Finding Her Heart (Orki War Bride #2)

by Isoellen

  "Women like to be covered. Wear clothing. Not have their chest and backsides flopping about.”

  "Why?"

  "Because we need to protect our skin from the elements.”

  "Why?"

  "Because we are not Orki, and I do not have thick skin like you." She poked at him, exasperated. Was he making fun of her?

  Lavender ointment in one hand, keeping Annabell pinned down with the other, he applied the stuff everywhere he thought she needed it. She escaped the hungries with minor injuries. Throbbing with her heartbeat, her ankle demanded attention. She thought it might be the worst of the damage. Turned back and forth until he finally flipped her to her belly, she watched the world go by in a rush as he checked on every little scratch and gouge on her backside.

  He was not gentle.

  Looking back at him, she said, "Do you have to push so hard?

  "Cuts deep."

  "Could you make that nice sound at least? It always makes me feel better."

  "No," he said, working ointment into a place on her shoulder.

  "It hurts.”

  "Yes."

  Annabell let her temper loose. "You know they dragged that woman away. You big bulls couldn't get to her fast enough because they purposely cut you off. You just can't admit how unprepared you were, can you? You needed help."

  He snarled in anger, not liking the truth.

  Oh, he was angry. Here comes the real male, she thought. Finally, he would show her who he really was behind the silence and the muscle. The gentle giant would show her his man-self. Orki or not, he was as male as the rest of them. Experience taught Annabell that males hated to be wrong, more than they hated to be called out. He'd have to put her in her place now and show her who was boss.

  "Orki unprepared for many, many, many hungries," he admitted, pushing ointment into a cut until she knew she was bleeding. There was agreement in his tone. But his hands acted with petty meanness, squeezing and pushing on every cut he found.

  "That hurts,"

  "Yes. It hurts."

  She flopped like a fish across his lap, yelling at him, "Would you stop then?"

  Instead, he explained, "Orki know of nests, watch nests. Ri gives last queen mercy under the red moons and flooded the nest with water. Hungries death blight too close to Homeland. Hungries dead after queen's death, but not all. All should die. All did not. A chamber was left. Hungries whither without a queen, but other queen call them. Hungries go to new queen. Other hive far away, in grasslands of easy fire. Lands of grass far. But dormant pupae everywhere. All over land. Only solid land, rock, or water, or Orki nesting grounds safe. Orki cautious, prepare, protect redress. Orki not prepared for many, many hungries."

  "You’re saying an Orki killed the last queen twenty years ago. And the survivors just left and found a new queen."

  "Some queens smart. Some queens dull. Find queen smart. Unexpected. This queen very smart," he said.

  "They want women for queens. Are you saying a smart human queen sent them after us?"

  "Start human. Not human now. Poisoned. Changed. Never human again."

  That sounded horrific. The science of the mutations was strange and too awful to contemplate. This was almost her fate—if she allowed images to form—she might never get them out of her head. "The hungries are disgusting. Why are they called hungries? Does the hunt for a queen make them hungry?"

  "No. Hungries eat dead. All dead. All heartbeats, dead, dying. Eid tell."

  "Who is Eid? You said that before?"

  He answered her with a combination of Orki and common words that made her think of a school library. "Eid knows."

  Having finished his torture, he sat her up again. Annabell's head swam and buzzed with the quick movement. She'd woke up with energy, feeling fantastic and physically herself for two days in a row. Woe threatened her in the shadows.

  This must be a stress response.

  Her stomach rolled, hurting like she swallowed something so cold it burned.

  "Doku-ni not know why Anna disobey and see others."

  "That rule is stupid. I had to try to save that girl. I told you. The pig-insect-deformed hungries were letting themselves be chopped to pieces on purpose to separate you."

  "Anna risk life."

  "I will not bring woe to your people. I didn't want to stand there and do nothing. That girl's Orki must love her like I love you."

  "Love?"

  Opening his hand around her throat, he turned her to face him, tipping her head back. She liked that. Oh, how she liked that. If she felt better, if her stomach ache wasn't ramping up to be awful, she would melt right there into soft, oozing heated bee's wax all over him. She mouthed the words, "Annabell sees Doku-ni ni-orki-ror-ess."

  "Doku-ni sees Anna. Anna will stay with Doku-ni." He lifted her high and rubbed a tusk against her cheek and then his lips against hers.

  Annabell wanted to respond. Half of her lurched up towards him in eagerness, but the other half continued to buzz, the sound on the verge of turning into clicking.

  Overly familiar with falling apart and fainting, she knew darkness pursued her yet again, but this was different. This dark pushed inward from the outside. Hundreds of hands pushing her down, under, trying to drown her in the sucking mud of the soft underbelly of the world.

  "Anna fight, redress will stay with Doku-ni."

  She tried to call out, but her lips were too stiff, and her numb tongue refused to shape words. He called her name, his voice fading away.

  One moment she was in his lap, the next, darkness had a hold of her and she was falling down the hungries hole into darkness.

  The cold, wet weight of a grave-like night pushed at her from all directions. At the same time, annoying needles of pain pricked her fingers. The first poke started on her left forefinger, increasing quickly to her palm then up her arm, then her spine. The feeling spread, appearing simultaneously on the tip of her tongue and at the back of her head, a slow-moving wave of unnatural discomfort.

  Frostbite. Below zero winters were rare in the mild temperature of the Peace River Valley. There had only been two, one when she was very young and another in the first year of her marriage. A cold wind came down from the mountains and covered everything in snow and ice. There was not much snow, each time, barely above an adult's ankles, but there had been endless amounts of ice. The ice lasted weeks, and with it, the threat of frostbite in people and animals. That needle-prick sensation, akin to falling asleep and cutting off circulation, one of the first signs. Annabell remembered it well. She'd almost lost a toe to it.

  When the wave of pins finished, it left her body pricked and pinged with sticking needles. She couldn't move to shake it off, to get warm, to get away. Instead, she struggled to breathe, encased in earth and mud. Trapped in the darkness with the hungries.

  Children and lovers they called to her, "Queen. Queen. Queen."

  One desperate voice of demand. "Queen, queen, queen."

  The children wanted in. Clawed fingers pulled at her mouth, trying to force their way in and feed her the mud and slime of their memories from the dark.

  "We know. We know. We know," they whispered.

  What do you know?

  "We everywhere. We everything. We starve." Humming, clacking voices vibrated in the prickles. Layers of voices and minds trying to take her over and possess her.

  The prickling needles sank deeper, a million sharp bites. It was pain, but not pain. Everyone suffered the sensation on a small scale, but this was all over her body, fierce and relentless afflicting every nerve ending.

  She could not move. Suspended in cold, swampy mud, the pressure of it pushing inward. She didn't know how she was still breathing.

  A cold mouth bit into her chest, over her heart, clamping to flesh and spirit. Had she not been so fully buried, she would have jerked from the pull of it. She could tip her head just a little, earth and dirt squishing in her ears, and see the mouth at the end of a proboscis. Her heart connected to her memories which the
thing attached to her began to suck out.

  The clearest ones went first.

  Those were also the dearest ones. Like lumps of soft tissue, fresh but healthy, the memories were sucked out of her into a starving body. There was no pain. Instead, underneath the prickling and pressure, the suction of her heart felt good. She liked it. It felt like she imagined it would feel to nurse a child.

  Children, they are all her children and she needed to feed them, bond with them.

  No. That couldn't be right.

  "Are you sure you aren't a little poisoned by the creeping dark? Are you stained? Who that is human would refuse clean, when a little water does redeem?" The words echoed. Annabell didn’t know who they belonged to anymore. Did they come from memory? Where they real?

  Mama, help me! Annabell couldn't speak. If she opened her mouth, it would fill up with mud, earth and that slime that covered the hungries’ skin. They would stuff it into her until nothing of her real self existed.

  She didn't want to lose Doku-ni. She didn't want to lose her memories, or the future, the adventure that hours ago shone with promise. If they got inside her, their chittering, grinning smiles and insect minds taking over, she’d lose everything.

  She didn’t want to lose herself again.

  This was a nightmare. A vision. Only it was a real thing happening to her body. The overtaking transformation that would kill her, or worse, transmute her into a hive queen. She knew it.

  Something had happened and she couldn’t let them win. She did not know where she was, couldn't remember the last thing that happened. But she had visited this lost, disoriented place of violent catastrophe before and let it suck her down.

  Not again.

  Clicking, desperate voices pushed, squeezed, and pricked, penetrating the first layer of her skin. The sucking, leech mouth drained more of her heart, taking chunks of her apart with each slurping pull of the wormy tube. The hungries siphoned her identity out through the hole, while pushing their will and need in through her skin.

  Stuffed and devoured.

  No. No. No.

  But the white Orki was more than a memory. She drank from the red pouch. She had lived, breathed, and eaten in the valley.

  The Orki was destiny. He locked himself inside of her, pumped her full of his seed. And child. There could be a precious child inside of her.

  "Feed us. We are hungry. Feed us. We will tell you what you do not know." Sibilant, humming voices spoke in her head and under her skin.

  You know nothing. Let me go.

  "Be us. We know, we know, we know the evil of men's hearts, we know who killed Papa. Come to us. Be us. And we will give you all the knowing. Be queen. Be mother. Be mate." A hundred focused intentioned shoved on the front of her brain, driving the spike of an icy poker at her mind, trying to get in. The thick nail head at her forehead competed with a niggling inching wave of needle pricks on her skin, inside and outside at once. They would squeeze the marrow from her bones, and draw out her memories.

  She didn't want to be a queen.

  They were the Many, the Hive, the Hungry, and they were lonely and empty without her. She could see them, boiling like maggots in the dead before her eyes. Looking like clear-skinned beetle larva, the Hive shed their skin again and again to become the creatures with claws and feet.

  They were not meant to breed. But this planet gave them life. And like the Orki, all women born on Dorsus were compatible with them. War brides even more so.

  "You are us. We are in you." A thousand of them said it against her ear, and she realized she shouldn't know what the hungry children looked like.

  No human who was not a queen would know that.

  No.

  They pushed at her forehead, sucked out her history, pulled at her jaws. A deep booming voice demanded, "You must drink."

  She wouldn't.

  "Are you sure you aren't a little poisoned by the creeping dark? Are you stained? Who that is human would refuse clean, when a little water does redeem?"

  This was the creeping dark and it had poisoned her. It would stain and she would never be clean again. Only could stop them and make her clean.

  They hated water.

  They pulled at her jaw, massaged her throat. The demand to drink pounded through her like a hammer blow. It was nearly a compulsion to obey, but she wouldn't.

  "Are you poisoned by the creeping dark?"

  She was. This was poison in her body, poison from the hungries who had scratched at her, dragging her to a hole to stuff her down. She was fighting a poison, and somehow, she had to flush it out of her system.

  "We can tell you everything. We can tell you what you didn't know you needed to know. We can show you. Our children eat the dead, and the dead share their stories."

  The needles deepened and the poker at the center of her forehead struck deep.

  Instead of taking her memories, they pushed one inside of her:

  It was late at night, and he couldn't sleep. The twin red moons were a glare through the window of the bedroom he shared with his brothers. Only his oldest brother didn't have to share or sleep in a bunk, he had his own bed. It was small, close, rolled under the bunk of two, but it was his and his alone.

  Benjere's belly twisted at the thought of it. Born too late, nothing he did would earn him that bunk. Or his own room. Annabell Roe had her own room.

  Her own room off the kitchen, next to Mama and Papa. Maybe if he was born first then he would have his own room.

  Maybe not. Maybe he wasn't good enough.

  It was hot in here. With six boys in one, room it was always hot and smelly. He couldn't take it, so he decided to do what he usually did. Go outside.

  It was the middle of the night, but two full moons made the world look like it was covered in blood. Since he was the second oldest, he got to help with the butchering. He'd seen buckets of blood. The smell was awful. Turned his stomach and made him vow to eat only vegetables until he smelled it cooking. That always changed his mind.

  Mama pig was awake. She wasn't a mama yet, but her belly bulged, and her teats were swollen. It was her third time around, and Papa said she was a good mama, but Benjere thought she wasn't cause when he tried to hold the piglets she'd chase him out of the pen. A pig bite was not a thing to mess with. Everyone knew that.

  Mama pig didn't have a problem with Annabell, though. Not a bit. Baby Annabell could go into the pen with Pa, plop herself right in the mud, hug and kiss the pink piglets like they were puppies and Mama pig would just snort at Annabell's hair until she giggled.

  Stomach growling, he went over to the vegetable garden. He'd have the carrots, his favorite vegetable, they were about ready, and a fresh carrot was always good even with a little dirt. Climbing over the fence, he pulled and ate one, threw the cap at Pig Mama. She ate it right up. Not much a pig wouldn't eat, he knew.

  One carrot. Then he pulled three by accident that weren't ready. Pulled one more and a beet plus three, eating the vegetables under the red moon. He tossed the mess to the pig.

  Pig momma oinked at him, and he oinked back. She lifted her snout in the air in his direction, making her snuffling piggy noise. She was a big old thing, and Papa was really proud of her. Short and barrel-shaped, she was still so fat and solid she probably weighed more than the cow. Her hair was coarse and stiff, with spots that reminded him of a rock. She was pretty ugly. Plus, she had those nasty tusks. Benjere had gone with Papa and Annabell to talk with some Orki who came to the village, and two of them had tusks just like Mama pig. Benjere had told Papa how stupid those Orki looked with those pig tusks and asked why Papa bowed to them so much when they looked so stupid?

  For no reason at all, Annabell burst into tears, crying her head off.

  Papa had reprimanded him and told him not to be rude.

  Benjere wanted to tell Papa that he didn't know everything, but Benjere kept it back. He knew when he was looking at a paddling on the butt and when he wasn't.

  Looking at the weird moons, Benjere t
old them, "Papa doesn't know everything, and one day when I grow up, I'll prove that.

  When he looked back at the garden, wondering if he should eat another carrot, he saw that he had made a mess of the rows. He accidentally stepped on one of the tuber plants crushing it, and he stomped a couple of leaves from the pumpkin plant, pulled up half a row of carrots and some beets. It hadn't been on purpose. It was an accident. But Mama was fussy about her garden, and she wouldn't see it that way. He knew he was going to get in trouble. Big trouble because he was outside at night.