Seduce Me in Flames (39 page)

Then there was a huge fireball, about the size of half the open area. Had it come a moment sooner, Bronse would have burned to ashes. It first appeared as a sphere, as though a live comet had struck the room, and then it
swirled into a cylinder. Only a second later it belched toward the ceiling and dissipated.

There, in its place, stood Ender and the Empress of Allay.

Violently bruised and battered, Bronse got to his feet. His ears were ringing, so he didn’t hear the screaming at first. He realized very quickly that Ambrea was suffering, in terrible agony, her naked body covered in burns and blisters, her skin peeling away and just about cooking before his eyes.

“Ophelia!” Ender roared, stumbling as he turned to look for her. Bronse could see the absolute panic on the arms master’s face. Rush was pulling Ambrea’s unburnt cheek against his. “It’s all right, honey. I’ll make it all right!”

“Rush! Help me!” she croaked, her voice giving out, her whole body shuddering in his hold. Then shock finally set in and she went suddenly limp in his arms.

Bronse acted, running over to the bay that Rave and the others were in, pulling toppled furniture off the stunned trio and snagging Ophelia’s hand.

“Are you hurt?” he demanded.

She gave him a look.

Satisfied she was all right, he yanked her to her feet and hurried her over to Rush’s side.

“All right,” she said in a soothing voice as she touched Ender’s hand. “I’m here,” she said softly to him.

It was all her teammate needed. They had worked together long enough to know how to trust each other. The moment it registered on Rush’s face that Ophelia was there, he fell to his knees and gently laid his burden at the young woman’s feet.

“It’s … it’s a chemical burn,” he rasped, his big hands shaking as he smoothed aside Ambrea’s gleaming red-gold hair, carefully pulling it away from her skin. “They put it in her clothes. Some sort of alkali I think.”

“Go wash your hands with the chemical wash,” Ophelia instructed him as she knelt beside her new patient.

“I’m fine. It won’t burn me.”

Bronse found that remark very interesting. The whole thing was pretty damn enlightening, but he was too busy lifting his wife out of the rubble and checking her for damage to dwell too much on Ender.

Rush grabbed for Ophelia’s hand and tried to pull her into contact with Ambrea. When the girl resisted, he felt himself explode with frustration and fear. “Help her, damn you! She’s dying! Do … do what it is that you do! What the hell good is it being a freak like we are if you aren’t going to use your power when it matters most?”

But Ophelia remained calm in the face of his tirade, as she almost always did. She met his eyes, continuing to pull away from his efforts to make her touch Ambrea.

“We have to wash away the chemical first or she will continue to burn while I heal her. It will only serve to exhaust me before I can heal her all the way. Isn’t that what you want? For her to be healed?”

“Yes! Heal her. Please,” he begged her in the barest of whispers.

“Then bring me all the bottles of chemical wash you can find, Rush.”

Finally faced with something he could do to actually help her, Rush looked up and around the room. The clinic was a disaster. He could see Bronse, Ravenna, and Jet picking themselves up out of the mess. Then he realized he had no idea what chemical wash looked like or even of the most likely place in the room to find it.

“I’ve got it,” Jet said suddenly.

Relief flooded through Rush so fast that he felt completely weak, the weakest he had ever felt in his life. The whole experience was like being invaded by some kind of disease, some kind of alien thing he didn’t know how
to cope with or fend off. All he could make himself do was hover protectively over Ambrea’s head, his fingers touching her pale, pale cheeks as gently as he had ever touched anything.

Bottles of chemical wash began to appear and Ophelia tore off the seals. She and Jet dumped the wash onto Ambrea, coating her twice with the stuff before rolling her over and repeating the act. Once she was on her back again, her hair and body were in a puddle of the blue gel. It had soaked into the knees of Rush’s pants even as it made its way slowly toward the drain in the floor. Ophelia gingerly examined the damage so brutally done to Ambrea’s skin. Rush knew that those puckish touches were not Ophelia’s healing touch, and it took everything in him to keep from roaring at her in fury, to beg her once more to do something.

The frustration of it burned tears into his eyes. In just a moment they were spilling free, dropping onto Ambrea’s face, settling into the wells of her eyes. Those startlingly beautiful blue eyes that he realized he might never see again if Ophelia failed him.

“Please, don’t fail me, Phee,” he said aloud to Ophelia without even realizing he was speaking.

“I won’t,” she promised him softly.

Then she reached out and laid her full hand on the only other unburned place on Ambrea’s body—her lower calf, where the robe had not reached to touch her. When she did so, a feeling crashed through Rush as though he had been holding his breath and had suddenly let it go.

“Thank you. Thank you so much, Phee,” he rasped.

Then he looked up into the bright, steady regard of his commander’s eyes. Rush had worked under the man long enough to know what that look meant. It said that when the crisis of the moment was over, Rush was going to have a lot to answer to. He hoped his commander
could read his expression equally well, because it said he really didn’t give a shit.

No. Everything he gave a damn about was lying on the floor covered in blue gunk and hovering on the brink of death.

No, he had no idea how it had come to this. Yes, he was pretty damn sure he was signing himself up for nothing but trouble and disappointment because no matter how he sliced it, there was no future for a Tarian barbarian from the IM and an empress from Allay. But none of that would even matter if Ophelia couldn’t make good on the promise of her mutation. Rush lowered his gaze and stared at the only thing that mattered—the blistered and bloodied flesh of the woman he loved.

“I’m such a damn fool,” he spoke softly to her, bending to press a gentle kiss to her forehead, uncaring that the gel wash chilled his lips. Then he realized she was shivering. Hard. Between being in shock and lying doused in chilled chemical wash, it was no wonder. He looked up at Ophelia. “Phee, can I warm her?”

“Blankets would be cruel on her skin. Even though she is unconscious, she will still feel it, and we need to let the wash chill the burn for a little—” She broke off and met his eyes. “Or did you mean something else?”

There it was. The first moment he would speak of it aloud to the family he had never trusted enough after the betrayal of the first family he’d had. Oh, they had already witnessed an incredible feat of his making, but speaking it somehow gave it life. Somehow made it real and undeniable.

“With my touch. I can warm the core of her without warming her skin.”

How peculiar that he spoke of it as if he had done it a thousand times, as if he really knew if he could do it. But he had never before tried to control it in such a direct way.

But then again, he had never before traveled through space as a fireball either. And he had done so without burning a hair on Ambrea’s head. It was exactly as she had said. By relaxing and letting what was instinctive have free rein, it had come with a natural reflex of protection that had kept her safe. He was counting on that now. After all, it wasn’t as though he could burn her any worse than she already was.

Ophelia looked absolutely fascinated. She nodded to him almost eagerly and then watched him very fixedly as he gently rubbed his knuckles over the rise of Ambrea’s cheek. He spoke to her softly, things he himself could not hear or understand. All of his focus was on the horrible shivers wracking her body almost like a seizure. He knew that shock could kill her long before the actual damage from the burns could. It was very important that he succeed. The more he could do to help Ophelia along, the better Ambrea would heal.

And then, slowly, he became aware of Ambrea’s body settling, of her shivers softening. Afraid it was a negative development, he sought Ophelia’s guidance. She was smiling at him with such wonder and strength. Such acceptance. It was the expression he had first seen on Ambrea’s face. Always she had accepted him. As a Tarian. As a mutation. As a soldier. As a man. Always.

He should never have doubted her. If she had told him he could belch fire like a dragon, he ought to have believed her. Believed in her.

Loved her.

“So I take it those burns on her had nothing to do with your rather pyrotechnic entrance?”

Rush smiled grimly and didn’t bother to look up at his commander.

“Unless you mean they prompted me to make said entrance, then no.”

Bronse let it go from there. For the time being. He
pulled Ravenna close and kept her hands prisoner in one of his, pressing them to his chest to keep them from absently wandering over his body.

Slowly, as everyone watched, Ophelia’s Chosen power did what it did best. Ambrea’s damaged, dead skin fell away, revealing beneath it something raw and pink and healing. It took the better part of twenty minutes, but eventually there wasn’t an inch of blistered skin left on her body. She wasn’t perfectly healed; her whole body was still raw and pink with advanced healing and the promise of scar-free perfection in the future. Ophelia didn’t take her all the way to that perfection, though, and when she saw Rush ready to protest her sitting back with her task seemingly undone, she held up a hand.

“Jet and I, with modern medicine and Ambrea’s own healing abilities, can do the rest, Ender. Sometimes it’s best to let nature have a part in the way things are done. When we try to fight it or do an end run around it, the result is not always positive.”

Rush knew that better than anyone, he supposed. All these years of fighting what he was had only made things worse for him. Now it seemed that relaxing and letting this thing inside him work itself out was the best answer.

“Fair enough,” he said.

“Come. Bring her to the bath. We’ll clean all this off her, bandage her up, and give her something for her remaining pain so she can rest.”

“So let’s have this conversation,” Bronse said softly as he stepped into Ambrea’s recovery bay. Rush was sitting beside her bed, his chair turned to face the empress, his eyes trained on her, watching every breath she took, making sure there was no sign of pain, and hoping for the moment when she would finally open her eyes again.

Rush didn’t need to prevaricate any more than Bronse did, so he shrugged.

“I’m a mutated freak from Tari planet who can erupt into a ball of fire at will. What’s to discuss?”

They both knew it wouldn’t be that easy, but Rush needed to be blasé about it. He couldn’t even make himself look at Bronse as they talked. Part of him dreaded the censure and horror that could follow; part of him knew he should feel guilty for not being forthcoming about all of this when he’d had a chance.

“Why didn’t you come out about this when the Chosen Ones showed up?” Bronse wanted to know. “Surely then you could see we would handle it well.”

“Yeah. You probably would have. Maybe even the IM would have in spite of the fact that, for all I know, I could be a weapon of mass destruction.” Now he looked at Bronse, wanting to see how that understanding registered on his commander. The other man didn’t even blink. “Look,” said Rush, “the last time I showed someone what I could do, they gathered a mob, tied me to a stake, dumped an industrial amount of jet fuel on me, and torched it.” He shrugged again. “They were so busy stabbing me in the back in spite of a lifetime of knowing me that it never occurred to them that setting me on fire was a stupid way to go about it.”

“Not a shining example of intelligence, no. So what
does
douse you? Water?”

Rush knew Bronse was asking him that probably because he couldn’t help himself. As a soldier he always wanted to know how to defeat everything in the room with him, just in case. But as the corner of Bronse’s lips lifted in a mysterious little smile, Rush realized it was more than that. Bronse wanted to know if Rush would trust him enough to give him the information.

“Seems like. Maybe the equivalent of four or five stun guns. But that’s more of a ‘get my attention’ rather than a defeat.”

“You know, I feel sorry for you,” Bronse said quietly, his attention briefly turning to the bed.

“Why?” Rush demanded, everything in him bristling at the idea of his commander taking pity on him because he was a warped-out mutation. That might be even worse than betraying him.

“Because Justice is going to kill you when she finds out. All these years? Man, she’s going to kill you.”

Rush grimaced as he relaxed again. He had to stop doing that. He had to stop expecting the worst from the friends of today because of the actions of the friends of yesterday.

“Let me worry about Jus and my life expectancy. I just want to know where I stand in the IM.”

Bronse chuckled softly and tried to cover it with a cough when Rush shot him a dirty look. Then, as always, Commander Chapel was blunt with him.

“Ender, I have a feeling that your days in the IM are numbered. Or am I mistaken in thinking your heart lies in the heart of Allay?” He nodded his head at Ambrea.

“I …” It was one thing to realize it for himself and quite another to say anything that might put things irrevocably in motion. “What I feel could very well be irrelevant in this case, Commander. She is the sweetheart empress of a country that despises everything I am. More so once reports of what I’ve done begin to circulate. Bad enough a Tarian, but a Tarian freak? And she’ll want children one day. Heirs. Her people won’t want my backwater blood in them, and I won’t want to pass on this crazy curse of mine.”

“I think her people will have to accept anything she wants them to accept. Especially when their only other option is the brother of the worst tyrant in the history of the planet Ulrike. And nothing says this is a dominant gene. Even if it were, it could be a handy tool to have when trying to run a country.” Bronse suddenly shrugged
off the notion. “But perhaps you ought to worry about other things first. Like who just tried to kill your empress.”