Shoot the Messenger: A Reverse Harem Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 1)

by Pippa Dacosta

  “Talen…” He looked at me, through me, just like they all did—as though I were nothing, just dirt to be scraped off his boot.

  “Talen,” the marshal warned. “TAKE YOUR HAND OFF HER.”

  Talen’s transformation had me gripped, but I suspected Kellee’s claws and teeth were out and ready. I reached out slowly, carefully, but didn’t touch Talen. Whatever he was doing to Natalie, he would likely do to me too. “Talen, tell me about your favorite book?”

  He blinked, and the blackness subsided. Violet blazed through. He looked at Natalie swaying on her feet and plucked his hand free. The messenger gasped and stumbled back into Kellee’s arms. She looked around her, panicked, until she set her eyes on Kellee. “What the…?”

  Talen turned away, barely registering that anything out of the ordinary had happened. What had happened?

  Kellee wrapped his arms around the trembling, dazed Natalie and took her out of the chamber, leaving me alone with Talen. Fluttering fear tried to pull me away. I knew he was dangerous. They were all dangerous. But somewhere in all the times we had jogged the prison circuit together, in the moments I’d caught him watching me and when I’d watched him, I’d allowed myself to believe he was different.

  Talen came back with a book in his hand. He held it out. “This is my favorite,” he said, oblivious to the pain he had caused Natalie.

  I looked down, forgetting for a moment what I’d asked him. Right. His favorite book. It had worked, bringing him out of his trance, but now that I had seen something of the monster inside, I wasn’t sure I could ever look at him again without seeing fae.

  “She had been about to attack you,” he explained.

  I swallowed and looked up into his normal eyes and saw something like hope in them.

  I took a step away and the hope faded.

  He was fae, and this prison was his for a reason. “What did you do to her?”

  “She intended to hurt you.”

  “What did you do, Talen?”

  He clutched the book against his chest and locked his sights on my scowl. “I was protecting you.”

  I backed up another step, and he noticed but didn’t move. I could never trust him or believe his words. Kellee had once told me that words were all the weapons Talen had left. That was before the marshal had freed him. Now he had plenty of weapons at his disposal.

  “What did you do?” I asked again.

  “I tempered her emotions.”

  He had made her feel something else. Dread undermined everything I had built up. Right now, he could be manipulating me. I was human, saru, and he could twist me around his little finger without me knowing.

  “When we first met, here… in this room.” My voice trembled. I swallowed and hoped when I next spoke, I sounded stronger, because what I was about to do would have consequences for us both. “You said if I let you out, you would serve me. Do this one thing and I will be yours.”

  “Those words are mine. Yes.” A muscle in his jaw ticked.

  “Talen, I can’t ever trust you. Do you understand?” He stared back, immovable, emotionless. “What you did to that woman, I’m guessing you’ve hurt people like her many times… You’re fae. It’s in your nature to twist lesser beings to your whims.” Of course he had. He was hundreds of years old. The Talen standing in front of me was a product of Faerie, and in Faerie, everything was seductive and beautiful so that you bled your life away while begging for more.

  “Yes,” he hissed. “It is my nature, and I have hurt many.” He narrowed his eyes and looked at me side-on. There was the threat again. It had always been there, buried under his quiet pauses and watchful glances. Talen was more dangerous than Kellee. He was the snake in the grass, the killer you never saw coming.

  “You can’t help what you are.” I steeled myself for what was to come. “But I can help you. Do you know what I’m asking?”

  He nodded once and dropped to one knee. He didn’t have to do this. I wasn’t forcing him. He could leave, take one of the shuttles and go. He was a creature made to manipulate, made to rule all other species, but now he offered himself to me. He wanted this because he knew there was no other way forward for us.

  He closed his right hand into a fist and pressed it over his heart, just as I had done with Eledan. The saru had been ruled by the fae for thousands of years, but now a fae kneeled to a saru. It shouldn’t happen, not in this multiverse, but it was happening.

  “Do you submit?” I asked.

  “I do.” He bowed his head. “I am yours. I will always be yours.”

  Magic flooded the room, rich with the scents of jasmine and honeysuckle, old scents from an ancient world. His words held a power I hadn’t expected, but I felt them, felt their touch wrap around me, lick across my human skin and sink inside. Pleasure spilled through me, arching my back and briefly silencing all thought, all fear. It rolled on and on, sinking to my human core and knotting tight.

  I staggered, reeling from the embrace. The threads of the binding tightened, combining with my humanity. Heat strummed through me, heat and power and desire, until in one sudden compounded moment, it snapped. The chamber came back into startling focus. Tingles danced across my skin and tiny sparks traced my tattoos, leaving needle-like shivers behind.

  I blinked, breathless. Somehow, I’d stayed on my feet, which seemed like an enormous triumph. Kneeling, Talen looked up, almost composed. Almost. The hand pressed over his heart trembled, and his breaths came in short and sharp between parted lips. If he had felt half of what I’d just gone through, then he did well to stay as composed as he was. What we had shared, I’d never felt anything like it before. No saru had.

  I nodded, afraid my voice would betray how racked I was.

  He bowed his head, collected himself, stood, and returned to his cot where he woodenly lay down, closed his eyes and sighed.

  Now I could trust that Talen would never hurt me.

  Chapter 24

  Talen and Kellee argued about returning to Calicto. Kellee refused to take him, probably because Natalie now watched the fae as though waiting for the first chance to attack. And I wasn’t allowed to go because I wasn’t ready. It was too risky. There was no point in all of us getting caught in one shuttle should the fae come looking. That last one, I reluctantly admitted, was a good point.

  So Kellee left with Natalie and my improved comms in his pocket, promising to return in a few days.

  “I know you killed Crater,” Natalie said under her breath, passing me on her way to the shuttles.

  I smiled at the absurdity of her claim. It was so long ago and a lie. She had me all wrong. I hadn’t killed one activist miner. I was the Wraithmaker. I had hunted my fellow saru for sport and then helped annihilate a civilization. When she glanced back, I flashed her a smile worthy of a mass murderer.

  “You’re making it worse,” Talen remarked under his breath. He stood beside me, calm and collected.

  “I don’t think it can get much worse. Do you?”

  The prison felt colder without Kellee. During the next few days, I jogged alone, avoiding Talen the same way he avoided me. On one of my circuits, I found a storage room and poked around inside, digging out spare tek parts.

  Talen observed me collecting the equipment on the floor in the main chamber without comment, until his curiosity got the better of him and he crouched beside me on the floor. In front of us was a spread of what looked like scrap metal, but to me, it was a hundred possibilities.

  Talen watched me work, and rather than find his focus on me uncomfortable, I welcomed it. Knowing he couldn’t hurt me allowed me to relax in his company, something I had never been able to do among the fae, not even in the palace when the queen had favored me.

  “What’s that one?” Talen asked, pointing to a compact silver box.

  “A sub-band communications device.” I picked up the box and turned it over. “It’ll send out a low-range frequency the fae won’t think to look for.” Picking up a second box, I weighed them both in either h
and. “It will talk to its partner, over several hundred thousand miles. Kellee mentioned his communications problems, so…” I shrugged. “I fixed it. I just need two good power sources for them to work.”

  “And that?” Talen pointed to a string of metal links, all hooked in a line.

  “That”—I tugged on one end and the links magnetically followed one another, slithering across the floor like a metal snake—“will be a new whip. I can’t charge it with fae magic, but it will still make an effective weapon.”

  His fae eyes brightened as he ran his gaze along the whip. “How did you come to wield it so well?”

  “Necessity.”

  He looked up and likely imagined all the things a saru had to do to survive. His ideas probably only came half as close to the reality.

  “They—the chief saru trainers—weed out the weak ones early on. They employ many methods, but the first is leaving newly harvested saru inside the delivery crate.” I searched his eyes, wondering if he had seen the vast crates the children were harvested into. I doubted it. But like always, his expression remained neutral, although the glisten in his gaze betrayed a little of the emotion he otherwise hid well from view. “They told us only ten would be spared. Twenty-one of us were harvested from our village. Ten left the crate. I strangled one with his belt and kicked another in the face until she stopped moving.”

  Talen looked away, thinking I wouldn’t see him flinch. “How do you not despise me for what I am?”

  Everything would be so much easier if I did. “Saru don’t despise the fae. We can’t afford to. Our villages, our homes, our food, it all belongs to Faerie. We understand that. We don’t hate you, we love you. Without the fae, there are no saru.” I ran my hand along the whip’s metal links. The words had been bred into me, into saru life. A large part of me believed them and always would, but I had also harbored a forbidden seed of doubt. I still did, buried under all the lies. A seed Aeon had planted, before I’d killed him.

  “I can help you charge the whip,” Talen said, suddenly enthused. “Not directly, the tek will repel me, but through you.” He looked up, lips pressed into a determined line. “Through our bond.”

  “You would share your magic with a saru?”

  “Yes. It costs me nothing and…” Whatever he had been about to add, he stopped himself. “It can help you.”

  A flutter of excitement brought a smile to my lips. Ever since Eledan had taken his mother’s magic, I’d felt as though a piece of me had been stripped away. The thought of having that back, or at least something like it… “Will it hurt you? I don’t want—”

  “No.” His lips curved. “I can show you if you like.” He lifted his hand. Liquid golden swirls spiraled around his fingers. The humanity in me immediately reacted, spilling want and need through my veins. The desire wasn’t something I could stop, but its sudden appearance reminded me how Talen wasn’t without his weapons.

  I pulled back and shut down. “No, I don’t think so.”

  He frowned, puzzled. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “I know.” I touched my hand to my chest and felt the fearful flutter against my ribs. “He… He took Mab’s magic from me. From inside…” I remembered the terrible pulling and how every second had dragged like hours as he’d drained me. “I don’t want to have it only for it to be taken away again.”

  “I assumed as much.” Talen lowered his hand and considered my words during one of his thoughtful silences. His gaze roamed over the tek scattered around us. “What you do, it’s a talent, Kesh. You should be proud.”

  “Proud?” I did what I did to survive. Why would I be proud of necessity? I wasn’t proud of killing my fellow saru and I wasn’t proud of what I had become or what necessity had made me. No, that was a lie… I had survived. I was proud of that.

  “I have lived a very long time and all of this…” He gestured at my tek experiments. “I don’t understand human tek. I resist it, endure its endless gnawing on my senses, but that is all. But you shape it and control it. You create where nothing was there before. Tek is your magic. It’s… fascinating. You’re fascinating.” He said it matter-of-factly but his words burrowed in, breaking open some long-neglected part of me that craved the praise of my fae masters.

  I wasn’t sure what to say, or even if I could reply. Only one fae had praised me before, and to hear such words from Talen? It felt… peculiar. Like I couldn’t possibly deserve it or that I’d stolen the praise from someone worthier. Saru weren’t meant to be praised.

  You are a nothing girl. A ghost.

  His voice whispered poison into my ear.

  I turned my face away, clinging to the pride Talen had given me, even as it slipped through my fingers. Just the messenger. You are what we made you.

  I was falling, the dreams clamoring for me. “Talen?”

  I reached for the table or something, anything real. But I couldn’t see. I was slipping, chasing the dreams, reality folding in around me. A wood-paneled room. The oak throne was empty because Eledan stood behind me, his fluttering breaths on my neck, his words poisoning my confidence.

  Couldn’t listen. Couldn’t let the dreams capture me.

  A sharp pain stung my arm. I looked down, distracted, and when I looked up, I was back in the prison chamber, right where I had been all along, sitting on the floor, surrounded by tek, and Talen was there, setting down the empty syringe.

  I hadn’t won my battle with the dreams.

  Not yet.

  I was clinging to the edge, so close to letting go, and I always would be until I killed Eledan. And I would kill the prince. I had to. It was the only way I’d survive.

  Heat raced through my veins, the dangerous kind. I coiled the metal whip in my lap and looked up. “Do it,” I told the fae.

  He didn’t hesitate, didn’t give me time to change my mind. His hand settled on my chest, and the smell of jasmine and something I had originally assumed was honeysuckle, but now I knew that to be wrong. The scent was from a night-flowering lily, the kind found only on Faerie and rare enough that it bloomed only once in a saru lifetime. Its sweetness was fleeting, just a flash and then gone. Talen’s magic swelled inside, filling me out where Eledan’s theft had left me empty. In my hand, the whip glowed a faint golden light. Strength poured into my body. The kind of strength a saru should never know. Mab had given me her gift for her son, but this was for me. All mine.

  It was glorious.

  And then the power died off, leaving me shivering. Talen withdrew his hand.

  I caught his wrist, barely aware of how I was gripping him. “Why did you stop?”

  “Too much too soon could damage you.”

  I pulled his hand back and pressed it against my chest. “Damage away. I’m ready.”

  “Kesh.” He tried to pull away. I arched an eyebrow. There was trying, and then there was his half-hearted tug.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I haven’t felt this good in forever. Hit me with it again.” He hesitated, stalling for excuses. I leaned in. “You want to. Don’t tell me you don’t. It feels good for you too, right?”

  His flash of a smile was a devilish thing. He spread his fingers, pushing against my breasts. I wanted his mouth on me and could see it clearly, see him peering up the length of my naked body. The second that image struck, the flood of battling fear and desire almost derailed me, until his magic bloomed again, and I drank it in. The whip crackled to life, buzzing brightly with the same thrilling energy that zipped down my spine and pulled a gasp from my lips. It was everything the human body ached for, everything Faerie offered us, all our dreams and desires in one.

  Talen yanked his hand away.

  I swayed and reached for it again, but the fae stood up and stalked off, shoulders hard and strides clipped. “No more,” was all he said.

  Breathless, I shuddered, careful not to groan out the little ripples of pleasure still sailing through me. Hot damn, I wanted more of that. But I had apparently overstepped some kind of boundary. I wasn’t us
ed to magic-sharing. Such intimacy was forbidden to saru. And when the queen had given me the gift, it hadn’t been like that.

  Heat warmed my face, and a familiar shame weighed on my back. I’d taken something I didn’t deserve. Something illicit. I wasn’t allowed to touch the fae. They were out of bounds, above me.

  I shouldn’t have forced Talen.

  The golden glow around the whip flickered and died out.

  Perhaps the whole magic-bond-sharing thing hadn’t been such a great idea.

  An alarm sounded, and Talen altered his course toward the exit. “The shuttle has returned.”

  I jogged to the dock alongside Talen. He kept his gaze ahead until the last doorway, where his stride wavered and he allowed a small smile to touch his lips. It was enough to know he’d forgiven me. I followed him into the dock area, wondering when his opinion of me had started meaning something.

  Kellee’s shuttled docked, and the airlock hissed open, revealing its occupant. Not Kellee.

  Machine dust covered Natalie’s freckles. Tear tracks had cleaned lines through the dirt. She bit into her cracked bottom lip. “There was an accident.”

  Chapter 25

  A fae warcruiser drifted above Calicto’s atmosphere. The sleek claw-shaped vessel blotted out the light from Halow’s sun, casting its shadow over the small planet. Our shuttle was a speck of machine dust in comparison.

  “It can’t see us?” I asked.

  Natalie shook her head. “We’re too small for it to bother with us. But they shot two passenger cruisers out of orbit when we tried to evacuate.” Her lips pressed into a grim line.

  Below us, as Natalie piloted the shuttle in low over Calicto’s surface, the biodomes glittered like upside-down crystal bowls. Two were cracked wide open, the sectors inside exposed to Calicto’s poisonous atmosphere. One remained intact, and at its center, the Arcon pyramid stood defiant. I fought back the memories and dreams trying to muscle in on my consciousness.