26. Chapter Twenty-six

Chapter Twenty-six

T he minute Amelia knew what she was protecting, she knew how to raise her soul shield. There was an audible scream of no that reverberated around the room and through her, as she scrambled to get her shield raised before the spider could rip the knowledge away from her, and with it, her ability to protect herself.

Amelia reached for her shield, pulling it up more like a cover of a long thick wall that had fallen on her just as the monster spider lifted its huge palp to break her shield and rape her mind. Amelia's shield dropped into place. The spider yelled in pain as its front legs crashed against the shield and it blew up in a profusion of guts and spider parts all over, landing on Amelia.

With the spider gone, having taken all of its offspring with it, Amelia could move. She scrambled away from the place of death and destruction, jumping to try to get as much spider guts off her as possible.

"Your Yelp rating for hospitality is going down, Vexar. You're in the negative star territory. This is disgusting."

She thought briefly about taking off her clothes and decided not to. Who knew what was going to happen next? Some covering was better than none.

"Amelia." The door opened and Vexar stood there in all his human glory. He was a tall male in his human shape, with olive skin reminiscent of a Greek heritage. He had inky black hair and eyes a strange color of blue. She bet he could have picked up a few modeling gigs if he were human.

It was strange now that she was looking at him through eyes not colored in fear, realizing that the true monster looked as human as she did. No wonder so many of her fellow citizens had been taken in by their smooth words, putting their efforts into a plan that would leave them dead and their planet raped of all natural resources.

Never discount the monster in the closet theory. She laughed. It was easy at first, more like she was laughing at herself. As the laughter continued, it got deeper until she was bent over. The whole situation from start to finish was playing through her mind like a bad comedy that she was reading from the script for the first time.

"Stop laughing," he snarled. "This isn't a joke. There won't be any April Fools following what's happening here."

Amelia stopped laughing and glared at the impeccably dressed Tan-ge. "You're on my time, not the other way around. You stole me from my ship and my mate. What did you think I was going to do? Then let's not forget about torture from the spider. You know, if you had left me alone, I might never have connected two and two, but now I know. There's a saying on Earth about when knowledge is shared. Kill me, Zylar will know before I die. Kill him and his cousins will know before he dies and then it'll be all over the news and you will be the number one most wanted on the FBI list and all the other alphabet police intelligence agencies. Your reign of terror is coming to an end."

"You don't get it, do you?" He took a step toward her, his face morphing from human to Tan-ge and back to human.

Amelia took a step backward, wanting to stay out of his arm's reach. "Tell me what don't I get."

"My people are like the locusts of your planet. We've always been this way. It's not in our roots to settle down and make a planet our home. We have to conquer new planets and bring resources back so our people can live. What gives you the right to live when we are dying?"

"Look around you. We don't need help to destroy our planet, but what we aren't doing is trying to destroy someone else's home world. If you needed help, you could have asked for it, or better yet battered for it. You're not a locust you're a high-level intelligent organism that decided one day to kill, steal, and pillage. You get off on that way of life. Sending your males and females out to hurt others, to destroy what they've spent their lives building. For what? So you can dismantle it, take it to your home world, and rejoice in the downfall of another planet. How long will you do that? Until you're in the universe by yourselves? Then how will you survive when there are no other planets to conquer? It's short-sighted thinking. Humans have been accused of thinking the same way."

"You know nothing." He threw an oily black substance that was hitting against her shield trying to burn it down. Two others entered the room. One she could fight, but three?

"Here's what Vexar is hiding." She sent a silent message to Zylar, hoping he could hear her.

"I'll always be able to hear you. Hang on I'm on my way." Except for when your goddess interfered, but she didn't tell him that.

It felt like great balls of hail falling from the sky when the second and third Tan-ge began battering at her shields. It would take years to develop her shield to where no one could tear it down. The force of their mental attacks made her stumble back until she was pressed against the wall, using it to keep her standing.

"I don't think I'm going to make it. It's three against one. I love you." Amelia went on the defensive. She started making weapons to throw back at her attackers. She was weak in this area. It felt like a child trying to stand and immediately falling on its diapered ass, but she didn't have a choice.

She needed a bomb, something that would take out the help. She stopped in the middle of trying to put one together. There was a growl that made her hair stand on end. Helee came into view at her feet, all five pounds of his blue-haired self.

They were going to die together, and Zylar would have nothing left. If his connection with her didn't kill him, losing her and his cat would.

"Kill it!" Vexar screamed as the two Tan-ge were tripping over themselves to get to the door.

Helee morphed from a blue ball of fur to a dark blue giant taller than Zylar. His body mass grew as he chased the two Tan-ge down. He bit the first one's head clean off and then used his claws to eviscerate the other. He picked up an arm and used it as a chew toy.

"Drop the arm, baby boy. You don't know where that's been." Helee hissed, but dropped the arm and shrunk to his five-pound size before disappearing from view.

This time, when she felt Helee jump to her shoulder, she knew what she was feeling. He was safe and had taken out the two who were trying to overwhelm her.

"Vexar, welcome to my house."

"That thing," he sputtered, "will kill you."

"Helee? My five-pound cat. He won't hurt a hair on my head. Your head may become his next snack you never know, but it seems he left you for me." She gave a petite shrug while smiling.

"What happened to the female I knew?" Vexar hissed.

"She grew up and can see you for what you are." She spits at his feet instead of a hiss. "Shall I tell you who you are or rather who you pretend to be? Jeremy Thompson, right-hand man to the president. The president was overtaken by the Tan-ge and killed. Rest in peace, President Lincoln. This has all been a game to you. Almost from the beginning. President Lincoln, the real Lincoln, signed a treaty with the Diza before you could kill her. Then you had to go along with it. That's when you decided to discredit them. You started with Rakha thinking getting to his mate and killing her would be easy. Every step of the way, you planned to discredit them. To show them in a negative light, even as you had others spinning the tale that the Diza and not the Tan-ge were the true monsters. When the prince elect came to Earth to claim his mate, you couldn't resist. Discredit the prince, discredit the Diza." She went deeper into her soul, looking for a weapon that would unalive Vexar. She didn't want to use the word kill when he looked so human.

"You forgot that Rakha and SaKura grew up royalty. They were able to avoid being in the papers or to put a spin on it like when Bella rescued the reporters from certain death."

"They're nothing." He lobbed another black mass at her shields, intending to eat through them and leave her vulnerable. She raised a second shield, one she worked on but kept back for this very reason.

When that didn't work, he targeted the darkness that was still lingering in her mind. He reminded her that she was nothing and tried to kill her cousins. They hated her and all they wanted was her dead, especially Jenna.

‘How dare you live when I almost died,' Jenna's voice spit out in contempt.

"No!" This isn't real. A picture of Stacey's face came back to haunt her. She was on the floor, dead by Amelia's hand.

"An empath should never kill. The ghost echo of that person will always be with you. Stacey will rise from the grave to point a finger at you, her killer. When you die, she will be there telling the gods why you should suffer eternal damnation. There is nowhere for you to run, Amelia, you're as good as dead."

Amelia clutched her head, falling to her knees. Vexar pressed his advantage, sending picture after picture to her brain that was lost in the fog of what was happening. There were pictures of Jenna dying at Jeffrey's hands. Something tore apart Bella, but Amelia couldn't see it. Their mates were pale purple in death as they cried out for the loves of their lives. Then there was Zylar, who was dead with sightless eyes staring at the ceiling with hands outstretched as if he was reaching for her.

"I'm alive," Amelia struggled to her feet. "And so is my mate." She gathered her weapons like children playing cowboys and Indians. They gathered their rocks and sticks and then banded together to beat the aliens that invaded their small town. "No!" It was a mental scream that came from her soul. She sent a barrage of weapons at him, testing his shield. When one got through and knocked him back, she mentally cheered and started looking for another of the same weapons.

"This time you die." Vexar changed forms, morphing from the smooth, cultured human to his natural form. His tail was sweeping around the room. Amelia knew that they didn't unleash the tail unless they planned to kill you quickly. Bella told her about Rakha's fight with a Tan-ge.

Vexar's body reminded her of a locust. Now that she was looking at him closely, it was segmented. His nails were black claws on a hand that only had four fingers. His legs were double-jointed and his tail which housed a deadly poison was sweeping the floor seeking her.

"Did you think you could ruin my plans and live?" He was stalking her.

She threw everything she had at him, breaking down his mental shields. It didn't matter because he was no longer actively shielding himself. That look in his eyes said she was going to die by his hand. Amelia ran to the other side of the room, but Vexar kept stalking her. She went to where the seam of the door was, but as she surmised, it opened on the outside, not inside the room. She banged at it as he got closer.

He reached out and grabbed her around the neck as she kicked and screamed for help. The pressure increased and her movement slowed.