by Claire Davon
Another groan and the trolley shifted a small fraction forward.
She studied Sonder, still standing in front of Illiria, but facing her. A muscle in his jaw jumped as if he were trying really hard not to say, or do, something.
“I know that this is not something to use capriciously. You, all of you, you have different time bases for a reason. I don’t know who, or what, these aliens, or future humans are, but there is a reason that there are brakes on your time jumps.” She sighed. “I don’t know if they gave this ability to me, or if it was something I was born with--something that came out when my life was in danger. There are so many things I don’t know. I don’t know what I am capable of, other than the small piece I’ve done.”
She looked at Sonder again. “I don’t know if I can trust you, but I know I trust you more than anyone else.” She glanced at Rogald. “You, jury is still out on, but you rank a close second.” She nodded to Illiria. “You, the rest of you, I don't trust at all. I know the Commander would have killed me and will probably still try. Tell him not to chase me through time, or he will be sorry. I don’t trust you, and I never will.”
Illiria shrugged, as if she expected it.
“It would have been better if you hadn’t survived. It would have been better if you hadn’t come back from the Event. I don’t know how this duality of time happened, but it did. It would have been better if we had ensured your death when we could have.”
Fiona absorbed that, a pang shooting through her, but trying not to show any outward sign.
Fiona absorbed that, a pang shooting through her, but trying not to show any outward sign. “But I did survive. Twice. If Rogald and I hadn’t been yanked back from the Event, we would have died. Something bigger than us is out there, watching. I don’t know where, when, or why, but I know it. So.” She looked at Sonder again.
“I’m not going to be a part of either one of your groups.”
Illiria sucked in a breath. “You need training. You need data. You need people around you to guide you.”
The fury that had been building in Fiona finally broke through. “What I need is for people not to be trying to kill me. What I need is to be left alone. What I need has nothing to do with you. I need to know a lot of things. But I’m not doing it with you. Or you.” She nodded to Rogald, who inclined his head in what seemed like respect.
“Fiona, what Illiria said, what she alluded to, back in Pepperell, you know that wasn’t true.” Sonder’s voice was harsh, and slightly desperate.
The man of her dreams was a puzzle. Literally the man of her dreams, not some crazy imagery, a man born in her dreams and who had come to life in front of her, he was nonetheless still a cipher to her. She didn’t know him, even though she’d been naked with him. She didn’t know any of them.
“Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. You just helped save my life, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know you,” she said huskily. “I don’t know who you are or what you are capable of.”
Everything around them moved forward a fraction. There was a slight feel of wind, a tiny breeze that indicated weather was coming back to their time frame as well.
“I don’t know anything, Sonder. I don’t know if I can trust you, not the way I need to, but you’re all I’ve got. Rogald, maybe, but the rest of the folks, not at all.”
Illiria was looking at her wrist device. “We’re almost out of time.”
Rogald looked at his as well, and punched in some numbers. “Commander will be back any second now with reinforcements. And he will be pissed. I could call my guys.…”
Fiona nodded, looking at Sonder. He walked towards her and stood in front of her, his arms crossed, slightly arrogant and very masculine. He was alpha, and he knew it. He was a man, a soldier, possibly a long-term lover. “You need me.”
“Don’t get cocky, kid.” She saw that the Star Wars reference went over his head. She didn’t know what she was going to have to talk about with a man born fifty years after she had been.
She was going to find out.
She nodded, hating to admit it, but knowing that now was not the time to play coy. “I do. I can’t do this alone. I have no idea what happens next, what all this means for the future. Or the past. Or the present. I don’t know what any of this means. I have a power, a power I don’t understand any more than I truly understand what has happened over the past few days. I need time.” She chuckled wryly. “I guess I have that, don’t I?”
Sonder put out his hand. “I am your man. I will help you.”
In the distance, there was the sound of a crash.
“You’ve got to go.” Rogald said. “Sonder, take care of her or you’re on my shit list. Fiona, if you need me, just whistle.”
She chuckled, recognizing the thirties movie reference. “I will.”
“She won’t need you,” Sonder said.
Oh, she was going to have her hands full with this one. She wasn’t used to alpha males, but maybe that was what she had needed all along.
“You’re making a big mistake. Good luck.” Illiria’s voice was dry, crackling with a thinly veiled contempt laced with fear. “Guardian, you are fired. If we capture you again, you will be locked up for a very long time.”
“I quit.”
She only nodded. “We will be watching.”
“Not if I see you first.”
She didn’t smile.
“You’ve got about a minute, Fiona.”
She saw the cars inch forward and thought she saw a person begin to open their mouth in recognition of the disaster about to happen.
She nodded. Sonder was looking at Fiona, his hand still outstretched.
“Where to?”
She didn’t know what happened next. She didn’t know what was going to happen, what her role in this crazy drama was, how her power affected things.
But, she supposed, they were going to find out.
She put her hand in his and smiled. He grasped it and lifted their clasped hands, pressing a kiss against her closed palm. She felt the tingle all the way to her toes and many places in between.
“I’ve always wanted to go to Greece. Santorini. I want to see the volcano and the stairs. I want to ride the donkeys up the path. I have seen lots of pictures I can use.”
“Greece is gorgeous,” Sonder agreed.
She concentrated on a picture she had in her mind of Santorini as she’d seen it in travel brochures. She pictured the stairs, the collapsed volcano in the middle of the water, and the white structures dotting the semicircular cliff until the image was vivid and clear in her mind.
As the time line groaned and began to return to the present around them, Fiona concentrated, and felt the shimmer and the blackness around them begin. She saw Rogald and Illiria still standing there, and then Rogald was gone. A moment later, so was Illiria, even as the people started to move around them.
With her hand still clasped in Sonder’s, she looked up at him and smiled.
He smiled back.
It was going to be all right, whatever "it" was.
“Time to go,” Fiona said.
THE END
BEST OF TIMES
By
Claire Davon
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2015 Claire Davon
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express written permission from the publisher.
ASIN: B00SP0KP2A
Chapter 1
The big, green subway car bore down on her, its windows blinking in the sunlight. Fiona shrieked and tried to run, but she was rooted to her spot on the concrete. It was no use. The streetcar was going to hit her and she would die. The large mechanical beast kept closing in, until it w
as so close that the windows looked like malevolent, blank eyes. Still, Fiona couldn’t move. She heard nothing but the frantic beat of her heart.
The subway car blurred and vanished, turning into the remains of a flaking, bent Golden Gate bridge. Its towers were broken, listing against the shattered cables. For miles around the bridge there was nothing but dirt and tall lumps that she identified in her dream as buildings. Fiona saw herself from a distance, standing in front of the decaying structure and staring up at it. The wind howled all around her. There was no movement, no sign of life. No birds sang and there wasn’t as much as a blade of grass or piece of clover. It was desolate, the kind of desolation that crushed the soul.
Then she was thrown into complete blackness. She could hear and see nothing. It was as if you were dying while also thinking that you were alive.
The tableau shifted and there were pictures, ones she’d never seen before, in front of her vision. They were stylized, foreign, familiar but unfamiliar. She knew the artwork, she’d seen it before, but she couldn’t place how. The pictures wavered, dancing like moving images. She should know them, she knew that. She thought she would be able to figure it out, if she had time to focus on them, but they kept flickering. They danced like a strobe light, moving past her vision, too fast for analysis.
Intermittent sounds assaulted her ears. Music seared the edges of her mind, creating a dissonant harmony like an old manual turntable winding down. It was atonal, and not similar to any music she had grown up with. Again, there was a haunting sense of familiarity, like she knew it and couldn’t place it in the dream sequence. It would all make sense if she could determine why she knew it.
“Fiona, Fiona…”
The voice was a welcome, familiar anchor in the weird.
“Fiona.”
Like a movie shown in reverse, the pictures and sounds peeled away, then the blackness receded, the broken Golden Gate Bridge pulled back and finally the subway car retreated, all of it spinning away into the dark, shaking as they spun.
No. They weren’t moving. She was shaking, or rather, being shaken.
Fiona surfaced into wakefulness and felt Sonder’s hand on her shoulder, his fingers pressing against the muscle, leaving white marks on her skin. He was rocking her back and forth with some force, as if he had been trying to wake her for some time. His body was tense, power coiled in the lines of his figure, and he appeared ready to react at a moment’s notice. Five years in the Guardians had given him quick reflexes. The instincts of a soldier didn’t fade in only three months.
She blinked. The images continued to pull away until they were gone, buried back into her subconscious and replaced by the early morning glow of sunrise over Santorini. The vista was in front of her, and Sonder was behind her. Fiona looked back, smiling at him. The sunlight caught his dark brown hair at the tips, making the ends lighten. Her future-born lover put his arms around her and pulled her against him.
“Bad dream?” he asked.
She nodded, burrowing her back against his warmth. His crisp chest hair and taut muscles created a wonderful contrast of springy and hard. His breathing was even and she felt the exhalation of it beside her ear.
“The usual,” she admitted, and turned around to face him.
The three months that had passed since she discovered she had the ability to travel through time had gone by fast, she reflected, combing her hand through Sonder’s hair. Three months ago she had no idea that the man of her dreams, the one who had begun turning up in her slumber when she was a teenager, existed. It still seemed like a dream sometimes, the good kind, not like the one he’d just shaken her awake from.
The sun’s rays glinted off the blue Aegean Sea as well as the surrounding pieces of Santorini, streaming through the diaphanous curtains into the long-term rental they had. The amazing vistas had not grown old in the months they had been there.
Fiona rose, naked, kissing Sonder and then going to the window. The view never failed to astonish her and Fiona thought it would be a long time before she got tired of looking at the multi colored strata.
“Are they more than dreams?” Sonder asked from behind her. She glanced back at him. He looked worried, but was studying her with an intensity that would make her shiver under different circumstances. She saw him glance toward a pile in the corner of the living room of their accommodations.
She hated that pile, although she knew why he kept it. Leaving the Guardians had meant leaving his old life as a protector of the time stream behind. She wasn’t sure if she was happy that he still had the equipment, but the times she had tried to find out his purpose in keeping it had been waved off. The equipment stayed with them, a remnant of his former life. She looked closely at it, making sure its lights and dials were dark. Without Fiona, he would need it to jump through time, but as long as she was there, it was irrelevant.
A similarly naked Sonder joined her by the large window. The sun was continuing to emerge and its rays lit the sea with yellow and red, making the waves appear to be on fire. She could see the volcano in the middle of the bay, and the darker ocean around its still active base. Santorini had a violent history, and the power of the eruption that had exploded millennia before, shattering the island apart was a big part of that past. Someday in the future the volcano would erupt again, causing untold devastation.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, and then shuddered when he curved his hands around her naked butt and pulled her into his growing arousal. “Are you trying to distract me, Mister Mishan?”
He smiled, more of a baring of his teeth than a smile before he leaned down and nipped her upper lip. “Yes. Is it working?”
He may be the man she had dreamed about for years, but she hadn’t known him at all. In the beginning Fiona had been worried she’d made a mistake and gone off with a man she knew nothing about. After the first few weeks, though, Fiona had not regretted her impulsive decision that day on the Brookline subway tracks three months prior. She had fallen in love with a man who she never would have met under any other circumstances, and it was the best thing that could have happened to her.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, she thought as she returned the nip. Life was about taking risks. She heard him groan deep inside his chest. He pressed himself, hard and heavy, against her thigh.
“It’s working,” she acknowledged.
“Fiona,” he murmured, and kissed her, his tongue seeking hers out and tangling with it. She leaned into him, raking her nails down his back and glorying in the ripple of his body. The future was something she had to face, and soon, but she pushed that knowledge off, preferring instead to snuggle up to the man she had dreamt about for years. The day was coming when she would have to face what it meant to be the Traveler, the one person who didn’t need to use devices to travel through time. Surely she deserved a small vacation before trying to save the world? Fiona thought about her safe places, two jump points she had fixed in her mind that were easy to remember. The first point was to London, on the grounds of Westminster Abbey. There was a single status in a quiet place in the gardens where their chances of discovery would be low. She’d taken trips there and studied the statue until she could see it with her eyes closed. It would be easy to shift there, even under duress. The other destination was Brazil, on the hill below the famous statue of Christ. Even if a gun was being held on them she was pretty sure she could visualize either in her mind quickly and get herself and Sonder out of danger.
Then all thoughts of time travel, safe places and bad dreams were put aside by the reality of Sonder kissing her. He pulled her back from the window, into his arms, his nose bumping hers as he caressed her. His hands moved down her body until they reached her breasts and cupped them. Fiona moaned when his thumbs played over her erect nipples. Sonder caught the sound and swallowed it, making a murmur deep in his throat.
Sonder duck walked her backwards to the bed, keeping their bodies locked together. She felt him shiver, and gloried in her ability to elicit that response fr
om him. It matched the need deep within her, the desire for this one man alone.
His hands and mouth roamed her body, kissing, suckling, until Fiona was grasping at him and moaning. His hard cock bobbed between them and she reached down to stroke it, feeling him gasp when she touched him.
“Yeah,” he whispered, moving her hand and replacing it with his own. He played his length along her and entered her slowly, so slowly she moaned and raked her nails across his back. Sonder threw his head back, his teeth bared. His body pulsed deep, tiny tremors rippling his frame. The answering echo in her own flesh shot through her nerve endings. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him all the way inside her. Sonder growled at the contact, burying himself to the hilt.
“Sonder, oh god,” she cried. Under the skin she felt the stirring of her heightening excitement. The delicious friction of his pelvis on her most sensitive spot was beginning to send her into overdrive. She groaned, low and guttural, and he echoed the sound.
He reached down and stroked her. Fiona bucked, small cries escaping her lips. Sonder pulled the sounds deep into his mouth, kissing her before his body rippled and he lengthened inside her.
“Kale mou,” he crooned, quickening his tempo. He had picked up the Greek endearment sometime in the last months and the use of it warmed her inside. She thrust against him, their bodies slapping together. Tendrils of ecstasy curled as he continued to caress her. The sensation built higher, stronger and she clutched at him as the world broke apart around her. With his name on her lips, Fiona came, her orgasm tearing at the fabric of reality. She heard him shout her name and then he, too, was crying out, his back arched and he lost it, his essence filling her.
She lay wrapped in his arms, feeling her skin begin to cool by increments, content to just stay inside his cocoon and not move. It was safe there, shielded from reality by his presence, and part of her never wanted to leave.