"They're gone," Jared panted, weakly raising his head until his eyes locked with Scott's. "They took her."

"She could still be inside," Anika soothed, touching his shoulder. "Let our team look."

Jared roared, his gaze sweeping the group of them still gathered there. "They have taken her! I felt it the moment the barrier dissolved." He struggled to sit up, but in another spasm of coughing he pitched forward until his fore-head came to rest against the floor. "They have taken my mate," he whispered in a hoa.r.s.e voice. "How did they know about her? How?"

It was Thea who crawled closer to him. "Jared, we will find her," she said, her voice calm, but Jared appeared almost crazed, eyeing her with a maniacal stare.

Scott knelt low, taking Jared's arm. "Jared, I'm getting you into the bunker."

Jared shook him off. "No!" he thundered, but Scott wouldn't yield, and wrestled Jared to his feet. Complaining the entire time, Jared struggled with him, battling him-as if he, Scott, were one of the invaders-but with Thea's and Anika's help, they forced open the door to the bunker in the hallway outside Jared's quarters. They'd installed the panic room adjacent to Jared's quarters for security breaches just such as this one.

As the group of them shoved him inside, Jared lunged like a wild-eyed beast, forearms lifting, wrestling toward the hallway. Finally, in an act of pure desperation, Scott slugged Jared across the face hard, sending his king sprawling against a high shelf of munitions that rattled with the sheer impact of Jared's muscular, solid frame.

Jared gaped back at him, eyes widening. "You struck me," he said, rubbing his jaw in disbelief.

Anika secured the bunker door behind them, and turned to face them both. Only the three of them stood in the darkened room, surrounded by shelves of weaponry-four-foot thick walls separating their leader from the potential danger that remained somewhere outside. Anika a.s.sumed a guard position in front of the door, hands behind her back. At the moment, Scott knew she answered to him, not to their flailing king.

Jared raised his own hand, ready to battle Scott, but in his weakened condition, Scott easily overpowered him, slamming him hard against the bunker wall.

"J'Areshkadau!" Scott shouted, employing Jared's most personal Refarian name. "J'Areshkadau," he repeated, breathless as he stared his friend down. "You are out of your mind."

Jared's lungs sucked at air, his bare chest rising and falling, a sweaty sheen gleaming on his naked body. "You have never once struck me." He seemed dazed, shocked, blink-ing back at Scott. This recent battle had left him depleted not just of energy, but also bereft of the physical here and now. Scott had seen this before in the man; that keeping his natural, energized form robbed him of something... tangible. He became like the energy itself, and returning to the material realm after a long time in his Change left him confused and disoriented.

Jared glanced around them, blinking. "My lord," Scott said, softening his tone, "security has been compromised." He kept Jared pinned against the wall, one forearm positioned squarely under his chin. "You are not in body armor. Your mate is taken-from your own bedroom. Don't you see that the Antousians wanted you too? That they came for you? If you won't think of your safety, sir, then I must."

Jared stared up at the ceiling, wrestling for breath, but said nothing. "Here," Scott said after it became obvious his commander would no longer resist, "take my clothes."

He shrugged out of his sweater, tossing it to Jared, but it dropped, unused, to the floor. The air about them shimmered as Jared shifted until he stood in full battle gear, compliant, body-armored to the hilt.

"This should meet your approval," Jared answered, his voice numb.

Scott gave a nod, taking a step apart from his king. "It's safer."

Jared glanced to Anika as if seeking help, then back at him. "I mated with her, and then they just... took her," he whispered, tears glinting in his eyes. Scott felt his own eyes sting-never, not in all the years he'd known and followed this man, had Scott ever seen him cry. Yet the brightness of unshed tears filled Jared's dark eyes. "I left her unprotected," he repeated. "And they took her."

"We will get her back," Scott vowed with a vigorous nod. "We will search until we do. Starting tonight."

"She knows nothing of this war, nothing of my enemies," Jared said, dropping his head into his palms. "My G.o.d, what have I done to her?"

Scott braced a hand against Jared's shoulder, but said nothing. In his deepest heart, however, he prayed that Jared had retrieved the mitres data in the midst of his union with the human woman. He prayed it not just for Kelsey's benefit, but for all their sakes.

Chapter Twelve.

Blue shot outward, a cobalt ring of light that rippled, becoming larger as it fanned into an elliptical pattern surrounding Kelsey. A slipstream of fractured images flowed, a luminous ribbon unfurling midair like a fast-projected film strip. Blinking her eyes, she tried a glance around the room, but could see nothing past the spinning arc of imagery.

It was as if some force had magnetized her to this unknown spot, pinning her like an anxious, drunken b.u.t.terfly. She felt almost dizzy, watching the procession of memories and unrecognizable futures swirling past her eyes. They came in chaotic order: her mother swinging her in the backyard when she was just a tiny girl; snuggling between her parents in their bed one nameless Sat.u.r.day morning; her hollow-eyed mother dying in the hospital.

More pictures followed, faster than she could identify them, so fast they caused blinding pain behind her eyes, yet she couldn't force herself to look away. Not until she saw where the images were leading. Mercurial patterns of her past unfolded, one upon another-sometimes reaching out to touch an unknown future-and then the visions would recede, leaving behind a concrete past Her father hugging her at graduation... a stolen kiss from Jared on the bank of a darkened lake... next Jamie Watson, stripping her out of her slinky black dress on inauguration night...

Wincing, she watched the spiral change and lurch forward by several crucial chunks of time until the memories-obviously plucked right out of her mind- became almost current, showing her father across the table from her at the lunch they'd had last week. Lifting a rub-bery hand into the air, she actually tried to touch his face, but the fading hologram looped past her, part of a larger cobalt spiral that seemed to physically ring her where she lay on the hard, cold floor.

The coil accelerated, then slowed, landing on a single image, one that caused all of her stupefied senses to come fully alert. Jared. But not as she knew him now, with the short-cropped dark hair and the slightly scarred face-no, this other Jared wore his hair long, pulled back into a sleek ponytail, significant strands of silver and gray threading through his natural black. This was Jared from the future- somehow, this stream of time had folded inward, touching her other self's memories like a shadow of foreknowing. Some of our people even believe time to be a mirror... Those had been Jared's own words, earlier, and gasping at the scene unfolding before her eyes, she knew she was glimpsing a future that she'd not yet lived. She pressed an icy hand to her breastbone, working to still her frantic heartbeat.

In the unfolding vision, this Jared stood proud as a king: defiant, rugged, fearsome-looking, his face lined with age and deep scars. But older. So very much older. And hardened in some significant way. His right eye had a strange look to it, half closed like that of a journeyman prizefighter. As he spun to face her, she caught a better look at him: The eye was blinded, its natural almond shape marred by a vicious scar.

She lifted a hand-or tried to-yearning to feel her lover's weathered face. Such pain and suffering were etched into his dark features, she could hardly breathe with what she saw. She worked her mouth, desperate to cry out to him, but no sounds would form. Why couldn't she comfort him? He turned from her, and as he moved, his strong, confident gait seemed altered from what she knew, less steady. A slight drag to his right foot punctuated each of his steps-the aftereffects of an old injury, perhaps?

Whatever scene unfolded, he stood, one hand on his hip, surveying, while with the other he unfastened his ponytail, allowing the graying hair to fall across his shoulders. He continued watching for something or someone, glancing in her direction ever so briefly-and that was when the full truth hit her with a freight train's vengeance: This Jared wasn't nearly so old as she'd first thought, yet his body had been ravaged. The war had eaten him alive, one battle at a time. Tears began seeping out of her own undamaged eyes as she watched him move through a crowd... doing what? She couldn't tell, but there were soldiers all about him; he shouted something, and his soldiers reacted, dispersing. Then, across the gathering, he lifted his eyes. His one good one-beautiful and dark as ever-locked with hers, and words pa.s.sed between them.

Do it, love. That was what he transmitted. Do it, now! His features never changed, never shifted or altered. She ran hard. With all the life in her lungs and body, she hurled herself through the pressing throngs, her feet slapping hard soil, dust rising around her. To her left, then to her right, she saw blood and bodies and destruction in every direction. And yet she ran. Go, love! Go now! She ran because he depended on her to do so. She ran because in some very crucial way, her husband and beloved lifemate could not.

Kelsey slapped the smooth floor with her open palms, transfixed in whatever location she'd been transported to. What was happening to her? What did these images even mean? Again, she tried to open her mouth to cry out, yet her jaw wouldn't move. Her lips wouldn't move. Suspended. That was the word her captor had used: He'd said they were suspended in interdimensional s.p.a.ce.

Then, in the unfurling strip of time, she saw him. The terrifying one with the shadowy features and the cruel scar across his forehead. Marco. He spun upon her, trying to make her cower, but she wouldn't back down. She experienced her other self's memories as if they were her own; in some elemental way, as irrational as it might be, she understood they were her own memories now. She was certain of it. In those memories, she watched Marco move closer, something in his hand. A weapon brandished, silver. Her heart beat out an insane rhythm. He had the weapon trained on her! Panting, she cried out, screamed something in a language she did not know. One word, over and over: J'Areshkadau! J'Areshkadau! J'Areshkadau!

Marco meant to kill her. He lifted the weapon, bore down upon her...

It's been too long, my dear. The lip curled back; he reached toward her, ripping something from around her neck, something precious beyond measure. The tink-tink sound of her wedding ring, clattering to the floor of somewhere cold and echoing, like a science lab-yet dark as a hidden burial chamber.

The fabric of the future and the present wove together with an eerie, resounding silence, making her light-headed and woozy. Kelsey sat up, groping in the darkness, and felt Jared's strake stone burn her hand, the familiar leather strap rough beneath her fingertips. But she'd left the pendant in his bathroom, on the sink when she took the bath. Still, she felt it burn into the flesh of her palm as she held it to the floor, unwilling to relinquish the precious item- sure as if it were happening now, not to her future self. A black boot came down upon her fingers, and with a gasp she withdrew her seared hand, the strake stone ricocheting off of Marco's boot until it clattered across the metallic floor. And there, in the darkness beside it, spinning like it meant to decide all their fates, stood her wedding ring- ripped from the neck of her future self, in a future time so many years from now. That was the last memory Kelsey felt sear into her mind before feeling the world teeter away from her once again.

Facedown on a cold polished surface, Kelsey came slowly to her senses. One hand was sprawled above her head, her torso twisted painfully atop something bulky that jammed into her rib cage, and only after several head-throbbing moments did she identify it as her other hand. Her whole body felt like a withered husk, as if the firestorm she'd just traveled through had sapped her dry on the most microcellular level.

Beyond her she heard heavy breathing and a rustling sound. But she couldn't force herself to move and investigate. She released a soft groan; in answer, the hollow echo of footsteps on tile neared her head. A hard boot nudged at her shoulder.

"Wake up." That voice she remembered: Marco, her captor, the man with the vile and terrifyingly empty eyes.

With a sluggish turn, she managed to rotate her head so that her gaze fixed on his boots. "Why?" she asked, and though she meant it as a defiant question, it came out more garbled than rebellious.

Above her, he chuckled softly to himself. "Such spirit, Kelsey Bennett," he said. "Such determined spirit.

Just like your husband. You two definitely had that much in common, despite your other differences."

"You know... nothing about Jared and... me," she managed to sputter through a spasm of coughs, and this protest seemed to enrage him.

"Wake up!" he growled, giving her a more forceful shove with the tip of his boot.

She pressed her eyes closed and willed the man to disappear. Or if not that, then she willed the blinding migraine that had exploded behind her eyelids to subside. With a soft moan, she managed to roll onto her side. An explosion of light came into view, all of it muted blue and low-wattage, but still bright enough to pierce her eyes after her plummet through the darkness. Marco dropped to the floor, crouching beside her with a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

"Yes, fair Kelsey," he purred, brushing several loose curls away from her eyes. "You are mine now." He allowed his fingertips to graze her cheek, and the gesture was invasively tender. She slapped his hand away, which only made him laugh, a deep, rumbling sound. "My little spitfire," he said with a shake of his head. "Even after so much time."

She struggled to sit up, the entire room swimming, until she pressed the heels of her palms into her eyes with an agonized groan. Once during her freshman year of college she'd drunk way too many Bacardi and c.o.kes, insisting with each refill that the alcohol wasn't affecting her. The next day she'd paid for her foolishness with the most nauseating hangover of her entire college career; she felt something approximating that memory right now.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," she managed to mumble, shivering with the sensation.

Marco reached inside his jacket, and then, with a movement of his hand, produced a Sprite. "This will help." She had the idea that the soft drink had been something else entirely just one moment earlier. Greedily, she popped it open and sipped from it, praying that her stomach would stop its uncertain roiling. So he was helping her now? She didn't bother to question his motives, not with the way her stomach flip-flopped acidly.

"Dimensional illness," he explained, rocking back on his heels to study her. "It happens."

She made no attempt to answer him, but after a time, her stomach began to still itself and the headache improved a little. Only then did she begin to steal glances around the room where she'd found herself. Everything in it gleamed: polished steel and ceramics, instrument panels of unnamed type (that did not look to be of earthly origin, either), and then a warren of tunnels that ran off this main room in several angled directions, vanishing into darkness.

Marco paced the room, stopping momentarily to enter some kind of data into one of the dimly lit panels, but said nothing more. It seemed he was giving her time to recover her senses. "Where are we?" she asked once she'd battled away the overpowering nausea. If she could figure out where he'd taken her, then maybe she could devise a way to escape. All those tunnels and open shafts had to lead somewhere, after all.

"Don't play coy with me," he replied, his voice tightening over the words like a vise.

"I'm serious-where are we?"

"You know exactly what this place is," he insisted. "He brought you here the night he proposed to you."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Proposed? He clearly thought that she and Jared were married already- and that the proposal had happened here, which it hadn't. Jared had essentially popped that question in the bathtub earlier tonight, not in this cold set of chambered rooms.

Scrutinizing her with his black gaze, Marco narrowed his thick-lashed eyes. "Your plan won't work, lovely Kelsey," he said. "I see what you're up to, and as ever I admire your tenacious strength, but trust me-you will fail."

"Marco, you know what's going on, but I'm in the dark here," she said. "If you want something from me -and you obviously do-then you need to bring me up to speed on things. First of all, you keep talking about Jared like we're married, calling me Kelsey Bennett, and you're just flat wrong."

"Quiet!" He spun on her like a black hawk, and he raised his arm. Suddenly some sort of supernatural pall descended on the room. It was as if he'd called upon the elements, causing shadow to fall upon them both. She shivered, blinking up at his face, a hardened mask of fury. "You will tell me everything, Kelsey, and you will start with your name."

She tilted her chin, a plan beginning to form. "No."

The fury intensified and her enemy swooped low. "Then you will yield to me!" he thundered, and grasped her face roughly in his calloused hands.

Marco held her head between his palms with an unrelenting force. "What is so important about this time?" he asked. "Why did he choose now?"

"He?" Kelsey asked, genuinely confused. "Now?"

"What was Jared trying to accomplish by choosing this particular time to send you back?" he pressed. "What is so critical about now?"

"I-I don't understand." Thoughts raced one after another through her mind, but one thing was clear-as she'd first suspected in Jared's bedroom, this man was not from her time; he was obviously from some future where she and Jared were already married. Probably that same time she'd glimpsed earlier, the one where Jared's body had been ravaged by the war. While all of these courses of thought defied science and logic, the foundations of her world, she reminded herself that Einstein himself had thought time travel possible, at least in theory. Perhaps it was more than just a theory for these aliens.

"Kelsey, he targeted this time, this day," Marco explained, with a strange kind of patience-as if they were coconspirators. "I need to know why."

Kelsey smiled in victory. "I'm not telling you anything."

All pretense of partnership dissipated. "You're so pathetic. Both of you." He sneered. "Your precious husband sacrificed everything to protect the location of the mitres. His family, friends, even his throne." He shook his dark head derisively, one fingertip reaching to trace the outline of his scar. "And then at the very last moment he got careless. Betrayed its location by sending you back to now."

Kelsey gasped. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I followed you. To these chambers." He paused, sweeping his arm about them. "The mitres. And after you prepared to use the weapon, I stopped you."

The muddled images she'd seen while pa.s.sing through interdimensional s.p.a.ce suddenly pulled into focus. "You killed me. In the future."

"Not quite," he whispered. He dropped his hands away.

"In the end, your king couldn't protect the mitres." His voice grew hushed, almost seductive. "And he couldn't even protect you, the one he valued most of all."

"That's not true." Kelsey shook her head forcefully.

"Are you so sure? You weren't there." He reached out and touched a stray strand of her hair, causing chill b.u.mps to rise on Kelsey's skin. "There were only the two of us, my dear. I enjoyed sifting your mind to learn his pitiful plan." She thought of what she'd seen in the slipstream, how Jared's future self had urged her to run. All the experiences and emotions of her other self pulsed through her body now, in this time, causing tears to sting her eyes. She owned the memories now; they were her own, sure as if she'd lived them. She felt a lifetime's love for her warrior husband; he'd counted on her with his very life to accomplish whatever plan he'd devised. And she'd failed him!

Kelsey's breath caught in her throat, and she flinched as Marco let his fingertips linger on her face, tracing a path down the skin of her neck. "But you were strong. You shut me out, at least from that area of your mind." He looked at her significantly. "I couldn't learn why he chose this time, but now you're going to tell me." His fingers stopped at the base of Kelsey's throat, and she could feel her pulse throbbing beneath his large hand. His black eyes met hers with a maelstrom's force, and she couldn't make herself look away. Why does he have such immense power over me?

"And then you're going to draw him here, out into the open." He let his hand drop.

Oh, G.o.d . . . he's here for Jared. To destroy him, before that future can happen.

"I don't even know who you are," she choked.

"True. But I know you extremely well, Kelsey Bennett." His dark eyes flared for a moment with an emotion she couldn't read. "It's one reason that I've come."

Kelsey met his gaze and tried to form some kind of plan. She had to protect Jared at all costs, had to lure this stranger away from him. She shivered because somehow she knew that part of Marco's mission was to end Jared's life, and then to set about changing the course of the future in his own ruinous way.

And with that, she made a fateful decision.

Chapter Thirteen.

Jared had experienced grief many times in his thirty years, until now believing that he'd identified all its faces. He'd known the sorrow of sending a friend out on an aerial mission, never to see her return; he'd held a comrade on the field of battle as he drew his last breath; he'd mourned his beloved cousin, Valyre, after the soldier's disappearance on a recon mission when they were both twenty; and then there had been his parents' deaths. Barely ten on the day of their murder, he had swallowed his grief when destiny had first laid the responsibility of leading the Refarian people at his feet. Yes, he had endured griefs season a thousand times over, and thought himself a man accustomed to it-inured to it, even.

But nothing, nothing in the vast emptiness of the universe and all its fickle dealings, had ever prepared him for this moment of absolute loss. His bedroom stood empty before him, all the promise of the past hours wrenched from his hands like the plaything of some cruel G.o.d.

His chambers hummed with complex power-they all felt it. He had ushered the soldiers away, holding back only Thea and Scott, since otherwise the powerful imprints left vibrating in the room's atmosphere might be disrupted. Now only the three of them remained-Thea because her skills of intuition were the most refined within the compound; Scott because as an Antousian hybrid, he had ways of seeing unlike any of them; and Jared because he was bonded to Kelsey as deeply as was possible between two souls. Together, they three held the best chance of win-nowing through the energized impressions here to produce some trail of evidence.

Thea knew he'd mated with Kelsey tonight, though she said nothing to acknowledge it-and for that, his heart thanked his cousin. From the moment they'd joined their power within the helix, his thoughts had been open to her. She'd expressed her grief at his choice then, as they united in their energized forms; nothing more remained to be said. Now she served not only her king, but the one he'd taken as queen- her queen as well.

Kneeling in the middle of the floor, her face drained of color, Thea reached with all of her senses. She hummed slightly, both arms wrapped around her body, rocking as she knelt on the same pillows where he and Kelsey had made love not long ago. He wondered what private moments might be unveiled to her, but the time for propriety had vanished along with Kelsey.

Pausing in the room's center, Scott scowled, turning first one direction and then another. "What do you see, Lieutenant Dillon?" Jared deliberately forced his manner into that of leader, not a desperate lover.

Scott said nothing, but resumed his pacing. His sensory abilities always involved movement, a physical outworking of the man's interior life. Only Jared sat, quiet and still. "One man," Scott finally told him in a whisper. "He came alone and he left with her."

Jared swallowed hard, urging Scott on with a firm nod. "What else*? I need to know, soldier."

"Refarian," Scott continued, narrowing his eyes as he gazed about the room. "Full-blooded, sir, no doubt about that." Scott paused, sniffing at the air like a timber wolf. "Rogue all the way."

Jared's hands clenched at his sides. "Why?" he cried, no longer able to control his simmering emotions. Why would this man have taken her? Why now, of all nights? On the floor, Thea's humming ceased, and he lowered his voice again: "Tell me, Lieutenant Dillon, of this man's motives."

Scott met his gaze with a forceful expression, one that spoke of endless loyalty, boundless commitment to his king. "They are obscured from me, my lord," he replied, "but I promise you I will discover his intentions."