She cupped either side of his jaw with slender hands. He bent at her coaxing, his moan low when her lips gently teased his open and her tongue slipped inside his mouth. He lifted her in his arms, reveling in the feel and scent of her asgehennablood roiled and bubbled in his veins.
Lenore’s fingers slid into his hair to massage his scalp. She ended their kiss with a soft sucking tug on his lower lip. Her breasts pressed against his chest in a shallow rise and fall. “When this is over and we’re home safe again, I would like another glass of pomegranate wine.”
He set her down and loosened his embrace. The ashen pallor from earlier had faded. Her cheeks were rosy and her mouth full and red from his kiss. “We will share a glass in a winter graveyard,” he promised.
“And you will recite verse to me.” Her lips turned up, and the corners of her eyes crinkled.
“Then kiss you under the moon.” He traced the contours of her corset stays beneath her bodice.
“It will be terribly improper.” Her hand glided down his arm.
He captured her hand and kissed her fingertips. “We won’t care.”
“No, no we won’t.”
A last kiss, urgent and hot enough to send the blaze of a blush from Lenore’s cheeks to her neck. Even her ears were pink. She left the berth before Nathaniel, her work boots tapping a quick rhythm on the gangway as she headed for sick bay to help prepare for receipt of the injured from the crippled ships.
He watched until she turned a corner, disappearing from view. He would share the wine and recite poetry and for a second time, put his heart on a plate before her. “This time, Lenore, tell me yes instead of no.”
They reached the Redan in record time, theTerebellum’sengines proving their worth and Nettie’s statement proclaiming the ship’s impressive speed. None cheered over their speedy arrival. Crewmen stood at their posts, faces tight with resolve or slack with disbelieving horror.
One crewman spoke, his voice high and thin as if he squeezed the words out of a constricted windpipe. “Blood o’ Christ, would you look at that.”
Nathaniel’s gut was a snarled knot that churned and twisted itself around his ribs. He forced down the fear and made himself stare into the great, lightning-fractured wall known as the Redan.
Twenty-seven years earlier, a renegade group of outcast guild mages, greedy for limitless power, met in a secret convocation and proceeded to rip a hole in the universal fabric that separated worlds, a small tear but one that grew like a lesion on a plague victim. What squirmed and crawled through made the worst nightmare conjured by a human seem a sweet daydream by comparison.
The Guild responded, using a magic similar to that which made the dimensional rift to build a barrier wall called the Redan . Half the guild mages in service to the Queen died in the effort. Since then, countless airships and crews from every nation defended the wall and the countries it shielded against monstrous abominations known as horrifics. In Nathaniel’s opinion, Hell’s levels didn’t go deep enough to hold these spawn of some dark, pustulant god.
TheTerebellumswung to port, and he got his first look at the crippled ships. Two were missing engine gondolas or propellers, another a portion of the control room gondola. They hung in the air, the catastrophic loss of power turning them into helpless prey unable to avoid or flee a strike from the rift’s abominations. A fourth ship spewed black smoke from its forecastle engine. The bow section of its steel envelope was flensed away from the hull from top to keel.
Lightning flashed across the Redan, illuminating a kraken-like thing with multiple bulbous eyes, tentacles edged with barbed spines like harpoons and three mouths. Those gaping maws were big enough to swallow theTerebellumwhole and ask for more. Fangs filled the mouths like sharpened menhirs, eager to shred anything that drew too close.
The thing crowded against another equally giant horrific that raked a seven-finger clawed hand along the Redan. The barrier held but tore in spots. Before it could heal itself, a claw inserted into one of the tears and casually gouged away the control gondola from the airship spewing black smoke. Bodies plummeted toward the ocean below. The broken airship yawed first to port before pitching back on her stern to follow those who sailed her.
Nathaniel’s knees turned to water at the sight. TheTerebellumwas too far away to hear the screams of the falling, but he heard them in his head, memories of his last minutes on thePollux. They made his ears ring. The weakness didn’t last. Rage, with a hard thirst for revenge, took its place, incinerating every fear and hesitation. No one aboard this ship would die like that. Not the crewmen, not him, not Nettie, and most definitely not Lenore.
Nettie’s voice crackled down the receiver tubes issuing orders. A burst of activity followed her commands. Nathaniel didn’t wait for her to request his help. He bolted for the ship’s center, bypassing the ladder connected to the B deck where the keel-based weapons platform was located. The newly made spirits of crewmen from the other ships flowed behind and in front of him, their ethereal chorus firing the already hotgehennainside him and making his armor sizzle and smoke.
“Shred them, gunner. Destroy every last one.”
A junior gunner standing by the turret’s entrance gaped at him. Nathaniel halted in front of him. “Where’s the control room speaker tube?” The gunner pointed to a tube attached to a girder.
Nettie’s long pause traveled the entire length of the tube when Nathaniel told her “Captain Widderschynnes, this is the Guardian requesting permission to enter and man the weapons platform.”
He waited, muscles thrumming in anticipation of seating himself behind the pair of Dahlgren guns to blast away at the horrifics lurking in the rift.
“Permission granted.” Nettie’s voice held an odd note—of both pride and a touch of fear. Despite her assurances that he’d have to be the one to bell the cat, she did it for him. “Nathaniel Gordon, if you die again, I will take your sorry carcass and hang it from my ship’s shield spike!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lenore clutched at one of the bed frames bolted to girders in the sick bay as the floor beneath her feet vibrated from the cannon fire theTerebellumspewed into the Redan from her gunnery deck and the rotating turret housed in the weapons platform under the keel.
“Nathaniel Gordon, if you die again...”
The shock of Nettie’s statement booming across the entire length of the airship made her reel.
Nettie had lost her mind. Too many years fighting in the Redan had done this to her, made her see ghosts of loved ones aboard her ship. Lenore was certain of it. Nathaniel Gordon had died five years earlier. No one died twice, not even him.
