Prince of Passion (5 page)

She let him flounder a moment then took enough pity on him to ease herself upright, smoothing the folds of vermillion around her. Her lips blushed brighter than the fabric. “I can’t imagine how that gets us closer to finding the mercenaries or their employer.”

No. It had just gotten him closer to her. He gave his head a quick shake. That had certainly not been his intent. “I only wanted… Never mind. I must plead lingering sheerways psychosis.”

A flicker in her dark gaze made him think he’d misspoken somehow, but then she smiled. “Perhaps I should have you imprisoned. For your own safety.”

He didn’t know her well enough to be sure she was joking. “I can’t help you protect your world if I am locked up.”

She tilted her head. “But what makes you think I accept your help?”

“You accepted my tongue in your mouth,” he snapped without thinking.

She lifted one brow. “Are the two connected, your tongue and your help? I am getting a deal then. I would have thought the sheerways’ last l’auralyo would come at a higher price.”

Her words scraped a raw spot in his psyche, and he straightened away from her. “Apparently the last l’auralyo won’t be coming at all tonight.”

She laughed. “So impatient, my sweet child.”

He glowered back. “I am not yours, and I am not a child. In my twenty-three sol-years, I have survived the induction of the qva’avaq and the destruction of my way of life. And I am fighting to save the sheerways from a threat most don’t know even exists.”

Her amusement faded. “Of course. Please forgive my distraction when you have brought us a serious matter.” She rolled to her bare feet in one smooth move. “Go to bed, l’auralyo. I will take care of this.”

He felt her pulling away, not just physically, dismissing him, and she was taking his only reason for existing with her. He scrambled off the couch after her, graceless with the surge of panic. “You can’t tell anyone else about this.”

“Can’t I?”

“These mercenaries and whoever is behind them are devious. If they know they have been found out, they’ll withdraw.”

“All the better for Saya-Terce.”

“But worse for everyone else. They’ll just find another way, if I am not there to stop them.”

She gazed past him, toward the darkened ocean. “I have only one world and that is sometimes too much. Yet you’d take on responsibility for all the sheerways.”

He stared at her, jaw tight, but the words sneaked out of him. “What else do I have?”

“Icere—”

In desperation, he threw out his last line. “I think they may have already made contact with Luac. Your son may be guilty of providing Saya-Terce secrets to outworlders.”

Her face drained of all its vibrancy, leaving only the color of the ice in her eyes. “If you say that again, I will kill you.”

He nodded. “Like Luac’s father was executed by your council for much the same crime.”

Her body vibrated with the force of her fury. “Be silent.”

“I know there was nothing you could have done to save him. Taking bribes from an outworld company to turn a blind eye to unsafe drilling practices betrays your most sacred laws. Understandable in a world where one bad spill can poison every wave. If you don’t want the same fate for Luac—”

She sprang at him. The coiled strength in her small body knocked him back to the couch. She crouched astride his chest, pinning his arms, with one hand high under his throat and her other raised in a tight-fingered blade. “I said silence. Your lack thereof makes me think you do not believe that I will kill you.” Her eyes glittered like ice. “But if you had studied the histories of Saya-Terce a little more carefully, you would have read between the lines that it wasn’t my council who executed Luac’s father.”

She flared her upraised hand, revealing the translucent webbing that reached halfway up between her wide-spread fingers. Indigo-colored rings patterned the webs like ancient coins, and similar markings flushed under the skin at her temples and the underside of her wrist, larger but harder to see in her dusky skin.

“Saya,” he rasped.

She tightened her grasp on his neck. “Quiet,” she reminded him.

His throat was going numb, and he gasped. She was not holding him that tightly, but he found he could not move.

The indigo rings on her hand glistened, and he shifted his gaze with terrifying difficulty.

“A neurotoxin,” she explained. “My great-grandfather’s bones and the malac aren’t the only relic monsters in these deeps.”

Icere tried to drag in a lungful of air, but his vision dimmed. With his last breath, he warned her, “The freedom of many worlds is at stake. It’s on you now.”

Then the world went black as the night-dark ocean.

Chapter Four

In the quiet hour between the passing out of the last revelers and the arrival of the breakfast crew, Rynn finished collating the data on the mysterious mercenaries allegedly targeting her festival. She stared out her office window at the rising sun silvering the backs of the low-massing clouds.

Much like the revelries, the clouds would build as the day heated, crashing open in the late afternoon and early evening, pouring out through the night to an uneasy rest.

Speaking of uneasy.

She tapped her stylus then found the noise irritating. She opened her hand to let the stylus fall and let her annoyance drift away as well while she stared at her webbed fingers.

Her great-grandfather would have chuckled and ruffled her hair—while avoiding the rings at her temples—but she tried to never let her anger get the better of her. The consequences were too unfortunate. She was glad Luac and Ky had inherited their father’s effortless charm instead. Of course, that charm had blinded her to his clandestine sideline dealings with the outworld drillers. And charm was no defense against neurotoxin.

She pushed out of her chair and stretched, wincing at the creak in her neck. The festival was always a busy, stressful time, accounting as it did for almost fifteen percent of the annual general treasury. She needed to relax.

With a grimace, she went out to the private deck off her office, stripped down to her thin white shift, and dove into the water.

Ruffled by yesterday’s early storm, the ocean was cooler than its usual body-temperature embrace as colder currents from below circulated with the warmer surface waters. The mix of temperatures brought the malac up from the depths to shallower waters to fight and mate. The brine was not yet flavored with their distinctive essence, but soon. She had an entire planet of people waiting for the entertainment to begin, although those who wanted an up-close show would have to take a smaller craft out away from the festival barge which was protected by an underwater barrier since the malac could be dangerous. Always, a few visitors were drawn more by that danger than the resulting pleasures.

And she might have a few others who had come with a darker purpose yet.

The rush of water over her skin soothed the remaining tingle of the toxin. This would have to be relaxation enough. Halfway around the barge, she paralleled another deck that ran the length of the guest rooms. This platform was subdivided with screens that cleverly reflected the ocean to give each room the illusion of utter privacy.

She counted as she passed the units, found the correct one, and, ignoring the helpful ladder, powered herself out of the water. She twisted as she hauled herself up and landed her backside on the smooth boards of the deck. If there was one thing to be said for being marooned on a water world, it was that she could be proud of her swimming-honed ass.

She stared out at the restless waves as she wrung out her hair and twisted it into a knot atop her head. As quickly as the water dried to a prickle on her skin, the tension flowed back into her. If only she could keep swimming.

Step one. Remember to let the blood flow freely.

In her great-grandfather’s day, the blood had flowed far too freely. She had put a stop to that. If people still faced dangers on Saya-Terce, it was only by their own choice. To think that someone was trying to take away such free will offended her to her very depths.

She glanced over at Icere who sat in the deck chair with his head in his hands. “Good morning.”

“Come to finish me off?” His voice was muffled in the sleeves of his robe that had folded back to reveal the corded muscles of his forearms.

She
pff
ed. “It was just a little tetrodotoxin.”

“Poisoning is a state of mind, body and spirit?”

“Not at all. Just a chemical.”

Finally he lifted his head to face her. Shadows bruised the skin under his eyes, and the previously smooth golden plait of his hair resembled a de-scaled carp, but he didn’t look any harder used than the other party-goers on the barge.

She trailed her fingers through the water lapping at her shins. “Swimming helps clear the toxin.”

“I told you I don’t swim. Which I assume is why you felt that locking my door was sufficient for keeping me confined.”

She ignored the accusation in his voice. “The salinity in our oceans is very forgiving. I think you’d take to it like—” she grinned “—like a fish to water.”

He straightened slowly and gave her a look that said he’d rather be poisoned again. “If you’ll recall, my body is infused with liquid crystal. I’ll sink like—” he matched her pause but not her smile “—like a stone.”

“Then I’ll hold you up while you float.” Her skin prickled again in a way that had nothing to do with the neurotoxin or the drying salt water.

He flicked his fingers. “You took all my tech and had time to process everything. Do you believe me now?”

“I believe that you have spent considerable effort seeking this organization you believe is out to control the sheerways.”

He narrowed one eye. “So you don’t believe me.”

She’d been kicking idly at the water, but she turned to give him her full attention. “You threatened my son.”

He stared back. After a long moment, he jerked his chin once. “I am sorry. I did not intend to arouse that particular instinct.”

He had aroused too many of her instincts last night. She glanced at her hand, splayed on the deck. The webs between her fingers shone in the cloud-diffused light, the indigo rings almost—but not quite—invisible. “And I am sorry I poisoned you. If I was angry, I should have just had you arrested.”

He snorted and pushed to his feet. “I am making some tea.”

She decided that was an invitation, so she followed him into the room, taking a plush towel from the cabinet kept stocked at nearly every exterior doorway of the festival barge. She wrapped herself loosely and watched him.

He made it almost a dance, a smooth, sparing movement through the space as he collected two cups and poured from a kettle. He was still wearing his robe, but it draped half open, without the careful closure of the night before. Perhaps her thoughtless attack had knocked loose more than just that knotted belt.

She wished she wasn’t so aware of the fact he wore nothing else below that slipshod knot.

Distracted as she was, she sipped from the cup he handed her before noticing what was in it. She lifted her brows in surprise at the unfamiliar flavor. “Are you now poisoning
me
?”

He frowned. “It’s a l’auraly tea. Don’t you like it?”

There was a note in his voice she needed a moment to identify: hurt. “I was teasing.” She took another sip. “It is subtle, but it has nuances. Yes, I can taste how this is a l’auraly tea.”

“We made it at the temple every third year. Takes a month to pick the leaves, dry them, grind them, and it all has to be done before the essential oils degrade. I hated every archaic minute of it.” He stared down at the shell cradled in his palm. “I opened the last pouch on the cruiseliner here.”

She studied the curve of his shoulders. “You could go home, you know. Let someone else track these mysterious raiders.”

“No. I can’t.” He drained the cup and put it aside, but his throat still worked as if he swallowed something more bitter than the delicately tinted tea. “If you won’t help me, at least let me go. Maybe I can catch them on their way offworld.”

For a heartbeat, the thought of his leaving wrenched something inside her. “I think I’ve found them.”

He stiffened. “Where?”

“Not here. Not anymore. I mentioned that something on your lists seemed familiar. I was right. I found an export manifest from here that followed a suspiciously circuitous route identical to one you had identified.”

He drew a sharp breath “An order of the liqueur? Am I too late?”

She shook her head. “We never ship the liqueur. Not because we haven’t tried, but it’s too unstable to be bottled, much less transported. But there is another product we harvest from ni-malac, a sub-species. The ni-malac secretion separates as quickly as malac liqueur, but we use the components for a very expensive beauty balm.”

He frowned. “A beauty balm? That’s a far cry from an aphrodisiac. Farther yet from a mind-controlling substance.”

She gave him a crooked smile. “Not really. Beauty can make people do strange things. As I’m sure you’ve found.”

He shrugged one shoulder impatiently. “Go on.”

She fixed him with a repressive stare.

He matched her earlier off-kilter smile. “Please tell me more, Saya.”

“I wouldn’t have even noticed the shipment three months ago except a subsequent order was flagged at the warehouse for insufficient stock. We’d run out.”

He blinked. “So?”

“We never run out. I should say, it is a very, very expensive balm. And it all went in that one order three months ago.”

He paced across the room. “A third-party retailer?”

“That disappeared into the sheerways? Unlikely.”

He paused. “The balm has similar components to the liqueur, and someone has enough to potentially recreate the raw source material.” He whirled to face her. “We need to question whoever was in charge of that order. Find out who was the contact, where it went.”

Her throat tightened. Avoiding his gaze, she took her tea to the window. The clouds had marched closer and were building higher now, towers of heat and violet lightning.

Behind her, Icere laid his hand on her shoulder. “Luac placed the order, didn’t he?”