Then again, maybe that was just something Gamin had told her to ensure she never tried to leave their dwelling on Earth.
This was all so confusing. Everything in her life she’d ever taken for truth had been turned upside down since she woke from healing.
It was enough to plunge her into the depression she’d fought against all her life. Wiping tears from her eyes, she got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and splashed cold water on her face. Patting herself dry with a towel, she looked at her reflection in the mirror.
Her white hair had lost the luster it had once had, and there were dark circles under her eyes as well as a hint of a bruise on her left cheek. Gamin had changed her life in ways that would never truly heal.
Did she owe it to herself to let Taber prove his promises? Was he the only chance she had at a happy life?
She didn’t have a chance to ponder it further, because as she stood there, a very large, solid male figure appeared behind her.
Davin!
She whirled around toward the door, but he grabbed her upper arm and pulled her to him, covering her mouth with one large hand. Fear churned inside her, leaving a bitter taste in her mouth, and she thought she might vomit. Desperate to escape, she lashed out at Davin, kicking and clawing at his shins and face.
She knew better.
When he wrapped both his hands around her throat and squeezed -- both preventing her from crying out and effectively stopping her assault -- she remembered that fighting was useless. This man, like her deceased mate, didn’t care if he hurt her. He didn’t care if he killed her. He’d come here to take her back to Gothe’mar.
Dead or alive.
“Gamin promised you to me in the event he died on this Universe-bedamned world. I get to fuck you until I’m tired of you, then I get to kill you any way I see fit.” His face was inches from hers. In her collapsing sight, he was all she could see. Little dots began to invade her vision, and her lungs burned with the need for air. “I rather think I’d like to be soaked in your blood as I fuck you… as you die.”
She couldn’t fight against his greater strength if she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe unless he chose to let her. Gripping his wrists weakly, she quit struggling. Still he held on.
His eyes glistened with battle lust, and she realized he might not take her back to Gothe’mar to end her life after all. Eyes glazed in ecstasy, his pulse rate quickening -- his addiction for blood was overriding his common sense.
Two things passed through Akahana’s mind before she passed out. The first was to wonder how Davin had been able to transport into a secure area of Medical Command. The second was an instinctive cry of help…
To Taber.
Chapter Seven
Taber sat straight up in his bed. Sweat poured from his body. His heart raced and his chest felt like someone was squeezing it with a vise. At first he thought he was having a heart attack, but then he felt Akahana.
She was hurt, and in extreme danger.
Throwing the covers back, he took only enough time to pull on a pair of pants. Grabbing his gun and communicator, he signaled Mikkarn and Kiril and Khan on the run. “Something’s happening to Akahana,” he snapped.
“Impossible,” Kiril responded. “That’s the most secure section of Earthside Medical Command and, quite possibly, the whole planet.”
“If it’s impossible, then someone here has done something, and you have a traitor in your midst. Akahana is near death.”
“I’m on the way.” Khan was all business. He didn’t question, he simply acted. It was a mark of a good commander. He had nothing to gain by asking for more information at this point, and the life of an innocent to lose if he delayed. Not for the first time, Taber was impressed with the man’s ability to cut through the bullshit and dig out the important information.
Taber reached Akahana’s room at the same time Mikkarn did. “Should we transport inside?” Taber asked. “Catch anyone inside by surprise?”
“If we do that, we’ll have no way of knowing what we’re actually getting into until we’re right in the middle of it. Kiril will be here in two minutes. Our best bet will be to enter here and deal with whatever is inside until he and Khan arrive.”
Mikkarn punched in his access code to Akahana’s door and crouched as he covered Taber. Moving quickly inside the darkened room to the cover of an extended wall, Taber carefully peeked around it. He saw Akahana and Davin outlined in the light of the bathroom.
Akahana’s body was limp, held up only by Davin’s grip around her neck. Taber could no longer feel her presence. Blind fury overwhelmed him. Instead of rushing the man, he simply took aim and pulled the trigger.
Davin moved just as Taber fired, and the shot went wide. Tile from the bathroom wall exploded around Davin’s head and shoulders. He drew his own weapon and fired in Taber’s direction. Taber fired again, this time catching Davin in the upper thigh. The exploding tip of the bullet blew his leg apart, and Davin crumpled to the ground.
That didn’t stop the Gothe’maran warrior, though. He fired several more times before pointing his destabilizer at Akahana’s head. Before he could pull the trigger, Khan’s voice bellowed over the noise. “You will stop, Davin!”
It was enough to make the man hesitate. Taber would have fired again, but Khan’s hand on his shoulder stopped him.
Then Davin was gone.
Transported back to wherever he had come from.
Taber ran to Akahana’s side and would have picked her up, but Mikkarn stayed him and began examining her. Taber whirled on Khan. “You wanna tell me why you stopped me from blowing his brains all over the wall?”
Khan’s outward appearance was calm and emotionless. God only knew what the man was truly feeling. “Because Davin obviously has his own agenda. I need to know what it is with regard to Akahana and the rogue faction.”
“I thought you guys said you had all of them in custody?”
“Considering the fact that Davin was able to transport directly into a secure facility within Medical Command, I’d say there are more out there sympathetic to… something.”
Mikkarn ran a handheld scanner over Akahana and shook his head. “She’s got major damage to her trachea and hypoxia to her brain. She’s lucky I thought to implant an anti-transport chip under her skin. Only a transporter with the proper code can move her.” He looked to Kiril, who had moved in beside Taber. “She’s alive. Barely. But without a healing tube, she’ll die.” His gaze shifted to Taber. “The problem is, I can’t be sure the tube will work on her again. I can’t guarantee she’ll ever wake up, Taber.”
“What do I have to lose?” Taber suspected he sounded as bleak as he felt.
“Nothing. Akahana’s dead if we do nothing.”
“Then do what you can.” He watched as Mikkarn barked a set of instructions into his communicator, and he and Akahana disappeared. Taber looked at Khan again. “I’ll take care of Davin.”
“You can’t do it alone, Taber.” Kiril gripped his shoulder firmly.
“I have to. I’ll find him. And when I do, he’ll wish I’d killed him here.”
“Taber.” Khan blocked his way when he would have left. “There’s another way.”
“I don’t need another way.” Taber tried to shove the larger man out of the way, but Khan stood his ground. “All I need is to get my hands on the bastard, and I’ll strangle the life out of him, just like he did my woman!”
“That’s right.” Khan grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Your woman! Publicly claim her as your mate, and Davin will challenge. He won’t be able to resist.”
“How the fuck is that going to help?”
“Didn’t Anna explain the Chamber of Souls to you?”
“No.” Taber hesitated, uncertain. “She was too busy explaining the whole soul’s mate thing, and I was too eager for a good night’s sleep without worrying about invading Akahana’s dreams. She was going to explain later.”
“It is quite important that you kn
ow this, Taber.”
“So I gathered. Tell me.”
Kiril chuckled. “You’re just like my Mara. If all humans are so demanding, I hope the Universe doesn’t see fit to give me another human mate.”
Taber would have growled, if he’d thought it would help. “Just spit it out.”
“The Chamber of Souls is a place where the souls of our people wait to be reborn. It is said that each soul there remembers every past life he or she has lived, and in the Chamber is the only place where mates continually find each other. But they cannot express their love physically,” Kiril explained.
“What do you mean, ‘continually find each other’?”
Khan leaned against the windowsill overlooking a crystal lake with mountains surrounded by an aurora that reached halfway down their elevation. The atmospheric phenomenon appeared lower to the ground than previously possible -- a result of the atomic blast and the resulting radiation cloud as it spread across the country at the beginning of the war. When it was visible, being indoors was preferable. “Think about it,” he said. “What are the odds that you and Akahana would find each other, halfway across the galaxy?”
“I see your point. One could go several lives without ever finding his mate.” Taber took a breath. “So you’re born, you die, and your soul ends up in this Chamber place where your ‘soul’s mate’ will meet you when she dies.”
“Yes. You don’t find your mate in every life. And as we’ve recently learned with Mikkarn, Kiril, and Mara, a soul can have more than one mate. In their case, they are all three mates to each other. Knowing that, I have no trouble believing that Akahana could have more than one mate.”
“Wait a minute, I’m definitely not any kind of mate to that Gamin character. I refuse to believe that, almost as much as I refuse to believe that he could have been her true mate. There has to be a glitch in the process somewhere because how could any higher power, or whatever determines a soul’s mate, stick someone as gentle in nature as Akahana with someone as viciously mean as Gamin?” Taber paced restlessly about the room. “A person couldn’t be that mean in only one lifetime. His soul would have to be rotten to the core.”
Khan raised a hand to hush Taber. “You don’t know that,” he admonished. “None of us do. Perhaps it is something you can find out in the Chamber of Souls.”
“Then take me there.”
Khan shook his head. “You’d have to go into the Chamber, and that simply isn’t possible at the moment.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
“Because Akahana has to go in with you, and --” Khan paused before standing straight from his lazy stance and advancing on Taber. “And you have to make love to her in the Chamber.”
Taber backed up a step -- not because he felt threatened by Khan, but in shock. “Never!” He pointed a finger at Khan. “I’ll never subject her to that.”
“You may not have much choice, my friend. It may be the only way to get Davin off your back. We can fight him -- even kill him -- but there will be others. I’ve been doing a little investigating, and unless I miss my guess, Gamin had a host of friends who are exactly the way he was.” He turned his back and placed his hands on the windowsill. “First we must protect your Akahana, then there are more women we must find and protect. And they do not have other mates.”
“Damn you all to hell,” Taber muttered. “All I want is to make Akahana comfortable and let her heal.”
“I know, my friend.” Khan sounded troubled, and Taber was surprised at how much he’d grown to like him in such a short time. This man was nothing like the Khan the Merciless Earth had been told about. “It’s just that this may be the only way to truly keep her safe.”
“Okay. Start at the beginning.” Taber desperately needed to understand what he was up against. “Why would I have to make love to Akahana in order to get inside the Chamber?”
Khan turned back to Taber. “Normally, one only enters the Chamber of Souls if he is challenging the validity of a mate claim, or if he is being challenged. Then both mates must enter, along with the challenger. The souls awaiting rebirth will wait for the couple to join, and if they are mates, they use the ensuing sexual energy. It is possible for mates to enter the Chamber to ask something of the ancient souls there, but it isn’t something to enter into lightly.” Khan leaned back against the sill, one hand bracing him, the other gesturing as he explained. “When a living being enters the Chamber, the souls draw energy from them. That energy can be either the person’s life force, or the energy created when two mates join sexually. The only exception is during a challenge. If the couple engaging in sex are not true soul mates, the challenger’s life energy is not used, but rather the life energy of the falsely mated couple.” Khan held up a hand when Taber would have questioned him. “Don’t ask me why, it is simply part of life and religion as we know it. We do not question the ways of the souls, because they have given us advice and kept the peace for longer than recorded Gothe’maran history. Personally, I’ve always suspected that they can’t stand for a couple to claim to be mates when they aren’t because many of them have not been able to physically touch their mates for many lifetimes.”
“It’s not that I need to know why, so much that it is you’ve lost me. There is a difference in the ‘energy’ produced between mates and two people who just really like each other?”
“Oh, yes. But that’s not all.”
“Somehow I knew you were going to say that.” Taber sighed and sat in a chair near Akahana’s bed.
“Just because there is a mated coupling giving the souls energy, doesn’t mean any bystander inside the Chamber is safe. The stronger the sexual energy between mates, the more energy the souls want. It’s like a drug. So anyone inside the Chamber is going to get sucked dry of energy if they stay too long without joining to a mate.”
“God! This is so bizarre! Can you hear how bizarre you sound right now?” Taber scrubbed his face with his hand and rested his arms on his knees. “So where does Davin fit in all of this?”
“He’ll challenge you if you make your status as mate to Akahana known publicly. He’ll see it as a slight to Gothe’maran honor to have a human claiming his best friend’s mate.”
“So we get him into this Chamber of Souls, Akahana and I ‘join,’ and he gets zapped?”
“It might only age him, but I have a feeling that the link you and Akahana share is almost as old as the one Anna and I share. If that’s the case, it will probably destroy Davin. And if that happens, no one in Gothe’mar or any other world will be able to question your right to be together. No matter how strongly they object.”
“What makes you say that? Why wouldn’t someone else just challenge us and bring their mate into the chamber with them?”
“Because it goes against the principles every Gothe’maran has lived in harmony with all his life.” Khan paused a moment before continuing, as if unsure he should say anything further. “Before I found Anna, no one on Gothe’mar -- myself and my family included -- believed it was possible for one to find his soul’s mate on another world, in another race of people. It was always assumed that a person’s soul stayed within the boundaries of our home, and the souls never imparted knowledge to the contrary to the High Priest, the only one who can receive information from the souls without directly entering the Chamber. Now we know that not only is it possible to find a mate off world, it is possible to have more than one mate. Mikkarn, Kiril, and Mara forged that path as they are all three mates to each other.”
“It sounds like your whole society is being turned on its ear. How are people taking this?”
“Actually, for the most part, well. It is only the factions like the one Gamin and Davin represent that seem to have problems with it. I am not entirely sure what to do about them. If I seek them out and try to destroy them, I’m no better than they are. But I will not have my wife or children put in danger because of a closed-minded fool.”
“Well, it sounds like you’ve got a lot to think about as
future king of Gothe’mar.”
“Yes. And you see why it is important for you and Akahana to enter the Chamber and prove you are truly mates.”
Taber nodded. “The more evidence you have supporting the fact that true mates can be found outside the Gothe’maran race, the easier it will be to combat the ones who are against your own union.”
“Partly, but it’s not just me and my family I’m worried about.”
Taber smiled. “I know, Khan. You’re worried about every non-mated person on Gothe’mar. With space travel to and from Earth bringing humans to Gothe’mar and Gothe’marans to Earth, someone else is bound to find a mate.”
“You’re a wise man.”
“Yeah, well. Tell me that after I convince Akahana to do this.” He stood. “Assuming she heals.”
“She will.”
“I sure hope you’re right.”
“With Mikkarn and Mara as her personal physicians, she will be able to do nothing else. Neither of them would stand for it.” Khan chuckled, and Taber couldn’t help but smile.
“I see your point.”
“Let’s go to the Healing Room and see how she fares.”
“Absolutely.”
Taber reached out with his mind and found Akahana’s essence. She was alive, but hurt very badly. Perhaps this was a good sign. Just in case, he did his best to enfold her in his love for her.
Please don’t leave me, Dearheart.
Silence was his only response, but he knew she’d heard him. He’d just have to wait and see what happened. It was in the hands of the Universe now.
Chapter Eight
Akahana sat straight up.
And hit her head on the healing tube lid before it had fully lifted.
“Where’s Taber?” She might have been deeply asleep in healing, but his thoughts and feelings bled over into her mind. She knew everything.
Forbidden 3: Sleeping With the Enemy Page 4