Possessive Aliens: Dark Scifi Romance Box Set

by Loki Renard

  “I’m better,” she says softly. That’s my cue to let her go, even though I don’t want to. I want to hold her until the end of time, protect her from the harsh realities of the universe outside this ship.

  I let her go gently, waiting for her to pull away and say something that will make me feel terrible. Every time she tells me to leave her alone, I feel the pain of those words in my own chest. It makes me want to kill things. She doesn’t want to be alone. I can tell by the way she hesitates to pull away. But she does, putting distance between us. She’s wary, her eyes cast low. I can see the ripples of the life she suffered before me running over her in shivers of fear or disgust or maybe both.

  “You said you wouldn’t touch me.”

  “I lied,” I say. “I lie about things that make you better and keep you safe.”

  “I wasn’t in danger.”

  “But the hug made you feel better. Admit it.”

  “Maybe it did,” she admits. “But you shouldn’t have done it.”

  “What can I say, I’m a rebel. A rebel with snuggles.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  She keeps saying those three words, and they are more crushing than being sat on by a reticulated elephant. I feel the air rush out of me, the hope of a connection with her broken for the moment. I know she’s not angry at me. She’s angry at what was done to her. Pain leaves marks on the mind, covers the world in shades of rage. Being scythkin means understanding pain more than anything else.

  “I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  “Why not? What do you want from me?” She looks at me with those brilliantly fierce eyes and I am lost for words. I want so much from her. I want to make her feel better. I want to fix the pain. I want to see that smile I got to see, just for a moment. I want her to fall in love with me. But I know I can’t say that. To her, I am a beast. Most humans never learn to tolerate the appearance of an undisguised scythkin.

  “You are taking way too long to answer that,” she says shrewdly.

  “I want to look after you.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “Because you don’t believe anyone because you’ve been hurt.”

  “Because you have no reason to help me, or look after me. I know what I am. I’m a commodity. I’m something to be sold. Are you going to sell me?”

  “Never,” I promise her. “Not ever.”

  “So you’re going to keep me for yourself.”

  “We're not holding you against your will, are we? Did you want to stay on the station where we found you?” I don’t like the tone I have. She definitely doesn't like it either.

  “So you saved me. For no reason. And now you're just flying me around, giving me clothes and food and looking after me just because you’re a nice guy with a sharp back.”

  I retract my dorsal ridge. Among scythkin, a prominent sharp ridge is a sign of virility and dominance, but I guess she doesn’t find it so appealing. I also lay my horned ears back along my head in a hapless attempt to look more human.

  42

  I feel so fucking horrible for saying the things I am saying. He has been nothing but nice to me. He has treated me like a queen, and now with his horns pressed back and every sharp bit of his body pulled in hard against his flesh, he looks so apologetic I can't stand it.

  But I also can’t trust him. I can’t trust myself. Every feeling I have is strange and uncomfortable, and his embrace made me feel better, but what if that was just a chemical lie my body was telling itself because I’m so desperate?

  He shifts a little further away from me, putting distance between us that I don’t desire, but have asked for. Tarkan’s touch is the only touch I’ve felt that has shown any care, that has been gentle or good or…

  I feel tears threatening to fall and blink them back. I don't know what to do with myself. I don't know what he wants with me, or what the future holds. I didn’t expect a future at all. Death was coming for me swiftly there in the chains. I was so hungry I had forgotten what it felt like to be fed. I was thirsty to the point of hallucination. And I was sick.

  They were going to let me die that way, because I was too much trouble. Maybe I should be careful not to be too much trouble for Tarkan. In my short span of memory I have managed to learn a few things, one of them being that being trouble leads to pain. But I can’t help it. I leaned into that pain in my first bout of captivity, and I can feel myself prodding for it again. Do I want to hurt? What is wrong with me?

  The frustration of not being able to remember is almost worse than any of the pain. The pain helps me remember who I am in a strange way. It’s as if when I hurt, I know that I exist. When I was dying, at least I knew I was alive. Now I’m caught in this twilight state where I don’t know that I can believe what my senses are telling me. I can’t believe in a hero. Heroes aren’t part of the small world I have found myself in.

  “It’s going to be okay.”

  “What?”

  I look up, barely having heard him.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he repeats himself.

  My eyes flood with tears I can’t hold back. He’s trying to comfort me, but I can’t be comforted. I don’t even know what I’m afraid of. It’s just a big feeling of badness swallowing me up making me want to be alone.

  “I do know what it’s like.”

  “What what is like?” He’s so damn vague.

  “What it is like to be hurt and to feel alone and to be small.”

  I look at him in surprise. There is nothing small about Tarkan. He is ten feet tall, more than twice my height. His width is more than twice mine. He is nature’s ultimate killing machine, a creature made with nothing but death in mind. There is no way he could understand a thing about me, or how I feel.

  “Liar.”

  He snorts. “I never lie. I’m not afraid enough of anyone to have to.”

  “You literally just said you lied a minute ago!”

  “Oh. Right. Well I never lie right now.”

  I’d laugh, if I still had the capacity for humor. As massive and frightening and obviously dangerous as he is, there’s something about Tarkan which is just… a phrase pops into my head, bubbling up from behind the black space of forgotten memories, class clown. If he were human, he’d be the sort of human who never did what he was told and somehow still got away with it.

  “Let me tell you what happened to Reaper and me,” Tarkan says. “Our kind are born in clutches. Eggs are laid dozens and dozens at a time. Usually thirty or forty broodlings are born. Then they do battle with each other, and any other clutches that might have hatched nearby.”

  “That seems like a really bad breeding strategy.”

  “It ensures only the lucky and the strong survive.”

  “Luck isn’t an evolutionary trait.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  I shrug. Maybe it is. I can barely remember anything about myself. Who am I to start giving lectures about evolution.

  “Usually at least a dozen survive, at the very minimum,” he says. “And that clutch grows up together, supporting one another, taking different roles, becoming a unit capable of great destruction and near ultimate power.”

  I’m still not seeing that there are any similarities between us, but I listen.

  “Reaper and I were under attack before we were born. Our matriarch was slain, the eggs of our clutch crushed. Of the many eggs she laid, only he and I hatched. We did not know what had happened before emerging, but we knew that the world we came into was cold and hostile and that surviving was unlikely. But we did. And you will too.”

  “You were born covered in razor sharp blades. You were born wild and free. You don’t know what captivity is, or what it does to you.”

  His expression closes. His horns return to their neutral position and he nods, moving further away from me. “I understand hardship,” he says. “I know what it does to you. It makes you think that there’s nobody and nothing that can help you. Most of the time, it’s right. It’s not right
today.”

  With that, he gets up and leaves me alone, giving me the thing I most want and least need.

  Tarkan

  This is not going to be easy. I wish I could make everything better, but she’s not going to let me. Not that easily.

  I leave her to calm down and soothe herself. It’s hard realizing that she will have to work through some of this on her own. The more I interfere, the more she’s going to blame me for it. I know how that works. I’ve done a lot of blaming in my time.

  Reaper is in the control room, monitoring the sensors. One of us has to be on watch at all times. There’s a very real chance that we will be hunted down at any time. Our lives are precarious, but those are the lives we have chosen. We could have remained faithful scythkin soldiers, loyal to the empire, but we went a different path.

  “How is she?”

  “Irritable. Aggressive. Sad. Scared,” I say, dropping the sketch I made in front of him. “This is what’s tattooed on her inner arm. If we compare it to the star maps we have, we might be able to find a location.”

  “You’re getting smarter in your old age,” Reaper smirks. “I’ll run it, but something like this could take days or even weeks to find a match.”

  “Just run it. I have to get back to her.”

  He makes a growling sound, which indicates a whole world of words he doesn’t have time to say before I go back to my girl. He doesn’t care for me giving orders, but I’ll order the whole universe into line if that’s what it takes to look after her.

  “You came back.”

  She sounds surprised, and she looks like she has been crying. Her eyes are red, and the tiara is across the room, as if a petulant princess hurled it there in a fit of anger. I’ve already decided what I’m going to do for her. I know what she needs most. I am going to have to teach this broken little thing how to be human, or at least help her rediscover what is already contained in the collective consciousness of her dead species.

  “I’m always going to come back.”

  Those words make her shoulders start to heave and her eyes glisten with fresh tears. It’s so easy to upset this girl. It’s going to be a lot harder putting her back together.

  “I’m going to make this better,” I tell her. “I’m going to teach you how to be a human.”

  “What does a scythkin know about being human?”

  Her question is valid, and my answer is more cutting than I intend it to be. “More than you do.”

  “You’re an asshole,” she smirks. “But you’re not wrong.”

  Chapter Four - How To Human

  Several days later, the ship’s computer is still working on the clue on her arm, and I am endeavoring to give 42 lessons on what it means to be human. We are still in the cargo bay. Suffice to say, Reaper was not pleased to discover the chaos in the medical bay. He said she should be spanked for that. I told him she’d been dealt with. He doesn’t know that meant I got her all the pretty clothes she wanted and have been doing everything I can to make her comfortable.

  We are sitting at a freshly fabricated table, set with all the cutlery and ceramic surfaces which make humans feel comfortable eating. I did not learn many customs of human culture over the years, but I did eat in a lot of human restaurants when Reaper and I used to visit the planet, hidden in the skins which allowed us a plausible disguise.

  42 is looking much better. Her hair has been cut to her shoulders, getting rid of the excess which was knotted and matted. Now it frames her pretty face, her sparkling blue eyes which always hold a mixture of intelligence and a strange kind of misery which makes me want to crush the skulls of whoever is behind it.

  “Humans have many eating rituals,” I explain to her. “They’re not the same across all cultures, but this was one of the more common ones, and if you meet any other humans, you want to be able to show them that you’re civilized.”

  “Why?”

  “Because humans are afraid of uncivilized people.”

  “That’s why that One girl hasn’t been around, huh,” she says shrewdly.

  Actually, the reason One hasn’t been around is because Reaper refuses to let his perfect little human be in harm’s way. He thinks 42 is a feral little thing who needs to be tamed with discipline, but I think she needs to be cared for and educated. Time will tell which one of us is right.

  “What’s this?” She picks up a small metal instrument.

  “That’s a fork,” I say. “Humans like to use them for ritual impalement of their food before it is consumed.”

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a knife. You use it to segment the food before you put it in your face.” I refrain from mentioning that knives are necessary because humans have small canines and therefore a great deal of trouble rending flesh from bone.

  “What’s this?” She picks at the corner of the tablecloth. “Should I try to eat this?”

  There’s a sassy little smirk on her face, which I love.

  “I think you know that’s not edible,” I say, moments before she stuffs it into her face anyway and makes a ridiculous display of pretending to chew.

  “You’re such a silly girl,” I laugh.

  She spits the table cloth out and smiles. “I need to say something to you, Tarkan. I should have said it the day we met, but I was so messed up.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Thank you,” she says softly. “For rescuing me.”

  “You are very welcome,” I say, finding it difficult to contain my smile. When scythkin smile, the fangs descend and the expression usually strikes utter terror into the hearts of softer creatures who encounter it. I have tried my best not to smile naturally since she arrived, thinking it would drive her into fresh panic, but she just smiles back.

  She is a quick learner, and I am certain that my refusal to hurt her even in discipline has helped her realize that I have no interest in causing her pain.

  She is naughty, though, and that will have to be dealt with at some point. Not now though. Now is a time for healing and building trust, and…

  “So is there going to be food? In this lesson about eating?”

  She really likes food. So do I. We have so much in common.

  “I put one of the old Earth menus into the computer, so we have a five course meal to look forward to.”

  “Is Reaper going to deliver it? Put him in a waiter’s uniform?”

  I laugh. She has not had much interaction with Reaper, largely because every time they get anywhere near one another, she irritates him on purpose. She likes to provoke, and to tease and to break things. She is a woman after my own heart and I love her. I love her with a fierce, protective feeling which animates me every moment I am with her.

  “We’re doing this on our own. He’s looking for your home.”

  42

  I don’t want to find my home. I don’t want to be taken back to a place I don’t remember. I want to stay right here, with this terrifying creature made of biological knives. At first I was suspicious and terrified of Tarkan, but several days have shown me that he is what he appears to be - ten feet of utterly lethal adoration and care.

  I still have moments of panic where I can’t trust him at all, but I try to hold on to the moments like these when I feel safe with him, and when I can let myself feel something good. But the idea of being taken back ‘home’ and then left makes me withdraw back into myself all over again.

  “What’s wrong?” He notices my shift in mood immediately. I know he’s sensitive to me. He has been caught in more sudden shifts than I can count since he took me on board.

  “You want to send me away,” I say.

  “No,” he growls immediately, taking my face in his palm, cupping my chin and letting his long fingers wrap around my jaw and cheeks. “I do not want to send you anywhere. You’re not going anywhere. You’re mine. I have no intention of letting you go. I just want to know where you came from. Don’t ever think I don’t want you.”

  He is so intense. It would be
too much to hear any other time. I would have freaked out and panicked and lost my mind if he had said that to me on the day we first met- though I think it was true then too. But now I am reassured. He wants me. He’s not going to let me go. I’m going to stay safe.

  “Do you understand me?”

  I nod a little, as much as I can while caught in his grip.

  “It’s important, 42. You’re mine.” His fingers tighten just a fraction.

  “Yours,” I say softly as a chemical reaction rushes through me. When he speaks, every part of me responds.

  “Shall we get back to our lessons?”

  It’s all I can do not to utter yes sir, two words that come up from somewhere deep in my psyche, through the barrier of lost memories.

  Tarkan

  “What are you going to teach me next?”

  Her voice is softer than it usually is. I knew it was a risk to declare my possession to her so boldly, but I would rather she panicked by feeling my desire than thought for a single second that I don’t want her. She needs to know that she is mine, and there is nothing I won’t do for her.

  “Hmm,” I say. “I don't know. I was going to do the meal and perhaps teach you about how you’re supposed to refuse dessert and then eat half of mine for some reason.”

  “Why?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Good teaching,” she snorts.

  “Listen, most things humans do don’t make any sense. They were forever confusing each other. They couldn’t even work out what they liked most days…”

  “Why do you always talk about humans like they don’t exist anymore?”

  “Because Earth is gone,” I tell her. I don’t want to tell her why Earth is gone. I don’t want to tell her what role I played in that. She’s teetering on the edge of trust. If I reveal what past mistakes I’ve made now, then she might decide that I am worse than her captors. I might be. They ruined her. I ruined so much more.