JANE'S WARLORD

by user

  She jumped to her feet and ran from the attic.

  “Jane?” Baran said, startled. She didn’t stop.

  “I thought we were going to look for that gun.” He descended the attic stairs, sounding puzzled.

  She found she couldn’t look at him. “There’s really no point. You said he was bulletproof anyway.”

  “Yes,” he said slowly. “I did.”

  Dogged by a nagging sense of shame at her own cowardice, Jane settled in front of the television to brood. Baran joined her, shooting a look at Freika.

  The wolf turned and silently trotted out.

  A moment later they heard crashing overlaid by an offended feline yowl. “Here, kitty kitty kitty!” Frieka called, sounding remarkably like Jack Nicholson playing a psychotic.

  “Leave her alone, Cujo!” Jane roared, leaping from the couch. She shot Baran a fulminating look. “Dammit, help me get him before he turns my cat into Octopussy plate.”

  She plunged from the room at a dead run, never even noticing the Warlord’s satisfied smile.

  Panting, her body still quivering with the aftermath of a savage orgasm, Jane slowly came to the realization that her hand was planted squarely in the middle of a slice of pepperoni pizza. Luckily, it had cooled. Baran had bent her over the kitchen table about five minutes after the delivery boy left.

  “The thrill is gone,” she wheezed as he slowly withdrew his softened shaft from the swollen grip of her sex. “You only fucked my brains out once today.”

  “The night is young,” he said, leaning down to nip her ear. “There’s still time to get in my quota.”

  She whimpered softly.

  Baran grinned. “At least you’re not brooding anymore.”

  On the table, the scanner crackled.

  The Tayanita Tribune offices were housed in a former National Guard armory building Jane’s father had built and renovated years before. The staff worked in the warren of postage-stamp-sized offices, while the big three-color press reigned over what had once been the main hall.

  Most of the employees had at least ten years with the paper, hired in the days when Jane’s father had run the operation like a combination good old boy and despot. Most of them had known Jane since before she was even tall enough to see over his desk.

  So when she walked in with Baran Arvid and his wolf in tow, all three of them became the instant center of attention. And it wasn’t approving.

  Jane took Baran around and conducted the introductions anyway, ignoring the speculative glances he collected.

  “I thought you said we couldn’t afford a photographer,” said Jeff Low, director of the paper’s three-man advertising team.

  Baran, expressionless behind his Ray-Bans, said hi a cold, deadpan tone, “I work cheap.”

  “You bring your dog to work?” Lillian Russell asked him later, eyeing Freika dubiously.

  “He gets lonely by himself,” Jane said hastily, half afraid the wolf would tell the obituary clerk he, too, worked cheap.

  “What is he, some kind of faggot?” one of the pressmen demanded of another, sotto voce, as Jane showed Baran the press. “No straight guy wears beads in his hair.”

  She winced, and was deeply relieved when she, Baran, and the wolf finally escaped back to her office and closed the door.

  “Well, that went every bit as badly as I thought,” she said, pulling a floppy disk out of her purse and booting her Mac. Pulling the scanner out next, she plugged it into its wall charger.

  “Your employees are stupid,” Freika informed her over the pop and crackle. “Two of them called me a dog! Do I look like a dog?”

  “No, you look like a loudmouthed timber wolf.” She turned up the scanner, hoping to confuse any eavesdroppers who might wonder who was talking. “Hold it down, Rin Tin Tin. We’ve started enough rumors as it is.”

  “Why is everyone so interested in my hair and sexual preferences?” Baran settled into one of the chairs Jane reserved for interviewees.

  She sighed. “It’s a Southern thing. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Visitors from the future or no visitors from the future, she had a paper to get out.

  Jane went to work pulling stories up and positioning them on each page of layout, flicking periodic glances from her computer viewscreen to the clock on the wall. The paper needed to be in the mailboxes of Tayanita County before everybody got home from work and started flooding the office with irate phone calls. Fortunately, she’d already done most of the interior pages on Friday, so all she had to worry about were the obits and ensuring the breaking news fit on the front and the jump page.

  She was toying with the placement of the photo Baran had taken of the firefighters clustered around the woman’s mangled car when there was a tap on the door. It opened a crack, and Billi Weaver stuck her bleached-blond head in. “Jane, may I have a word with you? Privately?”

  Despite the formal tone, there was a gleam in her best friend’s eye that made Jane’s lips curl in a reluctant smile. She knew what was coming—and it would be just as well if Baran didn’t hear it. She glanced at him. “Excuse us a minute.”

  He shot Freika a look. When Jane got up to walk out, her furry bodyguard trailed silently after her.

  “Ooooh, what a beautiful... animal.” In the hall Billi dropped to her knees and started to reach out to pet the wolf. Hesitating, she lifted a brow at Jane. “Does he eat reporters?”

  “Not so far.”

  “Good. You’re a doll baby, you know that?” A seasoned canine-lover, Billi knew just the spot behind Freika’s ear to attack with her manicured nails until the wolf leaned into her hand with a low whine of pleasure. Her busy fingers slowed as she discovered the jeweled implants in his skin. “What an unusual collar.”

  Jane winced and spoke quickly, hoping to divert her attention before she realized the gems were sunk directly into Freika’s skin. “I know what you’re going to say, and no, Baran is not gay.”

  Billi looked up at her and stood, attention successfully diverted. “Honey, it never even crossed my mind. I see the way he looks at you. Where did you find him, anyway? And are there any more left?”

  Jane shifted her feet. She hated lying to Billi, both on general principals and because she was so rotten at it. “Atlanta. I worked with him at the Times”

  “You never mentioned him.” Billi studied her, blue eyes sharp in her angular face. They’d been friends since grade school, and they’d hashed through every crisis in their respective lives for the past twenty-two years. Jane wished suddenly, violently, she could talk to her about this one. “And you really, really should have. Honey, he looks at you like you’re a bowl of homemade peach ice cream and he wishes he had a spoon.” She lifted a blond brow. “Does he have a spoon?”

  Jane flicked a glance down at Freika, who stared up at her blandly. “Yeah,” she admitted.

  The wicked gleam intensified. “Are we talking demi-tasse or soup spoon here?”

  She couldn’t help it. She grinned. “We’re talking ladle.”

  Billi’s eyes widened. “Do you mind if I lick the spoon?”

  Jane laughed. “One, the implications of that are kind of disgusting, and two don’t you think George would object?”

  “We have an open marriage.”

  “You do not.”

  “Okay, we don’t, but I’m also not dead. And you’ve got this whole cat-in-a-cream-bowl smile when you look at the guy that’s driving me insane with curiosity.”

  She grinned. “Suffer.”

  “Bitch. Okay, I’ve got to ask—does he know what to do with his spoon?”

  Jane thought back over the weekend. “Oh, yeah.”

  “There it is again—that cat smile. So, as far as culinary skills, are we talking the guy at Bill’s Stop N’ Chow, or are we talking Emeril?”

  Jane laughed.

  “Damn!” Billi gave a mock shiver. “That’s what I thought.”

  After listening to her friend segue into a complaint about her teenage son, Jane re
turned to her desk.

  As she slipped past Baran, he purred in a deep velvet voice, “The best thing about cooking is eating.”

  Jane’s eyes widened as color flooded her cheekbones. She stared at him, feeling her jaw drop.

  “If you’ll close the door,” he continued wickedly, “I’d be delighted to whip something up.”

  “Newspaper,” she squeaked. “I’ve got to get out the newspaper.”

  Baran chuckled in a sensual rumble that made feminine things quiver low in her belly. “Ah, well. Maybe when you break for... lunch.”

  “Warlords,” Freika observed, curling up by the desk, “have really good hearing.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Jane said weakly.

  It took her another ten minutes to get her mind back on the layout, but finally she sent the last page off through the system for output as a negative that would then be used to burn a flexible metal printing plate.

  Jane was about to massage her temples in a vain effort to relieve her habitual post-deadline headache when the phone rang. She reached for it absently. “Jane Colby, Tayanita Tribune”

  A male voice said over a loud crackle she at first took for a bad connection, “Better get to 604 Parris Street, Janey. She’s starting to brown.”

  And Jane recognized the crackle. It wasn’t static. It was fire.

  In the background a woman screamed.

  Jane banged the phone down and ran for the door, Freika and Baran lunging after her. They didn’t even ask for explanations; they must have overheard the conversation.

  As the three sprinted into the parking lot, she reached into her purse, grabbed her cell, and dialed 911. “There’s a fire at 604 Parris Street. A woman’s trapped, and the guy who murdered those girls is inside with her.”

  “What?” the startled dispatcher demanded. “Ma’am, slow down! What are you talking about? Who are you?”

  “Jane Colby. The killer called me again. He’s set fire to a woman’s house, and she’s trapped in there with him. Send fire trucks and police to 604 Parris Street!” Jane hit

  End as she unlocked the SUV with her key fob. The three of them piled in. A moment later, she was burning rubber down Main Street.

  She just hoped this encounter with Druas ended better than the last.

  Fire flooded Baran’s mind as his computer pumped the synthetic hormones of riatt into his body until his muscles jumped and coiled under his skin. He knew the feeling from a thousand battles, but with it came an emotion that was new: a cold, sick doubt.

  Was he going to fail this woman, too?

  Never mind that succeeding when he wasn’t supposed to could theoretically cause the universe-destroying apocalypse. If he failed, she died. And for Warlords, failure was simply not acceptable.

  Even less acceptable was the idea of failing Jane.

  He glanced at her as she drove. Her delicate profile was set and grim, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. He remembered the pleading eyes of the woman who’d died in his arms. The fear of seeing Jane look at him with that same terrorized despair made his gut clench into a fist.

  He had to kill the bastard.

  “There’s the smoke,” Jane told him. There was fear in her eyes, but something told him it wasn’t for the woman they’d come to save, or even for herself.

  It was for him.

  That realization sent another sensation rolling through him—not fear or even anger, but warm pleasure that she cared.

  And that, he knew, wasn’t good. A warrior could not afford to feel too much, care too much. That kind of emotion could cloud thought, make you prone to fatal mistakes. Shut it down, he thought.

  Besides, it wasn’t as though they had a future. He thrust the thought aside.

  The SUV rounded a corner. His eyes locked on a small wooden house off to the right, surrounded in a cloud of smoke pouring from under the eaves. The heat had not yet shattered the windows; he could see the leap of flames through the glass.

  Baran unbuckled his seat belt and threw the door open before she’d even brought the truck to a halt. He didn’t allow himself to look back.

  Is the Xeran inside? he demanded of his computer.

  Yes. Along with a human. Sensors indicate she has been injured. Fire burning at multiple locations, indicating arson.

  Guide me to them.

  Baran was halfway across the yard before Jane got .the truck parked, running with that inhuman speed she knew meant he was in riatt. As she watched, he jerked the screen door open and found the front door locked. Without hesitating, he kicked it in so hard she heard the wood crack from the curb. Smoke billowed out in gray, choking waves.

  “Dammit, he needs an air pack and protective gear!” She’d worked fires long enough to know how deadly smoke and heat could be for an unprotected human, genetically enhanced or not.

  “Well, he doesn’t have them,” Freika said as she flung open the driver’s door and leaped out. He loped after her as she ran across the yard. “And where the hell are you going? We’ve been through this. You can’t go in there. He doesn’t need the distraction.”

  Maybe not, but she was damned if she’d let him go into a burning house after that psychopath by himself. With no gear, if Druas didn’t get him, smoke inhalation would. Jane put down her head and ran harder.

  The next instant something massive hit her back, sending her flying. The world tilted as she plowed into the grass in an impact that drove the air from her lungs.

  “Sorry,” Freika said grimly, settling his considerable weight on her back, “but you’re not going anywhere.”

  All she could do was fight for enough air to curse the wolf.

  Though it was daylight, the inside of the house was pitch black and flooded with choking clouds of smoke. Baran couldn’t see a damn thing, but his computer painted a sensor image behind his eyes, picking out the shapes of furniture and walls and the glowing heat signature of the flames Druas had set as a blazing obstacle course.

  He looked around. Just beyond the next wall, his sensors showed a pair of glowing blue images: a male silhouette standing over a female shape curled on the floor. Druas and the hostage, both in the kitchen, surrounded by a ring of flame.

  Baran knew he had less than a minute to get the woman out. The heat would sear his lungs as thoroughly as it would hers, killing them quicker than even the smoke inhalation could.

  Took you long enough, Druas commed to him as he leaped a flaming coffee table. Evidently the killer had sensors of his own. / was getting bored. And she’s getting crispy.

  As if to punctuate his taunt, a female scream ripped through the air, ringing over the roaring crackle of the blaze.

  Baran swore silently. His sensors told him the bastard was wearing combat armor, a helmet and a breathing unit. With that kind of equipment, Druas could swim in molten lava without breaking a sweat. The Jumpkiller could easily trap Baran in the house until the heat finished him off.

  That wasn’t a game Baran had any intention of playing. He had to snatch the woman up and get out, even if he had to punch his way through a wall. They didn’t have time for anything else, not even the seconds it would take to disable Druas’s suit with the ring.

  What, no pithy reply? No chilling threats?

  The kitchen doorway was blocked by flame. Baran dived through it, feeling the heat singe his skin. Without breaking step, he lunged for the woman on the floor. At least lying down there, the air was cooler. Maybe she would sur...

  Druas caught him with a vicious kick to the jaw that slammed him into the wall behind him. The entire house shook with the impact.

  Somehow he managed to hit the floor on his feet, despite the stars that flooded his vision. So much for taking the bastard off-guard.

  Not that easy, Warlord, Druas mocked. You disappoint me. I’ve been looking forward to this fight.

  You want a fight, come outside and face me, Baran commed back. Without the T-suit and the armor—and without a woman as a shield. He snapped into a spinning
kick that could have taken the bastard’s head off even with his helmet, but Druas somehow jerked aside at the last minute.

  But the move had done what Baran intended—created an opening. He swooped down and snatched the woman, then wheeled toward the back door.

  You do know Liisa was my first kill? Druas stepped through the smoke to block him, shooting a fist toward his head.

  Only training let him duck in time, the woman still cradled in his arms. He didn’t dignify the Jumpkiller’s ridiculous lie with an answer.

  I loved the way she squealed for me. And she was so tiiight... Despite the smoke, Baran could almost hear the sneering grin on his face. None of the others have been as good. But Jane... Jane has possibilities.

  Kakshit! Baran commed, goaded into a reply. You weren’t there. You only heard the stories. Even in the deep, hot well of his rage, he felt the woman stir and moan. He had to get her out before the heat killed her. The back door...

  Perhaps. Everybody knows why the Death Lord kills.

  He ignored the mocking words and turned. The heat burned his lungs with every inhalation. He’d have to kill the bastard later.

  But do they know what Gelar did to you just before you killed him and escaped?

  Baran froze. Unable to help himself, he looked back at his enemy, at the cold, blue gleam that was all his sensors could show him in the choking smoke.

  They’d paralyzed you with your comp. I was in the next room, finishing Liisa, when I heard him say he wanted your mouth next. Then I heard him scream. Did the fool free you for that one second? Did he... ?

  You’re lying. Even as he commed the words, he rammed his foot into the door so hard the flimsy wood seemed to explode. If you’d heard, you’d have stopped me. He leaped, carrying the woman out into the blessedly cool air.

  / never liked Gelar.

  You weren’t there. I’d have seen you. Gritting his teeth, he ran, forcing himself to carry his limp burden to a safe distance from the house. Glancing down at her in the sunlight, he winced at the burns. And I’d have killed you.

  Oh, you’d have tried. The commed words slid into his brain like snakes. Which is why I had no desire to run into a Warlord in riatt after I’d just butchered his girlfriend. But I did take a trophy before I left...