Zenith, p.6
Zenith, page 6
She wanted to believe she was safe, but at the same time her muscles were so taut, the blood could barely squeak through her veins. Even a thousand Sunnys and Zeniths surrounding her wouldn’t be enough to let her sleep ever again.
He met her dubious gaze and let out a muttered sound that was either the gryfon’s frustrated clack or perhaps a Xymiran curse. “I need to clean these scratches,” he told her. “And I think you need to unwind.”
She wrinkled her nose at him. “Did you just tell me to unwind after I was attacked by a killer robot? And then dragged through this dark wood in the middle of nowhere? To this strange place with a dangerous beast—” Her voice rose with each beat of her outrage.
“Sunny isn’t a dangerous beast,” he protested. “Many Earthers have kitties as pets.”
“I wasn’t talking about Sunny,” she blurted.
He gazed at her. “I’m not dangerous.” When she snorted, he amended, “Not to you.”
“You’re the reason…” She shook her head to banish the rest of the confession. When he opened his mouth to ask—and she wasn’t sure she could stop herself from answering this time—she hurried on, “Maybe this is just as unwound as I can be.”
For a long moment, he studied her, then he tilted his head. “You came to a closed world when many intergalactic citizens believe these are rough and terrible places. You fast-talked your way into the employ of an incorrigible con man. And when you were grabbed by a rogue bot, you didn’t panic. Instead, when you opened the door here and saw what you thought was another threat, you stepped up to save me. I think there’s more to you than a one-of-a-kind, gem-encrusted sash handwoven from diamond thread.”
She scowled. But of course there was more to her—much more she hadn’t told him.
“Right now, there’s less to me than a black cloak,” she said with a sniff.
“Even less than that if you come with me.”
She gave him another wary look. “Come where? We just got here. Anyway, I thought you were hurt. Those aren’t just scratches.” Her voice hitched, like a sharp little claw in his chest. “You could’ve died.”
“But I didn’t. And we won’t go far.” He went to a small wooden trunk at the end of the neatly made bed and flipped up the lid. “We’re safe here, I promise.”
She snorted when he lifted out a satchel and a plasma gun thrice the size of the compact pistol he’d used to shoot at the bot. “Then why do we need that?”
“Because I want you to believe me.” He turned to face her, waiting.
She’d come all this way and left everything behind. Was she really going to not believe him now?
Chapter 6
She followed him without another word.
As part of a beast battalion, Zenith was used to going without words, but this time, for some reason, he wished she’d answered him instead. Maybe because he needed to be sure of her. Maybe because he liked the sound of her voice, a little husky, a little sweet. But at least she came.
He led her out to the lake. The last of the day’s light had turned the sky a deep blue, the last shimmering photons streaming their last wave particles toward them before the angle of the star traced the ecliptic below the horizon. The forest was still and silent, as if theirs were the only eyes left to see, theirs the only skin to feel that lingering warmth.
When they emerged between the rocks and reeds at the shoreline, Callie made a pleased sound, as he’d known she would. She seemed to have a weakness for anything beautiful, and Sunset Lake at end of day was a wash of color and texture with whispering waves and wind and the mysterious perfume of coming night that delighted all his senses. She lifted her face to the teasing nip of the wind, her eyes half closing so that the dark fringe of her lashes turned her brown eyes to the same hue as the shadows beneath the tree.
“It’s a lovely little world, isn’t it?” She took a deep breath. “Maybe this is a good place for the IDA after all—a reminder of the more primitive impulses when it comes to finding someone.”
He tilted his head. “Primitive impulses? Like what?”
Color as rich as the sunset bloomed on her cheeks. “Like…ah, um, catching a glimpse of someone and knowing in that instant they are the one.”
He arched a brow. “The IDA would have us believe that complex algorithms and elaborate courtship rituals are the key to a successful mating.”
She lifted her chin, looking down her nose at him with that certain attitude despite her bedraggled state. “I’d think as a predatory beast you would favor instinct and sensory input.”
“True.” He took another step toward the water. “This way.”
“We’re running out of room for me to follow you any farther.”
An odd hitch in her voice made him pause again and glance back. He hadn’t missed any of her mutterings that implied she expected something more from him. But he wasn’t going to push her for answers; he would let her circle in closer with whatever she wanted to tell him but couldn’t—or told herself she didn’t want to tell him but couldn’t resist—and then he would strike.
“Just a little farther,” he urged. “I think you’ll like it.”
Turning to the lake, he dropped the cloak she’d given back to him, and stepped out onto the first flat rock, half submerged. Ignoring the faint inhalation of her breath, he followed that to the next rock and the next. The nip in the wind was more like a bite now, but he liked bites—and biting.
Crossing to the far end of the circle of rocks, he set down his satchel and stepped off the edge into the water. Bubbling heat with the sharp, mineral scent of crushed rock engulfed him. For an instant, the water stung in his wounds, but after sucking in a harsh breath of his own, he settled gingerly into the relaxing warmth. The sting in his slashed skin and the ache in his strained muscles eased, as he sank up to his chin. He pivoted in the water to face Callie. “This is far enough,” he told her.
She was pacing on the edge of the shore, her mouth taut. “This doesn’t seem like a good idea,” she said. “It’s starting to get dark. It’s getting colder. There could be creatures around.” Her gaze darted toward the forest behind her.
“I’m the dominant beast around here,” he told her, and then acknowledged, “even if I don’t look it at the moment. He bobbed up a little higher in the buoyant water to show off his shoulders and casually propped one arm on the rock behind him; gryfons might not be the largest or strongest of the Xymiran beasts, but he didn’t mind flaunting his flight muscles to make her feel more protected.
But her gaze kept jumping around, refusing to settle anywhere near him. “I’m not really used to the cold, and I don’t know how to swim.”
“The water here is heated by a geothermal spring,” he told her. “The bubbles and heavy minerals will hold you up—or I will.”
Finally her wandering gaze snapped back to him. “I thought you were just washing your wounds.”
“The heat and minerals aid healing,” he told her. “And the energy here soothes the beast. But if you’d rather go back—”
She shook her head. “If you need this, we’ll stay.”
She needed it too, he thought, maybe more than a few gashes to his dermis. Whatever wounds she bore, she was obviously refusing to acknowledge them, even to herself. And though they’d left no marks on her skin, he sensed the tenderness inside her.
He started to rise, unwilling to continue the game if it hurt her. But before the water cleared his midline, she let out another puffing breath and waved him down. “I said stay,” she groused. “I suppose I can try it.”
He tipped his head back, ostensibly gazing up at the darkening sky while she stripped off her clothes. Apparently whatever she knew about gryfons didn’t include their excellent peripheral vision…
He’d already noted that she was built along the relatively common morphology of potential IDA clients: upright bipedal, symmetrical—more or less—along the vertical midline, four-limbed and one-headed with forward facing features and the mixed dentition of an omnivorous predator. Meaning she blended well with the local Earther populace, just as he did half the time. But as she stripped down to her skin only, as he had, she had patterns of pigmentation and papillae across her skin that he suspected would change hue and shape depending on her emotional state and perhaps even conscious choice.
A memory stirred but before he could chase down the twinge of thought, she took off the last silky layer closest to her skin. She stood for a moment, poised on the edge of the rock across from him, shivering, although she did not wrap her arms around herself. That glimpse of vulnerability in her, when she seemed so unprotected against even the simplest of elements, struck him harder than the airborne shards of plasteel that had sliced him. How could he protect her when she wouldn’t share the simplest reasons why she seemed so unprepared for this world or any other?
Pushing off from his rock, he half swam, half waded across the open water within the encircling rocks. He reached up to wrap his fingers around her bare ankle. Her skin was cold. She didn’t flinch, so she wasn’t surprised, but she did let out the breath she was holding with a little gasp that hit him a thousand times harder than the shrapnel or the glimpse of her exposure. “Come in,” he urged. “Join me.”
With another sigh of yielding, she crouched down on the rock—giving him an intimate view that he suspected she didn’t even realize—and slid her legs into the water. Her eyes widened with surprise. “It’s so warm and bubbly,” she exclaimed. He moved back a bit to give her space as she sank deeper and waved her arms through the water. “It feels so good.”
He gazed at her. “Did you think I was making it up?”
She tilted her face away. “No. You’ve never lied to me.”
Again with this intimation that they had a relationship he didn’t understand. They hadn’t been together so long that she had reason to doubt him or not. “Will you do me the courtesy then of returning the favor,” he said shortly. “Callie, have we met before?”
After an infinitesimal pause, one he wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t watching her so closely, she shook her head. “We never met,” she said in a voice that held such sincerity he wondered if he’d misread her hesitation. “I wish we had.” She backed herself against the rocks. “Before all this.”
He wanted to push at her more forcefully like a wyvryn or flare up like a fynix, but he was only a gryfon.
And for once, the game of stalk and pounce held no allure for him or his beast.
“Before all what?” he prodded. “These waters may not be magical, but they do have a power of sorts. Wherever you come from, wherever you go, water is a powerful solvent to wash away what’s come loose and what’s in the way.”
She sank so deep in the water that he thought she would submerge entirely, letting herself be washed away. But she stopped with the water just shy of her lower lip where she stayed unmoving, though a trick refraction of the last rays of light played across the still surface of the water, caught on the bubbles, and glowed down into the depths to reveal hints of her movements underneath, her fingers combing through the silky water as if she might find something there. “Before,” she murmured. “Before when I was someone who mattered, before when I thought worlds would be mine. Before I realized how easily it can all dissolve.”
“But why would you have rather met me then?” he prodded. “However far you’ve come from who you were, whatever you’ve experienced along the way, that only made you who you are now. And who you are now is here with me.”
She flicked a glance back at him with that little nose wrinkle. “Soaking wet and naked?”
He grinned at her with a flash of the gryfon’s teeth. “If you don’t like it—”
“I’d like it more if…” Abruptly, she bit her lower lip, some of the water splashing up to sparkle on the flushed flesh.
“If what?” He hooked both elbows onto the rocks behind him, forcing himself to a casual, nonthreatening pose.
“If I knew what comes next.” She sank just a little lower, so the water sealed off whatever other words she might’ve said.
He tilted his head. “We hide here for a little while. I might need your help closing some of the deeper wounds. I check in with my crew to see what set off the bot, if they were able to scrape any data. You help Evens launch his grand reopening. Lonely beings from around the universe congregate here to find the mates they’ve been missing. In this place at least, in an otherwise large and dark and empty and cold universe, some will find the love and other delights they were seeking.”
“Other delights,” she sputtered, her mouth still almost underwater.
“Big skies and breakfast burritos,” he supplied helpfully. “And sex.”
She bobbed upward in the water and sank again just as abruptly. “Sex!”
“If you’d like.”
Her only response was to sputter again, although she wasn’t quite as submerged this time.
“There’s something within you struggling to emerge,” he mused. “If you were Xymiran, I would say it was your beast. I might take you dancing or flying. But you are something else”—he paused a moment to give her a chance to enlighten him, but when she did not, he continued—“so this is what I could give you instead: a flight of pleasure we can share, a fall together in release, of forgetting, if that’s what we need.”
Ever since she’d said the word sex, her dark eyes were wide and unblinking, far beyond Earther normal, until he thought he might fall—or fly—into those churning shadows without ever leaving the bubbling waters.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I need.”
Although the yearning note in her voice touched him in a way he couldn’t resist, he held himself unmoving, even though the bubbles seemed to rise up under him, nudging him toward her.
It wasn’t only the bubbles rising either…
“Ask,” he said gruffly. “Or tell. Seek, try, taste it all until you decide and then choose.”
She clutched her hands under her chin, though there was nothing to hold. “I was so scared,” she said. “When the bot grabbed me, I didn’t fight it. I didn’t try to escape. If you hadn’t come for me again…” She swallowed hard enough to send small wavelets rippling through the water toward him.
The visible evidence of her regret and shame lapped against him, a pain he’d willingly absorb on her behalf just as he’d taken the hit of shrapnel—as was his duty, as was his desire for her. To protect her.
“I wasn’t strong enough,” she continued, her sorrow washing away everything else. “It took me and could’ve killed me and I couldn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t strong enough.”
“Neither was I,” he pointed out. “Nor my beast. I needed the training and tools to finish it. If you’d had those, you could’ve done the task yourself.”
For a moment he thought she would reject his reasonable explanation, her expression doubtful and mutinous. But then she laughed harshly and shook her head, swinging bigger waves with her shoulders. “If only I had a beast. I’d be as bold and brilliant as you.”
She thought he was bold and brilliant? He set aside that discovery for later since this moment was about her.
“What would you do, right now, if you had a beast? How would you be bold and brilliant?”
When she gazed at him, he would’ve sworn that the core temperature of this little planet must have risen which would explain his sudden heat.
“If I was bold, I would taste you,” she murmured. “If I was brilliant, you’d want to taste me.”
The strength he needed to hold himself in place took everything he had, and only his beast’s delight with her toying stopped him from making the leap he was trying to hold back. “Then be bold,” he rasped. “Because you are already brilliant.”
She did not come straight across circle of the hot spring. Instead, she followed the circle of rocks where the water was shallower and each of her steps over the uneven rocks below the surface bobbed her higher or lower in the water, revealing more or less of her with each step so that his pulse was racing and slowing—mostly racing—in the seeming eternity that it took for her to circle toward him. The beast within him thrilled at this teasing game, and he warned it that she was not mere prey. The gryfon snapped back at him that she was more, so much more, and he was the one who had no idea…
Before he could chase down its raw, atavistic instinct—what did it think she was?—the bow wave of her approach swept up to him, and then nothing else mattered.
The last glimmer of light in the sky gave his beast’s keen eyesight a clear view through the churning water to admire the lush curves of her body. The way she he was lounging let her tower above him, looking down at him, giving her all the apparent dominion and leverage in the moment. He wanted her to be bold, to seize whatever chance and choice she might.
She seized him.
At first he thought she had tripped on the uneven rocks out of view beneath her feet. She pitched into him so awkwardly, with all her weight. If not for the cushion of the bubbling water, she would’ve slammed right into him. As it was, her mouth crashed down on his with a ferocious intensity that would’ve chipped someone’s tooth—if he hadn’t been so, so ready to catch her.
Grabbing her shoulders to soften and aim the contact, he tilted his head just enough to angle the kiss for maximum erotic impact. He growled an approving purr deep in his throat as she squirmed against him, the bubbles frothing between them like a million seething breaths captured within.
“Zenith,” she moaned against his lips, breaking the wet, slick seal of their mouths. She clung to him, the effervescent waters gathering under her limbs to lift her up to him—an offering he’d be a fool to refuse. She writhed against him with a vigorous enthusiasm that roused his beast and his body. Roused the important part of him enough that her flailing limbs came too close for even his cavalier sense of danger, and he shifted her carefully across his lap, so that her long frame lay athwart him, letting her gaze up at him with a dazed passion that should have fed his hunger and his ego. But instead the dazed part stirred some protective need that his beast reserved for helpless eggs and innocent kittens, and that he himself had never felt. She was not an egg or a kitten; she was a mature, competent, consenting being who seemed to be searching for her path—and he happened to be in her way.
