Rockstar Romance: Julian (Contemporary New Adult Bad Boy Rock Star Romance) (Hard Rock Star Series Book 3) (62 page)

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The next morning Hava and Makhahr sat beside each other at the same long table as the night before. She held his hand in both of hers and rested it on her lap, finding comfort in him being so close to her. He had tied his hair back and wore his mask again, but now Hava found the intense, dominant effect even sexier.

"We will send the warriors back and let them deal with the rogues there."

"That is too dangerous. What if the battle is more severe than we anticipate and critical lives are lost? Ben has not been able to figure out why the people who have fallen have no hearts when he autopsies them. If we do not understand their attack methods, how are we to fight them?"

"We are running out of time. They have positioned themselves at just 24 hours from the vote. By now they have likely noticed your absence, gentlemen. It is important that you return at the proper time."

Hava listened to the men for several minutes before she realized that two were missing.

"Where are Jake and Josh?" she asked, suddenly feeling frantic.

"We unlocked a portal that opens in a different location close in time to the one you used to get here. We have returned them home."

"You sent them back? Without letting me know?"

"Would you have left?" Makhahr asked quietly and she turned to look at him.

"No," she answered truthfully, "but I would like to have said goodbye." She gazed into his eyes and something that he had said the night before flashed through her mind again, "If they were able to go back, I think I might know how to end this without losing any lives."

"What do you have in mind?" the man across the table from her asked.

"I will need to go with you when you go back to the point in time where they are."

"It is too dangerous."

"It may be the only way. Bring me with you and I will explain everything then."

Hava felt like her lungs were collapsing and she fought to breathe. The air around her burned when she drew it in and the sounds were loud enough that she felt like they were ricocheting in her head, drowning out her own thoughts. She pressed against the stone wall in the alley, focusing on the cobblestones of the street beside her so that she could force herself to acclimate.

1776 Philadelphia was louder, faster, and more aggressive than she could have imagined. She could feel the stirrings of Revolution in the air and the tension of families and friends torn apart by a singular, critical question of loyalty versus independence.

"When will the Declaration be finished?"

"Tonight. The men have all returned to their positions and will follow through with the pattern as we know it. It is our job to protect them and ensure that they get the document completed and distributed. As soon as it is read, the pattern is set and the rogues are destroyed."

"I need a piece of parchment."

Makhahr gave her a quizzical look.

"Why?"

"Please just trust me."

He nodded and they crept down the alley toward a backdoor that led them into a room near where the men were meeting. She could hear a heated argument and caught familiar phrases. They were piecing together the Declaration, stitching the words carefully to create a document that would change the course of history.

She found a piece of clean parchment and a pencil and jotted a quick note on the back. When she was finished, she handed it to Makhahr.

"Make sure that this is the piece of parchment that they have the official copy transcribed on. Meet me outside in ten minutes."

She touched a quick kiss to his lips and ducked back outside, stepping out into the oppressive heat of a July afternoon. They had told her how to recognize the rogues and she scanned the people who passed by carefully. None seemed to notice her, almost as though she were so out of place that they simply didn't register that she was there. Finally she noticed one of the rogues and began to follow him.

Hava stepped up close behind him, letting images of Makhahr temper the fear that was building inside her, and started to murmur words just loud enough for him to hear.

"When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth…"

She felt a hand grab her by the back of the neck and she suppressed a scream as the hand dragged her into another alley. The man who had been in front of her followed and as soon as they were away from the street, he pushed her up against the wall.

"How do you know those words?" he hissed, his face so close to hers that she could feel the spray of his saliva settle onto her cheek.

"I learned them in school."

"They have not finished those words yet."

"Are you sure?"

"Hava?"

She heard Makhahr's voice and she ducked suddenly, managing to slip under the man's arm and run down the alley toward him. A few people jumped out of her way, suddenly aware of her presence, but she couldn’t stop to worry about that. She could feel the rogue following her and she knew she had only a few minutes. The sun was already setting and the Founding Fathers were more vulnerable than ever.

"Bring me to the portal," she demanded when she saw Makhahr, "Do not stop the man who is following us. Just come with me."

They ran until they were back at the portal and Hava felt herself dragged into it. The feeling had become familiar to her and she didn't resist it, enabling her to land on her feet and continue running.

"I need you to get me to Washington, D.C.," she said as they ran through the building toward the original portal where she had arrived, "It doesn't matter when."

Makhahr moved levers along the wall until it shimmered and glowed in a purple so vibrant she had to squint. She reached for his hand, needing his touch to soothe her, and let the portal take her. When they landed, she looked around and realized that they were in the National Archives. She gave a sob of relief and pulled Makhahr to the side, concealing them around a corner.

Seconds later the rogue landed in a crouch beside the portal. He rose slowly to his feet and another appeared behind him. A moment later, two more appeared. Makhahr glared and began to rush toward them, but Hava held him back.

"Wait," she said.

They hesitated for a few more moments and then Hava grabbed him by his arm and started to run. Relying on her memory from fieldtrips when she was younger, she guided him, and the rogues now chasing them, through the National Archives Building until they reached the Rotunda. She sent up a prayer of thanks that the space was empty of tourists, ran up to the podium set in the center and wrapped her hands around the velvet rope blocking access to it.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," she started to read, "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

She saw Makhahr's face brighten and heard strangled gasps behind them. She turned in time to see the rogues backing away from their, their chests collapsing in before they finally crumbled into dust. Her knees buckled and Hava lowered herself to the floor.

Makhahr dropped down beside her and gathered her into his arms.

"How did you know what to do?" he asked, pressing a kiss to her hair.

"You told me that there are moments that must always exist and that the rogues could only change the patterns of time once. I knew that the message I wrote on the back of that piece of parchment would still be there when I came back here, because I heard about it the first time I came to see this copy. If we forced them to acknowledge a future that they didn't want to see exist, they would not be able to go into the past and change it because they already changed that past simply by being there."

Makhahr tilted her back and looked at her, the expression in his eyes looking stunned but overjoyed. He drew her close and kissed her deeply.

"You are my yesterday, my today, and my tomorrow," he whispered.

Hava tucked her hand around his neck and rested her forehead against his. She finally knew what had been calling to her for her entire life. In her heart, Makhahr always was and always would be.

THE END

Joran felt the buzz of the comm unit on his wrist as he strode through the human train station; for the moment he ignored it. His superiors on the ship could wait for his progress report—he had more interesting things directly in front of him.

He had spent the months of transit to this planet in preparation for the assignment he and twenty other scientists had been given; Joran smiled slightly to himself in memory of the research. The planet they had come to was densely populated—much more so than his home planet,
Khatanar (called Tau Ceti e by Earthlings)
—with lower gravity and a refreshingly lower normal temperature everywhere. The dominant life forms on the planet, the humans, were more diverse genetically than the Khateen, Joran’s own species. That genetic diversity was both the reason for the mission and the biggest hurdle to the goal of the mission.

Joran watched as a human woman paused at a ticket kiosk, glancing around furtively. She had been the focus of his attention from the moment she stepped onto the train; while Joran had not quite become accustomed to the various shapes, sizes, and traits of human females—and he had not yet come around to find them precisely attractive in a sexual sense—it was difficult for him not to stare from behind the dark-tinted glasses that he had adopted as part of his costume.

She was of medium height for human norms, and would have only reached Joran’s chest, standing in front of him. Somehow, however, when she stepped onto the train, looking around quickly to find a free seat, she seemed taller—an anomaly that Joran couldn’t quite understand. Her clothing subtly emphasized her full, heavy-looking breasts, the narrowing at her waist, and the flare of hips that suggested that she was sexually mature—and that she would be a very viable option for reproduction.

Joran had felt a hot jolt of something he couldn’t initially identify; keener than objective interest, more potent than scientific curiosity. He had carefully avoided her notice even as he stared at her, and even as he followed her off of the train and into the station. It had been impossible not to see the sway of her hips as she walked in front of him; he wondered why every male in the crowded train station wasn’t responding to it. Joran had watched a great deal of educational material, excerpts taken by his superiors and compiled in order to understand the vagaries of human sexuality.

His comm unit buzzed at his wrist again. Joran tapped the screen, sending an acknowledgement. He may have found the subject he was sent to locate; the thought filled him with a mixture of heady scientific interest and something much more intensely personal.

The mission Joran had signed on for was to locate specimens of the human race—female, for the purposes of the current mission, though there were some among the scientific community who thought that a future mission should include males of the species—in order to determine whether a hybrid race could be created. From what little understanding the Khateen had of the human genetic code, it was more complex than their own, far less stable, and prone to mutations. The humans themselves did not seem to recognize the wealth that this trait had—their efforts at genetic engineering were still in infancy, and information gleaned about common opinions on the subject suggested that most were against the idea of tampering.

The question at hand was whether scientists could somehow cross the inter-species barrier between the two races, to either incorporate human genetics into their own code, or to create a new race that combined the benefits of both. Joran and his colleagues were each assigned the task of recruiting human females for experimentation; and Joran thought to himself, watching the woman walking away from the kiosk, looking around the station for the signs, that he may have found an excellent subject indeed. Everything about her boasted reproductive viability; her general shape, the look of good health, and something like vigor in the way she moved told him that she was likely fertile. Joran felt another hot jolt work through him as he surreptitiously moved closer to her, the better to take in details.

The more he watched her, the more Joran began to think of how he could persuade this woman to come with him. He knew from his research that human females were highly alert to improper advances; there was something he had read, a human essay, about a phenomenon called “cat-calling,” which suggested that if he tried to make an overt move—especially a loud or vocal one—she would reject him outright, feeling threatened by his aggressiveness.

Joran tried to decide how best to approach this female. On
Khatanar
, it would be so much simpler; mating was decided by genetic index, with mates chosen from a pool of candidates based on the need to unite and mingle families rather than individuals. From what Joran had seen in his attentive watching of human film art, this was not generally the case among their people. There was a complex, often paradoxical dance that seemed to result in failure much more frequently than success. And yet there were so many humans on the planet that Joran’s superiors had thought for certain that none of the women they took for the purposes of their testing would be missed. They would be less than a drop in a barrel, as far as the population of the planet’s humans were concerned.

He contemplated how he would perform the maneuver that he had seen called “breaking the ice” with this female as he followed her towards the newly-arrived train, and Joran thought that he would soon see just how well the various safeguards he had been told to implement worked to disguise him as a human male. If nothing else, he thought wryly, it would be a good test; but he knew that if he were not able to recruit this woman, he would be very disappointed in himself.