“Not precisely true,” Theyn said. “The DNA scan showed that you were a hybrid, but nobody said anything about proportions. It may be that you have more Ylian blood than anyone suspected.”
She ran a hand over the osteoderms on her skin. The hard, flat scales were smooth and slick, almost like enameled glass. In the morning light, they sparkled with flecks of gold. “Apparently,” she said. She put a hand to her face, holding her fingers in front of her eyes. “My vision seems exactly the same.” She dropped her hand to her side. “I’m a real freak.”
“No,” Theyn disagreed, walking to where she stood. He put his hands on her shoulders, warm and supportive. “You are nothing of the kind. You’re beautiful.”
She embraced him, and he folded her in his arms, his mouth against her blonde curls. “I don’t want to stop being human…not that I’m ashamed of my Ylian blood, but I …” She sighed. “Ah, hell. I don’t know what I want.”
‘I know what I want,’ Theyn told them, switching to a more intimate means of communication.
Beno smiled. ‘What’s that?’
‘I want us and our baby to live safe and happy lives. I want to be together, the three of us, watching Kira as she grows. I want to make a home together.’
Sera leaned into him, pillowing her head against his chest. Theyn was more lithe than Beno, but he was still solid and muscular, more dancer than body builder.
‘I can get behind that,’ she told them both.
In her playpen, Kira clapped and giggled, delighted with something. Her parents looked at her as she babbled in her happiness.
‘Look at that,’ Beno told them. ‘She doesn’t know anything about politics or war, or science experiments or invasions. She just knows that she’s happy, she has a full tummy, and her diaper is dry. The world is so simple for babies.’
Sera couldn’t resist grinning. “Sounds like somebody’s jealous.”
Her dark-haired mate laughed. “I suppose in a way I am. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in such a blissful state? I’m just very glad that our daughter has that feeling of security.”
“So am I,” Theyn nodded. “For all of our sakes, I hope that never has to change.”
Sera felt a shiver rush along her spine. “That sounds suspiciously like famous last words.”
Their blond mate chided gently, “Cynic.”
She met Beno’s eyes, and he nodded slightly. He understood.
*
Itan opened his apartment door for Nima, who stormed inside, raging. She spat vile curses in the Bruthesan tongue, stomping a tight path through the living room he had been given. He sat on the couch and waited for her to calm herself enough to speak, choosing to avoid the words ‘I told you so’.
It seemed to take forever, but finally she faced him, her cheeks flushed and her fists balled at her sides. “They told me no,” she growled. “They won’t help!”
Itan nodded. “Well… that’s really not that great a surprise, is it?”
“Yes, it’s a surprise! One is a soldier, the other is a prince. Don’t they have any loyalty to their people? Don’t they have any shame?”
“Did they give a reason?”
She began to pace again. “Not enough information. Not enough of us. Too many enemies and too much risk.” She tossed a fierce glare in the approximate direction of the trio’s lodging. “Cowards!”
He waited for her to spend her ire, and he wasn’t kept waiting long. He knew her well after all of the years they’d been together. In a rush, all of her anger turned to dejection, and she sat beside him, her face in her hands. He wanted to comfort her, perhaps even put an arm around her, but he had learned that he was never to touch her without an explicit invitation or order. He clasped his hands in his lap and waited.
“When I heard what he did at that holding facility, I was so sure,” she mourned. “I was so sure he was the One.”
Itan sighed. “My wife, it may be that the One doesn’t even exist. If he or she did -”
She shook her head as she looked away. “Of course the One exists. We’ve been waiting for so long. And now…I was so sure.” He stayed silent, waiting for her to speak again. “At least you were brave enough to do what I told you to do,” she said, offering him faint praise. “You didn’t have to give yourself to the experimenters - nobody would have forced you.”
He took a breath, then blew it out. “Our marriage vows compelled me to be obedient to you,” he said simply. “You ordered. I obeyed.”
Nima nodded. “Yes. You’re a good boy.” She stroked his hair. “Did you learn anything from Lady Tayne?”
“Very little.”
She took his hand and looked at the cuts and scratches that adorned his skin. His Bruthesan heritage meant that he had no osteoderms to speak of, but his skill still had a glittery Ylian quality. He watched and waited.
“What did she do this for?”
He looked at the marks, too. “Those were places where she introduced different strains of the virus into my body.”
Nima’s nose wrinkled, and she pulled away, shoving his hand back at him. “You’re contaminated?”
“Every male on Bruthes is contaminated,” he shrugged.
“Yes but… did you get sick?”
He nodded. “Several times, and badly, too.”
He thought that she might completely abandon her seat on the couch beside him, and he could see the doubts flashing in her eyes.
“Are you contagious?” she asked.
“I shouldn’t be.”
“But you don’t know?”
Itan sighed. “I don’t understand everything she did to me, and she didn’t exactly discuss her findings with me. She’d open my skin, paint each cut with a different liquid containing live virus, and then she’d seal the wounds shut with temporary dermal patches. Then the next day she’d come in and take a sample from the cut. She never said a word to me.”
He looked into his wife’s eyes, not certain what he hoped to see there. Compassion, perhaps, or pride that he’d suffered so much at her behest. It had been Nima, after all, who had ordered him to volunteer as a test subject for Lady Tayne’s studies. It had been a risk - her studies had almost all involved full-blooded Ylian males. Those were in increasingly small supply, and he supposed that was why she had accepted him. It gave Nima and the Resistance a set of eyes and ears in the royal palace, and when he wasn’t being used as a living petri dish, he obtained information and sent it to his wife on Bruthes, at least until the last month when he had been quarantined in the Men’s Quarters.
“What have you told them?”
“Who?”
“Don’t be obtuse. The full-bloods. The humans.”
He shook his head. “Nothing that overtly links me to you, apart from saying that you had rescued me from the livestock barns and brought me to Itzela.”
“Good. The less they know right now, the better for our plans.” She stood up. “Continue as I’ve instructed you. I’ll be back when I decide what our next step has to be.”
“I obey.” He inclined his head toward her, and she left the room without so much as a backward glance.
*
Theyn and Beno sat side by side on the couch, engrossed in their data pads. Sera watched them from her perch in the rocking chair across the room. She smirked as they furrowed their brows at exactly the same moment. In everything they did, from the angles of their wrists to the tilts of their heads, they mirrored each other, unconsciously on the same wavelength. She wondered if that synchronicity and involuntary echoing was an outgrowth of their bond, or if it was a result of them knowing each other since childhood. She wished she had another bonded pair of Ylian males to observe so she could formulate a hypothesis. It was as if she was in grad school all over again.
They swiped their index fingers across the data pad screens, moving with the same speed and even blowing out similar long breaths. She grabbed her cell phone and started recording a video, partially for her own amusement, and partially so she coul
d show them later. At Sera’s feet, Kira babbled at a plush fox that Joely had given her, her tiny little hands tugging at the stitched nose as if she wanted to pull it off. She looked at her daughter with a smile, then turned her attention back to her mates.
She managed to record them for over five minutes before Beno looked up, breaking the absolute duplication of what Theyn was doing. He looked at her with surprise and more than a bit of embarrassment.
“What are you doing?” he asked sheepishly. Theyn looked up when their bond mate spoke, and he lowered the data pad toward his lap.
“I’m taking a video of you two. I’ve never seen anybody so in sync. It’s like you practiced it.”
The two men looked at one another in confusion. They clearly had no idea what she was talking about, so she decided to elaborate.
“Everything one of you does, the other one does it exactly the same way and at exactly the same time. It’s uncanny. It’s like you’re merged without merging, and it’s got you in lock step.”
Beno blinked. “Say that again.”
She hesitated. “Uh… that you’re in lock step?”
“No, the other part.”
“Merged without merging?”
He pointed at her. “Yes! That.”
Sera and Theyn shared a mystified look, and Beno started flipping through screens on his data pad. “Okay,” she said slowly. “What’s going on? Are we having a eureka moment?”
Without looking up, he asked, “What’s a eureka moment?”
“Back in Ancient Greece, there was a mathematician named Archimedes who discovered volume displacement while he was getting into a bathtub. The idea hit him with such force and amazement that he yelled ‘eureka’ and jumped up out of the tub and ran around like a crazy man. Eureka means ‘I found it,’” she explained. She had told the story often when she’d taught her freshman-level Ancient Civilization survey class. The memory of her previous life stung a little, but she pushed that aside. She would never be going back; best not to look at what she was missing.
Theyn chuckled. “Are we sure that what he found was displacement? He was naked at the time, wasn’t he?”
“Ooh! Naughty boy!” Sera laughed. “I’m positive.”
“Were you there?” her blond lover challenged playfully.
“No. Were you?”
“Probably not.”
She laughed again. “Probably not? You moron. Of course you weren’t.”
He shrugged. “You don’t know that. You weren’t there. You just said so.”
Sera flung another of Kira’s plush toys at him, and he caught it with a grin. Kira squealed and clapped her hands.
Theyn looked at Beno. “So, is she right? Are you having a eureka moment?”
“Possibly.” He scanned through another pair of pages, then looked up, first at his Ylian partner, then at Sera. “I think I know what Lady Tayne was doing.”
“Well, that makes one of us,” Sera said. “What’s your idea?”
“You were talking about merging without merging. I think she was trying to reverse engineer the effects of the virus to restore the males’ ability to merge.” He handed his data pad to Theyn, who looked at the readouts he indicated. “She was spending a lot of time isolating and studying the virion and the viral capsid, trying to understand how the virus was transmitting its reverse transcriptase into the host cells.”
Sera shook her head. “Speak something similar to English for the non-geniuses in the room.”
Beno took a breath. “Retroviruses like the one that has crippled our males work by making reversed copies of their RNA and then injecting them into the cells of their hosts. Viruses are obligate parasites - they can’t survive any other way. They have to attach to a host, or they die. The viral capsid is the protein shell around the virus, and in this case, it was formed with cells taken from the host. That way it could get parts of its own DNA - or RNA, in this case - to be accepted into the host without being rejected.”
“I’m still lost.”
“But you’re a scientist,” he complained.
“An archaeologist and anthropologist with minors in sociology and history. I’m not a biochemist,” she told him. “Use little words.”
He sighed in exasperation, and Theyn helped, saying, “Lady Tayne was trying to find a way to reverse the infection process of this kind of virus. She was trying to find a way to separate the virus’s DNA from Ylian DNA. I think Beno’s right. It would be a necessary part of restoring the males’ merging ability, and it makes perfect sense.”
Sera shook her head. “No, it doesn’t.”
Beno frowned. “Why not?”
“Because she didn’t have that many full-blooded Ylians at her disposal, and at no time did she have any of them try to partner up. Merging isn’t what she was looking for.”
“Then what?” the dark-haired Ylian asked.
Theyn was silent for a moment, staring at the data before him. In a quiet voice, he said, “Maybe she was trying to find a way to piggy-back on the virus, not to reverse engineer it.”
Sera nodded. “I’ll bet you anything she was trying to find a way to make that virus cripple the Taluans, too. She was engineering it and trying to put it into their food supply.”
The blond looked ill. “You mean she was putting it back into the males, who were then sent to slaughter.”
“Well, Elina did say they do a lot of flying between Itzela and Bruthes. And all those full-blooded males that we saw before were ‘destroyed.’ I think they were shipped to Bruthes to be slaughtered.” She shrugged, ignoring the disgusting truth of what she was saying. “I think it makes sense, and it’s more in keeping with the actual experiments that she recorded there.”
Beno tapped his fingertip on his knee. “And here you said you weren’t a biochemist.”
She smirked. “I’m not, but I play one on TV.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Theyn said, “She was injecting the males with multiple experimental compounds. That matches the theory that Sera has advanced. And she’s right - there’s nothing in here about attempts at creating pair bonds.”
Beno nodded. “I want to talk to the survivors, see if they heard anything, or if they know about any portions of the experiments that she didn’t write down. It’s possible we don’t have all of her notes.”
“I thought you downloaded everything,” Sera said.
“I tried. I’m not perfect.”
She smirked again. “Lies. All lies.”
He gave an exasperated sigh, but it was clear that he was amused under it all. He stood up. “Theyn, would you like to come with me?”
“Yeah, you should,” she told them. “You can keep Beno from scaring the poor guys half to death. At least if you’re there as his chaperone, they won’t think that he’s coming to kill them when he marches into their hospital rooms.”
“They wouldn’t,” Beno protested.
Theyn shrugged. “You do get pretty intense.”
“Fine.” He looked at Sera with a sour expression, but he winked at her and ruined it. “Let’s go.”
“Good luck,” she told them as they left, data pads in hand. “Let me know what you find out.”
They smiled at her, and Theyn nodded. “We will.”
Chapter Nine
Theyn and Beno entered the medical center, their shoulders nearly touching as they stepped into the lobby. One of the orderlies approached them immediately, a guarded look on her face, her golden hybrid eyes narrowed.
“Can I help you?”
Theyn smiled, doing his best to be charming. “We’d like to speak to one of the Itzelan men.”
“Which one?”
“Any of them. All of them.” Beno fixed her with his steady gaze. “We have questions for them.”
The orderly hesitated. “Just a moment.”
Beno told his bond mate, ‘They’re not going to let us see them.’
‘You don’t know that. Just be patient.’
‘I don’t trust them.’
Theyn smiled. ‘Do you trust anyone?’
‘Only you and Sera.’
‘I’m glad I made the list. I feel so honored.’
Beno scowled. ‘Asshole.’
Theyn laughed quietly as the orderly returned, this time with a white-coated human in tow. The man extended his hand toward Theyn. “I’m Dr. Winston. I understand you want to question my patients.”
The blond Ylian accepted the handshake. Beno looked at their clasped hands with open suspicion. “Yes. It’s not as serious as all that. I just need to understand what they suffered.”
Winston crossed his arms. “I would prefer that you leave them alone. The gentlemen who are still in this facility are in a fragile state, both physically and emotionally, and your questions may do them harm.”
“The last thing we want to do is cause anyone harm, or even discomfort,” the royal Ylian quickly assured him. Through their pair bond, he could feel Beno’s mind opening, reaching out. Telepathy could be a useful way to eavesdrop. “Are there any males who are no longer under your care that we could speak with?”
The doctor frowned, his mouth pressing into a thin, hard line. “Well… yes. There’s the man called Itan. He’s housed in the southwest wing, room eight.”
Beno smiled, offering an unusually friendly expression to the surly human. “Thank you, Dr. Winston. Your assistance is most appreciated.”
They turned in unison to walk out of the medical center. Theyn asked Beno, ‘All right, telepath. What did you read?’
‘He’s lying, of course. He doesn’t want us to talk to them at all, and he was prepared to send us to this Itan. He was waiting for us, and Itan will be, too.’
Theyn nodded as he held the door for his bond mate. ‘As you suspected he would be. Then there is some sort of conspiracy, and Itan is in on whatever is really going on here. He must have been planted among the others in the Men’s Quarters.’
‘Do you really think the Bruthesan conspiracy has extended all the way to this facility?’
‘You’re the one who says he doesn’t trust anybody.’ He let the door close, and they walked on. ‘You tell me.’
Ignition: Alien Ménage Romance (Phoenix Rising Book 2) Page 7