Authors: Eve Jameson
Paying no heed to the other three corridors, they took a
hard right down a narrow hall with a high ceiling. At the end was a guard who
stepped out of the way at their approach.
“Has anyone entered this corridor today?” asked Connyn.
“Not to my knowledge, sir.”
“Have you left your post at any time?”
The guard shifted uneasily. “Once. Briefly. Another guard
sounded the distress for immediate help, but when I reached the main entry, no
one admitted to calling out.
Rordyc looked at Connyn with an uneasy sharpness to his
gaze. Ignoring it, Connyn stepped forward, placed his hand over the center of
the door where the five stones were inlaid and pressed his ring against the
rythra.
The door slid back, revealing a long, dark passageway with shimmering ovals
along both sides hovering just above the floor. Reds of sunsets, yellows of
sunrises, blues of oceans and greens of jungles reflected in muted colors
through the inactive portals. But only one glowed with a bright golden ring around
it, indicating exactly which one was occupied.
Rordyc’s eyebrows flew up when it registered which portal
she had gone through. “I won’t waste my breath asking if you’d like help
returning your mate—”
“Good.”
“But I will remind you that she has a very difficult
audience to face in the morning.”
Connyn was already walking toward the portal. “She’s the one
who chose the portal,” he said. By the time he’d reached the gateway, Rordyc
and Beyran were no longer in sight and the door was shut tightly behind them.
* * * * *
Connyn found his mate quickly, though she’d left a rambling
trail that twisted and turned in on itself several times. Lust, relief and
anger all heaved through him at the sight of her standing by the edge of a pool
of water with her back to him. He moved in behind her as silently as any number
of predatory cats stalking their intended prey. She seemed to be staring
intently down into the clear water, though he knew from experience there was
nothing to see but the soft glow of the translucent orange rocks that lined the
bottom.
“The water’s safe,” he said when he was less than a foot
from her.
Aurora shrieked and spun around, her long dark green cloak
tangling around her legs. She arched precariously over the water’s edge as she
tried desperately to regain her balance. Instinctively, he reached for her.
Caught her and brought her up next to his chest. Her brown eyes filled with
shock and then pain as she tried to free her arm from his grip.
Pulling her up straight, he peeled the cape off her shoulder
and down, revealing a long bloody cut on her upper arm. She shifted her other
arm out of the cloak and it fell to the ground as he inspected the curved gash
down her biceps. A mark he recognized since he’d had one like it down his chest
years ago.
He said nothing but picked her up and carried her past the
first pool, through the dense vegetation and thick stands of trees toward
another pool surrounded by the specific tree he needed. When he reached the
bank of the pond, he lowered her to her feet. “Take off your clothes. Do you
have any other wounds?” he asked as he pulled away a section of the outer bark
of a nearby tree and then used the tip of his knife to scrape off the oozing
green sap.
“No.”
When he turned back to her, she was still clothed. And shaking.
A ferocity of emotion pummeled him at the sight of his mate wounded but safe.
Scared but defiant.
Afraid to touch her while such violence pounded in his
blood, he came only close enough to her to spread the sap over her cut with the
flat of his blade. “It’s shallow and should heal easily.”
She nodded.
He knew it stung, but his mate never so much as flinched. “The
sap disinfects any beginning infection and will neutralize the irritant from
the
meglay’s
claws as it begins the healing.”
After cleaning his knife in the grass, he sheathed it and
then tossed it to the ground. He checked the wound, found that the sap had
stopped bubbling. “Take off your clothes and get in the water.”
“I don’t want a bath,” she said.
The diverse emotions loosed by the hunt for his mate melted
together in a surge of anger. Connyn’s fingers curled into his palm as he
resisted the urge to rip her clothes off himself and toss her into the water. “The
water will soothe your scrapes and bruises.” When she didn’t move to take off
her clothes, he hissed through his teeth, “You can enter the pool under your
own strength or mine.”
After a brief hesitation where she seemed to be weighing her
options, she pulled off her clothes and set them carefully aside. Gingerly, she
stepped into the water. This pool wasn’t as clear at the other and she
hesitated with each step, finding her footing.
“There’s nothing harmful in this world,” he said, moving
toward her, “unlike the one where you received your cut.” Pausing, he watched
the water rise to cover her body as she moved deeper into the pool. He forced
his voice to remain calm even though the brutal truth of just how close she had
come to certain death still seethed through his veins. “You’re lucky the
meglay’s
hunting season just ended. We both are.”
He’d nearly lost his own life when he was a youth and had
foolishly disregarded Jordyn’s instructions to stay out of the
meglay’s
world. The
meglay
was not a large beast compared to those Aurora would
be acquainted with on Earth. A feral predator, it was the size and shape of a
large dog with feline claws and teeth. During its hunting or mating season it
attacked with a ferocity that knew no fear and no end until death. His own
first encounter with a
meglay
was nearly his last, due to a greatly
inflated and arrogant estimation of his own hunting prowess. If his youngest
cousin Siriyn hadn’t seen him enter the portal and immediately run to snitch on
him to Jordyn…Connyn shook the memory away. “How many portals did you enter?”
“Four.”
His heart did a quick, swooping dive toward his feet. The
meglay’s
homeworld was not the only dangerous portal that opened into this corridor.
The water was up to her shoulders now. She turned to look at
him. “The first was one that from the outside looked like the mountains of
Colorado, but Colorado doesn’t have flowers that hum.”
He cocked his head to one side. “True.”
“The second was a similar-looking environment and that’s
where I was attacked. I was still close to the portal and basically fell out of
it again when I jumped backward. I was still lurching and trying to regain my
balance when I fell into the third world. A world that looked like nothing more
than a deserted beach for miles and miles. But the sand moved under my feet and
it was like trying to stand up on a waterbed. Plus the water was a golden
pinkish color.”
An icy shiver crawled down Connyn’s spine. If she’d fallen
into either the right or left portal next to that one, his family would most
likely have been lighting mourning candles tomorrow instead of planning a long
overdue Mating Ritual celebration. He leaned over and began removing his boots.
“So not Earth?”
“No.” She watched him warily and stepped deeper into the
pool, bringing the water up to her chin. “But you already knew that.”
“Yes.” He straightened, pulled his shirt off over his head. “In
fact, I know that none of these portals lead to Earth or any other inhabited
world.” After he took off his pants, he stepped into the water. “They are not
even inter-dimensional portals.”
“You told me that all the portals were guarded.” Her
belligerent tone implied that he had lied to her and thus her actions this
afternoon were partly, if not completely, his fault.
“I never said such a thing. I said that the five portals to
Earth were guarded.”
“You never clarified the difference.”
“Could it be because I was concerned for your safety?” He
reached out and touched her shoulder just above her wound. She looked away and
crossed her arms over her breasts. “You caused quite an uproar in the city you
know,” he said.
Her brows furrowed over her deep brown eyes. “Why?”
A low growl rumbled at the back of his throat. “You don’t
think a Royal’s missing mate, a woman who in part holds the destiny of an
entire people in her hands, would be cause for alarm?”
Guilt flashed over her face. “Oh.” She backed away slightly,
discovered that the bottom of the pool started rising again and stopped. “I
hadn’t meant to be gone long. I got lost.”
“You’ve upset a lot of people. Beyran believes he’s failed
in his duty to me—”
“But—”
“Cait was in tears, you abused Brooke’s hospitality, caused
my parents anguish that they could have been spared, spurred a military search
from house to house and shut down the entire city among other things.”
Aurora blinked. Twice. Her lips parted as she stared up at
him in shock. “I didn’t mean…” She shook her head. “I’m sorry for everyone’s
trouble.”
He ignored her apology. “Why do you feel you must talk to
Ellyna?”
“I need to ask her a question.”
“Ask me.”
“You can’t answer it.”
“How do you know until you ask?”
Resentment flared in her eyes. “How do you know I won’t be
safe anywhere but in Ilyria?”
His anger threatened to breach the restraining walls he’d
caged it in. Fury at the danger she’d put herself in propelled him toward her.
He stopped himself just short of reaching for her, refusing to give up his
control. Instead he pushed off the bottom of the pool and floated on his back,
allowing the warming water to soothe the ragged edges of his nerves.
He could feel Aurora’s confusion and tension vibrate through
the waters at his actions. Letting her uncertainty build, he closed his eyes
and breathed deeply, strengthening his hold on his control. He was going to
need every last thread of it to deal with his mate tonight. At the moment, his
anger was burning so hot, so deeply, he halfway expected the water to turn to
steam where it touched his skin.
Finally she said, “You don’t seem to have been too upset by
my leaving.”
His feet dropped to the bottom of the pool. At once she
recognized her mistake and turned to flee. But he had the advantage of size,
speed and fury on his side and she’d not gotten halfway to the other side
before his arms wrapped around her and held her tightly against his chest.
“Do you really want to know how upset your disappearance
made me? How the knowledge that you purposefully ignored my commands in regard
to your safety affected me? Affects me to this very moment, Aurora? For your
information, I can’t tell you. Yet. The demarcation lines setting the
boundaries of those particular emotions have yet to be set.”
Sliding one arm up between her breasts and the other over
her stomach, he gripped her by the hip and shoulder, his arms crossing over her
torso in a way that pinned her more securely to him. “So let me tell what I do
know. I know how close you came to death in these last hours. How much I now
owe the gods in recompense for the miracles worked today on your behalf to
ensure your whole and safe return. I know that life freezes the moment someone
tells me you’re gone.”
Breath dragged into his lungs as rage colored vision to
black before he could find the control to push it back and grind out the cause
behind the rage. “What I don’t know is who helped you evade my guards and
distract anyone who might have stopped you.”
It wasn’t until the words were out of his mouth that he
realized how that poisonous thought had been subconsciously eating at him.
There was no other explanation of all the “coincidences”. It hadn’t been Cait
and it hadn’t been Brooke. Bethany hadn’t been around and the only others she’d
had any consistent contact at all were his own guards. There’d been hours she’d
been able to seduce or be seduced by any number of his men while he was
attending to state business.
Every soldier under his command marched through his mind as
he tried to sift through the most likely to betray him. Each was dismissed in
turn as he found it impossible to believe a treachery so deep from any one of
them. It burned like acid under his skin knowing that it had to have been one
of them and despite all the evidence to prove it, he was still too blind to see
which of his men could be guilty of such duplicity.
Aurora had help. As his thoughts clarified around that one
salient fact, other sureties fell into place. The betrayal hadn’t been by
someone loyal to the Sleht. If so, his mate would be dead or well into enemy
territory. She would
not
have been released to wander through the
portals. Everyone in Ilyria understood how The Gateways worked and his soldiers
knew that there were no inter-dimensional portals here. Any one of them would
have told her the same if they had known she was hoping to return to Earth.
Understanding lodged like a boulder on his heart. Her
accomplice had been acquiescing to her requests. She’d been in charge the
entire time, not revealing her whole plan, but arranging help for what she
could not do on her own. Which meant Aurora had not been seduced, but had been
the seducer.
Suddenly, the devious smile that had worried him earlier
that morning made perfect sense.
“Who is he, Aurora?”
Her body stiffened in his hold. “What?”
“Who is the traitor in my own household?”
“Traitor? What are you talking about?”
“Who helped you escape my protection?”
“No, you have it wrong.” Her voice rose with her panic. Her
arms and legs flailed. “You don’t understand.” She twisted, kicked, struggled
and then fought to turn in his arms, but he would not release her.
The pain of seeing her face when another man’s name passed
her lips struck a deep fear inside him of the brutal viciousness it could
loose. He felt the snarling and snapping of the ruthlessness already rising,
acutely sharpened by the collapsing hope that had only just risen to life at
Brooke’s declaration that his mate loved him. Now he knew that the emotion he’d
touched in her soul when he finally broken through that golden mist had not
been for him, but for another man.