Parallel Desire (20 page)

"I keep wanting to use our bond. To tell him I love him, in case it's the last time, but … I don't want him to hear how upset I am. I don't want to distract him or put him in danger, but this need to have some sort of link with him is almost more than I can stand."

"He will come home, Kelsey. I feel it with my intuition."

"Is your gift ever wrong?" Kelsey asked, rubbing her palm across her stomach, needing to be closer to Erica.

"Not very often."

"Then I'm going to hang on to what you've told me. I'm going to believe he will return."

S
helby blinked groggily
, the ceiling above her head spinning like a whirlwind. Only, what ceiling? Last thing she remembered, she'd been on the dance floor, trying to move to that numbing, mesmerizing rhythm. The lights had sped up weirdly; then, she'd blacked out—almost as if the light show had triggered one of her seizures.

"Ohhh," she groaned. She was lying on a soft surface, something like a bed or a sofa, although she couldn't manage to look at anything other than the rafters overhead. Even they were more of a gyrating kaleidoscope than anything solid. She moaned softly, trying to turn her head to the side.

"So you're coming around," a deep, familiar voice said. Only it was devoid of all warmth, lacking any kind of compassion at all. With a woozy effort, she managed to rotate her head, feeling something heavy clamped against her throat. Her gaze locked on a pair of legs, thighs that were thick like tree trunks.

"Jake?" she murmured, the words gauzy as they passed over her tongue. "Oh, gods, I'm going to be sick."

"Don't do that, not in here." Again, coldness, a hollow sound to his voice.

She winced, and managed to follow the pair of legs upward, realizing dimly that Jake wasn't wearing what he'd had on earlier, the black jeans and shirt. He now sported a biker jacket with metal studs across the front.

"What's going …" The words died right on her tongue. The man staring down at her had a smirking, lecherous grin on his face. His eyes lacked any sort of vibrancy or life. They were like hard green marbles, lifeless and cold, a chilling contrast to his swarthy face.

The sick feeling in Shelby's stomach spread to her heart. This couldn't be good. No way, no how. There wasn't any positive spin she could put on the situation, not when confronted with this vile expression on the face that she'd come to know and care for so deeply. She tried to move her hands and feet, but something heavy held them, pinning her down.

Stupidly, she mumbled, "You're not Jake."

"Oh, yeah, I am," he replied, sneering at her. He reached for a lock of her hair, stroking it suggestively, but before she could even pull away from him, he tossed it against her cheek. "But you're right. I'm not the Jake you're looking for. Don't worry; he'll be along soon enough."

Alarmed, she struggled to sit up, but the Jake before her—the human, murdering one, she was now certain—shoved her back onto the mattress. Only then did she glance sideways and realize what the heavy weights on her hands and neck were. She'd been manacled with hard, metallic bands.

"Let me go!"

"That won't be happening, sweetheart. Not anytime soon."

She tried to move her hands, but the grip about her wrists tightened, almost as if in response.
Oh, All, help me.
They'd fastened her in reflexive metal, a psychic alloy that originated on Antousia. If you resisted, it understood and tightened; if you complied, it rewarded you by loosening slightly. She'd heard of soldiers driven insane by captivity within their harsh confines. Hope and Scott had been held with similar restraints back in December and had managed to undo them because of their lovemaking and deep feelings for each other. Here, in the presence of such a threatening man, she had no such promise for liberation.

Jake trailed his fingers down the length of her arm and, dipping inward, he grazed her breast lightly. Shelby jolted, but he continued touching her body.

"Where am I?" she asked, ignoring the maneuver. Intimidation tactic, plain and simple.

"In my world now. You can kiss your old life goodbye."

She blinked up at him. "What do you mean?"

"I have plans for you, girl. Very lucrative plans. Well, lucrative for me, of course. For you, I'm afraid they won't be so good." Jake stroked a hand along her cheek. "Or, to be more specific, I have plans for your body."

And with that, Shelby knew that she'd stumbled right into the heart of the sex-slavery ring.

"Where is
my
Jake?" she demanded. "You tell me right now!"

As she tried to move her legs, the bands around her ankles tightened; he had her pinned flat on her back. With a lift of her chin, she glanced down her body and finally understood exactly what this Jake had, done to her: She was splayed out on a padded table, hands and feet bound against the surface. It was clear he made a regular business of this routine, too, because the fastenings were tarnished and grimy. The black table had worn places in its leather, a rip running beside her thigh.

"I'm sure you know how these bands work," he told her softly. "The harder you fight, the worse it'll be for you."

He put his back to her then, walking across the room, and Shelby worked to focus her blurry vision and see what he was doing. The room was mostly dark, and she became conscious of a thrumming beat, heavy bass notes pounding above them. Obviously, she was still somewhere inside the warehouse, and that meant she had a prayer of survival. No, she was
under
the warehouse, she corrected herself, feeling a chill and deciding she'd just concentrate on the survival part.

Jake fiddled with something on the far wall, a clanking noise sounding as if two chains were dragging together. After a long moment, he pivoted slowly back toward her. "How many different ways do you take it?" he asked, approaching her with something in his hand. "The more the better, as far as my money goes." He looked her up and down with those empty eyes. "But I figure you can be made to do whatever needs doing. And the first thing is to tell me your name."

As he stopped beside her, she strained her head upward and spat, missing him by a
ketro.
He just laughed right in her face, rubbing a sinister, dark object in his hands that she couldn't get a good look at.

"Here," he told her coolly, "let's get down to business." He fastened whatever it was against her neckband; then at once the manacles around her ankles and hands sprang free. With a deft movement, she rolled to the side, throwing a kick at Jake's solar plexus as she did. She might as well have tried to drop kick a mountain; her whole body was jerked back with such force that at first she swore he'd broken her neck.

Feeling with her hands, gasping for air, she realized what he'd attached to her collar: a thick, velvet leash clamped to the circular band.

And now he had the controlling end grasped right in both of his beefy hands.

T
he first thing Jake thought
, as soon as they grabbed him, was that he and the others had come into this place completely unprepared. As battle hardened as his team was, as many times as they'd gone up against these same enemies, they damned sure should have known better. But it had all happened so quickly, he tried to tell himself; still, that was no excuse. All the planning and preparation they'd done amounted to
meshdki
now that they were in the thick of things.

He and Jared had been walking along, trying to blend into the crowd while they searched for Shelby, when for the first time he noticed a barricaded back stairwell shrouded in darkness. He turned to look back at Jared, who just then was being approached by a tall, curvy brunette. Only this wasn't the Jared that the
vlksai
would know, at least by sight, because for this mission he'd adopted the form of a rugged blond ski bum.
I'll leave him to deal with that situation,
Jake thought to himself as the woman leaned toward Jared's ear, shouting to be heard over the loud music.

Jake slipped across the dance floor to the back stairwell that had caught his eye. The steps led upward to a balcony where partygoers stood surveying the scene below, but what interested him more was the flight that led downward, a dark, cavernous space filtered with shadowed light.

After climbing over the barrier, he crept carefully down the steps and through a door that opened onto a hallway made of jagged stones. Their surface was illuminated by a dim light that seemed to be coming from farther along, around another corner. He inched forward, the noise from the dance floor pounding above and behind him, but when he stopped to peer down that next hallway, his breath caught in his lungs.

It wasn't just the fact that the man ten
ketros
away looked just like him, only younger—or that he'd finally found the prey he'd been hunting for five years now—it was the dungeon like room he was coming out of. The walls were bordello red, and an array of barbed whips and chains dangled from above like some grotesque type of curtain.

With a sick, helpless feeling, Jake realized that he hadn't seen Shelby in more than thirty minutes.  
It was all he could do not to lunge at the human and choke the very life from his lungs—for a second time—but he forced himself to remain hidden, knowing that Shelby's life depended on it.

Down the hall, the human looked first one way, then the other, before entering another room. Jake stole along the passageway to the dungeon and gently pushed the door open. Past the torture implements hanging from the ceiling, he could see a large padded table on which a woman struggled, the shiny blonde of her hair painfully familiar.

Catching sight of him, Shelby struggled against her restraints, a mixture of relief and despair in her vulnerable eyes. "Watch out!" she whispered hoarsely, just loud enough to be heard over the throbbing bass notes from above. "He'll be back any second."

"I know," Jake answered, stepping toward her. "I just wanted to make sure you're okay—now I'm gonna go get help."

"Jakob," she told him with a faint moan, "be careful. Please. Look after yourself."

"I'm going to look after you, Shell. I'm getting you out of this hellhole."

When he turned around, all his plans faded to nothing as he found himself staring at half a dozen burly guys in security T-shirts. Not human, not by a long shot, even though they occupied that form. The Antousian scent wafting off the gathered men was downright sickening.
Well, well, well,
he thought.
So the stakes just got a hell of a lot higher
. His finger twitching against his hip, he felt the hard outline of his luminator.

"So," the tallest one of the group said as he stepped forward, chest thrust out for maximum intimidation, "mind telling us how you got in here, Mr. …?"

Jake tried to force a laugh. "Hey, it's me—Tierny."

"Oh, yeah … Jake," the tall one replied, looking around at his men with a sneer—clearly he was their leader. "Funny how you not only managed to change clothes, but you even aged at least five or ten years since we saw you a few minutes ago." Now he stared at Jake with a menacing expression. "But that's not the main reason we know you're lying."

Jake said nothing. The
vlksai
stepped in close about him.

"You don't want to know how?" the leader asked. "Well, I'm gonna tell you anyway. It's because the stench"—to emphasize that word, one of the Antousians landed a punch against Jake's stomach—"on you isn't"—and now another one, who'd somehow managed to get behind him, hit him over the head with a hard object—"strong enough."

It took four of them to pin him down in the hallway, but eventually they did. The leader stood by, looking almost amused, as Jake struggled with them. "Come on, now; don't fight it," he said in a soothing voice. "Ease up, man. Just let yourself go."

"Okay," Jake responded, gasping for air. But a second later, he shoved his elbow into the ribs of the nearest one, dropped low, and punched another in the gut. He was just about to turn his attention to the rest of the
vlksai
when several of them jumped on him at once and grappled him face-first to the floor. Jake cried out, a muffled sound against the slick concrete beneath him, and found himself pinned by something heavy. Must have been one of the freaks who'd jumped him, he thought.

"What the fuck?" he tried to protest, but with another jerking movement, they had him on his side.

Someone shoved his shirtsleeve up his arm, and from the side of his eye he caught the metallic glint of a hypodermic.
Shit, they're gonna inject me
, but he hardly had time to process the thought before a sharp prickle of pain shot down his forearm and his mind suddenly grew numb and hazy.

"What in hell," he tried, but the words felt gauzy—sounded gauzy. A rending pain shot through the whole of his body, accompanied by severe muscle spasms up and down his backbone.

"No!" He slapped both palms against the floor, arching in protest. "In All's name … no!"

But there would be no stopping it. A deeply primitive sensation rang through his core as bone and sinew stretched, as skin yielded to hide. His clothing, suddenly far too small, pulled and tore to shreds. Ropes of muscle tugged against enlarged bones, his jaw lengthened, and all the while he screamed. Screamed and screamed, making his agony known. Not just because of the physical onslaught, the horrific transformation—but out of sheer terror at what they were forcing him to become. Screaming and screaming, the pain almost too much, at last he fell still against the warehouse floor, monstrously big and large eyed.

He lay naked, surrounded by his own kind, who cackled and mocked him. "So you're a human, are you?" one of them taunted with a kick at his side. "We can smell our own kind from a mile away. There's no use impersonating what you most clearly are not."

"I have nothing in common with you. The only thing that we share," he gasped, struggling to get the words out, "is DNA. That's it."

"Welcome to our world, brother," another one chanted from the veiled darkness. "Welcome. Welcome."

His mind was fogged over, his body at war with itself as he struggled to his knees, tatters of his clothing falling to the floor around his utterly naked body. "Why?' he tried asking, horrified by the garbled, mangled sound of the human words passing over his Antousian vocal cords. Vaguely he wondered if Shelby could hear him from the room where she lay captive, and he shuddered at the thought. "Why did … you … do this?"

"
Why?
" another faceless enemy taunted from above him. "Pretty simple, Antousian brother. Because you can't leave this warehouse if you can't show your face." Jake managed to rise and turn sideways enough to see the gathered men through first one eye, then the other.

He shook his head, trying to clear it. "What do you … mean?" They'd injected him with a form inhibitor, quite obviously. A drug that forced him into his most base and natural body. But how long would the effects of the drug last?

As though reading his mind, the leader said, "You won't be able to change back." For emphasis, he kicked Jake's ribs, driving him face-first to the floor once again. "You can't so much as take one step into the human world without being seen for what you are—what you clearly refuse to believe you are—an Antousian, just like us. You have 'alien' stamped all over your body and your face."

"You don't know anything about me," Jake said with a groan.

The leader dropped to his haunches beside him, his menacing black eyes like pinpricks of malevolence. "We know you're aligned with our enemies. That's enough right now."

"Can't … keep me this way." Jake grasped at the floor, sucking burning breaths into his four lungs. "Not … possible."

"We can hold you in this form for the rest of your life if we see fit," the leader taunted. "You're ours now,
brother
."

T
hough Jake didn't know it
, Jared had disengaged himself from the lovely brunette, found his way down the stairs, and located the dungeon. Not that any of that did much good, Jared thought to himself as he watched in horror while his friend, now held captive in his Antousian form, struggled against a bunch of
vlksai
gathered around him.

There wasn't time to go for reinforcements; he had to act now—and fast. Crouching low against the turn in the hallway where he'd been concealing himself, he reached inward and allowed his internal energy to overtake him with an aggressive sweep. He became the powerful, surging being that he always held at arm's length, and in an instant swirled into a blaze of murderous energy.

They would not take his friend and comrade; nor would they capture Shelby Tyler, not if he had anything to say about the matter. Shooting down the hallway, he spun and gyrated, taking out at least two of the Antousians who stood in his way.
Can …
eliminate …
them.

But as a sickening crack resounded against his glowing core, he knew these Antousians had arrived prepared. From seemingly nowhere, they struck him, again and again. Their power tethers spun through the air, pursuing him like horrible, flaming blue lassos. With a roar, he flung his energized self down the corridor, ricocheting off the far wall, and in the process grazed two Antousian soldiers, both of whom collapsed to the floor in agony.

He thought of Kelsey and Erica, remembered all the reasons he had to escape—his enemies couldn't capture him, not this time. And he thought of his oldest and dearest friend, collapsed against the concrete floor, a man who had already lived enough torment to last too many lifetimes.

Still the blue lassoing lights kept circling him, slapping off of his surging power. With a terrible wave of despair, he felt his own energy dim, grow weaker. All the intensity of his energized body wasn't going to be nearly enough to withstand the relentless onslaught. The bands encircled him, spinning faster and faster, and with stinging welts, the Antousians' energy whips made contact with him. Lethal talons seared his natural D'Aravnian form, punishing him, whipping him to shreds.

Kelsey …
Erica,
he thought, taking a driving lunge at the soldier who held the largest whip.
Home … them.

The Antousians pressed inward, cornering him, beating him, over and over again, with their powerful, flaming whips. He struggled, expanded, but felt his energy growing dimmer. He would never make it out of this battle, he realized with a hopeless, grief-stricken spasm. Right then, an electric blue power grid began rotating in the middle of the air, and he could no longer move. He was trapped on all sides, frozen, left undulating midair in soundless captivity. He sensed more than saw what happened next.

From the ceiling, six clear sheets of material—like giant Plexiglas shields—descended, rotating mechanically until they centered in upon the power grid where he was held churning in midair. First one transparent wall came toward him, then another, then the final four until they joined and he hung captured and suspended within the narrow glass prison like a butterfly in a jar.

In that moment, J'Areshkadau B'net D'Aravni, king of Refaria, knew he was at the mercy of his enemies.

A
creeping, itching heat
smoked across Jared's belly; when he woke, he smelled it, like singed wool pulled over his eyes. At first, he had no memory of what had brought him here, just the thin awareness that he wasn't in his Refarian form—he was natural.
All natural
. He moved to stretch but met opposition. Feeling drugged, he tried again, opening himself so that he might see where he was.
Something off … natural form wrong
. Again he met the opposition of a hard, flat surface. Panicked, he came fully alert, opening his mind and senses full throttle.

Pressing up against a barrier of sorts, he realized once again that he had been closed in, glass all around him. His entire being was under their control, held prisoner by the familiar swirling helix of an Antousian power grid. Pressing hard against the flat surface, he tried to make out his surroundings.