by Sue Duff
He waved her off. She stepped around the Dumpster and knocked on the back door. Ian answered. He had his cell phone to his ear. “She’s here. Leave the body. Marcus is sending a clean-up crew.” He held the door open and stepped to the side. “Tara told me what happened. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Thanks to Buster and Tara.” Rayne hesitated, then stepped inside. The surgical room smelled of disinfectant and soap, but the body covered in a white cloth stilled her heart.
“Rayne, I’m so sorry. She didn’t make it. Dr. Mac did everything he could,” Ian said gently. The pain at his inability to wrap his arms around her was so clearly written on his face. Would she have welcomed his comfort if it could have been given? Memories bombarded her. Identifying her mother’s body in the morgue. Her father’s dying words on the balcony in Oregon. How cruel the brain is, that what we’d choose to forget, is what we remember with the most vivid detail.
Rayne walked over and touched the edge of the cloth. Smooth plastic, cool, crisp. Did Dr. Mac carry it in his bag? Was death as much a way of life for the Weir as nurturing the planet’s life?
“Patrick took Carlene and Bryant back to the hotel. He wanted me to tell you how sorry he is,” Ian said.
“Donovan?” Rayne asked.
“Dead.”
She looked up at him.
He gave a muted shake of his head. “The earthquake claimed him. Dr. Mac is going to stay long enough to get Zoe’s body prepared, and then I’ll shyft her to the mansion. Marcus is dispatching a squad to cover up what they can.”
“She has family, Ian. What am I supposed to tell them?”
“Marcus will find a way for her body to be discovered based on the . . . injuries.” Ian’s gaze fell to his feet. Rayne lifted the corner of the cloth. “Don’t,” Ian’s whisper stilled her hand. “Don’t remember her this way.”
“I want to remember,” Rayne said, anger flushing her des-pair. “To be reminded of what we’re all fighting for. Why you and I sacrifice happiness and intimacy for something bigger than ourselves. Why I have no choice but to live a life less ordinary.” Rayne pulled back the sheet. A scream as primal as any found in the animal kingdom lodged in her throat. She dashed to the sink and retched until she had nothing left.
{51}
Jaered propped himself up on his elbow and stared at his wife. The blistering sun’s scarlet rays entwined themselves in Kyre’s golden hair. She opened her eyes and found him watching her. His wife’s smile ignited his core. “How long have you been awake?” She ran her finger across the stubble at his chin.
He wrapped his lips around the tip of her finger and his tongue played with it. She smiled. “Awhile.” He rolled onto his back and pressed her hand against his beating chest.
“You never sleep anymore.”
“There’s not enough time with you as it is,” he said. “I’ll take what I can.”
“Don’t go,” Kyre said. “Let someone else transport the re-bels this time.” A tear found its way down her cheek.
Jaered brushed it away before it dripped from her jaw and into his heart. “No one else can take so many at once. Only my power is strong enough.”
“There have been too many trips to Earth.” She sat up on the bed and turned her back to him. “Your father will soon discover what you’ve been doing, if he hasn’t already.”
“Earth is a pristine beauty, Kyre, unmarred and plentiful.” Jaered placed a gentle hand on her belly. “Once you bear our son, we’ll live out our days on that amazing planet.”
“Living there won’t stop what you’re doing.”
She was right. He wouldn’t stop until the last man, woman, and child had been brought to Earth. He gazed into her eyes, the color of Earth’s oceans, and wrapped what he hoped were reassuring arms around his wife. Jaered pressed his lips against hers and tasted her sweetness. The rhythm of their heartbeats fell into sync and they touched in favored ways. He kissed her abdomen and reeled back his lust, until her tender voice pressed him to continue while her hands made sure of it.
Once they satiated each other’s desires, Jaered gathered her up in his arms and held her tight with his face buried deep in her silky hair. He swam in her scent with thoughts drifting on the rising heat of the day.
“I love you,” Kyre whispered, the peaceful moment enriched by her words of devotion. She grabbed his hand and locked their fingers, gripping tight.
An invisible finger pressed hard against Jaered’s forehead.
His wife’s image splintered outward like a drop disturbing the surface of a pond. He gasped. “Kyre!” His desperate plea was silenced by the pitch that enveloped their surroundings and erased her memory. His world turned black and cold, an eternal void.
“Are they groggy when they wake up? Do they dream when you put them under? Can Ian do it?” Rayne asked, each question louder, crisper than the one before.
“I’d teach him if I could,” a man said. “To hell with Weir law. The Primary’s insistence at nondisclosure is poppycock. That boy needs training, not indifference.”
Jaered struggled to open his eyes. He lay on his back against a cold metal surface. Something soft beneath his head. The butchered shoulder felt numb. Creaks rose from Jaered’s parched vocal cords when he attempted to speak. He blinked.
A familiar face cast a hardened and cautious expression. “Angus?” Jaered croaked. The man’s eyes widened in shock.
“You know him?” Rayne said.
“No,” the old man said.
“But isn’t Angus your first name?”
“I’ve never gone by that, not even as a child.”
“Why did you call him that?” Rayne asked Jaered.
Jaered remained mute. He didn’t dare look in her direction, at his wife in another life, from another universe. He closed his eyes. The dreams and memories that followed him back into this reality were still vivid and fresh. He wasn’t ready to let them go. A heartfelt sigh escaped before he could stifle it.
“Who do I thank?” Jaered said.
“Dr. Mac,” Rayne offered when the old man didn’t reply. The short, stout doctor pressed two fingers to Jaered’s wrist and looked at his pocket watch. A growl cleared the doctor’s throat.
A knock came at the door. Rayne paused with her hand on the knob. The old man wheeled the gurney out of view of the door and then tossed a sheet over Jaered.
“Ready?” It was the Heir’s voice.
“Ready,” she said. “Thank you, Dr. Mac. For everything.”
“So you keep saying.” The old doctor grunted. “Go.”
“Tara says you have about ten minutes at the most.”
“I’ll be out in five,” Dr. Mac said. “Don’t worry about me, Ian.”
The door shut. A second later, the sheet pulled back. The old doctor peered at Jaered with a touch of irritation. “You were supposed to be at the safe house.”
Jaered blinked. Safehouse? It seemed like a lifetime ago that Yannis delivered him to the run-down shack. “What do you know—”
“Eve contacted me. They were to keep you stable until I could get there,” Dr. Mac said.
“Ning slaughtered everyone. I followed him here.”
“You make a better butcher than a surgeon. I stopped counting the stitches.” The man wiped his hands on a blood-stained towel. “You are from Thrae. You know my paral. He goes by Angus.”
Adrenaline flushed the last of Jaered’s drowsy state and he pushed to sit up, but spikes drove into his chest and shoulders. He propped himself up on one elbow and waited for the shuddering pain to ease.
Dr. Mac didn’t move to help. A clear message for Jaered to stay put. The old man pulled the edge of the bandage back, revealing a portion of Jaered’s sun on his right breast. “The second I pulled off your blood-soaked bandage, I knew who you were.”
His thoughts stopped cold. Not another breathing soul on Earth knew of his birthright besides Eve—and his father. He gave into the weights pulling at his muscles, and he collapsed aga
inst the pillow.
“You’re Thrae’s Prophesied Son, the counterpart to our Ian, here on Earth,” Dr. Mac said.
Jaered gritted his teeth and steeled himself to the truth. Born too late—or not soon enough—forever destined as the one to fail his planet. “Did she see it?”
“No, I told her to keep watch at the front door while I treated you back here.” Dr. Mac wiped down the rest of his instruments and closed his bag. “I have a couple of questions,” the doctor said.
“I’m not one for answers.” Jaered said.
“Is he a healer, like me?”
His question gave Jaered pause. So much he could have asked, and yet, all he wanted to know was if his mirror image in the parallel universe had something in common. “Yes, he is.”
“Is he married? Are they happy?” Moisture veiled the old man’s eyes. He looked over Jaered’s shoulder and drifted into memories, painful or pleasant, Jaered couldn’t tell.
“Very happy,” Jaered responded truthfully.
Dr. Mac nodded as though satisfied. He laid a gentle hand on Jaered’s arm. “I’ve contacted Eve. She’ll send help to wherever home is for you. She said that you’re like Ian, that you don’t need a vortex to shyft, but I gave you a shot to boost your core just to be sure. You should be able to draw enough energy for a local shyft.” He grabbed Jaered’s arm and helped him to sit up. “At least wait until the room stops spinning. You lost a lot of blood.” The doctor shuffled over to the sink in soiled bunny slippers, washed his hands, then wiped down the surfaces. “Seeing how reckless you can be, I suspect our paths will cross again.”
“Thank you,” Jaered said.
“For the greater good.” Dr. Mac recited the rebel litany with more emotion than Jaered had heard in a while. The old man turned off the light and left Jaered sitting in darkness.
“For the greater good,” Jaered whispered to no one in particular. He’d known for some time that Eve’s rebels were numerous and stretched across Earth. Jaered had brought most of them from Thrae. But not all.
Jaered slid off the gurney. He drew energy into his core and a second later, shyfted into the bushes across from the Big Cat House building. He stifled a cough. Once he verified the coast was clear, he snuck up to the entrance. Blood seeped out from beneath the crumbled lion statue. The Pur clean-up crew had left Donovan where he died. How would the news speculate and spin the CEO’s demise? A twilight drug deal gone awry?
After shyfting to the zoo, it had taken the last of Jaered’s core energy to fling a concentrated energy blast at the statue. It toppled down on Donovan without the Heir any wiser, thanks to the quake. Jaered told himself he’d been saving the Heir from certain death, sparing the earth from premature genocide in the process. He knew better.
Jaered felt for the dead man’s pockets under the statue, careful not to disturb the blood. He found Donovan’s cell phone. It took a few seconds longer to locate the tranquilizer gun. In the scuffle with the wolf, Donovan had kicked it into the nearby bushes. The Pur clean-up crew hadn’t stumbled upon it. Jaered checked the chamber. One dart remained, still intact. The fool had wasted half the serum on the trash can. A partial dose was better than nothing.
{52}
A growling stomach roused Jaered from a dreamless sleep. The aroma of baking bread was overshadowed by garlic and onions.
Humming came from the opposite side of the room. A clat-ter as dishes collided in the sink.
At first, Jaered’s lids refused to cooperate, but with some effort he succeeded in opening his eyes. Eve stood at the kitchen counter with her back to him. Her hips shimmied while she scrubbed, splattering sudsy water into the air.
“You shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous for us both.” He cleared his throat when his words came out raspy.
“After the safe house, I wasn’t about to trust anyone else,” she said without turning around.
“It was Ning.” Jaered tilted his head to get a better look at something that dangled overhead. It was an IV bag, suspended from a wire hanger hung with a bent nail.
“A trick from my nursing days.” She hummed while stirring something in a pot at the stove. “This place was quite the mess. You’re all male, you know that, don’t you?”
“Whatever that means.” A deep inhale inflated his lungs, but it triggered a spasm in his upper chest where the doctor had repaired Jaered’s butchering. “There’s a cell phone on the table.”
Steps. A second later, a beep. “Donovan’s?” she said.
“Trace who he was talking to on Sunday, around one thirty in the afternoon.” He licked his parched lips and swallowed. “Whoever it was, knows about the serum’s key ingredient being manufactured off-site. You can track it down and make sure it’s destroyed.”
“Making whatever Aeros gets his hands on, useless.” She pocketed it. “Good work. My men found a tablet in Yannis’s car when they cleaned up at the safe house. My people cracked his password. We now have the shipment addresses.”
“You know where my father’s legions are?” This was huge. If Jaered had any spare energy, he’d have jumped out of bed. As it was, he compromised on a smile. “How many?”
“A little more than a thousand.” She resumed her stirring, her humming more lively than before.
Jaered rubbed his eyes. Beyond the IV bag, Eve had tacked several photos to the wall. They were from the batch he col-lected at the Duach warehouse and sent to Eve a few months earlier. Rayne was in most of them. The Heir in the rest.
He stared at them and fought to keep his breaths steady and even. “What is this, a test?”
“No.” She wiped her hands on a towel, then dragged a chair over from the dinette table. She sat down and pressed a gentle hand to his forehead, while at the same time she checked his pulse at his wrist. Her rose-pink nail polish clashed with her apron’s bright yellow and green stripes. “I get it now, why you can’t stay away from her. She’s a reminder of why you’re here,” Eve said.
“And the Heir is up there to remind me that it isn’t her,” he said. Eve kissed his forehead, then returned to the sink. Jaered closed his eyes. She moved around the kitchenette, cleaning up, turning on and off the water. The sounds of normal life dumped emotional drawers that had been stuffed with painful memories. “She was pregnant,” he blurted, compelled to voice what his heartache could no longer ignore.
Eve stilled. “That’s why you didn’t bring her to Earth with the others. She couldn’t parashyft.”
“I lost them both because I wasn’t willing to risk it.”
“You lost her because your father found out you were bringing his enemies here and hiding them among the popu-lace.”
He clenched his eyes against the flaming memories that consumed what little happiness he’d found in the universe. He had stopped trying to drown out her screams long ago. His father’s message loud and clear. Aeros couldn’t kill Jaered. But everything, everyone else, was fair game.
“How far along?” Eve asked.
“Five months.” Jaered stared at the pictures. Eve had opened the door, encouraging—expecting him to rid himself of what made him weak. A racking sob drove painful spikes into his chest and shoulders. He welcomed it. The floodgates burst open, and he gave Eve what she wanted. What they both knew he needed.
Jaered opened his eyes to find Aeros standing over him in the darkened room. He grabbed Jaered’s arm. They reappeared at the base of a rocky cliff. His father let go. Gale force winds slammed Jaered into a boulder, and he slunk to his knees with a groan. He grabbed his arm and pressed hard into the boulder against the painful jabs radiating from his shoulders.
Aeros crouched down and sized Jaered up. “You look like hell.”
“I was shot trying to cover your butt.”
Aeros shyfted to the top of the boulder a split second before the surf’s spray swept in. It doused Jaered. He spit saline out of his mouth and shivered from the icy chill. Salt water seeped into his wounds, christening them with a fiery ache.
“T
he shipment, where is it, Jaered?” Aeros shouted from his perch. “If you want to be spared my wrath, you had best tell me it’s en route.”
“Donovan double-crossed us. He tried to use it as a bar-gaining tool.”
“For what?”
“His wife’s murder.”
“And you had issue with that, no doubt.”
Jaered’s core turned into a searing cauldron and it took deep breaths just to control his voice. He was thankful the latest wave doused his temper before his father had the satisfaction of witnessing it. “He separated the formula into two parts. One half was being manufactured at his facility. The other half at a secret location. Unless they’re combined, the drug is no better than water. Somehow the Pur got wind of it. They didn’t waste any time infiltrating the company. We had no choice but to delete anything that could be traced back to you and cover your ass. Yannis and I barely made it out of there with our lives.”
“Ah, Yannis. Where is he?”
“I was wounded. He took me to get help. Ning showed up. Yannis died trying to protect me.”
His father scoffed. “Why would Ning waste his energy on you?”
“Donovan had us in a race to kill his wife. The winner would get everything.”
“What interest would Ning have in the serum?”
“We didn’t stop fighting long enough to make chitchat. But you saw what the serum did to a Sar’s core.”
“He’d administer it just to watch Sars burn,” Aeros said. “Where’s my little pyro, now?”
“I wish I knew. I have unfinished business with that ass-hole.” Jaered wondered what the Heir’s group had done with the body.
Aeros’s silence was never a good sign. Failure was hardly tolerated, much less betrayal. The unknown fallout kept Jaered’s nerves raw. His shivering masked his tightly wound nerves.
“I have a job for you,” Aeros said.
Someone’s fate was decided. “Are you blind? I’m injured!”
“Richard Donovan is dead and therefore out of my reach.”
“So, send flowers.”