Guardian of the Storm (8 page)

And she had no means of birth control, she realized suddenly. She hadn’t reached the age of consent before the disease struck, so she hadn’t been given the implantation that prevented conception. That was something else to give serious consideration to.

“No,” she answered him finally. “I’m not afraid. I know you wouldn’t hurt me.”

He sighed gustily, a mixture of relief and irritation. “I should not have kissed you.”

Tempest smiled faintly. “Probably not … but I expect it was my fault anyway. I gave you the wrong idea. It’s just… I was so relieved and happy, I didn’t think before I did it.”

Kiran frowned. As relieved as he was that he hadn’t frightened her, he wasn’t particularly pleased that she seemed so ready to dismiss it completely. Try though he might, though, he could see no sign that she was struggling to hide her feelings from him as she had when he wounded her before. She seemed … radiant with joy and hope, but neither distressed by what had passed between them or disappointed, as he was, that he’d not been able to carry it further. “This ....”

“Affection,” Tempest supplied when he seemed to be searching for the right word. She sighed. “I used to have so many friends, and my family, too. I don’t think I even realized how much I missed kissing and hugging, holding hands … just being able to touch somebody else and feel close to them. I guess it’s like you said, Niahians and Earthlings are a lot different in their ways and customs … worlds apart, literally.”

Kiran felt his belly tighten uncomfortably at that, realizing it was as he’d suspected. The discovery that she wasn’t the last of her kind had completely turned her mind to them, banished the sadness from her eyes, the loneliness that had pulled at him. “We are not so different that we could not learn,” he pointed out, wondering even as he said it why he had. They were different. He’d realized himself that they were so different the possibility of finding harmony between them was remote.

He should be glad … relieved. Perversely, he was miserable and angry.

Tempest shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t picture an Earthling taking a vow of chastity for any reason,” she said with a chuckle, then was immediately sorry she’d said it, and worse, laughed. Obviously, it was really important to him. She hadn’t meant to insult him or his customs. “Sorry. I know it’s important, but you see what I mean?”

“No,” he said grimly.

She reached up and patted his arm. “Never mind. It doesn’t really matter now, does it?” She sighed happily. “Oh, I just can’t wait to see them! I’ll bet we could go back to the colony.” She frowned. “I should go alone first. If the lab’s still working, I could run some tests .… I used to help my parents in the lab. I’m sure I can remember how to test for immunity. Well, I suppose I should check to see if the virus is still active first.”

Kiran studied her a long moment and finally lay back. After a moment, he put his arm around her waist and dragged her toward him, fitting her against his length. “Sleep. We must rest while we can.”

Tempest was a little surprised, but she was perfectly willing to snuggle closer to his warmth. “I don’t know if I
can
sleep,” she said, yawning.

“It will be difficult for me, as well,” Kiran said wryly.

Tempest chuckled sleepily, having discovered that his warmth and her full stomach combined with the day’s trek had tired her more than she’d realized in her excitement. Now that it was dissipating, she found it harder and harder to stay awake.

She felt Kiran’s hand in her hair, stroking her head. “I like the sound of your happiness,” he murmured.

“Hmm. Laughter. It feels good to laugh. I can’t even remember the last time I felt like laughing.”

“I am glad that I brought this back into your life.”

Tempest nuzzled her cheek against his chest and gave him an affectionate squeeze. “Me, too.”

Chapter Seven

The day was bright with sunlight when Tempest woke. She sat up with a jolt of anxiety, looking around.

Kiran was sitting across from her, studying her.

Tempest combed her fingers through her hair. “I’ve overslept.”

Kiran shrugged. “I thought it best to allow you to rest until you woke of your own accord.”

“Oh.” Tempest scrubbed her hands over her face, trying to shake off the dregs of sleep. “Thanks! I guess we should get going, though.”

Be the time she returned from the watering hole, she felt more alert, but also more aware of the soreness of her muscles from her unaccustomed exercise. Kiran had broke camp when she returned. Without a word, he handed her the water skin, hefted his pack and started the climb down the rocks.

He wasn’t the talkative type, but there was something about him that seemed different. He didn’t seem to be angry—exactly. He seemed withdrawn, she finally decided, as if his mind was elsewhere. She dismissed it after a while, following her own thoughts, allowing her imagination to run wild with plans for a future with the other survivors of the disaster.

Even if there was no longer any sign of the disease that had killed so many, or if, by some lucky chance, she and the other survivors had built up an immunity to it, it was going to be hard, emotionally speaking, to go back to the colony, bury the dead and take up the lives they’d had before. She felt certain, though, that that was what they should do. As many times as she’d heard the adults bewail the loss of so much of their technology in the crash, it was still vast when compared to what the Niahians had, and more than that, a part of
the people
that needed to be preserved.

It was mid-afternoon before they stopped to eat again. Tempest, still caught up in her own world, was surprised when Kiran stopped, and tempted to try to persuade him to keep going since she now had her own reasons for seeing that Kiran finished what he’d set out to do as quickly as possible. He seemed rather disinclined to talk, though, and she realized that she needed to pace herself, despite her impatience, so she kept her thoughts to herself.

They stopped only briefly in any case, since they’d had a late start to begin with. Tempest felt more than a little guilty about it. He’d emphasized how important it was for him to reach his destination in time. It didn’t matter what she thought about it, or that she couldn’t see what difference it made when they got there. It was important to him, and because he’d been kind enough to allow her to tag along, he might not reach this sacred place he’d told her about, not when he was supposed to, anyway.

Realizing that, Tempest made an effort to keep pace with him, pushing herself as much as she dared to try to make up the time he’d lost. He glanced at her curiously several times and finally spoke. “You cannot keep this pace. You will exhaust yourself.”

Tempest shook her head. “No,” she said a little breathlessly. “I’m used to it now. And we need to make up the time you lost waiting for me.”

“We will not make it up if you faint and I have to carry you,” he pointed out.

Tempest chuckled. “Good thing I’m not prone to fainting. I did once, though. The first time I killed something to eat, I puked and then I passed out cold when I cut its throat and it bled all over the place.”

His brows rose questioningly and Tempest shook her head.

“It’s the difference between knowing how and actually doing it. Like I said, I learned a lot, but actually
doing
it is something else altogether.”

“You had not prepared food before you were forced to leave the place of the star people?”

Tempest frowned. “Actually, nobody had had a lot of experience with it. When we crashed here—well, not me. I was born later—they managed to retrieve a lot of our supplies. It was a controlled crash, you understand—damaged the ship beyond repairing it, but they managed to set it down without killing many people. Naturally, they rationed supplies, but they mostly lived off of them while they were building the colony. They knew, eventually, the supplies would run out and they’d have to start growing, or catching, food, but nobody really had much of an idea of how to do that—they had to learn. On Earth, you see, everything was processed, packaged, ready to add water or heat or eat just as it was, right from the package. And then, too, they had to test everything to see what could be eaten by humans that wouldn’t kill them.

“Luckily for me, they’d figured all of that out before … before everybody got sick and started dying. I’d gone out to hunt and gather plenty of times, but mostly the young people just went to help carry things back, not to actually do it—the killing and preparation, you know.”

Kiran shook his head. “This is very strange.”

Tempest drew a deep breath with an effort. “I understand that it would seem that way to you. Violence almost completely destroyed our world, however, and we had worked very hard to learn
not
to be violent. Unfortunately, violence is part of survival and it was hard to learn to take care of ourselves when we found that we
had
to kill if we wanted to live.”

“We, too, are a peaceful people.”

Tempest glanced at him, but she didn’t argue the point. She was sure that, comparatively speaking, the Zoeans were peaceful. They were still, of necessity, far more war-like than
the people
, far less civilized.

She wondered quite suddenly if the Niahians were rebuilding, as well. It made sense, now that she began comparing the two different civilizations. Everyone at the colony had assumed that Niah was merely a primitive world, undeveloped, its inhabitants only just climbing toward true civilization.

Kiran had told her very little, but from what he had said, it seemed to indicate that something global had happened to his world. The Keepers of the Memory might indicate ancient records that dated back to a time when this world had been entirely different, perhaps much more civilized. He’d suggested as much, but she’d thought it was just tales, passed down from generation to generation. She hadn’t considered, until now, that it might actually be true and that his world, having been nearly destroyed, the survivors had had to start once more, virtually at the bottom of the chain of evolution to build again.

For the first time since she’d met him, she felt a genuine curiosity to know what it was that he had been sent to accomplish. Apparently, it was something he, and all of his people, believed would bring their world back to what it had been before.

It still didn’t make sense to her, turn it though she would. Planets, if they weren’t totally destroyed, usually regenerated, but they did it slowly, over time. Everyone believed, given time, the Earth would one day be inhabitable again, maybe not for many generations, but eventually.

But, short of moving the whole planet to a different orbital path, and perhaps seeding it, she couldn’t imagine anything that would bring about a sudden change.

Kiran abruptly drew her from her thoughts by grasping her arm. She looked up at him in surprise, then followed the direction of his gaze.

In the distance, just topping a tall dune, she saw men—perhaps a dozen of them, mounted on beasts. She could tell nothing about them at this distance except that they were wearing long reddish robes that blended surprisingly well with their surroundings. If not for the beasts they were mounted on and the fact that the fabric was flapping around them, she might never have noticed them at all.

Pushing her into the sand, Kiran covered her with his own body. Tempest grunted as the air was forced from her lungs by the impact. “What are you doing?”

“It is the Mordune,” he whispered harshly.

“Yeah, but why squash me?”

“Your flesh is white,” Kiran pointed out testily.

She wasn’t
that
white! In point of fact, she was more red by now than anything else … not brown, like the Niahians, but definitely not white—not anymore. She found she didn’t really have the breath to argue with him, however.

After a moment, he rolled off of her and began dragging her down the other side of the dune. “You think they saw us?” she gasped.

“Yes,” he said grimly.

Tempest’s heart seemed to stand still. “What do we do now?” There was no place to run to. No place to hide.

“We wait. If they did not see us, they will pass us by.”

“But, if they did …?”

“They might still pass us by.”

“And they might not.” Waiting wasn’t much of a plan in her book.

“They are mounted on
aquestans
. If they were on foot, as we are, we might have a chance of evading them.”

He might have a chance. He didn’t need to say it for her to figure out that having her along was enough to doom both of them. “You go then. I’ll …uh … hide here. I’m not Zoean, not an enemy. Maybe they’ll just ignore me.”

“You are female.”

“You think they could tell that from that distance?”

“I could.”

“That’s because you know,” Tempest pointed out testily. “You didn’t know at first.”

“Because I could not see you well.”

“Arguing isn’t going to get us any where.”

He smiled faintly at that, studying her sharply for several moments. Abruptly, he grasped her, pulling her tightly against his length. Before Tempest could even wonder what he was doing, he dipped his head and pressed his lips firmly to hers. A combination of surprise and pleasure jolted through her, making her toes curl in the sand. She gasped, grasping his shoulders. He touched his tongue to her lips, testing the sensitive flesh where her lips met, tasting her, and then plunging past that barrier to taste and explore the exquisitely sensitive inner surfaces of her mouth.

Tempest was both shocked and enthralled at the intimacy of his touch, captivated by the rough rake of his tongue along hers. His taste, his scent, filled her with a delightful sense of floating, a dizzying rush of heat. The muscles low in her belly clenched, a warm wetness flooding her sex.

When he released her almost as abruptly, Tempest swayed dizzily, opening her eyes with an effort.

“I will not allow harm to come to you, little grat. I swear it. Stay close.”

Tempest smiled at him a little vaguely, still too caught up in the sensations he’d created inside of her to spare much thought for danger, real or imagined. “I’m not a grat,” she said teasingly. “I’m a storm. Remember?”