Unending Desire: Outlawed Realm, Book 1 (7 page)

“No. You wouldn’t have believed me if I had.”

“Then why?” she pressed.

Yearning swept over his ruggedly masculine features. Just as quickly, he pushed it aside, his expression becoming distant. “What does it matter?”

“I want to know.”

“It changes nothing.”

“Dammit, tell me.”

“I wanted to be near you,” he admitted. “To feel the warmth of your hand.” He glanced down at her fingers embracing his. “To hear you without the barrier of the portal. To experience your scent.”

“We lived and worked together,”
he’d said about Sazaar. “
What you call love didn’t exist.”

Regina tightened her fingers around his.

With what appeared to be resignation, Nikoli pulled his hand from hers and stepped back.

Frustrated by his reaction, defiant, she asked, “Why are you pulling away from me when it’s obvious you don’t want to?”

At her candor, surprise registered on his face. Not allowing it to change his mind, he concentrated on the portable instrument he held. Regina noticed how his hand trembled.

“We have to leave,” he said. “We can’t stay in here much longer.”

Her caution returned. “Why? What is this room?”

“It’s where Sazaar and I worked together.”

“On what?”

He shoved his fingers through his hair, dragging it off his forehead. “Detecting the portals, protecting our people from what’s on the other side. I’m what those in your dimension would call a quantum physicist. Sazaar’s a theoretical physicist. This is our lab.”

Regina glanced around the spacious area, noticing it fully for the first time. On one wall hung a large circular item—what appeared to be a clock. The twelve circles on its face represented what she suspected were the hours. A faint silver light shone from behind the seventh and third orbs. Seven fifteen. She glanced at her watch. It read seven thirty—fifteen minutes difference. Glancing up, she saw a flash of light moving in a very slow circle around the clock’s face. Regina suspected it was the second hand.

She watched it for a long moment, then started counting. It remained in the same position for fifteen seconds before it moved again, telling her what seemed to be impossible. Time moved more slowly here than it did on what Nikoli had called her dimension.

Torn between needing to know the truth and wanting to flee it, she asked, “Are we still on earth?”

“Yes.” He kept his attention on his handheld device, observing or reading the symbols that scrolled by.

“How is that possible?” Regina asked.

“Your plane is above mine and closest to what you call the sun. There are five dimensions on this planet.”

Unable to imagine such a thing, she blurted, “Do people—beings—live on the others?”

“Each is populated, though time between them is distorted, not allowing the inhabitants to know of the others’ existence. Millennia before, my people discovered a means to open the portals between your realm and mine. They learned too late that what they’d done caused gateways to open spontaneously from one dimension to the other. Since then, my government has trained physicists to monitor the fissures, to close them as they occur so those like Andris and Sazaar will never compromise security or find a means to invade E2’s borders.”

E2? The second dimension on earth?

Not asking, Regina saw what appeared to be a hologram of the globe. Five lines circled it. Beneath each were symbols she couldn’t read. On the continents, white lights flickered, while brown ones burned steadily.

Indicating what? Portals opening? Closing? Breaches in this dimension’s security?

In the subdued light, she noticed the drab green monitors of what appeared to be computers, though the screens were circular, not square, and there were no keyboards or wires connecting them to a power source. She glanced at the walls, the floors, the furniture. Everything had the same drab, washed out appearance, the colors not vivid as they were on her side.

“She wanted only to experience what those in your dimension did,”
Nikoli had said about Sazaar,
“the intense emotions, the joy.”

The vibrancy of an imperfect world.

Regina glanced at Nikoli. He pressed his fingers to his forehead, his swarthy complexion still too sallow.

Because of her.

He’d risked everything to leave his dimension, not only to save her, not only for honor, but because he craved the comfort of her touch, words exchanged in pleasure, not duty, a man and a woman experiencing the delight of their first conversation because they were attracted to each other. What had always been denied him.

What she’d never experienced.

Acting impulsively, Regina took his hand, bringing it to her lips. She wanted to offer some measure of intimacy neither of them had known, to ask if he was still all right. The words didn’t come. She stared at what she hadn’t noticed before. There were no lines on his palm. Unlike hers, his fingerprints were no more than a single round circle at the tip of each digit.

Nikoli pulled back his hand.

Not allowing it, Regina held on to him, wanting to show him how a woman behaved in her world. With great care, she stroked his fingers, palm and wrist. There, she halted, disturbed at what she’d felt. Folding back his sweater’s cuff, she inhaled sharply at the puncture wounds on his wrist—mean, black circles ringed by reddened flesh. “Sazaar bit you.”

Twisting free of her grasp, Nikoli lowered his cuff. “Not tonight.”

Horrified, Regina whispered, “When?”

“Weeks before, when I tried to stop her.”

“Stop her from what?”

“From what happened tonight,” he said, frowning. “I crossed over to eliminate her so she wouldn’t be a threat to anyone here or to you. At the last moment, I hesitated, unable to bring myself to do it, and she tried to feed on me. Since then, she’s been vigilant, keeping herself just out of my reach. That’s why I had to wait until she showed up at your office, where she wouldn’t suspect my presence. If I could have had one more chance to destroy her before tonight, before she put you at risk, I would have.”

“I don’t care about that,” Regina said. “She bit you. That’s why you had trouble breathing in here when you crossed back over, isn’t it?”

He glanced at the lab’s door. “Within her is Andris’s poison. It’s not enough to turn me into what they are, but it has affected me here.”

“For how long? Will it eventually recede? Will your immune system, or whatever you call it, fight the poison she’d infected you with?”

Nikoli’s attention remained on the door. “Thus far, my body’s been able to counteract the effects, though each day they magnify. Now, I have only a few hours before I need relief in order to survive.”

What did that mean? Was he saying he could die if he stayed here? Frightened, Regina could barely get her words out. “Relief? How? Do we have to go back to my side?”

“Yes. We need to do so now before the atmosphere here overtakes me again and you’re left alone on E2.” He took her hand.

Regina glanced down at his surprisingly strong grip.

“Come,” he said.

Regina held back. “What about Andris and the others?”

Nikoli showed no emotion. “We have to return. We have no choice.”

Chapter Five

Nikoli breathed cautiously, aware that the intense burning in his chest could reoccur at any moment. Along with it, he feared a return of the atmosphere’s oppressive weight on his body, what Regina had felt for no more than a few minutes before her physiology had adjusted to it. What a vampire would experience as an increasing and crushing pressure on its chest, with the feeling radiating to its limbs. Frozen in place, it wouldn’t be able to harm his people. Nor would it be able to protect itself from them or the scorching air consuming its lungs.

If Sazaar had fed on him for a few minutes more, Nikoli knew he would have become what she had. As it was, he now belonged nowhere…neither in his dimension, where he found it increasingly difficult to survive, nor in Regina’s, where he was an anomaly.

A bead of perspiration ran down his face. Foreboding flooded him, an emotion discouraged in his structured, placid world.

The same as intense desire or love.

Impetuously, gently, he squeezed Regina’s hand, captivated at its softness and warmth, stirred in a way he’d never believed existed. As she curled her fingers more tightly around his, demonstrating her trust, Nikoli battled an urge to pull her into his arms, to have her close for a moment longer when what he needed was force of will to save her life, knowing what he had weeks before—that his no longer mattered.

He glanced at the figures on his handheld device. Even those in E2’s government didn’t have the power he now had—to open portals at will.

Not once had Nikoli hesitated in constructing the instrument, making certain it wouldn’t trip his realm’s complicated security. When he’d understood what Sazaar intended to confess to Regina, he knew he had no choice but to help Regina escape Andris and the others.

He led her to his lab’s door.

Holding back, she spoke in a whisper. “What are you doing? We came through the other side.” She turned to the back wall. “Are Sazaar and the others gone?”

“We’re not returning through that portal. I’m going to open another to your realm. Come.”

At the door, he stopped and released her hand. Taking his coat from her shoulders, he pulled it on, then placed his palm on the barrier’s metal, waiting for it to read the circles on his fingertips. Nothing happened. Nikoli’s skin went cold then hot. Sweat ran into his eyes, stinging them. Had one of his colleagues discovered he’d crossed over and helped a human? Did that individual intend to trap him and Regina in this room, forcing them to choose between dying here and returning to her office, where the vampires surely waited to destroy them both?

“What’s wrong?” she whispered, huddling against him. “What’s that buzzing sound?”

The lock opening, affording escape. Nikoli had an uncontrollable urge to laugh in triumph and to curse Sazaar for having caused this. He allowed neither emotion, speaking as quietly as Regina had. “A mechanism that opens the door. Some of my people may be on the other side of it. Say nothing, ask nothing, even if you’re afraid.”

Giving her no chance to respond, Nikoli took Regina’s arm and pulled her back several steps to allow enough space for the door to open a crack.

Face to the narrow slit, he glanced into the hall beyond the door, then to the right, the left. The area was deserted. His legs went rubbery with relief. For the moment, they were safe. With no hesitation, he led Regina into the dimly lit, deserted space.

As far as one could see, closed doors flanked each side, the gray metal bearing the names and ranks of the scientists that worked in those rooms.

Regina’s heels clacked faintly against the floor’s material, a silver alloy that resisted corrosion or wear for thousands of years. She matched Nikoli’s pace for several yards, then stopped abruptly, staring at something past him…above him, the blood draining from her face.

He saw what she did—the crystal globe floating in place near the ceiling, part of the lab’s surveillance system. Before crossing over tonight, he’d altered it. For a few more minutes, it wouldn’t detect or record his and Regina’s movements; then its backup system would reset and search for whatever had caused the breach in security.

With little time to waste, he pulled Regina past countless doors.

She struggled to keep pace with his long strides, hurried even when measured against the movements of those in her realm. Nikoli didn’t slow down. Her life depended upon their haste. Just short of the door he sought, she stopped again, her hand gripping his, her nails biting into his skin.

Only then did he hear voices coming from the left, belonging to men and women he’d known since childhood, scientists who’d trained at the same institutes of learning that he had.

Nikoli’s lungs began to burn, reminding him to take a breath. As he did, the air felt too heavy, thick—not from the lingering aftermath of Sazaar’s bite, but from terror that was bone deep. Listening closely, his mind racing as to what he should do, he caught snatches of the conversation Regina couldn’t possibly understand.

“Then you’ve seen it too?” his male colleague asked.

What?

The female scientist responded, “Earlier today. I must say, nothing was left to chance this time.”

Pressing against him, Regina whispered, “Who is that? Do they know we’re here?”

Not yet. They continued to discuss the new housing E2’s government had provided, extolling its excellence as fine citizens always did, never finding any drawbacks in their orderly, planned existence.

Weeks before, Nikoli had been no different. And then, he’d seen and heard Regina, lusting after her just as Sazaar had done with Andris.

Lightheaded, he pulled Regina even closer, unwilling to let the vampires or his people harm her.

She shivered. On tiptoes, she whispered in his ear, “What if they see us?”

They wouldn’t. He knew who they were. This hall wasn’t their destination. Within seconds, their footfalls faded away, telling Nikoli they had turned a corner prior to reaching this area.

Regina must have heard their departure. She sank to her heels and lifted her face to his.

Nikoli’s throat constricted with emotion he couldn’t deny, need he fought to resist. Everything about Regina—from her coppery hair to her green eyes, guileless smile and willing heart—was so different, so much more alive than the females in his dimension. They had never known true passion…nor had they experienced dread or hopelessness.

“What if they see us?”
she’d asked.

Her worry tore at him. But he couldn’t lie to her. She needed strength to survive this night and the others. “I’ll be executed for treason.”

She fisted her free hand into his sweater, so unlike the garments on this side. Clothing Nikoli had stolen so he would resemble the inhabitants on her plane, moving freely amongst them to eliminate Sazaar.

His failure to do so at the last moment had brought them to this.

Hating himself for that weakness, he led Regina to a door near an intersection. Halls continued in all directions. The sound of a new conversation came from the right, the words so muted Nikoli couldn’t yet determine what his colleagues said.