Page 6 of Stone Awakened

With worry over last night’s confrontation gnawing at the back of my mind, I decided this was the chance, we had to take it. “Come on boys, we’re leaving,” I said, and I firmly grabbed hold of Amar’s little hand. “Jett, like we talked about, head for those kitchen tunnels.”

The six-year-old looked at me with his big gray eyes, thinking hard. Did he remember the plans we’d discussed? The route I’d decided on? He gave me a shrug, and then he headed for the exit of the courtyard and started leading us into the palace tunnels, just like we’d planned.

A few times he paused as we walked and all of us would listen intently for any sound of people approaching. Sometimes, Jett would look over his winged shoulder to look at me for reassurance and I’d reach out to pat him on the back. “We got this, just a little further,” I whispered. My skin prickled with awareness when we reached the kitchen exit and still hadn’t run into anyone.

It shouldn’t be this empty, where was everyone else? There were dozens of slaves working in the kitchens or cleaning this humongous building at all times of the day, why weren’t they here now? I hadn’t been worried about them because they had no stake in ratting us out. They would likely assume I had reason to take the boys out anyway, as I was not a slave myself.

I made Jett wait, holding Amar’s hand, while I tried the door. It was locked but I had tested this door before and knew my access allowed me to open it. Raising my hand, I was just about to press it to the palm reader when a voice shattered the tense silence.

“What the fuck are you doing?” came an angry growl from behind me. I recognized the gravelly tones and felt ice skate up my spine, my heart racing. I turned slowly, clutching the boy’s hands and tugging them behind my back. I tilted my chin, hoping to look confident, as I tried to grasp hold of the feeble excuses I’d thought of previously.

When I saw him those fled my mind and pretty much any other thought too. He filled the hallway with his big, stony body, and his massive wings. With his face drawn into those deep, exaggerated lines, horns glittering atop his skull, and tusks sticking out of his mouth, he looked intimidating. It got my hackles up just enough that I fell back on some old patterns on how to deal with blustering parents. “Mind your language, Sir!”

I could tell how that derailed him, he tilted his head back a little, as if he was trying to assess what I’d just said. His brows lifted incredulously so that I could see the bright glimmer in his intelligent gray eyes. “My language?” he asked, confused. As if the man didn’t even know he’d just used the f-word.

“Dad!” Jett exclaimed, “We’re escaping, I knew you’d find us. We have to hurry.” He wiggled out from behind me, slipped his hand from my sweaty grasp, and hurried over to Sunder, wrapping his arms around the male’s huge legs. He was all vibrating excitement and happiness, while I was reeling with confusion from the bomb he’d just dropped on me.

“Dad?” I stuttered out, darting my eyes from the little, peace-form-shaped Jett, to the huge Tarkan in his battle-form. With their shapes so different, I couldn’t tell if there was any family resemblance, but I struggled to recognize individual features in all the different species I’d encountered over the past five years regardless.

“Escape?” Sunder said, echoing my tone almost exactly. Then he made a laughing kind of noise, “Oh, thank the stars. I was going crazy wondering why I liked you so much.” My skin instantly burst out in this intense blush that I hadn’t experienced since I was fifteen. My brain chanted ‘he likes me!’ over and over like this was the most important piece of information out of all of this.

“Yeah,” Jett said, “Sunder is my dad, Aggy. He’s come to rescue us. Now we’re all here so we can go!” He reached out and took my hand again, but he also took one of Sunder’s big clawed paws, his tiny hand dwarfed by those big fingers. Tugging a little, the big male willingly came along so that we were all standing clustered together.

Amar’s tiny little hand was what I focused on then, realizing that the small three-year-old had remained quietly tucked behind my skirts. Observing what was going on with his huge blue eyes. Feeling like I finally could act freely, I bent down and picked up the boy, hugging him to my chest. Like he’d done a million times since he was a baby, he curled his body against me, tucking his head beneath my chin.

When I looked up from my little charge, Sunder was staring at me, at Amar so trustingly resting against me. “Let me guess, you came here for that one,” he said, and pointed at the small boy I was holding, “and I came for this one.” To indicate Jett, he rubbed a hand through the boy’s wild black mop of hair, making the kid squeal.

I nodded, “Amar is the son of my best friend.” He had only been missing for three months by the time I got here, but it had been enough to make the boy quiet and shy. I hated how much his experience had traumatized him and would be forever grateful to Jett for taking on the role of ardent protector, despite his own young age and small size. Though… if Sunder was his dad, Jett wasn’t going to stay small for long.

“We can’t stay here, come on. If we hurry nobody will realize that we weren’t where we were supposed to be,” Sunder said. He reached down and folded his hand around mine, urging me away from the door, the tantalizing nearness of freedom.

“Hold on, we are right there, we can leave. This is the perfect opportunity to escape!” I protested as I dug in my heels, in vain, as he just kept dragging me along. It made Jett giggle, to watch me struggle. I tried to pull free my hand but his grip was much too firm.

“Yeah, and on the other side of that door is a courtyard full of slaves being addressed by their new Lord and Master. I know it looks like a good opportunity because it’s quiet inside this palace, but trust me, the place is swarming with security, especially the spaceport.” He explained it in crisp tones, dipping down to throw Jett over one shoulder without breaking stride so he could hurry our odd party more quickly through the empty hallways.

“Did you even plan that far ahead?” he demanded, “Did you have a ride ready off this planet? Or were you just winging it?” I was angry at being caught so unprepared, and apparently doing something that was going to get the boys and myself into really bad trouble if Sunder hadn’t stopped us. That is if he was speaking the truth.

There was no denying that Jett knew him, likely they truly were father and son. So I had to believe that he had his child’s best interest at heart. He’d come to rescue his son, so he wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t a bad guy. My hormones cheered the last bit, free at last to just guilt-free think of his sexy muscles. So he wasn’t exactly pretty, not with those features and those tusks, but he was all man.

I had changed from struggling against him to jogging at his side, but he still hadn’t let go of my hand. I wasn’t sure if I should try and extract myself again or bask a little in the physical contact. The rough but warm texture of his skin felt good, and these past months I’d been touch starved without my family away from Earth. Let alone the fact that I hadn’t been with a man since my abduction, and it wasn’t as if my sex life had been rich before either.

As we rushed past the bunkroom the boys stayed in and my assigned quarters next to them, I felt a pang of intense dislike at seeing these places. I wanted us to be out of here, after I’d hyped myself up, running away with the kids impulsively earlier, it was like a slap in the face to be back here. At least it didn’t seem like Jett or Amar were that bothered by it.

I felt the soft slap of Sunder’s tail hit my lower leg and my eyes immediately jolted away from the doors to look at his backside. He wasn’t looking at me, shouldering through the door and into the practice courtyard ahead of me. Yet, I had the feeling that he’d done that on purpose, distracting me.

Uron was still sprawled out on his bench in the corner, maybe even in the exact same position, but the bottle from his foul brew had disappeared. Had Sunder come in here, noticed we were missing, and still taken the time to get rid of that thing?

He let go of my hand, setting Jett down on his feet with a grin, “Good boy, I heard your little rumble. That was very clever.” He squatted to the boy’s level and rubbed a big, clawed hand through Jett’s unruly locks while the boy kept on beaming at him in the widest grin. “I knew you’d hear me!”

“I did,” Sunder confirmed, and I had the sinking feeling that Jett had led his dad right to us. That was what that look had been about, when I asked him to lead the way, thinking of how to get his dad to follow us. I wanted to remain pissed at the fact that we were still stuck here, and that Sunder had been a little condescending about my failed attempt. I had to admit though, that Jett had been really clever, even if I had no clue what sound exactly he’d been making that had allowed his dad to hear him. I hadn’t heard a thing, so it had to be a sound beyond my range of hearing.

“Yeah, that was smart Jett,” I said, “You could have told me Sunder was your dad though, we would have waited for him then…” He was just a kid, probably with conflicting instructions from the people he trusted. Things would have gone a lot smoother if I’d just known that Sunder was his father. For one, I wouldn’t have spent all of the last night tossing and turning, equal parts aroused from that visit, and terrified that I’d been found out.

Sunder and I shared a look, and in those deep gray eyes I saw a similar thought, and then a flare of heat. Oh, I was definitely not imagining his attraction to me. Not that this was the time or place to act on such things, we had two small children relying on us to get out of there. If I judged Sunder correctly, he was a man with a plan. I had to figure out what it was and make sure he’d take Amar and me with him when he got out of there.

Chapter 5

Sunder