by V. K. Ludwig
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
I let my hands slide into the pockets of his pants. The moment my fingertip reached a cold, smooth surface, he clasped my wrists and pulled my palms onto his chest.
“I forgot to tell you.” He grabbed into his pocket and opened his palm, a silver sphere resting at the center. “Kael gave me five of those. They contain souldust to pay off addicts who might come after us. They’re more likely to leave us alone if we hand them drugs than credits.” When I didn’t react right away, he tilted his head. “You believe me, right? I have no intention of using them.”
“I believe you,” I said, pressing against the hard planes of his body and tracing my fingers along those dips between muscles. I had no reason not to trust Melek. “I hope we’ll find her. Or the hacker.”
“No chance. I didn’t ask how much he charges for linking Earth females, but it must have cost Kidan a fortune.”
“That’s what he said.” My heart filled with an unexpected pity over it, but I’d take that over hate and rage any day. “I think it’s sad how he wanted a mate so badly, it made him act in such a way. Now I get why he continued to say he was sorry.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“No, of course not. But it allows me to look at it from a different perspective because, in the end, we were all victims somehow. As crazy as this might sound, I feel less like a victim now that I know he was desperate instead of plain evil.”
“You’ve got a good heart, Katie,” he whispered, his face hidden behind a hood but that smile of his gleamed regardless. “Now go inside before somebody sees you.”
“You’re not coming?”
He shook his head and walked me over to the door, hiding me underneath fabric. “I’ll be right there. Perhaps she won’t come, but I’d appreciate the silence because I have to come up with another plan now.”
I stepped back inside and strolled toward the kitchen, the humidity telling me lunchtime was near. Adora stood by the counter, crating Kokonian palm bark into a bowl.
“I don’t know how you do it all,” I said. “You’re the first one in the kitchen each morning, cooking for everyone at Brot Adnak. Then in the evenings, you tend the bar.”
She glanced over her shoulder and smiled, two hands grating, the other six wiggling at me. “And I can’t imagine how you did it, raising Grace alone with only two arms.”
“Lots of wine,” I said, more to myself than her. “On Earth, we sometimes say that we could use an extra set of hands whenever we can’t keep up.”
Adora smiled softly. “You can have mine whenever you need them.”
“Which I appreciate. Everyone here has been so great to us.”
“Melek is very special,” she said. “No matter how bad he was, he always kept it together enough to help others. Always.”
A swallow lodged in my throat. Adora knew a version of Melek I had never met before, and while I was glad of it, I was curious too.
“Just how bad was he? Back then?”
Her expression tightened, and her eyes turned unfocused at the memory. “Terrible, Katie. Skin and bones that boy. Many Vetusians are lost souls. Not because they stumbled off the path, but because they had none to begin with, wandering around aimlessly. But now Melek has you and Grace.”
“Speaking of her. Didn’t I see Grace walk in the kitchen earlier?”
Adora shrugged. “She came. She left.”
“I can’t believe this…” Anger flooded my system. “Something’s up, I can feel it.”
Stomps carried me back to the hallway, and I went straight toward the room she’d crept out of earlier. I’d had enough of her sneaking around, disappearing whenever I wasn’t checking, and then lying straight to my face.
Nerves twitched along my temples.
Without a knock, I pushed the handle down.
I stepped right in. I turned the light switch.
Empty.
I didn’t see Grace or any nightstands or tables. Aside from a couch with a blanket draped over it and a mirror leaning against a wall, there was nothing.
Liar.
“What’s going on?” Melek asked and hung his cape on the hook next to the staircase. “Why are you so pale?”
“I can’t find Grace, and she just lied straight to my face.” I pointed inside the room. “She said there is furniture in here, but there isn’t.”
Melek slowly lifted a brow at me. “So?”
“So? She’s lying!”
“About furniture?”
“No, Melek, not about furniture.”
I walked from door to door, checking one backroom after another. Some contained large tables for gatherings, chairs stacked atop. Others held dust-covered wall decorations, tattered dresses, and file chips scattered in boxes.
“She’s probably upstairs in her room,” he said and followed behind me.
“Upstairs in her room my ass. Didn’t Adora mention not too long ago that she didn’t stay the entire time to help her with a closet? This isn’t the first time that nobody knows where she is.”
The moment I approached the last door at the end of the corner, Melek said, “That’s just a closet for cleaning supplies, Katie.”
I turned the knob.
The door fell open.
My shriek ripped from my vocal cords at the same time as Grace’s.
She sat in the middle of spread sheets, her face carrying about the same shock as I did in my chest. The signs had been there, only for me to ignore them. Great job, mom.
Her arms still wrapped around that pimple-faced healer’s head, an oh shit formed wordlessly on her lips. Takel ripped his hands from her waist and wiped the saliva off his mouth with a sleeve, his eyes immediately falling to Melek.
“Oh shit,” Melek said.
“How long has this been going on?” I screamed, not giving a damn about how the entirety of Brot Adnak came together at the other end of the hallway, giggling. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“W-we can explain,” Takel stammered. “Grace and I —”
Melek’s hand wrapped around his throat and pulled him out of the closet. He slammed the young Vetusian against the wall next to it, making Grace jump out and scream frantically.
“Er… er… er…” Takel stammered.
“Oh, now you want to act all decent?” Melek asked. “I should punch you until they have to put you in a bed at the infirmary.”
“Please don’t hurt him!” Grace screamed, building herself up in front of Takel. “He didn’t do anything.”
“Didn’t do anything?” I stepped over to them and waved my hand at that little sheet nest they’d built themselves in there. “Didn’t the way you grew up teach you anything? Please tell me you were careful or used protection or —”
“Moooom!” She flung her hands onto her head and squeezed. “Oh my freaking god, this is so embarrassing. We only kissed.”
“Well, I only kissed, too. Next thing I knew I was pregnant.”
“We didn’t mate,” Takel said and threw his hands up. “I swear on the honor of my stratum we only kissed. A-a-and I held her. But I never had the intention —”
“Bullshit,” Melek barked. “You’re a young, horny Vetusian taking advantage of the fact that I trusted him enough to bring him here. Don’t tell me you didn’t think about mating her.”
“No, no, I swear,” he pleaded, his eyes darting in all directions as he shook his head. “I love her. And I know beyond a doubt that she is my fated mate.”
Melek and I exchanged a confused look, though his quickly formed into one of pity. He let go of Takel and gave me an apologetic shrug as if fate was the universal apology for everything in his world.
“You lied to me,” I said to Grace. “And what’s even worse, you lied to everyone in this house. Sneaking around with him instead of helping Adora like we’d agreed to. When did this start? The day he came here?”
A thick swallow trailed down her throat, and she nodded, not daring to meet my eyes. “He s
neaked inside the morning after and found me. We’ve met almost every day since.”
“Alright, so, here’s the deal,” Melek said. “We need to bring some calm into this —”
“Calm?” I shouted. “She’s fifteen for Christ’s sake and too young to go making out with guys.”
“I’m almost sixteen!”
“Does Odheim have CPS? Because if they do, please call them on me. Shit. I was so busy with my own crap that I… I… Ugh! Kick him out already!”
“Katiiie,” Melek said and gestured toward the hallway. “Can I speak to you for a moment?”
“But —”
He placed his arm around my shoulders and turned me away from the situation, whispering. “Let’s step away and take a breather, alright?”
I reluctantly let him guide me away from this mess, my nerves a wreck. Of course being locked up in a brothel on a strange planet with a wanted mother and mate wasn’t bad enough already. Now we had to chaperone my daughter.
Melek waved our audience back to their posts with a hiss, then stroked over my cheek, saying, “This is good.”
“Are you insane? She’s been sneaking around with this guy for over two weeks now, and none of us noticed. Fuck, what kind of mom am I? What if they have sex? What if she ends up pregnant? What if… what if…” Everything inside my skull clenched. Shit. Migraine. “You have protection, right? Right?”
When Melek tried to bite back his chuckle, it somehow spilled out as a snort that made me want to smack him. Until he took my hands in his.
“You’re really cute when you freak out like that,” he whispered, holding a finger to my lips as if he’d heard that breath I’d sucked in. “Come one, Katie, they just kissed.”
“She lied.”
“Okay, and we’ll talk to her about that. But for now, we need to calm down and look at the advantages of this situation.”
“Advantages?”
He took another three steps away from Grace and Takel. “He’s a healer in training about to shit his pants because we caught him with your daughter. What if we ask him to help us?”
“Help us?” I glanced at how Takel wiped a tear from Grace’s cheek. “Help us with what?”
“Okay, hear me out —”
“Oh my god…”
“No, just listen.” He once more took my hands into his, letting his eyes lock with mine. “He’s a healer in training, and everybody knows they try to gain as much practical experience as possible. Eden da taigh L’naghal sent me a bunch of ICs to pay off bounty hunters. How about we purchase the hormones for the Jal’zar females with it? Lots of it?”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this.”
“We ask Takel to announce that he will inject those Jal’zar in need for free. Set up a little makeshift office in a few suns from now, until the word spread.”
“Huh…” I breathed. “You think she’ll come? The female from the dock?”
He shrugged. “We don’t have another option right now, so we might just as well try.”
“I don’t know, Melek…”
Takel held Grace in his arms, comforting her in much the same way Melek had done with me so many times. How old was I for my first kiss?
“Look at it like this,” he said. “You and I both understand that we can’t check on her all day long, right? She might be your child, Katie, but she’s not a child anymore. This gives us a chance to get to know him. See how serious this is. I might not know a thing about raising kids, but I know everything about unruly teenagers because I was the worst of them.”
Other than mom, nobody had ever suggested how I should raise my daughter. For a moment, I expected anger to flare up inside me. But it never came. At that very moment, I was glad to have someone by my side who cared about Grace.
“And what are you going to do with the Jal’zar if she shows up?”
“Catch her and lock her up until she talks,” he said, his gaze falling to his boots. “You get that we might have to make her talk, don’t you? That’s not going to be pretty, but our circumstances have changed, and I won’t put what we have at risk.”
I nodded, the implications of his words causing a roil in my stomach. Melek was right. Watching Grace like a hawk wasn’t an option, and it might even make things worse. With our knowledge of them, at least the sneaking around would stop.
“Do you think they’re a match?” I asked.
“The department won’t run their DNA until they’re mature,” Melek said and pressed a kiss onto my lips. “But I can say without a doubt now that fate will get them together if they are.”
Twenty
Melek
* * *
“I didn’t mean to lie,” Grace murmured, washing her hands by the sink in my office. “But she’s a total nutcase when it comes to boys, so I… kept it to myself.”
“Your mom didn’t have an easy life, Grace. Even I get that raising a child is hard work, but especially when you have to do it alone, barely mature yourself.”
“But, we didn’t even…”
“Mate,” I huffed. “Is this a human trait? Not calling things by their name?”
She grabbed the bucket with tools submerged in cleaning solution and placed it onto the table beside the couch. “I told him that I’m not ready for it yet. And Takel said he wanted to wait until they profiled our DNA. That he promised himself, he wouldn’t mate with anybody but his fated one.”
“I fully support that.” I gave a mental gesture, thanking the Three Suns, and handed her the sonic cleaner from the hover cart. “Well, your mom wanted you to clean rooms without pay as punishment. But since you are an aspiring healer, cleaning medical supplies it is.”
When she swung her arms in front of her chest and snorted, I pointed at the door. “Or go grab a bucket and scrub bodily fluids out of the carpet. Your choice.”
“Fine,” she grumbled and submerged the sonic cleaner in the tub, hovering it over hook needles and dispensers. “Just so you know, Takel and I are fated to be together. Call it a fling or young love or whatever you want, but we know. You can’t keep us apart after he helped you tracking down that Jal’zar.”
I sat down on my little stool, waiting until my grin dissipated before I swung around to face her. “Let’s make a deal. I’ll convince your mom to let you have a movie night with Takel here at Brot Adnak.”
“And in return?”
“I’ll take her out to the Son’idar and won’t hear a word of complaint from you about it.”
“You said it’s too dangerous.”
“Is that a complaint?”
She held up a dispenser and let out a grunt. “This good?”
“Only if you want your next patient to die of infection,” I said. “And I take that as a yes to my proposal. I already thought of a way to make sure we’re safe.”
She let out a huff of annoyance. “This is more work than I expected.”
“That’s exactly the point,” I snorted. “You might not appreciate it now, Grace, but the guidance you get from your mom is something you should appreciate. When I was your age, I scrubbed medical supplies almost every sun because I had none of it.”
“Takel isn’t like that at all.”
“Takel has something to look forward to. I was harvested right around the time when our very last female died of old age. When I was around twelve Earth years old, the Empire abandoned yet another trial to fix the genetic mutation across those eggs they’d harvested.”
She held the dispenser underneath my nose. “Better?”
“Clean enough.”
She placed it onto a rag to dry and grabbed the next item, her eyes flicking toward me. “You used drugs.”
“Who told you that?”
“Takel said it’s in your eyes. It’s what bleaches them.”
I let out a huff. “Like I said… no guidance. Everyone says it bleaches to color from the irises, but it’s actually a genetic mutation triggered by the drugs. Irreversible.”
“If you and my
mom had a child, would it have two-colored eyes as well?”
My injector gun fell out of my clasps at that, a tingle spreading through my fingertips. “Shit, I never thought of that before. I hope not. It’s bad enough that I have to go through life with people spitting on my boots.”
I picked up the injector gun and placed it inside a drawer on the hover cart. “I’ll go check on your mom. Since there’s only one private party today, I doubt anybody will need me.”
“Can I leave as well?”
I let out a laugh and walked toward the door. “Sure. Once that tub is empty. If they’re not properly cleaned, I’ll throw them in the dirt and let you clean them all over again.”
I ignored her complaints and made my way downstairs.
K’terra sat at the large kitchen table along with other workers, toasting to patrons who finished up quick and imitating their grunts and moans.
“Did you hand out the announcement discs today?” I asked into the group.
K’terra glanced around the corner toward the main room, then folded her feet on the table. “Uh-huh. By tomorrow, every Jal’zar on Odheim should know about the free injections. We managed to rent one of the old stores and already put signs up. It has a backdoor, but I’ll take care of that.”
My veins buzzed at the news. “Are you saying you’ll be there as well?”
“Seriously?” She lifted a brow and tsked. “Considering the condition you came back in last time, there’s no way I won’t come. She might be in bad condition and with a limp, but that doesn’t make her tail claw any less dangerous if she still has it.”
“Where’s Katie?”
She lifted her arm and pointed at the hallway beside her. “The empty backroom. Adora has her arranging tables for a private party in two suns.”
I gave the group a wave and turned toward the hallway with a bounce in my step, all of yesterday’s gloom forgotten. As far as I was concerned, Earth was nothing, but two negative matter jumps away. Behind it, a modest habitat paid from a modest healer pay, but the happiness it contained would be priceless.
I stepped into the backroom, where Katie arranged round tables and set up chairs around it. “You’re all alone in here?”