by Roxie Ray
Yes, she was the one who I would carry from this awful place, but I knew better than to call her mine. Likely, once she was awake, she would be as terrified of me as she had been of the Rutharians. Perhaps she would be half-crazy as well, like the female in Nion’s arms, who had left the marks of her claws on the side of his face. Or perhaps she would scream, as the first female had tried to do before Gallix had stifled the sound.
I would not have any female that feared me, any more than I wanted a mate who wanted nothing more than to see me dead. Seeing the fallout of my own parents’ loveless marriage had left scars on me as well. Not as visible as the bruise on my female’s eye or the scabbed-over cut across her forehead, no, but still there. Always there.
Besides, there were more important things to attend to than my musings on human beauty. That much became clear as a Rutharian war cry clanged through the halls, followed by the sound of boots rushing our way. It stirred me from whatever silly thoughts my female had roused within me.
I blinked as the words of my own thoughts caught me off-guard. My female, I had just called her, Mine.
Before I could process that particular new sensation—the sudden feeling of ownership I now had for the unconscious human in my arms—ahead of us, Ronan drew his blasters, readying himself for the fight back to our cruiser. Shifting my female—the female—in my arms, I made sure to keep my own blaster pointed ahead as well.
We would take these females to safety, or we would die trying. But either way, we would not escape the dreadnought without spilling Rutharian blood.
Good.
The Rutharians had hurt these women in ways that made my own blood boil. It was high time someone finally made them bleed instead.
As we pressed forward, the heat of vengeance coursing through my veins scorched so hot, I knew any Rutharian who came upon me would see it in my eyes as well. Burning, glowing red.
3
Sawyer
The next time I woke up, I was cradled in a pair of strong, comforting arms.
At first, it felt like out of a dream. After the nightmare I’d tumbled into last time I woke up, I almost didn’t want to open my eyes. All around me, there was a strange sensation of safety that I didn’t want to give up.
After the nightmare I’d woken up in last time, I didn’t want this new feeling to end.
I was swinging gently, like I was in some kind of comfortable hammock swaying in a light breeze. Soft linen kissed against my cheek, warm underneath like it had been left out to dry in the sunshine. When I breathed in, the scent in my nose was clean and fresh—soft earth after a storm, the dark richness of a summer rain.
My body was heavy, and my head screamed with a splitting ache, but for the first time since I’d walked in on my fiancé fucking his best friend, I actually felt…good. Not great, but comparatively, not terrible either. I snuggled into the warm linen, enjoying the heat and firmness beneath it.
What it felt like, really, was like hope.
At least, it did until the low rumble of a voice pulled my heavy eyelids open—and a flash of red light shot across my vision, so hot that I could almost feel it sear my cheek as it passed.
Just like that, the hope was dashed.
All around me was nothing short of chaos. The flash of light had jolted me out of my dream-like state of half-awareness and straight into what looked like outright war. I was in a narrow hallway with three huge, male bodies up ahead of me, clad in white. Two of the men were holding women—immediately, I recognized the dark, ratted, silver-streaked hair of the madwoman from the cell across from me in one of their arms. The third man, though—if I could even call him a man at all—had more arms than even seemed humanly possible.
In fact, seeing a giant four-armed orange guy wielding four giant guns shooting bright blue lasers was kind of making me feel like we weren’t even in the realm of humanly possible anymore.
Suddenly, I was rocked hard to the right as another red light flashed by. If I hadn’t been moved so quickly, I was pretty sure it would have blasted straight through my forehead. Up above me, a grunt sounded, then a ferocious growl. Beneath me, another strange gun shifted in position and fired blue as well. Then, up ahead, I saw a bright red body crumple to the ground. Bullseye.
That’s when I finally rubbed enough brain cells together to realize that I was being carried, too. Maybe even…saved? But when I glanced up, all the air in my chest left it so fast that my whole body spasmed.
Nope-nope-nope-nope. Nothing after my car crash had made any sense so far, but the world was making even less sense than ever now. There was a man’s face up above me, snarling and fanged. A kind of handsome face, actually—if I was able to look past the fact that his skin was a vibrant orange and his cheeks were splattered black with something that looked a little like blood.
I clenched my eyes shut and buried my own face back into the warm linen—what I was now putting together was his shirt, his chest. Seeing that red-skinned, long-horned demon thing earlier had been terrifying enough, even before he’d hit me. But now, I was having to process an entirely new type of man…demon…thing. An angel, maybe? The way he held me definitely made me feel like I was being saved. But if he was an angel…
Then he sure as hell wasn’t any kind of angel that I’d ever known. The ceilings of the Sectorist churches had all been painted with blue-eyed, golden-haired, winged men wearing golden robes. But my current savior—or at least, that’s what I hoped he was—had hair almost as red as the skin of the demon-guys he was shooting at, with eyes to match.
“Brisingna.” My savior shifted me a little closer to him as he purred down at me. He must have realized I was awake. But whatever language he was talking in…it wasn’t one that I understood. Mixed in with the zinging of gunfire up ahead and the groans of the demon guys dropping with every shot the orange-skinned guys were firing, he almost spoke too low for me to hear at all. Almost. “Brrechkt. Vos parrishi lumox.”
Blinking up at him, I met his eyes and watched his irises flash from red to a soothing shade of blue. Weird. Probably not contacts, then—but at least, I guessed, there was a chance he might be an angel after all. His voice was soft and comforting too, which was almost as weird as the eye color change. We were obviously in the midst of some kind of battle, but as he looked down at me, the warrior’s snarl on his lips seemed to shift into a smile.
At least, until another flash of heat seared over our heads. Then we were moving again, and his eyes were back to the same red as before.
Who are you? I wanted to ask him. Or, maybe a better question: What are you? But it didn’t seem right to distract him with my questions just then. After all, even as we were being shot at, I still felt safe in his arms. I wasn’t an idiot. From what I was piecing together, we were being rescued.
There would be time for questions later, probably—if he could even understand what I was saying. For now…
“Okay,” I murmured, tucking myself back up against his chest and making myself as small as possible. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but anything’s better than being in that cell.”
“Callaphzi?” He was breaking into a run now along with the men in front of us. It was incredible how easily he carried me, even as his powerful legs moved us into a sprint. I could feel his breath rise and fall in his chest, calm and steady despite the exertion. Every bit of ground we claimed was scattered with dead—or dying—demon guys and pooled black with what must have been their blood.
“I can’t understand you…” I grumbled. “But I guess that doesn’t matter. Save me, big guy.”
And even though I had no way of knowing whether he understood me, either, there was a rumble of agreement beneath my cheek. As far as I could tell, that was exactly what he planned to do.
I kept my eyes closed through the rest of the fighting. Seeing all the dead bodies that were starting to pile up was making my stomach turn, demons or not. Up ahead there was a brief hiss of pain that I was pretty sure meant one of our guys had be
en hit. I just hoped that it wasn’t one of the guys carrying one of the other women—or that if it was the big four-armed guy, that he wasn’t too badly hurt.
All the while, though, my brain was whirring. It felt like things were trying to click in place, but something was blocking them from fully taking stock of what had happened to me—what was happening now. Crashing my car had probably given me a concussion. The way I must have passed out when the demon guy had hit me in my cell had probably given me another one. But it wasn’t just the flurry of head trauma that was making all of this difficult to understand. Four-armed, orange-skinned men? Guns that shot lasers? Angels with red eyes? I’d always prided myself on having a pretty good imagination, but all of this was a little much.
When I finally opened my eyes again, I was being placed in what looked like a strange little hover car or something. A small spaceship. It looked like it’d been ripped straight off the set of a science fiction movie, anyway—not exactly my genre. I liked romance films and period dramas, even though I knew that they were usually filled with just as much propaganda by the sectors as they were actual storylines. But at least the few sci-fi flicks that Aiden had taken me to had given me enough context to tell me what was probably the most important bit of information I’d gleaned so far:
Wherever I was—whatever was happening to me—it wasn’t part of my world, or any world that I knew.
“Aliens,” I whispered, looking up at my gallant rescuer again as he leaned out the door of the ship, his gun leveled at some unseen enemy outside. “You’re…you’re aliens.”
He fired once, then turned to me. There was a sternness in his eyes—which were quickly fading from red to a vibrant purple. He gave me a reassuring nod, then a single word: “Brisingna.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but it made me feel almost as safe as I’d felt in his arms.
Then, he leaned out the door again, shooting once more. The guttural sound of pain that followed told me that he’d hit his target. All around me, my savior’s comrades were strapping the other women in then taking their own seats.
Here in the light of the ship, I could see the network of bruises and scars that colored nearly every exposed inch of the unconscious madwoman’s skin. There was no telling how long she’d been there with the demons who’d caged us, but from the way some of her faded scars crisscrossed with newer, fresher ones, it had obviously been some time. The other girl, mousy and pale, couldn’t have been any older than nineteen or twenty. She didn’t look like she’d been harmed, but based on what I knew of the people who’d been holding us captive, I was sure it would have only been a matter of time.
What those awful people…those aliens had done to the madwoman, they surely would have done to us as well. Sex slaves, the madwoman had said. That was the fate that had awaited us with the red-skinned aliens. A fate that we had just narrowly avoided—at least, as far as I could tell.
I felt safe with these new aliens, sure. These other aliens, the orange ones we were with now… They had rescued us. Killed for us. And, I realized as my own rescuer pulled the door of our little ship closed, now they were taking us away from this awful place. I hoped, for good.
But that was the thing about hope. There was no way of knowing what was in store for me once they got me to wherever they were taking me. There was no way of being sure of anything, really—not anymore.
Aliens. It seemed stupid, but it was the only thing that made sense right now. Beneath me, I could feel the ship rumble to life then rise up, zipping away. If I craned my neck forward, I could see out the ship’s front windshield, which only confirmed what I already knew had to be true.
On Earth, light pollution and smog had made it all but impossible to see the night sky in Sector Two. But as I craned my neck to peer up out of the tiny ship’s windshield over the pilot’s big, broad shoulders, for the first time in my life I could finally see the velvet blackness of space. There were more stars out there than I could even count.
Which meant that no matter how insane it seemed, I had to be right…
We weren’t on Earth anymore.
“Callaphzi?” My rescuer, the one with the red hair, knelt at my feet and placed a hand on my knee. I squirmed at his touch—not because I didn’t want him to touch me, but because his hand was slick with something and, well… I was only wearing the thin shift the demon-looking aliens had put me in. No bra. Definitely no panties. And the shift was, uh…not exactly very long. A few inches higher up my thigh and he would have been practically feeling me up.
“Sorry,” I said immediately as my savior pulled his hand away from my knee. He left a black handprint on me where his touch had been, sticky and wet. Blood. Blood he’d spilled to save me—to save us all. “I’m—no, you’re okay, I just…”
But the red-headed alien was already turning a strange shade of deeper orange and moving away. We’d been rescued—but now, the guy who’d saved me wouldn’t even look at me. He just stared out the front windshield, stoic and statuesque as stone. Barely five minutes had passed since we’d been pulled from our cells, and somehow, I’d already managed to push the only man who’d made me feel safe away.
Not a man, though, I reminded myself. An alien. And the first aliens, the ones who’d been holding us hostage, had been planning to turn us into sex slaves, which begged the question…
Why would these aliens be helping us escape? What did they have to gain?
And now that they had us…what would they do with us?
4
Haelian
Idiot. I could not believe myself. My forwardness. My delusion. I had been so eager to touch the blonde female I had carried away from the Rutharian slave cells that I had actually acted on it. Placed my hand on her knee. Marred her soft, perfect skin with Rutharian blood.
“Take them to the medical bay,” I barked to Ronan after we had landed back on the Avant Lupinia. “If the conscious one cannot walk, carry her.” I cast a glance over my shoulder back to my blonde, who was looking up at me with wide eyes and biting her lower lip. After what she had been through, how could I have been so foolish? She deserved better than having my filthy hand on her body without her permission—and I should have known better than to put it there. “And, Ronan?”
“Yes, General?”
“Be gentle.” I looked to Gallix and Nion as well. “That goes for all of you.”
Out of the cruiser, I rushed to the bridge as fast as my legs would carry me. We were lucky to have gotten all three of the females out alive, and luckier still that we had not suffered any casualties of our own—at least, none too great. Gallix had taken a beam of blaster fire to his shoulder, and the scratches from the ferocious dark-haired female that Nion had pulled from her cell would need disinfecting. Nothing that Healer Adskow and his team could not handle. But we had been fortunate to catch the Rutharians off-guard. Our success onboard the Rutharian dreadnought had been largely due to having the element of surprise on our side.
It was an element that, unless Leonix had been more successful than I could hope for, we had likely lost by now.
On the bridge, soldiers rushed from station to station in a flurry of frantic movement. I spotted Leonix from across the room, still clad in her white and gold formalwear, shouting orders like a battle queen. She paused only when she caught my gaze and rushed my way immediately.
When I met her halfway, there was already a question on her lips.
“Did you—?”
“All three,” I said with a nod. “Safe and sound. And did you—”
Leonix smiled. “I had their captain eating out of the palm of my hand, General.” As quickly as her smile had risen, though, it fell. “Unfortunately, he cut the call short. You were detected, I take it?”
“We were. No casualties, thankfully. Have they retaliated toward the ship yet?”
“Not yet. But I do not think it will be long.”
We moved together toward the center of the bridge, manning the point of command side-by-side. By
right, Leonix should have been made general before me, I knew. She was older, with more years of battle beneath her belt—whether it was the soldier’s belt she normally wore, or the ornate, jeweled one that adorned her hips now. Unfortunately, her parents—my aunt and Kloran’s uncle—would have never allowed it. They were still hoping for the day when Leonix’s first heat cycle would start and blocking all chances of upward mobility in the military ranks while they waited. It was a ridiculous thing, in my opinion, wanting their daughter to become a mother when she could have so easily become a general instead, but there was nothing I could do to rectify it. The best I could do was to involve her in my decision-making as general aboard the ship as much as possible. Her expertise was beyond value. Her success in distracting the Rutharian captain had proven that well enough already.
“Shall we fire first, then?” I asked, fingertips hovering over the button to alert our soldiers at the weaponry station. “Given the state the humans were in when we found them…”
“We were only waiting for you to return safely, General.” Leonix nodded, her face grim. “Let us make them pay for what they have done.”
The battle ended quickly. We struck clean and fast, outmaneuvering the Rutharians at every turn. I suspected that by the time we fired our first round of missiles, the Rutharian captain was still being briefed on what had happened in the slave cells. When they were finally able to retaliate, their own missiles were launched far too late. Our defense systems eliminated each before they even approached our shields.
Before they had even been able to engage us in combat, we had already won.
In my quarters after, I ran a hot shower for myself and washed the sticky black Rutharian blood from my skin. The lives of the Rutharians that had perished aboard their dreadnought did not trouble me. For too long, they had waged war on the galaxies. It was high time someone gave them their just desserts in return. But no matter how hard I tried to scrub myself clean, my conscience would not clear.