“You already have our compliance,” Theyn said. “Why must you keep her away from us? Give her back, and we will continue to obey your directives.”
“She is too valuable to be out of our hands.” The Priestess nodded to the guards, who once again assembled around them like herding dogs.
“What are you talking about?” Beno demanded.
“She is the Burning One reborn. She is a very special baby, and one who will be raised by the temple to know who and what she is.”
Sera begged, “Let us have her. Please. Give me my baby!”
Alaia gave her a scathing look. “If you want a baby, have another one. This one is ours.”
Beno’s balance shifted as if he was about to take a step toward the priestess, and Theyn shouted through their three-way link, ‘Beno, no! Don’t risk it!’
The priestess watched as Theyn’s Companion struggled to master his temper, and when he made no threatening moves, she smiled. The guard to her left took his hand away from his bracelet, where he had been preparing to press the button that activated Beno’s collar.
“Lucky for you that you stopped,” the guard told Beno.
‘When we get out of here, he dies first,’ he told Theyn and Sera.
‘Nobody is going to die,’ Theyn scolded. ‘Calm yourself.’
A tense, silent moment passed, then Alaia smiled to the prince. “I’m pleased to see that you’re able to control your Companion after all. I had my doubts.”
“He controls himself,” Theyn said quietly. “You misunderstand our relationship.”
“I don’t care about your relationship.” The priestess gestured toward another door. “We’re going that way.”
Stunned by their sorrow, the three bond mates went where they were bidden. They followed Alaia through the door and down a wide, spiraling staircase made of Bruthesan marble. Quartz flakes in the stone glittered amid the pinkish streaks, an incongruously pretty touch to an otherwise grim procession.
The stairs descended two levels, and at the base stood a heavy metal door, its lock guarded by a retinal scanner. Alaia let her eye be scanned, and then the door slid aside. Thick, moist jungle air rolled out to greet them, and the sound of running water and birdsong followed it.
In the middle of this arid place, an oasis of life had been created. Artificial sunlight shone down from above, illuminating a tranquil rainforest. Trees a thousand feet tall stood, their crowns nearly touching the lights in the ceiling, their branches heavy with foliage and scarlet conical fruits that grew in bunches like grapes. The tree trunks were thick with moss, and just through the first line of trees, they could see a flowing stream of crystal-clear water with dark green grass and white flowers clinging to its banks. A flash of green in the canopy betrayed the passage of a brilliantly-feathered bird, its dangling tail feathers flicking as it soared from branch to branch.
‘Incredible…’ Beno thought.
When he spoke, Theyn’s voice was hushed with awe. “This is just like home.”
Alaia nodded. “Every plant and every creature originally evolved on Ylia. This is our treasury, the place we come to remind ourselves of what we lost, and why we’re fighting.” She turned to Sera. “Ylia was a lush world, filled with life and beauty. We were peaceful, and we had learned to coexist with nature in a way that allowed everyone and everything to thrive. We had cities, but they were built with nature in mind, and we were conscientious stewards of the wonders of our world. And then the Taluans came.”
Theyn asked, “Were you there that day?”
“I was.”
“What happened?”
The priestess walked farther into the arboretum, and the guards sealed and locked the door behind their little group. She put a hand against one of the trees, and her golden eyes dimmed for a moment at the memory.
“We were never good at watching the space around our world,” she said. “We were trusting and peaceful, and we assumed that all the rest of the universe was, too. We were so wrong. It was a glorious spring day. Crowning Day. Everything was lovely. The Empress was eager for the celebration to begin, for it was to be her jubilee. We were gathered at the capital to mark the anniversary of her coronation, and the mood was festive.
“The observatory noticed something approaching our solar system, but they assumed that it was an asteroid, and so they set the computers to observe its course and left their duty posts behind to come to the celebration. There was literally nobody minding the store.”
She took a deep breath, and Theyn told Sera, “Crowning Day was a royal holiday, and no work was permitted. Every citizen was to take liberty and mark the occasion with leisure and enjoyment. Crowning Day was always one of my favorite days.”
Alaia asked him, “Did you observe it out there on your scientific station?”
“Yes.” Theyn nodded. “Faithfully.”
She nodded and continued her story. “The first warning came from the lunar patrol – your old squad, as I understand it, Commander Beno, or what was left of it. Then the ships began to appear in orbit over Ylia. The battle fleet was led by their hive ship, and it was so large that it we could see it from the ground with our naked eyes. It was a black spot on the sun, a stain that grew darker and closer the longer we watched.
“The news reached the temple and the palace at the same time, and Empress Kina ordered all of the citizens to the safe bunkers that had been built beneath the city when the Taluans first sent their probes. People were being evacuated so safe places, or so we thought. Her Majesty contacted me and told me to prepare and launch the ships she had already filled with our libraries, our biological samples, and as much of our history as she could. It was then that I knew what she knew. We were facing destruction. She had known that day was coming from the day the first probe landed on our shores.”
She turned and faced them, and tears were on her cheeks. Sera, still hollow from her own grief and holding a significant grudge, found it hard to feel any sympathy for her. The answering sorrow on her mates’ faces, though, elicited more gentleness, and she took both of their hands as they listened.
“Empress Kina contacted the Taluan hive ship and demanded to speak to their leader, buying us time. We loaded as many of our people as we could onto as many deep-space vessels as we could find, and we filled the computers and the holds with our treasures and the biological diversity of our home. We sent seven hundred ships out into the black, loaded with all of our hopes.
“The Taluans were waiting, and they shot us out of the sky. For every ship that escaped, two more were destroyed, along with their precious cargo. We scattered across the cosmos, and if any of our people survived out there, we lost contact a millennium ago. My ship, obviously, reached Bruthes. I arrived here with three long-distance freight liners that had been pressed into service with our biological specimen collection and one passenger ship filled with our people. We were welcomed at first and given shelter and asylum. We thought we were safe. It was only when we began to sicken and when our males began to lose the ability to merge, even those who had been capable of merging with their partners before, that we realized how much we had lost.
“Ten years later, the Taluans came here. The Bruthesan High Council was more successful with negotiating with the hive lord than Empress Kina had been, and the result was what you see here. They sell us to the Taluans as food, but in return, many of us are allowed to live out our days in relative safety. We can no longer breed with our own males, but the Bruthesans can sire viable offspring on our Ylian females. Sometimes that happens in the usual way, in the course of relationships and such. Sometimes it happens during the culls, when the Taluans come and collect the breedable females and the fallow. The breedable are, well, bred. The fallow? You saw and smelled the abattoir.”
Beno shook his head, and in a voice tight with anger, he said, “And nobody tried to stop this farce? You all just went along with the Bruthesan plans? Why didn’t you just get back in your ships and go somewhere else?”
Un
expectedly, one of the guards spoke up. “The ships that reached this planet were damaged in our escape. By the time the Bruthesans told us what deal they’d made, the ships had already been scuttled.” He fixed Beno with a hard look. “We fought, Commander. Many of us died. Almost all of our Soldier class, such as yourself, fell in the battles to defend our people. We did not go quietly, I assure you.”
Theyn closed his eyes and walked toward the trees, as well, his own hand pressed to the damp moss. He breathed in the scented air for a long while in silence. Sera and Beno watched him, feeling the whirling of his mind as he thought, a thousand ideas and images flashing through his head too quickly for them to see.
“We should move on,” Alaia said. “I have more to show you.”
The prince said, “Before you show us anything more, tell me this. Has the Resistance been in existence since the deal was first struck?”
“Yes.” Alaia nodded. “It was through them that I’m still alive. They put those Ylians whom they considered the most valuable into a state of suspended animation, like the hibernation that brought the two of you through the years.”
“Why were you awakened?” Beno asked.
“I woke by myself,” she answered. “It shouldn’t have been able to happen, but it did. Perhaps the unit faltered and failed, or perhaps the Flames needed me. Perhaps it was when the two of you were brought back to consciousness. I have no answer for that question.”
Theyn spoke again, his voice measured, as if he was choosing his words with extreme care. “You are talking about rebelling against the Bruthesans and the Taluan presence.”
“Yes.”
“What preparations have been made?”
Alaia hesitated. “That is better answered by someone else. I’m responsible for the hospital, where we care for our sick and injured, and where we identify those females who are fertile, as well as the few hybrid males who are able to sire young. I also am the political face of our people, and I undertake all of our dealings with the High Council.”
“There were full-blooded males on Itzela who were sent away. What became of them?”
Again, the priestess hesitated. “They were sent to somewhere safe.”
Theyn looked at her. “Where is that?”
She looked away from him. “Somewhere else. That’s all you need to know right now.” She shook her head. “None of them can merge. They volunteered to help Lady Tayne find a solution, and time will tell if they succeeded.”
Sera asked the question that was most pressing in her mind. “So where does Earth come in? What is the colony on Itzela up to, really?”
The priestess looked almost embarrassed. “They have been supplying human meat as a delicacy for the Taluans. They’ve been abducting and selling humans for a hundred years.”
“That’s sick.”
“We slaughter our own. Why should humans be treated any better?” Alaia chuckled, a hollow sound that was completely without mirth. “They were also listening.”
“Listening?” Beno asked. “Listening for what?”
“For the Taluans. For other Ylians.” She looked squarely into his glowing green eyes. “For you and the prince.”
He squinted at her in thought and menace. “You knew we were on Earth?”
“Of course. We tracked your telemetry. The only thing we didn’t know was where you’d landed. Your pod was never meant for such a purpose, so it wasn’t equipped with the distress beacon that a passenger escape pod would have had. The only thing you had was the signal that linked your hibernation units together.” She took a step away from the trees and onto the path through the forest. “Even though it’s a relatively small planet, Earth is still a very large place to be looking for two sleeping males.”
She walked away, and this time the guards did nothing to herd them along. They followed her of their own volition, walking down the neatly-set white paving stones. In temperature and humidity, this little pocket of Ylia was not too unlike the Yucatan, Sera thought, and it made her feel homesick. The unwelcome pang added to her other complaints and kept her unhappy.
The path wound through the forest for what must have been miles, passing through this underground Eden the Ylians had constructed beneath their desert prison. They went under a low-hanging canopy of green, so low that they had to bow to proceed, and emerged into a wide, gleaming white plaza lined with colonnaded buildings topped with graceful spires. It was a smaller version of the palace on Itzela, and Sera suspected it was an echo of the royal palace that had been lost on their home world.
Theyn’s palace, she thought. His boyhood home.
An honor guard filed out of the towering silver and white double doors that waited at the top of a flight of white stairs. They arrayed themselves in two straight lines from the top of the steps to the bottom and saluted, their palm-down hands held flat at the level of their hearts, staring straight ahead with martial ferocity.
A host of Ylian women, all with the shining golden eyes of the full-blooded, gathered on the steps behind the honor guard. They stood, quiet and respectful, but all of them were looking at the royal Ylian who stood now in the plaza.
Alaia bowed to Theyn. “Welcome home, Your Majesty. As the last surviving child of the last Empress, we acknowledge you as Emperor of Ylia and all her colonies.”
The blond Ylian shook his head. “You are premature, Mother,” he told her. “I have not been crowned, and while we are in captivity, there is no royalty, no commoners, no aristocracy. We are all Ylians in this trouble together, and we will get out of it together, too.”
Beno looked at Sera and thought in the bleakest voice she could imagine. ‘We’re losing him.’
‘What do you mean?’
He didn’t answer. Instead he walked forward to stand at Theyn’s left side, slightly behind him. Their shoulders were nearly touching. Sera, uncertain, came forward to stand on Theyn’s right.
Theyn spoke in their heads. ‘Help me share this thought with Alaia.’ Beno tapped into the priestess’s mind, and Theyn said, ‘I will never be Emperor while my loyalty is compelled and you continually imperil my mates. You show me honor with one hand and insult with the other. Decide where you stand, Mother of Flames, and do it quickly.’
Alaia looked at him with a smug smile that Sera wanted to scrub off her face with a boot heel. ‘You are so brave when you speak in silence,’ she mocked. ‘But where is that bravery when it really counts?’
Beno answered for him. ‘Right here.’
The priestess smiled more broadly, then led the way up the steps through the passage formed by the honor guard and the watching Ylian women. The guards subtly pushed them forward, and they followed Alaia into the palace.
Someone in the crowd began to sing a song that Sear did not recognize, but it was lovely and lilting, sung in a variation of the Ylian tongue that her translator earring couldn’t quite comprehend. Theyn winced.
‘Our anthem,’ Beno told Sera. ‘This was a song written for Theyn’s family a hundred thousand years ago.’
She could tell that hearing the song was causing her darker mate a host of conflicting feelings. She reached out to touch him, but he stepped to the side, just avoiding the brush of her fingertips. He looked at her, and she could see the tears standing in his eyes.
‘Too much. I can’t have physical contact right now. If I touch you, I’ll be completely open, and I’ll fall apart. That would embarrass Theyn in front of his people.’
‘They’re your people, too, aren’t they?’
He looked at the crowd, and she looked, too. There were golden eyes all around, but none were blue, and none were green.
‘My people aren’t here,’ Beno told her.
‘I’m here,’ she told him. ‘I hope that’s good enough.’
He nodded as they reached the doors to the palace. ‘It’s all that matters anymore.’
Chapter Eighteen
The palace was as grand and beautiful as the one on Itzela, but this time Sera was less awed and mor
e cynical. She knew what rot was at the heart of the palace on Earth, and she expected this place to be no different.
As she walked, she asked Beno, ‘Can you feel Kira?’
He reached out. ‘Just barely.’
‘Is she all right? Can you tell? Is she afraid?’ She considered the discomfort in her breasts and added, ‘Is she hungry?’
Beno smiled, and although it was a shadow of his usual happy look, it was still a welcome improvement. ‘She’s angry.’
‘Angry? Can you tell at what?’
‘It’s not a what. I think it’s a who.’ She raised an eyebrow, and he told her, ‘She’s furious with Nima for not letting her come to us. She’s holding a grudge.’
Theyn, who was party to their conversation, smiled. ‘She gets more like you every day, Beno.’
‘Hey, I’m pretty good at holding a grudge, too,’ Sera said. ‘This bitch here is going to learn that first hand.’
They were taken to the private apartments at the back of the palace. The rooms were spacious and luxuriously appointed, with a balcony off the sitting room that overlooked an ornamental garden filled with flowers and carefully-trimmed topiaries. The furnishings were elegant and looked impossibly comfortable, and there were tablets and flowers and even a sort of harp arrayed around the room.
Alaia said, “This will be your home while you’re here. From here, you will bring hope to our people.”
‘At least it’s a step up from that white hell we were in before,’ Beno mused.
‘More than a step.’ Sera looked around. ‘I wonder if we’ll be given any privacy, or if the guards will stay?’
‘What does it matter?’ Theyn asked sourly. ‘Watched or not, we’re still prisoners, and the two of you still have those damned things in your heads.’
Aloud, Theyn said, “We were told that there was a queen in residence here. Was that another lie, or were they referring to you?”
Alaia looked uncomfortable. “There was a queen.”
“Was?” Sera prompted.
She looked at Sera. “She was found to be fallow.” A trio of hybrid males came into the room and bowed deeply to them. Happy to be able to change the subject, the priestess said, “These are your personal servants. They will see to all of your needs and will answer to me. Whatever you need, tell them, and they will get it for you.”
Ignition: Alien Ménage Romance (Phoenix Rising Book 2) Page 15