by C F Rabbiosi
I bolt toward him and, summoning all of my newfound ferocity, knock into his massive form. A chuckle breaches the air as he drops Alice and she scurries away. “Why did you come for me?” I ask, shaking off the sharp pain in my shoulder. “You made me promise!”
“Of course I did, but I decided to come get you now.” He glances to the side. “Along with a few other brood mares.”
I stomp the ground and turn away to hide my utter torment. The last thing I thought Brekter would do is mix his genes with someone fully human. I really believed his word, his trembling emotion…
“You think you are the only one that can give birth to a Koridon child?” He sniffs the air and signals for the warrior males to depart. “Because it would seem that you have many human women here that can do this.” He reaches around and pinches through my dress, grasping my nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “You will be my queen still…tough I will take many wives.”
One of the males take my mother around her waist and throws her over his shoulder. Rage and helplessness course through me and throw me into fiery impulsiveness. Screams pierce my ears as the Koridons move from cabin to cabin along with male voices, scuffling, choking, death sounds. I flip around and sink my teeth into Brekter’s throat. He stumbles backward, touching the wound, and I roar through bloody meat. His fist flies, and with a crack, I hit the ground, my temple throbbing.
“Where’s Kassien?” I scream as he jerks me against him. He holds the sharp edge of a massive blade into my throat. “Where is he?” I dare him.
“Why do you care about that now, pretty animal? You have bigger worries.”
“Because he’s going to find me, no matter where you take us, and he’s going to massacre you.”
“Well, perhaps we will stay a while.” He calls out, “Vaseron! Extentan ev sankara. Entra, sha entra.” He points to one side and then the other.
One of the Koridons drags Nancy and Marian, girls an age ahead of me, by their feet as they scream and another ties them, wrists to ankles behind their backs. Another one throws Oliver on the other side and ties him up, too.
The pain that rushes in from their shrieks makes helplessness twist and turn through my spirit, and in the moment my mother is thrown to the ground, it breaks. “Stop this! What do you want? I’ll do anything, just—” Silver glints at the side of a Koridon struggling with Horatio, who reaches out for his wife, Jane. She begs as she’s violently straddled upon the ground. I snatch the knife from the intruder’s holder and, with a flick of my wrist, slice my arm open. The skin splits and pours crimson. My breath becomes a frenzy.
“What are you doing?” Brekter lunges forward but I thrust the blade against my vulnerable stomach and dare him.
He stops and lets out a hearty guffaw, which he angles around to direct toward his men. “Is the frightened animal going to kill itself?”
Reaffirming my grip on the knife, I say, “Yes. And the life within.”
His smile drops. “Please do. Get rid of Kassien’s hybrid monstrosity.”
My head tips slightly. “Or yours.”
More men bellow from their quarters, the sharp ringing sound of metal slicing through air. Finn is dragged out and hits his knees, a Koridon behind him. I dig the tip of the dagger in and meet Brekter, psychotic grin for psychotic grin.
“Can you smell the blood, Brekter? Can you sense your young’s tiny existence fading?”
He takes a step forward and I push deeper, the sharp jolt making my eyes roll back. “Drop the knife, Calypso.” Never having heard him say my name before, I know he’s mine.
“Take them all away from here, Brekter. Leave us. Be a man of your word.”
“No. You do not have any power over me. I will make all of these women pregnant with my brood.”
“My blood’s more pure. With me, your child will be mostly Koridon.”
“I can find others like you.” Beads of sweat form across his brow and his face twists into a mask of rage. It eases my own. He steps forward, I step back.
“Goodbye, then.” I ready the blade and he knows I will do it. I don’t fear being cut. I don’t fear anything anymore.
“Wait,” he says, hardly above a whisper. “Wait!” he shouts, now to his men, and raises a hand.
“I will meet you in ten months ready to give you a child, like we agreed, if you go now.”
He squints, his hands in fists, knuckles blanched. “I could take all of these women, tie them down and force my seed into them. And so much more.”
“Fine. But I’ll be dead, and unless your prick would like to experience the cold meat of my corpse next it tries, then walk. Away.”
He purses his lips and twitches, my visual very alive in his mind. A low growl rolls out from deep inside his throat and his shaky hand outstretches toward me. “I need you.” I raise a brow as he pauses. “… to drop the knife. Do it now.”
“Let them go. Let them all go, and I will.”
“Drakon and his brothers are in accord with me. We must enslave your species if ours is to survive.”
“That is a shit way to do it, Brekter. You’ll never succeed. We’ll always fight you, and I know this isn’t what the true prince wants. He won’t support this.” If he still lives.
“So you think your prince will save you? Jump off with you into the sunset and live like happy idiots for ever and ever?” I think he means ride off into the sunset.
“Don’t take them by force. Don’t make them have your baby. That is no way for a child to be brought into existence. Can you imagine what that would feel like?”
Silence ensues through our compound, every whimper held back, every furious grunt swallowed as they wait.
Brekter speaks to Drakon in their language and they come to an agreement. “Your mother may stay,” he says. “The men and females that are too young to breed, or too old, shall live. But you and the other mateable women come with us. It is all I can compromise.”
“It’s not good enough,” I say through gritted teeth, though it is still far better than this. My hand aches with the tightness of my grip, the blade stuck just through the outer layer of my flesh. “You win.” I swallow hard. “Do it.”
He turns to his warriors and speaks to them sternly. One of them argues, but Drakon roars his immovable orders. Blade still pressed firmly, I carefully kneel next to my mother. “They are leaving. Most of you will be safe.” One of them roughly unties her and she stands in front of me, wild, putting her protective arms out.
“You won’t have her!” She links my arm in hers. They drag the girls away and tie them in a line by rope around their waists. Then, I see Scarlet. They put her at the back of the line, the last one, and she doesn’t fight. Pale and expressionless, she seems like a different person.
Brekter approaches.
“Momma, I have to go.” I unlink our arms and she embraces me. My best friend in the world, my safe place, already feels so far away, though she refuses to let go. “If I go, you and the others get to live. The children and men get to live. And I will be all right.” I tear away from her.
“Goodbye, my Calypso. I know you’ll be all right. You are strong!” Brekter scoops me up and whisks me off. As she gets farther away, her voice calls out, “Stay brave! I’ll see you again!”
Epilogue
The sun descends behind the tree line as we walk tied together by the ropes, twenty of us being led by the otherworldly hoard. Most of the women are half dressed, still in their night clothes, and their feet bleed as they’re forced to walk barefoot over the rough forest terrain. They ride their four-legged beasts around us, greedy eyes yearning for our stimulating flesh as they use their crackling orange whips to keep us moving. Brekter has barely spoken to me; I don’t know if it’s because he’s angry I sort of won, or because he couldn’t just let me die. His movements are feverish and something strange lurks behind his dark gaze.
From the front, I glance back at Scarlet, and though she offers me the tiniest reassuring smile, it holds no spark an
d her green gems have dulled to rock. But this deadened state was not caused by today, and the night she was brutally ravaged alongside me was only the beginning. The large males around us have leered at her many times—more than the others, I think. But that could just be my protective notice.
Kassien nor his crew are anywhere to be seen. Could these blackguards really have killed them? Their own kind, becoming more and more rare every day? I suppose the answer to that is yes. Here we are, walking toward a new future between two worlds, the beginning of a new breed. But what will we endure, and how many of us will die at the hands of these alien beings?
Soon, the sun’s pink fire dwindles, giving way to a dark atmosphere, and insects buzz their night songs across the land. The males stop and get off their beasts.
“We’re resting for the night,” Brekter barks, putting an arm out to stop me dead. The ones behind me stumble, but I do not give.
“Are you tired?” I ask with a sly smile.
“It will be a disaster to make you women continue, tripping over every speck in the dark.”
He shouts for us to lay down and my line pulls as a few collapse, including Finn’s sister, Glenda. The chilling Hollow’s-Eve wind whips at my bare skin, but my village mates don’t seem to take notice of the cold, so relieved to be resting.
Brekter sits beside me.
“Where are we headed?” I ask him as he stares off into the distance.
“The shore of the Pacific. Some from Efaelty’s clan and several from others around this land have joined me to rule over a new sect.”
“None of them your mates or females of any sort, I would bet.”
“A few, actually.”
Drakon circles the area before removing himself from his saddle. “That one will let you rule his sector?”
“I have been elevated to rule alongside.”
Because of me. If I carry a rare Koridon child, one that Brekter has claim of, it gives him so much power, I suspect. “What will I be, then? The mother of your child? A wife of many as you threatened? After the child is born, will I be passed around to the others?” I’m curious to see what future he has planned for this new society. Having dealt with their kind for only a short time, I already know what could happen when the unharnessed passion of Koridon males is allowed to be unleashed. In just these last days, I have fallen in absolute and despairing love with one. These males around us have no idea what they are in store for. How many of them are like Kassien? Like Tanak?
Brekter does not answer me though I think he wants to, always happy to say something utterly horrible to upset me. Not this time. I lay down and turn away from him, the ropes cutting in, but I reach some level of comfort as he sits there in his deep silence. Whimpering floats on the breeze, Mary-Shelley’s soft crying. I wish I could comfort them, but if not for me, they would be warm in their beds, at home with their mothers and grandmothers. I wanted my own mother and the comfort of home to the point of madness, and look what I have done to them. But could we have hidden from them forever? Our lives are restricted in every way, and we live in fear. Maybe it needed to be broken and rebuilt. But empires are built on the bones of the innocent—and that is a shitty way to become great.
I was so unbelievably stupid to have trusted Brekter. Blind for how Kassien made me feel, I believed that he had fallen for me, too, that this was just how Koridon males were: painfully passionate after a lifetime of repressing it. Honorable underneath it all. But they are just like mankind. Dr. Jekyll with a more powerful Hyde.
Movement rustles behind me and the warmth of Brekter’s body radiates lengthwise along mine. His breathing softly tickles the hairs on the back of my neck and a thickly muscled arm snakes over my waist, pressing me against him.
Oh yes. These beautiful giants think they have everything figured out. They think they will use these beauties strictly to create life. All the delicious chemicals pumped from our bodies, the blissful moans that will throw their blood into a frenzy. We will hypnotize them. I send a confident, wicked smile in Mary-Shelley’s direction, though she can’t see it.
We are about to change history, and these big, warrior males have no idea what they are in for.
END BOOK 1
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Table of Contents
Prologue
~Calypso~
1
(Untitled)
~Calypso~
2
~Calypso~
3
~Calypso~
4
~Calypso~
5
~Calypso~
6
~Calypso~
7
~Calypso~
8
~Calypso~
9
~Calypso~
10
~Kassien~
11
~Calypso~
12
~Calypso~
13
~Calypso~
14
~Calypso~
15
~Calypso~
16
~Calypso~
17
~Calypso~
18
~Calypso~
19
~Kassien~
20
~Calypso~
21
~Kassien~
22
~Calypso~
23
~Calypso~
24
~Calypso~
25
~Calypso~
26
~Calypso~
27
~Calypso~
Epilogue
(Untitled)
