by Alysha Ellis
“No, I’m fine,” he muttered, annoyed by his weakness. He dragged his pants on and reached for his shirt.
“Why do you wear a woman’s garment?” Eora asked.
“Probably because he’s weak,” Nieko snapped.
“It’s not a woman’s garment,” Elijah responded. “It’s a man’s shirt.”
“Our men don’t wear them,” Eora said. “Only women.”
The shirt fell back onto the floor without Elijah being aware that his fingers had opened. “It’s hot in here—I don’t need it.” His legs still felt a little wobbly, so he dropped back onto the side of the bed, since there was nowhere else to sit.
“How long before we can get out of here?” he asked. “If the rock movement is only a hallucination, surely it can be countered if you really concentrate?”
“It’s a thermo-magnetic storm,” Nieko said, offering something other than confrontation for the first time. “The magnetic disturbances generate a huge amount of heat. That’s no hallucination. Once the rock heats up, it can take days to cool down enough to make surface travel possible. This room protects us, but as you noticed, the temperature is still higher than normal.”
“Can’t you control it?” Elijah asked. Surely if, as Hopewood had said, these people were capable of causing warming of the Earth’s surface, they could deal with this.
“No one can control the Earth’s thermal energy.” He looked at Elijah, contempt clear in the sneering lips and hard eyes. “We’re all stuck here until the storm passes and the heat fades.”
“You can go,” Elijah said. “I’ll make my own way home somehow.”
“We’re not leaving you,” Nieko and Eora said in unison but with vastly different intonations.
“You’ll be taken to the council. They’ll decide what to do with you,” Nieko continued, and it was clearly a threat. “Humans can’t teleport, so the council will want to find out exactly how you got here, and why. Unless of course you’d care to tell me now.”
“I told you, I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
“He hit his head, Nieko.”
“Not that hard. It’s a damn convenient excuse, isn’t it, human?”
Lije exhaled heavily. The Dvalinn was going to be a problem. He might be forced to kill him. If he killed Nieko, he’d have to kill Eora too. The prospect of destroying the entire, faceless population of the Dvalinn hadn’t seemed as personal or as difficult as taking the lives of the two people who stood before him.
“Going before the council would be for the best,” Eora told him. “You don’t know how you got here, so you won’t be able to get back. Once the council realizes you mean us no harm, they’ll be able to help you return to the surface world.”
“How do I know the council won’t lock me up forever or put me to death?” Elijah retorted. If they knew what he’d planned and what he’d carried with him, that was exactly what they’d do.
“If you aren’t guilty of anything, they’ll let you go, help you back to your own world,” Nieko replied. “If you’re guilty, you’ll be convicted. That’s how you’ll know.”
Eora placed her hands on her hips and glared at both men. “None of this matters now. No one is going anywhere.” She gestured to a panel on the wall with a glowing red light and a series of numbers. “This is a really bad storm. The magnetic fluctuation is as high as I’ve ever seen it. The heat in the unshielded areas is intense. We’re stuck here for the duration. We might as well make the best of it.”
“How do you suggest we do that?” Nieko asked grumpily. “Sing campfire songs, play word games?”
“It would be better than sniping at each other,” she replied. To Elijah she said, “We have enough food and other supplies in this safe room to survive any storm and its aftermath. We’ll be fine.”
Elijah looked around at the restricted space. “You said safe room? If this is all there is, we’re going to get on each other’s nerves pretty quickly.”
“There’s a bathroom, of course—that’s essential,” Eora replied. “But otherwise, yeah, it’s just this room. So we need to call a truce. Don’t we, Nieko?”
Nieko glowered at Elijah. The Dvalinn’s brawny arms were folded across his chest. Beneath them, shadows highlighted the ridges of muscle of a defined six-pack. His legs were spread in an aggressive stance, shoulders’ width apart. The width of Nieko’s shoulders made it a pretty wide stance. The man radiated power and hostility enough to cow most people.
But not Eora. She had to be five inches under Nieko’s six-foot-two or -three, with the slim, athletic build of a long-distance runner or a dancer, but she strode up to him until she was nose to throat and poked him in the belly. “Nieko? We’re calling a truce, okay?”
And damn if the mountain of pure, hard meanness didn’t get a dopey smile on his face as he watched the woman try to push him around. “If that’s the way you want it, Eora. A truce.” His brows drew together, carving a deep V between them. “But if he does anything to break it…”
“He won’t, will you?” she asked, spinning back to look at Elijah.
Oh hell, what did it matter? He couldn’t do anything caged up in a single room with no weapons, the two of them to watch over him and no chance of survival if he tried to get away. For now, until the effects of the storm subsided, he might as well accept the offer. He didn’t have to trust them or like them, just tolerate them and disguise his animosity toward Nieko in particular.
“Yeah, all right,” he said grudgingly.
“You want something to eat?” Eora asked.
“Maybe,” Elijah replied. He was hungry but he would rather starve than eat some strange mold or rocks or whatever Dvalinn ate. “What have you got?”
“The stuff stored in the safe room is only field rations, so they’re nourishing but not particularly tasty. I brought some fresh food with me. We’ll have to eat it before it goes off.
“Yeah, but what is it?” Elijah demanded. “Slugs? Slime? Leeches?”
Eora’s nose screwed up in a look of disgust. “Ew! Is that what humans eat?”
“No wonder their temperament is so nasty,” Nieko put in. “Slugs, slime, leeches. You are what you eat.”
“We don’t eat that sort of stuff!” Elijah snapped. “I thought you would, being underground and all.”
“We have artificial light sources. We can grow anything,” Eora assured him. “Including a wide range of vegetables and nuts. We have bees for honey.”
“What about meat?” Surely they couldn’t be vegetarians, not with all that muscle rippling and bulging on Nieko every time he moved.
“We’d eat it if we could, I guess, but it’s not practical to farm large animals,” she replied. “We tried breeding smaller ones, like rabbits and birds, but it broke our hearts to see them caged up and shut away from the light and the sky, so the experiment was abandoned. It’s bad enough that we’re forced to endure our exile from the sun. We have no right to condemn innocent creatures to the same pain.”
Her answer surprised Lije. He hadn’t thought the Dvalinn would be capable of compassion. Perhaps they reserved their hatred for humans. If, as Eora claimed, humans had forced them to give up the surface and live underground, there might even be some justification for their feelings. But those feelings didn’t give them the right to destroy human society so they could retake the upper world. Two races in conflict for the same territory guaranteed enmity.
Eora handed him a ziplock bag. Elijah looked at the disconcertingly familiar device with suspicion. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“You open it, tear off the seal to start the exothermic reaction. Once it’s hot enough, you eat it.” Her voice took on the slow rhythm of someone explaining something to a child or a fool.
“How do I know you aren’t trying to poison me or knock me out?” Elijah asked suspiciously.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Nieko said. “We agreed to a truce. If we’d meant to kill you, we’d have done it while you were unc
onscious.” He rolled his eyes upward. “Are all humans this stupid or is it only you?”
“If this food is so harmless, where’s yours?”
“We already ate,” Nieko said. “I don’t like you enough to want to be sociable and share a meal with you. Eat or don’t. I don’t give a fuck.”
“He’s right,” Eora said, “We have already eaten. We don’t know how long we’ll have to make the rations last. We can’t waste them by eating when we’re not hungry.”
She held out her hand. “Give it to me. I’ll taste it for you, then you’ll know it’s safe.”
“What will that prove? Maybe you have a different metabolism to me. I could still get sick.”
Elijah’s intransigence finally pushed even the pacific Eora over the edge. Elijah discovered that beneath her cool exterior was a woman with a fiery temper.
“Fine, then,” she shouted. “Go ahead and starve.” With her hands held out in front of her, she ticked points off on her fingers. “I rescued you from certain death. I’ve tried to be nice to you. I’ve stood up for you against Nieko. I’ve taken what you’ve said as the truth. But if you want to think I’m a manipulative bitch who is trying to hurt you, then you can sit there and figure out some other way to get the nourishment you need.”
She stalked to the far wall and sat on the floor, knees drawn up, arms draped over them, glaring at him as if daring him to speak.
He stared her down for a moment, then turned his attention to the bag. Logically, he supposed he was safe. If they’d wanted to kill him they could have found a much simpler way than through poisoning him with food from a sealed bag. Although he had no way of knowing for sure his digestion system could process the rations, their shared disgust meant he’d probably be all right.
Slowly, hesitantly, he followed Eora’s instructions, breaking the seal. Within seconds the aroma of something spicy and delicious rose to his nostrils. If the Dvalinn emergency rations tasted as good as they smelled, they had their surface equivalent beaten hollow.
Still, when he dug the provided fork into the bag his hands trembled. He raised the first forkful to his mouth, screwed up his nose and gingerly tipped it in.
Lips pursed, he shut his mouth, chewed once, found the texture soft and mushy, and swallowed.
He gulped once, then twice, his heart racing as he waited for an adverse reaction. It didn’t happen. The food stayed in his stomach, which grumbled, demanding more, making Elijah aware of how hungry he was. With more enthusiasm, he continued eating until the bag was empty.
“Is there anything to drink?” he asked.
“Water,” Eora replied, and handed him a metal bottle. “We have plenty of water—it’s pumped from a reservoir protected from the heat.
The water was cool with a slightly mineral, not unpleasant taste. Elijah drank deeply.
When he’d finished, Eora lowered herself onto the bed next to him, close enough that her scent, sweet and alluring, drifted over him. Her skin was smooth and flawless. Like her male companion, she was exquisitely beautiful. Elijah knew she was the enemy, an alien species, but with her hand resting on his thigh, her gaze fixed on his face and her black-clothed breasts brushing against his chest, he was having difficulty remembering it.
Chapter Four
As much as he hated it, Nieko couldn’t take his eyes off the human. Unlike Eora, he’d never had any interest in knowing more about the species they shared the planet with—not that shared was the right word for the miserable underground existence away from the sun and the surface the Dvalinn were forced to lead.
It galled him that this man wasn’t what he’d expected. The violence and evil of humans should have shaped them into a stunted, bent and ugly form. But Elijah Denton was tall and beautiful, with a muscular body encased in healthy, sun-blessed skin. His face was symmetrical with a strong bone structure. Where were the tight, twisted lips, the harsh lines of cruelty? How could nature create such a lie?
Eora was fascinated by him. Every action, every word since she had dragged the human into the safe room had been focused on him.
She’d always had a romanticized view of the surface-dwellers. It galled Nieko to discover she’d been right. Right as far as appearance went, anyway. Whether he was honest had yet to be discovered.
Who knew what they would discover about each other, locked for days in the closed environment of the safe room. They would have to talk sooner or later. There wasn’t much else to do. Empathic communication with Eora wasn’t going to happen. Although Dvalinn were capable of telepathy, from infancy the rules of telepathic etiquette were drilled into them. Don’t intrude into others’ minds unless invited. To ensure it didn’t happen, every Dvalinn child was taught how to shield their thoughts. Nieko had taken to those lessons well. He’d needed to. The feelings and emotions he experienced were unacceptable in his culture.
He’d been so successful at blocking his thoughts that the person closest to him, the person who believed she knew him better than anyone else in the world, was convinced he’d been born without the ability to communicate telepathically. Out of deference to his perceived disability, she never used telepathy when they were together.
Eora pitied him. That hurt, but not as much as it would if she ever found out what he tried so desperately to hide from her.
For now, he needn’t have worried. Someone else was taking all her attention. She was perched on the bed, side by side with the human, only an arm’s length separating them, bombarding him with questions. Questions about the surface, the colors, the sky, sunshine. All things they had been taught about in school but had never experienced in real life. Never would experience.
Elijah was answering patiently, describing the chiaroscuro of light and shadow and the sky—tall trees and the riotous color of gardens. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “But you must know. The pictures on the walls are pretty accurate. A bit idealized, that’s all.”
Nieko’s teeth snapped together so hard they hurt. His fists clenched. “How the fuck do you know?”
Elijah paled and he swallowed, his throat working visibly. “Maybe my memory is coming back.”
“And maybe it never left you,” Nieko snarled. “There’s only one place you could have seen those paintings. Ogof. What were you doing in the city?”
Elijah’s eyelids dropped like shutters and his face went blank. “I don’t know.” Then he opened his eyes wide and looked directly at Nieko. “I don’t remember.”
“You lying bastard.” Nieko launched himself at Elijah but before he could land the punch he aimed at him, Eora flew off the bed. She pushed back against Nieko’s chest and he skidded to a halt, his fist pulled up and away from her.
“You don’t know he’s lying. Maybe his memory is coming back in bits and pieces. Maybe it is going to come back completely.” She pushed her hand against Nieko’s chest, and as he always did, he obeyed her command. “If it does, then he can explain.”
Getting his temper under control, Nieko took a step back. “He can explain to the council.”
“I’m not appearing before your council,” Elijah said.
“Yeah—you are,” Nieko said. “Unless I get sick of waiting and kill you first.”
“Think you could?” Elijah retorted, getting to his feet and squaring his shoulders.
“This is supposed to be a truce,” Eora yelled. “You might think you’re being tough, but from where I’m standing you’re behaving like children.” Her voice softened. “Enough, okay?” She strode up to Nieko and faced him square on. “No more, Nieko. This is going to be hard enough as it is.”
Then she turned to Elijah. Nieko felt his jaw tighten as she put her hand on his arm and looked up into his face. “I don’t think you’re lying. I trust you.”
Even through the blockade Elijah had built in his mind, Nieko felt the guilt radiating from him as he turned his head away, refusing to meet Eora’s open gaze.
It took a second for the realization to hit. When it did, Nieko had to bite down on
his tongue to keep from shouting out.
The human had telepathic powers, knew it, and had deliberately constructed shields to mask his thoughts! He either wasn’t aware that shields themselves gave out a characteristic signal, or he was one of those unfortunates who lacked the skill to disguise them.
Shit. What a sick joke. Here they were, all three of them telepathically able to communicate and all of them blocked for reasons of their own. If it weren’t so pathetic and dangerous, he’d laugh.
The human’s shields were sound, yet guilt seeped out through them. Guilt that strong meant danger. Cautiously, hoping Eora wouldn’t notice, Nieko lowered his shields enough to increase his receptivity to incoming sensation without allowing any stray feelings of his own to slip out.
From Eora he got a quick flurry of curiosity and excitement. Nothing unusual there. Curiosity and excitement had been the defining characteristics of Eora’s personality for as long as he’d known her.
From the human he got the guilt he’d already detected. A taint of self-loathing surprised him. The whisper of reluctant attraction to Eora.
What if Eora picked up a hint of that attraction? Eora claimed her few experiences at sex hadn’t been good. She hadn’t given him a critique of their truncated experience, but she’d seemed to enjoy it…right up until the moment she’d fallen asleep!
Who was he kidding? No matter how boring and uninspiring she’d found sex so far, there was no way she’d pass up a chance to indulge her curiosity with the human.
Jealousy was another of those annoying emotions Dvalinn weren’t supposed to feel, but Nieko was lacerated by it. He couldn’t let himself have her but he hated it when anyone else did. Nieko had already committed the folly of loving Eora—he was powerless to resist the other emotions that went with it.
He sat with his back against the wall, as far from Elijah and Eora as he could get. He could have sat on a chair but some perverse part of him welcomed the physical discomfort. It distracted him from the pain of watching Eora flirt with the human. He drew his knees up and rested his arms across them, letting his hands dangle.