Chapter 23

Abraxas

There are dead Vestalis all over my woods, but I cannot be bothered with their corpses. May their ghosts haunt this neverland for centuries. May they choke on the vitriol of their own vile spirits.

I must find Eve.

The ground is torn and shredded by my clawed feet as I slip through the trees like wet blood running hot and wild down a hill. Fast. Faster. I slide into the clearing where our den is located, but there is no den.

There is nothing but an empty crater in the land where it should be.

The vessels in my skin glow with violet rage, the heat of this world’s blood thrumming through me. I absorbed the energy and warmth of a thermal vent in order to kill the last of the prince’s guards. Now that they are dead, and I am here, where is she?

I turn my head up to the sky, but I see nothing.

I see nothing, but I needn’t see it at all because I know.

A roar rips through me, one that shatters the world. Creatures scurry or flap or slither to get away from me, the scent of their terror tainting the air with something strange and sour. I am panting when I lower my head, moving over to a tree and slamming my horns into the bark, grinding against it, gritting my teeth.

I must remain calm, I tell myself, but it takes all that I am to control the primal half of me that wishes to scream until the air cracks with my own thunder, snaps with the lightning of my fury. I pace. I pace some more. I understood this was a concern when I mated my female, that the prince might come for her. It was a risk I was willing to take because she is my soul’s other half.

I turn and dart into the trees, splash through the stream, and snag one of the legs on a Tall Bird. The Aspis prefer descriptive names over obscure ones. Why make something up when Tall Bird is self-explanatory?

I break its leg and when it falls, I break its neck. It is quick, but I am still sorry for the death. However, all beasts must eat. With my body satisfied, and my mind cooled, I head to the water’s edge and I crouch beside it.

Eve. My female. Brave but powerless.

I wish to lend her my power, give her my strength.

How?

I drop my wing hands into the water and then splash my face, cleaning the blood from my scales. My tail lashes angrily, a panicked rage clawing to get out. With half of my psyche, I fight it down. With the other half, I plan.

In order to rescue my female from a Vestalis prince, I must go into the sky.

Then I will need a ship that works and someone to run it.

I drink deeply, refresh myself, and shake out my wings before returning to the area where we encountered the Sucker Tail some days past. I can still smell him on the ground, can easily trace his scent. I follow it through the trees and back to the road where it mixes with others, and I find myself smelling the pirate, too. Both of them, and two human females.

It has been some time since they were last here; finding them will be a challenge.

But I do not hunt in such a way that escape is even a possibility.

I have wasted the better part of a day searching for that law keeper and his scumsucking friend.

But I have found them now.

And I am angry.

The pirate snarls when I snatch him around the waist with my tail, fighting every instinct in me that screams how he should die. Squeeze him tighter, squeeze him until he rips in half. I might be drooling when I split my mouth wide and get in the face of this scruff-necked alien creature. I have smelled him on Jungryuk before; I know what he’s capable of.

The way I look at him, the growl I offer as a warning, that translates into something he can easily understand.

“You have Jane, do you not?” I ask him, my best attempt to remain civil.

I am not civil.

I have never been civil.

I am not tame.

I am looking for my fucking mate.

The Scruff-Neck tries to kill me, withdrawing a weapon and then swearing in his native yipping sounds before I crush his wrist with one of my secondary hands. I don’t squeeze as hard as I’d like. Kill him, my instincts tell me. Eat him. Make them pay. Slaughter them all.

But I cannot do that.

If I am not rational in my search for my mate, I will lose her.

Sadness swamps me, but it has not been long. I can get her back. I can do it quickly.

I will tear the Vestalis prince to pieces, splatter him across the walls of his star traveling ship.I bite the pirate’s arm, and he spasms under the terrible pain of it. Only Eve enjoys my bite. Only Eve should survive your bite. Feast on him for sustenance. It is the way of things.

“Where is Jane?” I demand, panting, snarling, glowing so brightly that strange shadows skitter over his hidden campsite. The Night Feasters scurry away from me, so frenzied in their escape that they bite and snap at each other. I smile, but the expression only makes the captain fight harder.

It’s useless. I am slowly strangling him to death. I will continue to do so until he gives me an answer.

A pebble bounces off my back, and I turn to see a human female standing at the edge of the clearing. She’s holding a pile of rocks in her hand, breathing hard, staring at me.

“Put him down,” she grinds out, like she’s ready to fight.

Ah, this will be Jane then. This human is similar to my beautiful Eve. Fierce in the heart even if not in the flesh. I toss the pirate aside and he groans, slamming into one of the brightly colored alien dwellings.

But I did not put the pirate down because of Jane.

Because of the Sucker Tail.

“Alright, my friend,” he begins, putting his thumb digits under his belt and standing in such a way that it looks as if he is seeking a female of his own. He was aroused by mine when he saw her in the market. I will have to watch him carefully around her. Because he is here, I know I will be forced to let him near her again. We will need his help to reunite. I dislike him instantly and wish that I were as mindless as my instinctual hunger. Grab him. Finish him. Let his blood spray. “If you’re here, there’s a problem. What’s the problem?”

The Falopex sighs and drops his arms by his sides, walking over to his friend with a sway that draws the human female’s attention. The air is perfumed with arousal, and I wince. I do not like the smell of any female but my own. I have never before smelled a female who aroused me. Not once.

But Eve … I am surprised by our connection. Surprised, but pleased. Thrilled. Satisfied.

I will find her. I will not rest until my body gives out and even then, I will crawl. I cannot allow my Eve to die. If she does not mate with me in relatively short order, we will both perish. I do not understand why. My people are not concerned with the why of most things. If we are happy and fed, we are content.

“The Vestalis prince has taken my mate,” I tell them all, watching absently as the officer knocks a gun from the pirate’s hand, and then hefts him into the air using his sucker tails. He touched my mate with those. I should bite them off. “You or your friend will take me to her.”

“What the fuck is going on?” another human female says as she steps from the woods, and my hackles raise immediately. What was this one’s name? I cannot be bothered to remember. A small Earth-thing peeks its head from the female’s cloth coverings. A possum, Eve called it. I can remember that, but I cannot remember the female’s name. “Aren’t you Eve’s alien fuckbuddy?” the girl continues, her natural voice a horrific shriek that causes me to grit my teeth.

Jane shrinks away from me and the pirate groans, but the Sucker Tail is calm as he looks back at me. We have seen one another around, I suppose. He does not bother me. He kills the slavers and the tusks, and he takes the human women home. That is an act of good will with no reward. This makes him trustworthy to me.

If I had died that night, and she had found him again, he would have taken care of her. I know that to be a fact.

Instead, my mate fucked me back to life. My sweet, tiny, tender female. I release a purr that shakes all four individuals present, including the Sucker Tail. Even then, he only shakes with a laugh and then crosses his arms.

“The future king abducted his future queen, and you want to … confront the entire imperial family by ourselves?” The officer fixes his head covering with a flick of his finger, moving the white object up and away from his eyes. “That sounds like a great way for this all to end badly.” He lets his head hang back and then moves around me, ignoring me as I turn to face him. I leave little Jane and her pebbles at my back, unconcerned.

She doesn’t stay where she is for long, rushing past me to help the officer with his friend.

The two of them work diligently to set his bones and bandage his bleeding wounds. I lie down in place, the power of the thermal vents once again flowing through my veins. While I wished to swell to my full form, I did not for fear that I would not fit on the ship I must board.

I am still much larger than the others and confident that I can rest here without being attacked.

“Come the hell on, Hyt. Can’t you at least arrest that fucking thing? He damn near killed me,” the pirate bites out, gesturing violently at me.

“I am sorry to have acted unnecessarily,” I explain, my temper flaring beneath the calmness of my words. You don’t need two of them; you only need one. Eat the other to prove how serious you are. I shake myself out, scales ruffling. I must eat again before we leave. It will do Eve no good if I die from starvation before reaching her. “But I could not risk that you would attack me before I could speak.” I add a growl onto the end of that, daring him to continue with the snarky words that threaten to leap from his lips.

He would have attacked me. He need not lie to me. I will not hear it.

Make no mistake: I am the boss in this situation. I will be taken seriously or I will kill them, and I must believe this fully so that they will believe it, so that they will understand. I will break even my own moral preferences in order to find and protect my female. Nothing is off-limits.

Including this.

“Why do you need to find her so badly? Why not let her become queen and then if she wants to, I doubt even the king could stop her from coming to see you. She’ll have that power.” The Falopex male sounds oddly disappointed, but then he shrugs and uses his tails to open a bag so that he can pass out food to the humans. Whatever it is that he gives the screechy one only makes her screeching worse.

“This is what we have to eat?” she demands, her voice a high-pitched hysteria, like the sound the Night Feasters make when they have taken down a large kill. I watch them from the corner of my eye, daring them to approach the firelight. They reach and claw but do not stretch past the immediate edge of the orange ring around us. “I can’t eat this.”

“Here, you can have mine,” Jane says, trying to smile, but ultimately the fur strip above her eye twitches and I can see that she is displeased. The screechy one has torn the item from her hand before the other woman has finished speaking.

“Chips?” the screech girl asks with a derisive sneer, and then she opens them and starts to eat, feeding bits to the tiny creature stuck to her garment. “Here.” She shoves the other food she was given at Jane, and my mate’s friend sighs.

“Awesome. Raw rice.”

“Not raw rice,” the Falopex says with a sharp grin of his own. “Fresh hot rice with chicken.” He pauses. “I mean, it isn’t chicken, but my sister says—”

“Officer,” I snarl, and he turns slowly to look at me, his smile shifting into one of challenge.

I swish my tail and feel my lips splitting as I grin back at him. Ah, he is not boneless and weak like so many others.

“Gotta keep the humans fed, right?” he says, digging around in his bag with his tails. He uses them to pull items out, handing them to Jane without looking her way again. To fill her new pot with water, he holds his hand above it and makes rain.

“Holy fuck,” Jane breathes out in that human tongue. The words are cut up and slashed by the translator. I hear her response as a surprised snarl, a sound that cuts off abruptly to emphasize the awe of the speaker. My people are both less and more than words. “Are you a water mage or something?”

“A … what?” the officer asks, giving her an odd look. “No, of course not.” He stops the water that’s raining from his palm and then swipes his hand down the front of his body. “There’s a scientific explanation.” He winks and then steps away from Jane, a polite but clear dismissal of the others, and then pauses too close to me. I do not like that.

I stand up and growl down at him.

“If we do not find my mate within the next seven Jungryukian days, she will die of a broken heart.” I choose the lowest possible number, just in case. I have heard that couples who love one another most fiercely die more quickly as well. I cannot take that risk with Eve. “Even if you do not believe that, you will understand that she does not wish to be there. Are you not committed to saving all of the humans, at any possible cost?”

This is why I trust this male.

He has a softness towards humans that I do not fully understand. He enjoys them as a species, not just as individuals. The officer looks at me with the strange eyes of an alien, tails swaying and shifting behind him in a mess of movement that I track with a predator’s gaze, waiting for a moment to strike. I will not, but I must be ready to defend myself.

I force my attention to return to his face.

“This is … fuck.” He walks past me, and I turn to follow, moving to the edge of the clearing. He watches in awe as the Night Feasters scrabble to get back from me. If I were to mark this spot with my urine, they would give us an even larger cushion of space. “Okay, well, you got me there.” He stares at the ground in thought before resting his hands on his hips the way that Eve does sometimes. Very human gestures for an alien that spends too much time around them.

I wait, but only because I know we cannot take off for another day. A freak tide has rolled in. With so many moons, and with such irregular patterns in the sky, the seas are fickle. The gravity feels lighter some days, heavier on others. Only very skilled or stupid pilots try to land here.

Most do not make it.

They deserve their forested glen of graves.

“I’ll tell you what. I have to stop by the World Station anyway; The Korol is supposed to dock there around the same time. When I get there, I’ll talk to Eve for you.” There’s a pause here where I read many other things in the officer’s words and body language than he must realize. You are pining for my female. I lift my lip at him and consider snapping his head off.

I close my eyes and force myself to breathe through it.

“I must hunt,” I tell him, pushing past and into the shadows. A Night Feaster screams when I make direct eye contact with it. “Take me with you. I would prefer to leave at midday tomorrow.” That will be the earliest possible time this Falopex could leave and not crash his vessel.

“I cannot fucking take you to the World Station,” the officer says with a laugh from behind me. “I will tell your girl that you’re worried about her, but I will not force her to come back to you. If she wants to stay with the Vestalis, if she wants to go back to Earth, I’ll try to accommodate her.”

I look over my shoulder at him, study his face, his body language, his eyes. He does not care for me, but he doesn’t have to. He is worried about my female and will do whatever needs doing to keep her safe.

I turn and leave the Night Feasters to scatter again, stalking over to the officer and then rising to my back feet so that I can tower above him. The firelight catches on my horns, orange reflecting off of black.

“Tell me a known truth,” I say to him, and he sighs.

I am questioning his veracity, and he is supremely annoyed. I give a wicked flicker of a smile. What a little liar this one is. Still, I trust his actions more than his words.

“Don’t do this shit with me. I’ll find Eve. I’ll take care of her the way I do all the human beings who come through here. Stay with Captain Kidd, and don’t snap any more of his ribs, okay?”

I do not mention that I will allow the Falopex to leave only because I will get a ride with the space pirate instead. Two ships looking for Eve is better than one. Staying near Jane is helpful. I will keep her alive long enough to facilitate a reunion between friends.

With a laugh, I turn and fall to the ground again, hands hitting the dirt, claws extending.

I tear through the shadows of night, and then I turn those same shadows into a feast.

Lapping blood from my hide, I settle down beside the human dwellings—tents—to wait for Jane and Kidd to sleep. I do not sleep. I sit and I watch the woods, and I dream while awake. I dream of Eve and the future child we will have together. I am certain that my seed has taken hold in her womb.

My lips twist into a satisfied smile that scares Captain Kidd as soon as he emerges from his tent. He glares at me, keeping his distance as he circles around to stand on the opposite side of the clearing. Trees surround us, silent, nonjudgmental sentinels.

“Hyt suggested that I keep you here, that I watch both of these human girls, that I run around like his fucking slave because he likes to play hero.” The captain removes something from his pocket, lights the tip on fire, and then begins to draw smoke from it. “So, what is it exactly that you want from me?”

“All I wish for is a ride,” I explain, and then there is this poignant moment between us where he considers running. But then he looks toward the tent with the human females in it, and sighs dramatically, puffing on the lit stick in his hand. A roll of herbs, it seems. But I cannot discern the species from the smell alone. It is likely of alien origin. “You will take me to the World Station so that I may mate with Eve before it is too late.”

“You want me to take you to the Falopex’s space station so you can fuck a girl?” Kidd snorts and turns away, shaking his head. He finds his black head covering and puts it on, sitting on a rock with no cloth covering on his upper half. “You’ll kill me if I don’t do it, I assume?”

“I will,” I admit gently, inclining my head. “But the females will live.”

Kidd smokes his herbs, and then drops them to the ground so that he can crush them with a boot.

“Fine. You know what? I can’t actually dock at the station—or get anywhere near it—but I can drop you off with a friend who’ll get you there. How you’re going to get off is a different matter entirely.” He stands up and starts to collect items from the ground around the campsite. The sun has only just come up, and the light is dusky and sleepy. “We’ll leave in the afternoon.”

“I will be ready.”

The females emerge from the other tent sometime later, wash up, and then approach me. I expected Jane’s curiosity but not the other’s. I ignore the screechy one as she strokes the head of her poor pet Earth creature and stares at me. I curl my lip at her, and she flinches.

“Who are you?” Jane asks, her eyes the color of wet dirt. “You seem … weirdly invested in Eve?”

It is a clear inquiry, there is no doubt.

“I am Eve’s mate,” I explain, unsure how good the alien tech is that she is wearing. Likely, it is of poor quality.

That does not matter with my mate because words are pointless. We understand one another perfectly without a translator. But these humans? I must be able to speak to them in words or they will think me a mindless beast.

My mouth stretches in a grin as I clamp down on my instinctive need for solitude. Eve has changed that. Eve is an end to years of loneliness that I did not even recognize until I met her. I did not know that I was alone until I found the one creature that I wish to share my existence with. With her, I am both alone and in company at once. A blissful feeling.

“Her … oh my God.” Jane throws her hands over her mouth and gapes up at me. She drops her arms to her sides as I laugh, the sound scaring winged creatures from the trees. “You fucked my best friend.”

“Yes, I did,” I reply in as gentlemanly a manner as I am able. “I fucked her, but only because she wished for it as fiercely as I did. We are now bound together until our bodies surrender to the dirt.” I adjust myself so that I am sitting in a more human position, shifting so that my back is to a tree trunk, my knee is up, and my other leg is stretched out. I tuck my wings in close and rest my secondary hands on my shoulders.

I am coming, my female. I will always come. I resist the urge to threaten the captain. We cannot leave too early or the tide will take us. The officer left the camp last night, but I know that he, too, is going to delay his launch. I could not get out of here any earlier by following him instead.

“I’ll bet she loved it,” Jane says, and then she creeps forward to take a seat on my right side. “Can I, um, hear all about how you two met?” She grins at me and then scoots a little closer, and I find myself cocking my head out of curiosity. “I want to know everything.”

I say nothing, my mouth invisible when I hold it still. I am nothing but shadows. Jane will not challenge me. I fucking cannot speak of such things or I will lose my ability to think clearly. I would tear the world apart in my frustration, and I should not allow myself to do that.

“Then I guess I could tell you some stories?” Jane offers, and I turn to her, interested. She grins, as if I have verbally agreed. “Want to know about Eve’s past boyfriends? Most embarrassing moments?”

“I wish to know about her family,” I say, and Jane goes quiet.

The mood sombers.

Because it is one thing to know that you should remain cheerful in a crisis.

It is another to behave in that way.

As my mother would say, in a battle for blood, take blood, but in the in-between, take peace.

I listen to Jane talk and then, when midday hits, I stand up and walk quietly away from her in the direction of the ship.

Captain Kidd sees me coming and sighs, stepping aside to indicate the open door.

I have never been off of this planet, but it does not matter.

For Eve, I will travel the whole of this galaxy, the whole of the Noctuida.

With all four feet on the ground, I walk up the ramp and into the ship. Screens crackle with strange light and sound, scrambling the computer system. It is a natural adaptation of the Aspis, to disrupt technology. It is not always something we can control, but in this, I will not allow my biology to keep me here.

With a snarl, I whisper down the stairs and into the shadows, curling up in a corner in the dark. When I think about Eve, I smile, and the sharp gash of my white teeth splits the darkness, reflecting back at me from a mirror on the other side of the strange, wood-paneled vessel.

“This looks like a fucking pirate ship,” Jane exclaims from the floor above, but I ignore her.

I curl in on myself, twisting into a ball of blackness and rage and sorrow.

And love.

When I find that Vestalis male, I will eat him. I will bring my female home. Care for her. Take her. Claim her. Cherish her.

If it is necessary to achieve that, I will allow myself to tear this universe apart.

To Be Continued…