But the huge golden alien ruins that plan, too.
As soon as the bubble door lifts, he raises a now heavily bandaged arm and points a photon gun straight at Baby, while aiming his angry violet gaze at me.
My razor cat growls low in its throat, preparing to pounce anyway.
Believe me, I get it. I’ve never been so angry myself. But if his flat nose ridges are any indication, he’s already set the gun to the same setting that vaporized Baby’s mother right before my eyes. I can’t risk her life on the narrow chance that the photon blast won’t take her out.
“No, Baby, stay,” I choke out, my voice wretched in defeat.
Baby comes out of her pouncing position with a baleful look.
I hope that stand down will make the Xal relax his position. Give us the opportunity to take him out again. But he keeps the gun pointed at her until I lumber out of the flyer, my pregnancy, bad leg, and frustration making it way harder to get out than it was to climb in.
As soon as my feet hit the ground, he clicks, the sound hard and final. A command, I realize, when the flyer suddenly closes, trapping Baby inside.
Baby rowrs pitifully for me, and I turn back with my hand already raised, determined to get her out.
But the golden Xal grabs me by the arm before I can press a palm to the flyer. Apparently his injuries haven’t made him any less strong. He drags me into the house with almost laughable ease.
I notice two things right away when we enter.
The bow and arrow it took me weeks to carve and whittle is now lying in broken pieces on the floor. And the corner pallet I made for Baby and me, so that we didn’t have to sleep on the Xal’s mat, is nowhere to be found.
He stands there, appearing all too dangerous, despite the bandages now wrapped around his chest and arms. This is the part in the story where I should drop to my knees and beg for my life, because he looks angry enough to kill.
But…six months. He fucked me, then left me here for six months. Like I was a prize won. Something he could brag about to whatever girlfriend or wife he got those shift dresses from.
No…
I refuse to cower. I refuse to back down.
I stare back at the golden Xal, my eyes as defiant at his are angry.
Daring him to do his worst.
Chapter Twenty-Three
T’Kan
The hu’man staring up at me with murder in her eyes bears little resemblance to the nurturing female I reluctantly left behind six months ago.
She wants me dead and I find this difficult to reconcile. After the Kel’s announcement, I had a vision for our future. A way for us to be together. I wanted to bring her back to the city, present her with the life she deserves. I dreamed of us fucking every night and hearing her sweet songs of luv.
But her actions, this new defiance in her eyes changes everything.
My hearts catch with the realization…She would not choose me, I realize suddenly. In fact, now that the New Terrhan females have been given the freedom of choice, she would choose any other Xalthurian male over me.
Though my wounds still throb from the injury my treasure has caused me, it does not come close to the pain that explodes inside of me at that realization.
I clench and unclench my hands, wanting to lash out. Wanting to tear things apart.
Wanting to teach her a lesson.
Suddenly the pain disappears. Ridges setting to flat, I push past the female and palm open the door, my hearts as cold as the snow outside.
And this time when I leave, I lock her inside.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Zinnia
After he leaves—just leaves without even a click or hiss—I immediately rush to the door and palm it, determined to have this fight. But it doesn’t open now. At least not for me.
Okay, apparently the Xals do have some sense of security. I find that out the very frustrating way, and my stomach drops at the ugly realization: I’m his prisoner again.
I bang on the door a few futile times, shouting at him to let me out, then run to the window to do the same.
But if he hears me screaming at him, he gives no indication. Just strides straight toward the flyer, where Baby is also losing her collective shit. Throwing her whole body into the flyer’s glass in an effort to get out and back to me.
My heart stops when the golden Xal pulls out his photon gun.
“NOOOOOO!!!! DON’T!!!” I scream.
But he either doesn’t hear me or doesn’t care.
He presses his hand to the flyer’s bubble cover, then squeezes the photon gun trigger as it raises, before Baby can even think about pouncing.
Her body pitches to the side, and I scream and scream, my throat burning raw, when she disappears from my view.
Oh moons, oh moons! He vaporized her. She’d been my friend. My only friend in this hostile wilderness and he just killed her.
I thought I was all cried out on the return trip. But my vision blurs with tears as the golden Xal climbs into his flyer and zips off into the horizon. Leaving me behind. Again.
And to think, a few months ago I didn’t think it was possible to hate anyone as much as I hated my brother. Now there’s a new rage inside of me. Burning me up like nothing I’ve ever known.
I will never forgive him.
Ever.
The rage still hasn’t calmed when the golden Xal’s flyer appears again, many, many hours later.
But my mind has.
I move away from the window and get into position. Carefully slipping the shiv I made in the hours he was gone into one of the sleeves I’d sewn on that ridiculously thin shift dress—which must have been made for a much warmer climate. There’s no chance my plan would have worked without the added sleeves.
Actually, there’s still only a slight chance my plan will work with the sleeve.
But I swallow my fear and stand my ground anyway. I’m done being the docile dog that waits for her own to get home. Forget my flowery name, no more Ms. Sweet Gal. He killed my Baby. So now I’m going to kill him, for real this time.
The golden Xal strides in, then stops when he sees me standing there.
His wounds have somehow been healed, I note, but he’s still not dressed in his usual body armor. Which means he’s still underestimating me, still doesn’t think I’m any kind of threat to him. That makes me want his black blood on my shiv, even more.
He clicks at me, his ridges rippling, in a way I came to recognize as confusion during the weeks we spent together. Back when I let myself get stupid over him.
I don’t answer. Just wait. Willing him to come closer.
He does. But then, without warning, he raises another gun. It’s not quite as short and stout as the photon gun, but it’s long, and the thin barrel glitters dangerously under the light.
I pause. Still wanting to kill him, but also having to think about the life I’m carrying inside me now. As if sensing my distress, the baby kicks. Reminding me how many lives will be lost when he pulls the trigger on that gun.
I take a step back and then another. Trying to get away from the huge alien and his lethal weapon.
But it doesn’t work. For every step back I take, he moves forward, and his legs are so much longer than mine. He soon grabs a hold of me, one clawed hand cupping around the back of my neck and dragging me forward.
Oh moons! I desperately bring the shiv up—only to have it batted out of my hand, as easily as an insect in an old planet entertainment. His violet eyes flash with annoyance, but not one ounce of fear for his safety.
I wish I could say the same. I bang my fist into his robed chest, fighting him, fighting this death with everything I’ve got. But everything I’ve got isn’t good enough. He continues to drag me forward with almost comical ease.
So that I have to resort to begging.
“Please, don’t!” I say when he presses the barrel of his gun into the side of my head. “Don’t kill me. Don’t kill our baby—”
I cut short when he pulls the t
rigger without even a moment of consideration for my pleas. Something cold and sharp, slices into my head.
And only then does he let me go.
I fall to my knees, the world becoming pain. Red and blinding and everywhere. My stomach heaves with the urge to expel everything I’ve eaten today, and I curl my fingers into my scalp and press the balls of my palms into my temples, trying to achieve any kind of relief. But my palms do nothing to lessen the feeling that my brain has exploded inside my skull. With tears of agony in my eyes, I collapse onto my side. Praying to my parent’s old planet gods to save me from this certain death.
To my great shock, my prayers are eventually answered. The pain begins to slowly…very slowly ebb away along with the need to vomit. And then, I feel something bumpy and wet against the side of my head.
I slowly flutter open my eyes and find…
“Baby!” I gasp out. Crying for a very different reason now, I throw my arms around her neck. And though she gives me a little “rowr” of surprise, she nuzzles her broad, flat face into the side of my head, the front of her long incisors scraping across my shoulders.
She’s here. She’s really here and not dead. But something’s off, I soon realize when she pats my chest with one of her paws.
I draw back and gasp when I see the razor sharp talons I used to cut up the fur carpet are gone.
“What happened to your claws?” I ask her. “And how are you here? I thought you were dead. I thought he killed you.”
As if in answer to my question a monotone voice says, “Go to your place now, K’vani.”
I startle at the voice, and my eyes widen when without even a second of hesitation, Baby does as commanded. Padding away from me and retreating to the corner near the front door, where we slept together up until last night.
Her departure reveals the big golden alien, standing only a few feet in front of me, with one of those small wide mouth bowls that the Xals use as cups in his hands.
“I did not kill her,” he tells me. His voice is the same click and hiss show I’d come to know so well before he disappeared. But for some reason, it is now accompanied by a louder voice, speaking perfect New Terrhan inside my head. “But I did have to immobilize her, so that I could have her declawed and injected with a docility chip.”
He then offers me the bowl cup. “Water from the spring. It has many healing properties and will help with the pain of your translation chip surgery.”
Oh, so that was what that mega dose of pain had been…and also the reason I could understand what he was saying to me now.
I take a hesitant sip, then another. And he’s right, I immediately begin to feel better.
Which answers another question I didn’t know I had. The first few months of my pregnancy had been plagued by severe morning sickness. But when all the appliances had stopped working, I’d been forced to go outside to seek water from the hot spring the golden Xal had shown me before he left. The severe sickness had disappeared without a trace soon after I began my morning ritual of gathering water from the spring’s waterfall after bathing myself in its reservoir—which unlike the nearby lake was not full of demon fish with razor sharp teeth.
As I drink what turns out to be my medicine, the golden Xal watches me with the intense violet stare I’d spent months trying to forget. Then he takes the bowl from me and immediately replaces it with another.
“I offer my apologies for what you have suffered,” he says as I drink the second cup of healing spring water. “Usually patients are sedated heavily before the installation of the translation chip. However, I feared to use such strong sedation again with you. From the reports I have read, human females become more and more fragile with every moon cycle of pregnancy. And I would not cause harm to you or our babe.”
Would not cause harm…our babe.
His words send my mind into another reel of anger. “But you have caused me harm. You kidnapped me. Then you made me believe you liked me. Then you just left after you bred me. What do you mean you wouldn’t cause me harm?”
To my shock, the huge alien suddenly falls to his knees in front of me, his violet gaze filled with remorse.
“Acquiring medical equipment is very difficult and the operation of such by a non-medic is strictly forbidden under our laws. In fact, I was required to seek the aid of a powerful friend in order to get this surgical injector, or I would have done so sooner. But your pitiful pleas for yours and our babe’s life prove to me that it was a necessary danger. The fact that you believed I could harm you or our babe…” He shakes his head. “…our inability to communicate had become a barrier I could no longer abide.”
I shake my own head. Not knowing what to do with this new information. But then I decide. “No, fuck that. You left me. You bred me and then you just left me.” I repeat this to him, needing him to understand what a messed up thing he’d done to me and the child he now claims to care about.
He dips his head, his intense violet gaze finding mine. “Know…know that only death would have led me to abandon you.”
“I thought you were dead,” I admit quietly. “That’s what I told myself when the appliances and heat stopped working. ‘He must be dead.’ I hiked up to the top of the mountain with Baby, looked all around. But there was nothing but snow and purple forests beyond this mountain. No signs of life as far as I could see. And that’s when I knew that you’d stranded me here. Left me here with no hope of ever getting back to my planet. I returned to the cabin and Baby and I figured out how to be strong, how to make it work. But then you showed up….Not dead. Very, very much alive, in fact.”
He lowers his gaze, his ridges rippling violently. “I will never forgive myself for that…or for leaving you here alone without my protection for six full moon-cycles. Before this I had only one bitter regret, the death of my cousin in the Three Generation War. But now…”
He raises his solemn violet gaze up to meet mine again. “Now, I have two.”
My heart pounds, my insides becoming weak with confusion. “Why?” I whisper.
Chapter Twenty-Five
T’Kan
“Why?”
One word. But I understand her meaning. She wants an explanation. Not just for the six months. But for everything.
Why? I have asked myself the same question often these many weeks, while consuming the many reports our new Qel has released to counter my uncle’s highly negative survey of the hu’man race, and as she put it, “honestly introduce us to her people.”
I had devoured this information. Read and re-read it and eventually cobbled together an explanation for my actions and why I couldn’t bring myself to hurt Zin’nia—much less kill her to make my lie true.
But can I explain it to her. I must try, I decide. Setting my ridges, I start at the beginning:
“You ran. And the minimum sentence for that is ten lashes—despite the accord, we had many problems with hu’man females resisting the Breeding Ceremony, so the guidelines were very strict. Usually runaway females are handed over to the ship guards, so that the male who caught them might empty his seed in the more willing birthing vessels. But I told the guards I would administer your punishment myself. Before meeting you in that red woods, I was a consummate warrior, one who wished never to fail in his duty. However, my training failed me the night I attempted to punish you for your non-compliance. I could not bring myself to hurt you, so I brought you here, rather than hand you over to another warrior for sentencing.”
“Why?” she ask again, with a shaking of her head.
“Because I wanted to protect you. And for all that defies reason and logic, I needed to claim you. Make you mine.”
Zinnia’s eyes swivel back and forth in a way I know means she is calculating my words. Perhaps scanning them in her own mind for veracity. However, when she opens her mouth, she asks a rather unexpected question. “My friend, Kira. The other one who ran….did you whip her? And if so, did she survive?”
I kneel there, stunned. That she would be more concer
ned for her friend than herself….my hearts flood with warmth as I answer, “You have my assurances she was not truly punished. She was bred by our Kel, but he took care not to hurt her.”
“Like you did when you bred me,” she says, giving me a tentative look. “It didn’t hurt as bad as the women who went before us said it would the first time. And it really didn’t hurt the second time. Or any of the times after.”
Her words…I must adjust my hands to cover the inappropriate rise of my diijo at her soft and innocent observation.
“I am glad. Glad I did not hurt you,” I answer with a soft hiss. “Our females derive neither joy nor pain from the breeding act, and it was previously not understood that hu’man females did not have the same experience. When I lost all control before our second breeding, I was very surprised when you responded so passionately to my mouth upon your breeding slit…and with great euphoria when I moved upon your back with my diijo inside of you.”
It is a simple recounting of what happened between us, but Zinnia’s gaze drops from mine. And though her skin does not seem to darken or pale with her emotion as does a Xalthurian’s, I suspect my words have brought her great embarrassment.
“I like the way you became unhinged upon my diijo, Zinnia,” I assure her with an amused click. “There is no need to be embarrassed.”
“And yet, I am,” she answers, her voice sounding much as if she is choking on something lodged inside her throat. “Can we please change the subject? Like, maybe let’s talk about why you disappeared for six months if the sex was so damn great?”
Her question sobers me. “I thought I had no choice. I was most unexpectedly put under investigation for crimes against our Kel and under close watch. I was innocent of these accusations, but I had no way of knowing if the investigation would include the same. I feared what would happen if I came to you and was followed, but if I had known you were without power or food source, I would have risked it all to return to you. I cannot express how much it pains me that I left you to endure these hardships alone. You will always have my apologies.”
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