Dassenze had seen it too. “The shuttle lights are being trained on the attackers. You stay here. Brask is a soldier. He’s leading his men. Stay here. Stay down. More of the Preyfinders are coming down from the upper stories.”
After that last command and a stern glare, he strode after Brask, leaving her and a pile of fake swords and the fake pistol. So well-armed.
“Damn.” Male arrogance again, though truthfully this scared her. Fatigue had leaked back in within minutes of that kiss. She was see-sawing between exuberant superhuman abilities and feeling as rundown as a housewife with ten kids.
But she couldn’t just do as Dassenze said because...that connection she had with the two arrogant alien bastards was plucking at her. If they died, she’d feel it. Maybe if they got hurt even. Tore their damn toenails. She crept forward, head down, to watch.
Ten or more Australian soldiers were outside, crouching behind cover and shooting at a large mob of people darting about. Hundreds. Some fell, some made it to hiding places behind vehicles, or dropped to crawl closer. The sweeping lights from above cast it like some movie setting. Attack of the Killer Weird-ass People or something.
Five or six Igrakk warriors were shooting also. Why weren’t they moving in on the Bak-lal?
She chewed her lip. Go out and help? Stay? What could Dassenze do to her? Nothing.
The need to be out there, helping...them, ate at her. Until at last she sneaked out the door with a practice sword in hand.
A teenage girl was among the Bak-lal, scrambling along like a spider on all fours, her blond hair swinging. The floodlight seemed to pick her out. No one had shot her. Maybe the soldiers felt bad about shooting a girl? Maybe it was luck. She disappeared beneath a van across the street as a bunch of others swarmed forward either side. Most fell to the barrage of firing.
Blood would be running in the street after this. Bak-lal or not, it chilled her.
Brask was to her left and suddenly he turned to her and hissed. “Get the frack back inside!”
She shook her head.
His companion, the tall Igrakk she’d seen before, Brittany’s partner, Jadd, yelled, “More coming!” He raised his bulky gun. The rounds coming from it gave a small boom as they left the muzzle, streaking out in violet lines.
The teenage girl was there, rearing up with a briefcase in hand. She fell, tumbling head over heels, the briefcase thrown out and spilling, her head mostly severed by the blast. Little things scampered forth.
“Captain!” yelled a human. “Roaches!”
“Get them! Ten o’clock!”
Bullets spattered and rang off the road and the metal of cars. The things poured toward the defenders.
She could see them like blobs of running magenta. See their legs, hear their skittering. Could others see the magenta light?
Fuck. She raised the practice sword, knowing these were more dangerous than what ran on two legs.
Most were picked off by the concentrated fire. Their light faded. One came on, ran up the car to the left, then dropped onto Jadd. He didn’t seem to notice until it bored into his wrist. Why did he have no armor?
The firing was dying away as he staggered backward, roaring. Brask spun.
“What is it? You’re hit?”
“No! I don’t know! Something’s eating up my arm.”
“Nerve chewer,” Brask grated out.
A soldier in camouflage gear, Steyr rifle in hand, jogged over. “Watch it. He’ll turn within hours. The roaches do that. Half our base was overrun, tanks and all.”
Brask grabbed Jadd’s arm and snarled back at the soldier. “We can do more than you humans.”
“Our surgeons tried to operate. All that happened was a live one got loose and ate one of them too. They’re fast and they seem to multiply sometimes. He’s done for.”
“No. Go back to your kind.”
Jadd was white faced and clutching his arm. “My fault. I’ll take whatever happens on my shoulders. The thing is like a fire inside me. Fast. I think my arm’s gone.”
The last rounds were fired and echoes died away. More Igrakks gathered.
Brask ripped the cloth from Jadd’s arm and frantically stared at it. “Tell me where it is.”
“Don’t know...” Jadd fell to his knees, head down.
“Inside.” Brask took hold of the collar of Jadd’s black shirt and started to haul him toward the building. “Brittany would kill us both if I abandoned you. Out of the fracking way.”
“Wait!” Talia slid between two warriors and stopped in front of Jadd. Blood ran from his wrist and dripped to the pavement. “I can see it. Where it is inside him.”
The thing glowed even through his skin, crawling upward inside his arm, higher, higher, past the elbow now, speeding up.
“You can?” The hope in Brask’s voice was pitiful.
“Yes. Where’s it going?” She had to know.
“The brain.” That was Dassenze. “It’ll take him over. And no. We don’t have the facilities to remove it from there. Show me where it is. I’ll cut off his arm. We can regrow it, eventually.”
Meaning when the Bak-lal queen was defeated. His whole fucking arm?
Crap. If he mistook her pointing. Even an inch too much would be appalling. She wiped her brow with her forearm. “No. Give me a blade.”
Silence, except for the moans of the injured and the rasping breath of Jadd. He was head down to the pavement now, his arm held out to the side by Dassenze.
“Here.” A sword appeared in front of her.
Brask held it.
She met his gaze. “You trust me?”
“I trust you, for now. Do it. He’s my soldier brother. Do it!”
Talia snatched up the sword. His energy jolted into her in that miniscule section of time when the steel was held by both. She shook for a second, humming with new power.
Focus.
A knife would’ve been better. She grasped the bare blade in one hand, the other hand on the hilt, in the pure and sudden knowledge that it wouldn’t cut her. The weapon liked her. She sucked in a lungful of air then stabbed downward. The tip penetrated his biceps and plunged in, deep, just in front of the burrowing thing. Jadd’s scream was heart breaking but she ripped the blade downward, inward, hit bone, continued along. He’d bleed but...the tip caught on the creature. Yes! Sure she had it, Talia tore out the blade with the blot of fluoro pink wriggling and impaled on the end. It flipped loose, diving through spurting blood.
Like a fish on land, it flopped about on the pavement.
She drove the blade into it again, pinning it there. “How the fucking hell do you kill it?”
Someone must know the answer?
“Like this.” Dassenze crushed it with the barrel of a gun, mashing it into smudges of flesh and sputtering metal.
That Jadd was still screaming came to her a second later. She flinched and stepped back. Blood was everywhere. They held him down and wrapped a tourniquet above where she’d cut.
God. She’d done that. Nausea rose.
“It’s okay.” A man held her shoulders, squeezed them. “We can fix this.” His grip tightened. “Thank you.”
And that was Brask. Ugh. The emotions surging through her were overwhelming. Fear, horror, elation, and that damned inconvenient desire whenever, wherever, he touched her. So she stepped away, freeing herself, and shut her eyes to recover. A few tears ran down her face. Then she watched as they carried Jadd inside.
Brask let her be. It was Dassenze who shepherded her through the doors, barely grumbling at her disobeying his order.
Chapter 10
They were barreling along the highway at a hundred klicks an hour according to Steve, when an orange glow fell from the sky before them and winked out.
Somewhere ahead, it had hit the ground.
A meteor?
Ally felt a jolt of hope at the same time that her stomach sank with dread. Whatever it was, it scared her and yet also lifted her up with the promise of something good.
&
nbsp; Willow.
She knew it.
She leaned forward, her fingers digging into the upholstery at the back of Steve’s seat. “Keep going. We can’t stop tonight. I don’t care if the engine burns out or the heavens fall, we need to keep going.”
He only turned to Betty, who nodded. “If she says that, keep going.”
The relief was magnificent. She lay back and breathed easier than she had for what seemed a millennium. Willow was somewhere ahead.
That she was associated with a burning thing falling from the sky...it registered and yet she managed to ignore it. Time would tell.
She couldn’t give up. Not yet.
They went through town after small town, most of them barely functioning but a few had vigilante parties of armed men and women. Once the people saw Rimmil, their hostility invariably rose. The aliens were being blamed for the destruction.
Whatever had happened elsewhere, in other countries, Australia had suffered. They’d not seen more than a few air force planes jetting overhead and Broken Hill, an outback mining town of twenty thousand people, had been turned into a smoking flambéed crater.
They passed it via small bush tracks, rumbling through small farm gates and over roads made for smaller vehicles, as they journeyed on toward Yunta.
Yunta was a tiny town and deserted. The service station had diesel fuel but Ally’s sense of determination had dwindled. She was lost.
Whatever that falling flame had been, Willow was near where it fell. But where was it?
They climbed out and stood in a group about the prime mover of the semitrailer.
“We can stay the night.” Steve took off his cap and whacked it on his thigh. “Ain’t nobody here to shoo us away. I’ll sleep in the cabin though. Tomorrow, Miss Ally, we can have a talk, all of us. Maybe we should just keep on going south? Okay?”
The ache in her chest said no, but she nodded. What else could she do?
They built a camp fire near the truck and gathered around it, sitting to eat canned soup and stew, drinking warm water from the bottles taken from the service station’s fridges.
No one was foolhardy enough to venture away from the truck. It was their lifeline and they all set up sleeping bags inside the cabin. They’d found extra gear in the few abandoned houses and even a shotgun for Betty, who seemed to regard it as her weapon of choice.
Odd how she didn’t react to Steve. He had thoughts, jumbled ones, maybe mostly good ones, but normally that’d be enough to send her into a panic. They were there but distant, surface, and forgettable. Was she suddenly immune? Or was it something else? Even the mobs they’d passed through, of angry and frightened people, had done little to her.
If this continued, perhaps she could be a normal person when...if they saved the world? Whoever they was. Someone would arrive in the nick of time. A masked somebody who could spin the world backward and rescue everyone. They had to.
Though the desert air grew cold as the fire died, she and Rimmil sat out long after Steve and Betty had gone to sleep, watching the stars pop out and twinkle on the vast outback sky.
“Sit with me.” Rimmil beckoned. “We can be warmer together.” He lifted the side of the sleeping bag he huddled beneath and shifted his alien rifle to in front of his feet. It was a bulky red thing with many buttons and knobs. The scratches and wear marks made her wonder if they ever got new guns.
That he settled his arm around her was so comforting. She nearly burst into tears. The niggling pain in her forehead wasn’t helping her mood. “Why are you so nice to me?”
She felt his chest expand, heard him exhale. “Because...I like you.”
“Oh. Why?”
“You’re cute, pretty, brave. Your dedication to finding your cousin is wonderful to me.” He looked down at her. “In our culture, it’s very important to protect your friends, soldier brothers, your...bond mates.”
Wow.
Was he implying something there?
How should she answer that? She wasn’t as good as he said but denying it would be awful too, as if she didn’t value his words. She wanted to be nice to him. She nestled her head closer to his chest. His scent was something it’d taken her a while to get acclimatized to. It hummed through her like a burst of song, a song that made her want to lean up and kiss him. She wasn’t that forward but this ache between her thighs was killing her.
Fucking was something she’d never tried, or thought to, even if she knew what to do with a vibe. Besides, Rimmil was an alien.
She should be bold and kiss him. He liked her. She liked him, only she was sure liking was going to be too mild a word very soon.
The fire crackled, and the scent of smoke grew stronger and made her eyes water.
He looked out at the flames. “The colors of fire are beautiful, but not as beautiful as you are, Ally. That flower I gave you? To me, it was the beginning of my courtship of you.”
Then he moved away and turned to look at her again while his arms wrapped around her.
The throb in her head strengthened and she was certain. What awful timing, like being kicked in the stomach. No kissing for her. Her mouth trembled. Before she could object, he leaned in and kissed her once, lightly.
The alien man had a tongue for he ran it along the seam of her lips. The touch sent heat surging into her and she held back a moan.
She wanted him so much.
“I can’t,” she whispered, this time there were definitely tears brimming her eyelids.
“Why?” His frown was a puzzled one. “Don’t you want to?”
“It’s not you. It’s me. I would kiss you, but...” She grew courage, after all this was impossible anyway. “I’m not perfect. I have this thing in my head. It’s been there since the Bak-lal had me, weeks ago.” A lump arrived in her throat. “They called it a nerve chewer.”
His silence seemed terrible, though the angle and shadows meant she couldn’t read him.
“I can’t seem to lose it, though the others vanished when I travelled.”
For a while she listened to the crackle and spit of the fire and the sigh of his breathing. She dreaded his next words.
But all he said was her name. “Ally.” He thumbed her mouth. “Ally. Ally. Why didn’t you say?”
Though she shook her head to dodge his thumb, he stopped her and held her face still.
“Don’t.”
She swallowed. “I thought it had gone and...I was afraid you’d be horrified. You are, aren’t you?”
“No. I’m not. I’m sad for you. You have those crazy powers, Ally. If it’s not moved in all this time, in weeks, you must be holding it there. Quarantined or something. We can get it removed. We just need to get you to a military hospital.”
“There aren’t any.”
“There will be. We just need to win this war.”
That was easy to say. He was only trying to cheer her up.
“I’m also missing a toe.”
“Doesn’t count.” He waited.
“And my head is very fucked up.”
“I think my translator glitched out on that one so I’m not counting it either.”
“Now you’re being stupid.”
He snorted. “I’m not.” Then he added softly. “I know what I want and it’s you.”
Rimmil couldn’t know the nerve chewer wouldn’t move. If it did, she’d be gone, done for, a Bak-lal.
Head down, eyes shut, she said what needed to be said. “Promise you’ll kill me if I change into one of them?”
“Stop. No. We’ll find your cousin then we’ll fix you but for now, I want you to know this. At first, I thought it was nonsense that we might be destined to be with each other. Now, I know I was wrong.”
“What? That’s stupid and –”
Then he kissed her, and while he did so everything – everything – became perfect.
Chapter 11
Brask had avoided her after the attack, the night Jadd was injured. She didn’t care, she’d told herself, but now, here he was, in
her favorite place on the rooftop. Her little private spot where the damn soldiers didn’t intrude. She’d talked to Brittany at dinner time but she couldn’t stay with her forever. Her sister was married, or whatever the alien equivalent was, and she needed to take care of her man. Her talent for healing had tired Brittany. Jadd, though ninety-nine percent repaired, was also weary and occupied looking after his bond mate.
Their powers weren’t some free gift. They took a toll on the user. It had bothered her deeply that Dassenze had limited who Brittany could heal. None of the human soldiers even knew this magic whatever-it-was healing was available. They’d gone off to bandage their own wounded with not a single anything allowed them. Maybe some had died. It was a shit situation and completely fucked up.
Until she’d seen Brittany, collapsed and weeping, after she’d done her best for Jadd and some other Igrakks.
Awful.
She wondered what her abilities were doing to her. Nothing? She grew tired but, equally, it made her want to jump about like a flea on crack. Mostly when near this muscle-bound git who had more in common with a barbarian warrior from a medieval adventure than he did with some idealistic superior race. The Igrakk should carry a club so passersby knew to grunt at him rather than talk.
She waited behind him then cleared her throat. “My spot.”
He barely looked back. “No.”
“It’s the one place I can get away from all your men.”
“There’s fifteen stories.”
And none of them were under the open sky and looked out over the lake, with a small roof garden next to them and a cute little terrace edge she could dangle her legs over, like he currently was doing. Annoying.
The nearest reminder of the warriors was a gun barrel from the shuttle’s turret silhouetted against the moonlit sky off to the right.
She fidgeted then gave in. Maybe she could talk to him? Maybe he wasn’t as bad as she thought and they’d just hit off badly. After all, this insane attraction must irk him too, at times. Mustn’t it?
Cautiously, she sat on the edge of the terrace and dangled her legs. Under the military tights she still wore, a piece of grit on the concrete dug into the underside of her thighs. She shifted to get more comfortable.
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