The Alpha Prime Commander (8 page)

“Yes, exactly.”  He
smiled, and it was an ugly thing, full of arrogance and smugness.  “Legend
states that my immortal stone is one of four that were made.  I have two in my
collection, actually.”  He smiled again, and then the arrogance switched to a
dark greed.  “But it was only one kind of blood stone.  Powerful, yes, and
rare, but it is the second type of blood stone that I want.  My research has
shown only one in existence.  And you are going to help me get it.”

Lena took a deep breath
and blew it out slowly.  “And how will I do that?”

The Collector pulled the
immortal stone from his cloak and held the glowing rock up before her eyes. 
She looked from him to the stone and back again, wondering how such a small
thing could complicate things as much as the fist-sized stone has.

“And what,” she asked, “am
I supposed to do with that?”

“Let me show you,” he
said, that ugly smile turning to pure evil.  Then he shoved the stone at her
and without thought, Lena misted, or at least she tried to, but it was as if that
part of herself was off.  She was too slow and the stone hit her just above the
neck of her leathers and disappeared with a cold fire into her skin.  A second
later, it was as if that cold fire swallowed her entire body, her mind, and
then started to work on her soul.  She didn’t have enough of herself to
recognize when she started screaming.

***

Jackson felt the scream
cut through his body like a scythe.  He was already bent over double with pain
sitting in the navigator’s seat on the Alpha Prime Commander’s personal skiff. 
They had just docked on a Prime warship that Cordan had waiting beyond the
outer rim of the Space Station Lux.  When the wave of agony hit, he arched his
back, and then reversed so that he hit his head on the computer console in
front of him.  He reared back thankful he had at least been sitting down.  His
legs would not have held him. 

When the wave of pain
finally passed, he turned, sucking in oxygen and shuddering, thinking that was
the worst yet, only to see Cordan with pain etched across his face, and every
muscle in his body tensed like his spine was going to pop.  He too was
breathing hard.  He turned to meet Jackson’s eyes, his jaw hard granite in his
tightly drawn face.  His eyes flashed gold fire.  “Lena,” he growled.

Jackson hissed out a
breath he had just regained.  “What the fuck is he doing to her?”

Then it came again and he
was too busy feeling like his blood was boiling to think.  He heard the feral
roar of a Prime mingling with his own cry of pain.  Somewhere in his mind their
mate was being tortured.  When he could think again, the pain had turned to a
blood thirsty rage he was not sure was his, Cordan’s, or Lena’s, but the
outcome would be the same.  Someone was going to die bloody for this.

Lena came to again, and
she knew she was no longer in a ship, but deep underground.  The pain was gone,
even her headache.  She tried to assess if anything else was different and felt
nothing but a lightness of movement that suggested whatever planet they were on
had less gravity then the norm – if it was a planet.  From the look of the
caverns and branching tunnels, she could have been anywhere from a moon to a
mining colony on a stable asteroid.  She took in a deep breath and tried to
assimilate whether the air was canned or natural, and all she got for her
troubles was a sneeze and coughing fit when she inhaled too much rock dust.

When her senses cleared,
she resolved to breathe shallow, and turned her eyes to the walls.  Whatever
had formed them, be they manufactured or natural, they were old.  It felt more
like a tomb than anything else.  There was no light source.  Lena could see everything,
even the grooves and striations in the walls, but how?  She had always had good
night vision, but not like this.  The details were so clear; it was as if she
was walking around in the bright light of day.

She took a deep calming
breath and reached for her mates, and got . . . static.  She hissed and tried
to understand what she was feeling.  The link was there, she could feel both
Jackson and Lo, but it was as if the connection wavered between them, like heat
on pavement.  She knew they were alive, but she had no idea how close or how
far they were.  If they were in pain or hurt.  She looked around again, this
time closing her eyes and trying to hear or sense more.  Figure out which
tunnel to take, which direction might lead out.  Where the hidden sensors were. 
The Collector had put her here for a reason.  He had to be close by and
watching.  If this was just her prison where were the doors to the cell?

Then she felt it, the hum
of electronics; he was watching, but beyond that and a distant call like nothing
she had ever heard before.  A connection that pulled on a piece of her insides
she had no idea was there.  It felt like . . . home.  Lena closed her eyes and
tried to fight the call enough to think.  She knew whatever was at the end of
that line was what The Collector wanted, but her options were limited.  She
couldn’t stay here, but she would be damned if The Collector got his hands on
what she could feel waited at the end of that tug.

A whisper brushed over
her thoughts like an airy laugh.  She heard words form in her head of the same
consistency. 
Come.  We are not so easily tamed.

Lena stumbled forward a
step, her fight or flight instincts kicking in and doing her absolutely no good
against a phantom voice in her head.  She quelled her fear reaction and raised
her chin. 

Who are you? 
“Who
are you?” she tried asking again out loud, but received the same nothing in
response.  Telling herself she had no other real option, she headed towards
that powerful call, and hoped that whoever or whatever they were, they knew
what they were talking about.  The first thing she did was look for the sensors
monitoring her.  That electronic buzz led her to a swollen knot on the back of
her neck, and short of cutting it out, which she might have been tempted to do
if she had a knife, was coming with her.  Whatever she found, The Collector was
going to know about it.  The fact that he was not right beside her did not bode
well for the safety of this particular quest either.  Remembering that manic
gleam in black eyes, she knew that if he was not right with her, he was
watching from somewhere safe, as in not where she was. 

Lena sighed and opened
her senses wide looking for anything that might jump out and eat her, and hoped
like hell her mates were safe.

***

Jackson was getting
worse.  Cordan knew it, even as he gave orders to Trion, the Captain of the
Prime warship.  Directions that consisted of “Go that way,” which was the best
he could do at present.  He turned back to Jackson spread out across the Alpha
Prime Commander’s bed sweating blood from his pores.  The medic had come and
gone. Took one look and shook his head at Cordan.  Cordan sent the seven-foot warrior
medic stumbling out of the room with a snarl.  Then he turned back to Jackson
who had opened his eyes and was struggling to speak.

“Guess you don’t get to
control everything,” he said, his insolence almost hidden in the shaking
imitation of his usual voice.

Cordan snarled at the
dying human and the cocky bastard laughed, coughing up blood for his efforts.

After he had hacked up
what sounded like half a lung, he turned to look at Cordan again, his face dead
serious under the pale death that waited just under the skin.  “Can you keep
this from taking you and Lena, too?”

Cordan ground his teeth. 
“The bond is the only reason you aren’t already dead.  I have blocked Lena from
it, to an extent, but to do more would mean your instant death.”

“I’m already dead, and
you know it,” Jackson actually growled at him.  “Cut the fucking cord.”

Cordan hissed at the
insolent human who had been nothing but an aggravation from their first
meeting.  A man who Lo had resented long before that first physical meeting. 
Looking at him now, so very human, dying from the touch of an immortal stone
meant for their mate,
ordering him
to let go, he threw back his head and
roared his displeasure to the stars.  Then he took off his boots and lay down
beside the irritating human, and willed his own life force through the touch of
their skin, and down the ragged string of their bond.  He opened himself wide
and bound them irrevocably until the bond between them was a solid cable.

“You motherfucking son of
a bitch,” Jackson gave his own pathetic roar.  He would have pushed the bigger
man away, but even with the influx of energy, he had little to spare.  Cordan
easily pushed him over and wrapped him up tight in his Prime energy.

“You have never backed
down from a fight in your life, you irritating little bastard,” Cordan growled,
pressing as much of his bare skin against Jackson’s back as he could, tempted
to bite him when he continued to curse and rail pathetically.  “You give up
now, we both die.  Make your choice.”  The last words were almost subhuman, but
they had Jackson going utterly still.

“And Lena?” he asked,
then had to cough more blood from his exertions.

Cordan snarled, but held
the man tighter through the rough hacking.  When he was quiet again, Lo spoke
with complete conviction.  “I have always known she would need both of us to
survive.  We are Roenh, we rise and fall together.”

Jackson cursed again, but
finally Cordan felt him relax into the heat he was producing, and along the
line of their bond the cord strengthened. 

A while later, Jackson’s
voice grumbled at him in the darkness.  “You tell anyone we spooned and I’ll
fucking kill you.”

For the first time since
Jackson touched the stone and Lena was taken, Cordan smiled.  “Even if I was a
lover of men, which I am not,” Cordan practically purred it into Jackson’s ear,
“I believe the blood you keep spitting up and that continues to flow out of
your eyes and ears would assure your virtue remains intact.”

Jackson was forced to
laugh, regretting it instantly when he hacked some more before settling heavily
back into the Alpha Prime that held him both physically and with a mental
resolve that defied death.  He could feel the heat and power the man was
sending him and he wrapped himself in it and tried to forget the cold that was
like a living creature set to devour him.  “Still, wish Lena was between us.” 
God, did he wish she was safe between them.

Cordan’s voice turned
rueful.  “Bringing up Lena at present is guaranteed to cause a reaction that
will truly upset your frail human sensitivity while I am pressed up against
your bare ass.”

Jackson grimaced into the
dark thinking about that.  “You get a boner right now and I really will kill
you.”

“If you could sit up on
your own I might be worried,” the big man said ruefully.  “Though I find it
ironic that the more you threaten to kill me, the more assured I am that we
will survive.  Why I was cursed with two such stubborn and hard to deal with
Roenh continues to allude me.”

Jackson snorted.  “Yeah, ’cause
you’re so easy to deal with.  It’s a fucking mystery, that is.”

Jackson felt more than
heard the snap of sharp teeth by his ear and almost smiled.  Then he realized
he had stopped shaking.  He was warmer.  He went searching inside himself and
realized somewhere in the last few minutes death had left off the constant
hovering.  The link between him and Cordan was like a steel cable, and Lena felt
closer. 

Well, fuck. We might
actually survive this.

***

They are closer
,
Lena thought and wasn’t sure if she was referring to her mates, or whatever was
pulling her along.  Not that it mattered.  It was true for both.  The problem
was she had hit a wall, literally, and while the room she was in had more than
one cave branching away, she did not want to go down either of them.  She was
exhausted, hungry, dirty, scraped up from stumbling along.  Her body yearned to
sleep; she had no idea how long she had walked the dark caves, but it felt like
days.  At one point she had tried to lay down and sleep, even if she left
herself open to whatever she could hear beyond the walls.

Whatever The Collector
had placed in her neck shocked her awake when she tried.  Now the feeling of
death waiting in the dark and murky cave to the right was almost as strong as
the clitter-clatter of something numerous, small, and fast that she could hear
to the left.  Neither direction promised anything but death in her mind, and
the link to whatever was pulling on her was not leading to either cave, but
through solid stone.  The problem was she had no idea how solid the stone was,
or how far it lasted.  She could mist through objects, she had even misted
through walls before, but never for longer than a second of two.  If the rock
beyond where her hands touched was a solid wide section, she could lose the
concentration holding her mist and end up crushed to nothing inside solid
rock.  A very real possibility when she was dehydrated, exhausted, and fighting
to stay standing.

She tried reaching down
the strengthening link between her and her Roenh, but it still wavered and
slipped away when she tried to grasp it.  Whether it was something about this
place, or something The Collector did to her, Lo and Jackson were still out of
reach, and she had a choice to make.

Lena took a deep breath,
and misted through solid stone, and kept going, hoping that the connection she
followed was leading her where she needed to go, and was not just an elaborate
death trap for the unwary.  She walked and walked, and tried not to think about
breath that she did not need when misted.  The feeling of airlessness was
compounded by the lack of vision.  She held on tight to her concentration and
walked on.  Finally, when she was sure she was going to be dying inside the
solid rock of a mountain, she stepped out into a cavernous room, and was relieved
that when she misted back to solid and tried to breathe, there was actually
air.

After a few minutes of
just breathing in and out her eyes caught the light of a stone sitting on an
altar of white marble cradling it.  Lena stepped closer, looking around for
hidden booby traps, or other dangers, but it just sat in the large cavernous
space and glowed at her.

She was standing before
it and reaching out her hand when she caught herself.  She had no idea what it
was, or what it would do to her, and she was about to touch it?  She backed up
a hasty step when she realized she had no memory of walking across the cave to
get where she was.

What now?

***

The Collector had a
cloaked ship.  After a night of bleeding in fucking Lo Cordan’s arms, and then
a solid two days of sleep, Jackson was standing on two legs again.  And fuck
him if he had never felt better in his life.  Without any of the scars and
aches that had begun to plague him from his many battles over the years, he was
now in the prime of his life, no pun intended with the present company of Prime
warriors.  Prime warriors who knew fuck all about piloting a battleship as far
as he could tell.

“His ship is cloaked,” he
muttered, his eyes on the wavering section of space no one else seemed to
notice.  They had stopped the ship next to a dark moon orbiting a primitive
planet, because Cordan had ordered them to.  Jackson understood, he could feel
it too, no matter what the life sign sensors were telling them.  Lena was here,
and if she was, so was The Collector.

Cordan looked at him and
raised a brow.  “A guess, or knowledge?”

He could not blame the warriors
for looking at him as if he was stupid.  Cloaking a ship from long-range
sensors was one thing.  Fooling the eye was something entirely different, and
they were all looking at the same spot he was and seeing nothing.  “My gut,”
Jackson said, and heard more than one snort of disbelief.  He ignored them all,
his eyes moving from the space before the moon, to Cordan’s dissecting eyes.  “We
need to flush them out.”  Cordan studied him for a moment longer and then turned
to the pilot.