“Tany,” he said.
God, I’m so fucking stupid, I thought. A gift, a fucking gift. How the fuck did I forget? I felt it all come swimming back, the rose-pink haze of lust burning away like mist in the desert, leaving behind the cracked skin and parched throats of all the wrong kinds of memories.
He didn’t mean anything by it, I know he didn’t, but it also didn’t matter. The word gift stuck like a splinter in the back of my throat and I couldn’t cough it out. I swallowed, and it scraped against my tongue. Gift. Something given, something taken. A commodity accepted with a nod and a vague, polite gesture of appreciation in the form of a righteous beating.
My nails dug into my arms until I was sure I’d cut myself. I bit my tongue and found myself shaking my head, swaying slightly, like my body wanted to move or fight or run, but couldn’t quite figure out how.
“Forgive me,” said Darin, and I heard him rise, the blanket sloughing off him to the floor. “I have…done something you regret.”
Done something, I thought. Not said. Done. “No,” I said. “You didn’t.” Sex was one thing, but kidnapping was another. Or, aiding and abetting a kidnapper, as it were.
“Then I said something.”
“You did.” The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them, sharp as nettles and dripping something slightly too bitter to be anger.
“What?” He was behind me now, close to enough to smell. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, drifting through my hair, smelling like smoke and something sweeter than tobacco. He put his hand on my shoulder. “What was it?”
I pushed him away and turned on him. It all swarmed up out of nowhere, fire and lightning and every angry color in God’s rainbow pooling in my stomach and turning every word I said to ash. “Am I a fucking object to you?”
It wasn’t what he meant. I knew it wasn’t. But I couldn’t stop.
Darin’s eyes widened, and he took a fractured step back, confused. “What? No, of course not.”
I barely heard him. I was two different people now, one watching, one screaming. “Am I a fucking asset? A, a commodity?” The last word reared up and roared from my first conversation with Sol-dam, when he said humans were, for the moment, a precious commodity, one the world would do well to preserve. He said it so I wouldn’t worry about Jonathan or Katy or Naomi, but now the only part I could clearly hear was commodity, ringing like a steel bell.
“You…” Luras hesitated. He bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, the deepest blue I had ever seen, and he looked away. “You were. You were.” He looked up, desperation carved into the lines around his eyes. “You are not anymore.”
“Not anymore,” I said incredulously. “All of us? Or just me? Just the one who proved I wasn’t just some fucking animal?”
There was no perfect equivalent to “fuck” in the Sarchan vernacular, but it didn’t matter. It was obviously a curse, even Darin could tell that much. “No,” he said. He grabbed my arms, squeezing them softly. “No, no, Brittany. I was wrong. Do you hear me? I was wrong, we were all wrong.”
I shook him off. If he’d had a mind to hold on I couldn’t have done it, but he let me push him away. My vision blurred, and when I blinked I felt hot tears streaming down my cheeks, thick as the rain of a tropical storm. “Then where’s Katy?” I said. “Where’s Jonathan, huh? Where’s Naomi, where’s everyone else I came with, all the other people you stole? Why are we still here?”
Darin looked like I’d slapped him. “You…do not want to stay?”
“Jesus fuck, Darin, what do you think?” I said. “You kidnapped us and then you and your fucking dog gave me to you as an exotic pet! Do you realize how cartoon-evil that makes you? Do you know what a cartoon is?” Sol-dam might have told him.
“Yes,” he said, hesitantly.
“Well you’re the bad guy, Luras. You aren’t the, the fucking gentleman gangster, you’re an evil prick. You took us from our home. If I stay here, I’ll never see my family again, do you get that?” I pushed him. He let me. “If I stay here, if you keep me here, my grandfather will die and I’ll never get to see him again.” I pushed him harder. Harder. Again and again until I was slamming my fists into his chest. It was like beating against a wall for all he moved. He was looking down at me, I could feel his soft white hair on the back of my neck, but I didn’t look up. I was sobbing uncontrollably now, waterfalls of impossible pain pouring from my eyes, snot dribbling from my nose. I was gasping and screaming and cursing, and for thirty seconds all I could see was red.
Then I stopped. My hands went still, resting against him, and my screams turned to whimpers. I sank to the ground, and Darin sank with me. He laid a hand on my shoulder, but made no move to embrace me – maybe knowing I’d scream if he tried.
We sat for a long time on that stupid red carpet, just listening to the wind.
“I will get you home,” he said at last.
I stiffened. “What?”
“I will get you home,” he said. “You and everyone you came with.” He swallowed. “You and everyone they…we…kidnapped.” He seemed to choke on the word. “I will get you home. With or without Sol-dam’s help. I promise.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of my head. And without another word, he stood and walked out the door.
Part Three: Us
The weather here was strange.
Okay, everything here was strange, even if a lot of it was recognizable, but the weather was especially weird. It rained, yes, there were clouds and thunderstorms and it even snowed sometimes…but it would also periodically rain flaming rocks. They struck the sides of the monolith and bounced off and away into the ocean, where they sent up steam for the lesser part of an hour. The sounds they made weren’t much different from thunder, but instead of just feeling the sound in my chest I felt the whole building shake as meteors of varying sizes ricocheted off the glass and back into oblivion. The night was dark and the clouds were many, so the only light came from lanterns in the gardens and the meteors themselves, which glowed and pulsed like abandoned fires. They broke through the clouds and, as they fell, lit the waiting storm from beneath. It felt very much like we were in some magical underground world – the unfriendly kind with demons and lots of angry dead people.
I asked Darin about it when he came in to read. He did that more and more frequently now. He’d come to the library in the middle of the night, and he would pace and read until the sun came up, and he’d disappear until his next meeting. He was sitting in the red armchair now, feet propped up on the coffee table, reading something that was either called The Tales of Trillian or The Trials of Tilliam. The alphabet was as straightforward as I could have hoped for, but like U, W, and V, some of them were just close enough together to be frustrating.
I wanted to apologize. I did. But the part of me responsible for the screaming and crying thought it would be a sign of weakness, if not to Darin then to myself. I didn’t like yelling at him, or anybody, and I cringed at the memory, but every time I opened my mouth to tell him I was sorry, it clamped shut again – because I had a right to be angry. Maybe not for the “gift” comment, I knew damn well that was meant to be a compliment, but for everything else. For living in a cage, for being subjected to all those stupid, insulting tests by Kai-dam, for being dragged out of Sol by a metal claw and an alien with an angry boss to appease.
“Does this happen often?” I said.
Darin looked up and out the window, seeing the brimstone storm for the first time. “Sometimes,” he said. “Like your toradas, they are infrequent and dangerous, but largely survivable.”
“Tornadoes,” I corrected. Sarchaia was a predominantly cold planet, and its topography didn’t allow for tornadoes of anything remotely like tornadoes, so there was no perfect translation of the word.
“Tornadoes,” he echoed. I watched his face, angled towards the sky. Flashes of red light danced across him at intervals, making his scales shine. “I’m sorry.”
I blinked and closed
my own book. “Um. For…tornadoes?”
“No. I’m sorry for…saying you were a gift.”
Sudden guilt pooled in my lungs. “I know you meant—”
“It doesn’t matter what I meant,” he said. “What matters is what it ended up meaning to you.” He closed his eyes and sighed through his nose, the expression of a man pushing down an unfortunate memory – the inward flinch of regret. “You are a brilliant creature, Tany. You are smart and beautiful and braver than anyone I have ever known.” He chuckled grimly. “Myself included.”
“You…you’re a dragon, though,” I said stupidly.
He smiled, teeth glinting in the fire. “You can’t be brave when everyone else is already afraid of you.”
I chuckled. “Sure.”
We stared at each other for a long time. Most days, I forgot what it meant to be human, as far as not being Sarchan was concerned. Everything but my reflection was a part of this place now, for all my screaming and cursing.
Darin smiled and continued to read.
I returned to my book. Hours passed as I turned pages, absorbing the ancient history of this lonely grey planet. They only had one language, as it turns out, which lent itself to their inability to comprehend the existence of English or Mandarin or anything else they might have come across. Close to a thousand years ago they had experienced something called the “Master Conflict”, the war to end all wars, and the Sarchan civilization we knew today was the lovechild of the surviving Sarchans and their sudden desperate need for order. By some miracle, the planet never diverged again, likely (according to the author of this little slice of history) because of the pervasive “Sarchans are the only sentient race in the universe” rhetoric, which spread exponentially with the advent of space travel. Everyone who came back with something alive pointed at it and said, “Look! It’s stupid! It’s just an animal! We really are special.” It was honestly kind of sad. The whole planet had this bully mentality thing going on an intergalactic scale. But their alleged superiority bound them together as one functioning body, and that was more than could be said for Earth. I wondered if world peace was worth sacrificing the dignity of other races and your own cultural diversity.
Outside, the firestorm died, taking the clouds with it, burning them black against the sky. Stars took their place, twinkling at us through windows clouded with smoke, rising on a cold wind from little meteors quenched in the water far below.
“Would you walk with me?” Darin said suddenly.
I looked up. “Where?”
“Outside. To the beach. You haven’t been.”
“Is it safe?”
“The storm has passed. It will be a little warmer for it.”
I smiled. “Okay.”
***
The beach wasn’t much warmer for the fallen stars, though the pieces of them that survived the atmosphere, the clouds, and the sea itself lay steaming in the white sand. The air above them shimmered in the starlight, slight and silver and cold.
Darin walked beside me. Our heels dug into the sand with every step, cold waves coiling around our ankles. My shoes were in my hand, black lacing sandals, and an icy wind swirled through my dress.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, staring out at the vast black sea.
“I am sorry,” he said.
For the ocean being beautiful? I thought, then realized what he meant. I sighed slowly through my nose, feeling like a complete and utter ass. “Darin, you don’t have to—”
“I may not, but I am going to.” He took my hand and turned it over, staring at the lines in my palm. “I allowed myself to forget, for a moment, why you were here at all. I…I have been avoiding you, you may have noticed.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “May have?”
“Very well, definitely have,” he corrected, smiling. The smile collapsed a moment later. “It pained me to look at you.”
“Thanks?”
“Because you are human, and you have proven time and again that you are not only sentient, but smart. Smart enough to banter with Sol-dam and read your way through a third of my library in a matter of months. Some of those tomes are too thick for me to bother with.” He shook his head. “But I digress. I was careless with my words, yes, but before that I was careless with you. I do not mean to be so again.” He lifted my hand and brushed his lips against my knuckles. “We will get you home if it kills us. But, until then…”
“I’m here,” I finished.
He nodded. “And I would like to get to know you properly. If I can.”
I smiled. “You can.”
I turned to face the ocean and took several long, slow steps into the surf. The water lapped at my ankles, on the warmer side of cold, tickling them with suspended sand. Stars blinked down at us from the impenetrable black.
I wondered if I could see Sol from here, and if I could, which star it was. I asked them silently as they popped into existence out of the blue-black darkness. Are you Earth? I thought. Are you Jupiter? Are you Neptune? Depending on how old this world was, and exactly how far we were from Earth, the light of Sol might not have even reached us yet. Light is fast, but nothing is instantaneous.
“What are your constellations?” I said. Different side of the universe, different stars.
No. Same stars. Just a different perspective.
The sand crunched beneath Darin as he came to stand beside me. He pointed to the horizon. “The star nearest the cliff. Do you see it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Follow it up. Then right, and down, and right again. That is the Watcher.”
“The Watcher?”
“The Watcher,” said Darin. He clasped his hands behind his back and smiled. “He who watches over the living.”
“Is he a god?” I said.
Darin chuckled. “No. Merely a servant. As we all are.”
“Is he holding a scythe?” There were four stars arcing away from the body of the constellation, tapering to a fine, glittering point.
“He is,” said Darin. “To cleave the soul from the body when one’s time here is done.”
I smiled wanly. Some things really do transcend time and space. “Is he nice?”
He seemed startled by the question. “Of course. What else should he be?”
Scary, I thought, thinking of all the twisted interpretations we had of the Grim Reaper on Earth. Dark. Empty. I couldn’t think of a tradition that actually held Death the entity in poor regard. That was mostly a Western thing, and a Hollywood-Halloween thing.
“Exactly that,” I said – and felt something absurd and reckless sweep over me. “Can you swim?”
“Not well,” Darin admitted. “Why?”
I started wading backwards into the water, watching him. I could feel the madness spark across my face.
Darin laughed uncertainly. “What are you doing?”
I reached down, grabbed the hem of my dress, and pulled it up over my head…leaving me in white underwear and nothing else. Darin’s eyes widened, more with interest than surprise.
“Oh,” he said.
I laughed, giddy with the sudden cold. “Oh.” I tossed the dress to him and he caught it with one hand. He looked from it to me and grinned, wings folding and unfolding – small twitchy movements, the way you flex your fingers or pop your shoulders.
“Come on,” I said, sliding off my underwear and letting the tide carry it off. “I won’t go deep. I promise.”
Darin was on me in a fraction of a second, carving through the water and splashing me on accident. I held up my hands against the spray and laughed.
He grabbed my wrists and lowered them, pulling me closer. Before I could ask what he was doing, I felt his lips pressing against mine. His breath was warm and sweet like bonfire smoke. He wrapped his arms around me, claws trailing gently down my back, his unscaled hand pressing into the space between my shoulder blades, keeping me close.
He probed down with his finger, searching for the little nub. He was so close I could taste it. I shive
red with something beyond the cold and whispered, “A little higher.”
His hand rose and I gasped. He grinned and pressed harder, moving in circles. I tried to pull back from him so I could find his penis and return the favor, but he kept me pressed close against him. I moaned and shuddered, and he chuckled.
“Like that?” he said.
I nodded, totally speechless. I opened my mouth to say something, but every word I’d ever known had abandoned me.
“I want to try something,” he said. He put his hands on my shoulder and slowly, deliberately, slid them down to my wrists. His eyes never left mine.
“Okay,” I said.
“Just tell me if you want me to stop,” he said. “Alright?”
“Alright.”
He reached into his belt and pulled out a long ribbon of red silk. He moved my wrists behind me and, kissing my neck, drawing his tongue across my collarbone, tied the silk around them – binding them tight. Around and around, then looping through the center. The silk was long enough to pull forward and tie at my stomach when he was done, so my hands were now pinned to my back.
“Like that?” he said.
I nodded, heart thrumming. “Like that,” I said.
He nodded. “Good.”
He grabbed me and spun me back to the shore, dragging us into the shallows and laying me down in the sand on my back, and his hand returned to my clitoris, where he circled and pressed and teased until every inch of me was aflame. I hovered at the precipice of an orgasm and, right when I was about to explode, he would pull back, and start me from the very beginning.
It was agony – perfect, impossible agony.
“Darin,” I gasped, the word dissolving into a moan.
“Not yet,” he said. He kissed me, tongue diving in and out of my mouth, his hand growing ever more fierce, pressing harder and harder and faster and faster until I could barely stand it. I opened my mouth to say his name and could barely take a breath. I pulled at my wrists, wanting to touch him, some animal part of me wanting to dive down into myself and satisfy this burning urge, but I couldn’t, and somehow that made it all the more thrilling. The waves crashed over him, soaking the end of my hair, never coming higher than my chest.
A Pet For Lord Darin Page 11
