“Hey, baby.” He reached down to cup her cheek but she ducked away from his touch.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?” Merrick’s heart ached. “Are you afraid of me again? Because of what you remembered?”
“Not just remembered—re-lived.” She sat up shivering and put her arms around herself. “That was awful—much worse than what the AllFather did. With him, I only had to watch my past up on a giant IMAX kind of screen. With this…” She shook her head and looked down at the floor.
“Elise…baby…” Merrick reached for her again, tentatively.
“No.” She moved away from him. “You don’t understand. I felt it all over again, Merrick. Everything he did to me. Everything he made me do to him. Oh God, I wish I was dead.”
“Don’t say that!” Merrick took her by the shoulders and shook her—not hard but enough to get her attention. “Don’t ever say that, Elise!”
“Why not?” she demanded, pulling away from his hands. “It’s true! This is why I kept you at a distance, Merrick. Because I was so afraid anything we did might bring it all back. And I knew…” Her voice hitched in a sob. “Knew if I ever remembered it, I’d never be able to suppress it again.”
“Some things you can’t suppress forever,” Merrick said, trying to make his voice gentle. “Some things you eventually have to deal with, baby.”
“I never wanted to deal with it.” Elise swiped at her eyes. “You know James thinks I’m a virgin? That’s why he’s been willing to keep his hands off me until we get married.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth.”
“If he really loved you, he wouldn’t care about that,” Merrick growled. “Just like I don’t care.”
“How can you not care?” She looked up at him, her eyes wet with tears. “It wasn’t just that once, you know, Merrick. It…it went on all weekend long. And after too.” She looked down again. “After awhile, I lost count of how many times he…he raped me. I just wanted it to be over so I could bury Buck and try to forget.”
Fury surged inside him, almost as strongly as the agony he felt coming through their bond. “Was there no one you could tell?” he demanded hoarsely. “No one who could help you?”
Elise shrugged. “I tried, after…after it was over. My mother didn’t believe me, so I went to the police. But my stepfather told them I was just upset with him for ‘accidentally’ running over my dog and wanted to get him in trouble.” She swiped at her eyes. “I’m pretty sure he paid them off, too. That’s the way he operates—he thinks he can buy anything he wants.”
“Including the right to take an underage female who was under his protection against her will.” Merrick shook his head grimly. “There isn’t a painful enough death to pay for what he did to you.”
She laughed brokenly. “It doesn’t matter—it’s over now. And at least now you can understand why I can’t…can’t be with you.”
“What do you mean?” Merrick’s heart stopped a moment in fear. “I thought we agreed we wanted to be together, even after the bond is broken.”
“I want to, but I can’t,” Elise whispered. “Try to understand, Merrick. I’m broken. Used.” She looked away from him and he saw her swipe at her eyes again as more tears fell. “The things he did to me can never be wiped away. I’m dirty inside. Stained…filthy…disgusting.”
“No, you’re not! Not to me.” Merrick pulled her into his lap and held her despite her struggles.
“Let me go!” She pushed against his chest and then broke down, sobbing. “How can you even want to touch me after what he did?”
“I don’t give a fuck what he did,” he growled, still holding her. “The only thing I care about is you—keeping you with me. Spending the rest of my life with you.”
“You say that now.” Elise pushed away from him and he finally yielded and let her crawl out of his lap. “You say that now,” she repeated. “But what about after the bond is dissolved? Then you’ll see me for what I really am—damaged goods.”
Frustration welled up inside him. “Elise, Goddess damn it! How can I show you? How can I prove to you that I don’t care about the past? How can I—?” Suddenly, he knew. “Wait here,” he told her. “And don’t move an inch.”
Then he ran out of the hut in search of Mother-Healer who had stepped out of the hut earlier, presumably to give them some privacy. The old woman had something he needed—needed desperately if he was ever going to prove to Elise that he loved her no matter what.
* * * * *
Elise sat on the leafy bed and stared down at her hands. The hut was lit only by a pale blue flame in a light fixture hanging overhead, which threw shadows everywhere.
She shivered and it occurred to her that she was still naked, but someone—perhaps Mother-Healer—had left her robes by the side of the bed. Elise put them on and then sat back on the bed in the dim blue light.
Her hands were cupped in her lap and the shadows filled them like cool, dark water. She tried to make her mind a blank, tried not to think about what had happened, about the memories that now crowded her head like corpses raised from the dead. But she knew they would always be with her. Her days of living on the surface of life were over—from now on she would have to wake up every morning, get through every day, and go to bed every night with the memory of what had happened to her haunting her like a ghost.
It was almost more than she could bear.
“Here. Here it is.”
She looked up and saw Merrick holding the skrillix branch in one hand and a carved wooden cup filled with red liquid in the other. Immediately, she recoiled.
“Get it away from me! I won’t go through it again—I won’t!”
“No, no, baby,” Merrick soothed, sitting down beside her on the bed. He’d gotten his trousers back on though he was still bare-chested, and he looked very big in the dim light—like a shadow come to life. “You’ll never have to go through that again—I swear,” he said. “This time it’s for me.”
Elise looked at him blankly. “I don’t understand.”
“Remember on our flight here, the first time you let me touch you—really touch you—and I told you I’d tell you about my scars when you told me about yours?” he asked.
“Yes,” Elise said cautiously.
“Well, this is it,” Merrick said simply. “You did more than tell me—you showed me. And I want to show you, too.”
Elise frowned. “I appreciate the offer, Merrick, but I’m not sure how that will help. I mean, just because we went digging through my horrible past doesn’t mean we have to go digging through yours too.”
“Yes, we do,” he said. “I need to show you, baby. Although I warn you…you may feel differently about me when you see.”
“You don’t have to show me,” Elise said gently. She put a hand on his knee. “Don’t do it, Merrick—you’ll be sorry. Believe me, I certainly am.”
“I’m sorry too,” he said roughly. “I never should have let you go through that. I should have offered myself right from the start.”
“No.” Elise shook her head firmly. “You’ve taken enough punishment for me already. Which is why you don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do,” Merrick growled. “I want you to know me the way I know you. I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us to keep us apart. This is the only way to do that.”
Elise was touched. He really cares for me. Cares so much he’s willing to re-live the worst experience of his life just to prove it.
“Goddess-damned right, I care,” Merrick growled.
Elise frowned. Was their bond so deep that he could read her thoughts now? But she didn’t have much time to speculate. Merrick pricked his finger with one of the wicked-looking skrillix thorns and let a single drop of blood fall into the carved wooden cup. Then he put the skrillix branch carefully to one side and looked at her.
“I’m going back, Elise. Back to when I got this.” He traced the jagged scar that bisected his eyebrow
and ran down his cheek in a cruel, white line. “Are you coming with me or not?” He offered her the cup.
“Yes.” She took the cup, unable to refuse his sacrifice. “Yes, Merrick, of course I’ll come.”
And then she drank.
Chapter Thirty-three
Suddenly Merrick was back in his old home grotto of Lanash on Tranq Prime.
He looked down at himself, and saw that he was wearing a black tharp wrapped around his waist as well as black fur boots. His chest was bare and it was neither as muscular nor as scarred as he was used to seeing it. A glance upwards showed the vast stone roof arched overhead, too high to see at its peak. The columns holding it up were etched with the ancient Prime symbols for purity—racial purity, that was. And since Merrick was a blending of three races—Blood Kindred, Beast Kindred, and Tranq Prime, he didn’t exactly live up to the ideal. In fact, he fell so far short it was a fucking joke—one he didn’t find in the least bit funny.
He was on his way from the learning house, which had let out early that day, to the domicile he and his mother shared with Jonquil, the male she’d taken up with after they’d moved back to Tranq Prime. Merrick didn’t like living with Jonquil—he talked sweetly and pretended to love Merrick’s mother but Merrick could see the lie in his pale blue eyes. This Tranq Prime male with no Kindred blood in his veins didn’t care for his mother, not the way Merrick’s father had. But his father was dead and they couldn’t stay with their kin anymore. Though his mother’s sister had offered them the cup of hospitality to drink from, it was clear she didn’t want them in her domicile. Merrick knew why, too—it was because of him.
On Rageron, his differences had been noticed but accepted. His large size and mismatched eyes were remarked on but not mocked. But here on Tranq Prime things were different. The word “hybrid” was a curse, and his mixed heritage was looked upon with disgust and loathing. The Primes wanted no one with impure blood anywhere near them, and they were quick to let him know it.
Going to the learning house, where all the children were taught until their early teens, was a nightmare which he got through mainly by not speaking to anyone except for his friend, Sylvan. Sylvan, who was the only one who didn’t look down on Merrick or call him names or hate him for being different. But now even Sylvan was gone. His mother had died tragically and his father, a Kindred warrior like Merrick’s had been, had moved off-planet, taking Merrick’s one and only friend with him.
Merrick missed his friend horribly, but it had been years since Sylvan left, and it was clear he wasn’t coming back. So he’d learned to turn a deaf ear to the jeers and insults. He was larger than all of his classmates and could have beaten any of them easily in a fight, but his mother had begged him to be careful. Fighting was grounds for dismissal, and if he was cast out of the learning house, it would give Jonquil a reason to cast them out of his domicile. She never said this out loud but Merrick knew it was true. Jonquil didn’t like him any more than the other pure blooded Primes, even if he was supposed to be Merrick’s “second father,” a term of affection Merrick would rather die than use.
There was another reason he didn’t fight, but it was buried inside him, buried so deeply he was almost afraid to think about it. His mother had mentioned it once in a roundabout way, but that had been long ago.
“It’s dangerous for someone like you to fight,” she had said, rubbing his back as she tried to soothe him after a bad day at the learning house. A day like any other, when he was cursed at and spit on for being different. For being himself.
“You mean a hybrid—a half-breed,” Merrick had said bitterly. “It’s dangerous for a half-breed to fight. They never called me that on Rageron, Mamam. Why did you bring us here where everyone hates me just for being different?”
She sighed and he saw a troubled look in her lovely green eyes, which made him regret his words—but only a little. “Oh Merrick, you know why.” She rubbed his back. “The tribal wars and the plagues…I feared for you. Feared for us both, without your father to watch over us.”
“Shuura and Tongs were there,” Merrick said stubbornly. “At least they would have taken me on my coming of age hunt, which is more than Jonquil will do. It shames me, Mamam, that I have not yet killed a vranna.”
“Killing…violence…” She shook her head sadly. “Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up, my son. Being an adult is a difficult, ugly business sometimes.”
“You can’t keep me young forever,” Merrick growled. “Look at me, Mamam—I’m as tall as some of the Prime males already and I’m sure I’ll be as big as Father was soon. Yet I still have the status of a child. Since you forbid me to fight, I need to spill first blood if I am ever to be accepted at the learning house.”
“All right.” She nodded reluctantly. “I’ll speak to Jonquil about it again. But you must keep your temper, Merrick—no matter how the others tease you at learning house. You must stay in control of yourself at all times.”
Merrick couldn’t control his frustration. “But why, Mamam? You don’t know the things they say to me, the things they do. Why can’t I teach one of them a lesson, just once?”
“Because…” She’d hesitated, her green eyes troubled. “Because, Merrick, sometimes when someone like you—when a hybrid—starts fighting, they can’t stop. Do you understand?”
Slowly, Merrick had nodded. He didn’t think about it much, but he knew it was there—a deep, untapped well of violence that lived just under the surface of his soul. If I fought them, he told himself, thinking of the bullies at school, the ones that jeered at him and called him “half-breed scum” and “Kindred dog.” If I let myself go, even once, I wouldn’t stop until they were all dead. Every last one of them.
It was a horrible thing to realize about himself. Horrible, but true. He could feel the cold curtain of hatred—the killing frost, as he thought of it to himself—wanting to come over him sometimes. It hung over him like a cloud, waiting to descend when he was having an especially bad day and the other students wouldn’t leave him alone, but somehow he always managed to stave it off. In the past, he’d done that by talking to Sylvan. But now that his friend was gone, he had no outlet. Lately Merrick had felt the rage growing inside him, getting deeper and hotter, like an angry flame licking at the edges of his soul, hungry to consume him. But if he let the fire burn too brightly, he knew the killing frost would not be far behind.
I must not give in, he told himself as he walked through the public reflection area, looking at the snowdrop trees, which were in full bloom. Their delicate, lacy white blossoms looked like palm-sized snowflakes caught just before they melted. Can’t let them get to me.
But it was getting harder and harder to control his rage, to put it away and not give in to the cold hatred that wanted to consume him. Especially when the others teased him about not being a true male. Merrick thought the shame of not letting his first blood yet would kill him sometimes.
I should go out on my own, he thought as he walked past the quiet waters of the pond. I know where Jonquil keeps his shale. I’ll kill a vranna and drag it back to the grotto on my own. That would shut the bastards up. They’d never dare to call me half-breed or a child again. I—
“Hey, half-breed!”
The unwelcome shout came from his left and Merrick turned, frowning. It was Rattis, the leader of the males who bullied him at the learning house, and he had his whole group of followers with him.
Merrick glared at them. “What do you want? It’s a nice enough day—we even got out of learning house early. Can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Now why would we do that?” Rattis swaggered over. He and the other males in his group all wore blood-red tharps and red fur boots, a symbol of their gang of pure-blooded Primes. “When it’s so much fun to teach you a lesson?”
“And what ‘lesson’ would that be, Rattis?” Merrick growled.
“The lesson that hybrids and half-breeds aren’t wanted here. Especially ones not even male enough to kill a vranna an
d let first blood.” Rattis came right up and stood toe to toe with him. He was a head shorter than Merrick and not half as muscular, but he acted with the assurance of someone who is confronting a coward, someone who won’t fight back no matter what is done to him.
I’m no coward, Merrick thought, his hands curling into fists. I could kill them—kill them all without even trying. But if he did that—if he so much as laid a finger on them—Jonquil would cast him and his mother out. It would kill his mother if she had to live with her sister again and their only other option would be the frozen tundra above, where nothing warm-blooded could survive for long. Tranq Prime was a closed world—those without kin or someone willing to take them in died in its icy grip.
So Merrick took a deep breath and pushed the cold, killing rage that wanted to rise in him back down below the surface. “I have no quarrel with you, Rattis,” he said in the most neutral voice he could manage. “Leave me in peace and I’ll be on my way.”
“If we did that, then you’d never leave, hybrid scum.” Rattis spat on the ground at his feet. “You and your whore of a mother would stay here forever, polluting our grotto with your impure filth.”
“What did you say?” Merrick took a step closer to the other male so that he was towering over Rattis. “What did you just call my mother?”
For the first time, Rattis looked uneasy. “I only spoke the truth.”
“He’s right,” Nadire, one of the other males in the gang sneered. “My older brother visited her yesterday.”
“So did mine.” Rattis laughed, apparently forgetting his unease. “He said she has a mouth sweeter than any female in the grotto. And her cunt—”
Merrick could feel the rage rising in him and this time there was no stopping it. It was one thing to put up with the insults and jeers about his own mixed parentage, but no one was going to speak ill of his mother. His arm shot out, and he gripped Rattis by the throat and hoisted him into the air. He shook the other male as though he weighed no more than a doll. “You dare!” he roared. “You dare to tell filthy lies about my mother? I’ll kill you!”
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