Her eyelids blinked rapidly at the faded memory of another nameless young woman, speaking the same words so very long ago.
He drew another breath and looked straight into Miranda’s eyes and she shivered involuntarily at his intensity as he continued.
“I am the Aegis and this I swear on the blood of the Valkyrie.”
There was a long pause as the gravity of his oath hung heavy in Paul’s living room.
Miranda and Booker both abruptly shifted into a rigid posture and clapped their fists to their chests in salute.
“Welcome to the Aegis, kid.”
Epilogue
Fallen Aegis
Adrian Shaw clawed his way through the mud, the wounds in his arm and his calf throbbed and he grit his teeth in agony, tears seeping from his eyes as he dragged himself out of the frigid river with his good arm.
In the back of his mind, the intelligent man knew he was dead.
If he didn’t bleed out, then exposure would take him. His torn uniform was soaking wet, and without any supplies or the strength to start a fire, he was screwed as night descended and brought its deadly chill with it.
He sobbed at the memory of Cheri smiling at him.
She was the first to be hit in the ambush.
She had just finished telling one of her stupid jokes when he saw the flash of light behind her, the smile fell off her face and she crumpled to the earth, dead before she hit the ground.
Chaos had erupted all around the ordinance disposal team as people with blasters poured out of the massive cedars on either side of them.
It was over quickly, only a few of the team had any actually combat experience, they were supposed to meet up with a village of Amazons to provide an escort for them.
Only Commander Killian had been fast enough to cast one of his strobes out before being torn apart by oncoming fire, the blinding light of his one grenade coming far too late to save his team.
Adrian and one of the terrified Truffles had made it to the edge of the tree-line in a desperate bid to escape the slaughter, but both were taken down by more blaster fire.
The only reason Adrian yet lived was because when his leg was hit his body had pitched sideways into the rushing river and the powerful current had carried him quickly away from his pursuers.
After tumbling around in the water for what seemed like an age, he regained enough of his faculties to struggle against the river, somehow managing to escape its grasp despite his injuries.
He sobbed again as he lay exhausted in the muck of the bank.
He was the only one left alive, people he had known for years. Dead.
His closest friends. Dead.
His bond-mate...
With clumsy fingers he pulled the locket containing Cheri’s heartstone out of his jacket.
The stone was grey and lifeless.
He gasped and pressed the cold stone to his lips as he wept, kissing its surface again and again, as if the feeble warmth of his lips could somehow revive the lifeless heart of the poor girl.
After a time, he set aside his grief, anger fueling him as he struggled to get out of the mud.
He was cold and queasy from blood loss, but he had to live! He had to warn the Aegis, he had to warn… somebody!
He stuck a stick between his teeth and bound his leg with his belt, afterwards vomiting into the sodden moss beside him from nausea and pain. But he had managed to stop the worst of the bleeding with the improvised tourniquet.
Eventually he recovered from the bout of nausea and next worked on his arm.
He pulled the wounded limb out of his jacket, biting down on another stick as he considered the nasty tear in the flesh of his bicep, prodding at it with trembling fingers, flinching each time as his teeth tore into the wood.
It was a graze, already the bleeding had stemmed, but it still hurt like hell as he wrapped a piece of his torn shirt around it.
Some time later, the man who refused to die stumbled through the undergrowth of the mighty cedar forest. His hobbled leg was braced with a crude splint and his sodden jacket had been turned into a sling for his arm, while he had stuck another long branch under his other arm to act as a crutch for his leg.
He was lost in the cold night, but unable to stop, as stopping meant death.
He forced himself to go on for an age, but despite his determination, his vision inevitably began to fade as the loss of blood, the exhaustion, and the cold took their toll on him.
Then, in the middle of a clearing in the massive trees, his heart nearly exploded when a branch snapped to one side.
Abruptly adrenaline shot through him at the sharp sound, chasing away the darkness around his vision as he turned and brandished his improvised crutch against the night.
He blinked in surprise.
Instead of more people armed with illegal lost-tech weapons, he looked upon the face of a gorgeous fair skinned woman with raven dark hair, her features illuminated by the rising moon.
She was dressed in a short sarong, tied at her hip with one leg completely exposed while the other was barely covered to just below her knee.
A dark shawl was draped over her shoulders and even in the dim light he could tell that she wore nothing else, the dark tips of her nipples peaking out of the knitted fabric.
A simple basket hung from her elbow while she was holding something in each hand, the two halves of the stick she had just broken to get his attention.
Adrian swallowed, unsteady on his feet but uncertain of the woman’s intentions.
“Mushrooms.” Her voice, throaty and with a strange accent, called out to him.
“W-what?”
His own words came out in a rasp.
“The season for mushrooms is drawing to a close, that is what I am doing out here. But you, you smell of their blood.”
He blinked at the absurdity of her words, but didn’t have a chance to respond as she dropped the sticks and stepped closer to him on bare feet.
How she wasn’t half-frozen was a mystery to him.
“The question then, is why you are out this night. There are better places to bleed to death I think.”
Her eyes flicked to his seeping leg.
His mouth opened to respond, but a shout from one side caught his attention.
“Here! More tracks! He’s this way! Spread out, we can’t have any survivors!”
Without delay, Adrian stumbled forwards, dropping his crutch as he gripped the woman’s bicep.
“We have to move! They’ll kill you!”
She tilted her head, but allowed him to pull her along, a slight tilt to her lips as she smirked at his behaviour.
“Will they? I doubt that very much.”
Adrian didn’t catch what she said; he just knew that he had led his pursuers directly to her.
The thought of another woman dying in front of him was too much to bear.
They barely moved twenty feet before another shout sounded, much closer this time, and a flash of light broke through the darkness, a solid thump followed by an explosion sound to one side.
“That’s far enough!” A voice barked out.
“They are wrecking the best mushroom patches.” The strange woman complained at the same time.
She stopped as Adrian continued to tug at her arm, but she had planted her feet and with his injuries he hadn’t the strength to move her.
“Please, just go! It’s me they want! Run!”
In despair he placed himself between her and his pursuers. With his good arm he blindly pushing her behind him, his hand obliviously pressing at her breast, the shawl shifting to one side as his fingers sank into her yielding flesh.
“How forward you are. And yes, it is you they want. Instead they get me. Unfortunate.”
Her voice was steady, utterly calm in the turmoil of the night.
The pursuers poured out of the trees and Adrian saw that there would be no escape for either of them; belatedly he realized he had saved one canister when he had taken his belt off, a
single strobe, it might have been enough to buy them a few seconds.
The reality was he hadn’t used one in years; his skill-set geared more towards disarming the weapons of the ancients, not using them. He cursed at his own lack of foresight.
But the pursuers hesitated.
“Who the hell is she?”
“Doesn’t matter! We kill them both!”
Suddenly he felt a sharp pinch from his injured arm and he turned with a grunt of pain even as the assailants leveled their weapons at the duo.
The mystery woman was working his blood in circles between the pad of her thumb and her other fingers as she stepped around beside him.
“Blood of a protector. Gravely weakened, and ill with grief, but still very potent. This will do.”
She spoke loud enough for all present to hear, her words once more giving Adrian’s attackers pause.
Suddenly green light swirled forth from the strange woman; first from her eyes, then from her entire upper body, it hung there for a moment, all around her like smoke.
Then it rapidly coalesced on the blood coating her fingers, she kept working the now-glowing green fluid around for a few more seconds, murmuring under her breath.
As everyone in the woods watched, rapt with attention, she cast the light at the ground with a negligent flick.
It disappeared in the matt of moss at their feet.
There was a long pause as they all stared at the ground.
“What the fuck was that?” Someone finally asked.
Right as he broke the silence, light bloomed under the surface and spidered outwards towards him, as if following the system of roots below, and stopped at his feet.
He swallowed nervously.
“Guys, I don’t like thi-”
But he was interrupted when abruptly the moss beneath his feet exploded upwards and two green and ghostly arms burst forth, giant skeletal fists seizing him by each leg before ruthlessly tearing him in half and casting his remains with brutal force at two of his companions.
As the gory halves of his body struck home, taking the others to the ground, the corpse abruptly exploded in a shower of glowing green viscera.
To make matters worse, the enchanted remains burned like acid, and several of the others standing nearby screamed as their flesh was melted from their very bones.
One of the other men stumbled back, babbling in terror.
“Holy f-fucking hell! She’s a-a Witch!”
“Quickly! Before she can cast again!” A scar-faced woman desperately cried out in a bid to spur the others into action.
She had already shouldered her own blaster, but it was pointless.
Even as she and a few others fired their weapons, a green wall of force materialized out of thin air between them and their targets, protecting Adrian and the Witch from the barrage.
All the while, the mysterious dark haired monster girl was nibbling at a mushroom daintily held between her bloody fingers, patiently waiting for the crackling thunder of the weapons to subside.
“You underestimate the resolve of my defender, it seems. A single curse was all that was needed. Try to flee if you must, I don’t mind.”
She could have been remarking on the weather.
As Adrian realized he was still alive, dozens more green skeletal arms burst forth from the mossy earth, clawing all around at their desperate attackers as they vainly fired at the ground in a hopeless bid to save themselves.
The wounded Aegis technician, already nauseas from his injuries, was made even more so as the Witch’s spell worked its way through the frantic men and women that had murdered his team, systematically tearing them apart and reducing them to sizzling piles of goo.
Soon enough, all of his pursuers were dead.
“Oh bother. My mushrooms.”
Adrian swallowed bile as he turned to the woman beside him, in all the chaos her haul had spilled onto the ground. She went to her knees in the moss, picking them one by one, considering each carefully before placing it back inside her basket.
Her shawl was draped open due to her crouched position, the pale expanse of her breasts naked to the night’s air as the two globes swayed while she worked.
For a brief moment he absurdly thought he should be helping her.
Reading his intent, she spoke before he moved.
“Do not. You won’t have the strength to rise again. And I won’t leave my basket to carry you.”
“Who… are you?”
The Witch considered the last mushroom, clutched between her still bloody fingers, and then tore half of it off with her teeth, chewing the bloody meat of its top slowly before looking up at the wounded man.
“I am Olena. Come, my home is this way. Unless you are still determined to bleed to death?”
The End
About The Author
Make no mistake gentlemen, the time traveling space cat known as Lieutenant Archibald Bradford (Pronounced left-ten-ant like the British say it) loves to write smutty books. And just like all the other deviant housecats out there, he likes his smut to have a decent story to boot…
Find out more at our brand new website!
https://spacecatpublications.com/
Other Books By The Lieutenant
The Heartstone Saga
Book 1 - Empath Rising
Book 2 - Legacy of the Valkyrie
Book 3 - Home of Consequence
And coming soon…
Book 4 - Dark Empathy (Working Title)
Book 5 - Light of the Aegis (Working Title)
Erotic Collection - Amorous Interlude
Then some more books about Nameless, maybe after some books that aren’t about him…
Home of Consequence Page 36