Dark Solstice (22 page)

To her relief, they didn’t seem interested in enjoying their munch at the moment. When they’d pulled their helmets off, they took a deep drag of air and exchanged a look of pleased surprise.

Trying not to look too obvious, she put as much distance between herself and the two men as she thought she could get away with. She didn’t want to give them the idea that she was considering trying to run.

To her relief, after discarding the PECs both men settled down again, using the suits they’d discarded to get more comfortable. Almost as if they’d discussed it before hand, Cook closed his eyes and Grimes turned a watchful gaze back toward the opening of the cavern.

Calming slightly, Rhea inched a little further away, using the pretense of adjusting her pack and discarded suit for comfort. She was too tense to actually relax, though, and too wary to really close her eyes. Instead, she simply allowed her eyelids to drift nearly closed and watched both men through her lashes, waiting for the attack she knew was coming.

Chapter Nineteen

Raathe’s knees buckled before he’d managed to do much more than clear the entrance. He hardly felt the pain, though, as his knees struck the ground and he fell forward, barely conscious.

For several moments, he lay perfectly still, fighting for each breath. Fortunately, it dawned on him that at least part of the encroaching darkness was the need for air. It took an effort to lift his arm and push the helmet up. He was still searching blindly for his air tube when he realized the lightheadedness was receding.

Dragging in a deep breath, he opened his eyes when he not only felt air fill his lungs but warm air against his face. A shiver skated through him as the warmer air began to thaw his nearly frozen body from the inside out.

“She was right,” he muttered in a slurred voice.

When Justice didn’t answer, he struggled and finally managed to lever himself up enough to look around. Justice had collapsed as he had, he saw, but his helmet was still closed. His chest was barely moving.

Heaving an irritated breath, he crawled toward the other man and opened his face plate. Justice automatically sucked in a deep breath. A few minutes later his eyes twitched and then slowly opened.

He stared up at Raathe blankly for several moments. “Air,” he finally managed to say in a croaking voice.

“Rhea’s caverns.”

Justice closed his eyes again.

“We have to get moving,” Raathe said tiredly.

Justice nodded but didn’t move for several moments. Finally, heaving a deep breath, he pushed himself into a sitting position and looked around. “Got no fucking clue how far ahead of us they might be.”

Raathe nodded. “They’ll be moving, though.”

Struggling, both men managed to get to their feet. Justice looked at Raathe uncomfortably for a moment. “I guess I should thank you for saving my life.”

Raathe sent him an equally uncomfortable glance, knowing he would never have made it to the cave to start with if Justice hadn’t gotten him on his feet and gotten him moving. “We can form a mutual appreciation society later,” he retorted dryly. “Or better yet, you saved my ass. I saved yours. Why don’t we just call it even?”

Justice stared at him a long moment and finally shrugged. “Suits me.”

Lifting their heads almost in sync, both men surveyed the cavern around them. The light from outside had vanished altogether, but some sort of phosphorescent plants covered much of the walls near them. They saw other patches dotting segments of the cavern walls for some distance. It lit the cavern up as brightly as the light of a full moon on earth, creating pockets of deep shadow around rocky outcroppings and what appeared to be patches of nearly waist high vegetation in some places. It limned other features of the landscape in an eerie bluish green glow, gleaming on the thin trickle of water that ran roughly through the center and disappeared beneath an enormous boulder a small distance behind where they stood.

Raathe dragged his attention from the cavern after a few moments and turned to look toward the cave entrance. “It’s dark. They won’t try to follow us until it’s light.”

“Which means we don’t have to worry about our backs at the moment. We can focus on catching up to the others.”

Raathe nodded, transferring his attention to the floor of the cave. After a few moments, he crouched down for a better look. “They were moving fast when they passed through—long strides.”

“They’ll figure the hunt’s off till morning. They might not have gone far before they stopped.”

Raathe frowned, tilting his head to listen. The flora had a deadening effect on the cavern, though, and a good bit of the floor was covered with some sort of mossy plant. Although he listened for several minutes, no telltale sounds wafted back to him. “I’m guessing they were scared shitless the guards would be right behind them. They may have stopped by now—probably have—but they’ll have gone pretty deep before they felt safe enough to stop.”

Justice considered it and finally nodded.

Feeling somewhat rested now that they could breathe more easily and had warmed, they set off at a far more brisk pace than they’d managed up until that point, taking care to walk on the vegetation as much as possible to keep from giving themselves away. The phosphorescent glow from the plants made it easy enough to see their way, though it was an eerie world they traveled, full of deep shadows and deeper ones.

Raathe and Justice both paused from time to time to listen for any sound that might indicate they were closing the distance and to search for signs that they were still on the right track, but it seemed unlikely to either man, given their rush, that Grimes and Cook would’ve chosen a more difficult path to follow when they had easy passage by staying on the low growth.

Raathe felt himself growing more anxious the longer they traveled. It began to nag at him that they hadn’t made any effort to explore the areas to either side of the path they were following. He was certain that Grimes and Cook would’ve kept to the easier path while they were moving, but just as certainly they would’ve moved off once they decided to stop to rest.

He didn’t want to think about what else they might stop to do. He tried to convince himself that they weren’t stupid enough to stop to enjoy themselves with Rhea when they had to know the guards were after them even if they thought he and Justice were dead. He wasn’t entirely successful. Grimes and Cook had a taste for rape and torture and they hadn’t had the chance at a woman in nearly a year.

The urge struck, again and again, to stop and go back and search, but each time he ignored it, pushing on and hoping he wasn’t making another mistake that was going to cost Rhea. Eventually, the impulse became so strong he couldn’t ignore it any longer.

He stopped, staring back toward the cave entrance, plagued by doubts he’d never had before. In all the years he’d lived as a predator stalking human prey he had never suffered any doubts about his training or his instincts.

But then this was unlike any mission he’d ever been assigned. He’d never had anything riding on his decisions beyond his own life or the possibility of losing his quarry and being reprimanded when he was in military service, or losing a paycheck when it came to Johann.

“What is it?” Justice demanded, stepping close to voice the question quietly.

Raathe glanced at him, struggling with his unaccustomed indecisiveness. “We should have closed the distance by now,” he said finally.

Justice tensed. “You think we passed them?”

Raathe gnawed his lower lip. “Maybe.”

“I’ll double back ….”

A burst of sound interrupted him before he could say more, the sounds of a tussle and a feminine cry cut off. Both men whirled toward the sound and took off at a dead run.

The sounds had been close, damned close, Raathe thought, scanning the shadows a little desperately. A full fledged scream rent the air before he’d gone far, the sound, like nothing he’d ever heard, or ever wanted to hear again, making his heart jerk to a painful halt in his chest for a split second. He sprinted forward and skidded to halt at the sight that met his gaze. Justice, equally stunned, slid to a halt beside him.

In the eerie bluish green light a few yards away they could see three figures struggling. Rhea, they knew was between the two men, one holding her from behind. The second, in front of her, had just torn the front of her flight suit from neck to groin.

What froze both of them in their tracks, however, stunned them with disbelief, was the lightening fast blur as Rhea leaned to her right and came back with something in her hand. Almost too quickly even to see more than a flash of movement, she slashed the man in front of her across the throat and swung down and back, driving whatever it was into the groin of the man behind her.

A fountain of blood, black in the strange light, sprayed her across the face and her breasts. The man in front of her grabbed his throat and staggered back. The man behind her jerked away from her and grabbed his groin, bending double. Rhea leapt away from both men and dove into a clump of vegetation.

Galvanized the moment he saw Rhea was no longer in the line of fire, Raathe lifted the gun he held in his hand and fired at almost the same instant Justice fired. The man holding his throat—Grimes—jerked twice as both lasers hit him and then fell over. Cook managed to look up and caught the second barrage in the face and chest.

“Rhea!” Justice bellowed, surging forward.

Rage filled Raathe as he, too, rushed to the scene, lagging slightly behind Justice.

Rhea’s head popped above the vegetation. “Kyle?”

She launched at herself at Kyle, slamming into him hard enough he staggered back a step. “I thought you were dead! I thought they’d killed you!”

She spied Raathe as she leaned back to look up at Kyle and wrenched away from him abruptly, flying at Raathe and hugging him as tightly as she had Kyle a moment before. “I thought you were dead!” she said, sobbing now.

Raathe tightened his arms around her, rocking her slightly. “Jesus, munch!”

Rhea uttered a sound that was part laugh part sob and pulled away from him, glancing from one man to the other. “How?”

Justice had crouched to examine one of the men on the ground. “Dead,” he pronounced and moved to Cook. He didn’t crouch to examine him. Most of his face was gone. “Definitely dead.”

Rhea’s chin wobbled. “I killed them?” she asked a little weakly.

Raathe and Justice both looked at her sharply and then glanced at one another. “
We
killed them,” Raathe said firmly, leading Rhea away from the bodies.

Rhea looked up at him a little hopefully and then glanced back. Justice moved between her and the bodies. Rhea swallowed a little sickly. “You’re sure? I stabbed them. I’d worked it all out in my head that I was going to kill them … because I was sure they’d killed both of you and they were going to kill me, too.”

Raathe patted her head and led her a little further away. “You did good, baby. I didn’t have a clear shot until you hit them with … uh … whatever that was.”

She held up the shard.

Grimacing, Raathe took it from her hand carefully and tossed it into the brush. “You don’t need that anymore. Stand here, ok? We’re going to get the packs and then we’ll find a place to bed down.”

Rhea nodded shakily, trying to control the shivering from the cold that seemed to be working its way through her, mopping at the tears that kept streaming down her cheeks despite her best efforts to stop. She sniffed a few times. “I’m so glad you’re alright,” she babbled in a husky whisper. “I’m so happy you’re alright. I was so scared you were both dead.”

She surged forward to embrace Kyle again when he joined her on the path. Burdened with the pack, he pulled her tightly against his chest with one arm, holding her for a long moment before he released her. “I’m glad you’re safe,” he said in a strange voice.

Rhea glanced up at him miserably. “Don’t be angry with me, Kyle.”

He made an irritated sound. “I’m not angry, Rhea.”

She didn’t believe him. Raathe looked almost as angry as Justice when he joined them.

“We need to move. I don’t know if there’s anything in here that’ll be drawn by the blood, but I’d as soon not find out.”

Feeling more than a little bewildered, Rhea stumbled along between them as they headed out. She’d been tired before her ordeal and the emotional upheaval of discovering the hours she’d spent mourning for them, torturing herself with horrible images of them dying, had been nothing more than her own imagination. “How did you manage to get here?” she asked finally. “Grimes cut the air hoses.”

Raathe glanced back at her.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Justice responded from behind her. “I don’t think the guards are behind us, but it’ll safer to be as quiet as possible.

Chastened, Rhea let the subject drop, wondering if that was why they both seemed angry with her, because she’d lost it and sobbed and babbled hysterically. It was enough, she decided, harkening back to her limited experience with men.

They hated emotional scenes and it seemed to be a universal thing with men.

She thought that was part of it, anyway. She realized as she grew a little calmer that that wasn’t entirely the cause. She’d been too relieved to see them to consider what she had earlier—they both thought of her as theirs. She’d managed to thoroughly piss both of them off by showing them that she was as glad to see one as the other.

She sighed miserably when that occurred to her, but she decided she wasn’t sorry that she’d done it. She
was
relieved to see both of them. She had every right to be ecstatic that they were both alive and unhurt.

She was so relieved when Raathe finally decided they’d gone far enough and found a place for them bed down that she wasn’t even terribly upset that they emptied one sleep bag for her and then took the other two for themselves and lay down on either side of her with a good two or three feet to spare. It seemed to her that at least one of them might have offered to cuddle her. She wanted to cuddle,
needed
it after what she’d been through, but she wasn’t about to ask when they were being so cold and angry. Curling on her side, she stared a little longingly at Kyle’s back for a while and then turned over and stared at John’s back.