved to make the decision about what happened to Yormas. Whether that meant execution, imprisonment, or something else, he could not make the choice for them.
He had no idea how far away from home they were or what kind of supplies they’d be able to discover. There was something vaguely familiar about these woods, but Dryce didn’t trust that instinct. As far as he knew, one wood looked just like another and they could be a hundred kilometers from home or they could be within shouting distance.
Still, he and Peyton would need to lug Yormas back, trussed up like some kind of festive beast. It would add time and suffering to their trek, but it had to be done.
A man more interested in fair play might have walked up to Yormas and challenged him head on, but Dryce didn’t know if Yormas was armed, and though the man looked incredibly injured, there was no way to tell if he was faking. He flanked him until he came up behind the tree that Yormas was half-leaning on, moaning lightly as viscous blood oozed out of a wound on his side.
It didn’t look good, and there was a decent chance that the man didn’t make it all the way back to the SDA base, but Dryce was going to do his best to make sure it happened.
He hooked an arm around Yormas’s throat and squeezed, compensating when the man jerked against him. Yormas tried to fight, but by the time he realized what was happening, the struggle was already over.
Using Yormas’s own belt, Dryce tied his hands behind his back and checked out the wound on his side. Once he was satisfied that it looked far worse than it actually was, he patted the man down for weapons, kept his blaster for himself, and slung the man over his shoulder.
The walk back to where he’d left Peyton didn’t take long, and he had to be making enough noise to warn her of his arrival. But when he got there, the clearing was empty.
Peyton was gone.
PEYTON MEANT TO STAY where she said she would. Really. She even found a comfortable tree to lean against where the bark provided a bit of a cushion for her tired back and it blocked the wind that sent a chill down her spine.
She reasoned that as long as Dryce made it back before full dark, she had no reason to move. That was her plan. Her good intentions lasted for less than five minutes.
First she started pacing. She knew Dryce had a bit of distance to cover and that he could be facing an enemy at the other side. She had to give him time. But that didn’t stop her from peering into the darkness and hoping that he appeared.
Another five minutes had her walking a perimeter around the area where she’d said she’d stay. She never lost sight of a tree she’d marked as her home base, so she figured that counted as staying put.
She didn’t know how long she would have been able to keep doing that, but when she caught a hint of a familiar smell she couldn’t stop herself from exploring. She wasn’t completely stupid. She marked the trees as she passed them so she had some semblance of a path back, but the marks got fainter and fainter as she sped up, the smell of pungent fuel speeding her on.
The trees started to look familiar, which was strange in and of itself. She wasn’t the outdoorsy type, instead preferring to keep to her lab and all of the amenities that city life provided.
Though, now that she was with Dryce, she figured she’d need to come out of her lab at least a few times a week, if only to keep from having sex on any of the work tables. If they ever got around to actually having sex.
That she could focus on something like this while walking through a forest on the vague hope that she could find a way to get them home told her just how far gone she was.
There was a break in the trees and at first Peyton didn’t recognize what she was seeing. It looked like a bomb had gone off. Trees were split in two, broken in half like kindling. The ground had deep gouges torn into it, giant caverns that could have passed for canyons if it wasn’t clear that the damage was new.
But it only took another moment to realize that this was the aftermath that she and Dryce had left when they’d been sucked up in the teleport. Yormas’s weapon had been so thoroughly entrenched in the Earth that the Earth had broken when it was yanked from it. Her heart broke to see the damage and she trembled to imagine just what could have happened if they hadn’t managed to make the weapon disappear.
She’d known based on the Detyen history that Yormas was capable of destroying the planet in a single blow, but she hadn’t quite wrapped her mind around that fact until right now.
God, if she’d gotten something wrong...
But things were fine now. The bomb was left in pieces on a destructed Oscavian ship. There was no hope of fixing it and smuggling it back onto the planet. And if it hadn’t detonated and taken the fleet out with it, then the Earth and Detyen forces were seeing to that right now.
It was done, or it would be soon. The planet was safe.
Now all she and Dryce had to do was find a way home so they could report in and begin the rest of their lives, however that was going to look like. And now that she knew where they were, they at least had a plac
e to start.
“This tastes disgusting, how do you survive on these rations?” she heard a woman’s voice whisper through the trees. “At least ours just taste like... beige sludge.”
“You make it sound so tempting,” a male voice replied.
Peyton knew those voices. She started towards them, crashing through trees and making more racket than a marching band. She didn’t care, the team was right there and she and Dryce had their way home.
But when she finally found them, she was met with a blaster in her face followed quickly by a bright flashlight that almost blinded her. Her hands immediately went up and she let out a startled squeak.
“It’s me, Peyton. I’m your friend!” She almost babbled more, but the blaster made her bite her tongue.
And then it was lowered, along with the flashlight, and she saw Kayde standing beside Toran with Sierra, Raze, and Dru behind them, all with hands on their weapons.
“Where’s Dryce?” Raze demanded. “Where have you been?” The fear in his tone reminded her that Raze was Dryce’s brother, and Peyton didn’t spend a second offended that they seemed to be more concerned about her mate than her.
“Weren’t you guys supposed to leave?” she asked, amazed to find them here. It had been nearly a day since she and Dryce must have disappeared, the teleportation messing with their time. They’d traveled to the far end of the solar system and back, and it looked like their team hadn’t gone home, instead opting to camp in the forest for the night.
“Where’s Dryce?” Raze repeated, his voice growing more insistent as he took a step forward, his progression only stopped by Sierra’s hand on his shoulder.
“He’s okay,” Peyton assured him, “or he was not too long ago.” She’d be going crazy if Ella disappeared, so she could understand where Raze was coming from. “But we think someone followed us here. He went to check it out. I said I’d stay put, but I could—shit, I need to go back.”