Garrie gave herself an expression of dismay and rubbed her temple beneath her sun hat.
Enrique Soto relaxed slightly. “You mean that shot?”
Lucia smiled, a brilliant thing. “Yes, the new one, like a pen. Anyway, don’t worry. We can head it off if we leave now.” She raised one winged brow, brown eyes big and sincere. “Okay?”
“Sure,” he said, and Garrie stopped bothering to act like someone with impending headache agony, because now the man was watching Lucia even if his question was for Garrie. “But it would help if you could tell me exactly where you saw the bear.”
Garrie responded with precise words, directing the man away from the dangers of the entity while the gibberish still pushed at the edge of her thoughts. “You don’t suppose...” she said when she was finished, “I mean, what if it was...those missing men...”
“Defending its kill?” the ranger said. “It’s one reason they behave this irritably. But in any event, I appreciate your information. Now maybe we’ll be able to clear up what’s happening to people.”
Yes. By closing these trails and searching for bear kill and man bones far, far from where you’re ever going to find them.
But only if they were lucky.
Lucia put her hand out to help Garrie to her feet, as if Garrie actually needed it. She caught Enrique Soto’s eye with a look meaningful enough to startle Garrie. “Thank you so much.”
The man opened his mouth as if he might say something without quite doing it, and Garrie grabbed the chance to drag them away—down the worn, narrow asphalt lane to the lower parking lot, where Garrie reclaimed her bike.
Lucia gently patted Garrie’s head. “Poor Tia Rosie and her migraines. I never thought they’d come in handy. And where did the guys go?”
“To get their bikes, I hope.” It’d been enough trouble getting the rentals here in the first place. Garrie muttered what was meant to be a mild curse at the whole situation and instead spouted a collection of nonsense.
“Garrie!” Lucia looked at her aghast.
“Fark!” Garrie clamped a hand over her mouth, nearly losing the bike. “I broke my brain!”
Lucia’s tone turned wary—maybe a little warning. “Chic, what have you been doing?”
“Nothing,” she muttered. Nothing really, right? Connecting with a man on a different world, that was all. Crossing to that world through means she didn’t truly understand.
“Garrie.”
It didn’t matter that Lucia was willowy and precise and ladylike, or that Garrie could outrun her and out-fight her and out-reckon her. Not when Lucia took that tone.
Garrie guided the bike along the curving lane and took a deep breath, hoping her words would come out not just ungarbled, but uncrazy. “Lu, I’ve seen Trevarr.”
Lucia frowned. “You dreamed of him? Chicalet, how could you not?”
“No,” Garrie said firmly. “I saw him. Spoke to him.” Touched him. But she didn’t say that part out loud.
Lucia’s graceful gait faltered.
“I know,” Garrie said, reading her easily enough. “I don’t have any answers. Maybe that’s the way it works on his world, when people...when beings...when they...dammit.”
Lucia cast her a wise eye. “When they love?”
Garrie might have responded, if her throat hadn’t tightened so suddenly around her words, her grip gone inexplicably white-knuckled around the bike handlebars.
Lucia reached in front of her to plant a hand on those handlebars, stopping their progress. “Is he...all right?”
Garrie couldn’t do anything but stare at Lucia’s hand and blink hard, blink really hard, and still tears spilled over and down.
“Oh,” Lucia said, her voice small and sad. “Stupid. Estupido. Of course, no. Not all right.” She released the bike to put her arms around Garrie, not minding that Garrie just stood there like a lump, silently crying. She petted Garrie’s hair and rubbed between her shoulder blades, and then, at exactly the right time, she gave Garrie’s shoulders a final squeeze and took a half-step back. “Okay, then,” she said. “And these words coming from your mouth...those are part of this...visit?”
Garrie shook her head, sliding briefly from emotion to blessed numbness. “I don’t know. But think of his accent...the words we’ve heard him use. All hard and still...beautiful, in their way. And last night...I not only saw him. I spoke to him.”
“And now today here you are, babbling.” Lucia gave her shoulder a final squeeze and stepped back—and only then did Garrie hear a large vehicle approaching from behind. She hastily turned her face away, scrubbing at it with one hand.
She did not cry with delicacy.
“Mr. Soto,” Lucia said, at the sound of a window rolling down. “We’re fine.”
Yes, Garrie thought fiercely, watching with peripheral vision. We’re fine, and I don’t want to be in your governmental clutches, thank you very much, so go away.
“You’re fine,” the man said. “She isn’t. I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“No!” Lucia said, just as fiercely as Garrie had thought at him. “I can have her home and medicated in twenty minutes. If you call someone, we wait. Then we drive to the hospital. Then she waits. Then hours later she gets the same medicine she’ll get at home, but it won’t be in time to work right. If you want to do the right thing, you leave us alone.”
Go, Lucia. Wow.
A little more carefully, the man said, “She’s had a bigger shock than I realized. She could be injured and not realize it.”
Lucia’s voice softened, but only slightly. “I’ll give you my number. You can call me to check on her. But if you want to do the right thing, you leave us alone.”
The man hesitated; Garrie grit her teeth. Lucia leaned into the truck window, gesturing imperiously. Bemused, the man passed her a pen and his pocket notebook, and Lucia cupped it in her hand to write with crisp, precise strokes. “Here. And be careful of that bear!”
That unfathomable churning pillar of ugliness, you mean.
“Yes, ma’am.” The ranger took his notepad and tipped an invisible hat as Lucia stepped away. The window hummed back up and the big green SUV shifted into gear, rolling away with a lack of speed that told Garrie he was watching them in the rear view mirror.
Garrie wiped her face one more time, tucking herself back away inside. The moment for revelations was over. Besides, there were far more interesting things to talk about. “Did you just order that man to call you?”
Lucia pursed thoughtful lips. “Yes,” she said, and then smiled. “Yes, I did.”
Garrie hunted for words, found none.
Lucia straightened her already straight back. “It got him to go away,” she said. “Also. He is a handsome man, but not so handsome that he knows it. He’s strong, but not so strong he’s uses it against people. And. Also.”
This was such a strange speech that Garrie shook her head, as bemused as the ranger had been before her. Finally she gave in and prompted. “Also, what?”
“Also,” Lucia whispered as if the world might hear her and make it not so, “he doesn’t leak.”
“He doesn’t...” Garrie couldn’t quite bring herself to finish that sentence.
Lucia had no trouble with it. “Leak,” she said a little more loudly. “Everyone else leaks. Everyone but you when you’re shielding. He...didn’t.”
Garrie quite abruptly understood. Her beautiful, sensitive, wonderful friend might have one date with a guy; she wouldn’t have two. And now that she’d grown even more perceptive, responding not only to the wisps of past emotion but the unwanted feelings from everyone around her...
“I might not like him,” Lucia said, her voice low again. “But if there’s one...”
“There might be another.” This sentence, Garrie could finish. “Okay, Lu, I get it.” Then she grinned, knowing it a ridiculous contrast to her red-faced mess. “It did shut him up. And he is so going to call you.”
Quinn’s voice carried on the air, reachi
ng them as a murmur, and Garrie caught a glimpse of movement through the trees where the lane curved around.
Lucia sent her a quick, desperate glance—probably identical to the expression on Garrie’s face—and they spoke in panicked unison.
“Don’t tell—”
They stopped, an instant pact between them. And maybe it was that understanding, or the depth of the moment, or the gleam of gratitude in Lucia’s eye, that made Garrie say one last thing—quick, low words just breaking a whisper. “Here’s the thing, Lu. The entity on this mountain? Sklayne called it kyrokha. And its energies...they taste like...”
“Chicken?” Lucia offered, when Garrie stopped, glancing at the guys’ approach. But her tiny smile faltered when Garrie didn’t smile too, and when she bit her lip on that final word, stupid emotion clogging her throat all over again. “Chic, what then?”
“Trevarr,” Garrie said, and closed her eyes. “The energies taste like Trevarr.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 16
Kehar: Silent Promise
Anjhela spent the night alone in her private chamber. Pacing, her bare feet sinking into layers of plundered rugs, her eyes flickering over the normally soothing layers of deep, dark red, from wall hangings to bed draperies to woven art. Not self-pleasuring, not luxuriating in what the mendihar could offer, but stuck in the echoes of her own deeds.
And in Trevarr’s response to her.
The sklarr can no more get in than I can get out.
Those words had come with truth. Not with the sort of truth that came from defeat and resignation and the inability to attempt a lie, but a blunt truth that came with not bothering to lie.
Not caring enough to lie.
Not affected enough by her to lie.
Oh, it stung.
And it told her more than she’d ever anticipated.
Because if not the sklarr, then who?
Who else but the one for whom we search?
The one who had touched Trevarr in places Anjhela had never gone—taking from Anjhela that which had been hers.
The mendihar tickled her, insidiously cruel in reminder. She shoved back without finesse and knew her mistake the moment she’d made it. Never shove. It left her off-balance.
Shoving left the mendihar in control.
===
Remembering...
===
Anjhela’s failure lay on a stone consolation table, and it stunk.
This body had voided its bowels in death, the odor filling the small consolation room to capacity and joining the already heady presence of piss and fear and vomit and sex.
She’d indulged.
It was no wonder this one hadn’t survived her ministrations. He’d come to her already damaged, and he hadn’t lasted long. Now Glyphmaster Shahh’s final orders rang in her ears.
“Harvest him.”
The sour and fading memories of a man already dead.
This particular ’blood had been tortured into gibberish long before he’d ended up on her table. Anjhela knew what the overseer hadn’t bothered to say—the ’blood had possessed little information about the recent petty unrest, and had likely spouted it long before she met him in this small stone-hewn room.
For her, this had been a training exercise in which she could not have hoped to succeed. One that wouldn’t have befallen her if she’d gained the rank of fully vested mendikha.
Mistress of the glove and blood and darkness.
But that rank yet lingered just out of her reach. She needed to accumulate memories—quality memories of pleasure, of pain, of moments that would make her subjects scream for relief and release. Memories she could use to manage her subjects with finesse.
She snarled a curse, whirling from the stinking body to slap a hand on the latch. The door released and she flung herself out of the room, pressing her back against the shallowly incised wall glyphs of this upper level, tipping her head back to breathe of the fresher air. But never careless, never unwary...
I am not alone.
She knew exactly who had found her here in this short unimportant hall on this unimportant floor of unimportant consolation sessions. She didn’t need to open her eyes.
“Are you back?” she asked Trevarr, without inflection.
He said nothing, by which she knew she had indeed identified him correctly, and that he had once more returned from some task the Keharian Tribunal hadn’t expected him to survive.
But this time, without any scent of blood. Without the air of stress and effort and weary victory he so often carried.
She opened her eyes to look at him without moving her head, finding him closer than she expected. “The sklarr does well by you, then.”
“Rumor,” he said, with some amusement behind it.
Anjhela straightened. “Of course. Because no one has ever captured or bonded a sklarr before. No one would dare try.”
“That’s what they say,” he agreed. He looked good. Strong. Vital. Not nearly as tamed as the Tribunal thinks.
Not nearly as tamed as Anjhela had once thought.
“Have you come to make this moment more difficult?” she asked of him, as blunt as she’d seem to have become.
“Anjhela.” Another step made him close enough to touch—or to pull closer, or to push away. She did neither. “Has that been my way?”
No. Ruthless, yes. Ruthlessly true to himself and his people, yes.
But she didn’t know if she was still one of his people.
“What, then?” she asked him, finding no answers in the strong and masculine beauty of his features—quiet features, but for the storm always lurking in his eyes. She pulled a twisting k’thai braid from the mass of his hair, finding in the process several others. The sign of powers endured, powers absorbed...powers contained.
She placed the braid against his shoulder, pressing it there with a light precision. “What, then?” she asked again.
“To see what’s changed,” he told her. “One way or the other.” He glanced into the room, assessing the situation as quickly as any could. “To remind you that no one of us stands alone.”
“Except you,” she said, a bitterness to those words.
Amusement returned. It lasted only long enough to be replaced by something darker, something more intense.
“Trevarr?” She hadn’t thought to hear that uncertainty in her own voice again.
“No one of us,” he said, and took that final step—enough to press her against the wall, his hands in her hair and already unraveling the complex pattern of its bindings, his mouth already coming down on hers as if he had never been away at all.
In an instant she welcomed him, biting back at him with a fierce relief. Ruthlessly honest. She arched against him in a scrape of leather, clutching and tugging and giving way.
He pulled away far too soon.
Anjhela narrowed her eyes in protest. She reached between them to grasp him most firmly, most assertively. I’m not done.
One side of his mouth twitched, an actual smile. “Anjhela,” he said, and cut his eyes to the side, reminding her of the burden awaiting her inside that small stinking room at the end of this stinking little corridor.
“He can wait,” she said, pushing herself against him. A curse of demand formed on her lips, but never made it any further. He kissed her hard, bending to taste her neck. She sighed with pleasure, tipping her head so he could run his tongue up to her jaw, tracing his way back to her mouth.
Where he said again, “None of us stand alone, Anjhela.” He reached for her grasping hand, pulling it out from between them to run his fingers over the skin—as though he could perceive the sleeping mendihar, or the itch of its response to him.
Gently, deliberately, he lay that hand alongside his own face and bent to kiss her again. But this time he grasped her hips and jerked her to meet him, then slid a hand up to tangle in her hair, pulling her head back to give him complete access to her mouth, her throat, her jaw. Whatever he wanted.
Shock re
verberated through her beside the flooding rush of her white hot response. For that instant, she hesitated, understanding but not believing the invitation.
Take from me the memories of this moment. Use them. And carry them with you during the times of hardness.
To offer such a gift...to offer such vulnerability...
She pressed her nails lightly to the side of his face holding them there with precision even as he lifted her, holding her against the wall, grinding her against the wall and leaving her free to wrap her legs around his hips and to feel the flex and response of the hard muscle in his back and buttocks.
For that instant, she held utterly still, catching his gaze to find the storm there. I will never use this gift against you. I will NEVER.
In his gaze she saw acceptance...but not of her silent promise.
Acceptance of his own decision. Awareness of the potential consequences.
The gift of his experience, his pleasure...his own vital intensity. Potential weapon, potential weakness. A bond between them that nothing could ever break...even if one day she might just use it to break him. Ruthless honesty in a look.
Anjhela released the mendihar, and her screams of ecstasy echoed down the hallway.
===
...Remembered.
===
Now the mendihar released her, left her reeling and ragged, trickling tears unpleasant against the silky smoothness of her barely discernible face scales.
Her body throbbed with remembered pleasure, wanting more. Always wanting more.
From Trevarr.
Maybe there was something to what they said about the kyrokha after all.
It didn’t matter. She would never have more from him—not now. Because of course she had used his gift against him in these past days, stirring him against his own will and then crushing that rising pleasure with pain. Touching him through his memories, plundering him through their memories. And she would do it again, allowing the mendihar to work as much against her as it did him.
Just as he’d always said it could.
~~~~~~~~~~
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