“You cannot hold him, gentlemen,” she had said firmly to the angry cops who were muttering about turning murderers loose just because they had immunity. “He was only doing what any Kindred warrior does when his mate or the female he intends to make his mate is threatened.”
“But he killed Jason! He ripped out his throat!” Amanda Brannigan exclaimed. She had been there at the station too, playing the horrified heroine to the hilt, making the attempted rape on Melli and the subsequent killing of the would-be-rapist somehow all about her.
Lizabeth and turned to give the girl a cold look.
“And you can be thankful you didn’t get in the way, Miss Brannigan,” she said coolly. “When a Kindred warrior goes into Rage, he cannot be held responsible for his actions. I assure you, he wouldn’t have attacked and killed this other man unless he saw him attacking his female first.”
“Which is exactly what happened,” Liosh said quietly. He was in his right mind and cleaned up—wearing the spare uniform shirt Vorn always kept in the back of his shuttle. “When I came up, Melinda was on the ground and that…” His voice dropped to a lower register and his eyes began to gleam red. “That bastard was pulling down her shorts to rape her. Again.”
“Again?” Lizabeth said sharply. “You don’t mean he had already assaulted her once tonight?”
Liosh shook his head.
“Not tonight, no. Back when they were in school together. He lured her to a human mating ritual called a ‘prom’ and attacked her afterwards.” His voice ended in a positive growl and eyes were getting redder and redder as he spoke.
Vorn looked at his friend, alarmed. If even the memory of what had happened to Melinda could send Liosh into Rage again, they were all going to be in trouble.
Lizabeth Paige seemed to realize the same thing.
“Listen, officers,” she said to the policemen, who were muttering uneasily among themselves as they stared at the changes Liosh was displaying. “If you don’t want to have a repeat incident, I suggest you let my client go and be with his female. Seeing her well and safe is the only thing that’s going to calm him down and get rid of the Rage completely.” She had raised an eyebrow. “Now are you going to release Liosh to me or do I have to go over your heads? I have contacts on the World Council and I won’t hesitate to call them.”
There was more mumbling and grumbling and some pretty unpleasant names were thrown around referring to Lizabeth but at last Liosh had been released, despite Amanda Brannigan bleating about a “miscarriage of justice” and threatening to go online and post everything everywhere.
“Thank you so much,” Vorn had said, when they finally walked out of the police station, free males. “And I’m sorry for the rude remarks those bastards were throwing around back there.”
Lizabeth shrugged, apparently unconcerned.
“Please. It’s not the first time I’ve been called a ‘ball-busting bitch.’” She winked at him. “I do have a reputation to uphold, after all. Now—will you gentlemen be all right? I have twins back on the Mother Ship who need to nurse.”
“We’ll be fine now,” Liosh assured her. “I just want to go to Melinda and make sure she is as well.”
“Of course, you do.” Lizabeth patted his arm sympathetically. “Hey—was it your first time going into Rage?” she asked gently.
Liosh nodded. “I…didn’t know myself. I had no idea I was capable of such violence. I have killed in battle but this…” He shook his head. “It was completely different. I was…savage.”
“My husband, Lone, had the same feelings in the aftermath of his own Rage when he saved me from a fate worse than death,” Lizabeth told him. “And he didn’t just kill one man—he killed almost every man in an entire village. It was a really scary sight.”
“A whole fucking village?” Vorn shook his head and gave a low whistle. “I guess so.”
“I just want you to know there are support groups—both for warriors who have gone into Rage and killed to protect their females, and for females who have seen their warriors in that state,” Lizabeth told Liosh. “So if either of you are having a hard time dealing with it, come find me on the Mother Ship and I’ll give you the places and times they meet.”
“Thank you,” Liosh said gratefully. “You’re more than kind, Counselor Paige. Melinda and I will certainly come speak to you aboard the Mother Ship. But right now, I just want to see her again and know that she is safe.”
He looked worried and Vorn knew his friend wouldn’t feel good until he was holding the female he intended to bond to him in his arms.
Frankly, he wanted to see Jodi again, too. Despite the hard words between them, he cared for her—maybe even loved her, as fucked-up as that was—and he needed to know she was all right.
And now it turned out she wasn’t all right at all, he thought, looking down at the puny human male who had apparently just given up both girls without a fight or even, as far as Vorn could tell, a harsh word for the Varians who had swooped in and stolen them.
“You mean they’re gone?” he demanded again. “What exactly happened?”
James lifted his chin and gave Vorn a disdainful look.
“How many times must I repeat myself? These alien creatures who looked like mutated crocodiles broke into the apartment—doing considerable monetary damage to the kitchen window, I might add—and took both Jodi and Melinda away with them. End of story.”
“And you just let them?” Vorn looked him up and down. “Look at you—not a scratch on you! Did you even fight for them at all?”
“Most certainly not. Those brutes were armed.” James made a face. “I make it a point never to get involved in any kind of violent altercation.”
“So you just stood by and let them go?” Liosh seemed almost to be unable to comprehend this. “I don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “How could you not at least try to save the female you love and her kin? Have you no sense of honor at all?”
James flushed, apparently more shamed by Liosh’s honest confusion than Vorn’s wrath.
“I might have had more of an inclination to try and do something if the woman I thought I loved hadn’t admitted she’d been cheating on me all week with your extremely hirsute friend, there,” he snapped.
“Look, buddy, just because you’re going bald and you look like a hairless cat when you’re naked—yeah, Jodi told me that—doesn’t mean you get to call me hairy,” Vorn snarled. “According to her, I have just the right amount of hair, unlike you, you hairless little asshole.”
“Vorn, we’re getting off the point.” Liosh grabbed his arm earnestly. “Where did they take our females?” he asked James, who was still simmering—though if he was angrier at the fact that Vorn had called him a “hairless cat” or mad because Vorn actually knew the meaning of the word “hirsute” was anyone’s guess.
“I don’t know where they took the girls,” James said sulkily. “I only know that they said they wanted ‘vengeance’. And when Melli told them that the artifact they were looking for wasn’t available, they said they knew it and that Jodi and Melli would have to pay the price.”
“Pay the price? Goddess!” Liosh groaned. “This is terrible! They must be taking them to the Varian home world.” He looked at Vorn, who nodded grimly.
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Then we have to go—now! And we have to call Commander Sylvan and ask for backup.”
“Backup against a whole planet?” Vorn said flatly. “Do you know how big and populous the Varian home world is? They outnumber the Kindred of the Mother Ship fifty to one.”
“What are you saying?” Liosh gripped his arm harder, his eyes narrowing. “That there’s no hope? No way we can save our females?”
“No, Brother.” Vorn looked him in the eye steadily. “There’s always hope. Come on—let’s go.”
Forty
“What is this stuff they gave us to eat?”
Jodi poked with her strange, two-tined eating utensil at the mass of
long, slimy, white cylindrical things that looked a little like really thick noodles in the center of her plate.
Melli brought her face close to her own plate and took a deep sniff.
“Smells a little like Pad Thai,” she said hopefully. “Maybe we should taste one and try it.”
“Pad Thai doesn’t try to crawl off your plate,” Jodi pointed out grimly. “I think these are some kind of worms—there’s no way any of that is going in my mouth.”
“They are yerger slugs and you may count yourself lucky to eat them,” a voice from behind them said.
Jodi whirled around to look at the invisible barrier that separated them from the outside world. If this strange planet could be called a world, that was.
Standing on the other side of their prison cell was a female Varian. At least Jodi thought she was female.
She was different from the male Varians they’d seen because of the large, colorful ruff that surrounded her elongated alligator face. The ruff stood out around her head and changed colors slowly, sliding from vivid crimson to brilliant orange to lemon yellow and then back again to crimson. She was also dressed differently—her long, scaly feet were exposed but her tail had been carefully wrapped in a wide band of cloth and tied at the end with a strangely jaunty sky-blue ribbon, so that only its shape was visible.
Jodi wondered if maybe the tail was considered an erogenous zone somehow, and so had to be covered in females. The same way it was acceptable for males to go topless most places on Earth but not for females to do so.
“Excuse me?” she asked, approaching the barrier, but making sure to stay well back from its faint shimmer of the energy field that kept them imprisoned. She and Melli both had gotten nasty shocks trying to get out earlier, and she wasn’t about to subject herself to that agonizing pain again for no reason.
“I said they are a delicacy—given only to the condemned. You ought to eat them as they will be your last meal.”
Jodi’s stomach clenched tightly and she knew that even if she had been served her favorite sushi instead of slugs, she still couldn’t have eaten a bite.
Melli seemed to feel the same way.
“Talking about us being condemned and this being our last meal isn’t helping my appetite any,” she said, pushing the plate of slowly-writhing slugs away from her.
“Look,” Jodi said to the female Varian desperately. “We weren’t even the ones who took the, uh, T’lix Kruthe in the first place! That was Chain, our mom’s new boyfriend…er bond-mate.”
Not that she wanted to throw the M-Switch Kindred under the bus, but Chain seemed like the kind of guy who could look out for himself.
“Yes.” The female nodded. “Of this we are aware. The two of you are blameless.”
“If you’re aware that we’re blameless then why are you blaming us?” Melli asked.
“And more to the point, why are you punishing us?” Jodi added.
The female Varian scowled—which was a strange and frightening expression on her lizard-like face.
“Because someone must pay the price!” she exclaimed. “The T’lix Kruthe was the conduit through which the Varian people received their erotic energy, which is especially important because this is a breeding year. Unless someone pays the price of Blood or Lust, we will be unable to fertilize our eggs this annum and a whole generation of Varians will not be.”
“Wait, so…you’re saying that the T’lix Kruthe gave you the energy to, uh, make love? I mean, to breed?” Jodi asked, frowning.
The female nodded. “We are a long-lived but cold-natured species. Only once every twenty cycles do our males and females come together to breed and fertilize the eggs. The top breeders of our people all congregate in the Breeding Forum where they receive the erotic energy and pass it on to the others of our world via a synaptic connection. Then the whole of Varia breeds together on one long day and so our species is continued for another generation.”
“A planet-wide, day-long orgy?” Melli murmured. “That’s wild!”
“We understand you warm-blooded species can breed at any time,”
the Varian continued. “But without something to provide the initial erotic energy, our people cannot breed, which means this annum’s crop of eggs will not be fertilized and thus will not hatch. A generation gap could be fatal to our people and since you are representative of the ones who stole our erotic artifact, you must be the ones to pay the price.”
“But you said the price was blood or lust, right?” Jodi asked.
“Yes.” The female nodded. “Though I fear for you, it must be Blood. You have no males of your own with which to generate sexual energy and none of our males will defile themselves by mating with you.” She shook her head. “It is regrettable, though. Eggs that are fertilized through the energy generated by Blood are much more likely to crack before they can hatch. Still…” She shrugged her bony shoulders. “We have no other option. We must be able to breed and fertilize the eggs.”
“Right, of course…” Jodi swallowed hard. “Um, but let me ask you this, do you have to, uh, hurt both of us to make this work?”
“Well…” the female Varian seemed to consider. “I think that just one of you might do—as long as we could bleed you enough.”
“Take me, then,” Jodi said quickly. “I’m bigger than Melli and I have a lot more blood in me. I’m the one you ought to torture—to bleed—for your ceremony. Please—say you’ll only take me and set my little sister free!”
“Jodi, no!” Melli came to stand beside her. There were tears standing in her big blue eyes. “You can’t do this—I wont’ let you!” she exclaimed in a trembling voice. “Whatever we go through, we have to go through together.”
“No, we don’t,” Jodi said firmly, though her stomach was clenched like a slick fist. Turning to face her little sister, she put her hands on Melli’s arms and looked her in the eye. “Look at me, Melli—I’m not just doing this for you—I’m doing it for Mom. Just stop and think for a minute how awful she’ll feel if she loses us both! Besides, you have a life to look forward to with Liosh. And I…” She shrugged. “Well, I don’t have anybody anymore.”
“What about Vorn?” Melli demanded.
Jodi felt like she was going to cry, but she made herself hold back the tears for her little sister’s sake.
“No,” she said roughly. “He wouldn’t want me now, even if we could be together. He asked me to choose between him and James and I made the wrong choice.” She shook her head. “What an idiot I was! I thought that leaving James would be like Dad leaving Mom. But it wasn’t like that at all because Mom loved Dad. And James, well…” She laughed bitterly. “I guess it was pretty obvious he never really loved me at all.”
“James is a cowardly bastard,” Melli agreed. “But I still don’t want you dying for me, Jodi!”
“You have to let me do what I can,” Jodi said sternly. She turned to the female Varian who had been watching their exchange. “What about it? Can I be the only sacrifice? Please?”
The female nodded.
“I will speak to the elders, but I do not see why not. Only one is needed in a Blood sacrifice, though two are required for Lust.”
“Thank you.” Jodi’s mouth felt as dry as dust but she nodded eagerly. “Thank you so much.”
“You are welcome.” The female Varian extended one seven-fingered, claw-like hand and pointed at her untouched plate of food. “If I were you, I would eat. You will shortly need your strength to cope with the ordeal at the Breeding Forum tonight. Once you are mounted upon the stage, you will know the meaning of true pain as you are slowly bled dry. I suggest you consume the nourishing slugs.”
“I will, uh, certainly take that under advisement,” Jodi said, nodding. “Thank you,’ she added again.
The female Varian simply nodded and glided away, presumably to get the stage where Jodi would be tortured, all set up and ready to go for that night.
“Jodi!” Melli was weeping as she threw her arms around Jodi. “Jod
i, please don’t do this!”
“I have to, Melli. Please understand.” Jodi hugged her back fiercely. All their lives she had done her best to protect her tender little sister from the evil and cruelty of the world. She had failed to keep Melli safe on that awful night of her Junior Prom, but she wouldn’t fail now, she swore to herself.
She would keep her little sister safe, even if she had to die to do it.
Forty-One
“Are you certain this technology will work?” Liosh asked, looking at Vorn uncertainly as the Beast Kindred strapped a strange-looking contraption to his forehead. It looked a little like one of those flashlights one might wear to see better in a mine shaft. But as Vorn had explained, it didn’t project light—it projected images.
“Turn yours on and see,” Vorn told him, as he finished adjusting his own device.
Anxiously, Liosh did as he was told, pressing the pressure point at the top of the switch to activate the device he wore around his forehead. He turned to face Vorn.
“Well?”
Vorn nodded in satisfaction.
“Yeah, it’s working all right. Look here.”
He switched on his own device and suddenly disappeared. In his place, was a large, burly Varian soldier complete with a green, scaly snout, a long tail, and seven-fingered, clawed hands.
“Amazing!” Liosh breathed. “You look exactly like a Varian!”
“So do you,” Vorn told him. “Take a look in the 3-D viewer and see.”
The two of them crowded into the fresher of the shuttle together and Liosh saw that he, too, looked like a Varian now. From all angles he and Vorn both appeared exactly like the aliens whose planet they were planning to infiltrate.
“How does this work?” he asked, fascinated when he saw his new snout-mouth moving to form the words.
“The image projectors are all around the headband,” Vorn explained. “So no matter what angle anyone looks at you from, they see what the projector is showing—not you as you truly are.”
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