Thirty-Four
Kane studied her sleeping face, his own harsh features etched with regret. He had heard her wishes as she drifted off to sleep—her hopes that he would come back to her when she gave birth to their son.
“I want to, baby,” he murmured, too low to wake her up. “Want to so damn badly—but I can’t. By that time, I’ll be gone.”
Their bond and link would remain for a little while, at least—for as long as he lived. But Kane was well able to keep a barrier between them to keep her from feeling his mind linked to hers. And it wouldn’t be for long, anyway.
He watched her for hours, studying her lovely features, memorizing her face so he could take it with him—even into death. But at last he knew he could wait no longer. He gathered her into his arms and gave her a tiny but potent Sting at the base of her skull, brushing her lovely auburn hair aside to do so.
At once Alli’s breathing changed as her sleep deepened. She was out now—and she wouldn’t wake up until he wanted her to. Kane sighed as he pressed another kiss to her sleeping lips. It was time.
She slept through the trip back to her home universe and then her home world. In fact, she didn’t even begin to wake until Kane was sliding her beneath the covers, next to the worthless fiancé who damn well didn’t deserve her.
The male slept on but Alli’s eyes began to flutter as Kane drew the covers up to her chin.
“Wha…?” She looked at him groggily. “Kane? What’s going on?” Where are we?”
“You’re home, baby.” Suddenly his throat felt tight and it was difficult to talk. Instead of trying, he kissed her softly. Then, before she could ask any more questions, he pressed his mouth to her temple.
“Kane, what—?” she began, frowning.
Before she could finish her question, he Stung her once more on the temple. Through their link, he whispered, “Sleep and forget, Allisandra. Forget me completely..”
The furrows in Alli’s brow erased themselves abruptly and her eyes closed as her body relaxed back into sleep.
Kane watched her for a moment longer, his heart throbbing in his chest as the pain of loss speared through him sharply. Gods, he never wanted to leave her! And yet, this was the only way to keep her safe and to redress the wrongs his people had done to her planet in his own universe. The only way to make things right.
Finally, he turned away. As much as he might love Allisandra, now he had to leave her.
And he knew he would never see her again.
Thirty-Five
Alli woke with a mild headache and a feeling that she’d been having crazy dreams…dreams she couldn’t quite remember. The first rays of sunlight were just making their way through her bedroom blinds, showing her fiancé sleeping tangled in the covers beside her.
“Douglas?” she asked, sitting up in bed and blinking. “Douglas, wake up. I had the strangest dream. At least…” She put a hand to her temple which felt tender for some reason. “At least, I think I did.”
“Darling?” Her fiancé’s eyes slitted open, groggy at first. But when he saw her sitting there, his eyes flew wide in apparent surprise. “Alli!” he exclaimed. “Oh my God—you’re back!”
“Back?” Alli frowned. “What are you talking about?”
What followed was a very strange half hour. Douglas insisted that she had been gone for nearly a month—that she had vanished right out of their bed one night and he hadn’t been able to find her anywhere.
“We’ve all been frantic!” he told her, running a hand through his thinning brown hair. “I looked for you everywhere—I called the Mother Ship and they turned the place upside down! Searched high and low but you weren’t to be found!”
Alli shook her head.
“But…I don’t remember going anywhere. What are you talking about?”
She wouldn’t believe him until he showed her the calendar app on his phone.
“See? It’s nearly the end of June! Why, we’re supposed to get married in just two days! But I thought you were gone forever. Do you know how worried I was?” He took Alli by the shoulders and frowned at her fiercely.. “I’m relieved you’re back, of course, but it was really inconsiderate of you to make everyone worry so much.”
“I…I didn’t mean to. Honestly,” Alli protested.
Douglas gave a long-suffering sigh.
“Well, I suppose all that matters is that you’re back and safe. Come here.” And he pulled her into a hug.
Alli let him embrace her, but his arms around her felt…wrong. And the way their faces were on the same level when he hugged her seemed strange too.
His arms should be stronger, longer—more muscular, she thought. And I ought to have to look up to meet his eyes—way up. He should be a lot taller.
Then she pushed the strange thoughts away. Why would she think such things about her fiancé? Douglas was short and thin—he always had been. Why would she expect him to be taller and more muscular all of a sudden?
But he smells wrong, too, whispered a little voice in her head. He doesn’t smell like warm, masculine spice. I don’t like it!
“Douglas,” she said, pulling out of the hug when she absolutely couldn’t stand it anymore. “Did you, er, change your cologne or deodorant while I was…was gone?”
It seemed wrong to even say such a thing. Because as far as Alli could remember, she had never left. But since Douglas kept insisting and the calendar seemed to back him up…
“Of course not—why would you ask such a thing?” he asked and shook his head. “I was too busy looking for you to do anything else! I even handed the Johnson account off to someone else, just so I could concentrate on finding you and you know how lucrative that is! It cost me a great deal of time and effort, you disappearing like you did.”
Alli shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Douglas—I just don’t remember any of this.” She sighed. “Maybe I should go up to the Mother Ship. Maybe someone there can help me make sense of all this. ”
“The Mother Ship?” He frowned. “Why would you go there?”
“I don’t know.” Alli frowned. “I just have a feeling that somehow this…everything that supposedly happened to me…somehow has to do with the Kindred.”
Her fiancé threw up his hands.
“Fine. Just call me once you get there so I know you’re all right. I’ll stay here and make some calls to the Police Department—I have to cancel the Missing Persons report they have on you and ask them to close the case.” He shook his head. “Honestly, this is a relief—they were beginning to ask me some very suspicious questions.”
Alli frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, they seemed to think I had done away with you somehow!” Douglas made a face. “As if I would, after all the money I’ve already put out on the wedding!”
Inwardly, Alli winced. Leave it to Douglas to reduce everything to dollars and cents—even her apparent disappearance and the loss of an entire month of her life that she couldn’t account for.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” she said and kissed him lightly on the cheek, though honestly, she really didn’t want to get anywhere near him. Though she didn’t understand why, getting physically close to her fiancé just felt uncomfortable, which was really strange. It had never bothered her before, but now it felt wrong.
Well, add it to the list of weird things happening today, Alli told herself.
She had to get up to the Mother Ship and try to find some answers. As she had told Douglas, she had a very strong feeling that somehow the Kindred had something to do with what had happened to her.
She only wished she knew what it was.
Thirty-Six
“Oh, I’m so relieved you’re back, all safe and sound!” Sophia gave her a big hug, squeezing Alli tight for emphasis as she pulled her into her suite. “Come on and sit down. You really don’t know where you went?” she asked, examining Alli’s face anxiously as they both settled on her couch.
Alli shook her head. “I wish. Doug
las is going crazy about it but I don’t remember a thing. The last thing I can recall is going to sleep in bed beside him. And the next morning—or what felt like the next morning to me, anyway—when I woke up, he was insisting that I’d disappeared and been gone almost an entire month somehow!”
“You did and you were,” Sophie assured her. “We thought maybe you’d come back up here to the Mother Ship somehow, even though your shuttle was still at your house on Earth. We turned the whole place upside down looking for you.” She leaned forward and looked into Alli’s eyes. “What we were most afraid of was that you’d somehow been taken by that Kru’ell One you’d been dreaming about. I even had Doctor Lambert monitor her PORTAL, but we couldn’t find you anywhere, even though she was combing through different universes for days!”
Alli shook her head. This was too much to take in all at once.
“PORTAL? What’s that?” she asked, skipping over Sophie’s other strange statements about Krue’ell Ones and different universes.
“Oh, didn’t I introduce you to Doctor Lambert yet?” Sophie asked. “Caroline’s a scientist and she built a machine that acts like a window into other universes in the Multiverse. Or, well, she thought it was a window but it turns out that for certain people, it can act more like a door. Caroline herself got sucked through into a different universe and we had a terrible time trying to get her back again.”
“Really?” Alli shook her head. “Whoever heard of being sucked into a whole other universe?”
“Well, that’s exactly what we were afraid happened to you,” Sophie explained. “Especially after you told me about those strange dreams you had about the Kru’ell One warrior.”
“What?” Alli’s temples began to throb for some reason. “What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning. “I never had any dreams of any warrior.”
Sophie frowned.
“Yes, you did, hon,” she said. “You were telling me all about it the last time I saw you. About how you always saw him in a hall filled with shadows and he said he was coming for you.” She shivered. “Really scary stuff! So of course we were afraid that you somehow got sucked through the PORTAL and wound up in his universe.”
By now Alli’s head was positively pounding.
“I don’t…don’t remember telling you about any dreams,” she said to Sophie, rubbing her temples to try and ease the ache. “I don’t even remember having any dreams. I’m beginning to feel like I’m going crazy!”
“Oh dear—I shouldn’t have said anything!” Sophie exclaimed. “I’m so sorry, Alli!”
“No…” Alli took a deep breath, trying to calm the pounding in her head. “No, it’s all right. It’s just hard to hear that I’ve apparently lost even more of my memory than I thought. I mean, an entire month is gone but so is the conversation I apparently had with you about weird dreams and warriors from an alternate universe.”
“Sylvan and I were so worried about you after that,” Sophie confessed. “We were actually glad that you went back down to Earth because the PORTAL can’t work there—it has to be out of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. But when you went missing…”
“Show me the PORTAL,” Alli interrupted. She didn’t know why, but it seemed important to see the machine Sophie kept talking about that led to other universes.
“Oh well, if you think it will help jog your memory or something,” Sophie said uncertainly.
“Maybe it will, if I somehow went through it, like you seem to think,” Alli said.
“I don’t see how, since you disappeared from Earth. Though I supposed it can’t hurt to have a look,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “But you’ll have to stand well back from it—it can be dangerous!” She frowned. “I have to tell Caroline—Doctor Lambert—to cancel her search for you, anyway. Come on—we’ll go see her and the PORTAL now.”
“Let’s go,” Alli said grimly. “I just want to get to the bottom of all this and put it behind me.”
“Come on then.” And Sophie led the way.
Thirty-Seven
Dr. Caroline Lambert was a plump, pretty woman with wild, fly-away golden-red curls and a shy smile that Alli liked at once. When she found out who Alli was, her pretty face broke into a huge grin of relief.
“Oh, you don’t know how worried we’ve all been!” she exclaimed, wringing Alli’s hand enthusiastically. “I was so afraid that awful warrior from another universe that Sophie was telling me you dreamed about had somehow used my PORTAL to get in here and steal you away!”
“I can assure you, nobody stole me away anywhere,” Alli said dryly. But even as she spoke, her temples started to throb again.
“Can Alli have a look at the PORTAL?” Sophie asked Caroline. “From a safe distance of course,” she added quickly.
“Of course! I have a guardrail installed now,” Caroline answered. “It reminds people where to stand since they just seem drawn to it when we fire it up.”
She walked them to the back of her laboratory where the machine was. The PORTAL had a shiny, brass rectangular frame and looked a little like an oversized mirror but with no glass in it.
“Hmm,” Alli studied it, but the machine which supposedly allowed one to look into other Universes—and sometimes to travel in them—didn’t ring any bells.
“Does it jog your memory at all?” Sophie asked anxiously.
Alli shook her head.
“Not a bit, actually.”
“Maybe if I start it up,” Caroline suggested. “Though of course, even if you were sucked into the universe with the Kru’ell Ones in it, the chances of you seeing that particular world are pretty slim.”
“Still, it can’t hurt to look, I suppose,” Sophie said.
“Of course.” Caroline went over to the PORTAL’s controls. She pushed a button and turned a shiny brass wheel.
At once the empty brass rectangle filled with a field of stars.
Alli started to object that all she could see was space when a new object came into view. It looked like a dot and then, as it rushed forward, it grew and grew until it was clearly a planet. A blue-green planet wreathed in clouds.
“That’s Earth,” Sophie murmured. “But it’s almost hard to tell because of all the cloud cover. Those are way more clouds than our Earth usually has.”
Alli’s temples gave a warning twinge, signaling the onset of a headache but she found she couldn’t look away as the cloud-covered Earth got bigger.
You’ve seen this view before, whispered a little voice in her head. Back when you went to the feast.
Alli frowned. What feast? She had a brief mental image of herself dressed in a long, sheer black gown and a royal blue cloak but when she tried to chase it, the picture evaporated like smoke.
But now the view on the PORTAL was getting more detailed. They were past the atmosphere of Earth now and hovering over the White House in DC. But…was it the White House? For someone had painted it black—or at least, very dark gray and there was a high black fence all around it.
“What in the world?” Sophie murmured beside her. “I wonder what’s going on in this world?”
“Look at the armed guards out front,” Caroline said. “They look like Kindred—don’t they?”
“In a way. But look at those eyes—black and silver like mirrors!” Sophie shivered.
He had mirrored eyes but at the very last, you saw into his soul, whispered the voice in Alli’s head. Her temples gave another, stronger twinge—the warning of a truly awful headache brewing on the horizon.
Still she watched.
They were rushing into the White House now, speeding down a hallway to a room that seemed somehow familiar.
That’s where the feast was, the voice informed her. But the long, low table with its black and red cushions had been pushed to the side. Sitting at the far end of the room in a golden, throne-like chair, was a Kindred warrior so huge he dwarfed even the guards around him. He had a thick, bushy black beard that had been braided with a bone at the end of it and he was wearing a c
loak made of coarse black fur that was almost the same color as his hair. Instead of black and silver, like the eyes of the warriors around him, his eyes gleamed a deadly black and red.
“The Overlord,” Alli breathed and then wondered why she had said it. She didn’t know this man—did she?
“What’s that?” Sophie and Caroline both turned to her, looking concerned.
“Nothing. It’s nothing.” Alli rubbed her temples again. God, her head was throbbing. And still she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the PORTAL.
At that moment, another man walked into the scene they were watching. He was tall, with black hair shaved close to his scalp, and the same mirrored eyes as the other warriors. To Alli, he looked strangely familiar.
You know him, whispered the voice in her head. He’s important.
Yes, but who was he? Though she searched her mind frantically, Alli couldn’t find a name to match with the tall stranger.
“So,” the Overlord boomed as the warrior came to stand before him. “You come by yourself this time. Where is that pretty little concubine of yours? The one who’s going to be mine very shortly?”
“She will never be yours,” the warrior growled. His deep gravelly voice sent shockwaves through Alli. “She has gone beyond your reach.”
“Liar!” the Overlord snarled. “Did you think to hide her in another universe, perhaps? I can find her there just as well as here.”
“Even if you do, you’ll never be able to feed on her,” the warrior with the mirrored eyes said. “Because she’s bonded to me. You’ll be unable to get a single shred of emotional sustenance.”
“What?” the Overlord roared. “How dare you deny me the female I want?”
“It’s about time somebody denied you,” the warrior snapped back. “You’ve gotten away with far too much already. You’re in the process of ruining our society with your wanton cruelty and corruption! We never used to torture the females we fed from, but you’ve normalized it, just as you’ve normalized so many other forms of evil.”
Dark and Light: A Kindred Tales DUET Novel. Contains: Saved by the Drake AND Captured by the Kru'ell One Page 28