Earth's Requiem(9)
He closed his lips over hers. She kissed him back, too aroused to be ashamed of her need.
Chapter Two
The gateway to Taltos. How the hell was she supposed to find it all by herself? Travis was long gone, making a journey jump to wherever he lived. At least, that’s where he’d said he was going. Aislinn blew out a breath, feeling guilty. She hadn’t exactly asked him to go, but she’d hinted strongly that she needed time to herself. Travis was sweet—and a surprisingly adept lover. A reluctant smile tugged at her lips. She hadn’t expected him to be so skilled. Or so attuned to what she needed, which had been rough and tumble sex without much in the way of seductive undertones.
The smile vanished abruptly. Ever since she lost her family, she’d made a point of staying away from anything that could turn into an emotional entanglement. It hurt too damned bad when you lost someone you loved. She could go the rest of her life without that kind of pain again, thank you very much. Doesn’t matter. It will be months before I see him again. If then.
Relegating her tryst with Travis to the infrequent dalliances she’d given in to when need outweighed reason, she gazed about her cave. It wasn’t much, but it was all the home she had, and she was loathe to leave it. Aislinn shrugged off her ambivalence about the upcoming journey. Since her instructions were to take nothing and tell no one, she sure wouldn’t be wasting any time in preparations. Only problem was that she really did need to figure out where she was going. She closed her eyes and sifted through Lemurian memories that had been embedded within her at the time of her initiation. She kept two fingers centered in tattooed marks—black ink in the form of ankhs and stars—on her opposite arm as she concentrated.
Rather than a map of how to get to Taltos, what filled her mind was the Harmonic Convergence of August, nineteen eighty-seven, and its globally synchronized surges. The Surge three years ago had been the last one as far as she knew, though there’d been many prior to it. Resentment filled her, and she ground her teeth together. Of course it had been the last one. The dark gods had used it to leapfrog their way to Earth. They didn’t need to mastermind any more of them since they were already here.
Her parents had taken her to a remote location in the mountains of Bolivia during that last Surge. There’d been a surprising number of people, given it had taken several hours of strenuous climbing on slippery, muddy trails to get to a sundial supposedly placed by the Incas. Or maybe it had been the Aztecs. She couldn’t exactly remember. She’d been tired and not listening especially carefully to her father lecturing about the history of the Convergence as they made their way to the ancient shrine. He’d talked about it all the time. It had been his life’s work, his and Doctor José Argüelles’s. They’d spent over twenty years tracking every aspect of it at power points all over the world. That wasn’t the first time he’d taken her and her mother to some remote location to view a Surge.
While the trek had begun in thick jungle, they’d climbed beyond the line where trees grew to an arid, high plain, pocked with huge craters and the ruins of primitive dwellings. Small scrubby plants dotted the landscape. Herds of llamas grazed nearby. Aislinn had been fascinated by their huge, liquid eyes and long, graceful necks. When she’d reached out to touch one, her father had called her back, telling her they weren’t nearly as friendly as they looked. The journey had taken most of the day. Light was fading when they reached the sacred power point. Her father told her about dozens of such spots scattered around the globe. “People are gathering there, too,” he’d said with a knowing smile.
Her parents offered her cocaine leaves to chew. They’d given her a mild high. When the ground around the sundial began to undulate, she’d chalked it up to the drug. The rest of the crowd had rushed forward, though, chanting something in a guttural language. A vast hole had formed in the earth, and two naked alien beings had swarmed out of it. Several of the worshipers threw themselves at the feet of the things, chanting fervently.
The creatures had been so horribly inhuman, with eyes that radiated infinite power and colors shifting and changing under golden skin. Christ! An army of zombies wouldn’t have looked any more terrifying—or shocked her more. Danger rolled from them in waves, setting her teeth on edge and making her stomach ache. Though she hadn’t known it then, one was Perrikus, the other D’Chel. That had been the beginning of the freaky part. And her world had unraveled right along with it.
With a despairing look on her face, her mother had whispered in Gaelic so garbled that it was tough to follow, telling her and her father to fade into the shadows behind nearby ruins. They’d begun a surreptitious retreat, when one of the things materialized right in front of her father. One minute, he’d been behind them; the next, he was in front of Jacob Lenear, blocking his way. Jacob stood six foot four, but the glowing figure was at least half a foot taller. Up close like that, multi-hued eyes glowed menacingly. Shiny black hair hung past his waist. The colors flowing into one another under his skin had a hypnotic quality.