“I just… I can’t shake the feeling that something is very, very wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
She sat back and considered Beno’s question. “With me. With this place. With the people here. With … everything.” She sighed. “Maybe I’m just out of sorts…”
They joined her on the couch, Theyn bringing Kira with him. He put his hand on Sera’s knee, and Beno stroked her shoulder.
‘Whatever is wrong, we can face it together,’ her dark-skinned mate said, his words and his mental voice comforting in all of their minds. Kira looked up at him and smiled. ‘There is nothing that we can’t handle as long as we’re united.’
‘They took you away from me once before,’ Sera said. Images of the testing facility and the horrible injuries that they had endured rose in her mind’s eye, and Theyn gently pushed them away. ‘I can’t lose you again, not even for a little while.’
‘You won’t.’
‘You can’t promise that.’
Theyn sighed. ‘Nobody can promise anything about the future. What we can promise, and what we do promise, is that we will never leave you by choice, and we will never stop fighting to return to you if we’re separated again.’
She kissed him, then Beno, an uncharacteristic desperation behind the touch. Kira reached out to her, and she took her, holding her on her lap while her men put their arms around them in a reassuring embrace.
‘Don’t be afraid, Sera,’ Theyn said. ‘Everything will be just fine.’
*
Joely walked Itan to the medical center, trying to keep from staring at him. In the time she’d spent with the Ylians, she had seen plenty of hybrids. There was nothing all that special about this one. Still, almost unconsciously, she found herself watching him, taking in the way he moved, the russet highlights in his brown hair, the shape of his lips, and the purple-rimmed emerald glow of his hybrid eyes. Even the silver of the translator earring that he wore was somehow appealing against his skin. Something about him was compelling, and she had a hard time tearing her eyes away from him. Annoyed with her reactions, she firmly reminded herself that she was involved with Asa, and that this was not the time to develop some weird, random crush on an alien.
The medical center was filled to capacity with injured men when they arrived. She recognized Heron, the queen’s husband, and his presence among the injured surprised her. There were several men who were clearly close to the grave, their bodies mottled with scars and seeping wounds.
“This is awful,” Joely said. “What happened to all of you?”
“Lady Tayne,” Itan answered, as if that said it all.
“What did she do?”
He laughed, and it was a short, humorless sound. “What didn’t she do? She started out trying to find a cure for that Bruthesan retrovirus that’s afflicting our people, but then she changed. She’s doing something else, and I don’t understand. She has different aims now, and I question her loyalty to our people.”
An orderly came to them, her golden hybrid eyes dark with weariness and concern. “There are no exam rooms left right now, but if you’ll come to the triage room, I’ll see what I can do to help you.”
They followed where she led, stepping into a small room with a desk and a computer. It was prosaic, like every triage room in every walk-in clinic Joely had ever seen. The orderly sat down at the computer and began to type. Joely found herself listening closely.
“Name?”
“Itan. I-T-A-N.”
“Birthdate?”
“Echo 9, Year 21.”
The orderly blinked at him. “Does that translate to Earth dates?”
He smiled. “No.”
With a shrug, she typed the information into the system. “Birthplace?”
“Bruthes.”
“Marital status?”
“Married.”
Joely’s heart sank.
“Children?”
Itan’s face darkened, an angry flush coloring his cheeks. “Are you mocking me?”
The orderly looked confused. “No. Why?”
“No Ylian or Ylian hybrid from the Bruthes colony is able to merge. Without merging, we can’t breed. That’s the legacy of the retrovirus.” He scowled. “I can’t merge, and I have no partner. No bond mate. Therefore, I have no children, and I will never have children.”
Itan glared daggers at the orderly, and the evil look was his only answer. Joely wanted to reach out and take his hand, but she wasn’t certain how the gesture would be received. She stayed still and waited to see how things would shake out.
The orderly said, “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to hit a sore spot.”
“Well, you did.” He looked away and took a deep breath, calming himself with obvious effort. After a moment, he said, “I’m sorry for being hostile.”
“It’s okay. No harm done,” the orderly said magnanimously. “Do you know what bloodlines you have?”
“Ylian and Bruthesan. My mother was Ylian, and my father was from Bruthes.”
“Any human?”
“No.”
Joely looked at his exposed arms, which were scarred with dozens of crisscrossing cuts, some old, some very new. He lacked the osteoderms that the full Ylians, and now Sera, boasted on their skin. She supposed that his Bruthesan blood was the reason for the difference. She wondered what a full Bruthesan looked like, and if they had psychic abilities like the Ylians.
The orderly took Itan’s blood pressure and temperature, although Joely wasn’t sure anybody knew what normal values for a Ylian/Bruthesan hybrid should be. When she was done, she led them back to the waiting room where they could sit until a doctor was available.
They occupied their chairs in awkward silence, each stealing an occasional glance at the other but neither of them finding anything to say. Inside the medical center, the staff bustled from patient to patient, and chiming alarms told them when one of the men started to fail. Itan looked anxiously into the room, trying to see which man was causing the signal.
“Do you… can Bruthesans…” Joely began, but the questions died in her throat.
He looked at her briefly. “Can Bruthesans what?”
She sighed and opted for a question she hadn’t actually intended to ask. “Can the Bruthesans seriously be siding with the Taluans and farming Ylians for meat?” Itan fixed her with a hard, level look, and she knew she had overstepped. She babbled, “I mean, I know that your dad is Bruthesan and I’m not saying they’re all bad people, and -”
“It’s true,” he said flatly. “And I never said my birth was my mother’s idea.”
Joely fell silent, her mouth open in surprise. Itan continued.
“Ylian males can’t breed anymore, as I’ve said, because of this retrovirus that destroys the ability to merge. We weren’t the most fertile species to begin with, anyway. The Bruthesans selected the healthiest breeding females and made hybrid children with them whether the women wanted it or not. Ylian genetics are dominant, so the children tended to have Ylian traits, which made them desirable to the Taluans.”
“What traits?” she whispered.
“Some psi abilities, but it’s primarily the taste of our flesh.” He looked down at his hands. “Part-Ylian males, like me… we’re just livestock. We’re bred with Ylian females, but they can’t conceive if their mates don’t merge, and that’s something we can’t do, mostly because we’re hybrids and we’re all infected with this virus. We’re useless. We’re just fattened up and kept indoors until we’re at our physical prime. And then we’re…” He swallowed. “We’re slaughtered.”
“Jesus Christ.” She shook her head. “That’s horrible.”
“That’s the reality of life in the colony on Bruthes. We’re prisoners. We’re… cattle.” His eyes stared at the wall, but it was clear he was seeing something else, something very far away. “There are processing plants. They make the females work there, but only the non-breeders - the ones who are too young, the old, the ones who were born sterile because of t
he virus. It affects females, too, just not many.”
“They make them…”
“Help slaughter their own brothers, friends, lovers? Pack the meat into preservation crates for the trip back to Talua? Yes.”
“They must go crazy.”
“Suicide is a constant companion among the non-breeding females, and among many of the males… of course, if we kill ourselves, we just serve the Taluans’ purposes that much faster.”
Joely leaned closer. “I don’t understand. What does Bruthes get out of it?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” When she shook her head, he said, “They’re not the ones being eaten, and as long as they provide the Taluans with their tasty, tasty Ylian meat… and now the meat of Ylian/human hybrids… they’re safe. They keep their planet. They stay alive. They…”
“They’re cowards.”
He nodded. “Basically, yes.”
“How did you escape?”
He gave her a pale approximation of a smile. “Nima. She smuggled me and four others off of Bruthes and took us to Itzela.”
A terrible thought occurred to her. “Elina said that there are regular trips between Itzela and the colony on Bruthes. Are the Itzelans cooperating with the Taluans?”
“There aren’t many males on Itzela, now, are there? With limited breeding ability, they have to replenish their stock somehow.”
The dreadful import of his words sank in, and she shuddered. She had trusted the Itzelans, at least at first. Now she wondered if she’d ever trust any alien again.
“So the Itzelans have an arrangement with the Taluans like the Bruthesans do,” she hypothesized. “That’s why the Taluans haven’t come here.”
Itan nodded. “It’s why they haven’t come here yet.”
Chapter Five
Sera paced through the living room after putting Kira to bed for the night, her skin itching and her nerves aflame. It was all she could do to keep from scratching her arms until they bled. Theyn watched her quietly, splitting his attention between the data pad in his hands and the woman he loved. Beno sat on the couch, poring over a data pad of his own with rapt concentration.
‘What can I do to help?’ Theyn asked her.
She stopped abruptly, staring out the patio doors at the meadow beyond. The evening sunlight was bright, and the grass seemed impossibly green. Every color was too vivid, and she wondered if there was some sort of chemical treatment on the window glass. ‘I don’t know. I don’t even know what’s wrong. It’s just… like… my skin feels too small, somehow. I don’t know how to explain it.’
He put his data pad aside and joined her at the window, his hands resting lightly on her shoulders. His touch was comforting, and she could feel warmth as his healing power spread through her. The itching and the feeling of wearing an ill-fitting suit faded, and she leaned against him in grateful relief. Theyn kissed her temple.
“This is so strange,” Beno said, buried in the readouts in front of him.
She offered her blond mate a smile of thanks, then asked, “What is?”
“These tests that Lady Tayne was running. Thirty-five years ago, when these records begin, she was doing standard microbiology, studying the virus and its reactions to different compounds, trying to find a way to cripple or destroy it and its mechanisms. That’s what I’d expect to see. But then, twelve years ago, she suddenly shifted from trying to destroy it to trying to replicate it.” He shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Replicate it?” Sera asked, frowning. “If that bug is doing that much damage to your people, why would she want to grow it?”
“Was she trying to create more sample stock that she could experiment with?” Theyn theorized, “She might have just been trying to grow more virus to make up for natural attrition.”
“That makes sense, and it looks like that’s what she was doing… for a while.” His forehead crinkled. “But then she started genetically tampering with the virus, adding DNA strands from other creatures - and I don’t know, yet, what those creatures were - and then growing whatever mutant strains she was making.”
“You’re the xenobiologist,” Theyn said as he picked up his own data pad and moved to sit beside their mate, “and I’m not questioning your expertise. But isn’t that part of studying a virus and trying to find a cure?”
“Sometimes,” he allowed. “But… she was experimenting on live subjects.” He raised his green eyes to Theyn’s blue ones, then looked at Sera. “Live subjects.”
She was confused by his dismay. “Yeah… isn’t that what every virologist does, though?”
“You test on tissue cultures, not on live creatures. Even if you do, you start small, with rodents or something. But she started with Ylians.”
Theyn’s mouth fell open, and Sera said, surprised, “That’s a big first step.”
“If you’d seen the condition those males were in, some of them...” her blond mate said slowly. “Was she trying to infect them?”
He flicked a finger on the screen, and data rolled by. “She was using those hybrid males as living incubators.”
Theyn ran his fingers over his forehead, rubbing as if he was getting a headache. “I’m just a botanist, so I only know how hybridization works in plants,” he said carefully, as if he was trying not to offend their mate. “But wouldn’t the use of a hybrid host fundamentally change the nature of the virus and its performance? I mean, there are differences between full-bloods and hybrids, obviously, and I would think that the virus would react differently to the different biochemistries it encountered and each organism’s immunological responses.”
“See, that’s the thing I don’t understand,” Beno answered, shaking his head. “There were no longer any controls on the experiments. From what I see, it was all random and chaotic.”
“Maybe she was desperate,” Sera suggested, basing her theory on her training as an anthropologist. “When populations are under threat from an outside force like famine or disease, they do irrational things to try to survive. That’s when you start to see human sacrifices to the gods, meant to propitiate them and stop the dying. Maybe, in a way, that’s what Lady Tayne was doing.”
“We’re not a primitive society with angry gods,” Theyn corrected gently.
Beno snorted. “Says the priest.”
Sera sat on Beno’s other side and smacked him in the shoulder. It was like slapping a rock. “Don’t be a dick.”
Her brunet mate smirked. Theyn continued, ignoring Beno’s comment. “I can’t believe that any Ylian would suddenly turn to something that radical. We don’t sacrifice our own.”
Beno raised an eyebrow and looked up from his pad, facing his mate with skepticism. “Really? We don’t?”
“No. We don’t.” His voice was firm.
“Apparently, the Ylians on Bruthes didn’t get that memo.”
“Whatever is happening on Bruthes - and we don’t have the full story yet - is the doing of the Bruthesans and the Taluans, not the Ylians in the colony,” Theyn objected.
Again, their mate snorted. “You’re so naive, sometimes. You’ve been so protected and cloistered all of your life, first in your mother’s palace and then in your temple….”
“No.” He frowned. “You know as well as I do that there are two sides to every story. We’ve only heard what Nima had to say, and she’s a part of the resistance that wants to overthrow the Bruthesans and the colonial government. She’s hardly an unbiased witness.”
Sera raised her hands. “Okay, I think we’re losing track here. Let’s go back to just trying to understand what Lady Tayne was doing on Itzela without involving whatever weirdness is happening on Bruthes.” She sighed. “Beno, is there any time when a reasonable scientist would do random studies like this, without controls?”
He considered the question. “Occasionally.”
“Would she do it if she was desperate, or compelled?” They looked at her in surprise. “I mean, she’d been working on this virus for - what - twenty-odd years before she st
arted doing screwy experiments? What changed when she made the switch?”
Beno was annoyed. “How would I know? I was in hibernation. It’s not like they were sending information to my memory core.”
Sera pressed her point. “Who might have come to the throne around that time?”
“Apfira,” Theyn answered. “But why…”
“If there’s one thing I know from history and the civilizations I’ve studied, both the ones that lasted and the ones that fell, crowned heads are always obsessed with one thing: the next generation. Apfira wants an heir. Every king or queen does,” Sera explained. “She probably started pressuring Lady Tayne to solve the problem so she could breed the next entry in the line of succession.”
Beno considered her words, then shrugged the shoulder she had slapped. “I guess it makes sense…but it doesn’t excuse the things Lady Tayne was doing, or the condition of the males we rescued. Some of those males were tortured and in great, great pain. One of them died.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“I need to know why she did it, and what she was trying to do. There was more going on here than trying to find a cure.” He rubbed his eyes.
Sera gently but firmly took the data pad out of his hands and put it on the end table, well out of his reach. Theyn smiled at the two of them, telling their mate telepathically, ‘I think you’re done for a while.’
‘But…’
‘Intelligence is a turn-on,’ she said, smiling. The heat from Beno’s touch was still inside her, and she could feel it moving all through her body. She moved to sit on Beno’s lap, facing him and kneeling with her knees on either side of his hips. A slow smile crept across his handsome face, and she put her hands on his chest. ‘You work too hard,’ she said.
He laughed at her, but not unkindly. ‘I hardly work at all.’
‘Don’t argue with me,’ she warned.
Theyn chuckled in their heads. ‘Good advice.’
Beno put his hands on her hips, his smile broader. ‘I take it that you have some suggestions for a better way to spend my time?’
She quirked an eyebrow at him. ‘I’m always full of ideas.’
Ignition: Alien Ménage Romance (Phoenix Rising Book 2) Page 4