by Rena Marks
She was the monster.
She stared down at the dried husk of a white-skinned albino body, still smelling of rancid decay. His face was frozen in the throes of horror, eyes wide open, mouth released as if on a scream that had never manifested. It couldn’t. Her strike was vicious and instantaneous, the way the doctors had predicted it would be. The way she was afraid it would have gotten with Beast.
“What the hell did you do to Mike?” Off in the distance, another voice screamed.
Two men were a ways out, running rapidly her way. One carried a recording device, locked on her the entire time.
“The baby,” she muttered stupidly.
“Dead,” the first man said, abject horror in his voice. He continued to stare down at the husk. “It’s still in the shape of Mike.”
The second man seemed to come to his senses. “Come with us, or I’ll submit the footage of you killing an innocent baby to the world. The rest of the Xeno Sapiens will be viewed as the monsters they are.”
With shame engulfing her body, she nodded. But she knew Sam would be approaching her post shortly, and then she’d willingly walk with them.
“I’ll come,” she said slowly, focused on the shape of Mike and the baby. “But one of my coworkers is approaching the checkpoint. He’ll set an alarm if he doesn’t reach me.” She looked up. “Go back to where you came from, and as soon as he leaves, I’ll make my way to you.”
“Don’t try to fuck this up,” the second one snarled. “I’ll give you ten minutes. If you’re not approaching, I’ll push send.”
She nodded briefly, her attention back on the bodies.
The two men left. Far off in the distance, she heard Sam yell. It didn’t take long for the human in charge to reach her and place a hand on her arm. She held back her sob.
These were her people, she realized too late. Mike had been a mockery of a relationship she craved. Not once did Mike ever touch her willingly. No, he’d touched her once out of curiosity. To see how her skin felt.
That never occurred with Sam even though he was human. He touched her because he cared about her state of mind, about where she stared in shocked silence over what she’d done.
“What the hell is that?” Sam exclaimed. He leaned down for a closer look. “It’s human. A human body, drying like a…shell. Stay here. Don’t let anything disturb it. I’ll get some others and a backboard, and we’ll take it inside for studying. Poor fool.”
He left her like that, staring at Mike, never even noticing the wrapped baby who’d once slumbered in his arms.
As soon as Sam left, she walked away, the image of Mike and his son burned into her mind. She’d planned to neutralize the other two, take the video they’d made and threatened to expose the others with. But she never got the chance. One shot her with a dart to the neck as she made her way across the field.
Chapter Two
Beast stood with the security team of humans investigating Sunny’s disappearance. The team included a few key Xeno Sapiens. Eclipse, who was known for a highly developed sense of smell. Renegade and Steele, two of the others who had been in his test group in the laboratory.
The four of them had been named by Drs. Robyn and Amanda. Each Xeno Sapien was different and unique, as the only thing they shared was their human DNA. The other portion of DNA came from aliens of other dimensions trapped through a portal in the lost city of Atlantis, but there were numerous species.
His species had enormous strength that his best friend Robyn had taught him to control. If he wasn’t careful, he could snap the hand of a person without meaning to. He was the only Xeno Sapien with ebony skin—but all the darkness was broken up with gold stripes randomly strewn throughout his body. They matched the light color of his blond hair that he usually kept braided and out of his face. If it wasn’t braided, it floated around his shoulders and made him look like a lion.
And his mate, Sunny—who didn’t know she was his mate—was one solid color. The same color as his gold stripes. It was as if she was made from him, made for him, made to be his.
Beast’s rage disappeared, replaced with a cold nonchalance instead. They’d dared to harm his Sunny, to steal her like an object instead of a person. There was no one who’d escape his wrath. He’d dole the same punishment to them that they’d given her before ripping vital organs from their bodies.
They’d better pray they simply scared her.
Eclipse gulped. “The scent of decomposition from the body still lingers,” he said to Sam, avoiding Beast. They all avoided him like he was a volcano about to explode. He suspected a major reason why Renegade and Steele were here was in case he needed to be subdued.
“One person or two?” Sam asked.
Eclipse sniffed again. “One decayed. I detect Sunny’s scent, yours, and two other males here.”
“Are those scents familiar?” Beast asked, his voice mild.
“No.” Eclipse gulped again.
“Where do they lead?”
Eclipse kept sniffing, one foot walking in front of the other. “Here. And here.” They walked out for quite a distance. “Here is something chemically sweet, and Sunny’s scent ends. The smell of a car—the kind with wheels because I can smell the rubber—picks up.”
“Is Sunny’s scent combined with them?”
“No.” Eclipse looked confused. “It’s a bit stronger like she arrived at a different time.”
“Like she came willingly? After they left?”
Eclipse nodded vehemently and then stopped abruptly as Beast growled.
“Bullshit! She wouldn’t wander off on her own.”
On either side of him, Renegade and Steele placed calming hands on his arms. “Think about it. In light of what has happened, Robyn and Amanda informed us Sunny has manifested the ability to strike someone dead. What if the other two came looking for him? She didn’t want to tell them that he was the dusty mass at their feet. She wouldn’t have wanted them to remember him like that. So she directed them to their vehicle and wandered out there to tell them, away from the body. In their sorrow or fury, they snatched her, using a drug to render her unconscious.”
Beast clenched his fists. It made sense. Apparently, everyone knew Sunny better than he did. “Okay. I bow to Eclipse’s expertise. What next?”
Jason studied the car tracks. “We lift the prints. Find out where the car is registered.” He ran a scanner over the indentation in the ground. “We test the soil.”
Sam knelt, gathering dirt to put into a small glass vial, and then looked up at Beast. “It will tell us if any soil from their tires mixed into the ground here. It’s a long shot, but it may tell us the area they came from.”
Jason looked up. “And Steele will link with Lily to see what she’s found.”
Beast cut to Steele, about to argue that he would link. Steele held up his hands. “You’re in a highly emotional state and not thinking clearly. Let me do this for you. We’ll get you to the location where she is and let you loose. Okay?”
Beast breathed deeply and then gave a short nod.
They were quiet while Steele concentrated, and then Sam’s hand-held computer beeped. “Soil results are up.”
Steele blinked to awareness. “It’s pinpointed to a location of a ranch-style house, dilapidated. Probably abandoned. There is a storm cellar on the property, which is what humans used to protect themselves during the wars.”
Sam nodded. “Soil testing confirms a definite lack of nutrients from overplanting. It is probably farmland that was overused and abandoned. The last crop was sunflowers.”
Jason held up his scanner. “Tires were purchased from the fourth quadrant. So, a shop south of here. That ties in with the sunflower crop. There are a few abandoned farms to the south. Steele, can you have Robyn check and see which ones may have farmed sunflowers in the last decade?”
He closed his eyes again. Both Tempest and Lily were back in Systems with Amanda and Robyn, able to translate the telepathy for the humans.
Steele’s
jet black eyes opened, the color swirling like black ink. “There are three. Robyn is sending the coordinates to our communicators.”
“Let’s take the invisible car for the Xeno Sapiens,” Jason said. “I’ll drive. Sam, you take the hover-ranger, and the rest of the team will load up. Follow the blank space on the road; that’ll be us. Keep your car on auto, and it’ll sense where the invisi-car is. Everyone, move out and let’s find our girl.”
* * * * *
The next time Sunny woke, she was underground. She felt the dank air as it filtered through her lungs, suppressed and heavy as if moist. The way their lungs had felt every day in the underground labs, only back then they had nothing fresh to compare it to. She fought against breathing deeply as if she could avoid hauling dingy air into her lungs.
Lily? Tentatively she reached out, but there was nothing. There was a blankness in her mind where the previous link between them had resided. This…storm shelter that they spoke of. It must be a hole in the ground. For some reason, being buried in the earth meant her telepathic links were hard to navigate. They were heavy and rigid, buried in her head like she was buried under the ground.
She was completely alone, without a connection to her people.
“She’s awake,” someone said unnecessarily. There were six men playing cards and drinking at a small table.
She lay in a single bed pushed against a darkened corner of the wall, her left hand chained to a metal headboard. Her right hand hung at her lap, still wrapped in the bloody kitchen towel. It was now dried to a shade of black and hardened like a shell around her hand.
“Here where it’s dark, she almost looks human.”
Five other heads turned in her direction. Drawing their attention made terror rake icy claws down her spine.
“Maybe. Like she’s super-tanned.” One grunted.
“Without the light, her skin don’t have that glittery gold,” the first man said, standing up and moving closer to where she huddled. He stood still, near the foot of the bed, watching her for long minutes. The other men went back to their card game.
Slowly he reached down, grasping an ankle.
Sunny gasped.
He pulled her leg straight, then took the other one and straightened it. Using both hands, he separated her legs. She tried to tighten them, but his strength was stronger than she expected.
When he looked up at her face, his eyes gleamed. “Oh, yeah,” he crooned. “That’s nice, honey. That’s real nice. I can see why Mike liked you. You just gotta squint a lil bit, and you look almost human.”
She started a bit at the sound of Mike’s name.
“I dunno,” a man at the table snickered. “Her eyes are weird. That color. And the shape.”
“As long as her hole looks the same.”
The man who’d straightened her legs reached down and snapped the button from her pants, grasping the top of the waistband to pull them off her. She shrieked, bucking wildly against the chain around her wrist and at the same time, trying to squeeze her legs together.
From the table came snickers, and one by one, the other men moved from the table to watch her struggle on the bed.
Her pants ripped off her legs, and the man’s nails dug into her skin, scratching the outer edge of her thigh, the blood stinging where it rose to the surface. Furiously she glared, but all the men were staring at the spot between her legs. Dimly she realized her panties had come down with her pants and she was exposed. Again she tried to close her legs, but the one nearest her helped the other grab her ankles, holding her legs spread open.
“Nice snatch.” One leered, rubbing the bulge in his dirty jeans.
“Shit, I’d fuck that.”
“You get sloppy seconds,” the first one spreading her legs said. “It was my idea.”
“I don’t mind seconds,” another said. “It’s warm and wet that way.” He dropped his pants, where they tangled around his knees. The other men snickered at his show of eagerness.
His penis stood at attention, curving slightly to the left. It was ugly, reddened at the head but pale in the center of the shaft, and twisted with long black hairs at the base.
Would it be better or worse to be raped and hope for rescue? Or to suck their souls and risk starving to death while she hoped someone rescued her? There wasn’t a guarantee of rescue. She couldn’t even telepathically communicate underground. It would be a slow, painful way to die.
On the other hand, six men raping her would be another, although quicker, painful way to die.
A loud roar suddenly shattered the night. The hair on the back of her neck tingled with the raw fury that echoed in the air, the snarl bouncing off the concrete walls.
Beast.
For the first time, hope fluttered in her belly.
“What the fuck—”
The door to the storm cellar was ripped off its hinges, and a snarling black image came down like a force from hell, his gold stripes a blur in his haste. One by one, men tried to scatter as they screamed, and after a few blessed moments, the screams stopped.
But the scene didn’t.
Beast continued to roar, ripping limbs and tossing bodies that were no more than sickening wet thuds against the concrete walls.
Then the underground cavern filled with other people, and she was barely aware of them arriving, her ears still ringing from Beast’s roars. Steele and Renegade were there, drawing her pants back up over her legs, unlocking the chain from her wrist.
“Are you okay?” Renegade asked even as he sat and pulled her onto his lap.
“Y-yes,” she stuttered like a fool.
Eventually, Beast’s roars halted as he realized there was nothing else to slaughter. The humans on Jason’s security force—her co-workers—stood around and stared, stunned and horrified at the mess.
The walls dripped with chunks of meat and bloody goo.
“What the fuck is that?” Sam, one of the human males, stared at the table where the humans had been sitting.
The men looked at the card gaming going on at the table. It was remarkably untouched by the filth that covered every square inch of the hell-hole they were in. And then she noticed what they stared at.
Four tiny, slender, golden digits in the center, as if they were a prize to be won.
“Are you—injured?” Beast asked, his voice harsh and gritty as he stared at her hand. It seemed to be hard for him to form words.
She winced. “No.” She worked the dried bloody towel from her hand, finally pulling it away and wriggling her fingers. “They’re fine. They re-grew.”
“You still had to suffer through them being cut off.” Beast’s hatred was palpable and seemed to extend to her. He glanced at the dismembered torsos littering the floor as if he wished for a hand he could rip the fingers from. Then he looked at her, cuddled on Renegade’s lap and down at himself.
Covered in filth. Dripping with blood.
“Tell us how they got you,” Renegade said.
Sunny inhaled sharply and felt her stomach twist in horror. “I killed…someone. And his baby.”
“Baby?”
She looked up to catch Jason and Sam as they looked at each other confused.
“He was wrapped in a blanket in his arms when my power snapped loose and sacrificed them both.”
“Sunny,” Jason said slowly. “There was no baby. The lump in his arms was inorganic and covered in a blanket.”
“Are you sure?”
Jason nodded. “We took the body back to Xenia for examination before it dried completely. Even if we hadn’t, Eclipse would have sniffed out the scent of a real baby.”
“He tricked me,” she said slowly. “Oh, my—the whole thing. The whole thing was a set-up.”
“Tell us,” Renegade urged.
She avoided looking at Beast, who still stood by silently watching. “He told me his wife had passed, leaving him and two children, including the baby. He’d showed me pictures of them. He’d agreed to bring at least the baby so I could meet him,
but the infant was sleeping when he got there. He wanted me to come with him to see his house. He grew angry when I refused and said some nasty things. That’s when the power reached out and grabbed him. I couldn’t control it.” Her eyes widened. “The power. Get out of here! All of you. I don’t know when it will ignite again.”
“Shh, you’re safe,” Steele uttered. “Be calm, Sunny. Kaden has extended his own gift to you by borrowing Lily’s. It’s given you control over this power that your people could never control before.”
“Go on with the story,” Renegade urged.
Sunny took a deep breath. “Two of the men came running. They had the whole scene recording on some hand held device. They threatened to expose that the Xeno Sapiens had killed a baby if I didn’t come willingly.”
“Was that before or after I found you?” Sam asked.
“Before. As soon as you left, I walked to join them. Willingly.” She laughed, the sound hollow and not at all funny. “I decided to accept my punishment for killing an innocent baby.”
There seemed to be nothing left to say.
“Did they rape you?” Steele asked quietly.
“No. They were about to before Beast arrived.”
“Do you have other injuries?”
“No. I’ve been sleeping and drugged most of the time.”
“Then let’s get back to Xenia,” Renegade said.
“Me,” Beast snarled. “She. Rides. With. Me.” His fists were clenched, and he could barely control speech.
“It’s okay,” Sunny said. She’d seen him this way before, back when the scientists were sending subliminal messages to the computer chips implanted in the brains of Esson Four to increase their temperament. He couldn’t control himself against the tide of testosterone that washed through his body.
Beast calmed a little at her words.
Steele nodded. “The invisi-car is programmed to return to Xenia. The gates will open when it is close enough, and the guards on duty know not to allow anything else to pass.”
