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But then Sky’lar broke the clasp and the moment was over.
Torin waved at her once more and turned and went into his ship.
It was time to go home and he would probably never see her again.
FORTY-THREE
SKY
Sky watched as the sleek silver ship rose into the sky. Her eyes were burning but she told herself it was because the sunlight was glinting off the metal of the ship and blurring her vision. But did the sunlight make tears roll down your cheeks? Did it make your heart ache and throb in your chest like a rotten tooth?
Sky thought not. It wasn’t the sunlight making her cry—it was Torin, that stupid Kindred! Why did he have to leave her like this without so much as a promise to see each other later? Why had the beautiful experience they shared made him so upset?
She still couldn’t understand it and she thought she never would. It must be a Mammalian male thing—a matter of pride or ego, she thought. But she’d never felt for a male as she had felt for Torin and now he was gone—gone for good.
“I’ll never see him again,” Sky whispered to herself.
She turned and headed back into the Shrine. There were a few details to wrap up—maybe doing some work would take her mind off her sore heart. She would stay here for the night—Neen’ya had offered her a bunk in the acolyte’s quarters, just outside the High Priestess’s chamber. She would go back to report to her Captain tomorrow. Her life would go on as it always had and eventually, she would forget the big Kindred. At least, she hoped she would—remembering Torin all the time would be much too painful.
I just need to get back to routine, Sky told herself firmly, swiping the tears away from her face with one arm as Torin’s ship disappeared into the sky. Just need to get back to normal now that everything’s over.
She had no idea that things were anything but normal and the danger was far from over…
FORTY-FOUR
TORIN
“So this is the killer.” Commander Sylvan had met him at the Docking Bay, apparently not wanting to wait for Torin to come to his office.
“This is him.” They both stared down at the clear, vacu-sealed body-bag which held the white-faced corpse. “We finally got him,” he added.
“I know you’re probably wondering why I wanted to come see the body for myself,” Sylvan said. “It’s because I just got a report I asked for some time ago—from Hell’s Gate Station—which really disturbed me.”
“Hell’s Gate Station?” Torin frowned. “Isn’t that in the quadrant surrounded by temporal anomalies? What’s way out there?”
“What was out there was the Eye of Tengu—an extremely dangerous artifact from a parallel universe that’s entirely too close to our own for comfort,” Sylvan said gravely. “In that universe, there are also Kindred but instead of being created by the Goddess, they were made by another entity—a dark deity who calls himself ‘The Cruel Father’ or ‘The Dark Father.’ He also made the Eye of Tengu and infused it with deep evil and sent it into our universe to cause harm.”
“And it’s in Hell’s Gate Station?” Torin shook his head. “I don’t understand—how can something so far away affect us here? It’s not even in the same galaxy.”
“We were warned by the Goddess to recover the Eye of Tengu and to keep it someplace safe, where light could never touch its surface,” Sylvan explained. “I sent a team after it some time ago but two of them got stuck in a temporal anomaly. The third agent—she was actually a human archeologist that specialized in this kind of artifact—managed to get the Eye, but through a series of mishaps, it was lost under the Hell’s Gate Station in another anomaly—a ‘slow time suck,’ as they call it there.” He ran a hand through his spiky blond hair. “Since it was basically frozen in time and space in a dark place where light couldn’t reach it, we thought it was safe. But recent events have made me begin to question that.”
“Okay, so what happened?” Torin asked, still wondering where this story was going.
“I sent someone to find out if anything unusual has been happening at Hell’s Gate Station,” Sylvan explained. “Because there are so many temporal anomalies—time pockets—surrounding the station, the Mother Ship can’t safely fold space to that area—so it took me a while to get an answer. I finally did, though and it’s not good.”
“What is it?” Torin began to feel uneasy. “What did you learn?”
“That the slow time suck that surrounded part of the station had moved off. This freed a lot of people who had been stuck—basically frozen in time—for many standard years. But it also freed the Eye of Tengu. Somehow, light must have struck it and it opened, releasing the evil from within. They found the empty artifact aboard the space station…along with the same black poisonous goo that was found at all the crime scenes.”
