Wild Embrace Read online

  Tazia’s father was enamored of his grandson and spoiling the boy terribly (“as a grandparent should,” Mina had added).

  Tazia’s parents had given the money Tazia had sent them to the holy man.

  She knew. Of course she knew. In her heart she knew she would never again drink her mother’s sweet milk-tea or hear her father’s gravelly voice. She would never again laugh with her brother, never meet his bride or her nephew. And she would never again feel her beloved teta’s kisses and hugs, her grandmother who had so patiently brushed her hair the many times Tazia had returned with tangles after a day of scrambling up trees and rolling down sand dunes.

  She knew.

  She knew.

  • • •

  Next mail drop, she ensured she was fixing a hydraulic lift on the lowest floor of the station, where no one would come looking for her and where she didn’t have to hear the excited cries and see the beaming smiles of her colleagues as they received care packages or unexpected gifts, or letters that made them shed tears of joy.

  “Great,” she muttered when the relay tube turned out to have a hole in it.

  “A problem?”

  Her back stiffening where she crouched in front of the exposed inner machinery of the lift, she glanced up at Stefan. “Can’t you wear a bell or something?”

  “No.”

  Of course he didn’t have a sense of humor. Psy never did. She still couldn’t get her mind around the fact that two powerful cardinal Psy, including a gifted foreseer, had recently defected into a changeling pack. How could that possibly work? Changelings were as primal as Psy were cerebral. Like Stefan with his remote gaze and cool words.

  “The tube is busted,” she told him. “I missed the last equipment request, so we’ll have to wait till next month.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  She considered it, aware Stefan was a teleport-capable Tk. He could bring in emergency equipment in the space of mere minutes if not seconds, his mind reaching across vast distances in a way she could barely comprehend, but the unspoken rule was that the rest of the station personnel didn’t ask him for anything that wasn’t critical. Everyone knew that if Alaris sprang a fatal pressure leak, they’d need every last ounce of Stefan’s abilities to get them to the surface.

  “The other lift is still functional,” she said, hooking her spanner into her tool belt and tapping in the code that meant the computer would bypass this lift until she recorded it as being back online. “We can survive a month.”

  He nodded, his dark brown hair military short. Since he wasn’t part of the Psy race’s armed forces, she thought it was because he had curls; Psy hated anything that was out of control. When he continued to loom over her, she rubbed her hands on her thighs and stood up. That didn’t exactly even things out since he was so much taller, but it made her feel better.

  He reached out and gripped a lock of hair that had escaped her ponytail. “Grease.”

  Rolling her eyes, she pulled it out of his grasp. “Was there anything else you wanted?”

  “It appears I made a mistake last month in telling you no letter or package would come.”

  Pain in her heart, her throat. “No, I needed to hear that.”

  “However, instead of having you snap at everyone for two days a month, you’re now so quiet that people are becoming concerned.”

  Tazia remembered how Andres had been poking at her this morning, trying to make her smile with those silly jokes of his. But he was her friend. Stefan was nothing. “I’m not Psy,” she said point-blank. “I can’t ignore hurt or forget that my family hates me.”

  He didn’t flinch. “You knew that before. What changed?”

  “You took away my hope.”

  There was a small silence that seemed to reverberate with a thousand unspoken things. For a single instant captured in time, she thought she saw a fracture in his icy composure, a hint of something unexpected in those eyes she’d always thought were beautiful despite their coldness.

  Then a tool fell off Tazia’s belt and she bent to grab it off the floor. By the time she rose, Stefan was gone. Just as well, she thought, though there was a strange hollowness in her stomach. She wasn’t some bug under a microscope for him to study. She was a flesh-and-blood human being with hopes and dreams and emotions. Maybe those emotions made her heart heavy with sorrow and her soul hurt, but she would never choose to erase them in the way of Stefan’s people.

  What use was it to have such power if you saw no beauty in a child’s smile or in the sea’s turbulent moods? If you didn’t understand friendship or laughter? No, she’d rather feel, even if it hurt so much she could hardly breathe through it at times.

  Chapter 2

  Tazia was on her way back to her room three days later, her shift complete, when she decided to take a different corridor. Andres’s room was that way and he’d told her to go in and grab a reader on which he’d loaded the latest chapter in a continuing thriller from a shared favorite author. Having finished it already, he wanted her to read it so they could dissect the mystery from start to finish.

  He was convinced he’d figured out the murderer.

  Using his code to get in, she found the reader where he’d said it would be and shook her head at the state of his room. Clothes thrown on the bed and the floor, a T-shirt hanging off a wall lamp, a single shoe lying in solitary splendor on a bunched-up rug, while a used plate and cup sat precariously balanced on a nightstand crammed with candy, cookies, and a mess of data cubes.

  It was a good thing this wasn’t a military station or he’d be in constant trouble, she thought with a smile as she stepped back out into the corridor and shut the door behind herself. The funny thing was, Andres was an excellent and organized oceanographer, not a paper clip out of place in his office.

  The dissonance between Andres’s public and private selves made her wonder what Stefan’s living space was like. She tried to imagine him in a room full of chaotic debris: clothes strewn about, tangled here and there, hard copies of station reports piled up on random flat surfaces, and ran up against a mental roadblock. Stefan’s room, her brain informed her, would be as neat and as tidy and as flawless as Stefan—so perfect it had no personality.

  Still angry at him, though she knew he hadn’t meant to hurt her, she had to bite back a gasp when she suddenly found herself looking at the object of her thoughts. He was in his quarters, but the door was open and it gave her an uninterrupted view of a shirtless Stefan doing chin-ups using a bar that had been bolted in at one end of his room; his muscles bunched and flexed in a smooth, effortless rhythm that was a silent statement of his strength.

  Skin heating, she knew she should look away, but the temptation was too great. Men had always been something of an exotic animal to her—she’d never been the girl who knew how to flirt, or who had a secret boyfriend in the village. That hadn’t changed after she left her homeland. Always more comfortable with tools and machines, she’d never learned the “feminine arts,” as Teta Aya used to describe them.

  Neither had she been “awakened.” Another one of her grandmother’s scandalous euphemisms, the elderly woman having outlived three husbands, and who knew how many lovers. Tazia had begun to think she simply didn’t have that gene, the one that made the other girls sparkle with anticipation at the sight of a boy. All Tazia had wanted to do was learn, build, explore—and none of the boys in the village had ever found that the least bit interesting.

  Now, as she watched Stefan’s body move, her stomach fluttered, her blood grew thick and languid under her skin, and her breath turned jagged. He was beautiful. Never had she thought that about a man, but no other word did him justice. His shoulders were broad, his hips slim, the muscle on him sleek and fluid. Those muscles moved like liquid silk under the pale gold of his skin, the color having held even after months under the sea, which told her it was genetic, his ancestry not as obvious as it
might appear.

  A single bead of sweat trickled down his spine as she watched. Her throat went dry. At that instant, she wanted nothing more than to run her fingertip along the path taken by that droplet.

  Buzz. Buzz.

  Jerking down her head, she turned off the specialized comm they used inside the station, and moved quickly away before Stefan could turn, see that she’d been spying on him. Her cheeks burned as she hurried out of sight. Only once she was in her own section did she check the comm—to find a message from a friend asking if she’d like to have dinner together.

  About to refuse, she decided she needed a distraction and said yes. Because if she was fantasizing about Stefan, then she’d clearly been working too hard. Should he ever discover her unusual response to the sight of his body, he’d be faintly quizzical but otherwise unaffected. A few Psy around the world might be starting to question Silence, as their way of life was apparently called according to recent rumors, but Alaris’s station commander wasn’t part of that group—he was the most emotionless person she’d ever met.

  • • •

  Tazia didn’t run into Stefan again until five days later—possibly because she’d done everything in her power to avoid contact. When she did end up in the same space as him, it was at the senior staff meeting where they went over the health of the station piece by piece, including the health of the crew and anything else that might affect the smooth running of Alaris.

  Not up for discussion were any current research projects.

  Because while it was Stefan’s task to make sure Alaris ran smoothly, all staff and crew safe, it was water changeling Dr. Night who headed the research team and through whom all related data was funneled. Tazia figured the split had something to do with BlackSea not wanting the Psy to co-opt research they’d funded. She wondered if Stefan was troubled by the implied lack of trust, then realized he wasn’t troubled by anything.

  “I think we should have another station event midmonth.” That came from Allie Livingstone, the station’s chief counselor. “A single monthly get-together isn’t enough, not when some people inevitably miss it because of their shifts. As a result, it might be two months before they have a chance to blow off steam in a group setting.”

  “I’m willing to take your lead on this, Ms. Livingstone.” Stefan’s tone was even, his form motionless where he stood at the front of the room. Around him, some of the crew slouched in sofas, a few held up the wall, while Tazia leaned against a sofa arm.

  “However,” Stefan added, “you must ensure these social events do not leave the crew unable to function. The researchers set their own hours, but I need my crew alert if the station is to run at maximum efficiency.”

  Allie shoved a hand through her strawberry blonde hair. “Yeah, sorry about that. No more hangovers, I promise. I was thinking about a quiz night.” She held up her hands when several people groaned. “You mock me now but I bet you all get into it. Competitive lot that you are.”

  “Are there any other nonstandard matters that require discussion?” Stefan looked straight at Tazia.

  And she wondered if he could see her thoughts, see how her mind kept replaying the sight of his strong, beautiful body doing those chin-ups.

  He was telepathic after all.

  No, she reminded herself, uninvited telepathic contact was against the rules of the Psy race, and Stefan would never break the rules.

  “The lift situation remains stable?”

  She nodded in response to his question. “We’ll be fine until the next delivery.” Breaking the piercing intensity of the eye contact, she glanced around the room. “If any of you have noticed anything else buggy, let me know. I’ve got some leeway this week with the routine maintenance completed.”

  She kept her head down the rest of the meeting, but swore she could feel Stefan’s eyes on her throughout. Impossible, of course. He’d never pay extra attention to a particular crew member when he already had the information he needed from that crew member. Slipping out as soon as he dismissed the meeting, she headed down into the bowels of Alaris to tinker with a nonessential system.

  He found her there fifteen minutes later. “Is there a problem with that component?”

  “No,” she said shortly, frustrated that he’d followed her into her territory.

  When he simply waited, she blew out a breath and wiped away a tendril of hair using the back of her hand. “I have an idea about streamlining this system for better efficiency and I have the time to work on it today.”

  “I see.” His eyes lingered on her cheek.

  Flushing as she realized she’d no doubt streaked her skin with grease yet again, she turned back to her work, determined to ignore both him and her stupidly thudding heart. When she turned around a few minutes later, Stefan was gone.

  • • •

  “I think you two would make a cute couple!” Allie nudged Andres as they sat at one of the tables in the dining room a few days later, the station’s complement small enough that a larger space wasn’t needed, especially given that only a third of them were on shift at any given time.

  “Very funny.” Andres scowled, black eyebrows drawn ominously together over the rich hazel of his eyes. “Courtney would rip my nuts off—in fact, I think that’s what she tried to do today.” He rubbed at his face, his deep brown skin holding that too-long-without-actual-sunlight pallor. “All I said was that maybe she should double-check her results since they didn’t line up with current data, and boom! It was like I’d impugned her honor or something.”

  “She has had a hair-trigger temper of late,” Allie murmured. “I’ll have a talk with her.” The counselor’s perceptive eyes shifted to Tazia, the vivid blue color of her irises something Tazia had never seen while living in the village.

  It still took her by surprise at times, that brightness.

  “Talking of talking,” Allie said, “you’ve been very quiet the past few weeks.”

  Tazia took what Teta Aya would’ve told her was a rudely big bite of her pasta in order to give herself an excuse to delay replying. “Just tired, I guess,” she said after chewing and swallowing.

  Allie let her get away with that, though it was obvious the counselor didn’t buy her answer. “You haven’t rotated upside for the maximum period—good thing it’s only going to be a couple more weeks.”

  Tazia made a noncommittal noise, which Allie took as agreement. It wasn’t. Tazia’s stomach dropped at the idea of leaving the cocoon of Alaris and emerging back out into a world where no one wanted her, no one claimed her. Her closest friends were station folk, and those who were rotating out with her would go home to their families for the duration, leaving her to rock about alone until the month of mandatory shore leave had passed.

  Still, there was no way to avoid it; two weeks after that conversation with Allie, she grabbed her duffel and walked over to the docked transport that would ferry her upside. The psych team had a firm rule about rotating people out every three to four months, no excuses accepted once you were at the end of the fourth month. Something to do with psychological stress and close quarters.

  No one had ever asked Tazia’s opinion on that or she’d have told them that she was fine with close quarters and staying underwater with people she knew, the station’s comforting bulk around her. She had no need for the horrible nothingness that was the hell of shore leave.

  “What do they expect us to do?” she muttered as she and Andres boarded the advanced submersible that would take them up to the surface along a specially designed “rail” that had been built with the help of Tks like Stefan. “Go loco and shoot up the place?”

  Andres snorted, his scrubbed-clean skin gleaming in the lights inside the submersible and his shirt neatly pressed for once. “The first time I met you, you didn’t even know what ‘loco’ meant.”

  Tazia laughed because he was right. The two of them had met three year
s earlier, when she came on board the Alaris construction and development team. She had been green, still was in so many ways, but she’d learned enough to fit into this world that was now the only one that would accept her.

  “One thing you can say for close quarters,” she said, gut clenching against the fresh wave of pain, “you get to know your station mates very well.”

  “Tell me about it.” Andres groaned. “Goddamn Trev snores loud enough to make the walls rattle.”

  A step on the entryway before she could respond, a tall, rangy body with close-cut dark brown hair getting into the submersible. Stefan. She hadn’t realized he had an upside trip scheduled. As usual, he made no effort to engage in casual conversation; he was so remote and self-contained that she could barely connect this man to the flesh-and-blood one she’d seen that day in his room . . . and later in her dreams.

  Even as her shoulders tensed at the memory, she had the strangest urge to poke at him, to needle him into reacting—except, of course, he wouldn’t. He was Psy.

  On the entryway, the maligned Trev gave them a grinning salute, then shut the door, spinning the lock. The submersible was now sealed for the duration. It would take them some time to reach the surface—they didn’t have to worry about decompression sickness, since both Alaris and the sub were at a regulated pressure, but there was no getting around the fact that they were on the ocean floor, far, far beneath the surface.

  Andres, of course, could have gone up on his own. Sea changelings were built to transition from ocean to land without issue.

  “One day,” he said, as if he’d read her thoughts, “I’m going to swim up and surprise everyone.”

  Tazia raised an eyebrow. “You’re too lazy to swim that far.” His self-professed favorite thing to do in his snake form was to curl up and nap; even when he went out of the station through the special exits built for sea changeling staff, he’d told her he mostly just lazed about in the water while the others “got all acrobatic.”