Page 145 of The Edge of Dawn

The warrior screamed, but his voice quickly faded, becoming a hoarse last gasp.

He kicked him hard, pushing back the near-dead weight of his body from where it was skewered on Dragek’s blade.

The warrior fell to the ground.

And once again, all was silent.

Surrounded by the dead, blood splattered all over him, Dragek released his ka’qui, emerging from the qim.

It had all happened very fast.

He wasn’t even breathing heavily.

His sanity threatened to spiral out of control: filled with the euphoria and bleakness of violence, with the rippling, cracking chaos of the Mating Fever, and the sudden fear of realizing he was in another dimension—the past—where his actions could change everything, even her existence.

But she was here.

With him.

It was a feat that defied all the known physical and psychic laws.

She was with him, and she asked for nothing in return, even when he concealed part of himself from her.

Is this it?

Is this all I need to do?

It was probably best that he went back now.

Without touching anything else, without casting so much as a ripple in this otherworld.

He would leave the bodies of the intruders to freeze and eventually desiccate. With time, they would become shriveled and husk-like, with only their armor and weapons leaving any trace as to their identities.

My work here is done. Time to go back.

Urgency prickled inside his chest. The portal was so close. He couldn’t afford to let anything get between him and the way back…

To her.

Killing them had been so easy—too easy—but maybe that was the way it was meant to be.

So when he turned and found Tarak standing there, in front of the ancient, alien structure that had brought them back through time—an exact replica of the one on Duxuth—he nearly lost his mind.

“What in the Nine Hells are you doing here?” he whispered.

He didn’t even have the presence of mind to flick the blood from his sword. Normally, it would be an automatic habit, but right now…

He couldn’t move.

“Go.” Tarak gestured toward the portal. “Return to your rightful existence, where everything will be the same up until this point and thereafter.”

“What are you going to do? You can’t be here.”

Tarak stood in the faint glow, his helm down, revealing his face. His head was ever so slightly inclined, a cryptic expression gracing his hard features. “I won’t interfere with this world. This is the past that must remain intact for everything to progress as it should. Even you, as you are now, would not have existed without the version of you that exists at this moment. Somewhere else on this planet, there’s a past version of you, just as there is a past version of me. The one thing I need to do before I leave this place is to speak with my former self.”

“You’re messing with the timeline too much,” Dragek accused. “You’ll fuck things up for all of us.”

“No, I won’t. Because this has all played out once before.”

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