Finding the Jewel

by Evangeline Anderson

  “I love making love with you,” Chloe sent through their link. “And I love feeling you inside me. Do it, Tark—come in me one more time to seal our bond.”

  With a low groan he pressed deep into her pussy and she felt him spurting once more, filling her again with his seed.

  “Tark, I love you!” she sent as he crushed her to him.

  “Love you too baby…my Chloe…my jewel,” he sent back and Chloe knew they would never be parted again.

  Epilogue

  “So somebody’s looking pretty happy today.” Kat gave her a wink and Chloe laughed and felt her cheeks get hot.

  “Well, I am happy. Tark and I are finally together—bonded,” she said.

  “We figured that, hon,” Olivia said dryly. “Since it’s been two days since we sent you off to do the deed.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call you with any update yesterday,” Chloe said penitently. “You were all so wonderful and encouraging. I just…sort of lost track of time.”

  “That’s all right,” Sophia said, grinning. “We all remember what it feels like to be newly bonded. “It really is easy for the hours to fly by.”

  “And did it work?” Kat asked. “Are the two of you able to talk without his stutter getting in the way?”

  “It worked perfectly,” Chloe assured her. “We can have long, in-depth conversations now. You know, to look at Tark you’d think he was the monosyllabic caveman type but he’s actually very thoughtful and well-read.”

  “But of course the fact that he looks like an action hero while having the soul of a poet doesn’t hurt, I bet,” Liv said.

  “Exactly.” Chloe sighed happily.

  “What about his speech problem, though?” Sophia asked. “Are you going to work with him, since that’s your specialty?”

  “Oh yes—of course,” Chloe said. “It’s already getting better. You know, it’s funny but Tark says he’s noticed that when he’s around me, his stutter is much less pronounced.”

  “So you were the answer to his problem after all,” Kat said. “The Goddess doesn’t mess around when she puts people together—she knows what she’s doing.”

  “That's exactly what Tark said,” Chloe told them. “You know, he had that prophesy about finding a jewel that would heal him and save him—now he says he didn’t realize it at first but the Rainbow Crystal he gave up wasn’t what he was supposed to find at all. He says I was the jewel he was looking for all along.”

  “Ahhh…” Olivia put a hand to her heart. “That is just so sweet.”

  “Finding Tark—or having him find me—is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Chloe said seriously. “It even makes the time I spent in the Commercians’ fat-shaming weight-loss house worth it. Especially since Tark likes me the size I am.” She smiled.

  “Speaking of those little blue bastards, did Sylvan ever do anything about them?” Kat asked. “It’s really not good to have an alien species with technology that can bypass the energy net the Kindred put around the Earth running around out there.”

  Sophia frowned. “He and Baird and a squadron of warriors found their space station but they must have had some kind of advance notice—it was completely deserted.”

  “Deserted?” Kat raised an eyebrow. “Where do you think they went?”

  “Maybe back to their own dimension,” Chloe offered. “The dimension where there are no Kindred to stop them from kidnapping Earth girls.” She shivered at the thought.

  “That’s awful!” Kat exclaimed. “Who knows what kind of aliens might be roaming around that dimension looking to buy Earth girls! They might have wings or horns or skin that changes colors…”

  “I’m just happy we live here, in our own dimension where there are Kindred,” Chloe said, smiling. “Otherwise I might never have met Tark.”

  “Or met us either,” Kat pointed out. “And become part of our little circle.”

  Chloe smiled at her new friends and thanked her lucky stars—and the Kindred Goddess—that it was true. She was happy aboard the Mothership and after she had wrapped up her business and given notice to her job down on Earth, she and Tark were going to move here permanently. Tark could take a job as a pilot in the Fleet and she had discovered that they were in need of Speech Language Pathologists aboard the Mother Ship. So she could continue her calling also.

  It was going to be a good life and she would live it with the man she loved as one of the…Brides of the Kindred.

  THE END

  ***If you have enjoyed Finding the Jewel, please take a moment to leave a rating or a review HERE. Some of you might know that Amazon has recently made it much harder for indie authors to get reviews but they are the lifeblood of a book online--it dies without them. Good reviews let other readers know it's okay to take a chance on a new series, which in turn helps me keep writing for a living to feed your Kindred Cravings. ; )

  Hugs and thanks for being an awesome reader!

  Evangeline

  PS--want a sneak peek at the next juicy release--read on for an excerpt from the CyBRG series I am writing with Mina Carter:

  CyBRG Files Book 2:

  Unit 78: Rescued

  Unit 78, formerly Corporal Richard Hardgraves, is a Cyborg with a mission: to rescue the Amiral's daughter from the dreaded Tr'Low Cult on Beacon 5. The Tr'Lows have a prophesy that a half-metal man will come from the sky and father the perfect child on a chosen bride--Rich tells himself he will play the part just long enough to grab the girl and run.

  Kyrin Pierce is a Peace Keeper with IPKA--the Interstellar Peace Keeping Association. Lured to Beacon 5 by a fake call, she was captured and now she is being prepared for an unspeakable ceremony. She too plays into the Tr'Low prophecy because of her flame-red hair. As the priestesses of the cult inject her full of hormones to drive her wild with need, she has nearly given up hope of escape.

  Rich might be more metal than man but he still has a heart and when he sees what the Kyrin has been through, he aches for her pain. But in order to get her out of the Tr'Low compound, he must do the unthinkable...and give the cultists what they want by taking Kyrin in their public ceremony.

  Kyrin doesn't care that the man who has come for her is a cyborg, she only knows that her body needs him desperately. And after he rescues her, her heart needs him too.

  But Kyrin's father, Admiral Pierce, doesn't approve of his daughter loving a "metal monster." When he separates them and sends Kyrin to a hospital to take care of her "problem" can Rich rescue her again...in time to save their baby?

  Half man...half metal...all heart. The CyBRG series by Evangeline Anderson and Mina Carter.

  Chapter One

  Humans were shit-scared of rogue cyborgs.

  Unit 78, formerly Corporal Richard Hardgraves, stood silently in the grav-lift, his gaze fixed on the doors in front of him. A unit of marines stood around him, armed to the teeth. His ‘escort’ for his meeting with Admiral Pierce, they’d met him at the airlock when he’d arrived and even now he could smell the fear leeching out of their pores.

  He didn’t blame them though. They’d no doubt been fed horror stories about him and his kind. He certainly had when he’d been human. There were tales of early prototypes who had gone on killing sprees, their control subroutines corrupted so they saw anything and everything as a threat; soldiers, civilians, their own kind, random hunks of rock…

  He’d even been called in to a hostage situation with one a few years back. A cyborg had taken a base mechanic hostage and had killed the three teams sent in before their superiors had gotten some sense in their heads and called in the expert. AKA Rich. An expert in negotiation and hostage recovery, he’d been at the top of his game.

  It had taken a few hours, and bringing in an expert in computer coding to help him understand what was going on in the thing’s metal skull, but they’d finally managed to crack through the cyborg’s sub-routine lock and gotten it to release the technician. Unfortunately, the logical reasoning Rich had employed had locked the thing down, r
endering it useless as it tried to process out of the loop he’d put it into. He remembered looking at it with pity as it had been hauled off by CyBRG technicians, a hunk of metal and flesh that had used to be a man, had used to be a soldier. Like him.

  But that cyborg had been nothing like him, nor the rest of his group. The CyBRG program took soldiers killed in action, those who were confirmed as brain dead, and cyberized them into the ultimate fighting machine. That was the way it was supposed to go, anyway—until an asshole called Pike had seen the potential profit in selling CyBRG units on the black market.

  Supply and demand had meant that Pike needed more fodder for his money-making scheme. A land-mine had taken out several teams, including Rich’s. Thanks to conveniently malfunctioning medical equipment, the medical teams hadn’t been able to tell they weren’t brain dead and had cyberized them anyway on Pike’s orders.

  But cyberizing a body with a live brain was very different to cyberizing one that was brain dead. They didn’t take orders to kill innocent civilians well for one thing. Within weeks they’d broken their programming and gone rogue, fighting Pike’s forces to avoid annihilation. Under the command of their leader, Drew Fisher, they’d won. Pike was dead and rather than admit they’d fucked up majorly, the Space Corps was busy denying their existence completely.

  Until, it seemed, the Corps, or rather one of their Admirals, needed something from them. Hence the reason Drew was standing in a lift with a group of marines who had obviously all drawn the short straw. The marine to his left appeared to be muttering the last rites under his breath and the one on the right was sweating, a bead of perspiration detaching itself from his brow and rolling slowly down the side of his face. Since the temperate was slightly cooler than comfortable for a standard human, he wasn’t hot—he was scared shitless.

  Rich kept his smile to himself and looked straight ahead, playing up the cyborg act for all he was worth. Even among the rogue units, he was heavily cyberized.

  His right arm was all metal, the entire shoulder cradle replaced and armored. One side of his jaw carried visible implants embedded in the skin, smaller units disappearing up into his hairline. Under his form-fitting body armor, similar implants decorated his collarbones, and the lines just inside his hips, down his spine and further down on his legs. Mounting points for heavier hardware that would integrate with the cybernetics that laced his entire system and turn him into a cyber-organic tank. Under his armor, both legs were gone beneath the knee, replaced with metal.

  All in all, he looked like one scary motherfucker.

  They were right to be scared of him. He could drop everyone in the lift within 3.87 seconds and not be out of breath. He wouldn’t even need the pulse pistols holstered at his hips to do it. Brute force and speed that no human could comprehend would do the job just as well.

  The lift slowed to a stop and the doors opened. Without waiting for the marines around him, Rich stepped forward, letting them scurry to follow. They appeared to be on the Admiralty level of Pierce’s Flagship, the Redoubt, and, by the looks of it, all personnel had been cleared. Like the docking ring and his route up here.

  Obviously Pierce didn’t want people knowing he was dealing with the cyborgs.

  “This way…” One of the marines said, then paused, obviously at a loss for what to call Rich. Not surprising. None of them wore name tags or rank indicators anymore. There was no need. After their…conversion, rank was meaningless. Some of them had become comfortable using their old names, but some had chosen new ones to reflect their new natures.

  “Unit 78,” Rich said, his voice emotionless. Sure, he had a name and used it back home, but these assholes didn’t deserve to know what it was.

  “This way Unit 78,” the marine replied, his tight expression saying he was uncomfortable with Rich. Tough shit. They were the ones that had called for help, so they could just suck it up.

  He was led down the corridor and into a conference room. Ignoring the chair that had been offered to him, Rich stood motionless in the middle of the room and studied his environment without appearing to. It was swish, with deep, plush carpets, heavy wooden furniture and actual art on the walls. He had no idea who the artists were, but his ocular implants easily picked up that the works were real and finely done. No doubt they’d cost a fortune. The whole place was a far cry from the environments he’d been used to as a member of the Marine Corps.

  How the other half lived…

  “Ahh, it’s here.”

  The comment preceded the arrival of Admiral Brock Pierce through an opening door opposite the one Rich had arrived through. He had a glimpse of a similarly plush lounge before it swished shut behind the medal and braid bedecked admiral.

  Idly, his onboard processor noted and listed what each decoration was for, in a scrolling list overlaid over the vision in his left eye. It was an impressive list, the admiral had seen action in all the major engagements in the last half century.

  However, his active uplink to the ships mainframe also informed him that while the Admiral had technically seen action in all those battles, that was it. He’d watched them from forward operating bases, or from orbit. Never once had he actually stepped onto a battlefield. Another quick, but deeper, scan revealed the reason why.

  Pierce’s father had been an Admiral too… and had made sure his son was never in any danger whatsoever.

  “You didn’t disarm it?” Pierce asked suddenly, his gaze cutting from the pistols holstered at Rich’s hips to the marine commander.

  “Such an action would be pointless,” Rich commented bluntly. “I do not need any weapons to kill everyone aboard this ship.”

  To prove his point, he sent a command through the uplink. The lights in the room dimmed, replaced by flashing red as the alarm klaxons started to sound. Before any of the men in the room with him could react, the big cyborg cut the alarm. He’d made his point. If he could trigger a red alert without speaking, then he could also trigger the ship to self destruct.

  “Our aid was requested,” Rich looked down to meet the shorter man’s gaze, making sure to keep all the emotion out of his eyes. They believed him to be a killing machine, like the rest of his group. Since their ferocious reputation was all that kept every chancer and bounty hunter in the galaxy from coming after them, he needed to make sure this lot stayed terrified of him. And that included the good Admiral here. “You require your daughter recovered from a cult?”

  The reminder seemed to bring Pierce back to the present and he shuddered, his shoulders slumping for a moment and a haunted expression entering his eyes. Rich hadn’t liked the guy on sight, but that little sign of humanity, there for a fraction of a second before he shuttered his expression, gave him an insight into the Admiral’s mind. Whatever else he was, he obviously cared about his daughter.

  “Yes…”

  He nodded to the marines, who all fell back to the edges of the room. Apparently, despite Rich proving he didn’t need to be in the same room to kill him, Pierce didn’t trust him not to kill the admiral with his bare hands.

  He suppressed a sigh and focused on the holographic display that lit up in the center of the console table.

  “This is Beacon Five,” Peirce said, waving his hand at a star-map that appeared of a small system. It zoomed in on one of the planets in a small cluster. Blue and green, it was terran norm, and looked perfect for human life. “A T-5 class colony planet that has been largely unproblematic since it was first colonized. Until the Intergalactic Peace Keeping Association—IPKA—was called in to mediate a dispute of unknown origin.”

  Rich nodded, keeping his expression impassive. So far everything Pierce said seemed normal, nothing that would be cause for concern. But something must have gone tits up for him to call in the dreaded rogue cyborgs.

  “Unknown to IPKA or us though, the Tr’Low breeding cult had managed to establish a presence on the planet a few years ago and last year, took it over.”

  Rich’s only reaction was to blink as he used the uplin
k with the ship to mine the Corps database for information on the cult. It took less that a second and his jaw tightened in fury.

  The Tr’Low were, in a word, fanatical assholes. They followed the teachings of a Father Tr’Ayer, and their goal was to spread the ‘breeding wisdom’ of their god Tr’Low across the galaxy. Their methods were questionable at best and outright illegal at worst. Kidnapping was the least of it. They took young women and pumped them full of a cocktail of drugs, then bred them with specially selected males of good genetic stock, also drugged.

  A quick glance at the compounds that had been found in a female dumped by the Tr’Low after she hadn’t survived one of their breeding ceremonies made him shudder internally. If the men were injected with something similar, it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for the female. It would be akin to being raped by a Neanderthal high on Rush, one of the most potent stimulants in the galaxy.

  “And?” Rich prompted, his investigations taking less than a couple of heartbeats.

  “IPKA sent the Tranquility, my daughter’s ship, to Beacon Five to mediate a conflict. It stopped transmitting to IPKA headquarters shortly after arrival. Even the blackbox isn’t responding to pings.”

  At that Rich did pause. If the blackbox was no longer responding then the ship had taken heavy damage, or was destroyed. Intergalactic Peace Keepers’ Association ships were all highly distinctive and were given free passage throughout the galaxy. No one interfered with them, ever. They could fly through the harshest space battle or right into the roughest frontier town where most inhabitants would sell their own mothers for body parts and not have a thing or person lifted from their ships. Everyone respected them. They could probably even walk into the Cyborgs’ own base without issue and talk.