by Sky Winters
“I do,” Albion said before Ggregg could even get out the last syllable of his question.
Continuing to smile at them as though he was quite tickled, Ggregg closed the little Bible that he had not once actually read from and held it against his chest. “Then, by the power given to me by Supreme Resistance Leader Admiral Asquataine, I now pronounce you husband and wife!”
A cheer went up from the crowd.
“You may kiss. Always kiss each other. It would be a shame not to.” Ggregg winked at them.
Albion cupped a hand against her cheek and pulled Keandra gently to him. They kissed each other deeply, passionately, fully. She felt as though they were kissing each other’s souls. When at last the kiss ended, she felt dizzy and so happy that the planet could have exploded right then and there and she would have felt satisfied with her life.
Suddenly, Albion lifted her up into his arms and carried her hurriedly down the makeshift aisle while everyone stood and clapped for the happy couple. She was wondering at first if he was just that excited to consummate the marriage, but then she noticed the liquid that was coming out of her from between her legs.
Her water had broken.
CHAPTER SIX
As Albion brought her back into their bedroom, laying her softly down onto the bed, Keandra realized that she was the last person to realize that her labor had begun. She blushed a little when she saw all of the curious eyes in the doorway of their chamber, watching anxiously as though this baby was their own.
Dehneese pushed through the throngs in the way and came to her bedside. She took Keandra’s hand and smiled at her. “I’ve got this,” she said. “I’ve been reading books about this for a while now. I can do this for you.”
Keandra raised her eyebrows at her. “You can have the baby for me?” she asked her jokingly. “That’s a relief. I’m kind of afraid of the pain.”
Her friend laughed and shook a finger. “No, no.”
Albion took her other hand. She could tell that he was nervous. He had gone a paler shade of blue. It was strange to Keandra. He had never once lost his cool before. She supposed that having his child be born was a bigger thing than conquering evil.
Suddenly, the contractions began. Keandra let out a high-pitched squeal that would have broken glass if any was around. “Oh my shiiiiiiiit!!” she screamed. She clutched both Dehneese’s and Albion’s hands and practically shattered their bones.
“It’s okay, silly girl,” Albion said to her sweetly, petting her hair. “It’s going to be okay. Soon you will be holding our baby.”
“Gaahhhh, don’t tell me that!” Keandra shouted at him. “Don’t tell me there’s a light at the end of the tunnel—ARGHHH!!”
She threw her head back and convulsed against the bed. It did not feel like any birth she had ever read about or seen in documentaries. The babies she had seen and read about did not have fucking talons and wings!
Dehneese was calmer than both of them. “Push!” she commanded, moving down to Keandra’s opening so she could watch for the baby’s head or snout or whatever crawled out first.
Keandra pushed, not wanting to spend more time than necessary with the little reptile crawling around inside of her.
“The head is out!” Dehneese suddenly proclaimed, faltering a little bit when she saw how cute he was. “Hello, little one…”
“FOCUUUUUSSSS!”
“Sorry!” Dehneese went back to paying attention to the dilations and contractions, like the studies had taught her.
Albion looked like he was going to be sick.
Keandra could hear something breaking as she gripped his hand and pushed.
Suddenly, there was the sound of something flopping into Dehneese’s outstretched arms.
Waving his injured hand, Albion turned away and threw up into a wastebasket. At least he was considerate enough to do that. Keandra was proud of him for not fainting.
Dehneese focused on getting the baby dragon all cleaned up. She had not been anticipating that Albion’s baby would actually be born in his dragon form. No one had. But a chorus of delight went up as everyone caught a glimpse of the little blueish-purplish baby.
The baby let out a coo sound, and Keandra sat up on the bed. Now that he was out of her, she wanted desperately to see him. Albion took her hand, careful to use the slightly damaged hand so she would not break his other one. The medics were going to have a lot of work cut out for them today.
Grinning and crying a little as the emotion overcame her, Dehneese brought the baby to Keandra and gently laid him down in her arms.
Keandra and Albion started crying along with her when they saw how tiny, adorable and perfect he was.
“Hello,” she whispered to their baby.
He happily closed his eyes and grinned a sharp-toothed grin at her.
“He’s a dragon shifter like me,” Albion said quietly, amazement in his voice.
Their baby crawled around on Keandra’s chest, walking in circles until he finally caught his little tail in his mouth. He soon yawned and went to sleep against her there. She and Albion touched their heads together, fondly watching over him as he slept.
The crowd in the doorway eventually dispersed. There was going to be a lot of drinking and celebrating tonight. No other couple had made it this far. No other baby was born into the Resistance.
“What are you going to call him?” Dehneese asked Keandra, making sure to speak only in a whisper so she would not wake the baby dragon who slumbered so sweetly on Keandra’s chest.
Keandra looked up at Albion, who looked down at her lovingly.
“Albindaro,” she said, uttering the name she had created for the first time. She loved the way that it sounded on her lips and tongue. A mixture of his parents’ names. A good, strong name for a good, strong boy. “His name is Albindaro.”
* * *
In the weeks that followed Albindaro’s birth, the baby dragon grew bigger and stronger. Finally, one day, he shifted for the first time. As a humanoid child, he looked like the perfect mixture between his mother and his father. He had light brown hair, green-gold eyes and skin that was robin’s egg blue.
Keandra’s favorite thing about her son shifting and being strong enough to chill out for a while without needing her was that she was finally about to go out on missions with Albion. Dehneese was the first one to offer to babysit the half-Gekkota, half-human.
“I have never taken care of a baby before,” she said. “But I have read about it, and I am sure I will be fine.”
Laughing a little, Keandra nodded at her. “You will be. It’s not very hard to take care of Albindaro. Especially here, where you’re surrounded by other people who can help you.”
Keandra looked around and realized that Albindaro was nowhere to be found. He was not in his crib or his play area or even his feeding chair.
Dehneese started to freak out. “Has he been abducted by an enemy??”
Before panicking, Keandra thought rationally about the situation. “Wait, wait… I think I know where he is.”
She left the Resistance encampment and, sure enough, there was her son. He was sitting in his father’s arms on top of one of the mountain’s many dark gray boulders. Keandra laughed a little and climbed up there to join them. “There you are,” she said. “I thought that one of the Hoths had taken you both away.”
Albion smiled at her and handed the baby over to her. Keandra rocked Albindaro, gazing lovingly down at him. Now that he had taken his humanoid form, she wondered if he would mostly stay in it like Albion did. His dragon form had been a shocking and hard to deliver shape, but he was also quite cute as a dragon and she hoped to see more of it.
“So, what do you think?” Albion asked her. “Now that Albindaro is with us, do you want to hop onto a starship and go back to Earth? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. This planet is not a good place for a child to be raised…”
Keandra shook her head. She had given it a lot of thought. “I miss Earth sometimes, and it will always be
home to me, but my place is not there. My place is here on Hoth with you and the Resistance. Albindaro will be happy here. He is surrounded by beings who are more like him. And plus, you know how Dehneese would lose it if we even mentioned that we might take him away.”
Albion did an accurate impression of the yellow alien, gasping and throwing his arms in the air. “Not the baby!”
They laughed together, and Albindaro giggled along with them as if he somehow had an idea of what they were talking about.
“Shall we, then?” Albion asked her.
Keandra smiled. “We shall.” She stood up then, still carefully holding onto their baby. “But we’re not taking him. He’s too small. He deserves to have a blissful childhood. At least, as blissful as possible.”
Albion stood up and climbed down from the boulder with her, making sure that she did not slip or lose her grip on their baby. “He will have a perfectly idyllic childhood here, surrounded by thousands of doting fans.”
“They’re all his aunts and uncles,” she joked, grinning down at Albindaro, who was busily chewing on her shirt sleeve.
They brought the baby back to the compound, and Keandra handed him over to Dehneese. The other woman practically hopped up and down, she was so excited.
Keandra laughed. “Don’t do that too much if you want to keep that uniform looking nice and clean,” she teased.
With their baby in good hands, Albion and Keandra left hand in hand. She felt like taking off at a run, and that was much more exiting when he shifted into his dragon body. Then she ran to him and jumped onto his back like she had been preparing all of her life for this moment.
She had once thought that she did not want to go riding off into the sunset with her Gekkota friend. But now, things had changed. Now, Albion was her husband. They loved each other. And the prospect of sunset was a delicious one.
THE END
ALIEN’S MATE
CHAPTER 1
“I’ve never been to Mexico before. Have you?” The excitable woman next to Valerie had been chattering for the entire tour, and Valerie zoned out a few times as she tried to keep up with the information spewing from the tour guide’s mouth.
“No,” she replied abruptly, and hoped the woman would shut up.
But she kept going. “I’ve always wanted to come here, to visit the Mayan ruins, but I’ve never gotten the chance, and as soon as I won that ticket, I was screaming and…” She stopped then when she saw Valerie move forward, a clear indication that she wasn’t listening at all.
Valerie side stepped the woman, who seemed a little bit too lonely and in need of company, and caught up with the rest of the group. She slapped at a mosquito then that had decided it was time for lunch, and then fanned before her, in a desperate attempt to scatter the small flying insects that had started to gather into a swarm. She looked back at the woman, who quickly turned her head away in embarrassment over her earlier babbling. Valerie thought of apologizing, but she knew that would lead to more unnecessary and awkward conversations.
“The Mayan ruins depict a rich history of a talented set of people pre-dating 1500 BC, and often referred to as the Pre-Classic period. They were the pioneers of the first formal writing style, the hieroglyphic script, and they used their knowledge of the stars to document events in history, and as some would believe, even the future. It was rumored that their calendar ended in May 2012, and since their predictions are usually correct, it was thought that life as we knew it would end then. We know differently now, right?” he asked, and some members of the group chuckled.
“The Chichen Itza was the most important Mayan city, boasting impressive Central American architecture, and was oftentimes considered a magical place. Here, in the Coba, it is hard not to believe that.”
“I am most impressed by the fact that they had no technology, or charts, and they were able to make those massive pyramids, something modern man is yet to copy,” a bald man interjected. “I would have liked to be there back then.”
“I can understand how they could do that,” another man, perhaps a professor added. “Consider the early Greeks, like Galileo, who taught us how to read the stars. Back then, it all came back to the stars.”
“Or maybe they were aliens,” a young man said, and his group of friends with him chuckled.
“And that is not far from some of the stories we have heard,” the guide said. “It is often rumored that the Mayans were connected to aliens, which gave birth to their genius in architecture, language and art. It is said that they had pathways that connected both worlds, a gateway that the Mayans often navigated.”
“No way,” the young man said. “That’s awesome.”
Valerie listened to them, half of the times, as they trudged through the undergrowth in the sparsely lit and cold jungle. The path was relatively wide, an indication that it was travelled on a lot, but at the moment she regretted not wearing better clothes. Mosquitoes, flies and gnats whizzed by her face and ears and occasionally stopped to sip from her. She saw some of the others fanning this way and that too, but she would take this torment over the one that had been served her by her ex-husband. This trip was a way to get away from him, to get away from it all. Her weight hadn’t seemed to matter to him; in fact, he had encouraged her late night eating on occasion. To find out that he had been cheating with a skinnier woman had been like rubbing salt in the wound. But he could have her. She was beautiful enough to get another man on her own; a man that would love her, warts and all.
So distracted was she by her thoughts that she had wandered away from the group without realizing it. She stopped dead in her tracks then and listened, but all she heard were the sounds of the jungle; the gentle flowing of water over rocks; the fluttering of birds as they abandoned their nests overhead; the chirping of crickets and the croaking of frogs. But she hear none else. She stumbled along until she came to a fork in the trail, and after a moment of hesitation, she headed onto the path that led to the right.
It brought her to a dense overgrowth, and she called and looked around for anything or anyone familiar. Her feet were beginning to rub against the hard rubber of her boots, and she decided she would just return to the clearing and wait for the group to return. She had seen enough of the Copa anyway. It was getting darker, and she wasn’t sure how far back the trail went, so it was no surprise her adrenaline started pumping as she imagined she might get lost. She walked as fast as she could, and in her hurry, she didn’t see the slippery incline a few feet away. She stepped hard against the embankment, and before she knew it, she slipped and slid about one hundred feet down, the twigs and leaves slapping against her face as she whistled by.
Her screams went unheard, and when she came to rest again, she stood and looked at the muddy mess against her jeans.
“Oh man,” she sighed as she tried to rub the stain out, which only served to make it worse. Then she looked around and realized she was as far as she could be from the trail. “How do I get out of here?” she asked silently as she tried to climb the incline, using the hanging vines and exposed roots as leverage. They kept slipping from her grasp, so she decided she would walk parallel to the trail on the lower level.
She walked for a few hundred yards, and was surprised to realize she was right back at the spot where she had begun. She had made a complete circle, but what was most discombobulating was that on the second time around, the only thing familiar was the incline.
CHAPTER 2
“What the…?” Valerie said to herself as she turned about a couple of times. “Wasn’t I just here?” She wiped sweat beads from her brow, an unusual act considering she was in the middle of a cold and wet jungle.
She started again, but the path that she walked before seemed to have disappeared, and she stepped into a clearing that led to a stream instead. “Where did this come from?” She was growing worried and concerned that she was indeed lost, and that no one would find her. “Hello!” she started screaming at the top of her lungs. She knew better than to go across,
or she would really be lost. The tour didn’t feature a stream, even though there were supposed to be lakes in the Copa. Her idea of a simple getaway had exploded into something far more than she had bargained for.
She turned around and started walking in the direction she had come. Maybe if she went up the incline, she would find the path again before it got too dark. Her heart was thumping and her chest was heaving as she broke into a slight run. She got to the place, and just like before, she started maneuvering her way to the top by clinging to vines and roots. She exerted more effort this time as she kept her attention focused on the sun taking a darker shade and dipping further west.
She kicked and grabbed, dragging her oversized weight to the top of the incline, and when she got there, she flung herself over the embankment and stretched out on her back. Her breathing came short now, and she stared at the ceiling made of green that towered above her for a considerable time while she waited for her body to slow down. When her breathing resumed normalcy, she flipped over and grabbed onto an overhanging branch for support, and scrambled to her feet. She patted her hands against her jeans and started in the original direction. She came to the fork in the road as before, but there was no reason to expect there would be anyone waiting there, and she wasn’t about to wait for them either.
She started running down the path, pushing the oversized leaves from her path, and stopping once to look at what seemed like a giant mosquito fly by her face. Panic surged in her now, and she could hear the blood rushing through her veins as she went as fast as her feet could take her. And then she felt the sting as something wrapped around her feet. She fell to the ground. There was something like a cord wrapped around her feet, and it prevented her from moving.
She quickly worked her fingers over the hard cords, and as soon as she stood and started running again, she heard wails and cries echoing through the trees. Valerie turned around and around, as she tried to discern the source of the cries. Then she started running again, and came to an abrupt halt when she saw the giant animal standing before her. Its head was like a wolf, but it was as big as a bear, and it growled at her as it commanded her to remain. She did not, and instead started moving slowly backwards. Terror seized her, and with the adrenaline still pumping in her veins, she turned around and started running again.
