Nightswept Episode Four

By Odette C. Bell

Sebastien and Samantha might be together, but it won’t last. Nothing can when everything is on the line. As the Kore hunt them and the Landers push further into this universe, Forest fights for it form beyond.
Soon all the pieces in this dramatic play will come together. But for the Coalition to survive, it must learn the most fundamental lesson of all. For victories to last, they must find a path through the darkness for all.
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Nightswept follows a playboy and an amnesiac cadet fighting to save the universe from darkness. If you love your space operas with action, heart, and a splash of romance, grab Nightswept Episode Four today and soar free with an Odette C. Bell series.
Nightswept is the 19th Galactic Coalition Academy series. A sprawling, epic, and exciting sci-fi world where cadets become heroes and hearts are always won, each series can be read separately, so plunge in today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odette C. Bell
• Release date: Aug 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005905965

Book preview

Chapter 1

Samantha Baker

I’d done it. Battled through hell to get to Sebastien. But now another version of hell had arrived.

I didn’t have time to begin to think, to slow down long enough to appreciate that the universal key was somehow now in Asher.

The only thing that counted was the empress.

She looked resplendent in her giant purple robe. If this had been old Earth, and she’d been a Roman emperor, that dress would’ve taken every single sea slug in the world to produce that much die.

While I doubted any animals had been cruelly crushed to create it, I could guarantee you the people of her empire had been abused in another way. It all came down to the light that currently inhabited her and the deal she must’ve made with the Landers to acquire it. It was exactly the same light that had almost killed me with those batons on Robert’s vessel.

It pulsed within her, though raged was probably a better verb. She spread her hands out wide, fast enough that I heard the skin and knuckles crunch like somebody dropping fat from a frying pan into ice-cold water.

She said nothing. She looked right past me at her daughter. There was no familial recognition there. I might not have enough memories to appreciate what families ought to look like, but anyone could see that the look in her eyes was one of impending acquisition, not love and loyalty.

It’s over. You idiot, it’s over, Asher continued to mutter from behind me. She trembled, but before she could fall over, Sebastien was there.

I could see him out of the corner of my eye, though I wanted to turn fully to assess the exact way he grabbed her. I needn’t bother. He, apparently, didn’t intend to let me be the only one to stand up against the empress. Once Asher was standing, he jerked forward. I threw out a hand. I looked right at him. You’re not going to fight. I am. I could give him a thousand reasons why. One was that he needed the universal key back. I had to keep his body whole for that to happen, right? But screw that reason. I didn’t care about him being the last of his kind, either – even though such a phrase activated Locky on a deep level.

It was just… it was Sebastien. He was the one that I’d decided to save, no matter what. So it was time to get around to saving him.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have let the empress charge herself so freely and without reply. It didn’t take much time, anyway. The energy that shot through her did so with alacrity – a cruel one. Though I couldn’t hear it and I certainly couldn’t see it, I swore it bit through her veins, racing and marching, doing as much damage to her natural body as it could. Irrelevant. It would repair it, and where it could not repair it, sophisticated Kore technology could. And at the end of the day, it wasn’t as if the energy inhabiting her sought longevity. Though the empress could not appreciate this, she was a momentary host. Who knows what the Landers had promised her – what great riches from beyond this universe they’d told her they would throw at her feet once this was done. The Landers would not relinquish a thing.

And neither would I.

I didn’t do what the empress did, didn’t showily throw my hands to the side. I’d been through so many breakneck fights with no time to cool down that Locky’s energy was still within me, right under the surface, bubbling away like a pan on high heat with a lid on. Yank that lid off, and the steam would burn your face.

You are in Kore space. You are now under my command. You have one option— the empress began imperiously.

Let me guess? It’s to give up. I won’t. But I will bestow one option upon you instead. Relinquish that energy source. Turn around. Walk away. Stop protecting the Landers. It will only end in pain. You will not, I said, reaching a pitch that should have shaken right through the belly of the ship, threaten this universe. You will not make an agreement with the Landers. And you will not hurt the things that I care for. I let my gaze flash toward Sebastien, let this mean something. Then… you wouldn’t be surprised that then it was time to fight.

The empress was done speaking. Her greedy gaze sliced between mine and Sebastien’s shoulders and locked on Asher. As for Asher, she couldn’t control herself anymore, and with a guttural shake that spasmed up into her back, she shook until she fell against the wall. Then she slid down it, the pounding, heaving movements of her chest sounding like someone had stabbed an old Earth tire and decided to drive on it for a thousand miles.

No more talking. Just attacking.

I didn’t bother to try to think of how likely it was that I could win. I didn’t bother to list all of the other fights I was fresh from – all of the damage that Locky had yet to repair. Hell, Locky himself, in some way, was still damaged. He was still deeply traumatized by what he’d seen with Lawrence. I didn’t know what kind of sacred pact the Peacekeepers had with the Universal Guardians, but it sounded as if Lawrence was one of the first to ever go against it. Locky’s worldview would be shaken. He needed time to rest. He didn’t have it. So he could rest in my hands instead. He could rest in my bosom, and I could fight. Because I, Samantha Baker, apparently didn’t know how to stop.

I let Locky’s energy rush through my hand, into my fist, and across my knuckles. It sailed up high. It was so powerful, it should’ve come with a clap of lightning. But it wasn’t quite powerful enough.

When I had fought Lawrence, he’d had the ability to move around as pure energy if he saw fit. He was one thing, possessed as he was of five or more Peacekeepers. The empress was something entirely different. She let her lips tip up over her teeth. I said tip, because her body suddenly spun upside down, ignoring the rules of gravity.

It soon ignored another physical constant as she disappeared, then reappeared right behind me. This wasn’t matter transportation. She became energy momentarily as if her form was now imprinted fully on the Landers’ vile light.

Samantha, Bastian roared.

He tried to jolt into me and push me out of the way, but I was ready. I flung a hand out behind me and created a shield. It was three seconds before the empress attacked. Her hands manifested first, then her mouth. Nothing else appeared. It would be a pointless distraction from the deluge of power she fired my way. Bright light spun out in every direction. It pulsed like a broken heart and possessed blue, green, and yellow sparks. It was those that were most damaging, destabilizing too. They had the essence of the Landers, and where those sparks settled, space itself warped.

A few of them dashed across the wall just past Sebastien’s shoulder, and I watched as his neck strained toward them. The wall itself crumpled. There was a hiss as if it had always been made out of water and it had been thrown on a fire. It hadn’t of course been made out of water, but right now as that chaos virus ripped through it, you could convince it of any state. It could become liquid, it could become solid, it could become gas, and it would become every single thing in between.

Don’t let those sparks touch you, I roared at Sebastien. I wanted to take the initiative and attack the empress head-on, but Sebastien was the weakest link here.

Asher would not be killed. She held the universal key. Sebastien, however, to the empress at least, had outlived his usefulness.

Worse, the way I interacted with Sebastien made it obvious he meant something to me.

I didn’t need any more time to make a complete psychological assessment of the empress. I didn’t need to dive through the records of the Kore Empire to figure out how she operated. It was there in every movement, there in every look. There in the way her dark eyes flicked down toward Sebastien and her lips then curled up as if the only thing she ever found amusing was plunging people into hell.

Sebastien, I roared. I flung myself around and tried to grab his shoulders, but at the same time, the empress attacked from behind.

She shoved her hands down into the floor plating and ripped it up in a blast of force. A shockwave struck the middle of my back, flung me forward, and forced me against the wall. For a split second, I saw Sebastien as my arms flailed around my face, my hair dashing over my cheeks and eyes.

He just looked at me. He looked at me as if it was all over now and part of him had always seen this coming.

And that look… unbidden, from the past, I saw the moment Sebastien had turned away from me in the corridor at the Academy. He… we’d fought. We—

I couldn’t afford to remember the rest of that recollection. I’d told you that 100 times. Do that, throw myself into it, and I’d lose Locky. But I didn’t need to use self-restraint to pull myself back. I smashed face-first into a wall, and the impact did that for me. I’d been thrown into walls multiple times, but not like this. Because the empress’s power turned around, forced its way into my back, and kept pushing me forward.

The metal, though it had decided to be liquid a few seconds before, hardened up. And I found myself setting within it, and far more worryingly than that, found my lips and mouth being buried in that hardening substance.

I took one breath, then couldn’t possibly take another. I heard Sebastien scream at me, but there was nothing he could do. Maybe there’d never been anything he could do.

He—

One chuckle. The empress gave one chuckle. And it tore me right out of my fugue. It reactivated my drive to do this, reminding me what I was compared to her. And that gave me the impetus I needed to shove my hands into the metal and rip myself back. Lord knows what I would look like. Metal splattered all around me. The poor stuff would be damn confused. One moment it was liquid, one moment it was setting – then in another it was melting under my ferocity.

Let it be confused. Let the entire corridor have no clue what would happen next. It was not in control. Neither was the empress. I was.

Before she could hurl herself at Sebastien, I spun around, forced myself forward, and finally grabbed her.

I shouldn’t. I still had a functioning memory – well, at least of the past several days. I knew exactly how debilitating it had been to grab those batons on Robert’s ship. It had felt like grabbing up the greatest parasite in existence, turning it around, and pointing it helpfully toward your neck.

But this was worse – on a scale of about a thousand to one.

The maids’ batons had been small. They’d had a limited energy source, too. The empress was the size of a human being. But far worse than that, the power she had was not constrained by her current form. She was a channel, instead, drawing it from some external source. It was unstoppable, unquenchable, and the second I grabbed hold of it, it was all directed toward me.

Samantha, Sebastien bellowed. Maybe he could just sense the danger in the moment, knew how powerful the empress was, or had a strong enough connection to me to understand my horror.

He jerked forward.

Asher had been entirely useless until now. But she skidded around, grabbed his middle, and pulled him back. He tried to push her off. No. Samantha—

She’s sacrificing herself to give us the chance to get out of here. So we have to run.

I managed to twist my head around. It was one of the hardest things I’d done, and I was certain that my neck turned into concrete. The rest of me would join it. Every single cell would soon become nothing more than resin molds of their previous selves. Even sophisticated medical technology wouldn’t be able to thaw me.

The empress hissed, reached up, grabbed my throat, drew me even closer, and allowed the Landers’ destabilizing energy to pulse into my body, to fight Locky back.

My eyes rolled backward, then sideways, then backward again. My senses….

Sebastien broke away