by D T Dyllin
“Don’t yell at me about yelling! I’m the captain here! Not you!”
I hit the button again. “Yell at me again about yelling at you for yelling and we’re not coming to your stupid meeting!” I ground my teeth together and hit the button again before she could respond. “And it’s called a galley not an eating lounge! This is a space ship not a floating house!” I stepped away, and then stomped back over to the intercom, ready to hit it again, but Kade snatched my hand.
“Stop. Although your and Jane’s bickering can be quite entertaining at times, the meeting actually sounds like a good idea. We need to figure out what our next step is. We can’t hide inside The Pittsburgh on Xianfrey indefinitely. We may be cloaked, but eventually someone is going to stumble upon us like we did.”
“Get your ass up her right now, Smurfette! And when I tell you— Hey, Ash, stop!” The intercom switched off.
Kade tucked me into his side, moving towards the door. “Good thing me and Ash have some sense, or who knows where you two would be right now.”
“We did fine all these years without you guys interfering.”
He grunted, a low rumble of a laugh following. “Sure you did.”
Okay. Calm down. You’re a Galvraron. Mind over body. Don’t let your temper control you. Jane is half human so she has an excuse.
We stepped out into the hallway, not expecting to see my brother sitting on the floor across from my door, curled in a ball and asleep. I yelped, startled by his presence.
Mikla jolted up, his eyes going wide before he realized it was us. “I’ve been waiting for you. I knocked several times, but you were,” he cleared his throat, glancing away, “busy. So I put earplugs in and waited.” He yanked the two small devices out of his ears, grimacing. “And you copulating with it more is not going to help—” He stood abruptly, his mouth hanging open as he peered at my neck.
My hand flew up self-consciously. I’d almost forgotten about the bite marks. “It’s none of your business what I do behind closed doors. Literally.”
“I don’t want you to be injured. You have no idea what kind of fire you’re playing with.”
“Since when do you care about me being injured?”
Mikla had the nerve to back away, looking hurt. “I’m your brother. I care about your well-being.”
I snorted. “So … what? Only you can injure me?”
“That is standard sibling behavior across species,” Kade interjected. “Maybe Galvrarons aren’t that different in some ways than the rest of the Universe.”
Mikla stepped up to Kade, brandishing a needle. “Move away from my sister. You are not to touch her again until I figure out a way to settle the need for you to mark her.”
I slid in front of Kade. “What’s in the needle, Mikla?”
“Something to put him out of commission.”
Temporarily or permanently? My hearts took off at a gallop. “What’s in the needle?” I demanded again.
“Just a massive dose of tranquilizer. Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him just yet. I’ve put a lot of work into him.”
I knocked the needle out of Mikla’s hand, the vial bursting on the floor. “Haven’t you learned anything? We nearly died. Our planet was attacked, and we don’t even know who survived. And I’m guessing whoever attacked Xianfrey did it because of shit like this. Our brightest and best scientists don’t have any compassion. They … you only do something if it benefits science, and therefore you.”
“Your words wound, sister.”
“Whatever. We have a meeting to get to.” Stalking past him, I knocked his shoulder with mine.
“But, Zula—”
“No. We’ll deal with my personal problem once we figure out how to get The Pittsburgh space born again, and not a moment before.”
Bursting into the eating lounge, I realized Kade, Mikla, and myself were the last to arrive.
Jane glared at me from her position at the head of the table. “Oh good, you finally decided to show up. It’s not like we have anything important to talk about. Nope, just our survival is all.”
Tamzea leapt to her feet, her lavender hair fanning behind her as she raced to my side. “What happened?” She weaved her hands around the space in front of my neck, the marks burning as they healed. “There. All better. You should have come to me sooner. They could have gotten infected.”
Kade pushed me behind him, glaring down at Tamzea, his voice a low rumble. “No one asked you to do that, Mazatimz. Don’t stick your nose in things you have no knowledge of.”
Eron was on his feet in an instant, shoving in front of Tamzea. “Don’t speak to her like that. She’s a Mazatimz, which you clearly know since you just called her that, and it’s in her nature to heal. So back off, Talsen.”
A growl filled the air, emanating from Kade. “I’d back off if I were you. What are you going to do, heal me to death?”
Eron flashed a grin, nothing about it friendly. “I could kill you in an instant without even having to touch you. What a Mazatimz can giveth, they can taketh away, too.”
“That’s enough!” Jane roared. “You two can have a pissing contest later. Right now, I’m going to have my damn meeting.”
Mikla glided past me, his expression smug. “Told you his current state would cause problems. Should have let me knock him out.”
Scowling, I grabbed Kade’s arm. “Whatever that was, no more. Do you hear me?”
He grunted, which I’d take as acquiescence.
Tamzea corralled Eron back to the table, her voice too low for me to make out what she was saying, her tone furious.
I dragged Kade to the other end of the table, dropping into an empty seat, him folding himself down beside me, a frown tugging at his lips. His gaze darted from Eron, to Ash, to Dar, and then his arm shot out, yanking me from my seat into his lap.
“He’s not going to do us much good in his condition,” Ash spoke up, motioning to Kade. “He may only be spliced, but for all intents and purposes, he’s like a dragon with his unclaimed mate. He’s going to act out around other males.”
“Is that what it’s about? Oh, come on,” Jane snapped. “Everyone here is paired off. We’re like friggin’ Noah’s Ark. Well, except for your brother. No one but you wants Zula. Get over it, big guy.”
“She is right,” Dar spoke up, curling his Gartian grade alloy arm around Masha possessively. “You must calm down. The threat of potential violence has my own instincts to protect Masha out of control.”
Tamzea muttered something to Eron, and he leaned forward. “All right,” he snapped at her before turning his attention to Kade. “I’m sorry. I have a tendency to feel protective of my Metza as well. Just don’t get in her face like that again and we’ll be fine.”
I smacked Kade’s shoulder, narrowing my eyes at him. He growled under his breath, and then exhaled slowly. “Okay, I got off on the wrong foot. It was just … those marks on LaLa were important to me. I didn’t want them healed.”
Mikla caught my eye and raised his eyebrows. I glared back. He shrugged and slouched into his chair.
“Wait, where’s Nina?” I glanced around the table, realizing everyone was there, Jane, Ash, Masha, Dar, Tamzea, and Eron … everyone except our token supposedly good Denard. Or should I say human now?
“Apparently, she doesn’t follow directions well either. Now,” Jane kicked her boots up on the table, “we have a lot to talk about, and some very important decisions to make. Dar was able to hack into the local transmissions, and we were able to communicate with the Gartian planet. We’re temporarily land logged, but at least we have a better idea of what’s going on.”
We settled in for what promised to be a long meeting.
From what information we garnered from transmissions, and from the Gartians, Xianfrey was not the only planet under attack. Hundreds of peaceful races had suffered the same way my people had, although the end game was still muddled. The culprits, as suspected, were the Denards. At least unofficially. Officially, each planet w
as targeted for acts of treason against the UGFS. False, unsubstantiated claims, but reasonable excuses to the rest of the UGFS citizens.
Dar slammed his fist against the table. “I thought we had more time. Why are they making such a brazen move now?”
I pushed myself up in my chair, fighting fatigue. “It may have something to do with Ash, and the information you sent back with the prisoners of Telvin to their respective races. Maybe their hand was inadvertently forced.”
“It’s irrelevant why they’re doing it, at least for now,” Kade growled. His Talsen nature was showing, his need for battle causing him to want to shoot first and ask questions later.
“No,” Mikla interjected, “if we can figure out why, then we might be able to deduce their next move and how to stop them.”
“We need to get off of this planet and to Gartian territory,” Jane said as she tapped her chin. “We’re sitting ducks here.”
“I don’t trust Nina,” Dar added. “It’s suspicious that she’s missing again.”
“I hate to admit it, Jane,” Ash touched her arm, his tone soft, “but Dar has a point. Nina—”
“Brought us her husband. She let us torture and kill him. She loves Maddox, okay? She turned her back on her people for Maddox.” Jane glared at each of us in turn, her dark gaze lingering longer on Dar. “Let’s not make this about her. She didn’t do anything wrong, at least not again.”
“Denards are human, Jane.” I grimaced, knowing how she would respond. When we’d first dropped that bomb on her, one that Tamzea and Eron had also recently discovered, Jane had freaked out.
Jane jumped up, her chair clattering to the ground. “And I’m half human!”
Ash stood, wrapping his arms around her. She sagged against him, flames flickering in her angry eyes.
“New humans are not the same as pure-blooded humans. Your spliced DNA makes you more phoenix than human,” Mikla offered.
“Stop making sweeping generalizations about species,” Tamzea hissed. “If we begin doing that, then don’t we become just like the Denards, hating blindly? And that’s also why Nina is different, she chose love over hate.”
“I wish there’d been more information in that book,” I muttered to myself. Eron and Tamzea had been working on discovering what they could about the Denards from a book they’d stolen from Telvin. It contained an origins story, which is how they’d discovered the true identity of the Denards. But they hadn’t been able to garner much else; most of the book was hate-filled gibberish about the Denards being better than all species, even the ones on New Earth, who shared part of their heritage.
Mikla stood, pacing back and forth, rubbing his face in thought. “I think it’s clear that the Denards, since they’re human, clung to the same hatred that ended up destroying Earth. Before they fought the rest of the Universe, they fought each other, hating one another for things such as skin color and religious beliefs. Finally, they were divided by the Denards, who wanted to remain fully human, and the people who eventually populated New Earth, who wanted to splice their genes for survival. As it turns out, the Denards were correct … they didn’t need alien DNA to survive, but it’s become more than that.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “The Denards, in their quest to remain pure, and fully human, in fact lost their humanity. They’re less human than their spliced counterparts.”
My brother paused, meeting my gaze. “The irony is that the spliced humans are more human in their emotions and compassion than the pure bloods. It took alien DNA to return their species to what they once were.”
“And yet, us spliced humans still get treated like the scum of the Universe,” Jane spat.
Ash nuzzled Jane. “Not everyone hates humans, Jane.”
She shoved him away, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t like the Denards. In fact, I hate them just as much as the rest of you. Yet, I understand them … just a bit. All my life I’ve been looked down on, insulted, called a hu-mutt, and the best anyone had to offer was that at least I wasn’t one hundred percent human. In a sense, the rest of the Universe created the Denards, and now we’re all going to suffer.”
Tamzea hung her head, her lavender hair forming a curtain around her face. “Hate gets nothing but more hate. We’ve all been guilty of prejudice and speciesism.”
Dar slammed his fist against the table again. “It doesn’t matter why the Denards are the way they are. What’s done is done. The war we’ve all been dreading—the one we’d hoped to avoid—is finally upon us. So, what are we going to do about it?”
I palmed my forehead. “Zeffrin! Are all of us deaf, blind, and stupid?”
“Speak for yourself,” Mikla muttered. I shushed him with a glare that promised violence.
Kade nodded, a smile curling his lips up. “I know where she’s going with this. Zeffrin was manufacturing weapons—weapons the Denards and the UGFS wanted to keep secret from the rest of the Universe. I’m sure there are more places just like it spread out across the galaxies. If we take out the places supplying weapons, then we can stop them.”
Excitement coursed through my veins, a plan taking shape. “Mikla, the Elders must have had a list of all the places like Zeffrin, right?”
He shrugged, appearing bored again. “It would make sense if they did.”
I clapped my hands together. “Maybe it’s a lucky thing we’re still here.”
Jane nibbled her bottom lip, the flames burning brighter in her eyes. “Okay. So we figure out if such a list exists, we get said list if we can, and then we get the hell off this planet.”
“And then we get the list to our allies,” I added.
Please, please let this all be that easy. But I had a sinking feeling we were going to hit some snags in our plan, just like we always did.
“You’re not going,” Kade growled, his eyes glowing yellow. It was as if he’d gone feral, all reason and logic bouncing off of his testosterone infused force field.
I stabbed my index finger into his chest. “You can say that all you want, it doesn’t change the fact that I am going.”
“Let Jane and Ash handle it. They can become flame. You can’t. You’re vulnerable. So easy to injure. So easy to kill.”
Moving back a few inches, I flourished my hands down my body. “But they can’t blend in like I can, because, hello, Galvraron in case you didn’t notice. And we’re on Xianfrey.”
As if entranced by my movement, Kade leaned forward, his gaze darting hungrily over my body, and then back to my neck. “I’ve noticed a lot of things about you. I’ve noticed the delectable shade of purple you turn when I make you come over and over again, as if all your blood rushes to the surface of your skin. I’ve noticed the way you can’t seem to breathe right before you fall over the edge, right before you come. I’ve noticed the way your toes curl and your muscles tense when—”
“Have you noticed anything about me besides sexual things? Because you claim to love me, but you can’t seem to talk about anything else.” It was unfair of me to say, and I knew it. He’d essentially been stalking me for years, and until recently it was all of the non-sexual things that had intrigued him. But his single-minded focus on it at the moment was annoying … mostly because it was making me want to crawl on top of him naked.
“I’ve noticed how annoyed you get when I fluster you by talking about sex when you want to be thinking about other things.” He smiled smugly.
“Because I’m going on the mission.” I flicked him in the nose.
He blinked repeatedly before a dark chuckle escaped his lips. “You want to hit me, but you’re afraid if you do it’ll turn me on. You know how much I love it when you bite, scratch, and—”
I stumbled to the intercom, hitting the button. “I need help down here. He’s getting worse. I think not being able to mark me has short-circuited his damn brain.”
Kade grabbed me from behind, hissing in my ear, “What the hell are you doing?”
“What I need to do. I have to help complete this mission
, and we can deal with our issues later.” Hopefully by then Mikla would have a solution. He was currently in the medical wing working with Tamzea and Eron to find answers to our out of control spliced Talsen.
“Knock, knock.” Jane’s boots kicked against my door.
“Don’t let her in,” Kade warned.
“And stop giving me orders. I swear you gave me less when I was supposed to be your bounty.”
“Please, LaLa, I know—I know I’m acting insane right now. But there’s something inside of me telling me not to let you go. Not to let you out of my sight, and definitely not without a mark from me. It feels like if I do …” He ripped at his hair. “I might actually lose it.”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek. This isn’t losing it? “I’m sorry,” I said, quickly punching in the code to unlock my door.
Jane rushed in, laser cuffs in hand. “Okay, big guy. We can do this the easy way or hard way. But I have to warn you, I’m one of the best at my job.”
Kade bared his teeth, dropping down into a fighting stance. “Yeah, me too.”
Shit. Bounty hunter against bounty hunter, aka a human spliced with phoenix DNA versus a Talsen spliced with dragon DNA. Why hadn’t I considered the potentially explosion nature of this situation?
Ash strolled in, regarding Jane and Kade with amusement, and zero of my trepidation. “My money’s on Kade,” he said to me.
Jane’s mouth dropped open, her full attention turning to him. “Hey! That’s seriously messed up! I’m your damn mate!”
Lightning fast, Kade charged her, and because she was distracted instead of flaming out, he took her down hard. She grunted out a few curses before managing to roll him over.
Ash laughed. “I know how easily you’re distracted.”
“You’re the one who distracted me. That’s as good as cheating.”
Jumping back and forth from foot to foot, doing an odd sort of dance, I glanced between Kade and Jane, wincing when either got the upper hand. I didn’t want to see either of them get hurt, although neither of them were in any real danger. “You going to let them beat the shit out of each other?” I winced when Jane’s fist connected with Kade’s jaw.