by Maia Starr
I looked up and watched the shifters take to the sky; even those miles away heard her deafening shriek. Like rockets or shooting stars, hundreds of Parduss flew skyward.
Back home.
Chapter Thirteen
Brooklyn
I marched out into the battlefield, an empty runway of chaos, fire, and debris covering every inch of the property.
The sun was starting to rise, pinks and orange hues masquerading at the edges of the sky.
I swallowed hard, tears filling my eyes as I approached Korus. He had shifted back to his true form. The real him, finally.
Before…the things I said. I was in shock.
These were the thoughts that filled my mind, but I couldn’t make them come out of my mouth. I was too overwhelmed by the sight of him.
We stood just a handful of feet apart, watching each other.
This man, this Parduss, was the one I loved. I couldn’t deny that for even one more second. He was the one my soul needed. And I was so overcome by his safety and his love for me, that suddenly nothing else mattered. The rest we could work out.
His body heaved with ragged breaths, a warrior fresh out of battle, and he tried to stand upright, his neck hunching back as he looked up to the sky. He stood by the body of Naxra, beautiful and lean and practically lifeless. Perhaps she was.
“Korus!” I called to him, standing in his glory, watching his wingspan widen as he splayed himself out before me.
He looked down at me, shimmering golden chest and a body full of gray scales, and I felt proud.
I took a step forward, and he flapped his wings down, forcing a gust of wind to race through the runway. It was a warning. Don’t come any closer.
He grabbed Naxra with his mouth and slumped her body onto his back, blood spilling everywhere.
“I’m sorry,” I said, loud enough for him to hear. I knew he did, because when the words left my mouth, the black slits of his eyes flicked toward me, lizard-like.
And just like that, he was gone.
His whole body took flight, and he ascended skyward, going up into the fading morning stars until I couldn’t even see a trace of him.
I watched as he left me and wondered why, then rightly concluded that I deserved it. I hadn’t believed in him when he needed me to—I accused him when all he wanted from me was some compassion and understanding.
He kept saying he was coming back, that he wouldn’t give up on us.
But he did.
The days passed slowly after that, time ticking at a crawl. My days were only accomplished by viewing everything as a task. Get out of bed. Good job. Eat breakfast. Nice. Go to work. You got this, Brooklyn.
But then, when I would come home, there were no more tasks for me to do so I would crawl into bed and cry or reminisce or stare numbly.
I didn’t even have a way to contact him.
Joshua did, or so he said, but wouldn’t give up the information, saying it was official government business.
Even Joshua had given me something of a cold shoulder since the battle, telling me I was too hard on Korus, as though I didn’t already know that. As though I wasn’t already beating myself up for it every single day.
There were no more Parduss sightings.
No more reporters.
What I wouldn’t give to hear about them now. Before, it would have made me sick to hear that the shifters were in the area, that they had made their way back to Earth. Now I spent every free moment checking the alerts on my phone and watching the news, hoping for some sighting of them.
Then, on one not so special day nearly ten days after the battle, I came home to find my door ajar.
My heart sped up, and I walked into my apartment—and there he was.
His black hair was a mess of wind-bitten locks, his sharp eyes smiling before his lips did.
“I—” he began, but I never gave him the time to finish.
I raced over to him and jumped into his arms, curling my legs around his body and showering him with kisses. “I went to tell you how I sorry I was,” I said through my kisses, holding his face in my hands to make sure he was real, “But you left!”
“I know,” he chuckled, holding me tight.
“I love you so much; I didn’t mean those things I said, I…I was shocked but, it doesn’t matter now,” I said, looking back and forth from his eyes.
He leaned in, warm and familiar and mine, and kissed me. He ran his hand up the back of my head, holding me close to him. “I love you, too,” he said with a smile as he pulled away from me.
We stared at each other, basking in our reunited love, and then I
“What?” he teased.
“What?” I repeated wryly.
“There’s always a complaint, so, come on, let’s hear it,” he said, bouncing me in his arms to get a better hold of me.
I slipped out of his arms and set my hand on his chest, not wanting to stop touching him. I looked up at him with cupped brows and softly asked, “Why did you leave?”
“You told me to fix it,” he said, smirking.
“Yeah…” I tested the word out slowly. “And you did. You won the battle.”
“Right,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “But you told me to fix it.” I smiled up at him, brushing my hand through his hair, confused. He swallowed nervously and pulled out a transmat orb—a device used for interplanetary communication, complete with the ability to make recordings if a connection couldn’t be established.
“There’s something…I never told you,” he said slowly, and my heart lilted. More secrets?
My palms started to sweat as I looked up at Korus, my brows drawing together nervously. “What?” I asked desperately.
“I met your sister,” he said, and the words danced through my ears like a sentence I had imagined.
I shook my head and did a double take of his mouth. “Come again?”
“Alexandra,” he repeated.
He hit the switch for the orb, and we watched as it hovered there, a black screen coming up and trying to establish a connection.
“I met her when she was brought in from our mission on the Earth. And you were right. She’s still alive,” he continued. “So, when you said I had to make it right…” He shrugged, smirked. “I knew what I had to do.”
The room lit up with the familiar glow of a lit screen, and my gaze turned to the projection—my sister.
“It’s just a recording,” Korus said, but I could barely hear him.
“Brooklyn!” she nearly screamed, all but bounding into the camera.
I fell to my knees, looking up at her with wide eyes. “Is she real?” I asked with a laugh as tears spilled down my cheeks.
Alexandra looked absolutely perfect, if a little older than the last time I saw her. Her skin was glowing, and her dark hair was long and thick like mine.
She squinted both eyes shut in a cute confirmation of her realness, as though she really heard me. “So,” she said playfully, “I met your man. Korus.”
I swallowed hard and looked up at him with a smile.
“So now it’s time for you to meet mine,” she said and ducked out of the camera’s view before coming up with a little boy about the age of six or seven. He had dark hair and dark red scales. “This is Maxden. He’s mine. I know right?” she said, leaving room for a pause, as though awaiting my reaction. “Obviously, he’s a little…different,” she giggled. “But he’s my world.”
I inhaled sharply, and Korus knelt down on the floor next to me, taking my hand in his.
“So, Korus tells me you’ve been keeping the hope alive! Said you never gave up on me. I’ve never given up on you either. I’ve been…” she choked up then, tears invading her sweet, round eyes. The emotion got to me, and I let out an audible cry, putting a hand over my mouth to silence it.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for…ten years, sis. And let me tell you, that’s way too freaking long. I miss you. I love you,” she nodded, smiling into the camera now before exchanging a g
lance with Maxden. “And I’m coming home.” She gave a playful salute and smiled.
Then the video cut out.
“She’s happy,” Korus said, squeezing my hand.
“And she’s coming home?” I cried, hugging him. “How? How did you do all this?”
“I had to make things right. You mean too much to me to let everything be ruined by what’s happened. I knew I had to bring her back, no matter what.”
“But how?” I repeated.
He shrugged. “I had a friend help me back onto Cadir, to find her.”
I smiled, elated. I couldn’t believe I would see Alexandra again, and that she had a child—that we both managed to fall in love with Parduss shifters and choose to spend our lives with them.
“And I owe you…everything,” I said, nuzzling into him.
“I never want to lie to you again,” he said. “All I ever want to do is make you smile.”
“Well, you’ve set one hell of a bar,” I said, and we both laughed. “Now kiss me.”
He pressed his soft lips to mine, our lips dancing against one another, and I knew everything from that moment on was going to be different. But this time, I wasn’t afraid. I had a new life to lead, my sister to reunite with, a nephew to meet…and I had Korus, and that was the happiest ending of all.
The End
Scashra
(Warriors Of Cadir)
By Stella Sky
Chapter One
Chloe
Green goop.
That is what I chose to spend my last night on Earth staring at.
Of course, my ‘last night on Earth’ wasn’t due to anything as dramatic as my impending death. Nah. My last night was a bon voyage, of sorts. Heading off to a new planet for research.
I studied biology and neuroscience so intensely that I’d basically given up my sex life in university just to make sure my grades panned out. They did.
And that’s what lead me here, to work with the Space Administration Extraterrestrial Watch: SAEW.
“That’s what you’re eating?” came the incredulous tone of my roommate, Harper. She had light brown hair and brown eyes: a long wiry frame that looked gazelle-like.
I looked down at the gigantic bowl of mint-chip ice cream in my lap, piled into an oversized, white mixing bowl and being eaten with a wooden spoon. This was my last meal on Earth.
I sat in the window seat of the apartment I had in the SAEW base—each member of their elite units was given a dorm-style room in a luxurious high-rise to live in during missions. My real home was back in Seattle.
The window seat was a long bench in the crook of an awkwardly shaped wall with a giant bay window looking down over the space-station, which looked more like a billowing city from up here.
“This is what I’m eating,” I responded sarcastically, shoving a heaping spoonful into my mouth sloppily.
“She says, dead-eyed,” Harper said with a snort. She pulled a chair up across from me, dragging the legs across the gray hardwood floors. “Well, enjoy it now!” She said with a genuine smile. “You won’t be getting any of that in space!”
I nodded, mouth full of the cold, green and black dairy. “Why do you think I’m voraciously tearing away at this mint chip?”
“First of all,” Harper said, raising a long, sassy finger toward me and closing her eyes as though she were about to announce the meaning of life. “Mint chip is not a splurge flavor.”
I blinked and cocked a curious brow. “What?”
“Try going for peanut butter chocolate! Birthday cake! Hello?”
I could feel the right side of my lips pulling into a smirk as she berated me and then shrugged. “I like mint.”
Her eyes went wide. “Mint and chocolate should not be friends,” she announced speedily.
I rolled my eyes and took another spoonful. “You were saying?”
“I was saying…” she began slowly and then seemed lost. She shook her head and backtracked, “Have you seen you eat? Every meal is voraciously eaten!”
I snorted, not looking at her. “Thanks for that.”
“I live to serve,” she said with a smile and a seated bow. “Just wanted to make sure your ego stayed inflated during your voyage.”
With a nod and a faraway stare, I said, “Right, right…”
Three years ago, a Parduss alien creature came to the Earth, not to kidnap women, but to make a deal with them. He signed off on a ten-person treaty—a trade of sorts.
See, the Parduss originally came and began the L7 war thirteen years ago, kidnapping some twenty-sevev female humans and disappearing into the sky. Since then we’d learned that it was because their females were dying off—they were looking for new ways to keep their species alive, and we got to be their lucky guinea pigs.
We didn’t see any of them after that, not until three years ago when a Parduss crash-landed here and made a deal with the SAEW. They wouldn’t kidnap any more of our women if we agreed on a trade.
We could travel to their planet, study their biology and research their land: take their minerals and begin a trade agreement. Their price? Eight human females a year, each willing to shack up with them and start baby-making.
When I first heard of the trade agreement, it made me sick to my stomach. Now, three years later, I felt the exact same way about it.
But, it was neither here nor there for me. I was a researcher, not a breeder.
That’s what they called the females sent to procreate. Nothing takes the sexy out of interspecies nookie quite like calling the girl a breeder.
I was going to be one of the first ones to ever step foot on Cadir soil. There were twenty-two of us going.
One cyborg.
One pilot.
Two doctors.
Three scientists.
Seven guards.
Eight breeders.
That would be our happy family for the two years we were committed to staying on Cadir with the half-dragon, half-human Parduss creatures.
“You excited?” Harper asked, resting her chin in her palm as she cocked her head to the left. “One of the first! Quinn!” she cheered, calling me by my last name in her way. “One of the first humans actually invited to Cadir!”
“I’m overjoyed,” I said flatly.
“Yeah,” she laughed. “You look it.”
I was excited about the prospect of space travel. I had done one other mission with SAEW to a planet called Alkenar Seer.
It was a dry, dusty place with black soil and very few lifeforms, most of which were worm-like aliens that mostly hid below ground.
When we took the soil samples home, I was the first one to realize they had hyper-growth particles that could cause whatever was planted in it to grow like it was on steroids.
This was an amazing find that was being studied at great cost, hopefully to be shipped out to less-fortunate countries to aid in hunger problems.
Cadir, I’d heard, was anything but desolate. They had sprawling cities in the clouds and an immense sky river. Whatever that meant.
The scientist in me was itching to get there and see what gems their world had to offer… there was just one catch.
Hey, what’s a girl without a secret motive?
The Parduss had broken their promise of not attacking. On a mission to the planet south of Cadir, my best friend was taken.
Alecia. She was going there with her husband, Jack, who also worked for the SAEW. They were committed to six months on Yazir and then they would come home, and finally take their honeymoon.
But when the SAEW did their weekly check-in, all Jack could say was that a dragon had come and taken Alecia and four of the other women and left him for dead. An emergency evac shuttle was sent, but it took three months to get there, and by the time they reached the crew, only Jack and one of his security personnel had survived—barely.
The Parduss denied it, of course. But I was going to find out exactly what they did with her.
“I wonder what they’re like,” Harper said,
mostly to herself.
I looked out the window next to me at the sheets of rain that had been falling for over two hours now.
“Assholes,” I said and then set the bowl of ice cream on the floor next to me.
“Come on now,” Harper said slowly. She leaned forward in her chair and grabbed the bowl of ice cream off the ground, taking a mouthful from the spoon I had already licked.
I turned to her, brows drawn, and laughed. “I thought you didn’t like mint?”
She shrugged lazily. “Still ice cream,” she defended.
“I’m not expecting much,” I reiterated.
“I know what happened with your friend was shitty,” she said in a way that I knew, for Harper, was trying to be sympathetic. To anyone else, it would have sounded bimboesque and cold. “But, you have to move on.”
I raised my brows and slowly lowered them, staring back out the window.
“You know what I mean,” she said, biting her lip. “Ah, crap. That sounded callous again, right? Man, I have to start working on my tone.”
“Your tone is fine,” I waved her off. “I get it. I have to be focused. This is a huge opportunity.”
“And you have plenty of security going with you, so there’s no reason to be afraid!”
I turned my profile to her. “Who said I was afraid?”
“Well…” she shrugged her shoulders. “I am, and I’m just the pilot.”
I laughed. “We’ll be fine,” I said, making eye-contact with her. “And for the record, I’m glad you’re going to be there.”
Harper had become one of my closest friends in the last few years. We were brought into the SAEW at the same time and were even made roommates.
But, Alecia was my best friend. We grew up together more like sisters than friends. Her family was friends with my family, and when we went to school, we made sure we got accepted to the same one.
It was hard enough for me when she and Jack signed up to go to Yazir. Six months without my best friend? I was a ball of nerves and pent-up energy: no one to talk to randomly at four in the morning, no one to laugh with or bounce theories off of.