Awakening (10 page)

He met him halfway between his camp chair and the armory. A hug followed accompanied by a tightening of Duncan’s throat. “Thank you,” he said, gripping Samuel hard, pounding his back with his fist. Pulling back, he shook his head repeatedly. “I heard what you and Vela did for me. How the hell am I ever going to repay you?”

Samuel’s smile was crooked. “Have you forgotten that you rescued me from a decade under that same bastard’s thumb?”

“Yeah, I guess I did. I mean, yes, of course.”

Duncan stared at him for a long, long moment and Samuel returned the favor. They were brothers-in-arms and had been through hell, a shared experience that had brought them even closer.

“So, you’re a Warrior of the Blood now,” Duncan said.

“I am and I have to say the power boost rocks. I can kill more death vampires when I’m battling and that means everything to me. But what the hell is going on with you? I heard you’ve advanced up the food-chain as well.”

Duncan nodded. “Looks like it.”

Samuel clapped him on the shoulder. “Excellent. We could use you at the Borderlands.”

Duncan felt suddenly somber as the reality of his new path hit him hard. “I won’t be staying here.”

“Wait a minute, are you headed into the Third Earth darkening grid? Do you want me on board?”

Duncan turned to glance in Luken’s direction. “He’s in charge of the squad, but it won’t just be the darkening. Looks like we’re going to Third.”

“What the hell for? Because you’re talking Third Earth death vampires and I’ve heard they’re almost impossible to beat, even for a What-Bee?”

Another question
du jour
. “Well, it seems Her Supremeness had a vision.”

“Wait, you mean Endelle had a vision? Not one of her Seers? Not Marguerite?” Marguerite was the most powerful Seer on Second Earth.

Duncan shook his head. “No, this was all on her. In the vision, she saw both Luken and me doing battle on Third. So we’re going.”

“This is some fucked up shit.” Samuel’s gaze slid past Duncan. “And what is Gideon’s sister doing here? Is she part of the squad, too?”

Right in that moment, Duncan felt completely split. The
breh-hedden
kept him in a powerful protective mode about the woman so that the last thing he wanted was for Rachel to be placed in any more danger than she already was. Being on a squad would put her square in the enemy’s sights.

On the other hand, his gut told him she’d play a critical role in the coming days and weeks, especially serving as his shield. Just as Samuel had said, as a squad they’d be up against Third Ascenders and would need every power available to them and that meant Rachel’s shielding capacity.

“Endelle wants her serving, but I’m torn.”

Samuel nudged him with his elbow. “Heard it’s the
breh-hedden
.”

Duncan sighed and once more shook his head as he reverted his gaze to Rachel. Luken must have been talking to her about her stance, because she kept looking down and adjusting her feet. “It’s … overwhelming.”

When Samuel didn’t respond, Duncan turned to look at him and saw that he was grinning.

Duncan responded with the first words that came to mind. “Oh, fuck you.”

Samuel laughed. “Hey, it’s really tough at first, all this intimacy and sensation. But you get used to it. You even come to like it.”

Duncan narrowed his gaze. “Can you feel her right now? I’ve heard once you bond you can sense what your woman’s experiencing or some such shit.”

He watched the strangest light enter Samuel’s eye, love, maybe. “Right now, she’s in our kitchen, baking. Parisa is with her.”

Duncan grew very uncomfortable and his father’s misogynistic words came back to him as a constant reminder:
women are for fucking, nothing more.

Clearly, Samuel took a different view.

Duncan’s gaze slid to Rachel once more. Luken held the weapon now, demonstrating. She had her hands on her hips, her neck arched forward slightly, her long, blond curly hair in beautiful waves down her back. His chest felt absurdly full just looking at her.

But then he’d known Rachel a long time. He’d met her during her marriage to Grieg, one of his father’s squad members, a man who had hurt Rachel badly.

Duncan’s history with Rachel was long and complicated, full of incredible memories that did constitute love. But they’d had an equal number of disagreements that led to serious disputes about what kind of long-term relationship the two of them, so different in their essential life goals, could ever have together.

For Duncan, nothing about Rachel was simple.

After a few minutes, Samuel once more congratulated Duncan on breaking out of the trance and of rising to What-Bee status. He then took off; Gideon wanted him in the training center for the next few hours.

~ ~ ~

The entire time Rachel had been learning how to fire the wrecking gun, she’d been fully aware of Duncan sitting twenty feet away. The man was starved from two weeks on a couple of drips and a feeding tube, so of course he was pounding down a burger and fries.

But the way he looked at her kept her abdomen tightening and releasing and apparently in constant expectation of fulfillment.

The foreplay in the hall behind the med-bay hadn’t helped at all. Her mind kept returning to the feel of his body pressed against hers, his tongue in her mouth, his cock trying to push between her thighs. The latter had been a challenge with both her dress and his leather kilt in the way.

Which meant that from the time Luken had started teaching her how to use the gun, part of her mind had become fixed on Duncan.

Yet somehow, that hadn’t affected her shooting ability at all. She didn’t know what it was, but she had the oddest affinity with the wrecking gun.

Though she wore a thick leather pad at her shoulder, she ached from taking the recoil in the same place over and over. But she sent healing energy to the muscles and bones in a constant flow and couldn’t really complain. She’d also become fully aware that her most essential power base had surged and whether she wanted to admit it or not, she was becoming even more powerful than ever before.

Gideon had once shouted at her, as brothers often did to younger sisters,
You need to take responsibility for what the Creator has given you. To deny your gifts is a slap in the face to all we hold dear.

She hadn’t been able to answer him then and she honestly didn’t know what to say now. Her personal drive to live a simpler life, one that she’d begun to create for herself on Mortal Earth, still lived within her as her most important desire.

Maybe her attitude toward preternatural power generally would be very different if Second Earth hadn’t been caught in a war that had been going on from the time she and Gideon ascended.

She hated the war with a passion, what it turned men into, like her ex-husband, now deceased. He’d been a monster, following in Carlyon’s lead, treating women like dogs that needed to be kicked. Often.

Luken handed her back the weapon and she once more adjusted her stance and the set of her shoulders as she leveled her gaze down the sight. The target, a thick, large stack of straw with a bullseye on the front, asked her to pull the trigger.

She squeezed, the sound deafening as the shotgun shell exploded into the straw, blowing pieces everywhere. She quickly sent healing energy to her ears.

“Okay, you’ve got all the essentials now.” Luken held her gaze, his blue eyes intense. He was an excellent instructor. “And I can sense just how much raw power you have. So, why don’t you try using that power and see what a wrecker gun can really do.”

“You sound as though you have no doubt I have the ability to add a charge to the gun.” The wrecker guns were designed to accept an ascender’s power and the resulting explosion was the sound she’d heard when the wreckers had fired on her a second before she’d folded Duncan to HQ.

Was she really going to do this?

“Hey, you’re the woman with a Fourth Earth shielding ability. So, no, I don’t have even the smallest doubt. And Gideon always said that between you two, you were the gifted one.”

She huffed a sigh. “And I suppose then he complained that I wouldn’t make war.”

Luken caught her elbow, forcing her to look at him. He was frowning and serious as he said, “Gideon never said anything about you that didn’t reflect how much he loved and admired his sister. And if anyone disparaged your absence from the war, he was all over them like flies on shit.”

Gideon. Dammit, now her eyes burned. What he said to her in private, he apparently never stated in public. She loved her brother so much. They’d come from a big family, but they were the only two of their number to ascend.

Rachel nodded and once more leveled the shotgun. “So, how do I access my power?”

“For whatever reason, I find it helps to focus on my wings and what it’s like to release them. That gets the power flowing. You’ll see. Once you do that, the power will drift down your arm and connect, then the wrecking gun will do the rest.”

Rachel drew a deep breath and called to her wings. The familiar answering rush of power flowed exactly as Luken had said. Only instead of prepping her wings to release, the same power drifted over shoulders and down her right arm, straight to her trigger finger.

The moment that power connected with the weapon, she could feel the charge forming in the gun.

“Wow.”

“Yep, you’ve got it. Now fire.”

Rachel pulled the trigger and the resulting explosion made her jump. The entire target blew apart, scattering straw high into the air.

“I did it.”

Luken whooped loudly. He turned to Duncan and called out, “What do you think of your woman now?”

Duncan gave a shout as well.

She turned to him and smiled, then sent additional healing to her eardrums because the wrecking gun, with a charge, was unbelievably loud.

But as she stood there, watching the last of the straws fall to the ground, she felt almost euphoric. She’d asked to be trained on the weapon because she had an enemy that wanted her dead. She needed to be able to protect herself. But as she stared at the remnants of the target and smelled the burned straw, a window of understanding opened where her brother was concerned, as well as Duncan and all the warriors she’d known. The power she held in her hand, the kind of weapon that men had used for hundreds of years, began to feel not like something external but something that was part of her. She supposed this had to be the way warriors felt, the exhilaration of being able to protect themselves, the ones they loved, and the land on which they lived.

The concept of the war began to shift in her mind, if just a little bit. Maybe that had been Luken’s purpose in separating her from Endelle, to get her to a place where she could potentially protect herself from the enemy.

She held the shotgun at waist level the way the wreckers had done, using the brute strength of their arms to support the shot when they fired. She didn’t have that kind of muscle, but she could imagine the power each man felt as he faced his adversary.

And she liked it.

She spent the next hour reloading her weapon and firing. Luken even brought out his own camp chair and sat down beside Duncan, letting her do her own thing, shot after shot. Another crew kept piling up bales of hay for her.

With each shot, a sense of confidence grew that maybe she wouldn’t be killed by wreckers after all.

Then she traded places with Duncan. He hadn’t had the opportunity to fire the weapons yet, and he definitely needed to be upgraded.

She sat in the camp chair he’d vacated and had a solid view of his broad shoulders, narrow waist, and the black leather kilt that had always turned her on. She didn’t know what it was about a man in a kilt, but the look warmed her up.

She realized his wavy, dark brown hair was to his shoulders now and almost ready to be worn in the
cadroen
. Most of the Militia Warriors kept their hair military short, but Duncan had clearly been moving in the direction of the What-Bees for some time. All the Warriors of the Blood had long hair.

She felt the
breh-hedden
moving inside her, driving her toward Duncan in ways she’d never before experienced. Sure, they’d had great chemistry in the past. But this felt like more, as though a spiritual element had combined with the physical to make her want him not just with her body but with her mind and soul as well.

She felt a profound desire to
cover
him, to spread herself on top of him, palm to palm, her legs balanced on his, her abdomen connected from her breasts to the tops of her thighs.

This was Duncan, the man she’d loved deeply, fought with, yearned for. And now all those memories and sensations felt amplified in the same way that she could expand the capacity of the shotgun.

She wondered what making love with him would be like now, with his increased power and her apparent emerging abilities. Would it change the physical nature of their time together in bed? The thought was so intriguing that desire began to rise, a swirl of sensation compounded by the sight of him in his kilt, holding the gun in hand near his waist, and firing at the target.

He reloaded, but this time when he fired he added his preternatural power. The explosion made her jump.

She heard him say, “Holy shit!”

His back stiffened suddenly and when he turned to stare at her, she knew exactly what had happened; he’d caught her scent, her new, tell-all olfactory barrage that told him exactly what she was feeling.

About three seconds later, his answering response hit the air and she felt stomach-punched with his spicy-cider scent. In a very languid way, her knees parted, just a few inches, but he’d seen the movement.

To Luken standing next to him, he said, “We’ll pick this up later. I need a shower and I really need to talk some things over with Rachel.”

Luken nodded. “You got it. Just let me know when you want to resume training.”

She rose to her feet, wondering what the hell she was doing. Was she really going to get sucked back into a physical relationship with Duncan, open that door, poke at that stupid hornet’s nest?