Parallel Desire (22 page)

"Where is Jared Bennett? Shelby Tyler?" Jake demanded. "You tell me where they are. Now!"

"In good time, Jakob." Kryn spun to face him, a long velvet-covered belt in her hand, and she tapped it against her open palm like a whip. "First you'll tell me who you are, imposter. We know you aren't the Jake Tierny who's been supplying us with humans. He's a human, and you"—she raked her gaze up and down his naked form—"you are quite
clearly
not. So why don't you tell me how it is you chose to replicate Tierny's body? Shape-shifter? Or something else?"

Jake slid on the modular settee, backing himself—quite literally—into a corner. With one palm, he worked to hide his permanent erection, cupping it protectively; with the other arm he covered both of his nipples. He didn't want this Antousian bitch to see any more of his naked body than she had to.

"My, you are a shy one," she hissed, clucking her tongue. She dragged her gaze up and down his nude body once again. "Surprising, too, since from what I can tell, you are quite the
physical
creature."

Jake was aware that his breathing increased slightly, and his fingers twitched protectively against his cock. "What do you know about my physicality?"

She leaned close, whispering in his ear. "Just look at you. You're magnificent."

In a flash, he had hold of her ponytail and used it to drag her down atop the settee; she practically landed in his lap. Drawing his face up against hers, he snapped his distended jaws menacingly: He might not be Antousian in his heart, but the blood still flowed in his veins. "Bring Shelby to me. Bring her, or you die." The words mingled with his quick panting, modulating over his rough vocal cords.

With a second jerk of her ponytail, he had her neck exposed. "I could end your life right now." Another snarling snap of his powerful jaws just over her jugular. "I could choke the life out of you, little girl. But then you would be of no use to me—so you're going to get Shelby and bring her to me.
Now
."

Jake grabbed hold of her velvet whip, wrapping it tightly about both of her hands until he had Kryn straddled. As if he were roping a calf, he used it to bind her. Once he had her hands tied together, he backed away from her, not bothering with modesty. Hell, he had a nine-inch hard-on jutting right at the woman's face, but it wasn't a moment for shame.

"And I need clothes," he said.

"You aren't going to get any," Kryn announced, staring down at her hands.

"I won't spend another moment naked like this—not in front of you, not in front of your people. Call for someone, and get me some fucking clothes."

She gestured with her bound hands. "I can break out of these bindings easily."

"I'm aware of that." He gave the tie a securing tug. "And yet you were going to bind me with the same cord?"

She lifted her eyes meaningfully, and the dark irises flared. "Perhaps I wanted you to have freedom of movement." With a flick of her tongue, she licked her lips seductively.

Jake only scowled back at her. "Not interested, Kryn."

"That's right." She tossed her head back, giving her mane a shake. "You've only got eyes for your Shelby Tyler. I wonder what she'll say about you in your … natural form." Kryn scraped her gaze across his hide-covered chest, then lower over the hard plates that covered the center of his abdomen and stretched toward his naturally elongated cock. When he was in his Antousian form, it was fully erect and one hundred percent ready to go—any day of the year. A perverse fact of their evolution, it ensured that their bodies were capable of procreation, no matter how harsh the conditions back on their home world.

He bellowed angrily, throwing back his head and releasing a trumpeting sound of frustration. "Shelby knows who and what I am."

"Interesting. So it's only
you
who can't accept it?"

He clamped his long jaw, tilting his head slightly sideways so he could meet her stare full on. His nostrils flared with huffing, furious breaths, and it occurred to him that he sounded—and looked—every bit the monster he had long known himself to be. This was what flowed in his veins; this was what he truly was.

He rubbed the rough ridge that ran from his nose upward onto the crown of his head. "Why don't you assume your natural form, Kryn? If
you're
so proud?"

She gave him a coy, wicked smile. "I like being human."

"And so do I!" he roared. "So you're going to help me, or you'll die at my Antousian hands."

"I can't help with the shape-shifting." She gave a halfhearted shrug. "You're stuck until the drugs wear off."

"How long?" he gritted.

"A day, maybe two or three."

"Days? I'll be this way for days?" He rubbed the ridge atop his head again. "I can't go anywhere like this. I'm fucked."

"Their plan exactly." Odd, but her use of "their plan" struck Jake as meaningful—as did her tone. She wasn't gloating at all. "They can keep you here indefinitely so long as they keep injecting you—obviously you can't set foot outside in your Antousian form."

With a shudder, he imagined Shelby's reaction to seeing him this way. A terrible wave of shame crested over him as he thought of her reaction to him—so monstrously huge, so rough and alien.

Then he stopped and looked at Kryn. Something told him that she wasn't entirely his enemy, that there was the possibility of finding common ground. Instinctively, he began to soul-gaze her.

What he glimpsed inside of her caused him to stagger backward a step. At first she didn't notice—she'd been tugging at the velvet binding—but then she looked up. "You're gazing me, you bastard." She struggled to avert her gaze, but he reached for her face, roughly turning it upward so he could get a better look into her.

He intensified his soul-searching, delving deeper, and took yet another step backward from her, shaking his head in disbelief. A vulnerable, skittish look filled Kryn's eyes: She knew everything that he'd just intuited.

She lifted a shushing finger to her lips, a barely perceptible motion that said, "Silence."

In All's name, please help me!
he wanted to cry, but instead he heeded her warning and pretended that he hadn't just seen everything about who Kryn Zoltners truly was.

"I need Shelby," he whispered in a hoarse, fractured voice. Working at his jaws and lips, he tried to gain better control of his speech. "I need to see Shelby Tyler—sooner, not later."

"I don't know what I can do about that."

"And please, I'm begging you"—he blinked his overly large eyes at her—"get me some kind of clothes."

T
he clothes that Kryn managed
to find were an odd assortment of leather and denim: a worn pair of blue jeans that were perfectly sized to his extraordinarily long legs. He was, after all, six foot seven in his natural Antousian form. The only other clothing item was a black leather vest that barely managed to close over his rough chest, and unfortunately still revealed a bit of the thick hide that formed plates across his pectorals.

"A T-shirt? Nothing?" He tugged at the tight-fitting vest, struggling to fasten it across his bulky sternum.

"I couldn't come up with one. You look fine."

His face flushed. "She can't see this. I need"—he shook his head, swallowing the words at first—"well, more coverage." He tapped at his chest meaningfully.

"Open it," Kryn said, surprising him, but he shook his head. "Seriously, just wear it open."

He toyed with the top snap, loosening the vest. "My hide. I don't want her to see the thickness of it. …"

"She's seen plenty of Antousians before. She's a nurse."

He felt suddenly vulnerable—horribly vulnerable in a way that he hadn't since he'd first fallen in love with Hope, so many years before. Naked, exposed. It had taken years for him to allow Hope to see his natural form; he'd known Shelby for only about five months.

"But …"
We're lovers,
he wanted to say.

Kryn made a little cry of frustration and with a jerking motion unfastened his vest until it fell loose across his abdomen, revealing him for exactly what he was. With a nervous look down, he noticed the one plain fact that couldn't be avoided: the thick bulge in the front of his pants. He shifted, trying to adjust himself, but nothing helped.

Kryn seemed to read his mind. "You need a sling, but I couldn't find any."

He tilted his head sideways, studying her with his left eye. "What kind of sling?"

She scowled at him. "I'm amazed at how little you know about your own people."

"I'm Refarian!" he bellowed angrily, thumping at his chest.

"I can see that." She rolled her eyes. "A sling, Jake—a
sling
. It's how our males hide their, uh, state. It's like Antousian underwear—for men."

He gaped downward, studying the immense bulge in the center of his jeans, and tried to imagine what sort of device a "sling" might be—how it could possibly control or conceal his permanent erection.

"Get me one, damn it. Fast."

"I'll keep looking."

She started to leave the room, but he caught her by the arm. "We need to talk," he murmured under his breath.

With an alarmed expression, she shook her head, silencing him. "I'm going to see what I can do about having Shelby transported here,
nank
." she said loudly, then leaning into his body space, she whispered, "Keep quiet."

"We need to talk," he repeated urgently. "Where is my commander?"

She took two steps back, lifting both hands. "The fate of the Refarian king has already been decided." His heart plummeted. "He is being prepared for airlift to Refaria, where he will be tried for war crimes and where his D'Aravnian body will be studied as a potential chemical weapon. There is nothing you or anyone else can do to help him now."

Jake shook his head. "Godsdamn you all."

Using only her eyes, Kryn seemed to plead with him. "I'll do what I can about more clothing and getting Shelby moved."

And with that the woman who certainly had to be Thea's well-placed spy left him alone, bolting the door behind her as she departed.

W
hen Shelby finally came
to once again, it was still nighttime, and she'd been transported somewhere far—or maybe not—from the warehouse in Idaho. Rising unsteadily onto her bare feet—someone had removed her black boots and left them beside the bed—she walked to a window and stared out. All around, as far as she could see, were empty fields, with a large stream bisecting the one closest to her. Pushing her face up against the window, she could see that hers was just one cabin in a long line of others, with perhaps fifteen in total stretching along the stream bank.

It had to be an abandoned fishing camp of some sort. Or they were on a ranch, maybe. She couldn't tell for sure, although one fact was abundantly clear: She wasn't going anywhere. Two armed guards kept watch in front of her door, and although they appeared human, she had no doubt that they were Antousian-human hybrids. She shivered.

That was when she remembered Nate, and she pressed the heel of her palm against her temple, groaning.
I can't go there, not right now,
she thought. Seeing him again had nearly torn her heart out. All the betrayal, all the grieving … and to know he'd lied to her from the beginning? And supposedly for her protection? Yeah, right.

"Alien bastard," she grunted out loud.

Almost as if in answer, a door opened behind her; she hadn't noticed it before, and she lurched against the wall, falling into a protective stance. "Who's there?" she demanded, spreading her feet slightly apart. She'd rush any
vlksai
who tried to harm her—and she sure as heck wasn't going to let the human Jake drag her around by a leash anymore. Hopefully Nate had at least put the kibosh on that nasty maneuver.

A hulking
vlksai
entered from an adjoining door, and just beyond him she could glimpse a bed and a simply furnished room. "Who are you?" she demanded, wishing like hell that she hadn't been stripped of her weapons.

"Shelby," the alien whispered, his black eyes growing wide with what appeared to be relief, of all things.

"Just stay back," she insisted as he took several loping steps toward her. "Keep the hell away from me."

"Shelby, it's … me. Jake."

After all the strange, twisted events of the night, she wasn't about to fall for this flimsy trap. She rolled her eyes, relaxing a little. "Oh, just shut up already. I ain't that dumb."

J
ake cried out in frustration
. Of course she didn't believe him—she'd never once seen him in his Antousian form. Working at his distended jaw, he struggled to form English words. Strange, but the language felt foreign to him now. Hours he'd been like this … maybe even several days for all the confusion garbling his mind, but the sum total was that he was becoming more feral with every passing minute. Less tied to the Refarians and humans that had defined his world. Snapping his jaws, he managed to find his voice, though it required a good deal of labor. "Shelby, it's me," he repeated hoarsely.

She pushed up against the door to the cabin, flattening herself. "Don't say another word,
vlksai!
"

"Shelby!" he managed to bellow gracelessly, swinging his gaze first one direction, then another, to try to get a good, clear look at her. "It is really me. Jakob." He thumped his chest significantly. "
Me
, sweetheart."

She began to tremble visibly, sucking at the air around them. The terror in her eyes nearly broke his heart; to think what she must be feeling, seeing him this way. To imagine how little she trusted the image before her eyes.

Sliding along the door, she crumpled in a heap against the floor. "How can I know for sure?"

Gingerly, he approached her, doing his best to control his unwieldy steps. Squatting down beside her, he reached for a lock of her hair. "You're … my little Texas tamale," he said, the words vibrating. "The hood … of that truck. Boardroom. My … quarters." Every word he called forth was a labor, but her entire demeanor transformed, relief and faith returning to her clear blue eyes, even as she began to sob. "It's me," he repeated, opening his arms to her, and she flung herself at him so hard that he almost toppled backward.

He didn't even care that she burrowed her face against his rough chest, or that the hands he stroked her with were large and brutal. All that mattered—the only thing in his heart for that one moment—was how precious she was to him. And that for the moment, he had her back in his arms. Where she belonged.

She clung to him, wrapped her much smaller arms about his barrel of a chest, and murmured his name over and over, weeping. "You're safe," he told her, wondering how in hell he'd ever spring her from this fortified compound.

"Why're you like this?" She drew back, staring up into his eyes. "What did they do to you?"

"They injected me," he told her, wincing at the memory of his painful transformation. "They forced me to shift, and I can't change back."

Her eyes grew horrified and wide. "Ever?"

He hung his head. "Not until the effects of the drug wear off. Sorry. I know this body must be.… Well, it's distasteful to me, too."

She shook her head. "No, that's not it."

"They've trapped me. Limited my ability to escape because I can't show my face among humans. Pretty nifty little trick, huh?"

"Fuck that," she said, reaching a hand to his cheek. "Did they hurt you?"

"The transformation was a bitch." He gazed down his body, hoping she didn't notice the massive bulge in the front of his pants. Kryn still hadn't brought him one of those slings she'd mentioned. "But that's nothing in the greater scheme of things: They also captured Jared."

"Oh, gods, don't tell me that. Please."

He said nothing for a long moment. "They have him in his natural state, totally locked down, and are prepping him for transport back to Refaria."

"We have to do something. But what?"

Jake shook his head, staring up at the ceiling. "I have no idea. I've never felt so powerless. We're under way too many armed guards here to do anything." He wasn't about to explain that he'd placed whatever flimsy hopes he did have for Jared's survival in the hands of Kryn Zoltners, an Antousian.

"Listen, Jake, I have something else to tell you." She leaned back against the door. "About who's running this whole show." He nodded his encouragement, and she blotted at her forehead, her hand trembling. "I saw Nate."

"But you told me he died."

"He did die … or so he let me believe, but he's alive and he's the one in charge, from what I gather."

Jake couldn't help it; as irrational as the reaction was, he felt a horrible stab of jealousy. "You saw him?"

She nodded, averting her eyes.

"How did that go?" he practically barked at her. "Seeing him must have been interesting."

She fiddled with her hands, staring into her lap. "It doesn't matter what he said. But I do think that my connection with him might be our only prayer of getting out of this place."

"Or for you to get out." Jake shook his head. "Once they figure out who I am, they won't ever let me go."

Her gaze snapped upward. "Don't say that." With a nervous glance about them, she added, "You have no idea who might be listening in."

He reached for her hand, holding it tight. "If you can get out of this place, do it, Shell. Don't worry about me. You look after yourself."

"I won't walk out of here without you," she disagreed fiercely. "If it comes to that, I'm staying with you."

"No, you'll take care of yourself, Shell," he insisted. "It's all I ask of you. Please do that for me."

T
hea paced the meeting chambers
, wishing desperately that Kryn would contact her. Had the woman set them all up? Or had she somehow been betrayed herself? That would certainly explain how their team had been taken out so thoroughly and surgically. Behind her at the table, Chris Harper called her back to the moment.

"No contact from the spy yet at all?" he asked.

She shook her head. She had her data portal open and would know as soon as any message arrived: so far, total silence. "I have to believe that she's working to help them, even now."

Nevin Daniels sighed. "We have little left to us at the moment, not knowing where they are, where they've been transported."

"At least Kelsey and Erica have stabilized," she told them grimly, and Marco gave her a small smile of support from across the table.

"I hate this wait-and-see bullshit," Chris muttered.

"Well, what's the status on the situation with the vice president?" Thea asked. "That's something else we can focus on."

"And at least it's good news," Chris told them. "He's been taken to Warren for questioning."

"But how will they prove his real identity?" Thea asked.

"It may not be possible, but at least based on Patrick Wells's statements, we had enough to go on to bring him in. Not an easy feat when you're talking about the VP. But thankfully headquarters got the president to listen."

Thea was about to suggest DNA testing as one route but remembered that whenever Antousians seized human hosts, the genetic match remained identical. Retinal scans, DNA swabs, none of it would help. "Surely he didn't have access to the right security codes and so forth, the kinds of things that the vice president would have memorized."

Chris shot her a dark look. "Haven, we have no idea how deeply the White House has been infiltrated or compromised."

"Thanks for the pep talk, Agent Harper," she complained, and then her data portal beeped, signaling a new message. Every set of eyes in the room riveted right on her.

Staring down at it with trembling hands, she said, "It's from Kryn."

Quickly she scanned the coded message, breathing a quiet and heartfelt, "Thank All," as she did so. When she was finished, she turned to face the other gathered advisers. "All three of them are alive. Jake and Shelby are being held together in a cabin roughly twenty clicks away from the warehouse itself. They're in an abandoned fishing camp."

"And Jared?" Marco asked, the deep emotion in his voice undeniable.

Thea swallowed. "They have Jared in a containment cell, trapped in his D'Aravnian form."

Marco and Nevin cursed in unison.

Thea leaned over the table, planting both hands heavily on its polished surface. "Gentlemen, I think we all understand the gravity of this situation. The longer Jared is held in his natural form, the riskier and more jeopardized his return grows. But it's more than that. Kryn says that they're moving quickly to get him off-world, back to Refaria."

Nevin stared at her, his black eyes shockingly wild with emotion. "They will not take my king back to face his enemies."

"Agreed," Marco muttered with a sharp growl.

"We take in a full team," Chris added. "We go back in, based on her coordinates, and we bring in the USAF, the FBI, and your people … and we spring all three of them."

"How long for us to put together that kind of coordinated attack?" Nevin asked, tapping the table with his fingers thoughtfully.

"I'd say by early tomorrow morning," Harper replied.

Thea shook her head. "That's too long. Way too long."

"If we go in too soon and too sloppy, they might kill Jared. This plan has to be executed carefully."

"Chris," she said, "execution is exactly what they have on their minds. If they load him on a transport to Refaria, he's as good as dead already."

K
ryn jogged through the assembly
plant, past the rows and rows of mechanized systems that were responsible for creating their chip-based technology, the minute electron processors that Raedus planned to spread among the human population. The chips represented his latest plan for subjugating the human population, a way to mass-control them. Yes, it was quite the deal her so-called leader had struck with Tierny down here on Earth, getting the heartless bastard to supply human hosts for experimentation in exchange for cold, hard cash. And loads of it.

Living through the virus back home had been all she ever needed to see of the potential implications of a plan like Raedus's, and she'd decided to do whatever she could to stop the Antousian leader's strategy to vanquish mankind. But it appeared that her number was almost up: The intel that she'd been fed about the rave had been entirely bogus. All those in attendance had been either their own soldiers or humans who had already been successfully implanted—and controlled. It made picking out Jared Bennett and most of his team from the gathered crowd painfully easy, like shooting fish in a barrel, as the humans were fond of saying.

That was why she planned to meet with Nate now and learn whatever she could about the scheduled liftoff in the morning—then feed that ETD back to Thea so hopefully she and her people could abort the mission. And strike at the heart of this mechanized warehouse, she thought, hating the image of the chips and technology all around her. Back on Refaria these same chips had led to the deaths of millions of her people. She wouldn't stand by idly and let it happen to another race, not again.

Exiting the plant on its far wall, she entered the circuitous series of corridors that led to Nate's office. Arriving at his door, she entered the latest security code, and after a moment, the steel door swung open. Nate was expecting her.