Master of Darkness (23 page)

She wasn’t the only one exploring. Justice was evidently trying to find out just how to lick to make her lose her mind. He slipped his tongue back and forth across her clit in precise, even licks, pausing periodically to seal his lips around the little nub and suck. Back and forth, up and down, twisting his head this way and that.

Until each tiny, delicate gesture shot jolts of raw heat up her spine.

Miranda wanted to make him feel that good, so she wrapped one hand around his shaft and drew it into her mouth. Sucking hard, she rolled her tongue over its warm, nubby head.

Oh, Holy God.
The blazing delight of her own tongue hit her building lust like a shot of lighter fluid on a campfire. Heat blazed through her, so furious she didn’t think her need had
ever
been so hot. Not even during her Burning Moon.

After all, then she’d had no one to share it with.

Like most women, it normally took Miranda far more time to come to this kind of raging boil when it felt as if any little thing at all would shoot her into orgasm like a comet. But between the exotic eroticism of the Spirit Link and sharing Justice’s arousal—which built to a savage burn much faster than her own normally did—it wasn’t long until she realized she just couldn’t take it anymore.

Miranda didn’t even have to save the words before Justice started moving. Rolling over with her, somehow maintaining their floating support cloud even as he scooped up her legs and locked her knees over his shoulders.

His cock slid into the slick, ready grip of her sex. Miranda caught her breath.

Justice instantly eased back until the penetration wasn’t quite so uncomfortably deep. He drew out another fraction and began to ease in again, carefully controlling his thrusts to let her adjust to his width.

Not that she needed much adjusting, considering the lust burning up her spine like a flame along a fuse. Sensing that, Justice picked up the speed of his rolling thrusts, settling over her until they were close enough to kiss. And they did, meeting thrust with slow, rolling thrust as their lips slanted together, suckling deeply, tasting each other.

His cock hit something, some bundle of nerves she hadn’t even known was there, and they both convulsed in delighted shock at the sensation.

And they were grinding, no longer careful, hips surging and twisting, his cock plunging deeper as her inner muscles relaxed. Justice stopped for a moment, ignoring her groan of frustrated need, and sat back on his heels, pulling her knees together to tighten her already delicious grip on his cock. Lifting her ass in his free hand, he rotated his hips, rocking over her clit at just. The. Right. Angle . . .

Later Miranda decided she had started coming first, swamped by blinding flashes of orgasmic delight. He followed her over the edge with a howl that sounded far more wolf than man.

Coming, coming . . .

And still coming when Justice’s cushion of magic suddenly dissolved out from under them. They hit the water with a tremendous splash and came up sputtering.

“Dammit, I
knew
you were going to do that!” Miranda palmed water off her wet face and coughed.

He swept his wet hair out of his eyes and grinned at her. “Yeah, we won’t be trying the magic bed thing again. My concentration just isn’t that goo—”

Justice broke off, staring at her as if stunned. Miranda froze. She could see her own astonished face in the candlelight throwing shimmering reflections off the drops on her wet skin. The way her red hair was slicked down over the curves of her breasts as foam lapped back and forth.

His lips didn’t move, but she heard the question in his mind. She had to force herself to wait for him to actually ask it.

And then he did. “Marry me.”

“Yes! Oh, yes, yes, yes!” Laughing, she threw herself into his arms, sending another wave splashing out of the tub to flood the bathroom.

It was a long, long time before either of them even noticed.

EPILOGUE

Maeve tilted her
head, contemplating the new sword she was making for Dovregubben’s son. After all, the Troll King had paid her for the blade; the least she could do was ensure his family received it. Especially since a vision had shown her young Hrungne meant to fight for his father’s throne—and that he could well win it, with the right weapon.

She didn’t look up at the click of her familiar’s claws on the stone floor. “Maeve?” Guinness said. “The petitioners are here.”

Reluctantly, she dragged her gaze away from the huge blade to watch Danu, Finvarra, and Essus enter—the Phoenix eagle winging in to perch on her anvil, the cat and the Faedragon following more slowly.

Essus dipped his brilliant head in a bow. “Thank you for agreeing to hear our petition, Milady.”

Maeve kept him in that bow while the others scrambled up the great stone to join him. The cat shot Essus an irritated glance, presumably for his refusal to wait for those who traveled by foot.

Fin, Maeve noticed, looked too worried to participate in the trio’s usual sparring. That bothered her, for the Faedragon was always ready to fight anyone, anywhere. Particularly his fellow familiars.

“What has my children in such a tizzy, eh?”

“We are concerned for our changelin’s,” Danu said. “Our branch of the Sidhe has been too long from the Mageverse.” As she spoke, her Georgia drawl dropped away. “Their blood grows weak, as do their powers. We want to find them suitable mates of Sidhe descent.”

Maeve lifted a green brow. “From Llyr’s kingdom?” Oh, Siobhan would not like that. Not at all. That in itself was a good enough reason to do it.

It would give Maeve great pleasure to irritate Siobhan as she so richly deserved . . .

But Essus shook his feathered head. “No, milady—that is, if it pleases you. We would ask for suitable matches from among the Hidden Ones.” His clear, clever gaze met hers.

Maeve frowned. “You are aware I do not command the heart. Not even of those I consider my own dearest.”

“We know, milady,” Finvarra said, sitting back on his haunches with his tail curled around his toes, its frilled tip flicking in agitation. “But Branwyn . . . She faces greater danger than she knows, and I can’t make her see sense. I fear for her, milady. I fear for her a very great deal.”

The Sidhe studied the little dragon, reading his anxiety for his changeling partner in every flick of his tail.

Faedragons had a talent for sensing the future. If Fin thought the child was in danger, she probably was. Maeve sighed. “Very well, my dear ones. I’ll see what I scry in my forge fire.” She shot them a hard look. “But any matchmaking is your task, not mine.”

All three familiars visibly sagged in relief. “Of course, milady,” Essus said.

Danu nodded agreement. “We’ll set affairs in motion as soon as you identify the candidates.”

“And we’ll find a way to bring them all together, none the wiser.” Fin’s great golden eyes met hers, and his voice dropped to a despairing whisper. “Only . . . please, milady. Find my Branwyn a warrior, or she’ll not survive. None of our changelin’s will.”

* * *

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ENFORCER

Appearing in
Unbound,
coming in March 2013 from Berkley Sensation!

Dona Astryr paused
on the dark, narrow wooden stairs, listening with the instinctive caution of a woman who has been betrayed one too many times.

Outside, a crier read the American Declaration of Independence in a fine, rolling baritone. The Philadelphia crowd hooted and stomped for some of the more incendiary lines, bellowing support for the Continental Congress. If there were any Tories among them, they had the good sense to keep their snarls to themselves. Dona didn’t blame them; she’d seen a man tarred and feathered once. Judging by the screams of the victim, it hadn’t been much fun, though the crowd had thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle.

Temporal natives could be a bit sadistic.

An evidence bot darted past Dona’s shoulder, finding its way through the darkened house with the skill and silence of something programmed not to attract attention. The fist-sized robot anti-graved around a corner at the top of the stairs and vanished into the room beyond.

Outside the house, some hapless pedestrian apparently stepped into the path of a wagon rumbling along the narrow brick street. The wagoneer speculated—loudly—that the man’s mother had formed an unnatural romantic association with a mange-ridden beaver. Dona’s lips twitched. Probably the only smile she’d get tonight.

She continued up the stairs, only to pause just outside the bedroom door to do battle with her gag reflex.

The one thing Dona had always hated about time travel was the smell. All those romantic commercial trids never mentioned the reek of the horse manure piled everywhere, added to non-existent sanitation that often meant raw sewage running down the street.

This smell was worse. Much, much worse.

No surprise. It had been ten hours since the murders. Some of the bodies had spent nine of those hours ripening in the July heat before a courier bot arrived at the North American Temporal Outpost with the news that a tour group was under attack.

Two and a half minutes after the bot delivered its message, a team of ten Enforcers arrived in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, hoping to save lives. One deep breath told them they were too late. Though the call had seemed to come from a frantic temporal tourist, those poor bastards were all dead when the courier was launched. That meant the killers themselves had sent the bot.

Whatever their reasons for notifying Temporal Enforcement, the murderers hadn’t been in any hurry to do so. Probably too busy playing with the female victims.

The women in the bedroom had been the last to die.

Squaring her shoulders, Dona stepped through the open door. Her cop’s eyes automatically tracked the arching patterns of blood-splatter marking the walls. The rug squelched under her booted feet. No way to tell whether it had been an Aubusson or just hand-hooked wool.

The rug’s owner was just as unidentifiable. Or would have been, if the nanocomputer implant in Dona’s brain hadn’t started a simulation based on her sensor readings. Its calculations stripped away the blood, reconstructed what was left of the face, and located the missing bits scattered across the room.

A DNA scan reveals there is a ninety-eight-point-five percent chance the victim is Lolai Hardin,
the comp whispered in Dona’s mind.
She was a
licensed temporal guide and owner of Hardin’s Independence Tours, using this house as her base of operations. I have a recording of her last trid commercial in my files.

Play it.

Like a ghost, the woman’s three-dimensional image faded into view. Lolai’s oval face had been delicately beautiful, despite the fine lines that radiated from the corner of her blue eyes. According to her file, she was eighty-two, though someone from this time would have believed her no older than thirty. She wore eighteenth-century dress; a flounced floral petticoat and green silk gown covered by a lace apron and matching kerchief. A jaunty hat decorated with flowers covered her blonde head, tilting rakishly over one eye. She looked as comfortable in the historical garb as if she wore it every day. Which she probably did. When not ferrying tour groups back and forth through time, most guides lived wherever they conducted their tours. It helped them blend in with the temporal natives.

“I’m Lolai Hardin,” the woman announced, speaking Galactic Standard with a faint Colonial Philadelphia accent. “I have sixteen years of experience as a temporal guide specializing in Colonial America in the year 1776, particularly in and around Philadelphia, Boston, and New York.” Hardin’s smile was bright, her manner calm and confident. Dona tried not to wonder how she’d looked when she’d realized she was about to die—and how that death would come. “If you’d like to live as our ancestors did, Hardin’s Independence Tours will show you an experience you’ll never forget.”

“I’m certainly finding it pretty damned unforgettable,” Dona muttered.

“What?” Chief Alerio Dyami glanced over at her. There was no expression on his handsome face, though his black eyes gave him away. Glacial rage burned in those dark pupils, flecking them with crimson light.

Dyami wasn’t just an Enforcer. He was a Vardonese Warlord, a genetically engineered warrior bred to protect, with the superhuman strength and speed to do the job. His eyes glowed whenever his emotions grew especially strong. Everybody on the Outpost knew that when the chief’s eyes went red, you’d better duck.

The deaths of fourteen innocent people were more than enough to make Dyami’s eyes burn. Especially since there wasn’t a gods-cursed thing he could do about it.

You can’t change history.

Even if Dyami traveled back in time ten hours and attempted to prevent these killings, he’d fail. The victims would still die, no matter what he did. Thirty years of time travel had proved that all time is simultaneous. Past, present and future are an illusion. This made the concept of predestination and time paradoxes equally meaningless.

Temporal Enforcement existed to protect the innocent by preventing time travelers from committing crime. But sometimes you were simply too late.

Then there was nothing you could do but clean up the blood.

“What have we got?” Dyami asked, the impatience in his voice suggestion he’d been waiting for her report on the situation downstairs a little too long.

Dona jolted to automatic attention. “All fourteen victims are accounted for. We’ve got a total of ten tourists downstairs, including a ten-year-old boy, along with three support staff who posed as house servants.”

The chief grunted, his brooding gaze drifting to what was left of Hardin. “At least the bastards didn’t kidnap anybody.”

“Yeah, you definitely wouldn’t want to be a victim they could really take their time with.” Dona looked at the narrow bed under its flowered canopy. “It’s bad enough as it is.”

The woman’s wrists were bound to the canopy posts with mag cables. Loops of the metallic rope-like restraints circled the posts at the foot of the bed, but the ankles they’d bound had vanished.

Dona’s comp helpfully informed her that Hardin’s right leg was that red lump she could see half-under the bed, while the left one had somehow ended up against the wall across the room. She swallowed hard.
Don’t you dare let me toss.

Beginning anti-nausea treatment.
Her stomach stopped bucking. “It appears the killers were Xer,” Dona told the chief, once she was sure she wouldn’t decorate his boots with her lunch. “The wounds are consistent with those inflicted by Xeran Sevaks.” The fanatics’ weapon of choice made a Bowie knife look like a toothpick. “Preliminary scans indicate the presence of Xeran DNA. They gang-raped one of the staff and a female tourist between butchering the other victims.” When she met his gaze, she sensed he was just as concerned as she was about the sheer viciousness of the attack. “Chief, this isn’t normal behavior even for Xeran priests. The simulations we’ve run indicate they hacked at these people in some kind of frenzy. Maybe religious, maybe sexual. Either way, it was ugly as the seven hells.”

A muscle rolled in Dyami’s genetically engineered jaw. “Lolai wasn’t killed by Xerans. Her murderer was human—more or less.”

Dona stared at him, feeling her stomach drop to her boots. Technically the Xerans were human too, but over the past couple of centuries, genetic engineering had changed them into something . . . else. Something faster and stronger and light-years meaner than any mere human.

To the Xerans, humans were inferior primitives, heretics who refused to worship the Victor, their so-called god. Dona could think of only one man they’d trust to help them slaughter a houseful of innocent time-travelers. “Ivar Terje.”

It was a damn good thing her comp’s anti-nausea procedures were so effective.

“Yeah, Ivar. Again.” The chief curled a lip. “The DNA scan I just ran was conclusive. Ninety-nine-point-eight percent chance Terje raped and murdered Lolai Hardin.”

“Gods.” Dona’s eyes slid reluctantly to the dismembered torso now drying to a shade of dark brown in the middle of the bed. “How could he have done something like this?”
And why in the name of all the hells didn’t I know he was capable of it? I
slept
with him. I thought I loved him—at least until he tried to beat me to death and murder my friend.

As if reading her mind, Dyami shot her a compassionate glance. “I didn’t know what he was either.” His lovely male rumble dropped to a mutter. “I still can’t believe he sold us out for a handful of galactors.”

Actually, Dyami’s own internal investigation put the figure at 1.3 million galactors. But the chief wasn’t the kind of man to turn traitor for any amount of money; to him, more than a million galactors might as well have been pocket change.

Which was why they were in this mess. If Dyami hadn’t been so relentlessly honorable—not to mention inhumanly handsome in that Vardonese way of his, all height and muscle and hard black eyes—maybe she wouldn’t have turned to Ivar as a distraction.

Oh, beefershit,
Dona thought, suddenly impatient with her own rationalization.
You wanted to believe you were in love with the sociopathic bastard because he said all the right romantic tripe. You ignored the evidence that was right in your face
.

Her sensors had warned her Ivar used his comp almost continuously, controlling his body’s normal emotional reactions at all times. You only did something like that if you were lying every time you opened your mouth. But no, she hadn’t seen the truth until his fist hit her face.

Turns out, she’d gotten off lucky.

Her sickened gaze once more tracked to the corpse.
Fourteen, seven Gods love us
.
They killed fourteen people, and Ivar helped them.

“Would these people be dead if we’d managed to capture Ivar six months ago?” She caught herself rubbing her aching chest and forced her hand to drop.

“Probably.” Dyami shot her a twisted grin. “Though Goddess knows I hate to interrupt your wallow in guilt, Ivar is nothing to the Xerans. They don’t think much of traitors.”

“I’m not real fond of the dickhole myself,” Dona muttered.

Dyami shrugged those impressive shoulders. The dim light from the evidence bot rolled over the dark blue scales of his armored T-suit, making its silver piping gleam. Her eyes helplessly followed the rolling line of light as it played over powerful muscle barely concealed by the tight-fitting suit.

“So the teams completed the evidence collection downstairs?”

Guiltily, Dona snapped her gaze back to his face. If not for her computer, her cheeks would be blazing beet red about now. “Uh, yes sir.”

“Good.” He gave her a decisive nod, beads clinking in the braids worked into his shoulder-length black hair—actually combat decorations on his home planet. “We need to finish the cleanup before one of the temporals decides to investigate.”

No, they definitely didn’t want some eighteenth-century good Samaritan walking in on an Enforcer team in all its armored glory. “I checked before we left the Outpost, but I didn’t see any record of a mass slaying on this date,” Dona told him. “If somebody’d found this mess, they’d have talked about it.”

Dyami snorted. “Assuming any reports survived the ensuing five hundred years.”

That was the trouble with time travel. You might think you knew what happened, but you really didn’t. Records were lost, to fire or mold or other ravages of time. Those who reported the events at the time could have lied to protect their reputations, to make their cause look better, or just for the hell of it. Ever since temporal exploration began thirty years ago, humanity had been shocked to learn how much “history” was pure beefershit.

You never really knew what had happened during historical events until you went back and watched them occur. Otherwise, the past might as well be the surface of an alien planet.

“Coming through!” A body tube floated through the door, the blue glow of the two-meter-long cylinder’s antigrav field shining on the floor. Dr. Sakuri Chogan followed, her face grim and pale under her topknot of iridescent green hair. A swarm of evidence bots trailed her, ready to process the scene.

Chogan stopped in the doorway and stared around at the arching patterns of blood splatter. “Seven hells.”

Dona automatically took a step closer, concerned by her sickened expression.

“Oh, back off.” The Outpost’s doctor shot her an impatient glower. “I do autopsies for a living.” Then, as if against her will, her gaze drifted around the room again. “Though whoever did this ranks with the sicker psychopaths I’ve seen.”

“DNA scans say it was Ivar,” Dona said flatly.

“Oh.” Chogan, being no idiot, winced on her behalf, and promptly changed the subject. “We’d better get her tubed.” Revulsion crossed the human’s expressive face. “As soon as we can
find
all of her . . .”

* * *

Grim, unspeaking, Dona,
Chogan and Dyami went to work at the gory task. Luckily, temporal armor was as effective at blocking biological contaminants as it was at protecting the body from time travel.

As they worked, faint slurps and thumps signaled that the evidence bots were at work, removing every last blood cell from the plastered walls, every hair and bone fragment and stray bit of tissue from the bed and floor. Every last alien
anything
that didn’t belong in the eighteenth century. By the time they were through, you’d never know anyone had died here.