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  Quinn’s own life after death comes as a bit of a shock, and taking on a new life with the one man she thought forever gone leaves her in need of some hands-on consoling. His hands.

  Quinn went from Enforcer to Balm of Death in a matter of years. With her life locked into taking the pain of death from those entering the void, she had no choice in where or when.

  As death claims Quinn after a sudden attack, arms she has dreamed of for the last two years lift her and take her Home.

  Iskanu has been waiting for the moment that Quinn breathed her last, while mourning the pain she would be in before she released her energy and ties to her universe. He sweeps her Home to bring her back to him and then has to explain the hardest thing in his life.

  Two of her years ago, Quinn held his hand and comforted him while he died. He was now holding her hand as she woke with the power of the Orb inside her. How would she take the reversal of their positions and would she agree to her post as his partner and Sentinel of Time?

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Balm

  Copyright © 2012 Viola Grace

  ISBN: 978-1-77111-303-8

  Cover art by Martine Jardin

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books

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  Balm

  A Terran Times Tale

  By

  Viola Grace

  Chapter One

  Quinn Lios made her way out of the medical bay and sat in one of the few gardens left untouched on Recodan IV.

  Her soul was numb, and she buried her head in her hands as she ran through the final thoughts of those she had just eased into death. Ninety percent of the population of Recodan IV had died immediately from the pathogen dropped on their world by the U’kadi, five percent were immune, and the other five percent were dying at a slow and painful pace.

  The U’kadi were being interdicted while the Sector Guard tried to help the population of Recodan IV deal with the bodies of their loved ones. Scorchers were taking care of the dead, counselors were helping the living, and then, there were balms, or easers, like Quinn.

  She could take the pain, ease the panic, but not stop the inevitable march to death once a living being was headed that way.

  Tears crept through her fingers as the pain-filled sighs of her patients echoed in her thoughts. Three years as an Enforcer had put her on the active side of disasters, and when her talent for helping the dying had surfaced, it meant training in a job she had no interest in pursuing.

  “You have helped many today.”

  Quinn jumped and pulled her fist back in a reflex from her battle-ready days. A tall figure in swirling robes was standing a few feet from her bench.

  “Helped them? There is nothing left of them. I took their consciousness and let it drift into the afterlife. How is that helping?” She sniffled.

  “If they have any surviving family, their family members will know that they did not die in pain and fear. It means a lot to know that.” His tone was low, but the shadowed interior of his hood kept her from seeing his features.

  She analyzed what she could of his clothing, but she had no idea where his robes were from. “Are you with the Sector Guard?”

  “No. I am with an observational body.” He shifted and took a seat next to her. “If it hurts you, why do you do it?”

  Quinn snorted. “I wasn’t given any choice. Besides, if I don’t help them, their last thoughts on this world will be of pain. It isn’t something that I would wish on anyone.”

  “Why don’t you have a choice?”

  She looked at him in surprise. His curiosity was not something she had run across before. Most folks called her a reaper and gave her a wide berth.

  She didn’t know if it were the sympathetic tone or simply that he had asked the question, but she told him how she had ended up in her peculiar assignment.

  “I was an Enforcer sent to Wallu during the height of terrorist acts. We were guarding a disarmament team when a blast sent us flipping through the air, crushing three of the men in my unit. The captain was dead and the second in command was lying next to me, breathing more blood than air. He asked me to hold his hand, to help him keep calm while we waited for help. We both knew that he was not going to make it, and my mind reached for his and his for mine. I wanted to keep him calm, so I put that into my thoughts.

  “His features straightened, his body relaxed and a light filled his mind. I felt him go, and the moment he did, hands pulled me from him as a pair of beings lifted him and disappeared.”

  She snorted. “Everyone attributed my memory of the disappearance to shock, but I know what I saw.”

  He leaned close. “What did you see?”

  “A woman similar to a Terran, if she wasn’t actually one of us, and a Hirn. I looked it up. There is only one race that looked like that.” Quinn sighed.

  “Anyway, whatever happened at the moment that he died changed my mind. Literally. After that point, I could see who was about to die and if they wished it, I could ease them into the next world. The Citadel worked to train me and sent me out under the description of being the Balm of Death. Not a very attractive job title.”

  Her companion cocked his head. “Do you bring death?”

  She shook her head. “No. It will come on its own. I only see the end of the physical shape and let the soul free without trauma. I don’t keep the consciousness, just sooth the body, so the mind isn’t held by instinct and panic.”

  His voice was calming. “You would not have chosen it?”

  “No. I liked being an Enforcer. I liked helping the living to live.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “I apologize. I didn’t introduce myself. I am Quinn Lios.”

  She extended her hand in formal greeting. His hand struck her with its familiarity. There was a scar across the silken black velvet skin. She knew that hand, but when she looked up into the depths of his hood, a scream claimed her attention.

  “Murdering bitch!”

  Quinn jumped back and put herself between the charging woman and the stranger.

  Tears tracked down the woman’s face as she lunged at Quinn with a blade. Sobs punctuated every sharp motion as the stranger tried to kill her.

  Quinn disarmed her and held her as the woman snuffled out that she had struggled to make her way to the medical centre, and she had arrived too late. Her mother had been one of those who surrendered to death that morning.

  A shudder ran through the woman. “What were her last words?”

  Quinn looked at her, “I don’t know.”

  Where the woman got the second knife, Quinn didn’t know, but she gasped. It was buried in her throat.

  “When you kill someone, you should remember it, bitch.”

  Quinn’s vision was fading, but she felt arms holding her and voices calling out. Her attacker was being questioned, and she snapped out, “She didn’t remember my mother’s last words.”

  One of the medics that Quinn had met with in the morning spoke softly. “Your mother died before she arrived. She could not have known the last words of a woman already gone.”

  A low wail thrummed through the air, but Quinn was busy staring at the shadowy face above her. She choked on her own blood as her heart stuttered. With the last of her energy, she spoke one word. “Dahl.”

  The figure nodded and a bright flash of light embraced them.

  * * * *

  Iskanu Dahl held Quinn in his arms. He fought to keep the urgency out of his tone. “New arrival. Stabbing victim.”

  The medical staff of Home sprang into action, taking Iskanu’s officer into their arms and taking her into a repair room.

  The knife still stuck out of her neck, causing rising nausea every time he looked at her.

  The medical staff prepared themselves and withdrew the knife, working swiftly to repair her flesh.

  He walked toward the head of the table, placing his hands next to her head and waiting.

  The repair specialists worked quickly, and when they backed away and nodded, Iskanu poured power into Quinn’s body, bringing her back to him.

  The circle of the situation didn’t escape him. She had held him while he breathed his last, and now, he returned the favour.

  Quinn’s body bucked, and with a loud cry, her bright blue eyes opened, staring up into his.

  “Hello, Officer Lios.”

  She coughed up blood and turned to her side to clear her lungs. Wearily, she looked up at him. “Commander Dahl. You look better.”

  He cracked a grin and dropped his hood. “So do you.”

  Chapter Two

  He was alive. The most traumatic moment of her life was watching him die and holding
him while he breathed his last, and he was alive.

  Quinn swung her arm and slugged him in the chest. “You couldn’t have told me earlier?”

  He grunted obligingly and bent over. “It was not the right time.”

  She sat up, wincing at the blood covering her neckline and cleavage. “Where are we, and can I get a change of clothing? This is a little…bloody, for me.”

  “We are in an inter-dimensional space called Home. You are a candidate to become a Sentinel of Time.”

  She looked at him with her head cocked. “Are you insane?”

  “No. This is where I was taken and where the repairs to my body were enacted. The Avatar of the Orb woke me, and I have been acting as an agent of the Orb for the last four years.”

  Quinn frowned. “It has only been two.”

  “For you, but here, we are outside of time. I have been on dozens of assignments to watch pivotal moments in history on worlds I didn’t know existed.” He offered his hand.

  She took it. “You are going to explain all this?”

  “Of course. It is my duty as your senior officer.” His smile was blinding white in the darkness of his Selna features.

  Quinn chuckled. “You haven’t been my senior anything since your untimely death.” She slipped off the medical bed, and he caught her as her knees gave way.

  “Take it easy, Lios. Dying is tiring.”

  She inhaled deeply, and her body hummed happily. Two years after he had left her forever, she was in his arms. It was a chance she never thought she would have.

  It took Herculean effort on her part, but she straightened and smiled brightly. “Thanks for the catch.”

  His lips twisted in a frown as she stepped out of his grip.

  She turned up the wattage on her smile and brushed the front of his robes. “I think you got some of my blood on you.”

  The small contact relaxed him.

  “Then, we should obtain a change of clothing for both of us. Come with me to the acquisitions department, and I will give you a full briefing.”

  He gestured for her to come with him, and she really had no choice. He was her commanding officer after all.

  “Before this universe was born, there was another. When it came time for the old universe to beat its last, it took part of its consciousness and hid it outside time and space. The old universe died, and the new one took its place, but the Orb survived.”

  They were walking slowly along one of the arched pedestrian bridges, and she was getting a briefing from the very beginning of the history of this most peculiar place.

  A chunk of land was floating in the centre of outer space, strange stellar patterns spun through the sky, mountains edged the landscape and trees in the most bizarre configurations that she had ever seen were in the distance.

  She had to ask. “So, there is a core of a dead universe running the show?”

  “We call it the Orb of Time. Well, that is the name it has chosen for itself. It seeded itself within the population of dozens of worlds, and in several of those worlds, it integrated itself within certain bloodlines. Those bloodlines call to it when a person dies, and if the saturation is strong enough, the call is heard across time and space.”

  “I was one of those?”

  “As was I. Our deaths are immutable. We have to die to be given an option to take on life as one of the Nameless.”

  She chuckled. “The Nameless?”

  “We no longer belong to our worlds, we belong to the Orb. This world is ours to come home to, a fragment of a universe lost, and so, we are Nameless.” He inclined his head.

  “You are okay with this?”

  “It beats the alternative. My death was not something I had ever planned for, but I am content with the way things are working out.”

  Surprised, she looked up at him, and his glowing stellar eyes had a warm cast. It took her a few seconds to realize that she was part of his things working out.

  “That isn’t exactly flattering. I am still wearing the blood from my untimely death.”

  He winced. “True, but your death was not untimely. It occurred exactly when it was supposed to occur. The moment that I came here and the Orb transformed me, I became privy to my own future. You were part of it.”

  She blinked. “Part of your future, so you knew I would die?”

  He sighed heavily. “I knew. I didn’t know how you would end up here, but I knew you would. When the Orb sent me to Recodan IV and I saw you emotionally drained and crushed in the garden, I couldn’t just watch and not speak to you before it happened.”

  She thought about those moments when she was reeling from the death she had dealt with. His presence had been a relief and a balm to her shattered nerves.

  “How did your eyes change? They used to be a lovely bronze.” She bit her lip after she spoke.

  “The Orb becomes part of you and allows you to travel in time and space with just a little bit of practice. It changes your eyes to give anyone looking into them a view of another universe.”

  “Mine, too?”

  “I will miss those bright blue eyes of yours, but yes, yours too.” He paused, gripped her arm, and with the wind blowing through their robes, he stared into her eyes and caressed her cheek. “I will always remember these eyes.”

  She thought about the last time she had watched bright bronze looking at her instead of the midnight sky. She had watched the light dim in his gaze until there was nothing left. It was a memory that she relived every time she touched the dying. “I will always remember yours, Dahl.”

  He leaned in and brushed his lips across hers.

  She shivered and touched his robes, the smell of blood in the air between them. She went up on her toes and increased the contact. For three years, she had worked with him, and this had been her fantasy every day of those three years.

  Selna were one of the most seductive of the Alliance races. Their skin was a sensory delight. Their bodies produced pheromones to seduce the most resistant of species. Terrans had no resistance to that sort of seduction, not that Quinn wanted to resist.

  She shivered in his grip, the warmth of the palm against her cheek a solid link to the reality around her. When the heat seeped through her entire body and began to multiply, she pulled away.

  Quinn would have stepped back, but she was on the edge of a bridge covering a chasm that ended in open space.

  She turned her head from his and whispered, “I think I need to get this blood off.”

  He nodded and pressed his head to her shoulder, breathing deeply. “Right. First things first.”

  She nodded and threaded one hand through his thick, dark hair.

  He breathed her in for a few moments, and they returned to their slow walk to the clothing repository with his arm around her waist and hers around his.

  It seemed the most natural thing in the world, which made Quinn smile because the world was precisely where she was not.

  Chapter Three

  “Is this really appropriate?” Quinn turned from side to side, staring at her reflection. The purple, strapless gown was quite pretty but nothing that she had worn in service to the Alliance.

  “I think you should dress like that all the time.” He was wearing his own change of clothing—a tight smoke grey leather vest with a pair of charcoal trousers and black boots.

  “Not fair that you are still prettier than me.”

  His grin would have done justice to a six-year-old boy. He was practically preening when he offered her his hand.

  She noted a belt and dagger that blended with his outfit. “What is that?”

  “The mark of the Nameless. It is our only weapon.” He stroked his fingers down her throat.

  The pain of the remembered impact sent her stumbling back. She held her hand up to fend him off.

  “What is it?” He went from seductive to concerned in a heartbeat.

  “I just felt…” She didn’t know how to explain that the pain of the final attack was still fresh.

  “What?”

  She reached up and touched his shoulder to calm him. He was agitated. “When you touched my neck, I felt the knife strike all over again.”