Choices (24 page)

Everyone who had not yet spoken pressed
forward to say something kind. Even Julian Vazquez wished me a safe
journey and a warm welcome at the end of it. I stumbled upstairs
for the last time, to sleep in my cozy little bed for one more
short night.

My aide woke me when it was barely light. He
thought tender sentiments into my mind while he helped me bathe and
dress quickly, and stroked my hair at our final farewell. I don’t
think he had liked serving the Terran outsider at first, but had
grown to feel affection for me despite his prejudice. I raised my
hand cautiously, asking permission, and he allowed me to pet his
coarse dappled fur. For the first and only time I entered communion
with an aide. It was disorienting, the brain waves all sideways and
twisting around back to front, and I broke the connection after a
few strokes.
Mate
, he thought.
Your mate is
here
.

Dominic was indeed waiting when I ran
downstairs. He was dressed in yesterday’s martial outfit and was
impatient to get started. But when he learned I had not eaten he
unbuckled his leather coat and sat with me while I stuffed bread
and cheese into my mouth faster than I could swallow.

The formality of last night was wearing off
in the light of a new day and the pleasure of being alone with each
other. He laid his hand over mine as I was reaching for more food.
“It’s all right, Amalie,” he said. “I can wait a little longer for
you, now that I know there’s an end in sight.”

A quarter of an hour later we joined his
guards who were standing outside. I looked in vain for the handsome
cadet, the young man whom Dominic had been with when I had first
“visited” him. These men were all veterans, hardened warriors,
Aranyi forces from Dominic’s Realm—not Royal Guards, and certainly
not cadets. I recognized only Ranulf, the old lieutenant I had seen
in Dominic’s quarters during my
crypta
test. He had not
hidden his disapproval of the Terran woman then; judging by the
flinty eyes and dour face he showed me this morning, he had not
mellowed in six months.

I felt a twinge of uneasiness, not liking to
be the only woman in this company that looked little different from
a bandit troop. I would learn soon enough that the respect they had
for Dominic as a leader, his intellect and courage, along with his
iron discipline, would prevent the least misbehavior more surely
than any law.

As Dominic helped me into the saddle of the
horse he had brought for me, the unavoidable touch made the
crypta
arc between us like an invisible fork of lightning.
In the distance, over the mountains, there was the unmistakable
rumble of thunder. We all looked involuntarily toward the sound,
frozen in fear, knowing that somewhere in the same vicinity the
rebels were at work with their forbidden weapon, Eris.

Dominic connected with my mind, bringing my
eyes up to meet his that gleamed out from the shadow of his
helmet’s brim.
We’ll be home before dark
, he thought to
me, heartening in his certainty.

He mounted his own horse, barked a command to
the men, and we set out on the narrow, ascending trail to Aranyi.
We rode as swiftly as the horses could keep their footing in the
slop of the spring thaw, racing the weak light of the clouded sun
to reach safety by nightfall.

Can’t wait to find out what happens next?
Here’s a preview of
Wedding
,
Book Three in the
Eclipsis
series of Lady Amalie’s memoirs:

I
woke with a hair
in my mouth, strange dreams in my mind, of Dominic and me coupling
in a delirious, almost violent frenzy. We
were
hungry for
each other, I thought, anticipation rousing me from my stupor as a
fond smile curved my lips. After months of only telepathic
simulation, the chance to make love with our bodies and our minds
in communion was all we could think about.

Strange, though, that I was waking from deep
sleep and Dominic was not in the bed with me. I couldn’t feel his
presence at all. If he were anywhere nearby I should be almost
overwhelmed by the sense of connection.

I sat up quickly, in a sudden panic, fishing
with a finger and my tongue for that irritating hair, and lay back
down with a gasp. My body was stiff and sore, and not just from the
long ride.
What did I remember of yesterday?
We had left
La Sapienza at dawn, had pushed our horses with a driven
determination to make what speed we could in the slush and mud of
the spring thaw.

We would have made it safely to Aranyi but
for the dark clouds that had rolled down from the top of the
mountain we were climbing in the mid-afternoon, obliterating the
weak sunlight. Minutes later we had been engulfed by a raging
storm, with hailstones big enough to stun. We had been lucky to
find shelter, a hut built into the side of the mountain, and we
hurried in, an awkward file of men and frightened horses, Dominic
in the lead, half-carrying me like a precious bundle under his
arm.

And that’s when it had started. I had been
trying to light a fire in the little hearth, but something had been
wrong. I couldn’t remember how to make the inner flame. Six months
of training and I couldn’t manage the simplest trick of
crypta
. Dominic had ducked in at the door then and I had
turned around, meaning to ask him for help, but one look at him had
stopped the words before they reached my throat.

His eyes had a strange gleam, although they
were benign and silvery with their protective third eyelids
lowered, had not turned glassy in what I would have recognized as a
warning. There were no thoughts readable in his mind. He wasn’t
shielded, keeping his thoughts in. It was as if he were empty,
drained of all emotions or consciousness. The communion that had
enveloped us as we rode had vanished, and something else had taken
its place, in both of us.

I ran to him, this new force propelling me
the few steps across the room like a marionette hoisted on its
strings. With no words, only a feral growl of laughter, he lifted
me up and tossed me on the bed. He unbuttoned his breeches as he
spread my thighs, bunched my skirts up around my waist and entered
me before we had even removed our traveling cloaks. And so we began
our long evening that ran into night of mindless sex.

Mindless
. Ever since I had arrived
on Eclipsis, when I had known Dominic only as a presence in my
brain, it was our minds that had connected us, our thoughts that
had led us to a love that had overcome all the differences that
should have divided us. It was this love that made us desire each
other: not sexual attraction leading us to a deeper relationship,
but our conjoined consciousness creating the heat in the loins that
induced our bodies to imitate what our minds had already
accomplished.

Yet last night’s excess had been truly
mindless.

I had only one clear memory: a goddess of war
and fire, of destruction and death; a supernatural being shooting
lightning from her fingers, her hair undulating tendrils of flame.
The image had danced in front of me, all the while that Dominic had
fucked me and I had laid myself open to him, without thought or
awareness.

Eris
. She—
it
, I corrected
myself—
it
was a weapon. A piece of mineral, or perhaps
glass, like the prisms on the handles of the daggers Dominic and I
carried. Eris was simply bigger than a personal prism, and it took
a large cell of telepaths to use her.
It
, I reminded
myself again.
It
.

But it had been
she
last night. Eris
had infiltrated our minds, putting her own presence in place of the
communion and disabling our telepathic gift of
crypta
.
Dominic’s silvery eyes had reflected the image, I recalled with a
shudder. Not a reflection, but a projection outward of what was in
his brain, behind his eyes—and in my mind. I should have seen my
own face mirrored, but I had seen
her, Eris
, blazing and
burning and destroying.

Eris was not simply a large prism or a piece
of metal. I admitted the truth to myself. Eris was a telepathic
weapon, controlled by the gifted, people like me and Dominic. The
force she used, the source of her extraordinary powers, was
anger
—
an
emotion that Dominic and I possessed in
abundance.

This insight, oddly, gave me hope. Dominic
and I had cultivated anger, each of us in our separate worlds, over
years of growing up gifted, different and damaged. We lived with
anger every day and knew how to manage it. If we had overindulged
in its effects, now and in the past, we were veterans, survivors. I
doubted there were any two gifted people in the whole of Eclipsis
better qualified to defeat this weapon.

I sat up and pushed the covers aside, sliding
my legs over and down to the floor. Only now fully awake, I
realized Dominic was in the room, sitting on one of the rough
wooden benches. Something in his posture—the way he was hunched,
the muscles tense in his naked back—warned me. He was holding his
dagger, point facing inward toward his gut, staring at the blade
with fixed unblinking eyes.

“No!” I shouted, although it came out more
like a croak. I ran to him, battering with both fists to knock the
dagger out of his hands and I accomplished something—I broke his
concentration. He lowered the dagger and looked at me. His face was
gray and worn, his beak of a nose standing out more prominently
than ever. There were bloody gashes on his cheeks where I had used
my nails last night. He looked as if he had aged ten years since
yesterday. I didn’t like to think how I must look to him, but his
eyes told me enough.

“The gods forgive me,” he said with a groan.
“I thought I had killed you.”

I shook my head in disbelief. Even if he had
lost his wits not to notice whether I was breathing or if my heart
still beat, our communion must have shown him the truth. If one of
us died, the void, the gaping hole left in the survivor’s mind
would be excruciating. Until he experienced such desolation it was
a safe bet I was alive, regardless of injury.

“Dominic,” I said, “How could you think—” I
paused, at a loss. If our communion was not functioning there was
nothing I could say. It was this connection that had brought us
together, had made us “lovers.” What were we without it? Enemies?
Strangers?

While I considered, Dominic followed his own
logical progression. He held the blade of the dagger between thumb
and one finger, extending the handle to me. “If you prefer,
‘Gravina, take revenge yourself. As you have no other man to act
for you, it is your right.” He spoke coldly, in the formal language
of court and ‘Graven Assembly, the appropriate style for the
formula of vengeance central to ‘Graven life—and death.

I was confronted once again with the gulf
between his world and mine that always reopened to part us each
time we thought we had bridged it. Dominic knew he had wronged me
and that, by his code of behavior, only revenge would make things
right. His death for my injuries. The equation seemed unbalanced.
He hadn’t killed me or raped me, but he was acting as if he had. In
his mind, I suppose, he thought he had, that he had tried, that the
intent was what mattered.

Dominic shut his eyes in order to avoid
seeing me and the evidence of his mistreatment. “Do it, Amalie,” he
said, his voice breaking. “It is your right.”
I no longer have
any reason to live
, he was thinking, despair unlocking the
tight shield he had erected in his mind.
And I would rather die
at her hands than my own, my last sensation her touch…

Wedding
will be published in
mid-September.

Recognition
, Book One in the
ECLIPSIS series of Lady Amalie’s memoirs, is available in all
e-book formats, including Kindle, Nook and ePub.

Sex On A Regular Basis
Volume One
By T.T. Thomas

RONALD DEBBY

R
onald was an ugly
man. He thought so, his neighbors thought so and the kids he passed
on his way to the grocery store said so, aloud and every time. For
that reason, he only left his house once a week to buy groceries.
He bought the same dozen items every week, including one bottle of
extra-strength aspirin for the terrible headaches he got.

He took the aspirins every day except
Saturday. That day, he took his cure differently, triumphantly, as
if in celebration of having survived his life, and his ugly
appearance, for another week.

Ronald could no longer remember the exact
time in his life when he began making the phone calls, but he
always made the calls on grocery day. It had become a cherished
ritual, a coveted release from the pain in his head, and a reminder
that a new week was about to begin. The ritual created a solitary
dot between the endless, seamless increments of sameness that
defined Ronald.

He always did his grocery shopping early
Saturday morning. He made his phone calls throughout the afternoon,
but never at night. He knew calling at night might scare people,
and that was not his intention. Some of the people who hung up on
him, after yelling dirty things into his ear, made him mad enough
to want to call back at night and frighten them good. But he knew
that wasn’t nice, so he didn’t make calls at night.

On this particular Saturday morning, Ronald
felt lighter of step, heart and soul than usual. He entered the
store behind two fat women who had to walk single file through the
automatic door, but he was in such a good mood, he nearly smiled at
the delay. It must suck to be them, he thought.