His thumbs brushed the tight, erect peaks of her nipples. She sucked in a breath to curse him, but the heat bolting along her nerves made the words seem hypocritical. She found herself longing to lean back, to ease into his arms.
Dammit, Jane! “Let go,” she gritted.
To her relief, he did, dropping his hands and stepping away. But when she looked around at him, she saw dark male satisfaction in his strange, hot eyes, as if he’d tested her somehow. She didn’t think she wanted to know the results.
Jane fumbled for a topic that would put them back on safer ground. “You said…you said you wanted me to help you catch the killer. How?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” the wolf/dog said, moving to look up at them. Its jaws gaped, revealing an impressive set of very sharp, very white teeth. “You’re going to be the bait.”
Jane looked down at the animal, perversely grateful he’d broken the erotic tension. The intelligence she saw in those pale canine eyes was far more human than animal. A sense of vertigo swept over her. “What are you? And don’t bother with the FBI bull, because I don’t think even the Bureau has a talking K-9 corps.”
She looked over her shoulder at her captor just in time to see him pull out a length of what looked like thin gold cable. He reached for her right wrist.
“What are you doing?” Jane started to whirl, but he calmly stepped in and leaned a broad shoulder into her back, pinning her to the wall as he wrapped the cable around her wrist. Like a snake, it instantly coiled tighter. “Stop it!”
“I warned you, Jane.” His deep voice was grim and cold. Using his grip on the cable, he dragged her right arm down even as he seized the other wrist and pulled it back. She squirmed, but he kept her mashed against the wall. To her disgust, she felt another potent snap of sensual awareness at the feel of his hard, muscular body pressed to hers.
“You’ve got no right!” she spat, struggling against both his grip and her own potent reaction. The effort did her no good in either case. He was so damn strong she couldn’t break his hold no matter how she twisted and jerked. She might as well have been a toddler for all the effort he expended controlling her.
Fear slid through her fury. Granted, she didn’t make a habit of struggling with men, yet even so his strength seemed somehow abnormal. As if he wasn’t quite human. Instinctively she covered her unease with a snarl. “This is illegal!”
He simply ignored her, looping her other wrist in the cable. The thin metal seemed to coil around her arms like a snake, binding her hands. “They call this kidnapping, you son of a bitch!”
“Yes, and I don’t care.” He stepped back just enough to grab her shoulder and pull her around. The glowing striations in his pupils were still hot and burning, though the bloodshot red of his eyes had already begun to fade. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to catch Druas and keep you alive. So don’t push me. You won’t like the results.”
She tugged futilely at her bonds. Impossibly, the restraints squirmed around her wrists like something alive, maintaining their grip. She’d never even heard of a metal that could do that. It was impossible.
Impossible. Like the talking wolf/dog. Like her captor’s glowing eyes and amazing strength. Like the device that had instantly eliminated her perfume from the air.
The hair rose on the back of her neck. “What the hell are you?”
His handsome mouth took on a mocking twist. The iridescent tattoo on his cheek shimmered. “What do you think I am?”
Jane studied him, taking in the erect carriage, the fluid way he moved, the cold determination on his face. During her stint in Atlanta, she’d interviewed her share of soldiers, sailors, and Marines. He showed all the signs. “Military. Some kind of commando. Maybe.”
His eyes flickered in reaction. “Good guess.”
She relaxed slightly. That would explain all the James Bond toys. God knew what the government had cooking in the depths of some top-secret lab somewhere.
But what about the glowing eyes and the Big Bad Wolf? Not to mention the hair and beads, which sure as hell didn’t look like any recruiting poster she’d ever seen. And…“What does a Navy SEAL—or Delta Force or whatever the hell you are—care about serial killers?”
Just for an instant he glanced down at the wolf, which tilted its head in a gesture curiously like a shrug. It wasn’t the kind of look a man exchanged with a pet, or even an animal outfitted with a speaker as part of some elaborate masquerade.
It was the sort of glance you gave a partner when you wanted advice.
No matter what Wolfie looked like, he wasn’t an animal. And she’d be willing to bet that turning out sentient timber wolves was beyond even the United States government.
Which left…
“Are you some kind of aliens?” She felt ridiculous the minute she blurted the words.
Baran looked up at her, startled and amused. “Do I look like an alien?”
“I don’t know.” She glanced down at the animal, who watched them with sardonic intelligence. “But he does. He’s sure as hell no dog, whether that’s a speaker around his neck or not.”
“Dog?” The wolf drew up in an affronted reaction that couldn’t be anything but genuine. “I’ll have you know I’m a genetically engineered timber wolf. There are no dogs anywhere in my family tree. And that’s a vocalizer around my throat, not a ‘speaker,’ you ignorant hick.”
Her lips tugged upward in reluctant amusement at his outrage. “So what’s a vocalizer?”
“My body isn’t designed for speech,” the wolf told her with an outraged sniff. “My internal computer picks up my thoughts and sends them to the vocalizer, which turns them into sound.”
“Which is my point exactly,” she said to Baran. “Nobody has technology like that in the twenty-first—” Jane broke off, eyes widening as a new and even wilder idea occurred to her. “Are you from…” Damn, she couldn’t believe she was saying the words. She took a deep breath and forced them out anyway. “Are you time travelers?”
Baran’s brows lifted in an expression of startled interest. “What makes you say that?”
“The wolf. Your eyes. Your equipment. Like I said before, nobody on Earth has anything like this stuff. Yet aliens wouldn’t look like anything that had evolved on this planet.” Jane felt her tension building, stretching out, as if she were riding a roller coaster toward the top of a grade and the plunging drop on the other side. She took a deep breath and went right over. “But if you’re from the future…”
Baran stared at her a long moment, but not like a man inventing a good lie. Like someone who was calculating how much truth to tell. “Yes,” he said finally. “We’re from the future.”
A rush of goose bumps spread over her skin as Jane experienced a rush of the familiar quivering excitement she felt whenever she was on the trail of a hot story. And it didn’t get any hotter than this.
Unfortunately, this situation also had implications that were far more personal than any story she’d ever covered. Terrifying implications. Swallowing, she asked the question that was gnawing at her consciousness. “Is that…is that how you know this guy is going to come after me?”
“Yes.” Her captor said it so starkly, so simply, she had no choice except to believe.
“And he really is a serial killer?”
Baran’s sensual mouth tightened. “Yes.”
Jane licked her lips. “But you’ll stop him. If you’re from the future, you know what happens. Right?”
“Not necessarily.”
“What does that mean?” A chill rolled over her skin. “You don’t necessarily know or you won’t necessarily stop him?”
He drew his big body to its full height and looked down at her. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop him.”
Four
Jane’s heart pounded as she stared at the handsome invader who’d just turned her life upside down. “But you said you’re from the future!”
Baran sighed and dragged a hand through his hair. “Do you know e
verything that happened centuries before you were born?”
“You know this guy’s coming after me!”
“Temporal Enforcement told me only as much as they had to. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t much.”
“Temporal…?”
“Enforcement. They’re the agency that regulates time travel.”
“In the future.” A new question occurred to her, and she asked it cautiously. “How far in the future?”
He shrugged. “Three hundred years.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely the future.” She blinked, studying her brawny captor. Weren’t future people supposed to be scrawny eggheads with big eyes? This guy looked as if he’d just stepped out of the cover of an old Viking romance, the kind where the hero tied the heroine up and pillaged her repeatedly.
Which, she had to admit, sounded like much more fun than it had any business being.
Baran watched as she rocked back on her heels, both hands still bound behind her back. The pose thrust her high, pretty breasts into prominence and drew his attention to the hard pebbled nipples behind her bra. He found himself battling the completely inappropriate urge to pull up her shirt and suck and tongue and tease those luscious points until they flushed red.
Sometimes his Warlord libido had a rotten sense of timing.
But perhaps the timing would improve. He’d scented her response more than once tonight, particularly when he’d kicked her feet apart. A seduction wasn’t out of the question.
But since she’d apparently decided to cooperate, he’d have to explore that avenue another time. And he would. Now, however, she was too busy trying to process what she was learning—while he tried to decide how much information to give her.
He hadn’t intended to tell her even this much, but she’d seen through the cover story those sloppy bastards from Temporal Enforcement had given him. They apparently hadn’t anticipated how well Jane knew her own government and its workings. And Baran didn’t have enough knowledge of her time to come up with a more believable lie.
So he was stuck with the truth, or at least as little of it as she’d let him get away with telling.
“So this…time agency…” Her brows drew down in concentration over her dark, narrowed eyes.
“Temporal Enforcement.”
“…sent you. What do they care if there’s a serial killer in Tayanita County?”
“This particular serial killer is also from the future.”
Her full lips parted. “Oh.” For a moment she looked rattled. Then she rallied enough to manage an indignant snort. “What, they don’t have women he could kill back in his own time? He’s got to come back three centuries to find somebody to butcher?”
“Evidently.”
“Why me? Why would somebody from three hundred years in the future want to target a reporter at a small-town weekly?” Her soft, sweet mouth curved down in a puzzled frown. “And I still don’t understand why you’d care enough to come all this way to stop him.”
He glanced from her rich brown eyes to her tempting lips, then down to the lush, promising contours of her breasts. “I can think of a number of reasons.”
She blinked. “Umm.” A flush heated her cheeks. “Well.”
Baran smiled, watching those tempting nipples slowly peak under the soft fabric of her shirt. This mission was definitely looking more interesting all the time.
How did he do that?
One look, and he had her feeling as if she was about to burst into flames. It was humiliating.
“TE gave me a skull jack crystal on this time,” the wolf announced, breaking into Jane’s embarrassed arousal. “There are a couple of image files of the Jumpkiller in it. Could make things a bit more clear.”
Baran glanced at his furry partner and nodded. “Let’s see them.”
“What’s a skull jack…whatever?” God, her life was beginning to sound like an episode of Star Trek.
“Crystal. It’s a memory unit I insert in my skull jack—that’s the implant at the base of my right ear I can use to access data,” the wolf added, seeing her open her mouth to ask.
“Where is this implant?” She moved cautiously closer and started to kneel, but her bound hands threw her off-balance. Impatiently, she looked at Baran and held her arms out straight behind her. “Look, can we lose the bondage? I get it now: You’re the good guys. I have no intention of running away.” She grinned. “In fact, you couldn’t drive me off with a stick. I’m dying to learn more.”
He gave her an appraising look, then nodded slowly. “But the minute you start giving me a hard time, I’m tying you up again.”
Promise? her libido whispered. She told it to shut up. It quivered anyway as her handsome captor stepped behind her and went to work on her bonds. As the cable fell away, she stepped quickly away and turned, rubbing her wrists.
He tucked the restraints into a pocket of his coat, giving her a level, warning look.
Ignoring it, she crouched beside the wolf. “Okay, now about that implant…”
Freika helpfully angled his head, giving her access to the ear in question. Something that looked like a glowing blue gem glittered against his dark fur.
“So this crystal is some kind of recording medium?” She touched it. It felt warm and smooth under her fingers. “And it plugs directly into your head?”
“Right.”
“Didn’t that hurt?”
“Nah. I was just a pup when they did the procedure. Don’t even remember it.”
She looked up to find Baran watching her steadily. “Do you have one, too?”
He shrugged. “Not a skull jack, no. Any data I need, I get by downloading it from Freika.”
“That way he doesn’t have to worry about viruses,” the wolf told her.
She sat up. “They still have computer viruses in the future?”
“Yeah, and they can be fatal.”
Jane blinked, feeling more than a little boggled. “Fatal?”
“My computer controls my autonomic nervous system,” Baran explained. “If I downloaded the wrong virus, it could stop my heart or paralyze me.”
“Owww.” She winced. “That doesn’t sound like fun at all.”
He looked grim. “Believe me, it’s not.”
She was opening her mouth to ask for details when a man appeared in midair, floating a foot above the wolf’s head.
Jane jumped, but when everyone else studied the figure calmly, she realized he wasn’t real. Curious, she rose to examine the image. It was so sharp and three-dimensional, the man looked solid. Which pretty well finished off her last lingering doubt about whether they really came from the future. “Who the hell is that?”
“Kalig Druas,” Freika said. “The Jumpkiller.”
“He’s the one who wants to kill me?”
“Evidently.” Baran’s face was utterly expressionless, his body so still he could have been carved out of ice.
Looking at him, Jane felt a chill skate her spine. That, she thought, is a man with a very long fuse. But I don’t think I want to be anywhere around when he blows.
She turned her attention to the image that had inspired such cold hate. “Huh. Somehow I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble spotting him in a crowd.”
A series of metal rings placed on edge appeared to sink halfway into the man’s skull, forming a thick ridge across the top of his shaved head like a steel Mohawk. A second set of rings were implanted around the back of his head, stretching from temple to temple.
“And I thought nose rings were bad,” Jane said.
“Skull implants are considered high fashion on Xer.” Baran curled his lip. “Among other things.”
“What’s a Xer?”
“A planet.” He moved closer, staring up at the floating figure. “About twenty years ago the Xerans invaded my world, Vardon. It took us five years to evict them.”
Jane studied him, reading the cold anger in his eyes. “I’ll bet that was unpleasant.”
“You have a gift for
understatement.” He squared his shoulders. “Recently we found out they were planning to have another try at taking us over. We’ve launched a preemptive strike.”
“So what happened?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. The battle hadn’t begun yet when the Temporal Enforcement agent showed up and took me off my ship.” Baran’s gaze turned brooding. “When this is over, I’ve got to go back and complete the mission he interrupted.”
Something about the way he said the word mission sent a chill down her spine. It also thoroughly deterred her impulse to ask for details.
Dragging her attention away from Baran’s grim face, she looked back at the Xeran. Despite the gothic hardware in his skull, the Jumpkiller’s features looked human enough. In fact, the bone structure of his angular face was almost handsome, though his eyes were a bit too narrow and a bit too small. The color of his irises, though, was a distinctly nonhuman and very demonic red, complete with slit pupils. Add that hawk nose and tight, thin mouth, and you had the poster boy for meanasasnake.com.
Enhancing the reptilian effect, he wore a one-piece suit covered in what looked like tiny black scales. From what she could tell about the body under the suit, he was almost as thickly muscled as Baran. What do they feed them in the future, anyway? Jane wondered.
On second thought, she really didn’t want to know the answer to that one, either.
In one fist he held a knife with a long curving blade that widened toward the point, almost like a machete. “What is that? It looks like a bowie knife on steroids.”
“A Xeran sevik,” Baran supplied.
“He’s good with it, too,” the wolf said, twisting his massive head around to gnaw at a patch of fur over his haunches. “At least judging from the trid he made for his subscribers.”
“Subscribers?” Jane frowned. “What kind of subscribers? And what’s a trid?”
Frieka gave his butt a lick. “A tri-dimensional recording.”
“And the subscribers are Xerans who pay to see women murdered,” Baran added.
She gaped at him. “People subscribe to things like that? And it’s legal?”
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