Chapter 12 Brecca #2
“If I succeed,” he said, very quietly, “the war ends. The Lucian stop fighting. The humans in this camp stop dying. The woman in that cot—” He looked toward Elena’s corner. “—gets a world where no more blood farms exist.”
“Don’t use Cassi’s mother to convince me.”
“I am not convincing you. I am explaining why I will go regardless of whether you agree.”
I stared at him. The calm, measured, infuriating certainty. The way he presented suicide missions with the same clinical detachment I used to present blood test results. Your white count is elevated. I’m going to walk into the psychic range of a creature that can kill me with his mind.
“You’re an idiot,” I said.
“That is the third time you have called me that.”
“You’re consistently idiotic.”
Something moved in his expression. The ghost of the almost-smile, the one that softened the alien severity of his features and made him look like someone I could imagine waking up next to.
“I heard a human woman talk to me like I was a person,” he said. “That hasn’t happened in three hundred years.” His silver eyes held mine. “I would like to ensure she has three hundred more.”
“That’s — you can’t just say things like that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m trying to maintain professional boundaries and you keep—” I pressed my hands against my face. “You keep saying things that make my chest hurt.”
“Your chest hurts because you’re fighting what’s between us. Stop fighting it and the pain resolves.”
“That’s not how medicine works.”
“That is exactly how this works.”
I lowered my hands. He was close. Closer than he’d been when he sat down.
He’d shifted forward while I wasn’t looking, or the tent had shrunk, or the space between us had decided on its own that it was tired of existing.
His face was a foot from mine. Silver eyes.
The angular alien architecture of cheekbones and jaw and mouth.
The faint glow of his skin in the tent’s dim light, like something burning beneath the surface.
“I’m going to go on your mission,” I said. “I’m not letting you walk into a psychic minefield without a medic.”
“No.”
“That wasn’t a request.”
“Brecca—”
“You walk in there alone, he kills you through the network. You walk in there with me, I’m an anchor.
It goes both ways, you’ve said that. I can feel you, which means you can draw on me.
My mind, my—” I searched for the word. “My frequency. If Tyvor tries to break you through the network, I’m the thing that holds you together. ”
He was quiet for a long time. The warmth pulsed between us, his rhythm and mine, offset by exactly the interval that separated his species’ cadence from mine, creating a syncopation that felt like music.
“You understand what you’re offering,” he said.
“I’m offering to do my job. Keep people alive. That’s the job.”
“You’re offering to open the bond fully. To merge your consciousness with mine during combat. To feel what I feel, including what Tyvor does to me.”
“I know.”
“It will hurt.”
“Everything hurts. I’m a field medic in an alien apocalypse. I specialize in hurt.”
He reached out. His hand found mine where it rested on the table.
Long-fingered, pale, cool. His fingers closed around my wrist, not my hand.
Around the pulse point, where the blood was closest to the surface and the steady thrum was most visible.
His thumb settled against the vein and I felt the vibration—the subdermal hum of his body, the Lucian frequency that resonated through my skin and into my bones.
“You are the bravest person I have ever met,” he said. “On any planet.”
“I’m the stupidest person you’ve ever met. There’s a difference.”
“There is not.” His thumb moved against my pulse.
The warmth bloomed: in my wrist, in my chest, in the space behind my sternum where I carried his heartbeat.
“Among my people, what you are describing, two minds joined in battle, is the deepest form of trust. It is the bond that warriors share before a campaign from which they may not return. It is—”
“What is it?”
His voice dropped. The harmonic undertone pressed against my ribs. “It is the bond between mates.”
The word hung in the air between us. Mates.
Nothing like the Vampyren version, the possessive, biting, pheromone-driven claim.
This meant something else entirely: I choose to share my mind with you.
I choose to let you see everything I am.
I choose to face death with your heartbeat in my awareness because your pulse is the reason I want to live.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” I said. “Get some sleep. Both of us.”
“Brecca.”
“What?”
“Thank you. For coming with me.”
I looked at him. This alien. This creature from a destroyed civilization who spoke with two tones and had black blood and glowed in the dark and had killed his own people to protect a camp full of strangers.
This person who’d let himself be captured because he saw a Vampyren carry a woman’s pack and rub her feet in the surf.
This man, because that’s what he was underneath all of it, who looked at me like I was the answer to three hundred years of loneliness.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m important.”
“You are important.”
“I’m a field medic with a phlebotomy certificate and a bad attitude.”
“You are the first person who ever drew my blood and asked me if it hurt.” His voice was very quiet. “You are the first person who looked at what was underneath my skin and found it beautiful instead of monstrous. You are—”
“Stop.”
“—the reason I believe this planet is worth saving.”
I pulled my hand away. I wanted to keep it there.
But if I did, I was going to do something that couldn’t be undone, something that would take this from a warm hum to a full-frequency merge.
And I wasn’t ready for that. A hundred and forty-six people still needed me.
A war still needed ending. My best friend’s mother still lay in the corner of my tent staring at a canvas ceiling and remembering nothing.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “We plan the mission tomorrow.”
He stood. He looked at me one last time. That look, the one I’d told him to stop giving me, the one that made me feel seen in a way that was terrifying and addictive and completely unlike anything I’d ever experienced. And he left.
I sat in the tent alone and pressed my fingers against the pulse point on my wrist where his thumb had been, and I felt his presence dim as he walked away. Still there. Always there. Fading from a flame to a candle to a low ember I could still locate if I closed my eyes and listened.
“Fuck,” I said, for the second time in two weeks, about the same person, for the same reason.
Tomorrow we’d plan how to kill a psychic warlord. Tomorrow I’d walk into a war with my mind cracked open and tethered to someone who made my chest hurt in ways I couldn’t diagnose. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
I pressed my palms flat on the table and felt the ghost of his thumb against my vein and thought: this is the part where you put the walls back up.
The walls didn’t go up. The ember held. And somewhere across the camp, fourteen beats per minute, steady as a countdown, his heart kept time with mine.