J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

He took several steps into the room but froze when he heard a low moan.

Morgan’s moan.

“Go away,” hissed Bartleby from behind the screen, “you’ll make it worse!”

Just going to move her to a bedroom , Xander thought, one ragged part of his brain still functioning. Just going to get her off the floor, get her comfortable...

He staggered across the polished bamboo floor of the gym one step at a time, trying not to breathe too deeply because it sent the animal inside him into a frenzy of snarling hunger. Morgan moaned again, and the doctor cursed. Xander rounded the side of the folding screen and froze, looking down with his lips parted and his heart a sudden throbbing clench in his chest.

She was lying on her back on a futon unfolded on the floor, arms and legs akimbo, a sheet bunched up around her waist as if she’d been thrashing in it. She was clothed, but not by much: a simple camisole gone see-through with sweat, a glimpse of plain, girlish white panties beneath the wrinkled sheet. Her hair was a tangled dark mess over the pillow beneath her head, her eyes were closed, her skin shone with the Fever and a fine sheen of perspiration. Strands of hair curled mermaid damp across her brow, clung to her neck, and he itched to push them from her skin with his fingers.

Looking at her, every atom in his body, every nerve, screamed, I want! I need! Mine!

“I told you, it’ll make it worse if you’re—” Bartleby, crouching over Morgan with a syringe in his hand, turned while he spoke. When he saw Xander standing there, he broke off in surprise and came to his feet. “You’re up! How are you feeling?”

Xander’s mouth felt like baked stone. He didn’t take his gaze from Morgan when he answered.

“At this exact moment?” he said, his voice shaking. “Like King Kong on Viagra.”

“It’s the hormones she’s emitting,” Bartleby said, sending a worried glance toward Morgan. As if she knew he was looking at her, she let out a whimper. Her head rolled back and forth on the pillow, and she arched on the futon, radiating heat. Bartleby glanced back at Xander, whose mouth had begun to water. “You can’t be in here. You know that,” he said, moving between Xander and Morgan so he blocked the view.

A low, warning growl rumbled through Xander’s chest. He couldn’t help it.

“Alexander,” said the doctor, careful to keep his voice mild, “I’m only trying to make this easier for her. She is in a lot of discomfort—pain, actually—and though I’ve just given her a shot of morphine, she’ll still be able to feel you here and it will make the pain worse. You need to leave. For her.”

He didn’t move. His brain sent the command, but his feet refused. His entire body was in mutiny. Desire pounded through him in wave over dark, powerful wave, and he stood there fighting it, fighting the almost overpowering urge to rip off that sheet and those innocent white panties and take her right here, on the gymnasium floor.

“Why would Leander send me with a female about to go into her Fever?” he wondered aloud.

His voice cracked over every other word. “Why would anyone be so stupid?”

Bartleby sighed and set the syringe down on a low table that was filled with towels and water bottles and various medical supplies, then turned back to Xander. “He didn’t know. She said it’s her first Fever.”

Xander started. He’d never heard of a female going into Fever for the first time later than puberty. “What? That’s impossible! She’s—how old is she?”

“Twenty-six,” came the reply. “And, yes, it’s almost unheard of to happen this late. But not impossible.” His tone shaded with sarcasm. “Clearly.” He put a gentle hand on Xander’s bicep and gave a small push. It was like trying to move a building.

“I just want to move her somewhere more comfortable,” Xander said, licking his lips. “I can’t stand seeing her on the floor. Just to one of the bedrooms, downstairs.” He glanced at the doctor. “Will it hurt her if I move her?”

Bartleby shook his head. His eyes were worried. “But it might hurt you.” A flush spread across his cheeks.

“The wound is healing,” Xander said. “It hurts, but you know I heal fast. And she probably only weighs a buck ten, a buck twenty at the most—”

“It’s not your wound I’m worried about, old friend,” said the doctor, then sent a pointed glance at the front of Xander’s trousers, at the bulge straining there. Bartleby coughed into his hand and glanced away.

Xander dismissed that. He was under control. If he had stood here with the scent of her readiness pummeling him for the past few minutes and had done nothing to satisfy the screaming need it unleashed in him, he could control himself.

He was relatively sure of that.

He brushed past Bartleby and knelt beside the futon. He leaned over Morgan. His gaze traveled over her flushed face, her tangled hair, her chest...

He squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the sight of hard pink nipples straining taut through the sheer, clinging fabric of the camisole, of her breasts, so full and round.

“Morgan,” he whispered, opening his eyes. She made a little sound in her throat and her brow furrowed, but her eyes didn’t open. “I’m going to move you to a more comfortable place, to a bed. All right?”

She didn’t answer. He smelled the drug the doctor had given her, smelled the chemical harshness of it in her blood beneath the amazing, opulent scent of the Fever, and knew it wouldn’t last long. Her body was burning through it even as he knelt there.

He gathered the sheet around her, carefully slid his arms beneath her body, and pulled her against him, cradling her to his chest. He lifted her and stood up. Her head fell against his shoulder, she breathed a little, discontented sigh. Her skin was hot, so hot—

The fingers of one of her hands curled around the front of his shirt. Eyes closed, she burrowed against him, inhaling, breathing his own scent into her nose. Then she made another sound in her throat, but this one was purely erotic.

A shudder wracked him. He had to get her to that bed, and fast, and then he had to get the hell away from her.

Without another word to the doctor, he crossed the darkened gym, kicked open the doors, and headed toward the stairs.

Morgan was on fire.

Everything burned, everything hurt, her skin and her muscles and her bones. Even her thoughts —chaotic and disjointed as they were—scorched a painfully blazing path through her brain, pounding one word over and over.

Mate. Mate. Mate.

She’d never felt anything like this incinerating, elemental urgency before but supposed she shouldn’t have been so surprised; her own mother had her first Fever late, though not as late as this.

Once Morgan passed puberty without a sign of it appearing, then twenty, then twenty-five, everyone just assumed she was an anomaly. That possibly her powerful Gift of Suggestion came with a darker side. Infertility.

But no. She was fertile. Now she felt it to the very marrow of her bones.

And there was a male holding her. An Ikati male, not the human doctor that had tended to her since the first signs of the Fever hit. She smelled the difference between them, the power, the strength of this male carrying her in his arms. She smelled his lust, dark and deep.

Her lids were so heavy from the drug she couldn’t open her eyes, but she could inhale, and she took that heavenly scent of lust into her lungs. This close, it was thick and sweet like candy, delicious.

It sent a spike of heat straight down between her legs.

She made a little noise of longing in her throat. The male began to walk faster.

There came the sound of heavy doors being kicked open, then light behind her closed lids that hurt enough to make her turn, wincing, and bury her face in the hard chest she was cradled against.