The Fifth Moon's Lovers (The Fifth Moon's Tales Book 3)

by Monica La Porta

  Chapter Five

  The stars illuminated Valentine’s cabin with the power of a thousand miniature suns. Sprawled into the soft embrace of the chaise lounge, he stared at the transparent wall. Deep space stared back at him from beyond the thick glasses of the mullioned window encasing an entire wall of his spacious bedroom.

  The mullions were a cosmetic affectation. The former owner of the Beagle had wanted to recreate the galleon feeling to the last detail, and years of archeological research showed in the custom-made décor. According to rumors, the merchant used the Beagle as a floating love nest where he absconded for weeks at a time with his tax consultant, a handsome young man who eventually came into possession of a large chunk of his lover’s wealth, but not the ship.

  Valentine raised his glass-blown goblet to the memory of the merchant who had spent a fortune to please his paramour. He now knew what it felt like to desperately want to make someone else happy. Deep red Laurum sloshed inside the blue glass, tinting Valentine’s hand in a purple hue. He had barely drunk the wine. The last time he had partaken of this fine vintage he ended up on the floor of his studio and didn’t care for a repeat performance.

  “We’ll dock in an hour,” the captain’s voice announced from the speaker on the wall.

  Shaped like an ancient gramophone, the brass communication instrument distorted sounds but added a quaint touch to the otherwise historically authentic setting.

  The shadow of Sidera Prime loomed over the Beagle, but Valentine’s cabin faced the side farthest from the space station, and he could still see a portion of the sky from his observation deck. Soon, the dark hulk of the station’s disk would cover the brilliant stars. Never ready to confront the demons of his past, he was thankful for the delay and swallowed a gulp of the strong libation. The wine slid down from his throat to his empty stomach, warming him inside.

  He missed his small bride already. It didn’t feel natural to witness such wondrous beauty without her to share the sight with. She would have stared in wonder at the stars, and he would have made love to her under their silvery light. On this chaise lounge that was too large for him alone.

  The gramophone sputtered, and the metallic voice of the captain said, “Half an hour.”

  At the thirty-minute mark, Valentine usually joined the officers on the command deck where he would be given the honor of pushing the button that would initiate the docking maneuvers.

  Leaning over the side table, Valentine pressed the lever that connected a second miniature gramophone to the communication cables disseminated throughout the cruiser. “Go ahead without me.”

  After a moment of delay, the captain’s answer sputtered out of the wall. “Received.”

  Valentine lowered the goblet to the floor, then watched as Sidera Prime obscured the sky, quadrant by quadrant until the floating fortress of steel and glass was the only visible object.

  Every time he was in the space station’s presence, Valentine couldn’t help but wonder how Terrans managed to build Sidera Prime with the limited resources of their dying planet. Thousands of years of senseless ravaging of Earth’s surface had brought its population to the brink of extinction. Amidst famine, wars, natural cataclysms, and atrocities committed in the name of religions asking for sacrifices, a group of scientists devoted their lives to the creation of life-pods, space stations, as a last resort to save what little was left, to save a humanity that was no longer human.

  Shifters, vampires, warlocks and witches, every supernatural being left alive had helped the scientists, and in return they had been granted safe passage on the departing life-pods. Maintaining anonymity while living among humans in such restricted quarters had not been possible. After a few generations, people noticed that some of their companion travelers didn’t age and the paranormal world was forced to come out. The integration process wasn’t always smooth.

  “We are about to dock.” The captain’s warning reminded Valentine to grab the goblet from the floor and reach the chair facing the window.

  Glass secured in the cup holder, he strapped down and waited for the release signal.

  Venezio was a seasoned officer and directed the maneuver smoothly. “We have arrived at our destination,” he said, fifteen minutes later.

  Another hour passed before Valentine could walk through the sealed corridor that would keep the Beagle tethered to the space station for the length of his visit. No humans were allowed on Sidera Prime, and when the hatch door closed behind Valentine, he was completely cut off from any other living being.

  Technically, the only inhabitants of the space station, the members of the Brotherhood of the Wolf, weren’t dead. Given their constant interference in his life, Valentine sometimes hoped they were less alive though. Their official status was Cryogenically Suspended People, and they could vote in Lupine’s political elections, although they rarely exercised the right, delegating to their representative on the planet. Valentine would have liked to renounce the charge and preferred for the Brotherhood to take care of their own business. But after his uncle disappeared when his cruiser was attacked by space pirates, and his father chose death over a lonely life, Valentine was the last standing werewolf in the Coral System. It was his sworn duty to preserve his species’ heritage, but all he could think of now was how much he hated himself for being who he was.

  His beast, usually silent nowadays, nudged at the edge of Valentine’s thoughts with images of a child and his wolf pup, frolicking in a purple meadow. The vignette hurt Valentine more than a physical blow. Happiness and despair mixed. A newborn werewolf was a precious gift, and yet his very existence was rooted in tragedy.

  Valentine murmured, “I love him already,” pressing his gloved hand against his chest. “I’ll love Mirella until the end of time.”

  His wolf whined in response and retreated deep inside Valentine’s mind as he stopped in front of the inner gate. When he placed his booted feet over the red marks on the gray flooring, the entrance at the other side of the hallway was sealed. The hatch’s mechanism locked with a long hiss.

  “Identify yourself,” a disembodied, yet familiar voice said.

  The temperature in the corridor dropped, and Valentine’s breath solidified in white puffs. No amount of clothing would keep the cold at bay. He held his hand high to the violet light of the scanner. His retina was checked next.

  “Welcome home, Master Lobo.”

  The voice jarred on Valentine’s ears. Whereas automated messages were by definition impersonal, Sidera Prime’s voice sounded like his father’s.

  Marcellus had recorded the greetings and orders for the spaceship’s communication system when the original set was erased in a hacking assault by the Front Pro Humanity. FPH launched several attacks against the shifter and vampire community, and when physical warfare didn’t eradicate the non-humans, the guerrillas changed tactics and sabotaged software instead. The front caused more discomfort to their human fellows than to the paranormals, but they kept at it for hundreds of years. Ironically, what almost vanquished shifters and vampires was deep space, the very place they had escaped to in order to save themselves. With their enemies’ ranks finally decimated, the front relented and eventually went dormant. Valentine couldn’t help but draw a comparison between the FPH and this Leader who wanted him and the rest of the paranormal community destroyed.

  A hiss interrupted Valentine’s thoughts. The hatch opened, triangular sections retracting around the circular perimeter, leaving enough space for a person to pass through. Valentine was taller than most, and he stooped under the metal frame to clear the entrance. Once inside Sidera Prime’s hallway, the hatch sealed him into the mausoleum, and he shivered.

  “Brother Aretius would like to speak with you, Master Lobo,” the voice informed Valentine.

  Ahead of him, the hallway lit in sections. A blue arrow indicated the way as it moved across the steel-gray surfaces of the curved walls. He followed the signal, eager to get the audience with his elder out of the way as soon as possib
le.

  Gray corridor after gray corridor, Valentine walked deeper inside the space station. The steel surfaces were polished to a shine and mirrored his dark figure, gliding toward the Brotherhood Chamber. His steps were muted by the polymer flooring that conformed to his soles. The trail of boot prints vanished behind him as he reached the next section, absorbed by the spongy surface that auto-cleaned itself every few minutes. Dust particles weren’t allowed to settle for too long on Sidera Prime for fear of damage to the structure. The sound of vacuuming was a constant noise. Alongside the crisp scent of antiseptic pumped through the ventilation system and the chill temperature, the whoosh immediately transported Valentine back to his youth.

  Among the first generations stellar-born, for the longest time, Valentine’s world had been gray and sterile, then he discovered the public library. A wealth of books about Terran history suddenly available to him, he spent most of his adolescent days holed up in reading pods, feeding his curiosity about the planet of his ancestors until he was an expert on Earth. As he eased into adulthood, his passion grew with him, and he became a collector as well. Nowadays, his Terran library was the most extensive in all the Coral System.

  When he inherited Lobo Manor, Valentine surrounded himself with colorful art and sculptures to erase the gray from his memories, but every time he set foot on Sidera Prime, he was reminded of the unbreakable umbilical cord attaching him to the space station.

  The blue arrow disappeared around the corner, and Valentine hurried to catch up.

  Sidera Prime was built like a snail, tubular sections coiling from the outside toward the center where people lived in quarters resembling kibbutzim, ancient Terran collective communities. As their Earth counterparts, those communities relied on farming to feed the crew, but used hydroponic cultures and the most advanced technology to produce crops that were high in nutrients and small in density. Valentine found himself smiling at the memory of the succulent strawberries he and Gabriel stole from the berries section. Not bigger than hazelnuts, the fruits exploded in one’s mouth and stained one’s teeth with red juices, marking whoever ate them for hours. Not even a good scrub with the air-toothbrush would erase the pink stains from the enamel, and more than once, Valentine and Gabriel were caught red-handed by the pod caretaker.

  The blue arrow reappeared on the wall, and Valentine continued his meandering across space and time, his memories keeping him company, adding people and life to the hallways that had not always been empty and silent. Once, music had filled the space station. Musicians created pieces to celebrate frontier life, and their songs and ballads could be heard blasted through the communication system at all times. Sidera Prime had never slept.

  “Brother Aretius awaits you,” the automated voice said when Valentine stepped in front of a large portal.

  He squared his shoulders, then nodded, and the door opened, the triangular sections unfolding like any other opening on the station.

  “Valentine,” Aretius said as soon as Valentine stepped through the circular gate.

  “Brother.” Valentine looked around the chamber.

  The achingly familiar space hadn’t changed since the last time Valentine had visited Sidera Prime.

  Soon after Marcellus’s death, Valentine was summoned to the space station. In the span of a day, he had become the only known living werewolf in the system, and with that onerous charge came great responsibilities. It might have been because in that same room his elders had informed him of his father’s demise and what his apparent suicide meant to him, but the Brotherhood Chamber still instilled in Valentine a sense of profound dread.

  Shaped like a pentagon, rows of elevated wooden pews framed the perimeter on three sides. The intricately carved benches were a reminder of the werewolves’ wealth and power. Natural materials like wood were Terran relics and expensive extravagancies that had no place on a space station where everything was subjected to the reuse and recycle law. Each of those pews weighed twenty times its nano-fiber equivalent, breaking the station’s weight directive. The Brotherhood was wealthy enough to pay the luxury tax associated with any product imported directly from Earth though, and they had piled up the chamber with heavy wooden furniture to resemble one of those ancient places of cult called churches. Valentine had seen enough pictures of religious temples to recognize the general layout of the room as one. But nobody had ever prayed inside the Brotherhood Chamber.

  With its raised pulpit and dark glasswork on the walls, the space had served its purpose as meeting area first, and perpetual shrine later, and Valentine had despised the chamber all the same. When young, most of his punishments had taken place there, in a public form. As an adult, his dislike for that room hadn’t changed.

  Valentine moved along the perimeter, his hand trailing low over the smooth surfaces of the pews. The faint scent of jasmine oil used to clean the furniture reached his nostrils. For the smell to still linger in the air, mechanical workers must have just finished polishing the wood. As the thought formed in his mind, several air outlets swirled on their axes, and the room was vacuumed of any flowery trace. Absentmindedly, he rubbed his fingers, smearing jasmine oil over his skin as he had done so many times before.

  His eyes went to the glass cylinders carefully arranged against the wall opposite the entrance. Encased in wrought iron, the containers were etched with filigree designs that decorated the transparent glass surfaces. Each cylinder had a different décor, and whereas the rest of the space station was gray, here color abounded. Never had coffins looked more cheerful.

  Aretius’s resting place was situated in the middle of the wall, his body preserved inside the cylinder, floating in a liquid tinted in light blue. His eyes were open, staring at Valentine. Attached to the capsule were copper tubes that created a tree-like structure, which in turn was connected to the tubes from the other cylinders, creating a forest above the resting brothers. The copper pipes kept them alive and in communication with each other and the outer world through the communication mirrors.

  Valentine couldn’t help but spare a glance at the two empty cylinders on either side of Aretius’s. His father’s and his uncle’s capsules that would remain forever empty.

  “I imagine your journey was safe,” Aretius said when Valentine reached the center of the room.

  Valentine never understood the necessity for small talk, especially with someone like Aretius who was well beyond caring for daily life’s struggles. He didn’t say anything back, but waited for the brother to speak next.

  “A word of advice—” The brother seemed to hesitate, which surprised Valentine because he had never known Aretius as anything but direct. “Your father before you sought the answer to your question.” Another long pause followed, the liquid in the tank bubbling slowly, giving the body a resemblance of movement. “The truth was hard on Marcellus.”

  “I am not my father,” Valentine said.

  How many times had he said those words to himself?

  “At the end of this journey, you might discover that you are more similar to him than you think.”

  “Is there anything else I should know?” Valentine asked.

  “Visit again.”

  Valentine nodded at the brother’s order and retraced his steps out of the chamber, relieved that he was now free to enter the Brotherhood Library. But first, he needed to see Mirella.

  Chapter Six

  Black sky and faraway stars framed the Great Plains beyond the windows in the hallway. After wandering through the manor for hours, Mirella stopped in front of Valentine’s art studio and turned to Crea and her two guards. Martali had insisted on the escort when Gabriel and Dragon were called away, and Mirella felt safer in their presence, but now she longed for some privacy.

  “I need a few minutes alone,” she said, pointing her chin at the studio’s door.

  “We must check the room first, Blessed Bride,” Ike, the shorter of the two men, said.

  Mirella nodded and waited outside with Crea.

  “D
o you want me to fetch something to eat?” her lady’s maid asked.

  “No, but thanks. You’ve been feeding me around the clock, and if I don’t watch myself, I’ll soon be so big that I’ll waddle instead of walk.” Mirella pressed her hand against her stomach.

  Crea shook her head and chuckled.

  The two guards reemerged from the studio and Ike held the door for Mirella. “It’s safe,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Mirella stepped inside and closed the door, finally alone with her thoughts for the first time since the attack the night before.

  She closed her eyes and opened her senses. The faintest scent of sage and wild flowers lingered in the room. The memories from the last time she had been in the studio with Valentine assailed her, making her pant. Unable to bear the onslaught of the sensual images, she opened her eyes and walked to the corner. Her husband’s unfinished paintings and his pictures lay arranged against the walls. Some of the canvases were hidden behind white cloths. Curiosity won, and she couldn’t help but pinch the heavy fabric and raise the cover to peek underneath one of the paintings.

  Mirella gasped and brought her hand to her chest. A naked couple locked in a tender embrace was the subject of the painting. Resting with her back against a large man, a petite woman stood, her chin tilted toward him. The lovers’ faces weren’t finished, but she knew Valentine had painted them. The VL brand on the man’s arm and her wedding bracelet were sketched in great detail, but even without them, she would have recognized the hard lines of his body shielding hers from sight. His elegant hand was poised against the round swell of her belly, while the other hand covered her breast.

  Leaving the painting uncovered, Mirella slowly walked to the bed and sat on its frame’s edge, her hands on her lap, sweet tears falling softly from her eyes. She looked at them, the way they would look like in a few months when her pregnancy would start to show.

  “Valentine—” she whispered, lowering herself to the bed and wondering how she could endure a week without him.