The blade bit hard, the tip deflecting off her ribs, a blinding flare of white-hot agony. Death hadn’t been his goal. His strike was precise, designed to terrify her, to drive her into a frantic, dire survival mode.
It galled her that he knew her so well, severed her bond with the Veil so thoroughly, with his poisoned words that she lost all touch with reason. Bleeding profusely, clutching her wound, she fled through the trees toward the glade. Her thoughts narrowed to a single, white-hot point of madness.Destroy the font. Don't let them have it. Destroy it all.
* * *
Below the sanctuary,the world tore apart for the rest of the team.
Flash dropped to his knees, overcome with the intensity of the memory. Beside him, Fly, Easy, and Twister collapsed into the dirt, their hands clutching their heads, groaning under the sheer, suffocating weight of the psychic backwash. Flash was utterly paralyzed. The dark violence, the primal, heavy emotions of a dying empire, and the sheer, bleeding desperation of Quri’s flight overwhelmed his nervous system.
Then, the perspective forcefully shifted, throwing him out of the dirt and into the saddle.
Francisco rode hard within the attacking conquistador column. Sweat stung his eyes, dripped from his brow onto the leather of his jerkin. The air was thick with the coppery tang of blood and the sharp, acrid smell of fear, a palpable cloud rising from the fleeing people ahead. His warhorse strained beneath him, his muscles bunching and releasing with everyground-eating stride, his breath coming in great, panicked huffs.All around him, Spanish steel was cutting down Quri’s countrymen, the slaughter indiscriminate and total. He was a lieutenant of the conquering army, a scholar-soldier who came believing in a divine mission and watched it curdle into a mortal sin as he marched through a sophisticated world his comrades were dismantling. In the months he had spent away from her, his loyalties had fundamentally shattered. Quri was in the city. She would be ground to dust in the jaws of this conquest.
With a wild, panicked curse, Cisco jerked his horse’s reins, breaking formation. To love her fully was to accept that everything he was a part of was wrong, and he couldn’t reconcile the man he was supposed to be with the woman he was drawn to. He spurred his mount into a brutal gallop, abandoning his platoon, his honor, his oath, and his life. He was out of his mind with love, a manic, consuming madness that blocked out the roaring fires and the screams of the dying. Nothing else existed. If he died a traitor, let the crows have him. She was all that mattered.
The sword in his hand remained unbloodied, a heavy, useless weight of cold steel that he gripped so tightly his knuckles were white, but his hands weren’t clean, stained with all the conquest he’d participated in up to the moment he met her. A warrior followed orders, but he could no longer do so. Dense trees blurred past on either side, and the dirt kicked up by the charging hooves of the column was a choking, gritty fog that coated his tongue and the back of his throat.
He burst into the sacred glade, dismounting on the fly, just as the horse could give no more. Through the dark, tangled branches, he saw her. Quri was running full out toward the stone basin of the font, her hand pressed to her bleeding side, her breath coming in ragged, wet sobs.
“Quri!” he screamed, his voice cracking with terror. This was the night they’d died, and the madness in him spiraled into despair that had no walls.
She didn't even slow. Moonlight caught a glint, and dread coursed through him. The blade. At his back was certain death, in front of him was the same, the pall of men on horseback, closing in, the night turning as black as the blood pooling on the forest floor.
The vision cut off like a severed wire.
Flash snapped back to his physical body, but the boundary between the 21st century and the 16th remained, two men in one body. Still caught in Francisco’s suffocating fear, his only thought was to get to her. Without a word to the groaning team beside him, without thought, he tore open a corridor to the glade, and he plunged through the golden threshold, leaving the others behind.
Flash stumbled out of the rift into the moonlit glade, the air sharp and damp. “Quri!” he roared, the age-old name ripping from his throat.
From the edge of the clearing, Lechuza emerged, her eyes wide, wild, and glassy with the remnants of the trauma. They ran toward each other, driven by a raw, terrified need that bypassed five hundred years of separation. They collided directly in front of the inert stone font, their arms locking around one another with bruising force.
On the verge of total hysteria, his chest heaving, he grabbed the hem of her shirt, dragging it wildly over her head to expose her torso. His fingers scraped over her bare ribs, searching for the blood, his breath hitching in an intense, shuddering sob when he found only smooth, whole skin.
Lechuza’s hands were just as wild. She tore at his clothes, her palms finding the jagged ridge of his old scar, pressing her handsagainst it as if she could hold his soul inside his body. She was weeping openly, the tears hot against his neck.
They sank to the ground together, their legs tangling, refusing to lose contact for even a fraction of a second.
"Don't leave me, my heart,” Flash whispered, the words tumbling out of him in a desperate, broken Spanish, his chest heaving against hers. "Don't leave me again. I'll die a thousand times over if you'll just stay." He had her against his chest, rocking her, and his breath wouldn’t even out.
Lechuza locked against him, her face buried in his shoulder, she sobbed, "Never again." Her voice carried the aged, rhythmic cadence of Quechua. "I’m yours. I will always be yours."
Neither spoke the other’s tongue, yet the comprehension was instantaneous, striking straight into their hearts.
As their bodies pressed closer, the skin of their ribs scraped together. The chakana tattoos touched.
A sudden, blinding heat ignited at the point of contact, a passion so intense and localized it made them both cry out in shock. Flash’s body reacted instantly, his dick growing fiercely hard, throbbing and full between his legs with an ache that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with getting inside this woman he couldn’t live without. There was no comfort in this frenetic joining. The joining was theirs, had always been theirs, fulfilling a beautiful cosmic rule.
They ripped the rest of their clothes away in a frenzy of fabric, their movements turbulent and wild. They fell to the earth, devouring each other with bruising mouths, hands clawing at skin, bodies slamming together on the mossy ground, taking back what five centuries had kept from them.
His hands found her breasts, squeezing the soft, ripe weight, his thumbs brushing over the hard peaks of her nipples until she cried out against his mouth. Fingers clutching at her body, they roamed down the curve of her hip, tracing the line of her thighuntil they slipped between her legs. He felt how wet and ready she was for him, the heat of her a searing promise that made his own body ache with a hopeless need. Her hand curled around his erection, hot and impossibly hard, and she guided him to her with a sob of pure, unadulterated need.
Lechuza roughly threaded her fingers deep into his hair, dragging his head down, forcing him to look at her. As he thrust into her, aching, fully alive, and utterly lost to the hot, wet glove of her welcoming, eager body, taking all of him, she cried out, her voice a mix of English and the past. “You’re him…Cisco.” Her voice broke on the name. “I couldn’t see you. I couldn’t remember. But my heart never once stopped holding yours.”
He thrust hard into her, so deep he got lost, his voice a ragged growl against her lips. “Quri. MyQuri Killa,” he responded, his voice ragged. “You’ve always been her, and God, how I’ve wanted you for centuries. Give me everything.”
His words triggered a reckoning in which the physical bond met the cosmic.
The timeless font,ghostedback over the physical world. For three feet around the stone, the modern vines withered and disappeared, replaced by the clean, sharp edges of Inca masonry. Blue chakana glyphs carved into the basin flared to life, casting a brilliant lapis lazuli luminescence across their tangled bodies. Water, clear, heavy, and smelling of high glaciers, bubbled from the dry center, its current echoing against the limestone cliff.
