by Tara Janzen
Her gaze slipped to his mouth, and in an instant she realized her mistake.
His lips curved into a dangerous smile, revealing a flash of white teeth. She didn’t dare look up, didn’t dare move.
“So you would be kissed,” she heard him say.
He covered the short distance between them with a limping stride and caught her chin in his hand. He tilted her face toward his, and when their eyes met, an undeniable thrill coursed through her body, burning away every ounce of common sense she had.
“Do you know my name, geneth?” His voice was silky, the question barely audible.
“Morgan,” she said, hating the breathlessness she heard in her own voice. “Morgan ab Kynan.”
“Aye.” His smile faded and his eyes darkened to a fathomless shade of blue. “I am Morgan.”
With his name still in the air between them, he lowered his mouth to hers, and she was flooded with a new and wondrous awareness. Scents and tastes flowed and melded together, giving her a glimpse of the essence that was uniquely his.
Shadana. No wonder the woman had wanted to kiss him within seconds of his arrival. He was delicious. Intoxicating. Exotically animal. She could feel his breath and the heat of his skin, the strength of the body standing so close to hers. A faint taste of the wine was still on his lips, but the more intense flavor was purely his.
He lifted his head, his eyes meeting hers with a look of confused wonder. Then he lowered his lashes and kissed her again. With his second touch, she wanted more, and he obliged, one soft caress following another, each more daring than the last, until she felt as if she were being gently devoured by the grazing of his teeth across her lips and the lazy stroking of his tongue. Time ceased to exist, and when he whispered, “Open your mouth for me,” she eagerly complied, wanting nothing more than to lose herself in the heated enchantment.
Morgan was reeling, holding himself in check by the thinnest of threads and the knowledge that he was in no condition to do more than kiss her. His bad leg was near to giving out, and halfway through Pan-shei a fierce ache had started in his chest. He’d sprained or torn something under the Lyran’s handling, and the night’s trek had finally shaken it loose.
But the chit, sweet Jesu, she’d asked for a kiss with her bold look and he hadn’t had the self-control not to give her one, not when indulging her gave him an excuse to indulge himself.
He tunneled his hand through her hair, turning her deeper into his kiss and plundering her mouth. The taste of her swirled through his senses, so richly verdant, unlike anything he’d ever tasted before. She was sweet like flowers, sweeter than Carillion wine, her tiny braids and twists of hair softer against his fingers than the finest silk, the feel of her body against his an exquisite pleasure he could drown in.
It had been a long time since he’d held a woman in his arms, a long time since he’d felt desire for anything beyond getting drunk, but one kiss from her had him hard and wanting to claim her for his own—this stranger who had already claimed him with her bracelets.
The realization washed over him like a bucket of cold water.
God’s blood—was he out of his mind?
He dragged his mouth from hers, ignoring his arousal with an iron will, his mood going from passion to suspicion in one fell leap of logic. She had breached something in him he had not wanted breached, and she’d done it with just a kiss. He’d be a fool to take something that powerful at face value. The women of the future had a thousand tricks to employ for any one of a thousand different ends—and very few of them were to a man’s advantage.
He captured her face with his hands and forced her to meet his gaze. “What do you want from me, death-witch?”
Her lashes were brown, tipped in gold, the gray of her eyes edged in forest green. Her mouth was wet and softly swollen, and it was all he could do not to soothe her lips with a gentler kiss than the one they’d already shared.
“Only the Warmonger calls us death-witches,” she said, not even trying to escape his hold.
“The Warmonger and half of the Old Dominion,” he begged to differ. “So you are a priestess then, and not just a messenger.”
“A priestess, yes, of Claerwen in the northern dunes, and princess of the White Palace.”
Morgan’s grip tightened for a second before he stepped back, releasing her. He’d known it. So help him God, he’d known it.
“Ferrar!” he called out, taking another step away. His headache had never left, his chest was killing him, and he’d just kissed a White Lady of Death, who was also a princess of something called the White Palace, whatever the hell that was. If things were going to get any worse, he was definitely going to need more wine.
Avallyn watched him back away, too stunned to follow.
He’d kissed her.
The thief had kissed her and she knew to the depths of her bones that her life was never going to be the same again. Indeed, the Prince of Time had come.
~ ~ ~
An hour later, Avallyn still felt the impact of Morgan’s kiss. Ferrar had settled him in his bedroom, in a palatial bed draped with hand-blocked cerulean curtains. Unlike the bunks she was used to sleeping in, his bed looked big enough for three people. Ferrar had left the door partially ajar, and from all his muttering and the woman’s placating, Avallyn had determined that though hurt, he would live.
He had a small galley kitchen in his quarters and a profusion of plants growing in pots in the living area. The furniture was comfortable but worn, a divan strewn with orange and gold pillows and all manner of chairs and stools scattered over intricately patterned rugs. There were no windows, only the same amber-glassed skylights as in the courtyard—an upscale den for a thief.
She sipped her chai, an ancient drink made from spices, tea, milk, and honey. Ferrar had sworn its recuperative powers were potent enough to raise the dead, and Avallyn agreed. With her belly full of soup and the tea warming her insides, she felt renewed enough to face the journey into the desert. They could not delay. She had indulged the prince long enough. The Third Guard would not give up the search, and she couldn’t take a chance on their being captured.
She thought longingly of the rover in Racht’s east bays. Skraelings or nay, she doubted if Dray had abandoned it. Ferrar had to have a comcell she could use to contact her captain, but short of dragging Morgan off his bed and out into the tearoom, she didn’t have much chance of finding it. Her search of his quarters had yielded nothing beyond the virtu and curios of a vagabond’s life.
The scent of burning incense wafted out from behind the bedroom door. Myrrh, she thought, lifting the cup of chai to her mouth, with a hint of rose. Ferrar was a woman of varied talents, to use a healing incense along with her bottles of pills, salves, and elixirs.
Avallyn had enough marks on her to buy some sort of small transport, a scant-ton chassis or a double-wing sandtrekker. Neither would provide the protection and comfort of a rover, especially the fully armed rover they’d left in Racht, but both were capable of getting them to one of the caravanserai—the scantly populated outposts that marked the trade routes into the desert. Beyond the last caravanserai, her skills, more than any transport, would be needed to keep them alive, but she was undaunted by the challenge. She would face the desert on foot before she would face the Third Guard. The Warmonger had no love for her, not after what the Claerwen priestesses had done to him. However much Corvus wanted Morgan ab Kynan, he wanted her more—and the two of them were together, one neat package sitting in a tea shop in Pan-shei with the Third Guard on their trail.
“Sticks.” Frustration brought her to her feet in one supple move. The thief couldn’t have picked a worse enemy. With the Sha-shakrieg Night Watchers lost to them, she dared not wait any longer for Ferrar to finish. They had to get out of there.
She started for the bedroom just as the door to the courtyard opened behind her. Spinning around, she dropped to a crouch, her lasgun drawn, cocked, and aimed—straight at the heart of the wild boy from Racht.
He’d drawn e
ven faster than she, and she found herself staring down the barrel of a lasgun modified much in the same manner as hers, with an extra charge pack rigged for superfast reload. Everything inside her tensed for the shock of his first pulsing shot.
The door behind her opened wider, but she didn’t dare take her attention off the boy. His green-eyed gaze swept over her in a flash, and in that same flash came a recognition she hadn’t expected. His fierce expression melted into one of awe, and he dropped to his knees before her, his lasgun scraping the floor, his head bowed.
“By the Bones, milady.”
It was only then that she noticed his lasgun was trigger-locked.
Morgan stood in his bedroom doorway, staring at the strange and thoroughly unwelcome sight of his captain kowtowing to his captor.
“Aja,” he barked, then winced as a sharp pain lanced through his chest. Nothing was broken, according to Ferrar. He’d only sprained the muscles holding his ribs in place. Ferrar had given him what wine she had, a small bottle he’d slipped into his munitions belt. One swig had done as much to revive him as all the rest of the wallah’s potions and ministrations.
The boy looked up and grinned. “Morgan, milord.”
The desert woman glanced at him as she rose from her crouched position, but she wasn’t smiling. Her face was pale, understandably so. She was fast, but not as fast as Aja, and she wouldn’t have known his lasgun was trigger-locked. It was always trigger-locked. She’d been in far more danger of being impaled by a throwing star, and Morgan trusted Aja to know better than to impale anyone in Ferrar’s.
But this business of his captain on the floor, bowing to the death-witch, was taking things a bit too far.
“Where’s York?” he asked.
“In the alley with our transport, milord.”
“Transport?”
Aja’s grin broadened. “Aye. When you mentioned a rover in the east bays, it struck me that we might be needing one.”
Morgan felt a layer of his tension dissipate. Thank you, sweet Mary. They weren’t trapped at Ferrar’s.
“Good work, Captain.” The boy deserved a reward. Mayhaps ’twas time to give the Warmonger his friggin’ dragon and collect the final payment. It would be a nice change to have Van and the Third Guard off his back.
“You have my rover?” The desert woman stepped forward, her face showing the same relief he felt.
“Begging your pardon, milady,” Aja said, “but the rover is Morgan’s now.”
Morgan saw her stiffen at the boy’s words.
Slowly, she turned to him. “You’re stealing my rover?”
“Aye.” He gestured to Aja. Ferrar had poked and pushed and taped on him for nearly an hour, which was half an hour longer than Morgan had planned on staying at home. He and the woman had been fed and gotten as much rest as they dared. More could be had later. He’d decided to take her to a place he knew on the eastern fringes of the Old Dominion. She could sleep all she wanted once he had them safely hidden.
The boy started to leave, but got no farther than two steps before the desert woman spun around and issued an imperious command.
“Hold.”
Much to Morgan’s consternation, Aja did just that, stopping and turning to her, his face wiped clean of any smile.
“Do you know who I am, boy?” she asked in a tone that implied she damn well knew he did, though Morgan found it ludicrous that someone of her few years would call Aja a boy.
“Not who, milady,” his captain confessed, “but I know what you are.”
“And are you not sworn to the Priestesses of the Bones along with the others of your sept?”
Aja slanted Morgan an odd, nearly guilty glance, his hand going to the yellow wallet on his belt.
The warning hairs rose on the nape of Morgan’s neck, and he knew the day had just taken another turn for the worse.
Chapter 8
“Aye,” Aja said, averting his gaze.
“Friggin’ hell,” Morgan muttered. He reached for Avallyn and pulled her close, disarming her with the ease of long practice. Locking his arm around her, he pinned her to his side and held her off the floor while she squirmed like a madwoman. “Well, she’s mine now, Captain. So you’d best do as I say, and I say we’re getting in the friggin’ rover and getting the hell out of here.”
With that, he headed for the door.
He had to work to keep Avallyn from elbowing him in the ribs, which would pretty much put him out of commission. It was a risk he was willing to take. He’d be damned if he would let her have the rover and take him to the death-witches.
“Oh, aye, milord.” Aja’s smile returned in full bloom as he caught up with them.
The boy was ever one to recognize an opportunity, and Morgan had just handed him one. Desert septs and priestesses aside, Morgan knew where his captain’s loyalties lay, just as he understood the occasional necessity of swearing allegiance to save one’s skin. The boy, though, had rarely been out of his sight for the last ten years, so Morgan had to assume the priestess-swearing had been done when Aja was a small child at most, which by his code made the oath invalid. He had not taken Aja’s oath to him until the boy had been old enough to understand exactly what such an oath meant.
Aye, he knew where his captain’s loyalties lay. He’d known from the day Aja had allowed Van the Wretched to capture him rather than have Morgan taken alone to the warlord’s lunar colony. A miserable time that had been, with the boy—only ten years old—frightened to a near witless state by the skraelings, and Morgan wondering if there was any possible chance for escape. That night, chained in the filthiest of Van’s orbital dungeons, Aja had shown him the contents of the yellow wallet he kept on his belt. Bones, they were, small bones, divining bones, the boy’s mother’s finger bones nested in a bit of sand.
In retrospect, mayhaps Aja had been trying to tell him something then about the Priestesses of the Bones and his connection to them. If so, he’d been too damn subtle. All Morgan remembered from that night was the stark fear in the boy’s eyes and how tightly he’d held on to those small bones, praying for protection.
Avallyn suddenly went still in his arms.
Too still. Every muscle in her body was tense and thrumming with alertness.
He stopped, only partway across the courtyard, and looked at her. Her chin was lifted. Her ears twitched once. He glanced in the direction she was staring and saw nothing beyond the crates and bags of tea cluttering the storeroom, but he didn’t doubt for an instant that she saw something more. He looked to the boy and found Aja in the same state of hyperawareness.
“Captain ?”
Aja turned his head. The boy’s mouth was thin with worry. “The Third Guard, milord, coming up the alley.”
“And a skraelpack,” Avallyn added. “I can smell them.”
Morgan loosened his hold on her. She retrieved her lasgun as she regained her footing, lifting the weapon out of his hand. He let her have it without so much as a glance in her direction. Concentrating on the Quonset wall, the one fronting the alley, he could hear the faint sound of marching feet and, after a moment, thought he could hear faint echoes of the skraeling war cry in the distance—“Har maukte har”—but he’d be damned if he could smell anything.
“Which alley is the rover in, Aja?”
“Back alley, milord.”
That bought them a few seconds. He swung around to face the woman who had followed them out of the storeroom. “Trouble’s coming, Ferrar. You and Jons are welcome to share the rover.”
Ferrar made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “We’ve been raided before and we’ll be raided again. If we turned tail every time a skraelpack showed up, we would have been out of business years ago. Jons!” she hollered, shifting her attention to the center of the courtyard. “Lock us down!”
“This is the Third Guard.” Morgan felt compelled to remind her, not doubting Aja’s or Avallyn’s identification of the marchers.
Ferrar shrugged. “The Third Guard is nothing mo
re than a pack of skraelings from a little bit deeper end of the gene pool.”
The sound of moving troops was unmistakable now and growing ever closer. Jons was already moving the Quonset’s blast wall into place over the front door. The old choppes players slipped through at the last second. The few guests at the inn had heard the call and were up and running. Everyone who used Ferrar’s as a safe house knew the routine, and Morgan noted the goodly amount of firepower being carried out of the rooms.
Jons locked down the blast wall and headed toward the back of the courtyard.
“We’ll swing around front and draw them off,” Morgan said to Ferrar, signaling for Aja and Avallyn to leave.
He didn’t have to tell them twice. They were both out the back door before he cleared the courtyard.
“Damn,” he whispered. It was a good thing he had a tracking bracelet on her, or he would lose her for sure.
The sheer idiocy of the thought stopped him cold in his tracks. What in the hell was he thinking? If it weren’t for the friggin’ tracking bracelet, she wouldn’t have been able to hold on to him.
He followed them out the back door, reminding himself that she was his prisoner now. The thought brought him some satisfaction. As for giving her back her lasgun, he wasn’t about to have her running around without protection, and he figured the odds of her shooting him had dropped to nil after the kiss they’d shared. She couldn’t have been immune to the shock wave of pleasure that had rolled over him, or the odd sense that he’d found something more than what he’d expected. The taste of her was still on his tongue, still beguiling him.
The rover parked in the alley was a Class G, built to house a crew of twelve, with a modified chassis for desert travel. It had two gunports on each side and a scale-laced overcoat in dun brown. Despite its size—about half of the Quonset—it would be practically invisible in the dunes. Morgan took the amenities in with a glance as he jumped through the open hold door. He punched the “close” panel next to the jamb. The doors slid shut, and he was instantly accosted by the most fetid and horrendous smell known to man: skrael stench.