Enslaved (Brides of the Kindred Book 14) (58 page)

“Well,
that’s part of the problem solved, anyway,” Trin remarked, squeezing his hand.
“Now we just have to find this Brooks girl somewhere on Earth and get to her
before the
Verrak
assassin does.”

“I’ll
send a special prayer to the Goddess that you’ll find her in time,” Nadiah
murmured. “But something tells me that this girl, whoever she is, has a long
journey ahead of her…and she might not like what she finds along the way.”

Epilogue

Somewhere
in the darkness, hidden from view, the muffled sound of heavy boots crunching
on broken glass grew more and more distant. The deep voice of the alien
intruder was fading as he moved away, finishing his business here.

The
sounds were muffled by the nutrient bath that filled the tube so the one inside
it could not make out the words the intruder spoke but that didn’t matter—his
memory would store it all for later and bring it back when necessary.

There
was much to bring back when the time was right…memories of another—the maker
who had created the one in the tube in the first place. Memories and
directives…tasks to fulfill…missions to complete…a race of people to destroy.

For
a moment a pair of burning black eyes with reddish glints opened in the
darkness and looked through the cool green nutrient soup. Black hair floated
around his face and every muscle in his big body tensed in anticipation. But
the time was not right…the cycle was not complete. Soon his time would come but
it was not here yet.

The
one within the tube closed his eyes and slept for a little while longer,
dreaming of the day when he would wake to kill and kill again until the maker’s
orders were fulfilled…or he died trying.

The End

Read
on for an exclusive look at Kindred 15, Targeted, coming in Spring of 2015 as
well as a taste of Solar’s story
Mastering the Mistress in the Mastered II box set
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Chapter
One

It was happening again.

Emily Brooks gasped as a flash of heat
swept over her body. It started in her lower pelvis and rolled outward, like
flames licking her skin from the inside out, stealing her breath and making
every inch of her tingle with unwanted heat.

Oh
God, ohGodohGod…No, please—not this—not this again!

Her hands clenched into fists at her sides
and her toes curled in her sensible low heeled shoes. The shapeless cotton
dress she wore was suddenly too hot—sticking to her full-figured body with the
dew of sweat that bloomed across her flushed skin. The hair at the nape of her
neck suddenly prickling and her eyes burned. Not like she’d gotten soap in
them, though—they burned as if there was some strange heat source behind them.

But though all these weird physical
problems were uncomfortable and strange, they weren’t what Emily feared the
most. She feared the
other
coming
out. The one she sometimes glimpsed in the mirror. The one inside of her who
was getting closer to the surface every day…

“Miss Brooks? Miss Brooks, Avery pushed
me!”

“Did not. Anyway, she pushed me first.”

“Did not!”

“Did so!”

“Class!”
Taking a deep breath, Emily forced herself to forget
about what was happening inside her and concentrate on the kindergarten class
under her care at George Washington Elementary.

Her stress must have come through in her
voice, because all fifteen of her kids got suddenly quiet and looked at her
with large eyes.

Oh
God, what do they see? Do they see what I see when I look in the mirror?

Emily took a deep breath…then another.
Calm, she had to be calm. It was only 9:30 and she had to make it until 2 when
the bell rang for dismissal.

“Miss Brooks,” ventured Avery Andrews. “Do
you feel okay? Maybe you oughta go to the nurse.”

“I’m fine, Avery. Thank you for your concern
though—that’s sweet.”

Emily did her best to smile at the little
boy who was the class clown but so endearing you couldn’t help but love him.

“You don’t
look
fine,” Kelsey Pincter remarked.

“Yeah, your eyes look funny.” Miracle Jackson said. “All sparky
and hot. Like you gots a candle in your head, right behind your eyes—like a
jack-o-lantern.”

Like a
jack-o-lantern…
Emily took another
deep breath.

“I’m just
fine,”
she said again more firmly. “Or I will be if everyone will
settle down before we go into the library. Other students are studying in here
so we need to be…what?”

“Quiet!” they all chorused loudly and each
of them put a finger to his or her lips. “Shhhh!”

Emily tried to smile. Normally her class
was the light of her life—she loved kids and since she was never going to have
any of her own, being a kindergarten teacher was wonderful. But just now she
felt shaky and hot and out of breath—like she’d just run an hour on the
treadmill at the gym. Not that she could usually do more than a brisk walk for
that long but still—that was the feeling she had.

“All right then, let’s go in
quietly,”
she murmured, putting her
finger to her lips. “Elbows and tip-toes. Line leader, open the door and hold
it for the rest of the class.”

Avery was the line leader and he gave her
a big freckle-faced grin as he followed instructions, tucking his elbows in and
walking with exaggerated caution on the tips of his toes. Emily tried to return
the smile as she shepherded her class, which were all doing the same thing,
into the large, beautifully decorated media center.

It was a warm, welcoming area which had
been painted by a local artist with various storybook characters on the walls.
Alice and the Mad Hatter took tea in one corner while the caterpillar looked on
from his mushroom. On a far wall, Lucy was opening the door to the magical
wardrobe that led to Narnia and on a another wall, a haggard looking Frodo
Baggins was holding the One Ring aloft and staring up at the ominous Mount
Doom, looming in the distance.

This last mural was perhaps a touch dark
for an elementary school library but as a confirmed Tolkien freak, Emily had
always loved it. Today, however, she barely noticed it as she herded her class
to the big rainbow carpet in the
Alice in
Wonderland
corner. There, to her intense relief, she saw Mrs. Andrews, one
of the parent volunteers, was sitting in the big rocking chair and waiting to
read a story.
Dragons Love Tacos!
proclaimed
the book in her hand and Emily’s class was already crowding around her. They
loved story time.

Mrs. Peltz, the librarian with iron gray
hair and stern features, was standing behind the check out desk explaining to a
fifth grader why he couldn’t check out the graphic novel he wanted since he
still had two more out.

“Mrs. Peltz,” Emily murmured when the
disappointed student left. “Since you have a volunteer here, do you mind if I
run to the faculty restroom for a minute?”

Mrs. Peltz pursed her lips to a thin, pink
line.

“Miss Brooks, you
know
you’re not supposed to leave students unattended in the
library!”

“I know.” Emily was beginning to get
desperate. She could feel another heat wave coming on. “I know but it’s
just—it’s that time of the month. And I left my, uh, supplies in the
classroom.”

“Well…” The librarian looked at her
disapprovingly.

“Please,”
Emily begged in an undertone.

“All right. But no more than ten minutes,
mind.” Mrs. Peltz nodded her sharp chin at the door. “Go on.”

“Thank you!”

Incredibly relieved, Emily left the media
center by the back door at a fast walk.

She breathed a sigh of relief as she got
out into the chilly wind of the breezeway that connected the media center to
the rest of the school. Tampa didn’t get much
cold weather but it was mid January, just after the Christmas break and the
thermometer had actually dipped into the low sixties—positively frigid for Florida.

The breeze swirling through the breezeway
cooled and revived her, drying the sweat that had broken out across her
forehead but Emily could still feel the heat building inside her. By the time
she reached the faculty bathroom, located in the rear of the admin building,
she was nearly shaking again. Control…she had to get control!

She fumbled for the knob and let herself
in, intensely relieved to see she was all alone. Stumbling to the sink, she
turned on the cold tap and splashed her face with freezing water. Gasping in
shock at the water’s bite, she reached blindly for a stack of the coarse, brown
paper towels and blotted her cheeks and eyes. She tried not to smear what
little make-up she had on but her face still looked naked when she studied
herself in the mirror.

“Calm,” she whispered, her voice echoing
in the tiled room. “Keep it together, Ems.
Keep calm.”

Ems
was her nickname—an affectionate moniker given by her
big sister, Anna.

No,
adopted
sister,
Emily reminded herself.
Adopted—not really blood related at all.

The news of her adoption was still new to
her—something her parents had decided to tell her over the Christmas break.
“Because we’re getting older, dear,”
her
mother—no,
adopted
mother, Emily reminded
herself—had said.
“And you need to know
in case you have some kind of health problems down the line.”

“We
wanted to wait until you were married and settled down so you’d have a family
of your own and it wouldn’t be such a shock,”
her father had added.
“But,
well…”

“We
decided that now was as good a time as any,”
her mother had finished delicately. But Emily had
understood the unspoken message.
We
wanted to wait until you were married but you’re past thirty and it doesn’t
look like it’s going to happen any time soon.

“I’m only thirty-one,” Emily muttered to
the mirror. “It could still happen.”

But she knew it wouldn’t. She was never
going to get married and have kids of her own. It wasn’t that she was getting
too old—that was silly—she knew women in their forties having their first baby.
And in fact, she looked much like she had ten years ago in her early twenties.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

With a sigh, Emily stared at her
reflection in the mirror. Her shoulder-length dishwater blonde hair couldn’t be
more nondescript if she’d dyed it with a color called
Anonymous.
And her eyes were a wishy-washy blue-gray-hazel that
managed to be all colors and no color at once. Her face was just all right—she
had broad, almost Slavic cheekbones, and a wide, too-generous mouth with a
small nose. It wasn’t awful but it wasn’t model-pretty either and it wasn’t
like she had anything else to recommend her. Aside from her limp hair and
no-color eyes, she was too short—barely five foot four—and much too round. The
loose cotton dress that hid her figure did her no favors but she wasn’t about
to go out and buy anything that hugged her curves. She’d tried that once in
college and the result had been disastrous.

As a matter of fact, the last time she’d
had this trouble with the weird internal heat waves had been back in college,
too. Right before—but Emily pushed that thought away hurriedly. It was a memory
she preferred to leave buried.

“Should have known I was adopted,” she
told her image in the mirror. “Anna and Mom and Dad are all tall and thin and
perfect…and I’m the exact opposite.”

Her sister Anna was thirty-three, a size
six and a successful attorney. She was married to a heart surgeon who was both
handsome and kind and they had just produced a perfectly beautiful set of twins
with big blue eyes that Emily adored. She loved her sister too, despite the
fact that it seemed like Anna had gone down the “success checklist” of life and
checked off every single box in her relentless march to perfection.

“You’ll
find a guy, Ems,”
her sister had told her, when Emily confessed that the
way
her parents had revealed her
adoption had hurt almost as much as the adoption itself.
“You just have to get out there and get over what happened in college.
People do go on, you know. There are support groups for—”

“Stop it!” Emily pressed her fingertips to
her temples, rubbing fiercely. Damn it—why did everything come back to that?
She hadn’t thought of it in ages but lately, since she’d found out that her
family wasn’t
really
her family, it
had been coming back. The memories…the flashes of heat…the dreams…

Oh God, the
dreams
.

Emily closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
The dreams were horrible. One in particular…

I wake
in the night. I am thirsty. I go to the bathroom and run some water from the
sink into my favorite blue mug. As I raise it to my lips, I look in the mirror
and see that I am naked. Naked and pale in the moonlight streaming through the
window. My belly ripples—ripples like a white pond with some unseen predator just
below the surface of the water. And then the pains start—the sharp, blinding
agony right behind my naval.

I
start to scream and that’s when I see the claws…long, black claws, poking out
of me on either side of my belly button. They tear outward and blood gushes in
a wave—I am being torn apart. Annihilated. The other is taking over… ripping me
open from the inside out…