“Your word means a lot to us, baby,” Drace murmured, from where he was sitting, already dressed in his desert gear. “We know you’ll see this through.”
“I will,” I said. “And not just because of our contract. This is a matter of honor now.” It sounded kind of corny but it was true—I was determined to stick with them until I helped them get separated.
Of course it seemed like you were doing your best to bring them together last night, whispered a snarky little voice in my head.
Shut up, I told it, feeling guilty. That was all in our heads—we didn’t actually touch each other at all. That makes it all right.
Didn’t it?
“It is a matter of our honor to keep you safe,” Lucian said, breaking my guilty train of thought and trying to give me the boots again.
I shook my head firmly.
“Nice try but I’m not wearing those ugly-ass boots,” I told him. “You said we’d only be in the desert an hour tops, right? And we’ll only be on the fringes of it—not in the deep desert where you told us it’s really dangerous.”
“It’s true that the danger should be minimal but it does still exist.” Lucian gave me a frustrated frown. “Even if there is only a one in a million chance you could be harmed, I don’t want to take that chance with you, ma 'frela. You have…come to mean a lot to me. To both of us, I think.” He looked over at Drace who nodded.
“He’s right, baby,” he murmured. “You’re special. We don’t want to risk you.”
“If anybody is risking anything I’m risking myself,” I insisted. “You said there’s no danger on the surface of the sand which is where we’ll be walking, so I’m going with the lighter and slightly less ugly shoe option.”
Then I had put on the dune-shoes and that was that.
Now, as I hiked through the sand in the much lighter footwear, I congratulated myself again. Those long, ugly boots Lucian had wanted me to wear must have weighed fifty pounds. My thigh muscles would be screaming at me right now if I had worn them. It was hard enough getting through the dry, unstable sand in shoes specially made for it, let alone wearing what amounted to extremely ugly fetish-wear.
But even wearing the dune-shoes, walking through the hot sand under the hot sun was really no fun.
“This is crazy,” I muttered as I slid and slipped my way through the sand dunes that led to the back entrance of the city. “First we’re at the bottom of the ocean, then hiking through the freaking desert. What’s next—mountain climbing?”
“More likely we’ll be cutting brush through the jungle,” Drace grunted, keeping his sand-visor low over his eyes to shield out the brilliant sunlight.
“Oh, yeah? I squinted and shielded my eyes as I looked into the distance. At least the city was getting closer—I could see the back gates rising like monoliths in the sand some distance away.
It was a shame we couldn’t just fly Lucian’s ship right in but then he would have had to identify himself and everyone would know he was back in town and come looking for him. (Everyone, presumably, being his super-snobby parents. Not that Lucian exactly said they were snobby—it was just a feeling I got and the way Drace rolled his eyes when he mentioned their social status.)
“Why do you say we’ll be going through the jungle?” Lucian, who was leading our little expedition, looked back at Drace, who was heading up the rear. They were, as usual, keeping me between them.
“Been thinking about the prophesy,” Drace growled, adjusting his visor again. “That line about the Temple of Ganth. I thought the name sounded familiar so I looked it up—it’s an abandoned temple not far from Claw Clan grounds in the K’drin Jungle. So if we are able to locate this buyer and get the key from him, we’re headed for my home territory next.”
“Ah.” Lucian nodded thoughtfully. “Another piece of the puzzle, as Rylee would say.”
“Rylee would say she’s sweating to death and needs a shower,” I said. “So when are we going to get to—ahhhh!”
My last words ended in a scream because just at that moment my foot slipped into some kind of a hole in the treacherous sand. For a moment, I pinwheeled my arms, thinking I was about to trip and go flat on my face. Instead, my entire right leg slid down into the hole, as though I’d stepped into a pocket of pure nothing.
I cried out as I did an impromptu split. If I hadn’t been doing Yin Yoga once a week for stress relief for the past two years, I probably would have torn a tendon or snapped a hamstring or something. As it was, the split hurt, but I was still okay. Well, as okay as I could be with my leg jammed to the hip in the sand.
“What in the Frozen Hells? You okay, baby?” Drace knelt beside me at once. He tried to pull me out, but I was stuck fast.
“Rylee!” Lucian came rushing back, more graceful by far than either Drace or me on the hilly sand dunes. “We have to get her out, now!” he told Drace, a trace of panic in his deep, smooth voice.
“I’m all for that,” Drace growled. “Here—you take one arm and I’ll take—”
That was when I felt something sting me. Or else bite me. I wasn’t sure which it was—only that it felt like someone had heated two sixteen gage needles until they were red hot and then jabbed them into the tender flesh of my inner thigh.
“Ahhh!” I screamed again—this time in pain. “Oh my God—something bit me!”
Lucian swore, his dark blue eyes going wide with fear.
“We have to get her out—we have to get her out!” he shouted at Drace.
“Come on, then!” Drace snapped back.
The two of them each grabbed me under the armpits and heaved as hard as they could.
At first, it didn’t seem like they could budge me—I was really stuck fast! Then, just as I thought my arms were going to come out of their sockets, I popped out of the ground like a cork coming out of a bottle.
Drace and Lucian staggered and we all fell over backwards in the sand. But the next minute we were up again and running for our lives, staggering and slipping over the shifting sands—because there was something coming out of the hole.
Out of the blackness boiled a huge cloud of flying creatures, each as long as my hand from the tip of my middle finger to the end of my palm. They hummed and buzzed angrily but they were so big the hum was more of a thrumming sound—something you felt rather than heard—vibrating the air all around you.
“Moratas!” Lucian shouted, urging us onward. “Death goddesses! Faster—run! We can’t let the swarm catch us!”
I tried but the place where I’d been bitten or stung was aching and throbbing, making it hard to walk, let alone run.
My guys saw the difficulty I was having and they grabbed me under the arms again and dragged me along like a rag doll, the wide toes of my dune-shoes making wavy patterns in the sand as we raced through the desert.
“You didn’t say anything about any fucking swarm of killing things,” Drace roared at Lucian over my head.
“I’ve never seen them this close to the city—they’re usually only in the deep desert,” Lucian shouted back. “Come on—we have to get clear of them!”
“I thought you had immunity to anything out here,” Drace demanded.
“I do, but that doesn’t mean their bite doesn’t hurt like fucking Hell!”
I could certainly attest to that. The feeling of being jabbed by red hot needles had never really ended. In fact, it was getting worse. Now it felt like someone was twisting the needles, trying to cause as much pain as possible. My entire leg was throbbing with every thudding step Drace and Lucian took across the sand.
Despite their best efforts, the humming, thrumming moratas—or “death goddesses” as Lucian had also called them, were getting closer. To my horror, one of them buzzed past my head and landed right on my billowing sleeve. I started to shake it off but I had to do a double take to be sure of what I was seeing first.
The morata had a body that looked like a cross between one of those huge grasshoppers you see in the spring sometimes, and a palmetto b
ug—which is, unfortunately, a huge, flying cockroach. But it wasn’t the grotesque body or even the massive size of it that made me bite back a scream—it was the face.
The face—actually the entire head of the morata—was human. Small and chalk-white, it was the size of a Barbie doll head with short black hair, wide black eyes, and cruel red lips. I couldn’t stop staring at it. It stared back at me and for an instant, I thought I saw pure hatred boiling in its ink-drop eyes. Then those curving red lips parted and two horrible long fangs shot out. It was going to bite me.
I shrieked breathlessly and shook my arm as well as I could while I was being dragged along with big hands under my armpits. It wasn’t much but Lucian saw what was going on and batted the horrible insect-woman-thing off my sleeve before she could sink her yellow fangs into my arm.
“They’re getting too close,” he yelled at Drace. “Here—you take Rylee and run towards the city.” He pointed to the huge, sand-colored walls with their black gates looming up out of the desert ahead of us. “They won’t dare to follow you there.”
He shoved me at Drace who caught me up in his arms, cradling me like a baby.
“What about you?” he shouted at Lucian.
“I’ll draw them off.” There was a grim expression on his face and I remembered what he’d said—just because he was immune to the bite of the moratas didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt him to be bitten. He was sacrificing himself for us—preparing to bear what was surely going to be excruciating agony so Drace and I could get away.
Drace seemed to realize the same thing because he shook his head.
“You don’t have to do this, bond-mate!”
“Yes, I do—get Rylee to safety! Now!” And before either Drace or I could protest, Lucian veered off towards a nearby sand dune. He gave a whistling-hissing-cry as he ran that seemed to draw the swarming moratas towards him. I saw the black cloud of buzzing, horror-headed insects aim right for him and I bit my lip in terror. Even with immunity, how many stings could he take before they killed him? Surely no one could survive many of those awful burning bites without dying!
I had only been bitten once and my leg felt like someone had dipped it in kerosene and set it on fire—I couldn’t imagine having that sensation but ten or twenty or a hundred times worse all over my body.
For a moment Drace and I stood staring, then he said, “Come on,” as though I had any choice, and began running with me still in his arms, aiming for the high walls that surrounded the city.
“No! No!” I beat against his broad chest, tears stinging my eyes. “No, we can’t leave him back there—he’ll die! He’ll die.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Drace’s gravely voice was grim. “But he’s right—we have to get you to safety first, baby. Once I do, I’m going back for him—I swear.”
“I don’t matter—I’m not important,” I insisted. Despite the horrible pain in my leg and the disgusting humanoid insects, I had a strong—almost overwhelming—feeling that we shouldn’t be parted. That the three of us needed to stay together, no matter what.
But Drace refused to slow down. “Hell yes, you’re important—Lucian feels the same way I do. You’re our female—we have to protect you,” he insisted. “Anyway, look—we’re almost there.”
The city gates were looming closer. There was a wide road of some dirty-white stone extending out from them like a sidewalk to safety.
“Gonna leave you on the road where it’s safe and go back for Lucian,” Drace told me. Before I could answer he set me down as gently as he could, turned, and jogged back into the desert.
“Be careful!” I shouted after him and then felt like crying. What a stupid thing to say! How could he be careful when he was going back into that swarm of things? There was no way to stay safe in such circumstances.
Both—I’m going to lose them both! I felt tears welling in my eyes but a hot, dry desert wind whipped them away. The sun, which seemed like it had been setting for hours, suddenly dipped almost to the edge of the horizon. The city gates at my back cast long, ominous shadows over the shifting silver dunes—and over me. The wind picked up and seemed to hiss in my ears.
“…beware the shadowsss and the thingsss that lurk in them! It is your death…your death.”
I shivered, suddenly cold despite the heat baking up from the stones under my feet. I wanted to get out of the shadows but when I tried to take a step, I nearly fell. My burning leg couldn’t support my weight—not even a fraction of it. I was stuck standing on one leg, using just the toe of my other foot to balance.
“Drace!” I shouted, cupping my hands around my mouth to try and make my voice carry. “Lucian! Guys, where are you?”
The wind took my voice and whipped it away like a silk scarf, tossing it high before letting it die away to nothing in the empty, barren wasteland behind me.
I suppose at a time like this I should have been wondering how badly I was hurt and if I was poisoned or not. Or maybe I should have considered the fact that I was stranded alone on a strange planet light years from Earth with no chance of ever getting home.
Instead, all I could think of was my guys. Were Lucian and Drace okay? Or were they lost forever, buried under the weight of that horrible swarm of human-headed roaches, their bodies already being covered by the drifting sands of the desert?
At last the sun sank completely and not one but two moons rose in the Denarin night sky. One was vast and blue, much bigger than Earth’s moon and the other was smaller with a pinkish cast. It seemed to flit around the bigger moon and I wondered hazily if it was orbiting the larger planetoid. Was it possible that Denaris’s moon had a moon of its own? And why should I care since I was never going to see my guys again?
My throat was dry and sore from yelling and holding back tears but I shouted their names again anyway. Begging them to come back to me—to hurry up because I was scared.
“Lucian? Drace? Please! Please, come back to me—please!”
It’s too late. They’re gone—gone, whispered a nasty little voice in my head. Gone and they’re never coming ba—
The sight of a large, male figure staggering out of the dunes to my right shut the nasty voice up in an abrupt and very satisfying way. Squinting into the moonlit darkness, I thought it was Drace—it was big enough to be him, anyway. But there was something strange about the figure. It was shaggy around the edges, almost…furry, which didn’t make a lick of sense. But still, I couldn’t shake the impression.
“Drace?” I whispered, my lips so dry they were almost cracking. “Drace, is that…is that you?”
The huge, shaggy figure seemed to shake itself and change somehow. When it came closer I saw that I had been mistaken—it wasn’t furry after all. And it wasn’t an it—it was Drace and he was staggering under the weight of Lucian, who was tossed over one of his broad shoulders like a sack of grain.
“Drace!” I could have cried I was so happy to see him.
I wanted to run to him but I didn’t dare—my leg wouldn’t let me move at all. I just had to stand there, planted in one spot as he made his way through the moonlit dunes until he got to me.
“Are you okay?” I asked anxiously when he finally reached me. “Is Lucian all right?”
“See for yourself.” With a low groan, he deposited the other man on the ground at my feet and collapsed beside him, completely worn out.
I bent over Lucian as well as I could, feeling at his corded throat for a pulse. At first I couldn’t find it but then, just as I was about to panic, I felt a strong steady beat against the tips of my first and middle fingers.
“He’s alive!” I whispered and this time I couldn’t help crying. “Alive!”
“…’course I’m…alive,” a weak voice muttered.
“Lucian?” I reached for him and fell as my injured leg gave way.
He sat up, an obvious effort on his part, and caught me, cradling me in his arms. Drace was right beside him. He put a strong hand on my back steadying me. I felt surrounded by
their warmth, by their big bodies.
Safe, I thought. Now that we're all together again we’re safe.
“Lucian!” I whispered, pressing myself against his chest. “I thought…I was so afraid.”
“I’m fine, ma 'frela,” he assured me. “I only passed out from the pain of so many bites—my body has already metabolized the poison." He frowned. "But you—you will not be fine if we do not get you some treatment quickly.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “My leg still hurts but actually it’s feeling a lot better than it was. The burning sensation is almost all gone.”
Lucian’s face went pale. “It’s feeling better? That’s not a good sign, Rylee.”
“What? How can less pain be a bad sign?” I demanded. “I mean—”
“We need to get to my apartment in the city as soon as possible,” he interrupted me. “I have a dose of morata anti-venom there, in case a visiting business partner from another clan is bitten. We must get to it.”
“Why?” I started to ask. “I mean—”
Just then, the world started to spin around my head, making me feel dizzy and sick.
“Frozen Hells, she’s getting faint!” I heard Drace exclaim.
“The venom is working on her…one of the most potent in the world. We have to get her to the city—private transports by the gate,” Lucian told him. “Can you help?”
“I dragged your sorry ass out of the desert, didn’t I?” Drace growled.
“Yes, you did.” I had a blurred impression of Drace nodding at the other man. “Thank you—you risked your life for me. You didn’t need to do that.”
“Bond-mates risk for each other,” Drace growled. “That’s all.”
“But how did you keep from getting stung yourself? You didn’t use your second nature, did you?”
“Had to. There was no choice,” Drace said roughly.
“But—” Lucian began
“Come on,” Drace interrupted. “Like you said, we need to get our female out of here.”