The Changeling Game, Chapter 83

83.
Shape, Shell, Soul, Body

At least, Audrey thought, Riddick’s dark mood made sense… even if nothing else did suddenly.

She felt like they were in some weird game of verbal Chicken, each waiting for the other to break the silence as they stared, baffled, at one another. He thought Kyra was dead; she knew her sister wasn’t.

“Jack,” he finally said, his words deliberate and his expression almost cautious, “she died in my arms. I was holding her. She stopped breathing. Her heart stopped beating. I felt her die.”

She had walked with Kyra just that morning, showing her images of Elodie and her life on Deckard’s World, slipping through the mists of Canaan Mountain’s forests, revisiting the crash planet, until Lucy had summoned her back into—

Hmm.

Lucy? Can you settle this for us, please? She projected, making sure that Riddick could hear her as well. He gave her a quizzical frown.

What would you like settled, little one? Good; Lucy was somewhere in the room, although that could possibly get awkward soon.

“Riddick believes Kyra’s dead,” she said aloud, “but I know she can’t be because I was with her just this morning. And you and the other Apeiros told me she was safe and you had her, over a year ago. Can you tell Riddick what’s true?”

Your sister, Kyra, is safe with us, yes. Her five-shape is protected. Her shell failed last year, but I pulled her five-shape out before it could fail as well.

“Her shell…” Audrey paused, realization hitting her. She remembered all the talk about shells and shapes, years ago, much of which hadn’t made sense at the time. “Her body? Her body died?”

Riddick nodded in agreement, his expression still discomfited. “The old Lord Marshal threw her across the room. She hit a spiked pillar and five of the spikes impaled her through her back. She managed to pull herself off, but she was bleeding out when I got to her.”

Audrey felt the gentle touch of one of Lucy’s long, cool arms on her cheek. Riddick had turned his face away, unable to look at her non-human sister’s impossible shape for more than a fraction of a second. This is true, Lucy said. I was there. I pulled her five-shape from her shell and brought her to safety.

“Safety?” Riddick demanded, his eyes darting toward Lucy and then away again. “She died in front of me. Where the fuck is the safety in that?”

She will be reborn.

“What, ‘born anew’ in the fucking Underverse?” Riddick snarled, standing up and pacing. “We both know there’s no such place. The Underverse is a lie your brother cooked up to keep his minions pacified.”

That is not how she will be reborn, Lucy replied, her telepathic voice calm. But the Underverse, as his vessels conceive it, may indeed exist somewhere among the infinite iterations of reality. Most of the ways they imagine it, they have come up with on their own.

“Gods don’t write books,” Riddick muttered. “The fuckers leave that to the people who think it’s mystic voices they’re hearing in their heads…” He shot a furious glance at Lucy, still close enough to Audrey that he could only look their way for an eyeblink. “So how will Kyra be reborn?”

Audrey will bring her back when the time is right.

“…The fuck…?” If Riddick could have, he’d have stared at Lucy in disbelief.

It was news to Audrey, too. “Um, when will that be, Lucy?” She had a pretty strong suspicion.

After your hatching, you will be ready.

Riddick kept trying to glare over at Lucy, but kept being forced to look away. “Her hatching? Into her fuckin’ six-shape? You need to tell me something right the fuck now about that, because I’m about ready to ’jack this psycho-fuck voyage if I don’t get some better answers. Is this fuckin’ hatching gonna break her ‘shell?’”

No.

“You’d better be sure about that,” he growled.

I am certain. Her hatching approaches, but her death, as you understand death, is still far distant.

“So, uh…” Audrey had to defuse the tension between them somehow. “Riddick saw Kyra’s body die, but you pulled her soul out before it could die too… you’re keeping it safe… and I’m gonna somehow re-corporealize it after I’m able to move in six dimensions?”

Riddick had frozen, a look of horrified comprehension on his face. “Fuck. So that’s what he was trying to… motherfucker.”

“What?” she asked him, but he shook his head, lips pressed together in a hard line.

Your summation is accurate, Audrey. When the time comes, you will know what you need to do. She could no longer feel Lucy on her back and shoulder. I think you two have much to discuss alone. I will be near, should you need me, but not too near.

Riddick had closed his eyes. He shook his head, his lips silently forming words. Audrey, fortunately, had been trained to read lips.

Too much fuckin’ destiny in this shit…

“Riddick?” She kept her voice soft.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he murmured.

“Here?”

“Anywhere near you.”

She reached out, trying to get a sense of what he was thinking, feeling, in spite of the powerful shields he kept up between them. Rage. Outrage. Fear. Fear for her. And…

And there it is… She walked over to him and rested her hand on his cheek again.

“Jack… you should go.” His voice sounded pained. He hadn’t opened his eyes.

“Go where?” she whispered, stepping closer.

“As far away from me as you can. Everything I touch dies.”

“Not everything,” she told him.

“You’re all that’s left.” His voice was the barest thread of sound.

“Riddick.” She found herself barely able to restrain a laugh suddenly. “You spent the last several hours surrounding yourself, surrounding us, with friends. I’m not all that’s left.”

He opened his eyes, his expression shocked and confused. Didn’t he realize how many people had come to love him that day?

“But,” she told him, “even if I was the only one left, you don’t have to be so afraid of losing me.”

His lips pursed as he began to form a protest, an objection. It was more than she could resist. She brought her lips to his and kissed him, the way she’d dreamed of doing for years.

He froze for a second and then, with a groan, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close, taking over the kiss with barely constrained hunger. She still couldn’t get a read on his thoughts, but his feelings were clear: desire, longing, lingering fear for her safety… some kind of desperate need to wipe out the horrors of the ’verse by losing himself in her…

She slid her hand from his cheek to the back of his head, the stubble almost feeling like velvet beneath her palm, and wrapped her other arm around his back as she opened her mouth to him. Their tongues slid against each other and Riddick groaned again, deeper, pulling her even more tightly against him. She could feel his growing arousal, the disintegration of his worries and inhibitions, as his hands stroked her back and then moved to grasp her thighs, lifting her up and wrapping her legs around his hips.

He walked back over to the bed, never releasing her mouth, and then lowered her down onto the firm surface before breaking the kiss.

His hungry expression was strangely vulnerable. “Are you sure you want to do this, Jack?”

“Absolutely.” She reached down, pulling off her shoes and socks and dropping them over the side of the bed, before scooting into its center. “C’mere.”

He started to climb onto the bed.

“Whoa! Whoa there. Shoes. Off.”

That, it turned out, was exactly the right thing to say. Riddick barked with laughter, the last of his dour mood dissipating as he sat on the edge of the bed and unlaced his boots. “Demanding right out of the gate.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she quipped back.

His boots and socks removed, Riddick climbed onto the bed, crawling toward her with an almost predatory grin on his face. “So, now that my shoes are off, you got any other demands you want to make?”

“We’ll see,” she told him, beckoning him closer with a smirk. She wasn’t going to let on, for even a second, that she was having a massive case of what felt like stage fright right then. A fantasy that she’d cherished for years was about to become reality, and in response, she was suddenly having crazy performance anxiety.

Maybe he was, too. His answering smirk seemed to be hiding something more serious beneath it.

“Will we, now?” Riddick asked as he reached her, looming over her and gathering her into his arms.

She brought her hand up to his cheek once more, marveling all over again at the reality of him after years of dreams, the face she’d wondered if she’d ever see again, glimmering eyes that had haunted her for so long. “Where the hell can I get eyes like that?” she murmured, recalling the first time she’d seen them.

The emotion that appeared on his face in response was intense and complex, hints of sadness and longing mixed with fondness and desire. “Maybe I wasn’t entirely truthful about where,” he told her. “Shine jobs are real, but I never had one.”

“You weren’t born with them, were you?” Had he been able to see into the dark from the moment of his birth?

“Nah… my earliest memories have colors I can’t see now. I lost those colors and gained new ones while I was bein’ conditioned by the Quantifiers. Keepin’ me in the darkness all the time suddenly stopped workin’ as well for ’em once I started seein’ into the ultraviolet and infrared. I didn’t even notice that my eyes had changed their look until later.”

That was right; in one of the pictures Stacey had shown her, all those years ago, his eyes had been brown. He’d looked young in the picture; she just hadn’t realized quite how young he’d been. She wondered when, and how, Michael’s eyes had changed; he’d never undergone the same kind of brutal conditioning that Riddick had, but she’d seen his silver eyes, undisguised by contacts, just once. On the last night she’d been herself for a while. “Is it a Furyan thing?”

“Might be. I don’t know enough about Furyans yet to be sure. ’Cept for one thing I realized earlier today when I was talkin’ to Lucy. I know where we came from now.”

“Where?” she asked him, even as she slid her hands under his sleeveless shirt and began pulling it up his torso.

He helped her take it off, baring his chest as he answered her. “The second of your missing Star Jumpers, Jack. The Nick Fury. All this weird talk about ‘lightbringers’ and ‘lightbearers’ and the ‘Light of Furya,’ and it suddenly hit me why nobody was talkin’ about ‘fury,’ even though I’ve used that light as a weapon.”

How had she missed that? She rested the palm of her hand on Riddick’s chest and closed her eyes, focusing on his shape.

There: the soft flow of energy not of this ’verse, an innate part of him… no material element of him was straddling universes, and no energy exchange was occurring, but there was a wellspring of power from some other ’verse, and he was tapped into it. She could feel it singing through him, subtly harmonizing with his string frequencies, a perfect symbiosis—

Something her father had told her, years ago, came back to her. The Caldera shouldn’t exist. Nobody can figure out how it does. It isn’t volcanic. It isn’t anything that ought to be there. The fire, or whatever it is, just flows up from the ground for hundreds of miles. It looks like auroras rising up out of the rocks from a distance. The native population “fire walks” through it as part of a lot of ceremonies. I’ve seen them do it, stepping into the fire, their clothes burning right off their bodies, but they come back out without a mark on them, not even a singed hair. The old Lord Shirah told me that they’re the children of the fire itself, maybe a year before the ceremony where he passed his crown, not that he ever wore a crown, to a young woman who became the Lady Shirah…

That fire, she realized, was flowing through Riddick even now.

“Interesting,” Riddick rumbled above her, and she realized that he’d been “reading” her the whole time. “I never knew about that part. But fire doesn’t burn me. Guess now I know why.”

“It’s like there’s a living fire inside you,” she whispered, feeling awed. “It’s so beautiful.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he said, his voice pensive. “Seems to me, though, the ‘beautiful’ in this room is you.”

Guys on the make had often pulled out the word, but Audrey had long ago learned that guys would say almost anything if they thought they could get sex out of it. It was much more meaningful to hear it after the little courtship dance was complete, the outcome already a given, almost as meaningful as when—

No. This was not the time to think of other men, especially not that man. The important thing was what Riddick had said, because—aside from maybe stretching the truth about shine jobs—he had never once lied to her.

She tried to pull him closer, but it was like trying to budge a boulder. Instead, she pulled herself up to him, molding her body against his and kissing his mouth again. Her move stirred a low growl in his chest; a moment later she was pressed down on the mattress by the weight of his body. His hunger drove the kiss as he explored her mouth. He wrapped her legs around his hips again, pressing his erection against her; the wave of answering hunger and arousal that crashed through her made both of them gasp.

“You know,” he murmured against her lips, “I’m tryin’ not to go buck wild here, but you’re makin’ that really hard…”

“Maybe I’d like it if you did.”

“You might be insane,” he laughed, lifting his body away a little and sliding his hands under her tunic.

She arched her back and raised her arms so he could push the tunic up. Once he had it over her head, she pulled it off her arms and let it drop to the side, next to Riddick’s discarded shirt. When she returned her gaze to him, he looked transfixed.

She hadn’t been able to find a bra her size among the discards left behind by the old Lord Marshal’s harem, so she hadn’t had anything on under the tunic. Maybe, she thought, Riddick hadn’t expected that. He was staring at her as if he’d never seen bare breasts before.

“You know,” she parroted back at him after a moment, “you’ve seen the twins lots of times in my memories.”

“Not like this,” he whispered. He reached out, almost seeming afraid that he would shatter her with the lightest touch, and cupped his hand around one breast, stroking his thumb over her nipple. Her back arched as the sensation of his touch jolted all the way through to her core.

She slid her hand over his chest in response, cupping the swell of pure muscle under his nipple. He’s hard where I’m soft… “I’ve had a lot of fantasies about this moment,” she told him as he bent his head and brought his lips to her throat.

“Mmmmmm…” His lips and teeth grazed her skin with remarkable gentleness. “I tried very hard never to think of you that way.”

That made sense; she’d been a kid when they’d parted, and had probably stayed a kid in his mind until they’d met again. “Where did you go after you left New Mecca?” she asked, tilting her head back to give him better access.

“You’re gonna laugh,” he murmured in between nips at her skin. “You remember the planet you almost misdirected Toombs to?”

Holy shit. “You were on UV-6? That planet’s insane. A great big ball of Fimbulwinter!”

“On the surface, anyway,” he chuckled, nibbling at her collar bone. “Get undergound, though… there are hot springs. A lot of subterranean life, whole ecosystems that never see the sun. Funny thing is it made me think of the merc ship we’d been on.”

Audrey wondered what the members of her Amnesty Interplanetary chapter would think if she told them that Richard B. Riddick read poetry. During her “sleeper” year, their low opinion of him and “thugs” like him had left her confused as hell about what was true. “‘Caverns measureless to man?’” she asked him.

“‘Down to a sunless sea,’” he quoted back. “The water was probably too hot for most people to swim in, but I don’t burn. Or boil.”

No, he just ignited fire in every centimeter of her skin that he touched. “That sounds amazing. I’d have loved to see it.”

“You’d’ve hated smelling it,” he said with a soft laugh. “Rotten eggs. Most of the hot springs smelled like that, so I stayed near the surface even if it was cold.”

“Still…” she found herself wishing she’d been there with him.

He lifted his head from her throat, his expression turning sad. “I couldn’t take you with me, Jack. That would’ve gone bad fast. You were way too young for what would probably have ended up happening.”

She wanted to argue, but she knew he was right. “I was fantasizing about something like this happening back then…”

“The two of us alone on a cold world, with nobody else to turn to for warmth, and your hormones going out of control the way they did when you were on Tangiers Prime…” He raised an eyebrow at her. “Recipe for disaster. And no, even if you were dreamin’ about it, you weren’t ready for it. The reality would’ve broken the dream, probably broken you.”

She nodded. It was pure truth. He’d have resisted as long as possible, but she’d been tenacious and overconfident at that age, and would undoubtedly have turned up naked in his bed, maybe sneaking into it after he’d fallen asleep—assuming she could sneak up on him—in an attempt to get past his inhibitions. The results might have been disastrous for both of them. She hadn’t had her shots yet—

“Fortunately, I had mine,” Riddick told her.

Eavesdropper! she thought at him in her fiercest mental “voice,” not really bothered. He smirked at her.

“But just because I wouldn’t’ve given you a disease or gotten you pregnant, wouldn’t’ve changed the fact that it would’ve been dead wrong and would’ve hurt you in other ways.” His expression became regretful. “Last thing I ever wanted to do was hurt you, but I guess one way or another it was inevitable.”

“I… think that was more Imam than you,” she told him. With her memories back in their proper places, she could see clearly how the Holy Man had tried to “scare her straight,” thinking that killing Chillingsworth had put her on a dark path he needed to rescue her from, and had twisted everything, even Riddick’s nearly-wordless departure—

—eyes catching faint glints of light like a pair of tarnished coins as he bent down, his lips brushing against her forehead… “Sorry, kid…”—

—into an indictment of what he’d believed she was becoming.

The genuinely angry growl that started deep in Riddick’s chest, perversely, sent a thrill of arousal through her. “The only reason I told the hoodoo where I’d gone was so he could contact me if you ended up in trouble—which he fuckin’ never did—and so he could tell you where I was once you were an adult, if you still wanted to come looking for me then.”

“What would you have done if I had?” Audrey asked him, already certain of the answer.

“What I’m about to do now, probably.” He kissed her collarbone again and began to kiss his way lower, nuzzling at her breast. “Only reason Toombs got a bead on me there at all was I got a proximity alert about a ship coming in, and I was hopin’ maybe you were on it ’cause the timing was right, so I’d gone out to look…”

“Sorry,” she found herself saying as she arched her back. His arms tightened around her waist as he planted a kiss on her nipple, startling a moan out of her.

“Nah, don’t be. I got a nice little ship out of it. And a heads-up that the holy man was using the information I gave him for his own ends. I wondered if you’d be there when I got back to Helion, but I gotta admit…” he kissed her nipple again, circling its tip with his tongue. “…I was relieved you weren’t in on his bullshit.”

Audrey moaned again, Riddick’s mouth undoing coherent thought for a moment. She found herself wondering what might have happened if she’d been waiting for him on Helion and he’d found her there, believing her to be Imam’s accomplice. Suddenly, the thought of him maybe making her his captive felt intensely erotic.

“You want,” Riddick murmured, “we can play that out sometime. Don’t look for me to tie you up or anything, though. Not my kink.”

She could definitely understand why it wouldn’t be.

He was kissing his way down her abdomen, closer and closer to the waistband of her leggings, which he had hooked his fingers into and begun to pull down over her hips. Her panties were snared in his grasp, too. She arched her body so that he could slide all of it down more easily—

“Fuck, Jack,” he groaned. “How are you so wet already?” He sat up, pulling her leggings and panties off of her completely and tossing them aside before moving to spread her legs and kneel between them.

“’Cause I’ve been waiting for this for longer than you want to know,” she told him.

“Don’t even know what I want to do first…” She could see him contemplating options, and could see the option she wanted most straining against his cargo pants.

“In that case,” she told him, “I have another demand.”

He laughed, a look of surprise and delight spreading over his features as he unbuttoned his pants and pushed them down. “Let me just get these off my legs, Jack.”

“So I’m Jack again?” she asked, watching him as he moved to sit next to her for a moment and pull his pants off the rest of the way, his erection proudly saluting her the whole time.

“Safest name for you,” he told her with a grin. “Everybody here already knows you by it—knows it’s the name of the girl I’ve been looking for, anyway. Connecting your birth name or any of your other aliases to it could unbreak your trail.”

Whoops. He was right. She probably shouldn’t have called herself Audrey in front of Chantesa Vaako.

What’s done is done…

“You’re really okay with the whole Jack B. Badd thing? Even knowing where I got it from?”

“C’mon, it’s a classic.” He smirked at her. “Jack B. Nimble, Jack B. Quick…”

Oh, he was going to play like that, was he? She sat up and “pounced,” straddling his lap as his liquid silver eyes widened. “Jack B. ready to ride your dick.”

He threw back his head, mostly, she thought, so he wouldn’t guffaw right into her face. “Shit, girl, where were you when I was playin’ the dozens with the other kids in government housing?”

“I was probably pre-verbal back then,” she laughed. If she’d even been born yet at all. “Wouldn’t’ve been much help. But enough about that…”

He groaned when she reached down and wrapped her hand around the shaft of his erection. His breath caught as she positioned it against her and sank down onto his length, burying him deep inside her. “Fuck… right to the hilt…”

“I’m greedy like that,” Jack told him as his arms came around her again and he pulled her mouth to his.