Time Rider (Rise of the Skipworths)

by Mallory Kane

  She laughed a little, her breast rippling against his chest, but her warm naked body against him was no longer delicious. It was awful, somehow tied up with terror and sadness so profound he thought his heart would burst. He swallowed against the bitter taste in his throat and wished she would shut up.

  "It's like I said. I think I was looking for something—something those boys didn't have. A bond, a link. Like when you kiss me, Rider. I can feel what’s inside you. I can almost hear your thoughts.”

  Moaning, he sat up and pushed her away, the nausea overwhelming him, the ache in his gut blinding him. He vaulted up and ran into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him, ignoring her cry of alarm. He splashed cold water on his face and neck with shaking hands, then stood there bent over the sink for a long time, until the waves of sickness began to lessen.

  What was it, the memory that was trying to push its way past his conditioning? He clamped his jaw tight, seeing again the vision of black leather and goggles, and Mari’s lovely, smiling face.

  His wife was dead, murdered by Deviants.

  And Kristen Skipworth was the enemy. The Mother of all the Deviants. It was why he'd been sent to kill her. Bitter nausea gripped him again. He'd made love with her—with the one person he hated most in all time. He gagged and coughed, then sluiced his mouth out with water, swallowing several mouthfuls to quell the last of the nausea. Looking at his reflection, he searched his face, disgusted with what he saw. What had he done? He couldn’t remember the last time he'd made love with his wife, and now he had betrayed her with the woman whose spawn had killed her. He held on to his hatred with every shred of will he could muster, because something had gone terribly wrong with his conditioning.

  But even more frightening than that, something had gone wrong with his heart. No matter how strongly his brain insisted she was the enemy, worthy only of his hatred, there was something inside him that wasn't quite convinced. No matter how much he hated Deviants, he was having a lot of trouble hating Kristen Skipworth.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Kristen stared at the bathroom door through which Rider had disappeared. What happened? He had jerked away when she'd wanted to prolong the sweet sensation of lying next to him. She'd wanted to savor his closeness, the smell of his body next to hers, his warmth, his strength, the bond they'd discovered.

  Shifting in the bed, she winced at the soreness between her thighs. She'd waited so long to find someone like him, who wouldn't repel her with treachery and insincerity. How ironic that when she finally found a man who was honest and tender and good, he was also a lunatic who fancied himself an assassin.

  “And not just a local lunatic either,” she muttered, quelling an urge to laugh, a lunatic from five hundred years in the future.

  She got out of bed and wrapped Skipper's robe around her, yanking the belt tight. Then she pushed open the bathroom door.

  Rider was leaning over the sink, his head bowed and dripping with water, his arms rigid, hands gripping the edge of the sink like a lifeline. He stood with his legs apart, his muscled thighs quivering with weakness.

  Kristen couldn't help the knee-buckling wave of desire that flowed through her at the sight of his beautiful, naked body. "Come on," she said softly, putting her hands on his shoulders. They were cold and damp with sweat.

  He cringed and recoiled when she touched him, but after a few seconds, Rider allowed her to lead him back to the bed, where he flopped down and covered his eyes with his arm, his chest heaving, his ridged belly rippling with occasional cramps. Kristen covered him with a blanket and climbed into bed beside him.

  "Okay," she said matter-of-factly using her doctor voice as she tucked the blanket up around his neck and pushed damp hair off his forehead. "Conditioning, you said. I would tend to agree. You react violently to certain stimuli." She counted them off on her fingers.

  "Talking about your past, talking about your wife, cats, kissing me, making love to me. Yes, I'd say we're certainly talking about adverse conditioning here."

  She watched him as she talked. Except for his labored breathing and the slight contractions of his belly, he didn't move.

  Kristen wanted to slide down beside him, to pull him to her and hold him until all the hurt and sickness went away. She wanted to make love to him again, because she'd never felt anything as wonderful as kissing him and feeling him thrust inside her.

  What she'd told him was true. When he kissed her she could feel it all. Not only her own desire but his as well, beating against her like his heart, coursing through her like her own blood. And underlying it all, she could feel his fear, his sickness, his impotent rage at the things they, whoever they were, had done to him.

  She turned back to him and put her hand on his forehead. "Would you like to explain to me," she whispered, "why making love to me makes you physically ill?"

  He pushed her hand away then slid his arm under his head. He didn't look at her, just stared at the ceiling. "I hate you," he said calmly, no expression at all on his face.

  The emptiness in his voice hurt Kristen even more than the words, and the words ripped through her like a knife through rotten cloth.

  "I hate you and everything you stand for. You're a Deviant. The Mother of all Deviants. Your descendants murdered my wife."

  Rider’s voice trailed off as his stomach heaved and he coughed.

  Kristen pulled away, shocked and hurt. She asked, and she'd even expected the words. He'd said them often enough. But what she hadn't expected was the return of the cold hatred that emanated from him, Not after the beautiful few minutes they'd just shared.

  "I still don't understand, Rider. Why? Why would they murder her?"

  "I don't know, okay?" His jaw worked tensely, his neck was corded with strain. "It's so hard to remember. They’ve fixed it so I can’t remember without getting sick. I don’t know why I can remember anything. I’m not supposed to be hampered by emotion. It's a pain in the ass to have feelings!"

  He threw her a glare of such unguarded fury that she recoiled. He was suddenly so different, the antithesis of the man who had held her close and made her feel loved just a few moments before.

  "If I could get rid of the damned emotions, I could kill you like I was sent to do." He dragged himself off the bed, pulled on the sweatpants and walked out of the room.

  Kristen pushed her hair off her forehead with shaky hands. He still wanted to kill her. She was becoming more and more convinced that his preposterous story was true, that he really was from the future, come back to kill her. She tried to remember the science fiction stories she'd read, about time machines and time warps, about people changing the future by destroying something—or someone—in the past.

  Drawing her knees up, she hugged them and stared at the doorway. Had she really just made love with someone who wasn't even born yet? Someone who hated her descendants so badly he’d kill her to destroy them?

  When she walked into the kitchen moments later, Rider was standing at the patio doors looking out over Skipper's neglected yard. There was defeat in the air. Even without her empathic sense, she'd have had no trouble figuring that one out. She saw it in the slump of his shoulders, in the dejected curve of his spine.

  He turned around and smiled at her, that heartbreaking smile that could knock her off her feet. "I can't," he said, his voice cracking like a teenager's. He shook his head. "I just can't."

  She reached for him, her heart melting at his lonely despair, but he held up a hand.

  "Don't touch me, Doc. I don't have enough strength right now." He slumped down into a chair.

  "What? What is it?" She sat opposite him.

  He put his head in his hands and ran shaky fingers through his hair.

  Kristen was terrified at the change in him. She'd seen him nearly dead, defeated by starvation and pain. But this—this wasn't external. It was something inside him. He'd given up on something.

  "Tell me," she demanded.

  "I can't hate you. You caused my wife's death and I can't h
ate you. I can't kill you." His face twisted in agony. "They will kill me, but I can't do it."

  "Rider, tell me why. What about the conditioning?"

  "I don't know. It's not as bad as it was, somehow. Ever since I grabbed your ankle in that damned cold alley, their conditioning's been going haywire."

  "I mean why can't you kill me?"

  He looked at her, despair and fear in his eyes. "I don't know that either. My civilization depends on me killing you. They say skipworths will cause the end of the world. We've got to wipe them out."

  Kristen noticed the hesitancy in his voice, just like she had when he'd talked of similar things in her apartment. It was as if he were reciting by rote. As if he doubted the truth of his words.

  His head slumped.

  "Come on, Rider." She pulled him up and put his arm around her shoulder. He was right. The nausea and pain that lurked behind all his other emotions were losing strength. Maybe soon he would be able to shake off the conditioning and begin to function normally.

  "I'm always putting you into bed, aren't I?" She climbed into bed beside him. "Now," she whispered. "Let's just lie here together and tell stories ‘til we fall asleep."

  For a moment, Rider's body was stiff and unyielding against hers, but soon his exhaustion won over his wariness and pain, and he relaxed and allowed her to curl into his side and rest her head on his shoulder.

  "Tell me why you can't kill me," she whispered against his warm skin.

  "You never give up, do you, Doc?" From her vantage point she couldn't see his eyes, but his voice sounded almost lighthearted. She shook her head against his shoulder.

  “No. I can’t give up. I’m a doctor.”

  "It's you," he said after a long moment. "This is too good. Too real. There's something about you. Something familiar. Something sincere. I don't understand it. Everything inside me tells me I should hate you. But when I touch you, I can't." He shuddered and pulled her close, as if he wanted to draw warmth from her. "Do you know how long it's been since I could feel anything at all? Since I could even remember anything?"

  Kristen wanted to cry. He was so lost, so hurt. So terribly alone. "What did you do, Rider, before?"

  "Before? You mean when I had a life?"

  He shrugged, his voice heavy with irony. "I'm not sure. Until I touched you the first time, there in the alley, I didn't remember anything except the TAINCC. Then, when I touched you, things started coming back to me. The feel of genuine wood, showering with real water. I think I was some kind of professor. I'm not— " His voice broke, and Kristen felt his overwhelming sadness.

  She leaned up on her elbow and put her hand on his face. "Okay. Okay, you're doing good. I don't know much about breaking adverse conditioning, but it's probably like deprogramming a cultist. We'll have to work through it. But you're wearing yourself out. You need to sleep." She kissed him gently on the cheek. His arm tightened, hugging her to him with all his might.

  She hugged him back, savoring his crushing strength, wanting to be so close to him they wouldn't know where one of them ended and the other began.

  What made her feel so protective, so responsible for this man whom any of her colleagues would label psychotic? What made it so easy for her to believe in everything her logical side reasoned couldn't possibly be true?

  Finally she whispered, "I'll make you some cocoa, then you can sleep."

  His hand cradled her head, and for an instant he kept the pressure there, kept her face buried in his neck as his breath stirred her hair. Then he relaxed his hold and pushed her away.

  "Okay, Doc. Whatever you say. You're the doctor." He smiled, then his eyes drifted closed.

  Kristen dressed quietly and tiptoed out to the kitchen, her thoughts still with the man in the bedroom. She basked in the lingering warmth of his smile as she opened a can of milk and made the cocoa.

  She felt his quiet exhaustion within her as she stirred the hot milk. Deeper, underneath the weariness, she felt the dregs of his passion.

  Closing her eyes, she gripped the edge of the countertop as aftershocks of exquisite pleasure racked her. Nothing she had ever read or heard or imagined had prepared her for the instant when he had invaded her for the first time.

  "It can be better," he'd said, and she had no doubt he was right. The pleasure that had built in her after the first shocking pain had been filled with promises of greater joy.

  But somehow Kristen doubted anything in the world could equal the sensation of being totally joined with him for the first time. The almost unbearable rapture of bonding with him physically and emotionally was something she would never forget.

  When she took two brimming mugs of cocoa back into the bedroom, Rider was sound asleep, and her heart ached to see his face relaxed, his mouth soft and vulnerable as a child's. She left his mug on the bedside table, leaned over and brushed her lips against his.

  In the living room, she sat down at Skipper's desk and sipped her drink while she tried to make sense of everything that had happened.

  If Rider came from the future, and if in the future, people who bore her name were telepaths, and considered dangerous, then—Kristen shook her head. If she told anyone the things Rider had told her, she would be labeled insane. An overwhelming sense of loneliness engulfed her.

  Believing Rider cut a chasm between her and everyone she knew. She would never be able to explain why she believed his ravings about deviants and telepathy. Her belief in him made her as much of an outcast in this time as Rider.

  But she'd always been something of an outcast anyway. She'd always been odd. Her strong empathy was unusual, to say the least. Sometimes, if Skipper had really wanted to get to her, he'd call her a mutant, Darwin's latest joke. Kristen had never appreciated his humor.

  Why would nature select for the type of debilitating sensitivity she possessed? What purpose could that serve in the struggle for life? All it did was keep her emotionally battered and bruised by the constant barrage of other people's feelings.

  Her brother, however, had been obsessed with the idea that she was a new breed of human. A deviant? The word evoked horror, connected as it was to Rider’s story.

  She looked at the deceptively small nylon case on the desk. Skipper had been studying genetics, certain he could isolate a gene that would account for her supersensitive empathy. His original thesis, years ago, had been the empathic link between twins, and the literature was full of stories detailing uncanny links between twins, but there were no documented cases of the type of super-attenuated empathy that Kristen possessed.

  He'd gotten a grant to research a possible genetic reason for empathy between twins, but as he'd often told her, his real goal was to isolate the gene that he was sure she and she alone possessed. To that end, he'd collected dozens of blood samples from her for testing. More than once she'd laughingly accused him of drinking it, or selling it.

  She unzipped the nylon pack and touched the black laptop inside. He'd always kept all his notes on the laptop—his peripheral brain, he called it. She wondered why he hadn't taken it with him to the lab that last day.

  Skipper, I need you, she thought, and even as her eyes misted over with tears, she smiled.

  He would have found Rider fascinating and dissected him like an insect under a microscope. He'd probably already have figured out whether Rider had truly come from the future, whether he was telling the truth, whether Kristen could really be the "Mother of all the Deviants."

  She laughed out loud. What Skipper could do with that!

  Her hand on the laptop gave her a strong sense of her brother, the strongest she'd found in his house. The hollow place he’d left in her chest began to throb with loneliness. He'd always been there for her. Her only true friend, the only one who’d understood how awful it was for her to live in the world with no skin.

  As she opened the computer her gaze lit on the telephone. Her heart began to pound. She sipped at the cocoa, surprised to find it ice cold, then glanced toward the bedroom. Rider was sound as
leep. He'd probably sleep for hours. If she wanted to, she could call the police, or the hospital, have him locked up with a healthy dose of sedative before he woke up.

  She reached for the phone, then paused. Come on. What's the problem, Doc? She reached again, then stopped, confusion washing over her. What did she believe? What did she know?

  If she called the police, if she told them what he'd been telling her, he would be locked up, probably for the rest of his life, as criminally insane. She didn't think she could stand that on her conscience. Rider locked away? She shivered. It would kill him.

  On the other hand, someone did mean them harm. Kristen glanced at the gauze on her hand. Something had caused the streak of blisters across the back of her hand, something that definitely was not a bullet. And something had caused the explosions that destroyed the clinic and her apartment.

  Could Rider have engineered those attempts on her life? He'd certainly known about the explosions. Of course, he'd explained about the telltale odor and the metal. He'd said it proved people had come from even further in the future than he had to kill her. If she told the police that, she’d be committed right alongside Rider.

  Kristen put her palms on either side of her head, squeezing. What was happening to her? How could she have made love with a deranged killer? Why did she even hesitate to call for help?

  After a few moments, she lifted the receiver.

  #

  Rider came awake with a start. For a moment he was disoriented and his reflexes brought him upright before he realized where he was. He was in Kristen's brother's house. How long had he been asleep, and what was the Doc doing? He stretched and yawned, relaxing his muscles. He felt surprisingly good. The naps were beginning to help.

  There was a cup of dark liquid on the bedside table. Rider took a tentative sip. Chocolate. Not bad. Too sweet, but not bad. He swallowed it quickly, thinking more of the energy he could derive from the sugar and milk than of the taste. Then he heard her voice.