by Amanda Boone
Then she felt someone grab her wrist. She turned with her fist clenched. “Get the fuck off!” she yelled.
The man, whose face was covered in blood, glared down at her with dark eyes. “Stay and fight!”
Anita bit her lip, punching him hard in the gut, and kept running. Through the night, she could see a figure coming towards her, a silhouette she would recognize anywhere. “Bruce,” she whispered.
Then she felt something hard hit her in the small of her back. She stumbled to a stop, the pain taking her breath away.
“Who do you think you are?”
It was the same man. His bloodshot eyes made it obvious he was strung-out, overly excited. He held a knife in his right hand.
Her heart fluttered in her chest. She was nowhere near skilled enough to fight someone with a knife who was twice her size.
“Let it go.” Bruce’s authoritative voice cut through the noise.
The man sneered at the both of them.
“I’m warning you,” he said in a dark voice, wrapping his arm around her waist.
The man lunged at them, swinging his knife.
In one deft movement, Bruce shoved Anita behind him and bared his teeth at the man, an inhuman roar erupting from him.
Anita could feel it rattling her bones.
Before he had even finished, the man ran away.
Bruce turned to face her. “What the hell are you doing out in this?”
Anita threw her hands up in exasperation. “I could ask you the same thing!”
His chest rose as he sucked in a deep breath. “Visiting a friend,” he said tersely as he grasped her arm kept walking in the direction he had come.
“That wasn’t human,”
He shook his head. “Now is not the time.”
Anita stopped in the middle of the street, crossing her arms. Even though they had travelled considerably far away from the center of the trouble, the air was still alight with the aura of chaos. “Look, I don’t know what secret you have… But I want to keep it. You can trust me.”
Bruce chuckled, drawing her in for a kiss. “I know. I’m counting on it.”
Although he didn’t divulge anything else, she had a feeling things were changing… Hopefully for the better.
End of Part 2.
Space Tigers 3
Book 3: An Act of War
Book 3: An Act of War
Prologue
Bruce slammed his fist against the house he had trekked through protests and unrest to get to. The aging wood of the door seemed to Bruce, in the dim morning light, like it could crumble at any moment. The protests and rioting had reached their zenith right when he returned Anita to her home, so when he circled back around, it seemed to have died down. There were lines of men and women talking into their microphones and at their camera men, trying to get the most precise scoop of what had just happened. As he slipped in between the trucks and the people, he couldn’t help but feel relieved at the fact that no one seemed to notice him. His little stunt—invoking his tiger powers—could have exposed everything, but had seemed to go unnoticed. Soon, he would be getting on a plane to sell this resolution to the United Nations. He would be hundreds of miles away from all of this—away from Anita. The distance might clear his mind and silence the inexplicable pounding of his heart. At least, that’s what he had hoped.
So he continued to pound on the door until it was ripped cleanly away from his hand. Boris stood before him with his ruffled blonde hair and a dark, terry cloth robe draped over his frame. “Fancy that,” he said as he stepped aside, gesturing for Bruce to enter.
Bruce stalked over the threshold, his eyes sweeping the room, taking in the boxes, the piles of things: papers, files, clothes, kitchen stuff. He came to a stop in the center of the living room, crossing his arms defiantly. “What did they send you here for?”
Boris shut the door behind him, walking into the living room and taking a seat on his couch. “You.” He raised an eyebrow.
Bruce glowered at him. “Does he not trust me? Is there anything I have done that has worried him?” He couldn’t understand how, in the mere weeks that he had been on Earth, in the midst of only the first phase of the grander Plan, he could have upset the emperor this much.
“You’ve taken a lover.”
Bruce furrowed his brow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He hadn’t mated with anyone since… Lexus. He cocked his head to the side. “Do you know your girlfriend stowed?”
Boris hardly responded, except for a tiny flinch Bruce would have missed if he didn’t know him so well. “How do you know this?”
Bruce’s heart fluttered in his chest. He was beginning to think that bringing Lexus up to Boris was a complete mistake. “She came to me.”
Boris leaned over, resting his elbows on his knees, his face slowly turning a crimson color of rage.
Bruce was beginning to feel distinctly as if he had let the bull out of its cage.
“You mean to tell me that she stowed on my craft, but then tracked you down?” His angry voice cut through the tense air.
Bruce could think of nothing else to do but to change the subject. “I don’t have a lover.” But it was as he said this that he noticed something out of the corner of his eye. He stepped back to find a beret on the rug. He suddenly thought of Anita, but dismissed the image of her running through the dense crowd of dangerous people, her hair flying and her lipstick smudged, almost as soon as it came to mind. “But it seems that you have.”
Boris leaned back in the couch, stretching his hands out to either side of him, a mischievous gleam in his eye. “Of course I have.”
“Who?”
Boris shrugged. “She’s stunning, tall, smart. She’s got this kind of dusty blonde hair, and… those eyes.”
Anita. “What?”
“Any eye for an eye—”
Bruce crossed the rug in two long strides, clenched his right hand into a fist, and then drove it into Boris’s face.
Boris let out a yelp of pain, doubling so far over that his head landed in-between his knees. When he finally looked up, Bruce saw the blood spilling from the wound on his right cheek. Boris pressed his tongue through it from the inside of his mouth, flexing his jaw. “And you don’t have a lover?”
“She’s not my lover. But she also isn’t pawn for your petty revenge scheme.” But as Bruce said this, his body trembled with anger. The mere thought that Boris, or anyone, had laid a hand on her… The image of her delicate fingers running through his barbaric, blonde hair…
He squinted his eyes as he threw yet another punch, but Boris caught it in the air.
“She isn’t worth your anger. None of them are.”
Bruce ripped his wrist away from Boris’s hand, immediately driving a hook into his gut with his opposite hand.
Boris grunted, then grabbed his shoulders with both hands, shoving his knee into his torso.
Bruce staggered backwards, his head ringing from the pain.
But Boris followed after him. “You have a job to do…An allegiance to your own kind.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“Anita isn’t even worth being used as a pawn.”
Those words cut Bruce, but just as he tried to shove Boris, the man wrapped his hands around his neck in a chokehold so strong, it lifted him off the ground. “I am your handler, and it is my responsibility to make sure that you carry this out.”
Bruce could hardly breathe. The room was beginning to grow fuzzy around him. His hands clutched at Boris’s, trying everything to break away from them.
“Phase One is almost complete. No time for lovers… or even sex. You have a world to end.” With that, Boris released him.
Bruce fell onto the rug, coughing and spitting, his heart hammering at the thought of what would happen to Anita in all of this.
Chapter One
Anita cruised through the streets as soon as dawn broke. The protests seemed to have travelled over the course of the night. Th
e asphalt was a carpet of broken glass. Only walls stood where the shops had been, reduced to tombs of the ash and ruin. Her heart dropped, like a useless dead thing, right into the pit of her stomach, her gut churning at the sight of it all.
The crimson sunrise bathed everything in red as the odd cop or two patrolled the streets. As she drove at a crawling speed, she caught sight of paramedic vans and protesters and rioters all mixed in together, trying to catch their bearings and attend to their wounds.
Even through the vent of her car, she could smell the funk of smoke and blood. The thick, rancid scent was so much to bear that she cut off her heater, more willing to deal with the cold than with the smell of a profound social failure. She finally turned off the main road and onto a narrower, much quieter one on her journey to Bruce’s house. When she had woken from her short catnap at the break of dawn, the first thing she had thought of was Bruce. Her gut had been flooded with a strange apprehension, as if whatever was going on between them would reach its tragic, natural end far too soon.
With the sound of his roar replaying over and over again in her head, she realized that she needed to see him. The last time they had talked, he had finally opened up a little. He said that he trusted her, counted on her silence. Now, she was impatient to test that trust.
As she pulled into his short driveway and cut the engine, she couldn’t help but to notice that his house looked far different in the daylight. She could see the fading, chipping paint, the aged wood that seemed to be falling right into itself, the unkempt yard, and the unhappy looking pots of dead flowers lining his walkway. “Strange,” she murmured to herself as she climbed out of her midsized sedan and walked up to the door, all the while wondering why someone who made as much as Bruce did, had the background that he did, and presented himself as totally put together could let his house go like this.
She knocked on the door, part of her expecting to be ignored. But much to her surprise, she immediately heard footsteps traipsing toward the front door.
In the next moment, the door yanked open, but Anita’s face fell at the sight of a woman in a tank top and panties, her hair ruffled and her eyes full of sleep.
“What the fuck?” It slipped out of her mouth before she could gain her composure enough to stop it.
“Who the hell are you?” the woman asked, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and running her hands through her dark hair.
“Where’s Bruce?” Anita demanded, her stomach rolling as she glanced over the woman’s shoulder, hoping with everything in her that he would materialize and clear the situation up.
The woman scoffed, stepping aside. “You must be Anita.”
“How do you know my name?” she asked.
The woman shrugged. “You’re more popular than you think.”
Anita was trying to think of the right question to ask, the right thing to say or do… Anything to stop standing there in Bruce’s doorway looking extremely stupid. The woman impatiently gestured for Anita to enter. “So, are you coming in or what?”
Anita could think of nothing better to do than to step into Bruce’s house. Oddly enough, the inside of it reminded her a lot of the inside of Boris’s house. It looked half-unpacked and completely disheveled, as if he were either in the process of moving in, or of moving out. Either way, the inside matched the outside in the fact that it was so unkempt, and in how old and neglected it seemed. “Where is Bruce?”
“He had to run an errand,” the woman said as she walked past her, taking a seat on the couch and clutching the pillow in her lap.
Anita stood awkwardly in front of her. “So, what are you? To Bruce, I mean.”
The woman shrugged. “An old lover.”
Anita could feel the butterflies dying in her stomach, one by one.
The woman’s eyes swept over her. “What are you doing here? He couldn’t have invited you.”
Anita sucked in a breath. “I just had a couple of questions.” As soon as she started talking, she realized she really didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to be doing in Bruce’s house. “We need to talk.”
The woman let out a short, humorless laugh. “You want answers, don’t you?”
Anita narrowed her eyes. “So, you know about Bruce?”
She chuckled, gesturing around her. “Does it look like I know about Bruce? I live with him.”
Anita could feel her skin crawling with anticipation as she took a step towards this complete stranger. “Will you tell me then? Will you tell me what he is? What he’s hiding?”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “And betray him?”
Anita felt ashamed of herself for even asking. She took a step back.
“Look, human, the fact of the matter is, you wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
Human? “What is there not to believe?”
The woman sat back on the couch, shaking her head. “Your curiosity will kill you one day.”
Anita huffed out a breath, annoyed with the fact that this complete stranger was being so condescending. “Look, I’m not leaving until I speak to him.”
The woman smiled, as if amused by her, then pointed at the grandfather chair across the room. “Fine. Sit. Wait.”
Unable to think of anything else to do, Anita begrudgingly complied.
Chapter Two
Anita waited for almost an hour, watching the sun rise to its perch high in the sky and the crimson dawn turn into an ironically sunny morning. She smacked her lips, her craving for caffeine steadily becoming overwhelming. She tapped her foot, wringing her hands and slowly growing more and more impatient.
It was then that she heard a noise.
The woman, who had refrained from speaking to her the entire time, instead occupied herself with a copy of the yesterday’s newspaper, looked up at the sound, a smile stretching across her face. “There he goes,” she said just as the front door opened and closed and footsteps followed.
Anita gasped when she caught her first glimpse of Bruce. His eyes were barely opened, and he moved around with an odd, ghostly manner. His right arm was pressed to his torso as he bent slightly over himself.
He stopped short, his eyes darting from woman to woman. Anita watched his gaze harden for a short second before he nodded at the other woman. “Can I speak to you?”
She shrugged. “I’m all ears.”
He glowered at her, his lips barely moving as he said, “Outside.”
Although Anita was not the subject of his apparent frustration, she couldn’t help but to feel at least slightly worried for this unknown woman, and for herself.
However, the woman didn’t seem the slightest bit concerned. She let out a groan as she stood up and followed him back down the front hallway.
“What the fuck, Lexus!”
It was all Anita heard before the front door slammed behind them. She sat, not-so-patiently waiting for them to come back inside for almost two minutes before she started to pick out the sounds. They were yelling so loud that she could hear them through the exterior walls and down the hallway. She listened to their incoherent voices for a few seconds before she decided she couldn’t take it anymore.
She stood up and tiptoed down the hallway, driven by a reckless curiosity and a complete disregard for what might happen to her if they found her listening.
“… to sit here and wait for me until I came back!” Anita caught the last bits of Bruce’s words.
“Do you have any idea how boring it is just sitting around?” the woman yelled back.
“Lower your voice.”
Anita’s eyes went wide at the severity of his tone.
But, nevertheless, Lexus seemed unfazed. “You think you can just do whatever you want, don’t you? Even fall in love with a human.”
There it was again: human. It was odd the way Lexus said that, as if she herself wasn’t human… and neither was Bruce. The thought made her stomach churn.
“She’s not just a human. And I’m not in love with her.”
“
You entertain her curiosity. You let her in—”
“You let her in!”
“She wouldn’t have come here if you hadn’t done something to make her believe that you would even listen to her questions.”
There was a pause, a brief silence on the other side of the wall.
“What did you do, Bruce?”
“My mistake was not trusting Anita, nor was it even beginning to feel anything for a human. My mistake was letting you into my house. You could have turned her away. You could have lied to her, anything to cover me, but you refused. You don’t want to cover me. You don’t want to protect me. You want me reduced to nothing so that you can swoop in and manipulate me.”
“Ha! What are you, a child? It is not my job to protect you.”
“Then why are you here, you useless piece of shit?”
“Useless piece of shit? I detest the habits you have picked up, especially Anita.”
“She’s not a habit. She’s a person.”
“Exactly.”
There was a shuffling of feet as Anita heard someone go for the door. She scurried into a small room just off the main hallway, which she quickly learned was a guest bathroom, and shut the door behind her.
“Get out of my house. I don’t care where you go. I don’t care if you ever return to Hugo. I just don’t ever want to see you again.”
As she dropped onto the toilet, Anita’s jaw fell open. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what Lexus was feeling right then. There was more shuffling of feet, then a “Fuck you Bruce!” right before the front door opened and closed for the last time.
Anita tiptoed out of the bathroom to find Bruce standing in his small kitchen, his hands resting on the counter, his head bowed. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“If you were, you wouldn’t have come,” he said without even looking at her.
Anita came to stand next to him. She couldn’t help but notice how hurt, how lonely, he looked, with his tired eyes, his tense muscles, his set jaw… His empty house. “I suppose now is not the time—”
