White Christmas (novella) (2 page)

But she threw the line down anyway.

“So,” he said, sitting cross-legged in her cave and watching through her bioscope as the Hunters swarmed his ship. “Some Christmas, huh?”

He pulled a green vientamite-gel stick from her pack and drove it into the snow to light the little cave. It glowed prettily and he laughed, dark and delicious. “Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree…”

The tiny light was comforting and Tabi felt a thrill of relief that the Tyverians were blind.

Asha’s singing voice was beautiful – croaky but sweet, and she remembered he’d been a choirboy back in Sweetheart, Georgia, when the Earth had still been in one piece.

“We’re not supposed to celebrate Christmas,” she said. “It’s divisive when there are so few of us.”

“You always loved Christmas,” he said, punching her lightly. “Black market egg nog, remember?”

“Yup,” she said. “Now I hate it.”

“Egg nog?” He looked at her with wide brown eyes, all innocence.

“Christmas,” she spat.

“Me too,” he said.

The silence filled up the tiny cave. When he spoke again, the husky timbre made her jump. “You’ve sure become real charming these last ten years.”

“You wouldn’t know what I’ve become,” she said, turning her back to him and focusing on her breath. She needed to slow it right down to still the advance of the cold. It was a delicate balance,

giving yourself over to the cold to hide your body pattern from the predators, but slowing your system down so the cold didn’t take you before they did.

Asha put a hand on her shoulder and twisted her to face him. “I know a few things,” he said, brown gaze settling gently on her face.

“Really?” She could feel her mouth set in an angry line and forced herself to relax. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Yup,” he said. He hadn’t lived in Georgia for seventeen years, not since he’d been an eleven-year-old boy. But he’d never lost that low, slow, bourbon-sweet drawl.

“Shoot,” she said, turning fully to him and turning her palms upwards to indicate she was an open book.

“Well,” he said slowly, wriggling a little closer, and cocking his big, dark head a little. “I know you’re an Explorer.” He flicked a glance at her biopack. “And an Admiral-class Explorer at that.” He whistled. “Impressive, for a twenty-seven-year-old. You sure must have studied hard the last ten years.”

She stared him down. “I’ve learned some stuff,” she said. “Not much else to do on Mother Earth Five, once the gym gets old.”

He grinned, showing off white teeth and that familiar chipped front incisor. The charming feature piece that made his beauty bearable. “You never had any trouble finding kicks before.”

“That was a long time ago,” Tabi said.

“Ten years ain’t so long,” he growled at her, and she could have sworn she saw the smoky reflection of those kicks in his chocolate stare.

She shrugged. There was no way she was going to let him see the effect he was having on her, stretching out his long legs in her cave, and smiling in a way no man who’d just been shot out of the sky and hit with a shot of Narcan had any right to.

He motioned at the insignia again. “From what I hear, you’ve got to make a new discovery to make Admiral-class.”

She nodded. “You know your Explorers,” she said. “You must have slept with a few.” He hissed satisfyingly, so she went on. “The Tyverians are my specialty. That’s why I’m here. Getting some samples, testing a theory. We need their vientamite, after all, so we need to know how to avoid getting eaten by them.”

He chuckled, and the sound stroked long fingers down her spine, rekindling old memories. “So I’m stuck in an ice cave on Tyver with exactly the right woman.” He motioned out to where his ship lay on the rocks. “What have you learned?”

Tabi shuddered. There was no way she was telling him her theory. Even thinking about it in such close proximity to Asha made her blush.

“Keep cold,” she hedged. “For now, that’s all you need to know.”

He stared at her, rubbing his big hand over a chin dark with end-of-day stubble. “These seven suns sure mess with your head,” he drawled. “I’m never quite sure when I’m due a shave.”

“Now,” she said, trying hard not to remember the scratch of that beard against her belly, her breasts, her… “Anyway,” she said. “That was kinda easy. The Explorer thing. No points for reading the uniform.” She crooked an eyebrow at him. “What else you got? What else do you think you know about me, after all these years?”

The grin slipped a little. “You don’t have a man,” he said, looking right into her eyes.

She laughed, and even to her own ears it sounded brittle and a little mean. “How’d you figure that, flyboy?”

He wriggled closer, although the confines of the cave meant he was already sitting close enough to remember his scent as it wrapped around her. The salty, fresh smell of him. Still the only man she knew who managed to smell like home, long after the Earth had been blown to bits and those who survived had become galactic gypsies.

She would not move away from him. She would not flinch. She would not give an inch.

Not even when he reached up a long-fingered brown hand and gently brushed the spiky hair that framed her face. “The buzz cut gave it away,” he said.

She snorted at him. “Some men like short hair,” she said, trying hard to act like she didn’t notice that his fingers lingered on her hair.

“Nah, Tabysha,” he said. “They don’t.”

The arrogance of this man. He had always been this way. So freakin’ sure of himself. So long-legged and honey-voiced and bad, bad, bad.

“I’ve had enough of this game,” she said. “And we should stop talking now. They’re close.” Tabi picked up the scope Asha had placed back in the pack and trained it on the scene outside. She lay flat on her stomach, poking the scope out delicately.

The swarm was rising out of the snow, right below the broken ship.

Snake-like bodies wound around its carcass – first dozens, then hundreds, then, within seconds, thousands. Pouring from the snow like a plague, covering the craft with the writhing mass of their bodies. The sound of them, which had been at first a low hum, rose to a frenetic buzz as they slid in and out of the wrecked dome, seeking and not finding. They spread out over the snow and ice, covering the distance across the powder to Tabi’s ship and again raking it for clues. The sight of the swarm would have been impressive enough. But tonight it was all lit up by the firefight going on above. The Avenger ships were locked in a brutal dance with the Tyverian Warlords.

“Is it bad up there?” Tabi pointed at the sky as an explosion streaked flames across the horizon.

“Yep,” he nodded. “Worst I’ve ever been in.”

“Will they get to Earth Five?”

He shook his head. “I sure hope not,” he said. “That would make for a pretty lousy Christmas.”

Asha wriggled close to her to watch the show on the ground. The swarm had edged closer to the cliff, a seething mass of hunger and intelligence. “Will they find us up here?”

She wrinkled her nose, thinking. “Maybe,” she said. “But we’re clean out of other options.”

Except one.

Tabi wriggled to the back wall of the cave on her stomach, and Asha followed. They sat up almost as one. She motioned at his chest. “How’s the Narcan holding up? Do you have any pain?”

“None,” he confirmed. “It sure is a miracle drug,” he said. “I feel like I could run the Sancerei Circuit.”

“A temporary miracle,” Tabi reminded him. “If we don’t get out of here in a couple of hours, you’ll meet your maker.”

“Please try not to sound so disappointed,” he said, his beautiful mouth a wry line. “I’m thinking we’re gonna be fine. I’ve got no intention of going anywhere in a hurry, thanks all the same.”

“First time for everything,” she said, and immediately regretted the words.

“What’s that mean?” His brown eyes glowed intently as another fireball lit up the sky. For the first time she noticed a small, jagged scar running down one cheek, parallel to his right eye. It hinted at his dangerous job, and she had to give her heart a solid talking-to as it wilted in fear for him. After all, what she did was dangerous too. She’d never expected her little Explorer pod to get caught up in a bloody battle on its way home from basic reconnaissance, for example. And, let’s face it, no situation either of them had been in had ever been as dangerous as this one.

She eyeballed him. “It means you sure were in a hurry ten years ago. Remember? When you climbed out of my bed and ran away to join the circus?”

Asha’s mouth opened at her words, and his eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?” The way he lingered on the last word, that trace of the South digging its heels in a little more firmly, almost undid her.

“Deadly serious,” Tabi said. “I was seventeen. You broke my… ” She shrugged. Who cares if he knew? He deserved to know. “You broke me.”

He shook his head, frowning and running dirty hands through thick, black hair. “You don’t know, do you?” He lifted his head but shook it again. “Fucking hell, Tabi. You’re Admiral-class and you don’t know.”

“What?” Tabi registered the rising buzz of the Tyverian Hunters, locking on their scent, but the look on Asha’s face was more compelling.

“They take us,” he hissed. “On the Christmas we turn eighteen. They take us and make us Avengers. The ones who pass their freakin’ test.”

“What?” Tabi felt her stomach free-fall as all the sad certainties of the last ten years slipped away. “What do you mean they take you? Who take you?”

“The Grand Masters,” Asha said. He shook his head again. “I thought you must have known. Your father…”

Frayed pieces of memory and fact jiggled and realigned themselves in Tabi’s brain. “My father knew?” Her voice sounded small and reedy. “My father knew they took you?”

“Tabysha.” Asha reached out to her, but suddenly the cold was everywhere. She had been holding it at bay, but now it reached silken tentacles right through her blood and sang into her brain. They took him from her. And her father knew. She blocked him with her arm.

“Yes, he knew,” Asha nodded. “Of course he knew. He was the one who took me.” He tried again, reaching out a hand to her. “He never told you?”

“He died soon after,” Tabi said, the cold tunnelling through her veins like a diamond-headed drill. Her father. Her father had taken Asha, the beautiful eighteen-year-old boy she had loved. She had to know more. “Why? Why would he have done that? To me?”

Asha looked at her carefully. “He was on the frontline during the Apocalypse. He was one of the original Avengers. A true believer, I guess.”

She nodded. “Tough times call for tough measures.” She could almost hear her father saying it.

“Was it bad?” There were rumours, about Avenger training. The brutality of it. But it was so cloaked in secrecy that it was hard to know what was real.

He closed his eyes, and nodded. “It has to be, I guess,” he said. “To make you into what you need to be.” He ran his hands through his hair. “But it’s hard to understand that when you’re eighteen.” He paused, touching her hand. “And all you want is to touch your girlfriend one more time.”

In the silence, the buzz from the plains below could no longer be ignored. It had grown to an incendiary frenzy. Tabi could hear the creatures spreading out, the swarm on reconnaissance, unwilling to be cheated a second time, looking for its prey. And then the buzzing took on a more urgent edge. They had reached the mountain.

“Asha,” she said quickly. “Do you trust me?”

He looked at her carefully, narrowing his eyes. “Yes,” he said.

This bit was going to be harder. “And do you…” She swallowed and thought about what she knew, her recent discovery. She could do this. “Do you still desire me?”

He closed his eyes and Tabi saw that look. The one she would have known across all the reaches of space and time. The heavy-lidded, drowsy slide into light and heat. “Yes,” he said. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”

She took a breath. “You need to take your clothes off.”

Her words broke the spell and Asha’s eyes snapped open. “If this is some dying wish thing, you could maybe romance a guy a little first.”

Tabi laughed, not sure if it was mounting hysteria. “Asha, listen to me very carefully,” she said. “You need to take off your clothes, and I’m going to take mine off too. Then we need to make the hottest, heaviest love you can dream up right here on this cave floor.”

He studied her carefully, but they could both hear the whining buzz building as the creatures outside began their ascent. They would be at the cave mouth in moments. “I thought warm was bad?”

“It is,” she nodded. “But the thing… the thing I discovered, the thing I was testing…” She gestured at the admiral insignia on her backpack. “There is a particular pheromone, secreted during human mating, that repels them. Disgusts them.”

Asha smiled. “Bit like your kid brother that time he found us?”

Tabi grinned back at him. “Worse,” she said. “If we secrete it, they would no more feed upon us than a predator would consume decaying meat.”

He nodded calmly, like he was told to fuck for his life every day of the week.

“You say you were testing this theory?” He started to strip off his suit, tearing it from his arms and down his chest, revealing familiar long muscles and an unfamiliar smattering of scars. Tabi’s heart hiccoughed in her chest at the wounds on him. “How sure are you?” He began to pull at his boots.

“Pretty sure,” she said, stripping off her own suit in one fluid movement and standing before him in functional black underpants. “And if I’m wrong–”

“It’s a helluva way to go,” Asha laughed, throwing his boots towards the floor and stepping out of the lower half of his suit and his underwear.

Oh, but he was beautiful.

She was colder than death and she could hear the swarm scaling the cliff under them. But she had to say one more thing before they began. She stepped towards him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Asha,” she whispered, her body forgetting that this was a survival strategy as it melted against him. “You’re going to need to stay in the moment. This needs to be…very real. You can’t fool pheromones.”

“Oh darl’n,” Asha breathed in her ear as he picked her up under her thighs and lifted her onto his hips, pushing her against the back wall of the cave. “It’s not gonna be hard at all. It’s gonna be the easiest thing I’ve done in ten years.”