by Maia Starr
“She’s a lot younger than him,” I observed, trying not to sound too angry.
“Yes,” she said.
I swallowed. “Things still going on?”
“I am unsure. She seems attached to you, since your union by the mountain.”
“Or she’s a great actress,” I seethed.
Lele blinked and stepped up onto the porch of one of the trailers and opened the door for me. We stepped inside and turned on the generator; pumping the heat into the room and happy to feel it blowing against my spire.
“I know the captain would like to speak with you about the war crisis,” Lele offered. “Perhaps you can ask him about the status of him and Sidney then?”
I laughed and pinched the bridge of my nose. “Thanks, Lele.”
Definitely not going to happen.
Chapter Nine
Sidney
I scanned the room like a nervous puppy at its first veterinary appointment. The room was cold, with no pictures on the walls and thickly carpeted floors. It felt so strange to have Tessoul in my space, but it was a feeling I was becoming quickly accustomed to. It felt so domestic to bring him in, to see his immense form standing by my light green kitchenette and the old pots and pans I'd scavenged from a supermart some years ago.
Ed had stayed with us as well, making me absolutely glow with motherly adoration. I had grown to love the little creature in a way I hadn’t with anything else before. It was the only thing I’d ever had to take care of, to play with, and it felt like home when he was around.
Same, I supposed, could be said for Tessoul.
To see his ripped body on my bed felt unreal; it turned me on, sending shivers down my center and causing a heat between my legs.
We'd spent out weeks together less focused on our mission, irresponsible, and more focused on one another's bodies and all the different ways we could please one another. I was addicted to him, feeling more and more attached than I ever thought was possible.
"How are you finding my crew?" I teased and sat on his lap, straddling him and kissing his neck, sliding my hand along the limp spire that lay under his cowl and draped down his back. I was ravenous for him.
I couldn't get enough of him, and it scared me in the best way possible. He was less and less associated in my mind with monsters and more the man I wanted to be with. The more I thought about it, the more it really seemed like this could work.
It seemed he wasn't ready to give back the same lusty, animal passion I was when he responded, "Oh, just fine. Your camp looks at me like I'm some murderous creature and there's snow everywhere so... Yeah, great time."
"Hey, relax," I cooed, brushing his face with my hand and licking his lips, hoping to get his interest. "They don't exactly have the best experience, but we'll get there."
He cocked a brow, and it seemed to smooth his face somehow. "Is that so?” he dared.
"Look," I breathed, "Our commo—"
"I saw you in Baxley's trailer," he said, grabbing me by my arms and pushing me away so he could get a better look at me.
I shrugged. "So?"
"What's that about?” he thinned his lips, and suddenly I could tell we were in a fight.
I tried my best to laugh it off, flirtatious and light. "Well, he's my commodore and he wants to know I'm alright. I survived a..." I trailed off then, trying to choose the best phrasing possible. "I've been missing," I finally landed on. "He keeps a close eye on his team; that's all."
"That's all?” he repeated, unbelieving.
"Uh-huh."
"You know what's funny?" came his terse reply. "You didn't touch me at all yesterday."
"I'm doubling over with laughter," I scoffed.
"Hilarious," he said with an equal amount of annoyance.
“Fine! Well, it’s going to make some people uncomfortable, okay? As far as most of the people here are concerned, you’re… you’re dangerous! You stole our crew, killed our people, and took our land. Not everyone is as excited to have you here.”
He looked at me then and perked a brow with a calculated irritation: offense. “And here I thought you’d offered me forgiveness,” he said quickly, pushing me off of him and standing.
“Just stop it,” I said with a sigh.
“You stop it,” he repeated petulantly. “It seems there’s been a lot of lies slung around for my benefit, Sidney. Or should I call you Sid?”
“Jealousy looks terrible on you,” I laughed evilly. “Just saying.”
“I’m jealous?” he scoffed.
“Is that a statement or a fact? Because the answer is pretty obvious.”
He blinked and paced around my trailer with crossed arms; fingering over knickknacks and countertops. “I’m not jealous. Of what? Baxley? Is there something to be jealous of?”
He stopped then and focused his attention outside my window, watching the militia gather their supply of guns together at a far trailer.
“All I want is to be with you, and I’m not getting that same idea from you,” he said slowly, still not looking at me.
“It’s just temporary, until we get settled, okay?”
He turned his profile to me and began in a husky tone, “I find you inexplicably desirable.”
I chuckled. “Big word.”
“You are… wild and fierce. I knew it the minute you rallied me to fight you by the mountain. You are endlessly brave.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “First you’re pissed, and now you’re complimenting me? So, what? I mean, you’re obviously mad about something so why don’t you just come out and say it instead of playing games with me?”
“I feel uneasy,” he said, toneless, as though he wasn’t sure how to say the words. “A pulling.”
“Because you don’t trust me,” I said flatly.
“Something else,” he said, growing lost. “Something so familiar.”
I scoffed and repeated, “Because you don’t trust me.”
“No!” he yelled, a hollow roar coming throat his tone that sent a sick pang of white fire through my heart. “Not everyone is like you, Sidney! Not everyone is waiting to be double-crossed.”
I felt a pang of guilt bubble up in my stomach then. Not only was he right to be suspicious about my past with Baxley, but we were waiting to double-cross him. And he had followed me right into the arms of the beast.
I swallowed hard and walked over to him, quiet steps sounding like raindrops against the carpet. I put my hand over his and whispered, “I’m listening.”
“Something’s happening,” he said with such an urgency that it made me want to throw up.
“To you?” I asked, desperate.
“No. But I feel something… a calling.”
“To me?” I asked, now feeling stupid.
“No! I mean,” he traced his fingers across my face; kissed me. “Of course, but… it’s something deeper.”
I looked over his features and reached back in for a kiss, pressing my body against his, and felt displaced just knowing that he was hurting on some level. I wondered what the hormone did to him: what being ‘reborn’ must have felt like. The guilt that came with that.
Before I had a chance to respond, our kiss snapped apart like shrapnel as Baxley burst through my door, walking in with such familiarity I wondered if Tessoul would start a fight right in front of him.
“We gotta talk,” Baxley snapped, looking at Tessoul before slamming the door shut behind him.
My eye darted up across the room and immediately made my way to the door, following after Baxley with my hand firmly locked in Tessoul's. He stayed at the kitchen counter and pulled me back toward him.
I yanked him forward and offered him another kiss for comfort before we stepped out into the cold.
We sat in a semi-circle around a raging fire that was lit in an oversized tin barrel in the center of our camp. Tessoul was quick to warm his hands by the flames, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. It was freezing, and the Vithohn weren’t used to our temperatures.
�
��Baxley,” Baxley offered the first official introduction as he shook Tessoul’s hand from across the fire. “I’m the commodore here.”
My lover nodded uncomfortably and said, “Tessoul.”
“So, you’re the one who’s wrangled our soldier, hm? You don’t seem like the others we’ve run into. I understand that one of our scientists, one whom your people captured, actually, believes they can trigger something in the Vithohn system that numbs your tendency toward violence.”
Baxley was great at making speeches. I used to find this endlessly charming, but Tessoul clearly didn’t feel the same way.
With his guard up, Tessoul shrugged and offered, “I don’t know what it is, but it feels like waking up.” He looked at me and met my eyes with an expression that gave me butterflies.
Baxley flicked his brows up in dismissal and looked down into the fire. “Well, ain’t that romantic.”
“Just the truth,” Tessoul bristled.
“Huh,” Baxley breathed. “And your people, the ones who have mated with the two females in your base, how do they feel about the human race?”
“As far as I know, their goal is to save them from the destruction that we’ve caused. Nothing more, nothing less.”
Baxley parted his lips and licked across them nervously before looking back up at Tessoul. It was a meeting of male egos. “Is that right?” he tested slowly.
“Not all of the Vithohn feel that way, of course,” Tessoul offered, splaying his palms out before Baxley. “I used to be one of them, though. That’s how I know we can fix it: the thinking.”
“I heard Sid was attacked at your base,” Baxley spat.
Tessoul looked uncomfortable then; Baxley had a talent for narrowing in on insecurities. “Like I said…”
“Right,” Baxley dismissed. “And Sid says you want to make an alliance with us?”
Tessoul looked at me again, the group of us all watching one another in a meeting that was growing tense somehow. I began to feel agitated just watching them interact.
I knew that the militia deserved to know the plan: to get a feel for the Vithohn I’d brought into our camp. To see that he was on board, but I was starting to feel like Baxley had more in mind for this meeting than I knew.
“I want to stop this war,” Tessoul offered quickly. “And if you or your scientist thinks there’s a way to make us work together, then I think that’s worth exploring.”
“I see,” Baxley nodded. “And you wouldn’t be leading your people back to our camp?”
Tessoul narrowed his eyes, and I laughed uncomfortably.
“Baxley,” I breathed. “Come on. Manners?”
The look Tessoul gave my commodore was discomforting, and neither replied to my comment. The camp was still and quiet.
I looked over Tessoul's distinct features and sensed a rubbery tension; the way he looked at Baxley let me know he was suspicious. He could feel the hostility; he just couldn’t place it yet.
I bit my lip and moved my tongue over my teeth, hoping not to be found out. Then suddenly a bulb of unease crossed through me, and I felt the sudden urge to stop the whole conversation.
“When you found her,” Baxley began, but Tessoul interrupted him with a raise of his hand.
“She found me, actually,” he said, and the words were so filled with love that I could burst.
Baxley didn’t take it the same way. His eyes flicked to mine, brown and enraged, and then back to Tessoul as he snapped, “I know she did because I told her where to find you.”
The next series of moments played out like a blur. Tessoul looked at me with betrayal in his eyes: a deep-cut pain that made me sick. I went to speak, but Baxley let off a barrage of gunfire: a stun gun that sent Tessoul careening backward with an electric shock.
Our crew piled around him, disarming him and using all their might to restrain him, and all I could hear was my own scream.
Chapter Ten
Tessoul
It was day two in the cage the humans had constructed perfectly enough for me to be out in the forsaken cold for the rest of my days. I looked down at Ed as he squirmed up to the bars and I knelt down, patting his head.
He let out a high-pitched “brr-brr” noise and squirmed underneath my touch, satisfied. Then he looked up at me with his wildly expressive eyes and made something of a forlorn expression.
"You and me both, buddy," I said, wondering if he was as bored of the camp as I was.
I felt a bond to Ed that I hadn't voiced to Sidney, in large part because I didn't know what the bond was. There was a connection I felt when he was around that was both unfamiliar and unsettling on some level. It was the same feeling in my gut that left me sick, lost, and purposeless these days. A pull.
It turned out that on top of Sidney setting me up for capture, she'd also stolen some of the guns Jareth had been working on. I saw one poke out of the side of her knapsack: the heat gun. I scowled at that, at my stupidity, and became restless being cooped up in my chamber.
Several of the women at the camp had scoffed and scowled at me as I passed, shouting incoherent curses. But others, many others, had brought me blankets and made a makeshift tent around my cage so that the snow wouldn’t fall on me. They told me how wrong it felt that Sidney did this to me and that they didn't know that portion of the plan.
"Why lock you up?" one of them said with a thick Southern accent. "It just doesn't make sense now that yer, well, you know, thinkin' an all." She swallowed hard and grabbed my hands through the bars, apologetic. "Not that you weren't thinkin' before but, you know..."
I waved her off with a laugh. "I get it."
Now and then, one of the females would bring me hot meals that they'd cooked and seemed to take great pleasure in how quickly I would eat it up. Today a woman named Cathy, bright-eyed Cathy, had slipped into my presence and lay down a plate with strange, unknown meat on it and two squares of bread. I swallowed it down quickly, and she commented on my appetite.
She left me to my own thoughts, and my body transfixed once more on the strange pull I'd been feeling: the pull that Jareth spoke of and the same sensation that drew me to the mountains over and over again. And all of the sudden I realized what it was.
A war was coming, yes, but not with the humans.
I swallowed hard and bit my lip, pacing my cage as my hands shook unwillingly before me.
My mouth went slack, dry, and filled with taste buds then. A panic set over me that couldn’t be quelled: anxiety ballooning in my stomach and throat as Sidney approached.
She walked up to the cage with crossed arms; her body bundled in a thick green coat. She looked up at my makeshift shelter that the girls had made for me and rolled her eyes, jealous somehow.
I wanted to yell, to tell her she put me here and how dare she have something to say about it, but the anxiety had taken over me then.
My arms bristled with thick goosebumps, and I turned away from her.
“Hi,” she said in a small voice as she reached the bars.
I shook my head and looked away from her, wandering to the other edge of the cage.
“Look I’m sorry, okay?” she said, impatient. “Look at me, please. Talk to me.”
I bit my lip, my thoughts elsewhere, and knelt down once more, watching as Ed made his body go slack and slipped through the bars, rolling over to me.
Sidney leaned down then, following my movements as I knelt to reach Ed. “Please talk to me,” she pleaded once more. “I can’t sleep, I can’t think, I feel like my chest is caving in.”
“You set me up,” I said tersely.
She shrugged awkwardly, offering me a sheepish grin that likely got her out of trouble in the past. “Sort of,” she said with a finger to her lips.
“No,” I said slowly. “It’s one or the other. What’s the truth here, Sidney? Because I can’t tell anymore.”
She reached for me through the bars and tried to pull me toward her. I followed her touch, and she kissed me, hard.
When I pu
lled away, she said, “It was a mistake. Yes, I wanted to come back here. Yes, I was scared to stay with the Vithohn, but…”
I seethed and tried not to let her kiss throw me off balance. “Did you know I’d be put into captivity? To be—”
Then I froze.
“What?” she asked.
I felt a cold shock through me, and I grabbed my forehead, squeezing it between my thumb and forefinger.
“I know what it is,” I said quietly, mostly to myself.
“What it is?” she repeated, and my silence greeted her in reply. “Tessoul, please, I’m trying to talk to you. I love you, please. I’m going to do everything in my power to get you out of here.”
Just when I thought I had been emptied of love, my eyes shot to hers and I swallowed down a thick helping of air.
“You love me?” I repeated nervously.
She blushed, a pink hue overcoming her freckled skin. “Of course I do. What did you think?” She giggled then and reached back through the bars. “I’ve never felt more hope than I do when we’re together, and that’s saying a lot.”
I looked at her with a renewed hope then, only to feel the weight of my pull against my chest once more. I looked down at the creature in my hands and felt a burning sensation, an evil strength, and without thinking, I tossed him to the ground, crying out in agony.
“Hey!” Sidney cried out with fury. The shock that covered her face was painful to see as she raced to pick him up.
“Sidney,” I warned sternly. “Don’t.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” She scolded.
“Do you remember what I told you about the Kilari?” I asked, and she looked at me with a focused rage. “That… force I’ve been feeling for weeks now,” I said through gritted teeth, feeling weaker by the second. Drawn to the creature and trying to pull back from it. “It’s Ed.”
I wanted to laugh at the ridiculousness of it, but her face was stone stoic.
“That’s them,” I said, pointing to him once more.