by Bianca D’Arc
When she’d cleaned her plate and sat back, she did look better. Jim watched her closely, as did his men.
“Are you guys through talking about me?” She dared them all with the saucy challenge and the others grinned while Jim merely raised one eyebrow in her direction.
“Yeah, I think we’re through for now. Are you telepathic at all?”
“A little.” She broadcast the thought to everyone in the room. “Like I said, I have a lot of small talents, but no real specialty. I get a vision every once in a while. They’re not usually very strong. I can move things with my mind, but not very accurately. Not like Larry over there.”
“How’d you know his name?” Jim asked with suspicion.
Chapter Six
“Your name is really Larry?” The surprise on her face was easy to see when Larry nodded in response to her question. “Jeez. I was calling you three Moe, Larry and Curly in my mind since you didn’t bother with introductions.” She laughed at her own joke, and the men joined in to varying degrees.
“My three stooges are Max, Larry and Pierre,” Jim clarified, pointing to each as he introduced them. “Back to you—what else can you do?”
Her attention shifted away from the men and back to Jim. “I can talk telepathically over short distances.” She sighed, looking at her hands. “I guess the thing I’m best at is healing, but even there, I’m not great. Nothing like my dad or brothers. They were truly gifted.”
“How about we start at the beginning. We all probably saw news reports of you with a gold medal around your neck. Where were you when the crystal bombs started to fall and what did you do after that?”
“Man,” she pushed her chair back and got comfortable. “You really want to delve into ancient history, huh? Okay. Well, let’s see. I was in California, doing a publicity tour for the presidential children’s athletics drive when the bombardment started. I called my dad and managed to talk to him for a few minutes before all hell broke loose. I’d had a dream a few hours before it started while I was sleeping in my hotel room. I don’t really remember the specifics of the dream. I woke knowing I had to get to higher ground. I got in the rental car—I didn’t even check out—and ran for the hills. I warned my family back East using my mobile phone, but I was only able to tell them that something was coming and to take cover. I didn’t know what was coming. I’d never felt anything so strongly as the urge to run. I told them I loved them.” Her voice caught. “And that I’d be in touch again when we were all safe.” She looked at her hands through the retelling. Every man in the room could feel her sorrow—empathic or not. “The crystals took out the satellites and cell towers and the earthquakes and tsunamis did the rest. I never talked to my family again. I made it up into the hills just in time.”
She was quiet a moment, and Jim let her have the time to regroup. They all had painful memories of that time. He didn’t want to intentionally cause her pain by reopening those wounds, but he needed to know.
“I kept driving as long as I could. I found a gas station or two along the way to refuel as I got deeper and deeper into the mountains. I just knew I had to keep going. Eventually I had to take cover, and my rental car was demolished by a huge crystal shard. I went on foot then, trying to stay clear of the path of destruction. I wandered for days—maybe weeks—before coming upon other humans. We walked together for a little while. Then some of the men turned ugly. I was the only woman in the group. I knocked the snot out of two of them and took off on my own. That happened a few times. I lost track of time. I was drinking out of streams and eating berries and leaves. My strength was pretty low when I saw my first Alvian.”
“Did you fight the alien?” Jim asked, wondering how that confrontation had gone. Gina didn’t look tough on the outside, but he knew she had skills few human men could match.
“Not at first. He watched me like a bug. Like he’d never seen anything like me before. It pissed me off, but I was so weak. He spoke a little English, which I thought was weird, but was glad for at that moment. He gave me water and something to eat, then when he called his companions out of cover and tried to have them take me into custody, I went ballistic on them.”
“How many?” Larry asked.
“There were five of them. It was the weirdest thing. After their initial group response, the leader called some commands to them in their language and they came at me one by one, like they were testing my limits. Each one tried a different tactic—a different style of fighting. I felt like I was back in my dad’s dojo, taking some kind of elaborate test. And these guys could fight. They were as good as my dad or better.”
Jim knew that was really saying something. “What happened? Did they finally wear you down and capture you?”
“Oh, they wore me down all right. I was weak to begin with. By the end of it I wasn’t captured so much as adopted. The leader was the Zxerah Patriarch. The fighters were his students. These guys weren’t interested in capturing humans. They’d gone out into the wilderness with the express purpose of finding some and seeing what we were like. It was pure fate they ran into me first. And I do mean fate. These guys are like highly skilled Tibetan monks. That’s the closest analogy I can come up with. Even that doesn’t fit completely. The Zxerah are a secret clan of Alvians that have existed for centuries in complete anonymity. The only Alvians that know they exist for sure are the Alvian High Council and those they allow to have contact with the Patriarch and his people. The Zxerah spend their entire lives training and teaching fighting skills to other warriors. When they go out among the Alvian army, they’re introduced simply as advanced teachers. Nobody knows where they come from or where they go, and the Council keeps it that way.”
“What does the Council get in return for keeping their secret?” Jim asked.
“The best assassins money can’t buy,” she answered bluntly. “Zxerah never miss.”
“Merde,” Pierre cursed, clearly shocked by the idea. “A secret Alvian hit squad? And you’re friends with them?”
“More than friends,” she admitted. “I’m a member of the clan. They adopted me and a few other humans they protect. Even the Council doesn’t know the Zxerah have been interacting with humans almost from their first day on this planet.”
“Why would they do that? I mean, what makes them different from the rest of their kind who want to put us in pens?” Jim didn’t know if he believed her. A quick check with his team told him she wasn’t lying.
“The Zxerah value innovation,” she said. “They’ve come to believe that psychic abilities are the manifestation of the next logical evolution of both our species. The Patriarch also believes that by breeding emotion out of his people, they’ve made a giant mistake. He studies these things—population growth and sustainability—and he thinks that unless the process is altered, his race is doomed.”
That idea sank in for a moment while Jim thought about the implications. This could be big—if the Patriarch was someone they could work with.
“You’ve lived with these Zxerah since then? You’ve spent decades with them, right? Can you tell me why nobody ages anymore?”
“Oh, yeah. That was a surprise even to the Patriarch,” Gina said. “He discovered well after the fact that one of the lead Alvian scientists discovered lost Alvian DNA in certain humans she was studying. It turns out all human survivors have some amount of Alvian DNA and it was a simple matter for their geneticists to design a treatment that would turn on the Alvian aging gene that was dormant in us all. The scientists figured it would give them more time to study us, so they disseminated the treatment planet-wide. It was an airborne thing that eventually infected us all. That’s why our aging slowed. We age like Alvians now, and they live several hundred years.”
“If that don’t beat all,” Max murmured.
“Your Patriarch sent you here for something.” Jim brought the conversation back on track. “What did you hope to accomplish?”
“I’ve been sent out from time to time over the past decades. Always in se
cret and always to advance the Patriarch’s own secret agenda. Most often, I’ve gone out to rescue human women who were being mistreated by their males. I’ve also been used to find other human martial artists and bring them into the Zxerah fold. Seems more than a few remember my face from the Olympics and the ad campaigns that came after. We have a small cadre of human fighters that had some training in martial arts before the cataclysm and have since been taught Zxerah fighting styles. We train hard every day. We’re as good as the Alvian Zxerah and in some notable instances, even better. When the Patriarch realized the difference that made humans better at the ancient Zxerah arts than his own people, he decided on his current course of action.”
“What was the difference? And what’s his course of action?”
“The difference is heart.” Her gaze held his as she made her revelation. “Emotion makes the difference. Too much emotion is not good in a fighter, but the Patriarch believes that too little emotion is just as detrimental to his brethren. His current course of action is to do everything he can to return emotion to his people. Like I said before, some Alvian scientists are already experimenting with such things. It’s the Patriarch’s plan to help those experiments along as best he can from the shadows. More than that, he’s vowed to help protect humanity because he sees no future for his own people without humans too. He believes a blending of our races is what will save them both—eventually.”
“Then why come here? We’re one small enclave, and we don’t get too involved in what goes on outside our complex.”
“Your group is one of many, Jim. There are other strongholds, like this one, scattered around the world. A large number of them are on the North American continent. The Patriarch sent me to try to put you in touch with the others. I’m hoping yours will be the first to reach out to another encampment of humans—if you’re willing to take the chance. Eventually, all the different groups of humans could be organized into a real resistance working in concert with each other, if and when necessary.”
Jim sat back, regarding her steadily. “That’s a mighty tall order, sweetheart. Many of our folk don’t want anything to do with the outside world. A lot of them barely made it here and this place represents safety. Opening it up to others puts them at risk, and I’d hazard to say many of them won’t want to take that risk.”
Gina sighed deeply as she seemed to consider his words. “I see your difficulty. There’s got to be some way to bring you together—at least into communication with each other—without jeopardizing everyone’s safety.”
“We can’t decide something this big in a matter of hours. Maybe not even in a couple of days.” Jim stood and his men followed suit. “I hope you planned on staying a while. We have some guest quarters nearby where you can sleep. There’ll be a guard. Sorry for that, but by your own admission, you’ve been consorting with Alvians. To us they’re still the enemy.”
“I understand.” Gina stood and followed the men out the door and down the hall. Max, Larry and Pierre said their farewells and stayed in the hallway, but Jim followed her right into the guest quarters.
“So what now?”
Gina turned to face Jim—a man she had secretly admired when she was a teenager. Heck, if she were being honest with herself, she would admit to the huge crush she’d had on him. He’d been a hottie then and things had only improved with time. He was tall, muscular and lean in the way martial artists often were, only he carried himself with more assurance than any man she’d ever known outside her own family.
Jim had that indefinable something that made him nearly irresistible. She stacked him up in her mind against her dad and brothers and knew he could have held his own with the men she admired most—both intellectually and physically. He’d been a talented fighter when she’d first seen him in the gym training with her dad. After only a few months of her father’s instruction, he was a force to be reckoned with.
She’d watched him from afar, even though she’d known better. Her dad was the specialist the CIA had sent certain people to when they needed extra training. Only the most gifted athletes and operatives were sent and more failed at the rigorous training program her father subjected them to than passed. Jim was one of the latter. He’d not only passed the months of training, but he’d earned Sensei Hanson’s respect.
The object of her thoughts closed the door firmly behind them and leaned back against it. His expression was guarded. She thought she sensed regret mixed with something indefinable that almost felt like attraction as he watched her from half-closed eyes.
“Now you’d better strip.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Jim sighed and pushed himself away from his leaning position against the door.
“You heard me. I’m taking your clothes and your bag for safekeeping. There’s a jumpsuit in the bathroom for you to wear.”
“You’re kidding right?”
“I’m afraid not, Gina.” His deep voice growled across her skin, raising goose bumps. “Take off your clothes.”
“Taking your security measures a little far aren’t you?”
His sensuous lips firmed into an unrelenting line. “Never far enough, sweetheart. I’ve learned the hard way that I can never be too careful when it comes to my people’s safety.”
She recognized the determination in his jaw and the bitter truth of memory in his eyes. He wouldn’t relent on this point, and she realized she should have expected something like this.
“Oh, all right. Turn around.”
“Can’t do it. If you’re hiding anything on your person, I need to see it. And if you’re hiding anything in your person, I’m going to do my best to find it.”
She gasped. “This is a body cavity search? You’ve got to be kidding.” She felt shaky when she realized what such a search would entail.
Jim moved toward a small bathroom on one side of the guest quarters. He opened a small medicine chest and took out a couple of things—among the most daunting was a jar of something that looked like petroleum jelly.
“Afraid not. Look, I had medical training back in the day. I know what I’m doing and I promise not to hurt you, but this has to be done. I won’t allow you to smuggle anything that could be dangerous to the safety of my people any farther into this facility than you already have.”
“I’m not smuggling anything!”
“I’ve trusted you this far on instinct alone, but I have to be certain. Now strip. I won’t say it again.”
The edge of steel in his voice made her shiver, but it wasn’t all in fear. No, something started to stir in the pit of her stomach at his dominant tone.
“Isn’t there any other way?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, agitated at the idea of what he was asking.
“If you don’t agree voluntarily, I’ll call in the troops and after what I suspect will be a painful fight, we’ll restrain you and do it by force. You can’t be allowed to leave now that you know about us. You’ll be a prisoner.”
“Some choice.” Gina held his eyes as she began to unfasten her top with rough motions. She was angry and not shy about showing it. He looked relieved, but his expression also held a hint of anticipation she found hard to ignore.
“Throw everything onto the chair by the door.” He nodded toward it as her top came undone, but his eyes followed her movements closely.
The dark, alien fabric shrugged off her shoulders, and she threw it over the chair with deadly accuracy. She removed her pants next and his gaze flicked over her skin like flame, making her hot in an inexplicable way. The pants dropped to her ankles, and she kicked them upward toward the chair. Her soft shoes and socks followed, leaving her in her underwear. There she hesitated.
“Everything, Gina.”
She felt a flush steal up her cheeks, lighting her face bright red, she was certain, as she debated her next move. Before Grady, Gina hadn’t been intimate with a man in more years than she could count on one hand. Her few liaisons hadn’t ever involved this kind of thing. She couldn’t rec
all ever being totally naked in front of a man who wasn’t also bare-assed. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and now Jim—this man she’d lusted after as a teen—was ordering her to not only get naked, but allow him to…to…stick his fingers in places she’d never had anybody’s fingers.
Why did that thought turn her on? Especially since her stolen night with Grady. She must be depraved for the idea of this invasion to be even remotely exciting. But she couldn’t help the little gasp that caught in her throat when Jim walked closer to her.
“I won’t hurt you, Gina, but I have to be sure. Turn around and keep your hands where I can see them.” His voice was pitched low, coaxing and demanding all at the same time.
Gina did as he asked, feeling her body quake with fear, excitement and…was that yearning? She gasped out loud this time when Jim’s warm fingers undid the clasp on her bra. He pushed the straps down her arms and moved closer, his tall body warm against her shivering back as he pushed the garment all the way down her arms and off. He threw it behind them to the chair before stepping back.
Gina knew he could see her breasts, tall as he was, looking over her shoulder, but he moved away, restoring the illusion of privacy. She breathed easier until his hands returned to her body, this time skimming her panties down over her hips, dragging them slowly to the floor.
“Up,” he commanded, leaving himself vulnerable to a kick as he crouched behind her legs. He trusted her not to take advantage and try to hurt him. It was a significant gesture that made it somewhat easier to do as he said. She lifted one foot, then the other as he flung the panties to the growing pile on the chair.
Jim took her hand and led her into the small bathroom. She felt his eyes on her. She was too mortified by the situation and her body’s response to this compelling man to meet his gaze.
He positioned her in front of the countertop and used a cotton swab and a pointed light to look into her ears first. That done, he did the same for her nose and then instructed her to open her mouth. She did, finally meeting his eyes, unable to ignore his handsome face close to hers as he poked around inside her mouth with a small mirror and the light. Apparently satisfied, Jim laid the instruments down on the counter, then ran his fingers into her hair, stroking all over her scalp and down her neck.