Warrior's Touch (Deadly Touch book 2)

Llew froze, peering up into the branches, but over the hollow hiss of the wind caressing the meadow, there was no other sound. The tree projected a sense of reassurance, but it was the kind of reassurance someone might give as they clutched the entry-wound of the arrow in their chest. It did little to ease Llew’s mind.

Hisham brushed at her arm, two empty syringes in his hands.

Llew looked back at the tree. Silence. She turned back to where Jonas lay. His gravest wound was fixed, but he was still covered in gashes and the shine of his shirt suggested he was still losing blood. She couldn’t leave him bleeding out.

“Okay. Just close your wounds.” She turned back to Jonas. “I don’t know how much more the tree can take.”

He nodded. “I can live with a few bruises and scars. I used to have ’em.” His smile broadened.

“A few more should do it,” Llew said.

She presented her arm and Hisham set about filling his syringes. He passed the first to Braph, who injected Jonas. He placed the empty syringe on the ground and reached for the last one. He turned back to Jonas and paused, as they all watched the visible abrasions and contusions shrink and fade. Jonas took a deep, fortifying breath, sat up, and beamed at the darkening sky above, like he was drinking in a summer sun, not a murky winter’s moon.

“I don’t remember ever feelin’ this good.” He stretched his body one way and the other, one arm up, then the other, a chuffed curl to his lips.

Braph sunk the needle into his stumpy arm and depressed the plunger.

“Hey!” Llew took a step to stop him, and Jonas jumped to his feet, but there was little point; the blood was gone. She watched with disturbed curiosity as he withdrew the needle, inhaled, and blew out a shuddering breath, his face a study in bliss.

Scowling from Braph to his own nearly smoothed skin, Jonas studied the results Llew’s blood had had on himself. He stretched and jiggled, marveling at his well-being, looked to Braph with wary disgust and Llew with awe. Braph sighed again, but this time his lips pressed together in disappointment. He set about gathering up the vials and needles. Jonas stood over him.

“It ain’t that I don’t appreciate your help, but that …” He indicated Braph’s stump, a dribble of blood trickling over the end. “Don’t do that again.”

“You felt it, didn’t you?” Braph squinted up at his half-brother, his narrowed eyes sparkling in the low light. “The power.”

Jonas took his time answering. “I felt it.”

Braph smiled. “Isn’t it...?” He closed his eyes, sucking in air as if he’d injected himself again.

“It ain’t right.” Jonas half turned his head as if intending to look to Llew, but unable to make eye contact. How good did her blood feel to them? “You’re walkin’ a fine line,” he said to Braph. “I want you alive for now, but—”

Pop!

They all looked up at the incredible sound followed by the rattle of shaken leaves. But this time it didn’t stop. A series of ticks and crackles were punctuated by even louder snaps and bangs. The tree started to lean. Llew shrieked. Her tree!

Jonas gripped her arm and started pulling her away, but she couldn’t move. Her tree was dying, and it was all her fault.

“I have to—” Shaking Jonas off, she ran to the tree and tried to push it back upright. A rational part of her knew it was pointless. In fact, more than likely it was downright dangerous, and she had no way to heal herself without draining a huge area of the Turhmosian landscape and pinpointing her location for anyone interested. But she wasn’t about to stand idly by as her tree toppled. Another part of her hoped that her touch might heal the tree’s flesh the way it healed hers. She could feel something passing between them, but it was so faint she didn’t know if she was mending the tree or if it was making up for the damage done as it bore down on her. Then Jonas was beside her, stretching to his full height to ease the pressure.

The meadow still rang with creaks and groans like a ship on the high seas.

“Run,” he said through clenched teeth.

“We have to save it,” she began. “Maybe if we—”

“Run!” he roared, straining under the weight.

He was right. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t deny it. Tears streaming, she ran out into the meadow, turning in time to see Jonas twist out from under the Ajnai, letting it fall with a crash.

She remained still, staring at where the tree had stood for hundreds of years. Braph stayed back, while Hisham took care of a baser need behind another tree. Jonas came to stand beside her.

“I didn’t even get to tell it about the Quaven tree,” she said after another while. The tree had looked, that was true, and it seemed to have caught a glimpse of the other tree with the child’s soul entwined with its own. But Llew was almost certain it had gleaned no understanding about that pulsating tree. Llew barely understood how her child’s soul could talk to her from within the tree’s roots, but it had happened. This tree had only seen that the Quaven tree existed, and that had been enough to make it happy – as trees went – but Llew wished she could have shown it more, maybe asked it what it all meant. Now she would never know if the tree could have comprehended what they had somehow created.

Jonas had the sense not to speak. It was Quaver’s fault only a single Ajnai remained since the time of the Immortals and, as far as Llew was concerned, Jonas was the epitome of everything Quaven. The part of her that needed to blame someone, anyone for what had happened was waiting for him to give her an excuse. In the absence of a reason to lash out, all she had was disbelief and sorrow.

“It saved your life,” she said.

“I know.” He sounded sufficiently saddened, though she wasn’t sure she detected any guilt for the role he’d played.

“Twice.”

“I know,” he said. “I wish we could’ve done more.”

Llew gritted her teeth. He had given her nothing to snap at. In fact, he’d said exactly what he should’ve. But she needed to snap.

After all those years she’d finally found her pa only to kill him as they had slept, his hand resting on her arm, while the Syakaran knife wound in her hand began to fester. Then she’d found this tree. Her tree that had welcomed her as family, and now she’d killed it, too.

“All we ever did was use it,” she said.

“Its power existed to be used,” Jonas murmured. Turning to her, he said, “Aris did this, remember that.”

Llew nodded. It was all Aris’s fault. If he hadn’t killed their children, they wouldn’t have been here to use the tree and he wouldn’t have felt a need to chop it down. Her tree would be standing, and she would still be pregnant – with an uncertain future ahead of her; but who was to say her new future was any more certain?

Right then, she didn’t think she’d hated anyone more. Even Braph; and that was saying something.

They were all still standing in silence as darkness settled in fully. Llew was struggling to turn her back on the tree. She kept closing her eyes to say a final farewell, or apologize for allowing it to fall and, each time she opened them, some tiny part of her held out hope that she had imagined it all and the Ajnai still stood. And each time her hope was dashed.

Braph sighed loudly. They were all tired, spent, but so much had happened Llew couldn’t imagine giving in to the folds of sleep.

“How long does it take for the Aenuk blood to leave our system?” Hisham asked.

“Your own body has destroyed it and flushed it from your system by now.” Braph almost sounded mournful as he waved his hand vaguely at the tree Hisham had been behind moments earlier. He glanced at his stump – the arm where he had worn his device. “Most attempted blood transfusions have been troublesome, but the Aenuk power negates whatever goes wrong in the process. It’s one reason you need to use so much; it has to fix the damage it does going in before you can use the rest.”

Hisham nodded, scowling when Braph mentioned damage but, otherwise, his demeanor relaxed with relief. He caught Llew’s gaze and looked away, scratching at a shoulder.

“We may as well get some sleep.” Jonas gave her a kind smile. “We all need it.” His smile broadened. “Though, I’m feelin’ pretty good, all things considered. I’ll take first watch. Once I’ve, ah, flushed my system.” He bowed bashfully before stepping away to disappear behind a tree.

Hisham brought the horses and cart closer, hobbled them near the fallen tree and threw bedrolls in the vicinity of the others.

On his return, Jonas’s gaze lingered on Llew, somewhere between hungry for more and savoring what he’d already tasted. Llew didn’t know what to say. That look was too close to the way Braph had looked at her. And others before him. Before she took more than a step towards her own bedroll, he gripped her arm and pulled her close.

“We make a good team, you and me,” he said. His eyes shifted across her face, taking everything in under what light filtered down from a mist-blurred moon. “Don’t you think?”

“What? My blood and your getting killed?”

“I wasn’t dead.”

“Not this time.” Her cheeky grin muffled the worry behind her words. They’d done this too often already, and Aris was still out there – and she still didn’t trust Braph. Their... she couldn’t call it luck, but whatever it was, it had to run out some time.

“You know, it’s usually I’m the one savin’ lives.” He released her and brought both hands up to frame her face. “But you’ve saved mine twice.” His leather-clad thumb rubbed across her left cheek. He looked at his own digit moving up and down, then pulled both hands back to tug the gloves free, dropping them to the ground and clasping her face again. His face lit up as they connected skin-on-skin for the first time in weeks. He brushed fingers across her forehead, down her cheek, neck, across her shoulder, down her arm, and took up a hand. He warmed her knuckles with a couple of breaths before pulling them to his lips, lingering on the sensuous touch. “It feels so good to touch you again.”

Llew brought her hands to his face, his stubble rough beneath her fingers. Six weeks. It felt like nearly as long as they’d known each other they had been unable to touch. Her fingertips brushed over his face and not a tingle or a zap passed between them. Not of the kind she felt when healing, anyway. She ran her hands down his torso, tugged his shirt free of his belt and slid her fingers up his back to savor that heat he continuously released.

Hisham and Braph shuffling into their bedrolls pulled Llew from the moment, but she couldn’t pull her eyes from Jonas’s. In a grip somewhere between aggression and tenderness he pulled her to him and pressed his mouth to hers, tasting her, drinking her in. She kissed back at first but was all too aware of their audience. She didn’t know if the other men were watching, but there was little chance they were unaware of the goings on. She pulled back. Jonas gave a pained expression and pulled her back into a full-bodied, if chaste, embrace.

“Aris can do what he likes, if I could get you alone right now,” he rumbled by her ear. “I missed this.”

“I can’t do anything with him around,” she whispered.

“Nothin’ wrong with showin’ him what he’s missin’,” he said, but didn’t force the issue.

They stood together in silence, holding hands. Now and then, Jonas brushed his fingers across Llew’s forehead or a thumb over her cheek, and then he took up her hand to kiss it again.

He led her away from the sleeping bodies and eased himself to sit against the fallen Ajnai trunk. Llew’s first instinct was to admonish him, horrified at the disrespect, but the tree’s soul, or whatever, was gone, and she allowed herself to do the same. She rubbed her free hand idly over the thin outer bark.

“There’s nothing there,” she murmured. Just a fallen tree. Just wood. The power and the... personality were gone.

As Hisham’s and then Braph’s breathing shifted into the deep rhythm of sleep, Jonas said, “You should be sleepin’, too.”

But she wasn’t tired, and after so many weeks laid up in bed, she didn’t relish returning to it.

“What will Aris do now he’s destroyed my tree?”

“I don’t know,” Jonas said solemnly. “I’m sorry I never questioned him, Llew. But I’m learnin’. He’s a dead man the moment we figure out how.”

“Him or you.” It was a poor attempt at a joke, but Llew didn’t feel like avoiding the issue. “I don’t blame you.”

“You don’t have to. They were my babies, too,” his voice caught on the words.

“I know that.” Just in time she stopped herself from snapping at him. Maybe she had forgotten. She’d slept through most of the normal mourning period, had hardly thought of her babies, so wrapped up in her own damage as she was at the time. And she’d assumed Jonas would be more concerned about his son that still lived. Somehow, in amongst it all, their children had died and been forgotten. But maybe they hadn’t. Maybe all this traipsing, this desire to bring family back together – a mother, a son, maybe even a half-brother – maybe it was all for their children. But that still left Aris out there, and Llew couldn’t get her head around what might happen now he was all-powerful. “What did he do the last time?” she asked. “Didn’t he try to take over the world, or something?”

Jonas gave her a pleading shake of the head.

“Don’t, Llew,” he said. “Aris has done my thinkin’ for me all my life. I never thought to question him, never thought to learn outside of what he taught me. What I know of the days of Immortals... It’s not much, and now I know why. But at this moment, he’s not here and you are. And... I can touch you and it ain’t gonna kill me.” He smiled. “And I’m gonna savor it, ’cause maybe Aris will be back tomorrow, or maybe Turhmos’ll declare war. But I don’t wanna think about that when I’ve got now.”

Llew swallowed.

Something fluttered out from the forest canopy and squawked off into the distance, and a breeze stirred the tussocks into a whispered roar. A leaf fluttered down.

“Wow,” said Llew. “I told you, you always know what to say.”

Jonas silenced her with a shake of his head, and they sat, hand in hand, listening to the sounds of the night. Until Jonas murmured something about his leg being cold. They sought out needle and thread and Llew managed to help mend his trousers while he still wore them – it was too cold for him to sit around butt-naked – without pricking him too much.