Chapter 7
Lyra
Claimed us. Mate.
Apparently, my beast approved of his possessive touch. We can’t keep him. We have to go back. We can’t stay on Earth, and he won’t want to leave. He’s human. He doesn’t know what we are. He hates aliens.
Mine.
That one word encapsulated and summarized her entire argument.
My chest tightened and the blood rushed to my ears as I waited for the scanner to tell me if I’d taken enough of the Scion’s DNA to extract memory data.
Ethan’s warmth at my back was oddly comforting.
I wasn’t used to being watched, to anyone caring about what I was doing.
Not since my brothers both died. Truly, not for years before that.
Both Warlords, my brothers had left me safely at home on Atlan and had gone off to fight the Hive war. I never saw either one of them again.
Reji had comm’d every few weeks, just to check in.
But Kovo? No. He was older and had been gone longer.
I knew he was fighting mating fever. When I realized it caused him discomfort to contact me, to be reminded of home, I made sure I missed his comms. I knew his mating fever was riding him hard. That he was barely holding on.
Then he did the unthinkable.
Lost control. Killed his own brother.
I effectively lost both of them on the same day, one murdered, one arrested and executed shortly after. Our parents were already gone by then. Thank the gods. I think the circumstances of losing both sons would have killed my mother with grief. It nearly ended me.
Brothers dead. Mate alive. Here. Fuck mate. No more sad.
That isn’t how it works. I couldn’t seem to stop arguing with her. Based on the skeptical snort inside my mind, I wasn’t convincing her of a damn thing anyway.
Ethan mate. Mine. My beast took over for a moment and rubbed her—our—ass against the male standing behind us.
“Behave.” Ethan’s hand tightened on my waist, but there was no sting in the command.
“It wasn’t m—” Damn it. How could I tell him I wasn’t the one rubbing my backside all over him in blatant invitation? “Sorry.”
His chuckle made my cheeks hot. His hand, roaming up and down my thigh beneath under the hem of the oversized shirt, made my brain short-circuit. “You going to answer my question?”
Question? What question?
Gods help me, how the hell did the Warlords survive this madness?
The voice inside me, the entity I thought of as my beast, had to be mild compared to the mating fever our males suffered.
I was not someone who enjoyed battle or violence.
Fighting. I didn’t even like to argue, if I was being honest. But our Warlords lived and breathed battle from a very young age.
They thrived when defending the home world against the Hive, found purpose in protecting their mates and children from danger.
Became so dangerous and difficult to control that their beasts would literally obey only one person in the known universe and none other—their mates.
Without a mate, an Atlan Warlord would evolve into a mindless, brutal, murderous killing machine.
I kill. Protect mate. Mine.
We’re not killing anyone. Unless it was a Silver Scion.
My beast didn’t care about such details at the moment.
She was too busy preening, enjoying his warmth, his touch, the way he boxed us in and surrounded us with his presence.
Wishing his hand would go just that much higher, stroke our ass.
His scent filled our head. I was drowning in physical sensations I had no business noticing, let alone obsessing over.
“Lyra?” His soft tone brought me back to the present. To reality. “What are you doing? What is that machine?”
“I apologize.” I shook my head to clear it and tried to ignore everything about him.
Which was truly impossible. “This device reads memories encoded in the crystalline structure of DNA. Every experience we have is written on the DNA of every cell in our bodies. I’m sending his DNA scan to the Coalition Fleet’s Core Command.
They’ll run it through their system and reconstruct the last few minutes of his life.
If we’re lucky, they’ll be able to read several days of memories before the DNA degrades. ”
“Are you saying they can recover his memories from his cells? Not his brain?”
“Yes. Earth’s scientists are still struggling to understand the way memory and consciousness work in the human body.
” The scanner beeped. Success! Thank the gods.
I started the transmission to Core Command via the quantum comm link inside the device.
Nothing could intercept or interfere with the encrypted data stream except destroying the machine itself.
“Humanity will soon discover that crystallized water and DNA encode every moment of our lives into a living lattice inside each and every cell. The neurons in the brain merely translate that data. Access it, like a computer reading data on a hard drive. But the memories, the data itself, is actually stored in the body’s DNA. ”
Hot breath fanned the back of my neck and every hair on my body stood up to take notice. “That’s why they wanted the body. And why you destroyed it.”
“Yes.” My nipples were hard little pebbles under the soft shirt.
“You don’t want them to know who killed their man?”
I was a stupid, weak-willed female, because I leaned into him, thrilled when his arms wrapped fully around me and held me close.
“There are several possibilities. They have a traitor in their midst. The victim was eliminated for disobeying an order. He was killed by a rival faction within the Silver Scions, or someone from Rogue 5, or human criminals who think they can take over their operation. Or—”
“Or?”
“Or someone from the Coalition’s Intelligence Core took him out. In which case, the Coalition wants me to protect their operative’s identity at all costs.” I wanted to kiss him again. “If they have someone operating deep undercover, they can’t risk exposure.”
“There are alien intelligence assets operating on Earth, undetected?”
“Of course.”
“Of fucking course. They probably have their people inside the FBI. The CIA. Everywhere.”
“Probably. I would. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes. How is it that the CIA doesn’t know whether or not they have someone on the inside?”
I scoffed at the suggestion. “Right. Like the CIA and FBI reveal their plans and operations to each other and to the Miami police department? The leader of the Coalition Intelligence Core doesn’t reveal their plans to humans.
The Scions are aliens. Makes sense the Coalition would send their own people to take them out. ”
“You’re right. Alien cops for alien criminals.”
“The Coalition might share technology, if it serves their purposes. But their intelligence agency never shares operational details with the CIA.” Or any other human intelligence organization.
Ever. In fact, I’d spoken to Commander Helion exactly once a month since I’d started this mission.
I was overdue to report in, but I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of admitting he was right.
He’d been trying to convince me to come to Earth for a long time.
Swore I would find the Scions here, in particular the bastards my younger brother, Reji, had been hunting when he died.
When every other lead I had on Reji had dried up, I’d finally agreed to come to Earth in an act of pure desperation.
The device flashed and beeped. Transmission complete. I nearly sagged in relief. I deactivated the scanner and turned in Ethan’s arms. Facing him felt much more… intimate. “How is your shoulder?”
“I’m fine.” He handed me the ReGen wand.
The light had dimmed, indicating there was nothing more that needed healing.
At least in his shoulder. I wanted to take the wand and run it over him from head to toe, make sure he was in optimal condition.
Unhurt. But the scowl on his face indicated that now might not be the time.
He had his detective mode activated. “Why are you here? Why did you show up at the morgue? Not that I’m complaining. ”
“Over a year ago, the I.C. made contact with the CIA, requested assistance tracking a criminal organization known in the Coalition as the Silver Scions. According to my commander, the CIA responded with a promise of cooperation, but when the Coalition made contact a second time, the CIA claimed to have no idea how the Silver Scions were distributing their illegal technology on Earth. In reality, they were hoping to track the Silver Scions and keep the tech for themselves.”
“Sounds about right. The I.C. didn’t believe you?”
“Of course not.” I tilted my head and looked into his eyes. “We’re fighting for the upper hand, for control of knowledge so dangerous that hundreds of worlds, many of them millions of years more advanced than Earth, deemed it necessary to ban the technology for the safety of all.”
“And these Silver Scions are running around selling the technology anyway.”
“To the highest bidder.”
“And the CIA doesn’t trust the Coalition to take care of it.” It wasn’t a question.
“Nor does the Coalition trust the CIA? Would you?” I asked.
“Fuck no. I don’t trust aliens.” He leaned down to kiss me on the lips, a quick apology for the next few words out of his mouth. “I don’t trust your people, either.”
“Do you trust me?” Weak. I shouldn’t have asked a question I wasn’t ready to hear the answer to. Not when his trust was as vital to my heart as the blood pumping through my veins.
“No.”
Damn. That hurt far more than it should have.
My beast howled in protest, and I had to close my eyes, afraid Ethan would see them change, glow, as some of the Warlord’s eyes did when they shifted into their beast forms. This was all new to me.
I had no idea what outward signs my beast would exhibit, if any. I had to be careful.
“Hey.” Ethan pulled me close and pressed his lips to my ear. “It’s nothing personal.”
Nothing personal? He just had his cock buried inside me. His seed swam in my womb. His scent was all over my skin. But it wasn’t personal. For him.
For me? He was the air in my lungs. The blood in my veins. My reason to keep fighting. He was everything. “Why do you dislike the aliens so much?” I needed to know just how precarious my position truly was with him.
He held me close and we swayed as if there was romantic music filling the room. “A few years ago, Jenkins and I were working a case. The FBI came in, took all our evidence, and told us to drop it.”
“You didn’t?”
“No. One of the victims was a rookie cop. The whole department was pissed off. So when we started digging, no one stopped us.” His shoulders tensed and I knew whatever he told me next was going to be bad.
I melted into him. Quiet. Accepting. Willing him to tell me the truth.
“The dead cop was my little brother, Eddie. An Atlan Warlord killed him. We have it on an ATM’s surveillance camera.
Huge fucker threw Eddie into the Atlantic and we never found the body.
The Atlan was wearing an armband. Gang colors.
Turned out he was with a criminal organization from a place called Rogue 5.
Part of a group that calls themselves Cerberus.
We did some digging, found out all the aliens from Rogue 5 are hybrids.
These guys were big, mean. Evil. Just fucking evil.
Jenkins and I tracked them to a building on the edge of the city.
Brought back-up. Alerted the FBI. Told them they could yell at us later, after the raid. ”
“What happened?”
“We kicked in the door and no one was there. The place was empty. When Jenkins got home, he found his wife and eleven-year-old daughter…”
Oh gods, no. “Cerberus killed them?”
A shudder passed through my mate. I rubbed his back in slow, soothing circles, trying to coax the truth from him. “That’s what we thought, at first. But now we know they were working for a larger group, one run by cyborgs.”
“The Silver Scions,” I confirmed.
“Whoever they were, they tortured the girls first. Made an example of them. Tore them into pieces. A warning to the local police not to interfere in their business.”
Horrifying, and something I’d seen on multiple worlds while chasing the Silver Scions. They were truly merciless, lived by one law, and one law only… profit. “I’m sorry.”
“Some asshole from the FBI sat us down and told us it wasn’t the Atlan Warlord’s fault.
That he had mating fever and couldn’t control himself.
That Cerberus enforcers kidnapped and drugged him.
That he was integrated with cyborg shit, and they agitated him until he turned into a savage beast. That tearing a little girl in half was sad, but not unusual for a beast in that condition.
” He pulled away to stare into my eyes. “Then they made the whole incident disappear. No news. No evidence. No reports. Like none of it ever happened. Like Eddie, Charlene and Maddy never existed at all.”
I tried to make sense of that. Could not. Why would the human authorities tell such lies? Keep something like that a secret from their own people?
“I don’t like to talk about it. I don’t like aliens. I really fucking hate Atlans, and all the motherfuckers from Rogue 5.”
He hated my people. Not just aliens in general, but Atlans in particular. “I don’t know what to say. I’m—that’s sad. Horrible and sad.”
“Enough living in the past.” Ethan kissed me again, an obvious attempt at distraction. “What about you? How did you end up in this line of work?”
I considered lying but felt like I would be betraying my brothers if I did so. Instead, I told Ethan the shortest, cleanest version of the truth. “The Silver Scions killed both my brothers. I don’t have anyone left.”
“That’s why you hunt them.”
“Why I’ll never stop hunting them.” Not until I was cold and dead.
He kissed me softly. Gently. Swung me around in my bare feet as if we were truly dancing. “We are the same, you and I.”
“I guess we are.” The same loss. Heartbreak. Loneliness. But I wasn’t from his world, and he hated everyone from mine.
He raised his eyebrows and grabbed my ass, pulled my hips against his. “So, you have a magical healing wand, a gadget that will remove part of a man’s spine, and you can transport around with little silver buttons. What else did the aliens share with you? Do you have one of their silver pistols?”
His playful enthusiasm was contagious. I laughed and jumped into his arms, wrapped my legs around his waist and smiled. “I have two.”
“Oooh, one for each of us.” He kissed me. Thoroughly.
I was still smiling when he finally let me up for air. “No, Detective, you can’t have one.”
“We’ll see.”
He kissed me again and I realized I would deny him nothing. Not my body. My possessions. Not even my life. The beast had chosen, and there was no going back.