The Arcav General's Woman

by Hope Hart

  “It is okay, Harlow. You want to protect all humans. I understand. I promise I will not mate with any human women until they are considered an adult in human years.”

  “Look what we found, boys.”

  I snarl as a face comes into view, and my palms sweat as I lie on the ground, more vulnerable than I have ever been.

  He smiles down at me, showcasing a mouthful of fangs, and I clench my fists. If this planet is what I think it is, I am unlikely to survive the next cycle.

  “An Arcav. The boss will sure be happy with this find.”

  Chortles sound, and I am immediately surrounded by more beings. If I was at full strength, I could have killed them with barely a thought. After a night of lying in my own blood and sweating through the beginnings of a fever, I am nowhere near full strength.

  “Do not—”

  One of them kicks my leg and I groan, even as they laugh. The next kick is aimed for my head, and I sink gratefully into unconsciousness.

  Chapter Three

  Meghan

  There was no sign of Methi or Talis on Udek. No giant ship waiting for the Arcav to explore either. They did find something though.

  A tiny piece of metal that may or may not have come from an Arcav ship.

  “Can’t we have it analyzed?”

  I’m pacing in Darja’s office, while he ignores me for the most part, catching up on his version of paperwork. I sneer at the many screens surrounding him. Who cares about paperwork when Methi is out there somewhere?

  He doesn’t glance up. “It has been analyzed. While it is made from the same components of an Arcav ship, there is no way to know which ship it came from, or when it landed.”

  “So? You don’t think there’s any way they landed there?”

  He finally sighs, meeting my eyes.

  “It is a possibility. But there is no proof that it happened. Your coordinate theory is just that— a theory. I do not have time to explore a youngling’s every thought and idea.”

  Who pissed in his Cheerios?

  “I’m not a child!”

  I’m conscious that my instant denial sounds childish, and I grit my teeth.

  “Out,” Darja says. “I have work to do, and we are working on another theory.”

  “What theory?”

  “The theory that Talis landed the ship on one of the planets close to Fecax.”

  “What? Why would he do that?”

  “Out.”

  I stalk out, more than a little pissed off. Darja has obviously decided not to share with younglings, and I brood the entire way to Eve’s self-defense class.

  It’s one of the few times during the week that I get to release some of the constant energy that plagues me.

  “Meghan,” she grins. “How are you?”

  I like Eve. She’s what my granny would call ‘tough as old boots.’ She’s funny, but when you look in her eyes, you can tell she’s seen some shit. I don’t know what’s going on with her, but I get the feeling she’s barely keeping it together some days.

  I shrug bad temperedly and she raises an eyebrow. “Still no sign of him, huh?”

  I shake my head and unlike everyone else, Eve skips the sympathetic look.

  Instead, her brow lowers. “You’ll find him. Jack managed to beat me for a place on the investigative team, but let me know if you want to brainstorm.”

  “Jack beat you?” Eve is ex-FBI. “How did that jackass take your spot?” I laugh “Jack-ass, get it?”

  She rolls her eyes. “He got chummy with Darja. I heard they’ve become drinking buddies.”

  I scowl. Typical.

  Everyone else begins to file in, and we start the warm-up. I let my epic brain go to work while we switch between jumping jacks and mountain climbers.

  There’s no possible reason for Talis to land close to Fecax. He knows the Arcav are the biggest badasses in that part of the galaxy. And since he turned off the locator, he also knows they’re looking for him.

  He’s working with the Grivath. Where would the Grivath tell him to go?

  We move into partnered drills, and I duck as Bree swings at me. I smoothly step to the side and position her arm in an arm lock.

  She frowns at me. “How the hell do you always remember the moves? I have to do the same thing over and over again.”

  “Photographic memory, yo. I got all the brain you guys wish you had.”

  My smile is cocky, but it feels fake on my face.

  Where are you, Methi?

  We move on to weapons next, and I hit target after target, imagining each one is Talis’s face. Arcav blasters are completely different from human guns. They don’t take bullets, for one thing, and instead have to be recharged.

  Recharged.

  I lower the blaster in my hand, ignoring everything around me as I go to that place. The one that’s nothing but stone-cold logic.

  Humans have a unit to measure the distance between planets. We use astronomical units, which is approximately the distance between Earth and our sun. The Arcav use a similar measurement.

  I’ve seen the maps. Mycia is the closest planet to Fecax. But it’s several billion miles further than Fecax. Further than even the trip to Fecax and back to Arcavia.

  How did Talis get the fuel? Whether he really did go to Mycia or planet even further away, or he made it to Udek, he must have refueled somewhere.

  The only question is where.

  “I’ve got to go,” I tell Bree, who looks confused but simply nods as I pocket the blaster and sprint toward my quarters. I need the maps and the data from a few days ago.

  “Meghan? Are you okay?”

  “Fine, mom, working on something. Talk later.”

  I pour over the data for hours, listing all the possible places where Talis could’ve refueled. Some planets are welcoming, open to visitors and a common place to find fuel. Others are hostile, and simply not visited. By anyone. By the time the sun sets, I’ve got three possible options.

  But I know which one it was.

  Gut feeling, women’s intuition, a weird feeling. Call it what you like, but it’s your brain doing what it does best. Where we run into problems is when we ignore that intuition. When an animal in the wild hears a noise, do you think it thinks don’t be stupid, it’s probably just a leaf falling?

  Of course not. It gets the fuck out of there and lives to fight another day.

  Intuition is basically just our bodies alerting us to something our brain has already figured out. But because it’s not walking us step by step through how it got to that point, we disregard it. We want it to show us its work.

  And when it can’t? We brush it off as nothing.

  When you’re walking down a dimly-lit street, intuition can save your life. That fight or flight instinct has one job and one job only- keep you breathing.

  But we ignore our intuition about other stuff too. Like that guy we meet who makes every hair on the back of our neck stand up. Or the job offer that seems too good to be true. Or the fucking flight path that doesn’t add up.

  I’m not ignoring this.

  Methi

  A cool hand brushes my hair back from my forehead and I groan.

  “Meghan?”

  The hand pauses, and I feel a wet cloth wiping down my face.

  “No.”

  My body is in pain.

  I groan again as I attempt to shift. Someone curses, and I realize it’s a female wiping my body.

  I force my heavy eyes open, and they meet shining emerald orbs.

  “Where am I?”

  “A prison cell.”

  I struggle to raise my head, but it is as if I am a small child. After a moment, I give up, studying the damp stone above my head.

  “Which planet?”

  The female shrugs and I study her face. I do not know where she is from, but something about her seems familiar. Her hair is filthy, sticking together in clumps. Her face is not faring much better, although she obviously managed to find relatively clean water from somewhere
to tend my wounds.

  “You may want to pass out again. This will hurt.”

  She unwraps the strap from my leg and I pant, struggling not to scream as my leg erupts in flames.

  “It’s infected.”

  “I know,” I rasp. The fever, the weakness, the shaking— none of them are good signs.

  She is silent for a long while, and I can feel her deliberating something beside me.

  “Your people have helped mine in the past. Our captors have starved me and I am weak so I cannot help you as much as I would like. But it is possible I can remove the infection and encourage healing.”

  “How?”

  “My blood.”

  I narrow my eyes on her face but she chooses not to elaborate. It would be foolish of me to trust a stranger to share her blood with me. And yet, that stranger has helped me and shows no signs of deception. Her face is young and open, and if she wanted to cause me harm, she could have easily killed me while I was unconscious.

  “Elaborate.”

  “No. Choose.”

  I sigh. I am dying, lying here feverish in a cell on a planet far from home. If this female is offering hope, I have only one choice.

  “Do it.”

  She nods as if that was the answer she expected, and reaches out, pulling a sharp rock from the wall. I can see where she has pried it loose, and her hands are cut and scratched after what must have been hours of clawing at the stone.

  She drags the sharpest edge of the stone along the inside of her wrist, and I study her face, seeing no sign of pain as the blood wells. She drips the blood onto my wound, reopening her own cut again and again as it heals.

  Finally, she stops, leaning back against the bars.

  “You will sleep now. If you are lucky, your body will take over and the infection will be gone when you wake up.”

  Meghan

  I’m shifting from foot to foot, every muscle in my body tense as I go another round with Darja.

  “I’m telling you, this is it.”

  He leans back in his chair and stares at me from across his desk.

  “You think they landed in Durin?”

  “It would make sense. I know it’s in the opposite direction of Fecax, but it’s the most likely scenario if you also take the random coordinates that the ship sent into account. They would’ve had to stop in Durin to get that far.”

  “We do not have the resources to check every one of your theories. Durin is a difficult trip and one that will stretch our forces too thin.”

  I tremble with impatience. I need him to listen.

  “I know he’s there. Would you just look at my report?”

  He stands and tosses the report to the side.

  “I will go over it later. Right now, I have a meeting.”

  I grit my teeth as he leaves me standing in his office, then I shrug and circle his desk, staring down at the papers and screens in front of me. I search through them but find nothing interesting. I can tell Darja is close to giving up, and I prowl his office, looking for anything I can use.

  Everything is passcoded for his biometrics, and I eventually sigh and make my way home, despondent.

  Mom is doing her own paperwork on the sofa when I arrive and she pats the spot next to her.

  “Sit.”

  I slump down, and she leans back, studying me with her eagle eyes.

  “Bad day, huh?”

  “The worst.”

  “I know you took it hard when Methi left.”

  “He left for no reason. He’d told me he wouldn’t be going off-planet anytime soon and was planning to tell Jaret and Varian to pick someone else to go to Fecax.”

  Her gaze shifts, and I frown. “What?”

  “I imagine Methi would not have left unless he thought he had to. I know you had feelings for him.”

  I look away. Some things are private. “We were friends.”

  “Perhaps Methi wanted to be more than friends? And maybe he was worried about your age?”

  “Why would he be—Harlow.”

  I jump to my feet over my mother’s protests and she leaps up as well, laying her hands on my shoulders. I already tower over her, and I move away, furious that she kept this from me.

  “Meghan, calm down,” she orders. “Methi made his own choices. If he decided he needed to take some space, that was his right.”

  “Would he have gone if someone hadn’t told him I was too young?”

  I stalk out, hurt and anger warring inside me. I’ve been Harlow’s friend. I’ve cheered her on, been her sounding board, and helped with whatever she needed. In return, she sent my best friend away.

  I find Harlow in her garden, sitting in the shade, a cool drink in her hand.

  I get straight to the point.

  “Did you tell Methi to stay away from me because of my age?”

  Her eyes widen. “I wouldn’t exactly put it like that.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  She gets to her feet and doesn’t pretend ignorance. I wonder if she feels guilty knowing that whatever she said is likely the reason he left.

  “The day you guys met, when we were on the ship, I told him how old you were,” she says, giving it to me straight. “I told him that you were years younger than the human women who were tested for compatibility with the Arcav, and asked him to promise that he would never mate with any human women under the age of eighteen.”

  I don’t understand why he would’ve left. We were friends. Sure, we’d kissed, but we could’ve talked about it. He didn’t need to run away.

  “How could you?”

  “You were fifteen, Meghan. He’s got centuries on you.”

  “I thought you were all about choices! Hanging out with Methi was my choice, and you stole that from me.”

  Her mouth firms. “Like it or not, but you weren’t legally able to make that choice. On Earth, we call that statutory rape.”

  I snort. “Your badge is back on Earth, remember?” I feel like an asshole when her eyes blank at the reminder. I know what she gave up and how much she misses her career, but the words are like a flood pouring from my mouth.

  “I didn’t say I wanted to fuck him,” I spit, and she flinches at the word. “But your warning ruined everything. It’s your fault he wouldn’t come near me. And it’s your fault he took that mission when he really wanted to stay.”

  Harlow pales, and I see the glint of tears in her eyes. Good. I hope she feels just as horrible inside as I do.

  “Enough,” Varian’s voice is dangerous as he appears behind Harlow. I don’t argue. I just turn and walk away.

  Chapter Four

  Meghan

  I’m hanging with Korva, talking his ear off. He nods, replying occasionally. People think he still can’t talk properly, and he lets them think it. He strings more than a few words together when I’m around, and only ‘cause he knows I’m not gonna go blab to everyone that he’s actually hilariously funny even when he’s not really trying to be. Sometimes he sounds like a human— probably because he’s spent so much time listening to human women talk at him since he was released.

  Some people are surprised that Korva and I are close. But I think it was inevitable that the least trusted Arcav would hang out with the human girl who never fits in.

  See, Korva kind of lost it when his mate died a few centuries ago. Lost it enough that he slipped something into the water, ensuring no one else could have their mates in Arcavia. Luckily for mom, he also messed with Earth, thinking it would be a great cosmic joke for the Arcav to have to mate with puny humans.

  You have to admire the guy. Even when he was batshit crazy, he was still pure brilliance.

  I know what it’s like— to want to hurt everyone else just because you’re hurting. Harlow’s face flashes in my mind and I sigh. I know I need to apologize. Harlow is obsessed with protecting everyone she meets. I think it’s something wired into her DNA. It’s the reason she agreed to come to Arcavia in the first place.

  She would nev
er have allowed Methi to go to Fecax if she thought he’d be hurt. I’ve seen them together, and they have a deep, mutual respect, even when Methi’s doing something he knows Varian won’t like, you know, like chaining him to a wall so Harlow can declare her undying love for him.

  Long story.

  Anyway, seventeen sucks. My moods swing wildly, and I spend most of my time trying to control my impulses. Seventeen is still young enough to be considered a kid, but old enough for it to chafe- especially when you’re as smart as I am.

  How will a year of life suddenly make me worthy of being listened to? My brain is already bigger and better and faster than almost anyone else’s. But that one year is all it takes to be able to make my own decisions?

  I snort and Korva glances over at me. I almost shiver. The Arcav are all big, most of them standing at least seven-feet tall and packed with muscle. But while the others try to restrain themselves, especially around humans, there’s no question what Korva really is: a big, bad, motherfucker, holding onto his sanity by a thread.

  Hey, no judgement— everyone’s fighting their own battles. But I’m pretty sure Korva’s battles are darker than most. As if he sometimes wonders if it’s even worth fighting. And that hurts my heart.

  I stare at his painting. He paints the same woman over and over, in a variety of poses and with varying backgrounds. The woman is his mate— the one who died and started this whole chain of events. She’s beautiful, but at this point, I’m sick of looking at her. I’d love for Korva to paint something, anything, other than a woman who has been dust for centuries.

  “I’ve been kicked off the investigative team,” I tell him. I pick at one fingernail. What the hell will I do next?

  “Why?”

  “I searched Darja’s office. Forgot I was being recorded. Dumb move.” My cuticle starts to bleed and I wipe the blood on my jeans. “He said Blake would take any of my theories back to them for discussion if he felt they were valid.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  I frown. I like Blake, but I’m still pissed.

  “Oh please. What does he have that I don’t?”