Learning to Blush: Swarii Brides, Book Two

by Korey Mae Johnson

  Penny cocked her head to the side, her eyebrow raising, wondering if Graham was hitting on her. She turned to Thorton, who was now inclining his head to the right, looking thoughtful. “She does, doesn’t she? Hopefully she’s not as poisonous.”

  “The prettiest flowers always are,” Penny said with a slight laugh, and then winked. “I’m afraid I have no idea who you are, outside of text-messaging.” She thought he would eventually let go of her hand, but instead Graham began to slowly lead her off around the dance floor and towards the tables. Thorton followed closely behind her. “So… So who are you, Graham?”

  “Your new cousin, I imagine,” Graham replied simply. “I’ve been married to Eleanor for a year now—um, over a year, I suppose.” His eyes suddenly rolled back like someone doing math in his head. “Yeah, about twelve of your months or thereabouts.”

  “My months?” she echoed, just because it struck her as odd. He said it as if he normally measured time differently.

  Well, Graham didn’t respond to her confused look. He just continued to gently pull her towards a table filled with her brothers and Mike. Thorton said, seeming to notice the apprehensive look on her face, “We met Ellie under a covert military operation near her location. It’s sort of a long story. We’re sort of from… far away.”

  “I got that much from your accent,” she replied with a laugh, of course thinking that they meant Denmark or Ireland or Russia—their accent was still impossible to place, and she had been very bad at fingering accents, anyway. Graham pulled out a chair for her at the table and motioned towards the seat before letting her go. Slowly, she sat, surprised that he pushed the chair in for her as she sat, like a proper gentleman. “Where is Ellie, anyway?”

  “Getting us food.”

  Penny turned her head at the answer and saw Ellie pad up to the table with a beer in one hand and a pop in the other. She handed Graham the beer. “Shesha,” Ellie said as if she was explaining what the drink was. The strange word wiped the look of confusion off his face and made him sniff his drink.

  Ellie turned back towards the rest of the table. “I’ve decided that—”

  “I’ve decided, actually,” Graham added quickly as he pulled a chair up to the end of the booth and sat down on it.

  “We’ve decided that we’re not leaving here without giving you guys some sort of non-B.S. explanation of what the hell’s going on,” Ellie said without missing a beat. She looked like she was going to just stand next to Graham at the table, rather than sitting in a chair, but Graham suddenly swept his hands around her waist and brought her into his lap, where she sat, looking extremely uncomfortable and unhappy about it.

  Mike didn’t notice. He ran his finger over the rim of his beer glass and said, “That’s mighty kind of you, Sis,” he replied crisply. He still seemed upset that he was unable to get Thorton shit-faced, which was the original plan. Thorton’s eyes didn’t even seem glassy despite all the beer he'd drunken that night.

  Thorton sat down next to Penny, although it seemed like he did so just after deciding that squishing her into the booth would keep her not visible to the rest of the room. “Don’t get too angry with her for a fib or two,” Thorton told Mike. “The truth is stranger than fiction, I should warn you.” He turned his head slowly and asked Ellie in a different language, “Bue li lia dek?”

  Ellie shrugged and replied, “Zili.”

  Tim scrunched his face up with confusion. “Dude,” he whined to Ellie, obviously not liking being excluded from any conversation, “I didn’t even know you knew another language.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know, Tim,” Ellie assured frankly, looking up at him with a distant expression, like someone about to ask some of their family members to bury a body for them.

  The expression on her face made her family all lean in toward her as if she turned on a magnet. “The waiting is killing me,” Tom clarified, stealing the hat off of Mike’s head for no particular reason before putting it on his own and trying not to look like he cared about Ellie’s story. “Tell us or don’t.”

  Ellie didn’t look comfortable, but she seemed less so when she shifted her weight on Graham’s lap and cleared her throat. “Well… You see… You’re not gonna believe this, but let me get this out.” She lifted her chin stoically. “When I disappeared a couple of years ago, I was actually abduct—”

  Suddenly all the lights went out in the entire restaurant.

  There was the sound of screaming from shocked customers, startled at the sudden pitch-blackness of their surroundings. There was no light anywhere. Not even from the outside streetlamps.

  “Hold on, people! I have generators that will turn on any second!” Landon called from the bar.

  But the generators didn’t turn on. Not in the next second or the second after that.

  Through the darkness, eyes glinted at Penny—reflecting non-existent light like a hunting predator. Their eyes shifted around and then they disappeared for a moment before returning. She realized then that the eyes were Thorton’s. “Iki dun le’tie, Frian zu,” his deep voice rolled out in a concerned hum.

  “Huh?” Penny asked, and realized alarm was in her voice. Although she was normally fine without lights, there was something about it that gave her goose bumps.

  Ellie’s small hand reached across and clutched hers. “Keep close. We need to get out of here,” she said, her voice a hushed whisper.

  “Why?” Tim asked, clueless.

  “We were followed. They must have spotted us landing in this area from orbit,” Thorton answered. She could hear him clutch Tim and Tom tightly and pulled them from their chairs. Graham must have just grabbed Mike, because he made a displeased grump from being touched in the darkness.

  “Who followed you?” Mike asked in a frustrated hiss.

  “Bad guys. Bad guys with big guns who are good at finding people they don’t like.” Ellie couldn’t have been more puzzling if she tried.

  “Huh?”

  “Move it, Kids!” Graham hissed, and Penny felt Ellie pull her through the darkness, weaving effortlessly through the room. Finally the cold air of the parking lot hit her face, but there were no stars overhead. Everything was still completely dark. It was as if a blanket had been pulled over her eyes; she couldn't see her hand in front of her face!

  WHOOOM. There was a blaring noise that was so low-pitched that it felt like it was vibrating Penny’s brain. She let go of Ellie and clutched her hands to her ears.

  “Penny! Where are you?” Ellie sounded like she was already across the parking lot.

  “What is that?” she called out after the silence returned.

  A strong hand closed around her upper arm. “Penny, we need to go,” Thorton’s voice warned in her ear.

  “No!” Penny refused, jerking her arm away from him. “What the hell is going on?”

  Suddenly a large, blue light lit the sky like a lightning strike… Revealing one very large, very round spaceship. Penny could barely breathe when she saw it—she had never been so awed or afraid in her life. Thorton moved fast and quickly tossed her over his broad shoulder. “Don’t worry, I got you,” she heard him say. In the distance, she heard Mike’s car slowly whine and roar to life, and it sounded like it wasn’t happy about it, as if it had had a dead battery before.

  Don’t worry? “Are-are those-those…?” Even she sounded out of breath, but he was the one racing into the woods.

  “They’re called Frians.”

  “Frians?”

  “They’ve been harvesting humans for decades for their slave population. They probably saw us fly in and are scouting the area for us… But we’ll be okay. I promise,” Thorton replied with a hoarse whisper as he sprinted towards the car.

  Penny just closed her eyes and tried to wake herself up from this nightmare.

  Chapter Six

  “What the fuck?” Mike squeaked out. He didn’t look very well; under his overly freckled skin, his face was completely drained of color. He had never been so terrifie
d.

  “Buckle up,” Ellie advised, sitting in the front-middle seat of the SUV as it raced along the completely black roads with no headlights on.

  “Why? What the fuck’s going on? Are those ALIENS?”

  Her reply lacked all emotion, scared or otherwise, as she said, “Yeah, big, scaly green ones.” Suddenly Graham hit a speed bump that sent them all flying. The boys’ faces smacked against the dashboard of the car while Thorton’s grip around Penny’s body merely tightened as he held her firmly on his lap. “Told ya to buckle up.”

  “Dude, this is fucking nuts! We’re gonna die! You can’t see a goddamned thing!” Tom shrieked, reaching over Graham’s chair to try to see how fast they were going. “We can’t do ninety on this road!”

  “Graham’s eyesight is twenty/twenty right now, guys. Just try not to throw up or piss your pants,” Ellie assured, but even she was gripping her hands around Graham’s torso and was holding on tight.

  “Do you even know where you’re going?”

  “Yeah, we just came from there,” Ellie replied, looking like she was forcing herself to act like this was normal. “I dropped off some of my stuff on the way to the bar.”

  “From where?” Mike demanded.

  “Um…”

  “Guys,” Graham said patiently, although his jaw was locked, his eyes focused on the road ahead and the alien spacecraft in the rearview mirror with searchlights beaming around and through the nearby trees, looking for them. Graham seemed to be swerving around the searchlights, keeping perfectly in the veil of darkness with the car's headlights still off. “I need you to bear with me, okay? Let’s play the quiet game.”

  “Graham, we’re all adults here…” Ellie said with a nervous giggle.

  Graham swerved around another search light, saying, “And you lose the practice round, Sweetie. The object is to stay quiet so I don’t make a wrong turn and kill us all.”

  That definitely made them all very silent, even though there were definitely more questions to ask, and at least a million of those questions were very important.

  Penny began to whisper, “Where're we going?” to Thorton, whose lips were only an inch from her ear.

  “Somewhere safe,” he said, and then he turned towards the backseat, where the boys were looking forward with frightened, dead eyes… Except for Tim, who seemed to think that this was all just a big joke or a video game, since his eyes were round and wild with excitement. “Guys, when we get out of the car, I need you to follow orders. I need you to go exactly where we tell you to, and I need you do exactly what we tell you to do. No questions. Go fast. If you’re slow, we will all die. If you ask questions, we will all die. If you stop to gawk or look around, we will all die.”

  “Erhm,” Penny said uncomfortably, wondering how the night could have turned so dark and terrifying so quickly. She wasn’t used to feeling afraid. She had Mike and two older brothers, all who were huge—fear was one thing she had never been bedfellows with.

  “Do you understand?” Thorton asked seriously.

  The boys nodded, and remained silent, but Penny began to shake her head, fret swelling up in her chest. What were they about to see? Why wouldn’t they answer any of their questions? She had a horrible feeling. “I can’t do this. I can’t…” she said, trembling.

  “I got you, Beautiful. Don’t worry. When we stop, I'll carry you. Just close your eyes. Can you do that? Just close your eyes for me…”

  * * *

  “Open your eyes for me, Beautiful…” Thorton’s voice echoed above her. Penny felt his gloved fingers play with the hair around her face. Her eyes fluttered open to the dim, golden light that lit through the main cabin on the Swarii Space Vessel. Thorton grinned kindly and said, “Another bad dream?”

  She nodded. She’d had bad dreams nearly every night since they’d all escaped from the Frians six weeks ago.

  The escape hadn’t been easy. After they got out of the car, there had been a spaceship in front of them that they had to board just to keep from being blasted at from aliens on-high. And talk about ‘blasting’! Half the forest was on fire. And worse, they were chased out of the atmosphere; the moon had gone by with a swift blur as Graham and Thorton tried to pilot them through the galaxy with a whole mess of very pissed off Frians right on their house-sized ship’s ass, trying to blow them up.

  Those damn green, scaly aliens nearly succeeded, too. They certainly hadn't offered them any breathing room, and they fried half of the outer parts of the ship, including a lot of their fuel and even their communications tower, which meant that now they had no radio and no way to contact help. Luckily, they had enough to soon be able to get them to an almost safe and semi-populated solar system that might have the parts they needed…

  But still, they had been on the ship over a month already, and she still couldn’t get over the horror that she had felt.

  “How’d you know I was having nightmares?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. When she had fallen asleep, she had been in the middle of playing a board game with her brothers. Now, the board game was cleared away and the boys were seated in front of the over-sized monitor, playing Swarii video games, completely dead to everything and everyone around them.

  “Let’s just say you’re a mumbler. Let me get you some water or something.” He gave her a friendly pat on the hip as he slid her feet off of his lap. With a weary groan, he walked around the sofa and towards the kitchen.

  She watched him go, mostly admiring his body from her view over the back of the sofa. It didn’t really matter if he was one-hundred percent alien. He was one hot speciman with a fine, fine ass, not to mention he sort of had a roguish pirate thing always going on due to the small gold loop in one of his ears and the tattoo that curled up his neck. She wished he would take off his shirt so she could see the whole thing… But so far, he hadn't given her that delight. He was certainly playing hard-to-get!

  Thorton had shown interest in her, he was just shy… Even though he didn't seem shy about anything else. Penny wasn’t unused to chasing down men, but after the last month, she was beginning to run out of breath.

  She still jumped off the couch and padded after him towards the kitchen, her feet covered by only her socks. “Hey, Thorton?”

  “Hm?”

  She sat down in a chair that was bolted to the floor next to a very large dining table. It looked like something she’d find on a submarine… If the submarine was built in the Victorian era yet had the technology of four millennia in the future. Every time she looked around, the word 'steam-punk' came to mind. She played with the edge of the table. “When do we land?”

  “On 67761?” he asked, and Penny always marveled how he and Graham could keep the planets straight if they saw them all as numbers… They’d said they would get more confused if they all had names, since there were so many known planets. “I don’t really know—that’s Graham’s area. Tonight or tomorrow, I figure. Then we’ll probably stay for a couple of weeks doing repairs…” He turned and put a glass of water in front of her with a little slice of lemon on the edge of it, just for decoration. He wouldn’t have done that for the boys.

  “Do you want to…? You know… Hang out when we get there?” she asked, peering at him suggestively. He was now foraging in the several refrigerators; there were no pantries here. Everything was frozen in a way that would preserve the stores for up to one hundred years if necessary.

  “We’re hanging out right now. All we ever do is hang out,” he replied simply, completely clueless about her meaning.

  She huffed a sigh and crossed her eyes for a moment behind his turned back. That man could be dense. “No, I mean… You know—date.”

  He turned around, looked at her, and blinked. “Like… Date as in… Courting?”

  “This isn’t the Regency Era, Thorton. Dating’s more casual…”

  “But it’s romantic in nature and normally the precursor to marriage?” His face was blank and unreadable.

  “Supposedly there’re
lots of places on Earth where you can just hop straight to marriage. I tend to think dating forever is the way to go. But yeah. I think we’re on the same page there.” She shrugged, just because she didn’t want her nervousness to show. Just say ‘yes’, she begged inwardly. Say yes. Yes!

  His face grew firm. “No.” He turned his back again without another word, no explanation.

  “Why not?” she heard herself whine. Maybe she sounded childish, maybe even desperate, but she couldn't help it. “Don’t act like you don’t think I’m cute!”

  “I think you’re more than cute. Drink your water, sometimes bad dreams are brought on by dehydration…”

  “Don’t change the subject!” she demanded, hopping out of her chair and walking up to him. He seemed to be avoiding eye-contact, and so she stepped in front of him. “You like me!”

  “You make a better door than a window,” he said, pushing her aside to bring out a small bag of something out of the freezer. He then took it to a microwave-like box, stuck it in, and pressed a button to start the cooking process.

  “Thorton! C’mon! We’re good together! And I don’t care about you being an alien!”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “I’m an alien? You’re the one who grew up in the boonies! Besides, I don’t want a romantic relationship with you.”

  “But why?”

  Mike came around the corner and, without saying anything, took a bag of drink-mix out of the freezer and started preparing it.

  “Because it’s a bad idea!” Thorton replied, echoing her whiny tone. “Mike? Can you please tell Penny why dating me is such a bad idea?”

  Mike squinted slightly and gave them both a ‘how’d I get hooked into this?’ expression. Penny was surprised that Thorton had asked Mike—she was still unsure whether Thorton or Graham even liked him. They seemed to yell at each other a lot; Mike had fought in a battle of wills with them since they made it out alive at the end of their first warp-jump after Mike had peeled himself out of his chair.