His To Steal

by Taylor Vaughn

  Epilogue

  N’Thn

  I spring to my feet immediately upon waking in the dark fighting pen. And I pound my chest as the Kaidorian fighters do even though they have pitted me against another Xalthurian this time.

  The first time they matched me with another Xalthurian prisoner of war, I resisted. Refused. Only to be subjected to days of torture. The body blows I managed to deal with. The needles…they were the worse. They made me see things I would not wish on my worst enemy. But apparently my worst enemy had no such reservation.

  When I was returned to the fighting pen, it felt like a relief.

  All around me the horned monsters, cheered and yelled. The noise amd lights hurt after all the experiments with my eyes. It also angered me. I was their slave. Their entertainment. The rage pounded in my ears.

  But I set my sights on the Xal in front of me. My opponent. An orange soldier is barely full grown. He trembles before me. But all I see is my enemy. Me or him, I told myself as I charged. I clawed, I punched. I fought. Until he was no longer breathing. And I did not mourn him. At least he escaped.

  I am still in this prison. Still fighting whoever they put in front of me: Kaidorian, animals, my fellow Xalthurians. I care not. They are nothing compared to the scientists in the labs. And unlike the battle with my mind, I win every time.

  I sniff the air again. It is not just one Xalthurian this time, but two, possibly three. Essh! Another multi-fighter deathmatch. The Kaidorians like to put several of us in a ring sometimes to see who will come out alive.

  But I already know the answer to that question. It is me. I will be the only one leaving this ring alive. I bark, and crouch down low, prepared to rip their throats out with my lab-sharpened teeth—

  But just as I’m about to charge, something stops me. A strange sound, like a hu’man making word song.

  A hu’man female.

  I think of her. The only hu’man female I have ever fucked. She had been making such word song outside of a red clay building the day of the Breeding Ceremony, when I first saw her. I had found her rocking back and forth on her knees with the two other females. They were all clasping their hands together with a strange finger interlock, but she had been the only one making word song.

  I could not see their birthdate stamps, but a quick assessment of the closed door and the eyes peeking out of the clay building’s only window, told me they had all been locked out. Made to wait outside until one of us Breeders came to take them away.

  I had ignored the other two females. Every hunting instinct I had zeroed in on the one singing.

  I dragged her back to the ship and had taken her. Frantically. Until I spilled my seed inside of her. Not once but thrice. Even when I was fully spent, I could not bear to let another Xalthurian male have her. She was mine. Mine. And I ended up holding her the remaining three hours. Allowing no one near.

  I sniff now, and yes, it’s true. There is a female in the ring with us.

  But I thought the Kaidorian valued females. Revered them even? Why is she here in the fighting pens?

  Do the Kaidorians think I will fight her? Because I will not. My mind spins, frantically trying to come up with a plan to save her from the other Xalthurians. I will die in this ring before I let them harm her.

  She continues to sing, and I come out of my crouch, determined to get to her, to protect her.

  “He is no longer in fighting stance! Keep singing,” one of the enemy Xalthurians calls out.

  Light suddenly floods the room.

  “N’Thn…” one of my challengers says. He is large and golden, and he looks like…

  No, it is, I realize squinting at him. It is T’Kan. My cousin. My commander. The one who left me for dead.

  I focus on him with a narrowed glare. “Where is she?”

  T’Kan looks over his shoulder and I follow his gaze to see a hu’man female as dark as onyx. She is beautiful, but she is not the one I bred. She must be the source of the word song. It cuts off abruptly as she asks my cousin something in her strange throatbox language.

  “I do not know if it worked,” T’Kan answers. “But he seems less crazed.”

  He is right. I am less crazed, I realize as reality floods back into my mind.

  I am not in a fighting pen but in my cousin’s house. T’Kan, who became a general while I was locked away…and apparently acquired a hu’man.

  I look from him to the female. “T’Kan. How is a hu’man here in your house? I do not understand.”

  “She is my mate,” T’Kan answers, his ridges setting to a careful neutral as they often do when he speaks to me. As if I am a diseased animal who must be spoken to like a Xalling. “Xalthurians are allowed to take hu’man mates now.”

  Mate…

  The Kaidorian who runs the matches electrocutes me with a long stick. He barks a word I know means “Fight!” in their rough language.

  I am back in the fighting ring. And the onyx hu’man morphs back into the female I bred. She is surrounded by three Xalthurians, two orange and one golden, and she looks to me with sad brown eyes.

  She is mine. I must go to her. I must protect her!

  I charge the golden challenger standing between her and me. But as I get close, something presses into my neck.

  A sedation disk, I realize when my body instantly weakens, and I collapse at my hu’man female’s feet. She looks down at me. There is sadness in her eyes, still. So much sadness.

  “I am sorry to have failed you,” I say with a broken hiss. Then the world fades to black.

  Zinnia

  It had taken me nearly a year to convince T’Kan to let me try to get through to his cousin. But my singing experiment had ended with N’Thn crumpled on the floor with a sedation disk plunged into his thick green neck.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say to T’Kan as soon as we walk back into our suite. “I only made things worse.”

  “It is not your fault, my treasure,” T’Kan answers with a weary smile.

  He then goes directly to the crib we special commissioned.

  Xalthurian babies usually sleep in pods that provide warmth and monitor their every breath. And New Terrhan babies usually sleep on the floor with their parents or siblings. But after seeing a crib in an old planet entertainment, T’Kan and I had decided to try it a new way, with a warming pod, designed to look like a crib. A perfect mix of his culture and mine.

  Gently handling our son, T’Kan straps Buck to his chest with a way more secure version of the bark cloth sling I used with Stevie—another perfect amalgamation of our two cultures. And necessary, since T’Kan has been just as stubborn about wearing Buck to work as he was with Stevie. I’m more than a little suspicious he’ll try to get me pregnant again before this one becomes too old to carry in a sling, too.

  “At least you tried to help him,” T’Kan says when he’s done strapping Buck in. “I am afraid more and more of my cousin’s mind slips away every day. That was the first lucid moment he has had in months. Soon there will be nothing left.”

  I shake my head. “There’s got to be a way to help him. I mean, he did become lucid for a few seconds there.”

  He gives me a severe look. “I will not allow you back in that room with him. If he had gotten to you…”

  “No, me singing has obviously been crossed off the list,” I assure my golden Xal, before he can go into overprotective mode. Moons, you get kidnapped, beat, and tied to a tree by your brother once. And you instantly get shut out of doing anything dangerous, twice.

  “I’m just saying, maybe he didn’t get agitated because the song didn’t work, but because I wasn’t the one he wanted to be singing it. He was asking where she was. Did he have a girlfriend? Someone who might have been special to him?”

  T’Kan thinks. “As you know, most Xalthurians were not able to comprehend such ideas of romance and love before being introduced to them by your race...”

  No, they hadn’t, though that’s become harder to believe in the months that have passed
since the first free-to-choose Breeding Ceremony. Thanks to the “get to know each other” program run through the holo system we finally managed to get up and running on New Terrhan, every room in the Ceremony House, we built for the occasion was filled. In fact, one of my many jobs that night had involved handing out numbers to the couples who had to wait their turn until a room became free.

  Many of the Xals had become so instantly smitten with the females who had chosen them as their baby daddies, T’Kan had to deal with an influx of last-minute applications from males who wished to stay planetside after the now week-long Breeding Ceremony.

  I’m so happy we were able to move into the new Kel Regent palace a few months before the big ceremony, because the formerly space-spoiled Xals, were now having to deal with two to three males soldiers sharing a room. And T’Kan had already announced to next year’s Breeding Ceremony participants that medics, tech workers, and builders would be his first choice for work application picks, since he only had limited space left on the ship.

  The flow of migration went the other way, too. After finding out they were pregnant, we ended up carting quite a few females with us this latest quarterly diplomatic trips.

  Some of the females had struck “work deals” with the married Xals they chose to breed them, with the full permission of their wives as was stated in the new accord—I can only hope those deals actually work out.

  But most of the New Terrhan females found their future baby daddies waiting when we landed outside the palace. Pulling out yet another skill he’d been forced to acquire as Kel Regent, T’Kan had officiated a ceremony for one hundred and thirty couples right there in the palace field.

  Some days being Qel and Qel Regent is a total pain in the ass, but there were some good days, too. That had been one of them. Kira and I had cried buckets of tears as we watched all those human-Xal couples pinky kiss.

  There was still a lot of growing to do and prejudices on both sides to overcome. But that day it felt like we were definitely making it work.

  Which might be why I just can’t let go of the idea of how to help N’Thn and all the other prisoners of war, who seem to be getting worse by the quarter.

  “Okay, so maybe he didn’t have a Xal girlfriend. But is it possible he made a special connection with whoever he bred during his ceremony? I mean, L’Gon released that public health warning about Ceremony Mind Rot—maybe he fell in insta-love, too?”

  T’Kan considers my words and brings out his databoard. “I will ask L’Gon now to run a DNA scan against the records we have provided him. Hopefully we will able to secure a name.”

  Yes, hopefully.

  New Terrhan in its first settlement-wide election, voted in Wang-Lei to the High Leader spot. But unfortunately, Xalthuria wasn’t quite as fortunate.

  Their newest Council Leader is this red guy named, L’Gon. T’Kan has tried to convince me a few times that he’s not a complete piece of pigeon shit, but he’s totally anti-human because of this thing that went down with his cousin, who apparently disappeared after getting a beatdown from the main Kel—anyway it’s a huge complicated story. And the main point is he hates Kira, N’Maryah, and pretty much anybody without nose ridges.

  So of course, his Health Department is the one in charge of running the Breeding Ceremony DNA matching program.

  We had gotten and properly filed DNA samples from every past female Breeding Ceremony participant in the settlement two quarters ago, but all those samples still had to be run against the DNA for all the male and female babies currently in the Xalthurian’s system. I was told by our planetside medics that all of this could be easily done with an algorithm.

  But according to L’Gon, he hadn’t been able to spare any staff to work on the project. So the matching project had languished until T’Kan had threatened to kick the special medical team that had been flown in to tend to and monitor N’Maryah off the planet, if he didn’t give all the hybrids and hu’man mothers who were waiting for news about their DNA matches something.

  Even then, L’Gon had only given in grudgingly, and had insisted that any mother who wanted to be matched had to put in a special request in Xalthurian. And I will not even get started on on what he’s put N’Maryah through just because she’d managed to get and stay pregnant—by a human male. Kira says there’s a lot of excitement buzzing around the royal city for possible Xalthurian female inclusion in the next Breeding Ceremony, but I’m not at all confident about that happening any time soon with L’Gon in charge of the council.

  “He will not hesitate to give me the information I seek,” T’Kan assures me, correctly reading my worried look. “He and N’Thn became good friends when they were under my command. He will want to help him.”

  “I hope so…”

  He suddenly pulls me in closer and kisses me over Buck’s head.

  “What was that for,” I ask when he pulls back. I know no matter how often I’ve tried to explain it to him, he still considers kisses and expressing of gratitude.

  “For worrying about my cousins as if they are your own. You give fealty even without blood line connection, and it is one of the many things I admire about you.”

  So…one year later, and have I mentioned that my golden Xal still makes me feel like the most beautiful, kind, and talented woman in the universe?

  “I love you,” I murmur against his lips, finding it hard to believe that there was ever a time when we honestly thought we could kill each other.

  Now I’d die for him. Our family. Our people. And I know he would, too.

  “I will forever be diseased with this love for you, too” he answers.

  I wince. “Do you have to keep calling it a disease, though?”

  “You will let me worry about N’Than. And you may focuse all of your worry on A’Ry.”

  N’Maryah…yet another thing to feel guilty about.

  To be clear, she still isn’t my best friend, but I have…I guess you could say gotten used to her. We both went through our pregnancies together—even if hers is lasting a whole Xalthurian year to my nine months. She was one of the first people to come by after Buck’s birth—mostly because she barged in and insisted to Br’In that she had some kind of special status as my bestie—but still it feels like I should be back on New Terrhan for the any-day-now birth of her first child.

  T’Kan correctly reads this look, too. “One more day and then we we’ll return home tomorrow,” he reminds me, tipping my chin up with one clawed finger.

  Yes, one more day…

  Stevie and I decide to spend the last afternoon of our trip in the palace gardens with Kira and the blue and brown swirled prince we all refer to as Telly—but only in private.

  “You know I’m totally shipping Telly and Relly, right?” my real best friend asks as we watch our children run around the picnicking field with Baby.

  “Me too! Maybe we should arrange marry them like in the old old planet days.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to D’Rek and you get T’Kan on board, and then we’ll remind Wang-Lei his wife owes me one, like forever, and we’ll pass it into law. Why are you laughing? I’m totally serious.”

  I just shake my head and say, “We’ve come a long way from digging hidey graves in the red woods.”

  “Holes!” she corrects sternly. But then her face softens to say, “And yeah, we really have.”

  A holo hail beep interrupts the nostalgic moment.

  “Glee again,” I say with a laugh, when I see it’s originating from our red clay palace. “I swear that kid likes when we leave more than when we’re there, because then she has an excuse to use the palace holo system.”

  But my laughter peters when the screen blinks on in front of me. It’s Nova. When I saw her last she’d been in good spirits, and had even spoken of teaching a dance class on the colony ship now that she had turned a corner in her emotional healing.

  But now, that hollow look is back in her eyes, along with the dark circles she’d sported back in the early days after Dan�
��s death, when she was still having nightmares that he wasn’t really dead.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  Nova shakes her head. “Glee was attacked by a group of boys on the way home from school. They threw rocks at her. One of them cut the side of her face.”

  Anger and sadness shoot through my being. Has all the work we’ve put into Xal-human relation on New Terrhan been for nothing? “Who were they? Get me their names. T’Kan and I will deal with them and their parents as soon as we get back. And until then, we’ll assign a guard to walk to school with her.”

  “Thank you, Zinnia. I really appreciate everything you’ve done and continue to do for us. But I was talking to N’Maryah and she says stuff like this never happens on Xalthuria. She says the hybrid kids are treated with respect, reverence even.”

  I can’t refute that. Kira’s son is the official next in line for the throne, but she calls all the hybrid males on Xalthuria Little Tels. They’re the only sons of the wealthy and warrior elites who were almost exclusively granted Breeding Ceremony spaces before Kel D’Rek and Kira converted to a lottery system to pick the spots. And unlike the generation born directly before them, they had never had to fight in the war. So even the nicest among them tended to be spoiled and entitled after a lifetime of growing up receiving everything their swirled double hearts desired.

  “Yes, the hybrids are treated quite well here,” I admit. “Are you thinking of moving to Xalthuria?” I ask.

  Nova nods. “I’d miss you and Stevie terribly—not to mention Mom and Dad. They’ve been so amazing with Glee.”

  My heart pangs with sympathy. As a fellow orphan taken in by them, Kira’s parents have a special place in my heart, too. But… “You think the situation has become untenable down there,” I guess.

  Nova shakes her head. “After all she’s been through, I can’t help thinking I should give her a fresh start. But from what I’m hearing there aren’t any established immigration rules for people wanting to come from New Terrhan—especially since I’m…”

  She doesn’t finish, but she doesn’t have to. I’d overheard Dan blaming her inability to provide him with children often enough as the reason he’d used her as his punching bag.