by Zara Zenia
“You used to find them distasteful too,” I muttered.
“I did, but then the scanner worked and I found my mate. Well, she came to me first, I suppose. Still, that was before the scanners stopped working properly.” He smiled.
“And will they be fixed? Will we have a chance to use them to find our mates?” I asked, recalling the argument I’d had with my twin.
“Don’t start this again—” Jinurak started.
“Countess Tormundson damaged them beyond repair. I have been working on it, but it takes time,” Akrawn answered. “Since she created them, and her tech was corrupted, we have had to start from scratch.”
I frowned.
"What was damaged in the cultural center?" Gardax asked, changing the subject and releasing some of the tension from the room.
"A better question would be how long will it take to start repairs to the cultural center," Jinurak said. "My AIs estimate six months. Lortnam's say nine."
Akrawn clicked his tongue at me. "Always too conservative, Lortnam, even your AIs have picked up your conservativeness."
"His frugalness keeps the resources flowing back home," Darbnix said. "How long do you think the Humans will allow us to look for mates among their women if we've nothing to trade and our presence leads to violence?"
"You're forgetting that our brother is their latest hero," Gardax said, hiding his smile behind tented fingers. “The mission may continue unchanged if we can use Lortnam's newfound fame to our advantage.”
A dull ache formed at the bridge of my nose, spreading slowly to my temples. I pinched the cartilage to stem the flow of pain. It seemed it was too much to ask to make it through the council meeting without having to explain myself.
"That woman is a liar," I snapped. When my brother's expressions turned from mocking to shocked, I softened my tone. "Or maybe the stress of the event muddled her senses. In any case, she doesn't remember the attack clearly."
Akrawn folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned back in his chair. "If you say she's a liar, then what's the truth?"
I told my brothers the entire mess, from realizing Rachel had never prepped properly for the event, to disarming Jake Corbin’s device in the back hall. When I finished, they stared at me in stunned silence. Rawklix leaned forward and reached for the wine bottle again, the creak of his chair breaking the silence. He poured himself half a glass and guzzled it down. With a lick of his lips, he tilted his forward toward me.
"Let me see if I have this correct. You saved a building full of Humans and averted an intergalactic disaster... while running away?"
I nodded, lowering my head as the shame made my temples burn. Rawklix's laughter opened the floodgates, and in seconds the room had erupted into fits of it.
No, I was nothing close to a warrior and I never would be.
Rising from my chair, I straightened my spine to its full length. I didn't speak until Gardax stopped laughing, but when I did, I infused as much seriousness into my voice as I could.
"By your leave, High Prince, I would like to return to my palace and get back the investigation and rebuilding." I may have been their brother, but damn it I was a Prince of Trilyn as much as any of them. I would not stand for mockery, not even from my blood.
Gardax's eyes softened as he nodded. "Granted. Keep me informed of your progress, Lortnam."
My boots couldn't carry me from the room fast enough. Anger stung the sides of my face, bringing an echo of the Solarin Islands at summer at the start of Baltimore's winter. The story of my ineptitude had amused them so much, we hadn't even gotten to meaningful discussions about the scanners. How was I supposed to find a mate without one?
Heavy footsteps trailed me down the hall, moving in double time to catch up. To my surprise, I turned to find Jinurak coming up behind me.
I braced myself for another round of laughter, but as he came closer, I saw I needn't have bothered. There was no humor in my twin's eyes. Maybe he understood how I felt. Until the argument about the genetic scanners, he always had.
"They laugh because the alternative is unbearable," he said.
"I don't know what the alternative is, but I can't imagine it's worse." I turned and continued on the path back to my hover craft. If I lingered near the door too long, Rawklix might come out into the hall and continue hunting me for sport. Boredom brought out the worst side of his personality, but the same could be said of us all. My twin fell in step beside me, the rhythm of his steps contrasting my own.
"Tthere's a version of all this where we lost you, Lortnam," he said. "Far from home and in the engagement of a war we didn't know we were fighting until recently."
Jinurak furrowed his brow. Suddenly his face looked far older than our perceived twenty-one years. "Our people would never have recovered from that. We would never have recovered."
We were both silent until we reached my transport. What was there to say? He was right, but that didn't make my brothers laughing at me any easier to take. It didn't make the rift between my twin and me any easier to weather.
"But I'm still here, brother. I didn't die." The word caught in my throat. I didn't realize until then it was the first time I had admitted the ultimate consequence of the attack out loud. Prince Lortnam of Trilyn, Sovereign of Norna, could have died surrounded by Humans on foreign soil, having never fulfilled his duties to his people. A wretched epitaph for a life half lived.
Jinurak clapped a hand on my shoulder. "Indeed, and as stubborn as you've always been. You're missing the most important part of your own story, brother. You are alive and a hero besides."
I cocked my head to the side, shaking it in disbelief. "Not you, too, Jinurak!"
"The building was really wired to explode, wasn't it? And you really disarmed the trigger?"
My stomach roiled as I nodded grimly. It hadn't taken the Baltimore Police Department's explosives specialists long to confirm the deadliest of the Corbin brother's threats. The cultural center had been wired with enough explosives to reduce it to rubble and still have enough power to heavily damage the buildings next door.
Jinurak squeezed my arm, using the gesture to silently call me from my memories. "You may be a reluctant one, Lortnam, but you are hero. Use it." he said. "The Human’s fascination with you is a gift not a curse. If you hate the parties, fine. Use their press to find your mate. It has a truly astounding reach. I'm sure they’ve already reached out to you."
I raised an eyebrow. "Have you been spying on my household, brother?" Even as I said the words, there was no venom in them. I already knew the answer.
"I know the Humans as well as you do, brother," he said, raising his hands in the air in mock surrender. "My specialty just happens to be negotiating with them. You just became the most desirable of us—"
"Based on a lie," I said.
"But it’s not. Not really, and that makes you the most desirable none-the-less," he continued. "I'd just hate to see you waste it."
"It will still come down to the scanners. How are we to know who is a genetic match? The same problems with no solutions." As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them.
A slight hardness crossed Jinurak's face. It was too small a change for most to see, but I knew his expressions as well as I knew my own. The wound was too fresh for picking, and I had ripped it open.
"Or a solution in want of one." Jinurak turned and went back up the corridor without another word, likely back to the council room, to usher our brothers out of his home.
My twin's words weighed heavily on me during the ride back to my palace. They hung in my mind as I retreated to my office, too distracted to relieve my kitchen staff by sending for my evening meal. I considered them as I watched the first snowfall on the city through the shielded window in my office. They were the first words of kindness my twin had spoken to me in weeks, and he used them to urge me to find a mate.
He didn't mention the unspoken consequence, that as soon as I found a mate, she and I would leave for the home world while he
and Rawklix stayed behind to continue the search. It had been four years already. It could easily be four more. Maybe it was just as well we let the distance grow now.
I growled in frustration and stalked back to my desk, punching the button on my message machine along the way. Another dozen interview requests had been left while I was at the council meeting.
In my insistence on asserting my version of events as reality, had I overlooked the one advantage this planet had given me since I got here? Could I use the Human's flights of fancy to improve my chances of finding a mate?
Possibly. Probably, but the sort of woman who would be wooed by press attention wouldn't be a suitable mate for me. With a little savvy, she could trick the scanners into a match. It had happened before, to our horror. But even that wasn’t an option now. The scanners had been damaged beyond repair but using the press as a matchmaking service was pure insanity. But perhaps I could use that as an excuse to cover other plans.
I couldn't trust the technology to find my mate, but if the spirits who had protected our people this far were on my side, I could use the attention to stamp out the threats to us. Next time, it might be my twin or Rawklix alone in that room, and they might not have luck on their side.
My assistant had organized the messages in order of the likelihood of my acceptance. I put the inquiries from business journalists aside— for later outreach —and flipped through the rest of the digital stack. In the morning, I would give the first of them the chance they so desperately wanted, a personal interview with a Prince of Trilyn.
Chapter 3
Kelly
Santino's Pizzeria! Just click to order!
The three-dimensional rendering of a middle aged Italian man with salt and pepper hair and a mustache threatening to tip him over waved at me and pointed toward the "custom" button with way more enthusiasm than should be allowed for a glorified cartoon. The smell of spicy sauce and red pepper flakes in my mind would have been enough to make my stomach growl, if the dumpster fire of a website wasn’t so distracting. The red trim along the hem of his coat clashed with the yellow and blue logo of the restaurant enough that I wondered whose son or nephew had done the graphic work as a favor. It still didn't justify the assault on my retinas.
"Oi, Pizza? Kelly, no!" Mei said, scrunching her nose and leaning forward. Her electric blue hair fell in her eyes as she bobbed from side to side, as if a change in her position would magically transfer to the camera in my apartment and give her a better view.
"Whoops. Forgot we were sharing a screen." It was a bold-faced lie. In fact, I had initiated the screen share when the last meme tunnel went too deep too fast for the glacial paste of copy and pasting links, but Mei hated it when I teased her.
I shrugged, barely managing the hide my smile of delight. "It's past lunch. I'm starving!"
My friend's objections reminded me of my real business - Signor Mustache. That 3D fucker stood between my lunch and me. I followed his instructions and with the click of a button, zipped to the order section—done in yellow and red. Double yuck. It was an affront which could only be remedied with gooey cheese, crispy crust, and spicy sauce delivered to my door in under half an hour. Maybe sooner, if I beat the first of the dinner rush.
"You don't have food in your fridge? There's no store downstairs?" Judging by her tone, Mei knew both of those things were likely true.
"They're more like aspirational ingredients."
"Well, next time don't talk to me through breakfast. Or lunch." Mei grinned, revealing her buck teeth for just a second before sucking her cheeks in and pursing her lips in a perfect imitation of a fish.
"Careful, Usagi-chan, your dimples are showing," I teased.
"Stop calling me that!"
My friendship with Mei and a terminal case of curiosity led to me studying Japanese. I couldn't hold a conversation on my own, but I could get the odd phrase Mei said. Sometimes, I looked up new ones in between our daily conversations to surprise her with. Although, I had to admit, sometimes it was more to annoy.
"Well, quit judging my food choices, little bunny rabbit," I said, finishing up my order. "Besides, it's my last splurge for a while. Business has been slow lately. Looks like all the corporations decided to go honest for Christmas."
More fear crept into my voice than I wanted. All of the humor vanished from Mei's face, replaced by a genuine look of worry. That wasn't an emotion I liked to see directed at me, especially not from Mei.
It didn't help that I was lying. Business wasn't slow as much as it flowed in the wrong direction. Any Human woman foolish enough to up and abandon her husband on the dream of warming an alien Prince's bed had long since had her day in divorce court. She might have even crawled back on her hands and knees begging forgiveness for being so stupid. Either way, the end result was the same. No divorces meant no executives hiding assets or embezzling funds from the big coffers. Which meant nobody needed a private investigator to dig up the dirt.
The apartment behind Mei was half the size of mine, but because it was in Tokyo and not Baltimore, the rent was several hundred dollars higher. After a few shots of sake— to match my glasses of cabernet sauvignon —Mei would threaten to bring her little hacking act stateside and squat in my spare bedroom.
Deep down, I was hoping she'd make good on the threat. It would have been nice to have someone I liked in arm's reach for once. And it wouldn’t be long before my rent caught up to hers, making a roommate a necessity. I’d been on my own for five years— ever since I told my piece of shit father to shove his insults and his beer up his ass and struck out on my own. By twenty-one, I’d had enough money coming in regularly to get a real apartment instead of a room in someone else's.
But rent had gone batshit insane in every city with a Trilyn Prince Charming palace and Baltimore was no exception. My rent went up thirty percent. The second year it doubled. My renewal was still six months away, but I was already looking for something new— and preferably way the hell away from alien Princes and their amusement tax spill over.
"You need some leads?" Mei asked, concern etched in her heavily lined eyes. "I can crawl around some databases. See if I find anything worth looking at."
I scrunched my lips up and to the side in a skeptical expression. "No, I'd rather you didn't do something illegal to help me make rent."
"No, no, not illegal," Mei said, waving her hands across her chest for emphasis. "Just... slightly naughty."
"Yeah, right, naughty. I know what that word means to you, Usagi-chan." Mei's idea of naughty involved cracking into highly secure websites for fun. If the company was above board, she'd offer to shore up their security for a handsome fee. If they were shits, they got a demand to change their ways before their sins were exposed. No blackmail. No way to trace the mysterious hacker.
I'd never seen Mei work— I probably wouldn't have fully understood what was happening if I had —but I'd begged for her help cracking more than one case. I probably would again.
"It's not that bad, yet," I said, letting my shoulders slump a little. It's not as if I had anything to hide from Mei. "I've been careful with my money and the snow always brings insurance cases."
Mei wrinkled her nose again, but this time I saw the sympathy behind the motion. "You hate those. What about your family? Do you have any that are close?"
It took every ounce of self-control I had not to let loose every insult I could think of at the mention of my family. I never brought them up in conversation, not even with Mei. Most people assumed it was because I had the same boring, slightly crazy family that everyone else had. When your family's version of crazy included your father calling you a slut in between flinging beer bottles at the wall, you learned not to share too much.
"Well, I like eating pizza and drinking wine," I said. "Those'll soothe the wounds," I said.
The image on the screen jiggled as Mei moved her laptop from her lap to her side and curled up. She yawned as she pulled the blanket up to her chin. "And if that doesn't work, you
could always move here. My landlord won't mind if I vouch for you."
"You live in a studio in Tokyo, Mei." I leaned back against my couch, curling up in the same way Mei had, but with my laptop on my coffee table. Fishing between the cushions, I grabbed the remote and switched to the news. My demographic's half of the male-female duo— a woman with a deep burgundy color job and layered cut that I envied but knew I could never be bothered to keep up —had been replaced by a younger woman with blonde hair in a green dress clearly chosen to bring out her eyes. It worked, but I still hoped my usual anchor would only be gone for a day.
"I'll get a bigger futon."
"You're just trying to con me into doing all of your grunt work for you," I said with a dismissive snort. "First it'll be sorting your email or some crap like that. Then I'll be running to the convenience store for groceries. And before you know it, you'll actually be talking me into cleaning!"
Mei giggled. "Uun. You'd put things where I couldn’t find them and only buy junk for dinner. So...we'll eat out."
I couldn't help but laugh. I could almost feel the warmth of my friend beside me on the couch and smell the empty containers of takeout ramen. It probably wasn't any healthier than my gooey delight, but the company would have been a vast improvement.
"Maybe I'll come for a visit when things pick up," I finally said. "But we're watching the news when I do."
To cope with the reality of being self-employed but having been raised by a man with the organizational skills of a caveman, I had taken to running my life on systems and routines. My morning routine— which I technically did late morning —helped me rev up. My evening routine helped me wind down, a vital step if I came across something particularly enraging on a case that day. But my afternoon/evening routine was my favorite. We watched something, laughed, ate, and filled the gaping holes in my day.
Mei rolled her eyes, barely stifling a yawn. "Felt like sleep time was close, but I cannot see the sky from here. And I'm not getting out of bed."