Silver Storm: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 2

by Michele Callahan

“How long will your ‘tangle’ last?”

  “A few hours. Maybe a day. I’m not sure.” The truth was, she had absolutely no idea. The camouflage was working, she could feel the cold bite of their energy when they brushed up against her defenses, but they were brushing glances, like a busy bee hopping between flowers. The cold didn’t stick. Thank God. Maybe she just needed more time to work on her control.

  “Hours.” Tim’s eyes rounded in alarm and Sarah waved off his concern.

  “They can’t find me right now. Trust me. If they could, they’d be attacking already. And I’ll feel them when they do find me. I made sure of that.”

  He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows like she was a fool for believing her own words. Perhaps she was. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Assuming they won’t be able to break my energy shield, they’ll start looking for me in the flesh.” God, was that calm, detached voice really coming from her? Wow. She was better than she thought.

  “No. They won’t.” Someone wasn’t calm about the idea. So much coiled anger vibrated through the words her head throbbed again in response.

  “Yes, they will. If they can’t kill me from afar, they’ll try to kill me on the ground.” She looked him straight in the eye, but he didn’t budge. Not even a muscle twitched. She polished off the last bite of her sandwich and used her blessedly free hand to try to rub the pain out of her temple.

  Tim watched her vain attempts to rid herself of the pain, then promptly reached across and pulled her into his lap.

  “What?”

  “Hush.” Tim took the hot chocolate mug from her, set it aside and placed his palm on her neck, over her Mark, and soothing warmth flooded her limbs. He lifted her hand to the Mark on his neck and held it there. The flood of heat was heady and the room spun around her as if she were drunk. She closed her eyes and pressed her now pain-free head into his shoulder. No pain. Floating and spinning, but no pain. Just heat…

  Tim’s voice rumbled through his chest beneath her ear, and he sounded a bit out of breath. “So, how do they track you?” Tim’s question tied her stomach in knots.

  “I don’t know. I just felt their intention. They’ve been here a long time. They know human ways.” Sarah placed her free hand on his shoulder and mustered every ounce of courage she had. She could do this alone if it meant saving Tim. She would find a way to keep him out of danger. It would be hard, but a small, cold, and extremely calm part of her soul whispered to her that it wouldn’t last for long. It whispered the truth to her with icy resolve. Deep within, where the energy built and gathered, she knew there was one way she could guarantee the girl had enough time to grow up. She was just having a bit of a hard time accepting that option. If she transferred her existence onto the energy field and surrounded the girl there, she could protect her for a long, long time. But her physical form wouldn’t survive long without her soul. It was a sucky choice, and she’d fight tooth and nail against it, but she had no guarantees that it wouldn’t come to that. She’d be immortal in the energy fields, and powerful. But Tim would be left behind in the physical world. Alone.

  Suddenly, she was fiercely glad that Tim wasn’t in love with her. Perhaps she was meant to be alone. She had a definite purpose. The Archiver had come for her. That bolt of lightning had struck true. This was her destiny. She was a Timewalker.

  Tim would help her, could keep her alive and ease her burden for as long as possible. But, if she had to leave him behind in this world, he’d be free. No pain. No broken heart. Everything was as it should be.

  “Are you sure you can you feel their approach? Will you know when they are closing in on our position?”

  “Yes, I think so.” It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  “Where are they now?”

  Sarah opened her mind to the energy swirling around them and followed the threads she’d woven around herself outward until she reached the wide-open expanse of this world, this time. Everything moved in a giant slosh of waves, energies dancing and crashing against each other like rolling tides and currents in the ocean. She knew what she was looking for, knew what their energy tasted like to her soul. It took her mere moments to find them, lightly probe the edges of their corrupted, evil natures, then retreat to her body, still warm and snug in Tim’s arms. “They’re still watching Chicago.”

  She opened her eyes to find Tim’s gaze locked on to her face like a laser. First her eyes, then her cheekbones. His gaze roamed her features, then stopped and held on her lips.

  “Maybe we should hunt them instead. Can you find their ship?”

  “Yes. I can feel them individually. I would assume they’d be gathered on a ship. So, yes, I think I can.”

  “And you’ll feel them if they break through now? You’ll have warning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God.” He whispered his thanks and crushed her to his chest, his lips covered hers, demanding a response.

  She was helpless against the onslaught of sensation. His masculine scent teased her nose beneath the subtle aroma of rose bubble bath. The reminder of the way he took care of her, held her, filled her head and heart with lust stronger than anything she’d ever felt in her life. He was perfect. Strong. Sexy. Stubborn as hell.

  His hands rounded the curves of her waist and back. He shifted, laying her down on the couch and covering her. His hot body pressed her down into the soft leather at her back, lips never losing contact as his tongue sought entry into her mouth to taste her and explore. To seduce.

  She wrapped her arms around his head and pulled him closer, her tongue dueling with his, tasting him as she ran her hands over his head and shoulders, absorbing the feel of him, the absolute power he held in such tight control. For the first time in her life she felt small, feminine, and beautiful. Desired.

  The sensation was both heady and painful. All that coiled strength. All his intelligence and honor. He was perfect, the perfect man. And he wanted her. Her. There was no room for deceit in the power of his kiss, no hesitation in the firm touch of his hands as they roamed her body, no doubt of the desire that pressed so firmly against her through the fabric of soft cotton pants. Nothing mattered but surrendering to his touch. She didn’t need to breathe, to think, to cry. She needed to feel, to give him everything.

  At least once before she died, she was going to give herself totally and completely to a man. He couldn’t love her yet, he couldn’t know what her future might hold. But she would take him with her, carry this moment inside her soul and draw on its power. When she had nothing left, the memory of his touch, his kiss, would give her the strength to do what needed to be done. With Tim at her side, perhaps she could become a predator, too.

  The moment he placed Sarah’s hand over the Mark on his neck he was lost. His entire body pulsed in time to her heartbeat and his need for her roared back to life with the fury of a beast twice denied.

  So, he asked her what he needed to know. They had a few hours. Chicago was no longer the prime target. They wanted Sarah…

  Over his dead body.

  He kissed her because he had to, rolled her beneath his larger frame on the couch because he needed her to know she was his now, his to touch, his to protect, and his to claim.

  The fact that she wore his sweatpants and T-shirt and they were caressing her naked flesh, were all that separated her from his touch, added to the animalistic knowledge that she belonged to him now. The couch he’d settled her naked body on just hours ago was large, plush, soft, and more than long enough to accommodate their six-foot frames.

  The chaos of the day swirled through his mind once again as he tasted her kiss. The image of her cold, spiritless form at the top of the observatory fueled his need to explore her skin, to keep her hot, pliant, and soft as melted butter everywhere his fingertips roamed.

  He’d had lovers. He’d started seducing the pretty girls in high school. Once he’d joined the military, keeping a woman became too hard. Too many secrets he couldn’t tell her, too many lies. His las
t girlfriend had survived eight months of not knowing where he was or if he’d come home. That was that. He figured it wasn’t right to ask any female to put up with the demands of his life.

  He’d been playing in the sandbox like an innocent five-year-old while people like Sarah, Timewalkers, were on the real front lines battling planetwide destruction.

  An invisible time-traveling guru had chosen him, Timothy Daniel Tucker, with his shaved head, burn scars, and tattoos to protect Sarah, to help her save the world. To love her.

  Sarah didn’t have a team of trained soldiers at her beck and call. She had no backup, no training, no group of knuckle-headed, rude, sex-starved, testosterone-driven wild men willing to take a bullet for her. She risked everything for a nameless, faceless humanity.

  The pressure would break most men he knew.

  But Sarah didn’t break, she arched her back beneath him and wrapped her arms around his head, locking him in place like a band of molten metal. Her hands roamed his head, feeling her way around the lumps and scars on his neck, clinging to him and his hard-ass head like she cared, like the rigid lines and uneven landscape there turned her on. Like she loved him.

  No. He couldn’t allow his mind to go there, to imagine her lips lingering on his old wounds and healing him from the inside out. It hurt too much.

  He pulled away and lifted her T-shirt over her head, bared her to his hungry eyes. “You’re beautiful, Sarah.”

  She didn’t answer, just lifted her hips off the couch so he could pull the loose sweatpants down her legs and throw them on the floor. He wanted to taste the slim lines of her throat, the lean muscled legs and small, pert breasts. Every inch of her slender form was long, lithe and calling out to him to explore.

  He shucked his own clothing in a frantic series of impatience and covered her, skin to skin. He reclaimed her mouth in a kiss meant to sear her to the soul. She’d never forget she was his. She’d never question again.

  The two lamps at the ends of the couch flickered. Tim tore his lips away from her mouth so he could taste the column of Sarah’s neck, her ear. His lips grazed behind her ear to kiss the Mark there.

  A jolt of power flowed from her skin to his lips and into his mouth before flooding his body with the drumbeat of her erratic pulse. The sensation traveled straight to his groin and he swelled to painful fullness.

  She moaned his name and her legs wrapped around the back of his as she opened for him and he settled against her core.

  “You’re mine, Sarah.” Tim nipped at the sensitive flesh one more time and enjoyed the rolling flow of energy that buzzed through his bloodstream. “And I’m yours.”

  He stopped thinking then and let his body take over, go where it wanted to go, taste where it wanted to taste. His lips wandered down over her shoulder to tease her nipple. His ears filled with the soft sounds of her surrender as he continued to nibble and pull her soft flesh into his mouth. He shifted enough to allow his hand to slide over her petal-soft skin, headed south to her welcoming heat. He stroked her there until she panted his name, begging for release. Only then did he make the small shift and slide into the wet heat of her body, joining them at last.

  Sarah cried out and arched her hips. She drove up against him until he was completely consumed by her flesh. He would have survived the exquisite pain of denying his own release if she hadn’t chosen that moment to wrap her hands around his head, placing her palm over the sacred Mark on his neck.

  He stopped breathing. Air stopped moving, trapped in his lungs by the surging tide of electricity that swamped them both. The charge built between them. Everywhere they touched power flowed skin to skin, surrounding them in a bath of sensual energy. The heat built, concentrated where they were joined together. Sarah’s fingers dug into him as the sensation tore him away from reality.

  She whimpered as orgasm after orgasm rippled through her entire body. The wet heat surrounding him gripped his body, squeezed and massaged him with relentless fury.

  The once flickering light bulbs popped and returned the room to near darkness. He didn’t care. He wanted her to blow up the whole damn house from wanting him. He wanted to burn his touch into her soul and he’d sacrifice the building’s wiring if that meant she’d be his forever.

  He didn’t have much to offer her. He was broken and scarred, ugly and hard. But he could protect her. He could kill for her. And he could give her this…

  Sarah’s mouth sought his and he complied, wanting to taste her sighs of pleasure. She found his hand with her own and guided it to the Mark on her neck. He followed her lead, touched her Mark and completed the circuit he somehow knew would change everything.

  Pleasure rocked through them again and she sobbed his name as the next climax thundered through her.

  He held on as long as he could, a marathon of erotic torture forcing him closer and closer to the edge.

  He succumbed at last and bit back a shout as his own orgasm started in his toes and swamped his bloodstream like a blowtorch of pleasure wiping out all doubt, all fear, all thought.

  When he could move, he nuzzled her neck with his nose and allowed the sweet scent of roses and sunshine to sooth his soul. Sarah was his now. He’d kill anyone who tried to hurt her.

  They lay entwined and he knew she felt it too, the ebb and flow of warmth, the pulses of soothing heat that filled his body with peace.

  He rolled to the side and pulled her to lie across his chest before covering them both with the blanket. She wasn’t ready to hunt for the ship just yet. He’d make her rest, then eat. Then they’d figure their next move out together.

  She fell asleep almost immediately. He had a long time to lay there, hold her, and think…

  <><><>

  Sarah blushed as she pulled a comb through her still wet hair. Their lovemaking had blown her mind, her body, and her heart wide open to the soldier sitting across from her. They’d fallen asleep for a couple of hours, naked, limbs entwined, still connected in the most intimate way possible. It had been embarrassing to wake up and feel him still inside her…for about half a minute. Then desire had come roaring back as he shifted against her and his erection returned with a vengeance, filling her from the inside out. The sensation of him growing within her had triggered an immediate answering heat and they hadn’t even tried to deny each other.

  Sarah sighed at the memory. Tim was big. He was smart. He was brutal, unforgiving, and trained to kill.

  Maybe he was perfect for her after all.

  A quick shower, always touching, and now dressing in some more of her new clothing made her feel almost normal. Almost.

  The hungry animal she saw lurking behind his gaze as he watched her shower then dress made her feel decidedly not-normal. Men did not look at her like that. They just didn’t. Until Tim. She didn’t even lie to herself about it. She relished his lust, reveled in the memory of their mind-blowing orgasm-fest. In fact, she wanted him again. She could still feel the firm surety of his fingers on her flesh, his mouth on her breasts, his lips and tongue tasting her like he could never get enough.

  Jesus, that kind of attention could be addictive. She flinched at the blasphemous thought. “Sorry, Gran.”

  Her grandmother would have washed her mouth out with soap for that one.

  “What?” Tim sat across from her at the small table, bare foot covering hers beneath the chair, a map of Chicago on the surface with circles and grids.

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  Tim wanted to plan, to figure out the best way to hunt the bad guys’ ship. He’d asked her the one question she hadn’t thought of…what if the girl never left Chicago? Ever. What if that was why the bad guys were camped out here? She couldn’t leave. She had to defend the city at all costs.

  They’d already spent a couple of hours poring over Luke’s flash drive and all the data on geomagnetics and quantum physics. Theories and formulas and a bunch of words that may as well have been Greek. Tim was in his element. She was no help at all.

  She wasn’t stupid.
She had a journalism degree and had planned to go to work in the field after she’d finished playing volleyball. But more than twenty-five years of life and discovery had passed her by. Newspapers were, according to Tim, dead or dying. Everything now was on the computer, out there in space somewhere in “the cloud” on his iPad gadget.

  She tried to comprehend the changes, but found she didn’t care right now. She needed to worry about survival before she worried about the future of journalism. That meant physics. Mathematical theory. She could understand general terms and ideas, but she wasn’t a physicist or electrical engineer. Magnetics and electricity were beyond her ability to decipher and absorb in a couple of hours.

  Especially when her mind was constantly preoccupied with thoughts of getting Tim naked again.

  Her attention glued to the steel-like strength of his shoulders where Tim leaned over studying a map of Chicago and her gaze wandered the curves of his neck, jaw, and head. Her lips longed to follow.

  Seriously, this was ridiculous. She wasn’t a sex-starved teenager. She had to find a way to take out that ship before it could wipe out Chicago, and as much as the thought disappointed her, sex with Tim wasn’t going to help her with that. She didn’t know who the girl was. She only knew the girl’s soul was young, and in Chicago somewhere. There were way too many people at risk to try to find her in time, nine million too many.

  Chapter Nine

  Maybe if she had ten years, Luke’s fancy telepathy that Tim had told her about over coffee, and no enemies hot on her trail she could find the girl. Even then, she doubted it would be possible. The child was powerful, but she was very young and didn’t have a clue why she was hunted. Sarah was still in shock trying to digest the fact that these enemies were dedicating so much energy into killing one little human girl.

  Why didn’t really matter. It didn’t have to make sense. Maybe she should tell the Archiver and Celestina. They had power. Perhaps they could help her protect the girl.

  Perhaps not. And Sarah had no way to get in touch with them, other than attacking their ship again to get their attention. Maybe Luke could get them a message. But was that the right decision? The girl was human. Celestina and the Archiver were not.