They raced to the back of the basement, and used a window to exit into the modest rear garden. Jack shoved her up, then he followed. As he was exiting the house, the gunfire started.
The manicured lawn provided little cover, so they hugged the bushes flanking the house until they reached the corner. Soldiers in the standard strike team load-out and uniform stood by two large SUVs. Black balaclavas completed the sinister outfit, making them unrecognizable.
“Covenant.” The word slipped out, filled with more derision than expected. But who in the Covenant, Raine wondered. Ramon? Fielding his own rogue team? Or Kerr, said a wicked voice in her head. Why not? The Druid had agendas like everyone else. “I count ten.”
“Maybe Covenant, maybe a look-alike,” Jack whispered. “The equipment is the same, but the tactics are sloppy. Mission protocol for this kind of situation is pretty run-of-the-mill. A strike team would use muzzle suppressers, keep the noise down. And see how they’re hanging in a clump around the vehicle? They’re cocky. They’ve killed Manny, figure we’re in the house, so they’re not watching the perimeter the way they should.”
“We’ll need to run for it.”
“Hope you feel up to operating a Were guide vehicle.”
“I don’t.”
“Maybe the run will get you in the mood.” He handed her the ruck. “I’ll provide suppressive fire. If I don’t make it, don’t wait for me. Get these to safety. Then call Ramon. He’ll know what to do next.”
If I don’t make it. Her chest tightened. “Don’t talk like that.”
He ignored her, inched a little higher, and scanned the kill zone. Then he reached into the coat, and pulled out a strange grenade: shaped like the old-style pineapples, but made of glass and glowing a soft, menacing red. “Go. Now. Don’t worry. I’m full of tricks, remember?”
Raine drew up her hood, and took off at a sprint across the lawn. As she ran she said a quick prayer to any God that might be listening. Three seconds later, she was spotted. She heard the soldiers rally. Then a massive explosion detonated, blowing one vehicle over on its side and sending hellfire shooting a hundred feet into the air. She didn’t stop. Didn’t turn to look for him. If she did, she knew she’d turn around and run right back to his side.
More gunfire erupted, coming from behind and to her right. Soldiers peppered the night with bullets. They zinged by her as she ran in an erratic pattern designed to make her more difficult to hit. The ones that impacted were shed like rain drops from the enchantment in the armor.
She’d all but reached their SUV when a welcome site filled her eyes.
Manny.
He wasn’t dead. But his jacket was full of bullet holes.
“Got me a vest,” he screamed over the noise. “Get in and get ready! I got the boss man.”
He raised his arm, revealing the stocky black body of an Uzzi. Then he stepped in and returned fire, providing cover for Jack. She couldn’t get into the SUV until she was certain he’d cleared the worst of the danger. It was crazy, yes, but her body refused to move. She needed him to be safe, in a way that scared her as much as the fear of him not making it home.
Jack burst through the growing haze of smoke.
“Get in!” he screamed, joining them as the strike team closed in.
Raine turned, opened the door, then something heavy hit her at full speed and took her to the ground. At the same time whistling sound pierced the air, followed by the screech of torn metal and an explosive detonation. When she looked up, the door had been blown clean off the SUV. Jack rolled off her, clutching his chest. “That hurt,” he chuffed out. “Now get in the damn car! You drive!”
She crawled in and threw the artifacts in the backseat. Jack climbed in after her. Raine gunned the engine, and popped the clutch, sending the big vehicle into a launch of motion and squealing tires. Manny was already opening the portal into the mists. Bullets shot out the rear window and blew holes in the front windshield.
Raine slammed the gas to the floor, unleashing the full power of the V8 engine.
The mist swallowed them moments later, blotting France, the villa, and the strike team from the rearview mirror.
Jack strapped in and held onto the dash for dear life.
“Are you hit?” The hiss of mist and temporal distortion of the tunnel roared around her words, eating them up.
“I’ll live. You?”
“I’m good.” And relieved. For more reasons than she could count.
“If anyone was wondering about a conspiracy, I’d say you don’t need to wonder anymore. I just want to know how the hell they found us. I don’t believe in coincidence.”
Neither did she. “I don’t have an answer.”
“Me either,” he shouted above the din. “But I’ll find one. And then I’m going to kick some serious ass.”
The cloudy tunnel air started sparking purple.
A sign of imminent collapse.
“Oh shit,” she said, pushing harder on a pedal already buried to the floor. “Abort! Manny, abort!”
He couldn’t hear her, of course.
The sparks turned to striations, closing up ahead in an ominous point.
Manny made the hand signal for a left-hand turn.
The metal vehicle began to warp and bend.
Raine motored to his rough position, then yanked the wheel for all she was worth.
There was a screaming sound, a moment of total terror, and then the SUV was rolling over rough terrain, headed down hill. She passed Manny’s skidded-out Harley, and fought for control of the wheel. She nearly missed a stand of oak, then managed to guide the car onto the nearby dirt road, where she finally brought it to a hard stop.
Jack was paler than usual. From blood loss, or fear, she wasn’t sure. “Now I get that thing about women drivers.”
Raine sucked air deep into her lungs, glad to be alive for the second time in less than an hour. “You need a different guide.”
“Fuck that.” Manny’s face popped into view at the side window. “It’s the storms. They’re ripping up the ether. I warned you both. We need to chill. Weather is not nice, ladies and gents, not nice at all.”
He winked, then trudged back up the hill and grabbed his Harley.
No such thing as coincidence. Raine turned to Jack. “These storms are getting worse, aren’t they?”
“If Manny’s being cautious, then it’s about as bad as it can be, because that cowboy will travel any tunnel, anytime. Prides himself on being a suicide jockey. You’re thinking it ties into the artifacts?”
“Or the resurrection of a dead God. We both agreed you’d need to open a portal. Opening a portal, inter-dimensional, or extra-dimensional, means temporal distortion. The more the natural order is subverted, the worse the distortion, the more likely you’d be to trigger adverse collateral damage.”
Jack smiled wanly. “See, way too smart to be a knight. You’re a freethinker, Raine. I like that. I agree. This is more than unusual, it’s statistically unlikely, and if you figure the odds of it happening in conjunction with our mission, things don’t look so good.” He undid the seatbelt and groaned. “If the storms are stirring, I’d think there’s an active cause, which would mean someone is already working mega juice. We might be totally off, you know. These artifacts might not be the initiators of catastrophe, they might be more icing on the cake, so to speak. Even if we get them all, we may be too late.”
“It keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?” She dismissed the notion of failure from her mind. It was not an option. She slid over to him and parted his coat. “Let me see for myself how bad you’re hit.”
This drew out a sexy little smile. “Oh, I like the fussing. Promise it will lead to more later?”
“You’re never satisfied.”
“I can never get enough. That’s different.”
Near as Raine could tell as she peeled back his shirt, Jack had taken a grazing shot across the chest. Probably from shrapnel when the door blew off the car. The blood had stopped an
d the wound was already closing. “You have to teach me that trick.”
“That and many more.”
The Harley’s engine roared to life.
“Hey, Manny,” Jack yelled out to the guide. “Where the hell are we? And don’t tell me Innsbruck, Austria.”
“Looks like somewhere in Sicily.” He cussed in Were. “Okay. Yep. We’re right near a fishing village. Carmella. Got themselves a nice two-star hotel. Neutral safe house. How about it, papi? Feel like some calamari?”
On his throne in Vallhalla, Odin stirred from trance.
Loki knew that look in his blood brother’s one good eye. “We’re set,” he said low to Seth. “How about it, Odin? Can you halt the storms? The humans need to succeed or we are all dead.””
“The storms.” His voice rumbled like a dangerous thunder. “Worst I’ve ever seen.”
“You’re a God of air, and of travel between realms. Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do.”
The robust God stood and braced his fists on powerful hips. The stare coming out of his single eye was nothing short of menacing. Loki nearly pissed his pants. One Eye’s rages were the stuff of legend. Even Seth radiated fear.
“I can do something.” He looked them both over with that ice blue eye, then settled into a stare that looked into the abyss. “We may all be too late. We’ve been too cautious. Too afraid to cross lines. Fear in battle leads to death.”
He stepped down from the dais, taking the stairs and worked-stone floor in ground-eating strides.
Beside Loki, Seth stirred. “Caution is needed. I think this is what our enemy wants: all of us angry enough to feed into our urges. We’ll end up turning on each other.”
Odin passed them without a sound, heading towards an open balcony that looked over the Bifrost bridge.
Loki followed, and Seth, at a more discreet distance.
Outside, the ethereal winds stirred uneasily, scraping his skin with fingers of biting cold ice. The Norse God of Chaos held back for a moment, then braced himself and joined Odin on the balcony.
“Can’t you feel it, brother?” The All-Father’s deep voice was rich with power. Magic, the province of women, ran thick in Odin’s blood. “There’s a shift. Like the fabric of the universe is stretched too thin and close to the breaking point.”
The wind caught a corner of Odin’s blue cape, swirling it back around the All-Father. His ravens sat on the railing of the balcony. Below, the wolves began to keen.
Loki shivered, and Seth paled.
“Yes. There it is.” Odin paid no heed to the other two Gods as he reached out and summoned the winds of time and space, and bent them to his infinitely powerful will.
“Open for me,” he chanted. “Let the mortals pass unharmed.”
Manny brought his hog to a screeching halt, spinning out the back tire.
Rain slammed onto the breaks, cranked the wheel and skidded up beside him. Her heart leapt into her throat. Beside her, Jack roused from his half-slumber.
“Did he do peyote when no one was looking?” Raine put the SUV in park, as Manny raced over to the car.
“I got one! A passage back to Kansas, Dorothy! Solid, ready.” He was all but vibrating with the excitement.
Jack raised a brow. “Are you certain?”
“Man, yeah! It just, like, opened. I wasn’t even looking, but it came across the moonstone, like a miracle, baby!”
He raced back to his bike.
Raine breathed a silent prayer. At last, luck was back on their side. “Do we risk it?”
“If we don’t, we can be stuck here for who knows how long.”
Adrenaline sparked in her blood. She shifted into reverse, straightened the vehicle and threw it into drive. “The sooner we get back, the sooner we can find out who hit Cardiff.”
Vargr’s program locked onto the anomaly. The discreet alarm triggered, and he studied it for a long moment. The passage followed no discernable pattern, evidenced no normal tunnel readings, but it was certainly viable.
He threw some money on the table, closed up the laptop, and finished the last of his pilsner.
It was time. Gods be praised, at long last, it was time.
Chapter Sixteen
The desert—and Jack—had never looked so good to her. He’d stepped out of the shower, clean, but tired and worn-out. She couldn’t stop the crazy rush of the mission out of her system. There was the fury surrounding the loss of one jar, and the elation of surviving the attack and spiriting away the remaining two. There was the relief that Jack was safe. That she was safe. And, the realization that death was so close, but this time life had won out.
Jack toweled off, then dropped it to the polished marble bathroom floor and padded over to the mammoth bed. His step was a little slower, but still an arrogant swagger of a sexually confident male. That one single action, the sex walk to end all sex walks, sparked her off like a pile of dry tinder hit by white-hot lightning. She hadn’t bothered dressing after her own shower, at first because she enjoyed the thick desert air drifting over her clean skin, and then later because she realized she wanted a victory celebration. The kind only he could give her.
“Oh, I like where that smile could lead,” he purred, sitting beside her. He took her face in both his palms, touching her with a reverence that made her ache.
“Don’t be a tease.” Raine’s thighs grew damp with the stirrings of lust. She tilted towards him, knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist.
His look turned feral as he slanted his mouth over hers. Jack’s tongue swept in with a hot, fierce motion, and at the same time he trailed his hands lightly over her skin. Down her hips. Across the swell of her breasts. A pause to rake over her nipples with calloused thumbs. Then down further, settling around her hips with a strength of purpose that made her heart skip a beat. He moved quick, a shift of her body just so, putting one knee, then the other between her thighs.
She sighed as he settled more fully, placing the naked length of his sleek body soft against hers. Finally he broke the kiss, staring down at her with a drugged look.
“Happy to be alive? Or is it really me?”
“Does it matter?”
He nuzzled her neck, raising gooseflesh over her skin, triggering more hot explosions deep within her core. “I’m a desperate man. I’ll take either for the moment.”
Jack was fluid grace, controlled power, moving lower as he held himself centimeters above her body. The motion generated a delicious friction that had her nipples tightening. Raine arched, increasing the skin to skin contact. She sifted her fingers into his damp hair, enjoying the luxurious feel, so at odds with the rock solid muscle of his body. He was the total fantasy package. Created for her, wrapped-up and delivered with a bow. Like someone climbed into her head and designed him straight from all those unspoken wants, needs and desires she had only half a clue lurked within her.
He fastened onto one tight nipple with his talented mouth, laving it ’til it stood peaked and rigid. She moaned, spread wider, trying to lure him in, but he wasn’t ready, and instead decided to torture her other nipple with the same delightful punishment. His engorged cock hung low and heavy with desire. The satiny skin tickled her as he moved, never quite coming close enough to her aching slit for her to gain any relief. He skillfully played her body, working the need into a rapid frenzy of desire that had her writhing and moaning and all but begging for him. Jack was beyond incredible, beyond perfect, and so far beyond her grasp. Raine pushed the thought away in favor of the pleasure he aroused. She didn’t want to think past anything other than this single moment in time.
She reached between her legs and moistened her hand with her own cream, then reached for his cock, circling the head with her thumb and forefinger. Raine used light strokes to coat him with her juices, alternating pressure and twisting each time she came up beneath the thick crown. He stopped moving, lowered his lids, and sucked in a hard breath. Smiling at his reaction, she moved up on the bed, and pressed his cock down, dipping the l
ength into the swollen channel of her labia. Tilting her hips back and forth in micro-movements, she built pleasure, rub by aching rub. Her vagina pulsed, empty and longing. His cock engorged, pushing her lips apart as she massaged him with her heated slit.
A cry escaped him. Something dark and deep and utterly masculine seized him.
“I need to take you now.” There was urgency in his husky voice. “Spread wide for me, Raine. That’s it,” he coaxed, positioning himself. Cool air grazed the tightened flesh of her clit as he shifted his hips momentarily back, then there was nothing but solid, hot male, driving into her with one fluid stroke, going deeper and deeper until there was nowhere in her left untouched by him.
Jack rolled his hips with an upward thrust that shook her to her core, then pulled back with an equally shattering movement. She gasped as he repeated the action, setting a ruthless pace that sucked the air from her lungs and forced the passion to a dangerous point. The first fission of orgasm spiked through her, and she locked her ankles around his back as her hips bucked. His musky scent marked her, his every touch searing, tagging her as his own, as sure as she’d been branded.
Control slipped out of her grasp. Her vault contracted with rapid pulses, and he read that as a sign, thrusting harder, deeper, faster than humanly possible. Again and again, he drove into her and out, until it was hard for her to even know which came first, the devilish pressure on her clit, or the scintillating slide of the crown of his cock over her G-spot. Bliss erupted, blowing out both pleasure points with erotic lightning strikes, short-circuiting every nerve in her sensitized body. Jack gave one last thrust, then cried out her name as he spilled himself into her. His seed was molten, his cry savage, both triggering further release, spiraling them into oblivion.
Raine clasped him fast against her. His heart beat raggedly, and his breath was tight. He trembled from the powerful orgasm. Each sensation marked the passage of time. Time she didn’t want to end. Her heart squeezed with a strange, unwelcome kind of pressure that had nothing to do with the aftermath of intense orgasm. As he cooled against her, she realized they were close to the end. If they won, she’d take the oath and there’d be no more victory celebrations, no more wild sex and magic, no more madness and no more Jack. If they lost, the whole dimension lost with them.
ImmortalIllusions: The Eternity Covenant Book2 Page 26