His Mate to Keep by Ivy Sparks

19

Merrit

Xavier and Ilay on our sides with our arms around each other. This kiss of ours lasted for what seemed like hours, but neither of us showed any sign of bringing it to an end.

I stared into his eyes while we kissed. After making love for so long, I should have needed rest. Instead, I wanted him as much now as when we first started. The lightest touch of his fingertips sent me over the edge.

He hooked his arm under my knee and pulled my leg up to his shoulder. His steady thrusts came from somewhere far away. This oceanic tempest of pleasure crashed through me and made thinking impossible. Nothing existed but him inside my body and heart. I couldn’t escape him, and I didn’t want to.

He didn’t look away. Those eyes penetrated my deepest being. He learned more about me from looking into my eyes than I could ever tell him in words. I didn’t have to explain, because he already knew. He knew more than I would ever dare to tell him myself.

He caressed my hair as he glided in and out through a river of wetness. I no longer distinguished one climax from another. If he released inside me, I wasn’t aware of that, either. He just kept going without ever stopping, or so I thought.

His breathing changed, and he shuddered. I snapped out of my bliss as I realized he was quaking and groaning in climax. My heart cleaved seeing him grimace as he increased the speed and power of his thrust. His fingernails dug into my leg and back as he crammed himself into me.

I devoured his twisted countenance. I never treasured him more than when he made himself vulnerable to me. He gave me a part of himself when he emptied himself into me. I cherished the seed that filled me to overflowing.

Sweat broke out on his skin, and all his muscles tensed as he drove to my deepest limits. The sight of his agony overflowed my heart, and I felt myself reaching another climax. I clung to him with all my might, wanting to hold him inside me forever.

All too soon, he collapsed against me. His mouth found mine, and he kissed me even more ravenously. He kissed like he wanted to steal every moment, every breath, every sensation.

I floated in a dream. Was he still inside me? Did it really matter anymore? Every second with him brought me so much pleasure and passion that a few more climaxes didn’t matter much.

Our lips came together, parted, and found each other again. I saw him even when I had my eyes closed. He occupied my entire awareness, waking and sleeping and daydreaming. He was my everything, my world, my heart and soul.

We might have stayed that way for days. I had no sense of time anymore as I slept with Xavier’s arms around me.

Eventually, a shaft of sunlight blasted through my eyelids and startled me out of a dream. Xavier squinted like he was just waking up along with me. “Are you two awake?” someone asked.

I twisted around to see Daphne standing over us. I groaned. “We are now.”

She opened her mouth and stopped herself from saying whatever it was she was about to say.

Xavier stretched and rubbed his head around the base of his horns. “Is something wrong?”

Daphne didn’t answer. She opened her mouth and shut it one more time. Then she croaked, “I think you better come with me.”

“Which one of us?” I asked.

Daphne wasn’t listening. She hurried out of the tent as abruptly as she entered it. Xavier and I exchanged glances. Then he sniffed. “I better go see what’s up. You stay here and…”

“I am not staying here!” I pushed myself out of bed. “Don’t you dare even suggest that.”

“You’re supposed to be resting up.”

I laughed and teased, “That didn’t stop you from having your way with me all night.”

“Really, though.”

“I’m coming with you,” I insisted. My head swam when I sat up, but as soon as I started getting dressed, I felt fine—until I got to my feet.

I staggered, and Xavier had to grab me to stop me from falling over. “This is a really bad idea,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“When one of us comes up with a really good idea, you be sure to let me know.”

We both left the healer’s tent, and I almost didn’t believe what I saw when I beheld the sheer gargantuan magnitude of the cavern the Kavians were living in.

So this was Caverncall.

There was no time to look around, though. Daphne hurried away with Xavier hot on her heels. I had to run to catch up with them. “Where are we going? What’s the problem?”

Daphne scrambled up a long wooden catwalk that ascended almost to the cavern roof. It ended at a rock shelf in the farthest corner where no one could see it. She ducked into a crack, and Xavier had to stoop to fit his body inside.

I followed into the darkness and emerged on a ledge to find Xavier and Daphne overlooking a huge valley carpeted in jungle. We were outside the mountain in which the Kavians took refuge.

In front of our eyes, a bunch of ships descended through the atmosphere, but they didn’t land. They hovered a thousand feet above the dark green canopy. “Do you recognize them?” Daphne asked. “Did they follow you here from the lab?”

“We don’t know,” Xavier told her. “We never saw the experimenters’ ships. They used a masking technology, so it seems most instruments can’t pick them up.” He gazed across the valley. “If these are the experimenters, this is the first time we’ve ever seen their ships.”

“We have no way of knowing if they’re enemies or some other race,” Daphne replied. “They could be harmless to us. We don’t want to attack if they…”

In the middle of her sentence, a hatch opened in one of the strange vessels. Something that looked like a spider’s web dropped from the breach and some creatures scrambled down to the ground. They didn’t look human or Kavian or anything else that I could recognize.

In seconds, the other ships did the same thing. They ejected thousands of tiny black specks that vanished into the jungle. “What are they doing?” I asked, squinting at the distant figures.

As soon as the passengers finished disembarking, the ships retracted their nets, but they still didn’t leave or land. They just stayed there, hovering in place.

The three of us strained our eyes to see what was happening on the ground, but the canopy hid the new arrivals from view. I almost gave up when a flash of movement caught my eye. Between the trees, I spotted a large robot clawing its way through the uneven ground.

Xavier froze. “Sentinels.”

No way.

Was Xavier and I really worth sending an entire fleet after? They couldn’t be expending all these resources just to recapture us. We weren’t that crucial to whatever their mission was, were we?

Regardless of their reasoning, this was bad. Really bad.

I spun around and seized Daphne. “Raise the alarm! Arm everyone you’ve got!”

The three of us bolted into the cavern at a breakneck speed. I dreaded alerting all of these people of the impending attack, but the instant Daphne got inside, she ran to the nearest wall.

She pulled a horn from a hidden hollow and blew through it to create a blaring shriek that echoed far and wide. The Kavians reacted to the sound in a heartbeat. The entire cavern exploded into chaos.

Xavier plunged down the catwalk. “Stay here!” he yelled over his shoulder at me. “Don’t put yourself in danger if you don’t have to.”

The next instant, he was gone. He dove into the crowds and vanished. I rounded on Daphne. “What defenses do you have? Do you have any weapons?”

“We only have hand weapons—spears, blades, bows and arrows. But you’re hurt. You should go back to the healer’s—”

“To hell with that!” I blurted out. “The sentinels followed us here. Now it’s our responsibility to end them for good. Where are these weapons?”

Daphne hustled to one of the houses. She pulled a trunk from under the bed and threw it open. The weapons she mentioned filled it to the top. I picked up a smallish blade—at least, I tried to pick it up. It was way too heavy. “I can’t use any of these. Where are the blasters Xavier and I brought from the runner?”

“They’re in the healer’s tent with the rest of your gear, but only two of them won’t do any good against all those…” She waved toward the catwalk down which we just descended. “Those things.”

I thought fast. “You’re right. We need something bigger.” My eyes shot open, and I pointed at her. “The defense turret! Where is it?”

She frowned. “How do you know about that? I never told you.”

“I heard you mention it to Xavier at some point, maybe when I was going in and out of consciousness. So where is it?”

“It’s on top of the mountain—about a half a mile from here. Too far to get to right now. Besides, it never works right. We can’t even target it where we want it. We’ve almost given up on it completely because it’s as likely to hit us as it is to hit our enemies.”

“You must have some way of controlling it. You didn’t just mount a high-powered turret on top of the mountain with no controls.”

“Yeah, but that’s…”

“Show me,” I demanded.

She made a face. “We should be helping the warriors defend the cavern.”

“I know my way around gadgets, especially malfunctioning ones. You don’t keep a pirate ship flying without knowing how to pull off a little mechanical magic. So take me to the controls, and I’ll get them working.”

Daphne hesitated for a moment longer, then relented, showing me the way. As I followed her, I saw Kavian males gathered on the cavern’s other side. They all carried countless weapons as they streamed into a tunnel leading into the mountainside. I caught a glimpse of Xavier among them. He looked like he was right where he belonged.

Daphne didn’t go back to the mountainside. Instead, she led the way down dozens of stairways and gangways to the cavern’s very base. She raced around enormous waterfalls to a hidden cave behind the largest falls.

She stepped into the shadows and paused for me to catch up. “This is the control panel to the turret, but it only functioned the first day we had it installed. It stopped working as soon as our lovely traders absconded with our payment.”

I flipped open the panel and gasped. “This is Gnaio technology.”

Daphne grimaced. “Yeah. It was Gnaio pirates who ripped us off.”

I sprung the latch, and the panel opened. It revealed a jumble of wires, many of which had fried and melted where they should have been attached to the control relay. “Jesus! Look at this cat’s breakfast.”

“See? I told you it’s hopeless.”

I turned to her. “Listen to me, Daphne. I need you to get up to the healer’s tent and bring my backpack down here—not Xavier’s pack, but mine. Do you know the difference?”

“Yeah, but are you sure you can fix it? We would be wasting our time otherwise.”

“I’m sure! I can get the turret working, and we can target the ships and the sentinels from here. It’s our only chance. Even the toughest warriors won’t last five seconds against an army of sentinels. Trust me.”

She grew pale, then bolted out of the cave. I took a deep breath and attacked the panel with all my energy. I’d only worked on Gnaio tech a few times. It was notoriously unreliable and complicated. I wasn’t even sure I could repair the turret, but anything was better than letting the sentinels wipe out the only Kavians left alive in the galaxy.

I scraped all the carbon and melted plastic off the wires using nothing but my fingernails. I cleared as many of the connections as I could, then traced each wire to its connector. The few wires the Kavians had attached were mismatched. They didn’t understand Gnaio tech at all, so I was one step ahead of them.

Just then, Daphne arrived, stumbling under the weight of my pack. She let it fall next to me. “Here. All the warriors are out on the mountain. It sounds pretty bad out there.”

I nodded toward the tunnel. “You can go if you want to. I’ll handle this on my own.”

She gulped. “No. You’re right. This is our only chance. I want to help. What can I do?”

“Do you know how to realign a G3G charge receptor?”

Her countenance turned an even starker shade of white. “No.”

I shoved my tool roll into her hands. “How about you just hand me my tools while I work?” I turned back to the panel. “Hand me the fusion modifier.”

She looked up at me in confusion. “The what?”

I reached down and pulled the modifier from the roll. “It’s okay. Just hold my tool roll.”

She looked away. “Sorry. I’m a botanist, not a mechanic.”

“That explains why you know so many cures for the dangerous plants around here. But I’m not a mechanic either.”

She frowned “Then what are you?”

I shot her my most disarming smile. “I’m a pirate.”

I thought she might have a nervous breakdown right there, but she only fiddled with the tools and refused to look at me. “Oh.”

“I should probably qualify that by saying I was a pirate. I’m not anymore. There. That’s all done.”

I clipped the panel into place and switched it on. Daphne’s jaw dropped when it powered up and lights flashed over the controls. “What did you do? That’s amazing.”

“Not really. We can’t target it from here. Without a working actuator, the turret could swing in any direction. It could fire into the Kavians instead of the sentinels.”

“What are we going to do then?”

“First, tell me where the turret is.”

She frowned. “The turret? This is the turret.”

“Not this,” I snapped. “The gun itself. You said it’s on top of the mountain.”

“Yeah, but you can’t go out there. It’s suicide.”

I turned away and shut the panel. “Maybe, but there’s one thing I know for sure.”

“What’s that?”

I hoisted my pack onto my shoulder and faced her. “My mate is out there on that mountain. If there’s a way to defend him from the sentinels, I’ll do it. I don’t care what it takes. I’m going out there with or without you.”

Daphne’s expression changed in a heartbeat. The frightened pinch around her mouth turned to a hard, thin line. Her mate was out there on the mountain too. Garath and Xavier were facing the sentinels with nothing but crude, homemade weapons. If we had a high-powered phase cannon to use against our enemies, we better hurry and get to it.

With a resolute nod, she turned and ran. “This way!”

I followed, my heart pounding in my chest. Somehow I could feel it in my soul that Xavier was okay—but that could change at any moment. I had to get this turret up and running, and fast.

Daphne and I climbed back up through the tunnel. On the other side, we burst into a scene of mass destruction the likes of which I’d never seen. Sentinels fired their lasers every which way. The Kavians made use of shields and cover, throwing spears and other pointed projectiles to match the sentinels’ fire. I didn’t see Xavier anywhere, but I didn’t expect to in this chaos.

I didn’t have time to waste. I turned to Daphne and bellowed over the noise, “Where’s the turret?”

She pointed behind her toward the summit. “Up there! I’m not sure how we’ll get there among all this laser fire though!”

I shoved her back toward the tunnel. “Get back inside! Prepare to defend the inner colony in case the sentinels breach the perimeter. Understand?”

“Forget it!” she yelled. “You wouldn’t stay behind, and neither will I. I’m coming with you. You’ll need my help.”

I had to smile at her. “You can’t come with me, Daphne. You have a child who needs you. Your place is here.” Her face changed again as the truth sunk in. “Go,” I insisted.

Daphne pulled something that looked like a small handheld communication device from her pocket. She pressed it into my hand. “Take this. If you need help or directions, you can contact me.”

She turned on her heel and bolted into the tunnel. That left me alone among the sentinels and battling Kavians.