by Queen, Nyna
Softly pressing her lips against his chest, she ran a finger from the hollow of his throat past his right nipple, just grazing it, and over the hard bunches of his abs, moving down in a slow, confident seduction.
Darken shivered, and this time it wasn’t from laughter. “I know what you’re trying.” His deep voice had gained that breathless, husky cadence that always tingled along her nerves and keyed them up in just the right way.
“And? Is it working?”
“Yes.” The word came out squeezed. The muscles along Darken’s stomach contracted—all tense strings sheathed in golden skin—as her finger slowly moved further down, playfully trailing the raise of his hipbone, inching closer to the hot promise of bliss that waited between his legs.
Darken’s hand caught hers before she could reach the obvious aim of her caressing course.
Alex let out a frustrated snarl and tried to pull it free, but Darken didn’t let go. Smiling, he brought her fingers up to his lips. Their touch sent a bolt of lightning through her. Alex gasped. Sweet Jester, she had no idea since when fingers were particularly erotic, but every touch of him was like dipping her toes into a sea of liquid electricity—a dance on the verge of death and rapture and ecstasy. Giddy desire flooded her, setting both of her skins on fire.
But instead of following through on the unspoken promise, Darken let go of her hand and his smile was replaced by a light frown tinted with worry.
“Morning isn’t that far off anymore. We must go to the camp and then get you back to Canterbury Estate.”
Alex made a face. “Just why do you have to be so reasonable?”
Darken’s mouth curved into a lazy grin. “Because one of us has to be, and you obviously don’t intend to be that one.”
The grin vanished. His face turned deadly serious. “You have to be back at the estate before sunrise. If someone were to see you or found you missing in the morning…” His lips pressed into a tight line. “If anything happened to you, I would never forgive myself.”
Alex sighed and flopped onto her back, staring at the star-sprinkled sky above, so innocent and peaceful it was easy to forget that they were laying on the edge of an exploded mine field.
Darken was right of course. They had to move. They had wasted too much time already.
But the truth was, she didn’t want to leave. She wanted to stay right there, wrapped in his arms, and forget the rest of the world. She wanted to remain in this little sphere of happiness, afraid that the moment they left this surreal place at the edge of the sky, it would pop like a soap bubble pricked with a needle, and she would be forced to realize none of it had been real in the first place.
The fear was so substantial, she couldn’t help shivering. Darken’s arms automatically tightened around her, pulling her closer to his side.
Alex pushed herself up on one elbow to look at his face, causing his fingers to get tangled in her pale blonde hair.
“This is real, isn’t it?” she whispered. “We are really here and not laying smashed a thousand feet below at the foot of the mountain and this is just a fantasy of my dying mind?”
Darken’s warm lips touched her temple. “I’m glad I’m not the only one who is afraid of that.”
Well, at least, she wasn’t the only head-case of the two of them. If only that would make her feel any better.
Alex closed her eyes and rested her forehead against his, savoring the simple pleasure of his heart beating next to hers.
“Let’s just stay another five minutes,” she said, wishing she wouldn’t sound so much like a child that was being chased off to bed but refused to go, scared of the nightmares lurking behind the veil of sleep.
Darken turned his head, his mouth softly brushing against hers.
“Five minutes,” he agreed.
IT was more like fifteen minutes—and a few more stolen kisses—before they finally pulled themselves up from the ground, got dressed, climbed off the ledge and started to track back up the mountain slope.
Alex, who was taking the lead again, deliberately didn’t set too high a pace. Now that the adrenaline rush was finally sloughing off, every inch of her body was beginning to hurt, and every step felt like pushing herself though a curtain of needles. It would be a surprise if she would be able to move at all in the morning. And if this was how she felt, shaper resilience and all, she didn’t want to know how much pain Darken had to be in. He was tough as leather, true, but he wasn’t a shaper. He had to be running on fumes, but if she was waiting for a word of complaint, she had yet to be surprised.
You had to give it to him, the man was absolutely hard-bitten. And he was hers. A tiny smile flitted across Alex’s features. She winced when it pulled on a cut on her lip. Ouch. Wow, she really was a mess. She didn’t even want to think about all the makeup that would be needed to cover up her cuts and bruises tomorrow. Also, her left hand had started to swell and throb like a wicked bitch; sprained, most likely.
Still. All in all, they had gotten off cheaply. They could have easily broken their necks in the fall. For once, the Great Mother must have been watching over them.
The ground slightly gave way below her feet and Alex swerved a little from her course. That was another reason for their rather slow ascent. The tortured ravine was bleeding loose earth and stones, and twice already they had nearly caused another land slide before she registered the instability in the soil and led them another way. Although it seemed almost impossible that there was any bomb left inside the slope that hadn’t been triggered by the mountain slide, there was a tiny chance some dud shells were still buried underneath the violated soil. Alex was too aware of them both being alive—and the bloody miracle that it was—to risk their lives now by being sloppy. Not now that she finally knew Darken wanted her as much as she wanted him.
All the time they had wasted… Sweet Jester, if only she’d pocketed her pride and picked up her courage before today. All the hours of silent heartache she could have spent in his arms instead. Or in his bed…
Alex gritted her teeth. Well, what was past was past, but she’d make damn sure they didn’t bite the dust before they could make up for all the time they had lost. If that meant moving a little slower, so be it.
Her sensory threads incessantly probed the ground, coiling around her like a dark web of snakes while her true eyes scoured the perimeter: the torn out trees, the deep grooves in the earth that slashed the mountain side like open wounds…
This was what it had to feel like walking through a war zone, she reflected. Except the corpses here were the pale limbs of trees and the cracked skulls were fragments of exploded stones. Still, it was only too easy to imagine them covered in flesh and add a few splashes of red to the scene. The thought made Alex’s skin crawl, and she rubbed her arms.
Beside her, Darken seemed completely untouched by the destruction surrounding them. It made Alex once again wonder what he had seen throughout his life that none of this would trouble him. His eyes were on the ground, looking for his sword which he had lost in the mayhem. Alex was keeping an eye out, too, but they could as well have been looking for a needle in a haystack. It seemed a fair guess that it was either deeply buried under the soil or had fallen off the precipice in the land slide and was now laying miles and miles below, forever lost.
It took them nearly an hour to climb back up what to fall had cost them barely a minute.
When they neared the walls of the prison camp, Alex and Darken took cover in a clump of ripped out bushes to assess the situation, all but expecting spotlights to flare and armed people to pour out of the gates.
They needn’t have worried. The scene lay eerily silent. Everything was gone, the people, the guns on the walls, the vehicles…
All that remained was a faint magic residue in the air and a sharp, bitter smell that almost made Alex retch. She spat out, trying to get the taste out of her mouth, but it stubbornly remained.
The explosions had messed up the ground in front of the walls pretty badly, burrowing deep
, ragged craters into the land, but the wall itself, though scorched and scarred in places, had withstood the attack like a giant who had been pelted with pebbles but wasn’t any the worse for wear.
Not trusting the peace, Alex motioned for Darken to stay put. She put a hand to the ground, silently sending out her threads toward the dark camp. They crept through the darkness like invisible spies on ghostly spider legs, sneaking through the cracks in the walls, probing, tasting, searching. She felt her way along them to the inside of the camp.
No vibrations. No movement at all. As empty as a place could get.
Alex was about to retract her threads when something brushed against them.
She tensed. Concentrated.
Nothing.
Whatever she had thought she’d felt was gone. But there had been something, had there not?
Alex stretched her threads a little farther, thinning them out toward their ends—thinner and thinner until they became dangerously brittle—aware that if they snapped, she would be in for one hell of a headache.
Still nothing. And yet…
She pushed her threads forward a little more. Just another bit.
Alex’s mind recoiled. Her skin tingled like that of a rabbit which had just spotted a fox watching it with hungry eyes. It wasn’t like anybody or anything was moving in there, but … Alex focused on it again and shivered. Like sticking your fingers into a bucket full of black slime, not seeing the bottom but instinctively knowing there was something there about to bite.
Gooseflesh crawled up and down her arms. Her threads frayed at the edges and she quickly pulled them back before she could be hit by a backlash.
She flickered a disturbed glance at Darken. “Everybody’s gone,” she said. Hesitated. “But I felt … something.”
Darken’s brow knitted. “A trap?”
Alex shrugged, wishing it would shrug off this foul, slimy feeling that had touched her mind. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t be able to sense a physical trap, and I didn’t feel any magic either, but … something felt a little … off.” If only she could put her finger on it. “Somehow … tainted.” She couldn’t think of a better word to describe it.
Darken didn’t doubt her assessment. He simply nodded. “Alright, we’ll be careful.”
They peeled away from their hideout and slunk over to the entrance, two elusive shadows in the darkness surrounding them.
The mountain coaches that had blocked the inside of the gates had vanished, and the heavy metal doors were closed like gritted black teeth.
Darken gripped the thick, heavy iron handle and pulled at it. The gate didn’t move so much as an inch.
He strained. His features distorted.
“Let me give you a hand, sugar.” Alex slipped forward and joined him with her good hand. “One, two, three…”
Together they pulled. Muscles bulged on their arms and shoulders, the cords in their necks sticking out through the skin.
Oh, come on!
Alex locked her teeth. Sweat pooled on her brow, trickling down her temples.
With a faint creeeak, the doors opened the tiniest crack.
They were both panting for air, leaning against the cold metal beside each other.
Wohoo, great! Two inches. Now, if they kept going at this rate, they’d be in tomorrow night for sure.
Alex wiped a strand of hair off her forehead and cast Darken a poignant sideglance. “I’m wondering, just how exactly would you haven gotten into this place without my humble help?”
Darken watched her with a look of harried amusement. “You just want me to tell you I’m glad I brought you along.”
“Are you?”
His mouth quirked into one of those exasperated smiles that told her she was absolutely impossible. He bent closer and his lips grazed her neck, their soft warmth sending a pleasant shiver through her entire body. He raised his gaze, his cavernous eyes bright like smoldering embers. “Yes, I’m glad. Satisfied?”
“That’s all I wanted to hear.” Alex gave him a sly wink. “Now. Let’s give this baby another try. Pull!”
It took them a couple more tries before, finally, with the feeling of a screw coming loose, the gate swung open with a low, eerie moan.
Before them stretched an empty yard of hard-packed earth getting lost in the darkness. No shrubs, no flowers. Nothing but gray-brown dirt, uneven and rutted by years and years of rain showers.
About a hundred yards from them, at the foot of the steep mountain face to their left, the outline of a flat building shaped like a giant hammer squatted in the shadows. The handle ended in a round dome with a huge steel outlet reflecting the moonlight. It took Alex a moment to identify it for what it was: a crematory with a massive vaporizing unit. She shuddered. Sweet Jester, just how many people had died here that it paid off to build something so expensive? Of course, mining always took a heavy toll on human lives. Still.
She forced her eyes to move on.
The ground at the bottom of the prison wall had been excavated to make it even higher on the inside. Small round marks at regular intervals were proof of a portable magic ward that had been attached to it at some point. At its top, rolls of barbed wire glinted weakly in the light of the pale moon, like a metal hedge of thorns.
Ergo, the keepers of this place had expected their prisoners to try to escape by growing suckers on their hands and feet, climb this warded monstrosity, and crawl over five feet of barbed wire. Hardly likely. Even if the wards had been deactivated at times, and someone had made it to the wall and started the next to impossible climb—she couldn’t imagine anybody but a shaper even attempting it—a high watchtower with a 360-degree field of fire in the middle of the yard destroyed all hopes of such an endeavor to be successful. If you stationed two people up there equipped with spellguns and half a decent aim, they would be able to pick out dozens of escapees one by one between idle sips of coffee before any of them had a snowball’s chance in hell to reach the top of that wall.
“Not even the Order’s convents are so well guarded,” Darken muttered beside her.
He fished his recordare memorandi from his backpack. Alex’s own device had been smashed in their tumble, but a quick inventory had shown that Darken’s had survived the fall.
Magic sparked. The recordare whirred as he started taking images, bright blue flashes ripping through the dark.
Alex followed Darken through the gates, ignoring the shaper’s voice inside her, telling her to get the hell away from this place.
Run, it hissed. Danger! RUN!
Alex silenced it ruthlessly as she slowly circled the empty yard, her senses on high alert, probing the night for any sign of threat, yet sensing nothing but the lone, pressing emptiness around them. No strange slimy feeling. Nothing.
A good distance behind the prison building, three big black holes were burrowed into the naked mountain side, as if giant worms had chewed their way inside. The mine entrances.
Alex approached them carefully, trying hard not to feel too much like a prisoner being marched to work while invisible eyes watched her through the scope of a rifle from atop the watchtower, waiting for one misstep to press the trigger.
All three entrances to the mine shafts were heavily boarded-up. As Alex drew closer, she was confronted by the pungent smell of rotten wood and rusted metal, mixed with stale water, bat droppings and something even more disgusting … sulphur. Eww.
Inside the dark holes, overturned mine carts hunkered beside the broken remains of torn tracks and dented metal buckets covered in dark red rust. Broken pickaxes stuck out of the ground, and a twisted birdcage lay half submerged in a dirty puddle.
It seemed hard to imagine that the most valuable and beautiful gems of Tharsis had once been produced right here.
Something moved behind the boards. Alex tensed. What the—?
She dropped down into a crouch and covered her head with her arm. With a shrill, clicking noise, a cloud of bats broke though the gaps in the boards and streaked past her into the
black night sky.
Mother’s mercy and Jester’s grace!
She got up and squinted into the tarry darkness behind the boards. More bats huddled along the walls and the ceiling of the shaft, a writhing mass of fur and gleaming eyes.
Darken joined her side.
“These were barricaded years ago,” Alex told him. “I can smell the decay. They haven’t been entered in ages. Well, except by them.” She pointed after the dissolving cloud of hunting bats, rubbing her eyes. They stung. Probably the sulphur. Bloody oversensitive senses.
Concern filled Darken’s eyes. “You alright?”
“Fine. Just, the idea of going underground…” Alex shuddered. “Let’s just say for most shapers it’s not a very appealing thought.”
Darken leaned close to her ear. “Claustrophobic?”
Alex rolled her eyes. “More like afraid of a mountain collapsing on top of me.”
“Well, lucky for you then that we don't seem to have to go in there. I believe that’s where the action is.” He nodded to the prison building, a smudged gray spot in the dark before them.
Side by side, they walked past the ugly bulge of the crematory toward the building’s entrance, Darken still taking memoras.
Alex couldn’t shake the feeling of invisible eyes trailing them, following their steps from the shadows around them. Inside her core, the spider perked its head up in alarm and growled, ready to pounce at any second. Except when Alex probed their surroundings again, her senses gave her the same clear answer as before—they were completely alone.
Sweet Jester, she had to be going nuts!
Her nose tingled, and she rubbed it with the back of her hand.
The entrance complex peeled out of the darkness before them, a flat square of drab gray stone with a heavy security double door. That door looked considerably new; the weather hadn’t yet left any visible stains on it. Sturdy wasn’t even beginning to describe its appearance. Alex lifted her eyebrows. She had serious doubts that her lock picking kit would be any match for it. If this puppy was locked, she’d have to climb up the building and hope she’d find a non-barred window or some other way inside.