Parallel Attraction Read online

  More pictures followed, faster than she could identify them—so fast they caused blinding pain behind her eyes—yet she couldn't possibly look away. Not until she saw where the images were leading. Mercurial patterns of her past unfolded, one upon another, sometimes reaching out to touch an unknown future; and then the visions would recede, leaving behind a concrete past. Her father hugging her at graduation ... a stolen kiss from Jared on the bank of a darkened lake . . . then Jamie Watson, stripping her out of her slinky black dress on inauguration night.

  Wincing, she watched the spiral change and lurch forward by several crucial chunks of time until the memories, obviously plucked right out of her mind, became almost current, revealing her father across the table from her at the lunch they'd had last week. Lifting a hand into the air—a hand that felt rubbery and numb—she actually tried to touch his face, but the fading hologram looped past her, part of a larger cobalt spiral that seemed to physically encircle her where she lay on the hard, cold floor.

  The coil accelerated, then slowed before landing on a single image—one that caused all of her stupefied senses to come fully alert. Jared. But not as she knew him now, with the short-cropped dark hair and the slightly scarred face—no, this other Jared wore his hair long, pulled back into a sleek ponytail, significant strands of silver and gray threading through his natural black. This was Jared from the future—somehow, this stream of time had folded inward, touching her other self's memories like a shadow of foreknowing. Some of our people even believe time to be a mirror . . . Those had been Jared's own words, and as she gasped at the scene unfolding before her eyes now, she knew she was glimpsing a future that she'd not yet lived. She pressed an icy hand to her breastbone, working to still her frantic heartbeat.

  In the unfolding vision, this Jared stood proud as a king: defiant, rugged, fearsome-looking, his face lined with age and deep scars. But older. So very much older. And hardened in some significant way. His right eye had a strange look to it, half-closed like that of a wounded prizefighter. As he spun to face her, she caught a better look at him: The eye was blinded, its natural almond shape marred by a vicious scar.

  She lifted a hand—or tried to—yearning to feel her lover's weathered face. Such pain and suffering were etched into his dark features, and she could hardly breathe with what she saw. She worked her mouth, desperate to cry out to him, but no sounds would form. Why couldn't she comfort him? He turned from her, and as he moved, his strong, confident gait seemed altered. Less steady. A slight drag to his right foot punctuated each of his steps—the after-effects of an old injury, perhaps?

  Now he stood, one hand on his hip, surveying, while with the other he unfastened his ponytail, allowing the graying hair to fall across his shoulders. He continued watching for something or someone, glancing in her direction ever so briefly—and that was when the full truth hit her with the force of a freight train: This Jared wasn't nearly so old as she'd first thought, yet his body had been ravaged. The war had eaten him alive, one battle at a time. Tears began seeping out of her own undamaged eyes as she watched him move through a crowd ... doing what? She couldn't tell, but there were soldiers all about him; he shouted something, and his warriors reacted, dispersing. Then, across the gathering, he lifted his eyes. His one good one—beautiful and dark as ever—locked with hers, and silent words passed between them.

  Do it, love. That was what he transmitted. Do it now! His features never changed, never shifted or altered. She ran hard. With all the life in her lungs and body, she hurled herself through the pressing throngs, her feet slapping hard soil, dust rising around her. To her left, then to her right, she saw blood and bodies and destruction in every direction. And yet she ran. Go, love! Go now! She ran because he depended on her to do so. She ran because in some very crucial way, her husband and beloved lifemate could not.

  Kelsey slapped the smooth floor with her open palms, realizing she was still transfixed inside the chamber where she’d been taken. Or was she? It was an unearthly, supernatural realm, and nothing felt solid. What was happening to her? What did these images even mean? Again, she tried to open her mouth to cry out, yet her jaw wouldn't move. Her lips wouldn't even part. Suspended. That was the word her captor had used: He'd said they were suspended in inter-dimensional space.

  Then, in the unfurling strip of time, she saw him. The terrifying one with the shadowy features and the cruel scar across his forehead. Marco. He spun upon her, trying to make her cower, but she wouldn't back down. She experienced her other self's memories as if they were her own. In some elemental way, as irrational as it might seem, she understood they were her own memories now. She was certain of it. And in those memories she watched Marco move closer, brandishing something in his hand—a weapon. And not just any weapon, but one made of silver. And he had it trained on her. Her heart beat out an insane rhythm. Panting, she cried out, screamed something in a language she did not know. One word, over and over. J'Areshkadau! J'Areshkadau! J'Areshkadau!

  Clearly Marco intended to kill her. He lifted the weapon, bore down upon her....

  It's been too long, my dear. The lip curled back; he reached toward her, ripping something from around her neck, something precious beyond measure. The room was dark as a burial chamber, but she could hear the tink-tink of her wedding ring clattering to the floor, and the hollow sound told her that he'd taken her somewhere cold and vacant.

  The fabric of the future and the present wove together with an eerie, resounding silence, making her light-headed and woozy. Kelsey sat up, groping in the darkness, and felt Jared's strake stone burn her hand, the familiar leather strap rough beneath her fingertips. In reality she'd left the pendant in his bathroom, on the sink where she'd placed it when she got into the bath, yet she felt it burn into the flesh of her palm as she pressed it to the floor. She refused to relinquish the precious item as surely as if these events were happening now, not to her future self. A black boot came down on her fingers, and with a gasp she withdrew her seared hand, the strake stone ricocheting off of Marco's boot until it clattered across the metallic floor. And there, in the darkness beside it, spinning like a coin that would decide all their fates, stood her wedding ring—ripped from her future self, in a future time many years from now. That was her last memory before the world teetered away from her once again.

  Facedown on a cold polished surface, Kelsey came slowly to her senses. One hand was sprawled above her head, her torso twisted painfully atop something bulky that jammed into her rib cage. Only after several head-throbbing moments did she identify this object as her other hand. Her whole body was a withered husk, as if the firestorm she'd just traveled through had sapped her dry on the most microcellular level.

  Beyond her she heard heavy breathing and a rustling sound. But she couldn't force herself to move and investigate. She released a soft groan; in answer, the hollow echo of footsteps on tile neared her head. A hard boot nudged at her shoulder.

  "Wake up." That voice she remembered: Marco, her captor, the man with the vile and terrifyingly empty gaze.

  With a sluggish turn, she managed to rotate her head so that her gaze fixed on his boots. "Why?" she asked, and though she meant it as a defiant question, it came out more garbled than rebellious.

  Above her, he chuckled softly to himself. "Such spirit, Kelsey Bennett," he said. "Such determined spirit. Just like your husband. You two definitely had that much in common, despite your other differences."

  "You know . . . nothing about Jared and . . . me," she managed to sputter through a spasm of coughs.

  This protest seemed to enrage him. "Wake up!" He growled, giving her a more forceful shove with the tip of his boot.

  She pressed her eyes closed and willed the man to disappear—or, if that didn't happen, at least for the blinding migraine that had exploded behind her eyelids to subside. With a soft moan, she managed to roll onto her side. An explosion of light came into view, all of it muted blue and low-wattage, but still bright enough to pierce her eyes after her plumm
et through the darkness. Marco dropped to the floor, crouching beside her with a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

  "Yes, fair Kelsey," he purred, brushing several loose curls away from her eyes. "You are mine now." He allowed his fingertips to graze her cheek, and the gesture was invasively tender. She slapped his hand away, which only made him laugh, a deep, rumbling sound. "My little spitfire." He shook his head, an expression of near-admiration coming over his face. "Even after so much time."

  She struggled to sit up, the entire room swimming, until she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes with an agonized groan. Once during her freshman year of college she'd drunk way too many Bacardi and Cokes, insisting with every refill of her glass that the alcohol wasn't affecting her. The next day she'd paid for her foolishness with the most nauseating hangover of her entire college career; she felt something approximating that memory right now.

  "I think I'm gonna be sick," she managed to mumble, shivering with the sensation.

  Marco reached inside his jacket and produced a can of Sprite. "This will help." She'd had the idea that the soft drink had been something else entirely just one moment earlier. Greedily, she popped it open and sipped from it, praying that her stomach would stop its uncertain roiling. So he was helping her now? She didn't bother to question his motives, not with insides flip-flopping like they were.

  "Dimensional illness," he explained, rocking back on his heels to study her. "It happens."

  She made no attempt to answer him, but after a time, her stomach began to still itself and the headache improved a little. Only then did she begin to steal glances around the room where she'd found herself. Everything in it gleamed: polished steel and ceramics, instrument panels that did not look to be of earthly origin, and a number of doorways that opened into yawning darkness.

  Marco paced the room, stopping momentarily to enter data at one of the dimly lit panels, but he said nothing more. It seemed he was giving her time to recover her senses. "Where are we?" she asked after she'd battled away the overpowering nausea. If she could figure out where he'd taken her, then maybe she could devise a way to escape. All those open shafts had to lead somewhere, after all. “I mean, we must be at a high-altitude still because I feel the pressure in my sinuses. I always do when I’m in the higher elevations around Jackson.”

  "Don't play coy with me." His commanding voice tightened over the words like a vise. “You won’t somehow lure me into revealing things I don’t intend to.”

  "Then I’ll be extremely blunt. Again—where are we?"

  "You know exactly what this place is," he insisted. "He brought you here the night he proposed to you."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about." Proposed? This man clearly thought that she and Jared were married already—and that the proposal had happened here, which it hadn't. Jared had essentially popped that question in the bathtub earlier tonight, not in these cold chambered rooms.

  Scrutinizing her with his black gaze, Marco narrowed his thick-lashed eyes. "Your plan won't work, lovely Kelsey," he said. "I see what you're up to, and as ever I admire your tenacious strength, but trust me—you will fail."

  "Marco, you know what's going on, but I'm in the dark here," she said. "If you want something from me—and you obviously do—then you need to bring me up to speed on things. First of all, you keep talking about Jared like we're married, calling me Kelsey Bennett and all that, and you're just flat wrong."

  "Quiet!" He spun on her like a vicious hawk, and raised his arm. Suddenly a supernatural pall descended on the room. It was as if he'd called upon the elements, causing shadow to envelop them both. She shivered, blinking up at his face, which was still a hardened mask of fury. "You will tell me everything, Kelsey, and you will start with your full name."

  She tilted her chin, a plan beginning to form. "No."

  The fury intensified, and her enemy swooped low. "Then you will yield to me!" he thundered, and grasped her face roughly in his calloused hands.

  Marco held her head between his palms with an unrelenting force. "What is so important about this time?" he asked. "Why did he choose now?"

  "He?" Kelsey asked, genuinely confused. "Now?"

  "What was Jared trying to accomplish by sending you to this very particular time?" he pressed. "What's so critical about now?"

  "I-I don't understand." Thoughts raced one after another through her mind, but one thing was clear: as she'd first suspected in Jared's bedroom, this man did not come from the present, but from some future in which she and the king were already married. Probably that same time she'd glimpsed earlier, the one where Jared's body had been ravaged by war. While all of these courses of thought defied science and logic, the foundations of her world, she reminded herself that Einstein himself had thought time travel possible, at least in theory. Perhaps it was more than just a theory for these aliens.

  "Kelsey, he targeted this time, this day," Marco explained with a strange kind of patience—as if they were co-conspirators. "I need to know why."

  Kelsey smiled in victory. "I'm not telling you anything."

  All pretense of partnership dissipated. "You're so pathetic. Both of you." He sneered. "Your precious husband sacrificed everything to protect the location of the mitres. His family, friends, even his throne." He shook his dark head derisively, one fingertip reaching to trace the outline of his scar. "And then at the very last moment he got careless. Betrayed its location by sending you back to now."

  Kelsey gasped. "What do you mean?"

  "I mean I followed you. To these chambers." He paused, sweeping his arm about them. "The mitres. And as you prepared to use the weapon, I stopped you."

  The muddled images she'd seen while passing through inter-dimensional space suddenly pulled into focus. "You killed me. In the future."

  "Not quite." He dropped his hands. "In the end, your king couldn't protect the mitres." His voice grew hushed, almost seductive. "And he couldn't even protect you, the one he valued most of all."

  "That's not true." Kelsey shook her head forcefully.

  "Are you so sure? You weren't there." He reached out and touched a stray strand of her hair, causing chill bumps to rise on Kelsey's skin. "There was only the two of us, darling. I enjoyed sifting your mind to learn his pitiful plan." She thought of what she'd seen in the slipstream, how Jared's future self had urged her to run. All the experiences and emotions of her other self pulsed through her body now, in this time, causing tears to sting her eyes. She owned the memories now; they were her own, same as if she'd lived them. She felt a lifetime's love for her warrior husband; he'd counted on her with his very life to accomplish whatever plan he'd devised. And she'd failed him. The realization sickened her, and her stomach nearly pitched again.

  Kelsey flinched as Marco let his fingertips linger on her face, tracing a path down the skin of her neck. "But you were strong. You shut me out, at least from that one area of your mind." He looked at her significantly. "I couldn't learn why he chose this time, but now you're going to tell me." His fingers stopped at the base of Kelsey's throat, and she could feel her pulse throbbing beneath his large hand. His black eyes met hers with a maelstrom's force, and she couldn't make herself look away. Why does he have such immense power over me?

  "And then you're going to draw him here, out into the open." He let his hand drop.

  Oh, God . . . he's here for Jared. To destroy him, before that future can happen.

  "I don't even know who you are," she choked.

  "True. But I know you extremely well, Kelsey Bennett." His dark eyes flared for a moment with an emotion she couldn't read. "It's one reason that I've come."

  Kelsey met his gaze and tried to form some kind of plan. She had to protect Jared at all costs, had to lure this stranger away from him. She shivered because somehow she knew that Marco's mission was to end Jared's life, and then to set about changing the course of the future in his own ruinous way.

  And with that, she made a fateful decision.

  Chapter
Thirteen

  Jared had experienced grief many times in his thirty years, and believed that he'd identified all its faces. He'd known the sorrow of sending a friend out on an aerial mission, never to see her return; he'd held a comrade on the battlefield as she drew her last breath; he'd mourned his beloved cousin, Valyre, after her disappearance on a recon mission when they were both twenty; and then there had been his parents' deaths. Barely ten on the day of their murder, he'd swallowed his grief when destiny had first laid the responsibility of leading the Refarian people at his feet. Yes, he had grieved a thousand times, and thought himself accustomed to it—inured, even. Until now.

  But nothing, nothing in the vast emptiness of the universe and all its fickle dealings, had ever prepared him for this moment of absolute loss. His bedroom stood empty before him, all the promise of the past hours wrenched from his hands like the plaything of some cruel god.

  His chambers hummed with complex power; each of them felt it. He'd commanded all his soldiers away except Thea and Scott, since otherwise the powerful imprints left vibrating in the room's atmosphere might be disrupted. Now only the three of them remained: Thea because her skills of intuition were the most refined within the compound; Scott because, as an Antousian hybrid, he had ways of seeing unlike any of them; and Jared…well, his gifts combined with his connection with Kelsey would be crucial. Together, the three held the best chance of winnowing through the energy and impressions in the room to produce a trail of evidence.

  Thea obviously knew he'd mated with Kelsey tonight, though she said nothing to acknowledge it—even though from the moment they'd joined their power within the helix, his thoughts had been open to his cousin. She'd expressed her grief at his choice then, as they united in their energized forms. After that, nothing more remained to be said. Now she served not only her king, but the one he'd taken as queen—a woman who was now her queen as well.