Planet Sand (Planet Origins Book 5) Read online

  Another one down.

  Dolpheus wheeled on the third man who’d been ogling Ilara as someone yelped behind me.

  I couldn’t get my head to move enough to look behind me. I imagined it was Kai, taking the fifth man out, but I wasn’t sure.

  My eyes were heavy, droopy, like they’d be at the end of a long night of indulging in the heady nectar the courtiers on O preferred.

  “Stay with me,” Ilara was saying. But if anything would get me to stay with her, it was the love and grief the swirling cosmos of her eyes conveyed. If I hadn’t already known she loved me, I’d have known then. Her eyes brimmed with love and tears, the woman who’d just defended herself against three men with guns impossible to reconcile with the image that came in and out of focus above my face.

  This Ilara was all love and caring and fear and loss. She might not be a princess, but she was all I’d ever wanted.

  “Look at me, dammit. Keep your eyes open.”

  I wanted to do as she asked, I really did. I wanted to look at her forever. To drink those eyes that contained enough faithum for several galaxies. That body that came close to awakening my passion even as my body contemplated leaving this world, all worlds. The lips that had opened worlds to my wildest dreams, where it was safe to indulge in all my imaginings and bare all parts of my body and eternality.

  It felt as if I might be moving, but I couldn’t be sure until I felt sand beneath my legs again. I no longer felt the agonizing pain in my calf. It and the pain of my shoulder melded with every other part of my body that screamed in pain until my entire body was a pincushion of numbed tingles.

  Then the rest of the world disappeared behind a veil of her long, dark hair. She shielded me from everything but her and me. She offered me her love as, I supposed, a final parting gift.

  I didn’t know what happened to the eternality once it left the body. I found myself wishing I did. I so desperately wanted to see and touch this woman again. My experience with her wasn’t complete. There was so much more of her I wanted to taste, touch, feel... and mostly love.

  I’d flirted with death a million times as a warrior. But now, nearing death, I discovered myself a lover.

  In fact, I appeared to be finished with fighting. The willingness to fight to hold on to this life was fleeing. There was so much I still wanted to do, but I was shutting down. I could feel it happening.

  My chances to do and say were gone. I couldn’t even muster regret for the five and a half centuries I’d still had left to live. Now Ilara would live them without me. There’d be no one left to protect her as she faced the treacherous existence of a princess—and then queen—on Origins. Dolpheus might protect her out of a sense of loyalty to me. But I’d no longer be there to look out for her as my fathers plotted to finish what they started, and end her once and for all.

  “No, Tanus, no. Please. Don’t leave me.” Ilara pleaded, and every instinct in me would ordinarily fight to grant any wish she asked for in that voice. But my instincts had already shut down. I didn’t need them anymore. Death was already approaching.

  “I can’t do this without you,” she said.

  But of course she could. She was strong. She was the fiercest creature I’d ever met. Fiercer even than a she-dragon. Perhaps fiercer even than a mowab, and definitely more ferocious than any woman that might ride one.

  As if she read my muddled thoughts, as if she finally remembered who she was—a fucking kickass princess of an entire planet—and that she could mind speak better than the best of them, she said, tenderly, with a world of defeat in the short words, “I don’t want to go on without you.”

  But she would. Of course she would. Ilara wasn’t a quitter any more than I was.

  “Look at me, my love, look at me. Don’t close those beautiful eyes.”

  I fluttered my eyelids open. I got to watch every feature of that face that stole my breath away move closer to mine. Her lips parted slightly and then pressed against mine, the wetness of her tears washing the sins from me, soothing the parched, cracked skin, soothing my heart.

  “Goodbye, my love,” I managed to whisper against her lips.

  Her chest heaved and her sob rolled across my mouth, but she refused to take it from mine. “Don’t say that, please don’t say that.” Her words were muffled, but I felt every desperate word.

  “I love you.” When I said the words, I wished I’d said them to her more. Every damn day, whether she was at my side or not. There wasn’t enough time to say it enough times for her to realize how deep my love ran. “I’ll love you always, wherever I am.”

  Ilara kissed me with a passion I wished I could respond to. But I couldn’t. Nothing about my body was responding the way it usually did. Never had my dick ignored any of her kisses. But it hung against my leg, limp like the rest of me.

  Then Ilara let the rest of the world in. She pulled the curtain of her hair from around my head, and the world revealed itself a harsh, bright, and unforgiving place.

  Dolpheus’ face was next to mine now, and I thought perhaps he’d picked up my hand. I felt something in my fingers I hadn’t moments before.

  “My friend,” he said, his words hitching before he could grasp elusive composure. He opened his mouth to say something more, but closed it. He looked at me with those deep, brandy eyes that drove the ladies wild. There I discovered all he wouldn’t say, volumes on friendship and loyalty and brotherhood. Of a very different kind of love than I shared with Ilara, but that was just as meaningful. He’d had my back for centuries. With me leaving, who would have his?

  My heart lurched for my friend. I wanted to continue to protect him. He wasn’t as prickly and ferocious as legend made out him to be, whether on the battlefield or in the bedroom. He was an orphan flung into the harsh universe, who’d needed the support of a brother. That we didn’t share blood meant nothing. I hoped I’d go to a place where I couldn’t miss him.

  Yes, he was definitely holding my hand, because he was squeezing it hard enough that I felt it, even when I barely felt anything anymore.

  My eyelids drooped. Dolpheus didn’t ask me to keep them open like Ilara did. He wanted me to have peace, even if I left him in turmoil.

  I was on my way somewhere that I couldn’t hurt anymore when I heard my name called by a voice I hadn’t heard since I was a young boy. Was this an angel come to deliver me somewhere kind? To make up for the cruelty of life?

  Tanus. The voice came again, as did the unique pronunciation of the vowels in my name. There was only one person in my entire life who’d ever said my name like that.

  I looked into a face I thought I’d never see again and smiled. My eternality was being delivered to its completion. Returning to the inception of life.

  “Mother?” I whispered.

  And then the darkness of nothing and everything claimed me, once and for all.

  23

  This dying business was strange and not at all as I’d expected it to be. The Devoteds on Origins spouted notions of an existence after the death of the body, where the eternality continued on in some sort of energetic expression, unburdened by the limitations of the physical world. It was an existence free of pain of any kind—or so they said.

  I’d never invested much belief into the Devoteds’ dogma, or in anybody else’s teachings. There was only one way to determine the truth of something, and that wasn’t through an interpreter. But I realized I’d harbored expectations just the same. I’d thought I wouldn’t feel anything more once I closed my eyes for the final time. I’d imagined I wouldn’t experience any of the heartbreak of leaving lover and friend behind, of knowing I’d never share with them all that we still could’ve shared, if not for the damnable trip to Planet Sand, with its cruel and indifferent ways of killing.

  I’d seen the face of my mother, the one I hadn’t seen since she left me as a boy of eight. That could mean only one thing. She’d died and was coming now to guide me home, to a place gentler and more forgiving than the life I’d led ever was.
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br />   I hadn’t seen my mother since before I grew fuzz on my face, but it was undoubtedly her. No one else had eyes like hers, with that languorous expression. More wrinkles than I’d remembered sprang from the corners of her eyes like starbursts, as if life had been full of sorrow before she died.

  I wasn’t happy she was dead. I wasn’t happy about anything, and I was confused I could feel any emotions at all. But I was relieved she was here to lead me away, and not for the normal reasons. If she was dead, than it would explain why she’d left her son to a father and a husband she’d abandoned for his instability. Understanding that she hadn’t returned for me because she no longer had a body to return with was a balm that soothed injuries that had festered for centuries, until it was easier to pretend they didn’t exist at all.

  Her face, the one that looked much like mine, was there again, hovering above me, brown hair cascading downward. She smiled a sad smile that matched the sad lines around her eyes.

  When she reached a hand to cup my cheek that was so gentle it felt like little more than a caress, my mind reeled and lurched. Had I not known better, I would’ve sworn that touch was real.

  But I was dead.

  Something nagged at me—hard, unrelenting, pushing me brusquely toward some revelation I was already certain I didn’t want to have. Shouldn’t the unsettling sensation of nagging be absent from the afterlife?

  When her lips moved, I couldn’t make out the words she spoke.

  She gave me a light slap to the cheek. My eyes widened as big as they’d ever been, I pulled my head back to retreat from her, and it exploded into a cacophony of blinding light, shattering sound, and thumping agony.

  What kind of a fucking afterlife was this?

  My mother, the sad angel, spoke again. This time, I registered every word she said. Each one left me desperate to run away, without any place to run to.

  “Wake up, my son. You won’t be dying today.”

  I passed out just to spite the afterlife or her or something. Because a melee of confusion and hurt was already coming to boil in my dead heart, and I didn’t even understand why yet.

  When I next registered something outside of myself, it was Ilara’s face, and the joy that swept across it suggested that maybe I wasn’t dead, because I wouldn’t consider the possibility that Ilara might be dead along with me. If anyone was meant to live on, it was she.

  She began to weep, silent tears streaming down those beautiful cheeks, the ones I hadn’t thought I’d ever have the chance to plant kisses upon again.

  Instinctively, I reached for her hand. My mission in life, if I’d ever had one, was to comfort and protect this woman. I moved without thought.

  In a flash, her fingers squeezed mine. The pain wrenched up my arm and into my shoulder. This didn’t make sense. There was no way I could begin to understand it. But I knew what she’d say even before she said it.

  “Oh my god. I thought you were dead, Tanus.”

  Aye, so had I.

  But clearly I wasn’t. Every throbbing pain confirmed it, every ache that wrung out my bones.

  “I’m so relieved you came back to me. I know we’ve only known each other for a few days, or maybe it’s been the lifetime you say it has, but I don’t want to have to live without you. Ever.”

  Her words were heartfelt, a significant expression of vulnerability for a woman as fierce as she was.

  As much as her presence intoxicated and lured me to desire more of her, I barely registered what she was saying. I could think only of one thing. My thoughts revolved around different expressions of the same, exact preoccupation: If I wasn’t dead, and I was, indeed, alive, then what the fuck was my mother doing here?

  Ilara’s beautiful, full, sensuous lips were still moving. But I no longer processed what she was saying when the revelation hit me. Of course. I hadn’t died, but I’d been close to it. When I’d seen my mother, it was in the space between life and death, the stage where the possible and the impossible melded, where the real and the unreal blended. It was in the space that a mother who abandoned her son and then died could reach out to the man he’d become.

  That was it. I allowed myself a smile because I’d seen my mother for a fleeting moment that would carry me through until the true moment of my death, centuries from now, I hoped. She’d abandoned me, that I’d manage to forgive her for now that I realized she hadn’t returned to me because she couldn’t, not because she didn’t want to, not because she didn’t think it a whole load of fuckery to leave to an eight year old boy. Life wasn’t fair, and that I’d learned to accept a long time before. But it became more bearable knowing my mother hadn’t left me in the clutches of a mowab of a man and not looked back. That had been an unbearable burden I’d carried into manhood, and never figured out how to rid myself of.

  Ilara interpreted my smile as one for her, and she dazzled me with her own, beaming at me. I could move on now.

  I was a warrior. Near death experiences were a regrettable but necessary part of my vocation. If I was alive and merely injured, I’d recover and then we’d try to sort out this mess we were in.

  I squeezed the hand of the woman I loved, ignoring the spasms of pain that brought my flesh to life. “Hello, my love,” I managed around cracked, split lips.

  She met my eyes and I thought myself the luckiest man—now clearly alive. The cosmos of her irises swirled hypnotically, sucking me into them, into the promises of a future with her.

  Then she looked over her shoulder. I tried to follow her gaze, but it hurt to lift my head.

  When her eyes returned to mine, they twinkled, and I grew excited anticipating what she’d do next. My dick stirred enough beneath the cloth that covered me to affirm it was working as it usually did, that it, too, had survived death, that before long I’d be able to put it to satisfying use with this woman that could stir me from the nearly dead.

  When she said, “There are some people here who want to see you,” I prepared myself for the rowdy welcome back to life from Dolpheus and perhaps Kai. Maybe even Lila.

  But when my mother’s face replaced Ilara’s, I choked.

  “Hello again, my son,” she said.

  And I said nothing in reply. Not a single word.

  When she looked behind her and motioned to someone, I experienced real fear. And when she said, “This is your brother,” I passed out again just to spite her and the man who looked eerily like me, and all the fuckery life welcomed me with, a sour reward for surviving death.

  Fuck them. Fuck it all.

  24

  I came to long before I opened my eyes and let on that I was awake, and I opened my eyes before I’d managed to come to terms with the seeming reality that my mother was here, on another planet, and that she seemed to have a brother I’d never met with her.

  As much as I wished to deny the possibility that my mother was alive and here—against all odds—I wouldn’t. It was her. More than four centuries did little to dull my memories of the woman I’d believed would always nurture me or the pain of her abandonment. Her features, a more youthful version, were seared into my mind like a scar.

  And my supposed brother? Well, only a fool would deny how much he looked like me, and I was no fool. Desperate and panicked and nauseated, yes—though perhaps the nausea was from whatever was being pumped through my veins—but I wouldn’t discount this man as my brother, even if every single part of me wanted to. Even if I longed to shout at the top of my lungs that life was unfair, to bring me a mother when I had no more need for her, when it was more painful to see her now than to die without this torture. And a brother... a man who’d been no more than the seed of an idea when my mother left me, one that’d been easy to dissolve into nothing. I’d never imagined a brother. Or a sister. I’d never imagined any blessings coming into the life of a woman who’d abandon the son she already had when he still needed her.

  Shouldn’t there be a special kind of punishment for those who abandoned the vulnerable? Perhaps not. But that didn’t mean I h
ad to lie here, trapped in a bed, whizzing and whirring contraptions pinning me down, and play the role of the dutiful son. For that, she’d have to be a dutiful mother.

  I was in a small room with dim lighting, and I listened until I thought my mother had left. Then I finally opened my eyes.

  I had a few moments before Ilara discovered me. She was pacing the small room like a caged cat, desperate to pounce, to do something that would make a difference. I recognized the energy of feeling helpless, of wanting to save the person you loved without seeing how. Her muscles were long and her movements quick, looping her around in my direction in seconds.

  Her eyes whisked to my face, and she ran to my bedside, where she took the seat next to my bed. “Oh my god.” She smiled, and only then did I notice how tired she was. I suspected she’d slept in that chair. “Hi. It’s so good to see you.” She took my hand, careful to avoid the tube that snaked out of it.

  I attempted a smile back, but the gesture fell short. I sensed movement at the door and turned my head, ignoring the throbbing pain at my temples.

  It was he. The man that looked like me, except for the gray eyes instead of my mother’s green. Like my green ones.

  Ilara followed my gaze. “Oh, Narcisse, tell your mother he’s awake.”

  “No,” I whispered.

  Ilara looked at me. “No? Why not?” She turned her head back toward the door but my brother, Narcisse, was gone. When she looked at me again, her eyes were wary, as if they finally grasped the pain that boiled just beneath my sore and tender flesh. “Why don’t you want him to tell your mother you’re awake?”

  It was hard to remember that even though this woman looked just like the one I’d shared so much of myself with in late night secrets, whispered against the hair that fanned across my pillow, she might not be that woman. More importantly, she didn’t remember what that woman was supposed to remember, those secrets she was supposed to tuck against her bosom and treasure.