Warlord Read online

  When he finally rose from his kill—Jane could feel that last image of Mary Kelly’s mangled body searing itself into her brain—Druas turned and picked up a mirror standing beside the bed. The face he saw reflected there was smeared with blood, flecked with crimson bits Jane had no desire to identify.

  He addressed the mirror in a foreign language, the words incomprehensible, the triumphant, gloating tone all too clear. She realized he must be talking to his perverted subscribers. His mouth was twisted into a feral grin, his eyes wild in the mask of gore surrounding them.

  Then the image, at last, winked out.

  “What did he say?” Jane managed. She was standing at the other end of the room as far from the trid as she could get. Her lips felt cold and numb. She suspected she’d recognized a word, and found herself hoping she was wrong.

  For a long moment, neither man nor wolf answered. “He said, ‘Wait until I get to Tayanita,’” Baran said.

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  He barely got to her before her knees buckled.

  Jane felt…strange. She knew she should be asking questions, making plans, but all she could seem to do was sit on the couch, staring sightlessly into space. It was a comfortable couch, thickly padded in cream leather. It had cost her a thousand dollars. She tried to concentrate on the feel of that very expensive couch, tried to lock her thoughts on it instead of…other things. She closed her eyes. And saw blood spray across the soft pale leather.

  Her eyes flew open.

  Baran was talking. Jane struggled to listen to him, but it was difficult when she could hear Druas humming to himself as he sliced….

  Stop that. Freika turned off the trid. It’s over.

  But it kept playing in her mind, flashes of red horror, seconds of incomprehensible evil caught in an endless feedback loop.

  “…been fighting Xer since I was sixteen,” Baran was saying. She tried to switch her attention to his words, to the movement of his mouth. It was a very nice mouth. “I know how he thinks….”

  “I very much doubt that,” she said, her voice low.

  He rubbed a thumb across an eyebrow. “All right, I don’t. But I am more powerful than he is, and anything he tries, I’ll be ready for.”

  How could anybody be prepared for the kind of mind that could conceive of the things Druas had done to Mary Kelly?

  And how could anybody want to watch him? That was the question her mind kept circling back to. People had subscribed to his recordings, had effectively paid him to butcher Mary Kelly the same way men in her own time would subscribe to an Internet porn service.

  God, she was cold. Shivering, she looked around dully until she spotted the colorful crocheted throw lying over the back of the couch. Its expanse of warm reds and yellows looked like a spill of sunlight across the pale leather. Jane reached up, tugged it down, and wrapped it around herself, moving slowly, clumsily.

  She still felt cold. She wondered if she was in shock.

  The question emerged so suddenly even Jane was caught off guard. “Why didn’t you save her?” Baran and Freika, engaged in an intense low-voice conversation, looked up as if surprised she was capable of speech. “You could have stopped him before he murdered Mary Kelly. Then that woman he killed here tonight wouldn’t have died, either. And I wouldn’t have had to see—” She stopped, vaguely ashamed that she’d even mentioned herself in the same breath as the others.

  Baran sat down beside her. There was a tightness around his mouth, a shadow in his eyes. Futuristic warrior or not, the trid had shaken him. She was glad. She wasn’t sure she’d want to be around a man who could watch that kind of butchery without being affected. “I couldn’t have saved Mary Kelly, Jane.”

  “Why not?” If he couldn’t save Mary, did that mean…? “You said you were stronger, faster….” Her voice rose. Jane could heart he edge of panic in it and knew she should reign in her fear. She also knew that kind of control was currently far beyond her meager resources.

  “I couldn’t have saved her because I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, but why? Why didn’t you?”

  “For one thing, because TE didn’t transport me back to 1888. But even if they had, it wouldn’t have done any good. Druas murdered Mary Kelly, and there was nothing I could have done to stop it. If I’d tried, I would have failed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shook his head. “Because humans have been time traveling for sixty-five years, and none of them have ever changed history. I’ll only be able to save the victims I’m supposed to save.”

  There was a strange, high buzzing in her ears. She swallowed hard. “Are you supposed to save me?”

  “Yes.” His gaze was fierce and certain.

  “You said before you didn’t know.” Jane licked her lips and fought the impulse to scream. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. “You said they hadn’t told you. Unless…I’m supposed to die?” Oh, God! To end up like Mary Kelly…

  “No, you’re not going to die.” Something in his determined gaze steadied her. He closed a big, hard hand around hers, encircling her chill fingers in strength and warmth. “I swear to you, I will save you, Jane Colby. Druas is the one who’s going to die.”

  The confidence in his voice made the fear recede. She felt her thoughts clear slightly. “So you’re saying, what? You couldn’t have stopped it because it was fate? We have no real control over what happens to us?”

  Baran waved a strong hand in dismissal. “No, you misunderstand. Look, time travelers are not suddenly inserted into history. They’re part of the time plane even before they make their Jumps. Hell, before they’re even born.”

  Jane stared at him, wondering if he really wasn’t making sense or whether her battered mind simply wasn’t processing the logic. “What are you talking about?”

  “Let me see that.” He reached out and gently tugged the throw from around her shoulders. “My computer says that people in your time see time as a river. But it’s more like this.”

  “Time’s a giant blanket?” She blinked, puzzled.

  “More or less.” He spread the throw across their laps, then picked up one of the tassels that fringed its edges. His long fingers separated the strands down to one. “Let’s say this piece of yarn is a life.” He pointed at the knotted base of the tassel. “This is the moment of conception, and at the other end is the instant when decay ends and the body ultimately vanishes. Take a cross section of the string at any point, and that’s the now, the instant you’re in right at this second. Does that make sense?”

  She frowned. “Not sure. Go on.”

  “Everything has a time string, a series of ‘nows’—this couch, you, me, the Earth, everything. All of the different strings weave together as they extend forward into time.”

  She felt her fear drain even more, banished by the academic tone of the discussion. “So your people see time as a physical dimension—like width, length, and depth.” Jane rubbed a hand over her belly, where the sore muscles still protested her bout of vomiting. “Okay. So?”

  “Let’s say when we made the throw, we took one string from here”—he pointed at one end of the throw—“and looped it around to here.” He pointed at a spot in the middle. “Then wove it back in for a few inches, and then we looped it back to the point it came from.”

  “So if that string is a time traveler…”

  “Everything he did during his Jump happened before he was born.”

  She dug her fingers deeper into a particularly stubborn knot of aching muscle. “So that old paradox about going back in time to shoot your own grandfather so you’d never be born…”

  “…couldn’t happen, because you didn’t shoot your own grandfather. Your gun would misfire, someone would wrestle you to the ground, something would stop you. That’s why I couldn’t prevent Mary Kelly from being murdered. One theory has it that the only possible paradox is when someone doesn’t go back in time when they’re supposed to, to play whatever role they’re s
upposed to play. TE makes sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  Baran shrugged. “There have been a couple of times TE has decided not to transport somebody, only to have a TE agent from the future pop in and Jump the individual anyway. But theoretically, if you didn’t end up where you were supposed to go and do whatever you were supposed to do…it would create a ripple effect. Every action has consequences that affect other actions, which affect other actions, and so on. So if you’re not there, the things you don’t do cascade into the future, getting worse and worse. Almost instantly, the entire time plane would rip itself to shreds. Everyone who’d ever existed would die, past and future.”

  She stared at him, blinking at the image of such sudden, incomprehensible destruction. “But what about the real Jack the Ripper?”

  “What real Jack the Ripper?” Freika asked, tilting his head in a gesture of canine puzzlement.

  “The original Victorian guy who did those killings. If Druas killed Mary Kelly before the real Jack got a chance, then wouldn’t that have caused one of these paradoxes?”

  Baran shook his head. “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. There was no Victorian Jack the Ripper. It was always Druas. He went back in time and killed those women, just as he killed the one tonight.”

  “That’s why they call it ‘time travel,’ Jane,” Freika said, and twisted his head around between his hind legs.

  Jane eyed him as he went to work. “You know, if you’re smart enough for sarcasm, you’re smart enough to know it’s rude to lick your own genitals.”

  The wolf looked up. “You’re just jealous.”

  She opened her mouth to deny it, then stopped. “Well, yeah.” Shrugging, she turned to Baran. “Let me get this straight—Druas went back in time to commit the crimes of Jack the Ripper. But if there really had been a Victorian Jack, Druas would have killed not only the first victim, but triggered the destruction of the entire universe—including himself?”

  “Basically.”

  “What a lunatic.”

  Freika glanced up at Baran. “My. She is clever.”

  “I think I like you better when you’re licking your own backside.” To Baran, she continued, “So it’s not really me TE sent you here to save. It’s the universe.”

  He shrugged. “Basically. But the end result is the same. I will save you.”

  Jane frowned as a new and unpleasant thought struck her. “How do you know that, Baran? What if they just sent you back here because this is where you’re supposed to be?” Her voice rose. “What if that bastard gets his hands on me anyway, and does to me what he did to Mary Kelly?”

  “He won’t.”

  “What do you care?” She stood up, unable to sit still any longer, red nightmares spinning through her mind. “I’m nothing to you, any more than I mean anything to those sick bastards who’re paying Druas to kill me for their entertainment. I’m just a victim. Just like that poor lady tonight. Just like Mary Kelly.”

  Anger stirred behind his eyes. Apparently he didn’t like having his word questioned. “When I say I won’t let you die, I mean it. I don’t make empty promises.”

  “How do you know you can even stop it, Baran?”

  “How does anybody ever know they can do anything? You just do it.”

  “What are you, a Nike commercial?”

  “Protecting people is what Baran does,” Freika said. “It was what he was created to do: He’s a Viking Class Warlord. He can no more fail to protect you than he can stop breathing.”

  Jane snorted. “I’d probably find that a lot more comforting if I knew what the hell a Viking Class Warlord is.”

  He and the wolf exchanged a long look, as though in silent communication. Finally Baran said, “Like Freika, I’m genetically engineered. Almost a century ago, genetic designers on Vardon created a warrior class called Warlords, designed to act as the planet’s protectors. They made us several times stronger and faster than an ordinary human the same size. And I’ve got cybernetic implants in my brain and muscles that enhance my natural abilities even more.”

  “And he’s instinctively protective,” Freika added. “They breed the desire to defend into the Warlords. He would literally die to protect you, without any hesitation at all.”

  Looking into the wolf’s crystalline blue eyes, she found herself believing him. Jane swallowed and looked away, finding the moment too intense for comfort.

  Warm fingers closed around her wrist, drawing her into a warm, dark gaze. “Trust me,” Baran said quietly.

  “It’s not as if I have much choice.”

  He stood in a smooth rush of muscle and rustling leather. The top of her head barely came to his shoulders. “You’re right. You have no choice—except to trust me and do exactly what I tell you to do. Not if you want to live.”

  “And what exactly are you telling me to do?” She folded her arms. Perversely, it felt good to challenge him rather than let herself be borne helplessly along on his strength.

  “Cooperate. I’ll have to be with you every minute. And I do mean every minute. The fact that Druas can Jump means he could simply transport wherever you are and kill you before I even know what’s happening—unless I’m right there. At all times.”

  Oh, that was going to be fun. “How are you supposed to fight him?” she asked, frowning as she considered the implications. “I mean, if the guy can just teleport or Jump or whatever the hell you call it, how are you going to catch him? Can you Jump, too?”

  “No. I don’t have a suit; TE transported Freika and me here. But I can keep him from Jumping.” He lifted a big hand and spread it. She blinked, focusing on the long fingers, the broad, square palm. It looked intensely masculine, that hand. Intensely skilled. “…power pack neutralizer,” he was saying.

  She shook her head. “What? I didn’t hear that.”

  The wolf snickered. “No, you were wondering if the size of his hand matches the size of his—”

  “Freika,” Baran interrupted in cool warning. He stepped in closer to her, and this time she managed to focus her attention on the gold ring he wore. The band was filigreed, incongruously delicate on such a big man, and the red stone seemed to glow against his tanned skin.

  “TE gave me this ring,” he explained. “If I can get close enough to Druas, press it against his temporal suit and hold it there for several seconds, the pulse it generates will wipe out his suit’s power pack. He won’t be able to Jump.”

  Jane frowned. “Several seconds is a long time in a fight.”

  “True.” He shrugged. “I’m going to have to pin him down somehow.”

  “Which puts you back in the same boat—getting close enough for long enough.” She dragged her hands through her hair in frustration. “So what are we going to do, just wait for him to show up and kill me?”

  Baran’s ringed hand came to rest on her shoulder, radiating strength and warmth. Startled, she looked up. “He’s not going to kill you, Jane.” His eyes were so dark, so rich, like pools of dark chocolate….

  “At the risk of interrupting your mating ritual,” Frieka said, “it’s been three hundred years since I had anything to drink. I have three choices—I could go outside and look for a stream, I could drink out of the nearest toilet, or—”

  “I’ll get you something.” Jane turned away from Baran, fighting the niggle of regret as his comforting hold dropped away.

  “Food would be good, too,” Freika added. “Though I suppose I could hunt for myself—if you don’t mind losing your cat.”

  She eyed him. “Octopussy is not wolf chow, furball. I’m sure there’s something in the freezer.”

  “Don’t put yourself out.” Raising his voice, he called, “Here, kitty, kitty….”

  “All right, already!” Jane stalked toward the kitchen. What the hell was she going to feed him? She didn’t have any dog food, even assuming he’d lower himself to eat it.

  Steak. There were a couple of rib eyes in the freezer.


  She pulled it open and reached inside, found the package, and grabbed it. Out of habit she started to check it for freezer burn.

  A chunk of meat, dark red, traces of frozen blood on the plastic…

  An image rose in her mind—Druas, digging Mary Kelly’s heart out of her chest…. Her ears began to buzz. She stared sightlessly at the steak, fighting to stay upright. It felt as though her throat was swelling shut. Breathe, dammit, she ordered herself. Don’t pass out on the floor in front of them. They already think I’m…

  Gutless, her father’s voice whispered in her mind. I always said you were gutless.

  No, she thought, fighting the well of tears. No, you’re wrong.

  He’s going to kill you because you’re too incompetent to save yourself.

  Dammit, no. She blinked the tears away. I’m not incompetent. That may have been what you told me for twenty years, but I proved you wrong. I’m aggressive, I’m tough, and I will survive this.

  Only if that big hunk of muscle in there saves you. Otherwise you don’t have a prayer.

  Anger flooded her, welcome and hot, chasing away the chill. Yes, I will. I’m going to beat this.

  I’m going to beat you.

  Baran and Freika watched as Jane started opening cabinets and rattling crockery. Because he didn’t care to be heard, Baran used his computer’s com unit to speak silently to his partner. She’s beginning to function.

  For the time being, the wolf replied. Would you care to bet on how long it’ll take her to collapse again?

  If she does, she won’t stay down. She’s got courage.

  She’d better. Freika let his tongue loll in a lupine grin. Speaking of going down, when do you plan to spread her? I haven’t smelled so much pheromone in the air since the last time you took leave.

  Voyeur.

  Hey, somebody should get a little pussy on this trip.

  Leave the cat alone, Freika.

  Spoilsport. The wolf padded toward the kitchen. “Well, I’d better make sure she isn’t dumping horsemeat in a bowl,” he said, pitching his voice loud enough to make sure Jane could hear him. “I keep telling her I’m not a dog, but I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”