by Ashley West
Chapter Fourteen: The Last Ditch Effort
"I will be honest with you, Kallel. I am at a loss for what to do here."
Well, that made two of them. Kal hadn't been prepared to talk to his queen that day, and he had to admit that he had been avoiding calling her for the past few weeks, if only because he flat out didn't know what to say to her.
There had been no updates to the map. It sat there on the coffee table, gathering dust with the last pins on it the ones they'd put there after they'd stopped the last attack three weeks before.
With nothing to say besides 'we're monitoring the situation', he had put off calling because he didn't want to waste her time. And he didn't want her to call him back home. Not yet.
But when faced with her directly, he couldn't look her in the face and lie. He couldn't tell her that there was something happening when there wasn't and he couldn't have her send out the might of the Hakkan when there was no reason for it. It would be a waste of resources, a waste of time, and a danger if anyone found out that most of the warriors were away on another planet and got it in their heads to attack while the people were vulnerable.
That was not going to be his legacy to his people. And so slowly, haltingly, he had explained what they knew, what they had done, and then told her he had no idea what was going to happen next.
"If they are planning something, then I don't know what it is," he admitted to her. "We haven't found any kind of hideout or headquarters and they aren't smuggling anything in as far as I can tell. It seems like they've just...vanished."
"Gotten tired of the fight, perhaps?" Kamina suggested.
Kallel shrugged. "I am not sure. At this point, it could be anything."
And she admitted that she was at a loss, and Kal admitted that he was, too, and they sat there in silence for a moment.
"Could it be that they do not need our help any longer?" she asked. "From what I understand, you have taken down a good number of the Alva since you arrived on Earth."
He nodded back, fidgeting a little at the thought of not being needed here anymore. "Yes," he said. "I have. But we have no way of knowing if it's safe for me to leave. They could be biding their time until we give up."
She considered that, and him, for a moment and then inclined her head, leaving him breathing a sigh of relief. The last thing he wanted was for her to order him home now. Not when he didn't know for sure if things were safe. He had to see this through to the end.
"That is a fair point," she said. "Very well. Continue with your observation, Kallel. The minute you have evidence of something bigger, let me know. I will send our best on the fastest ship we have."
Kal knew from Haven's schedule and how rigidly she stuck to it that she was working that day. He also knew that if she knew what he was planning to do, she would probably tell him he was an idiot. But she didn't understand.
She had never been a warrior, and she didn't have the weight of her people's expectations weighing on her like an ever constant reminder of what needed to be done.
If this failed, no one would call her a disgrace. But everyone would call him one. His father's memory was heavy on him as well as he armed himself.
His father had never once backed away from a fight, not even the one that had killed him in the end. He'd been brave and true to the last, and when he died, everyone mourned him and praised his valiant nature.
Kal wanted to be like that. He had gotten caught up in the fun parts about being here. In Haven's eyes and Haven's smile, and the way her stomach was soft and warm under his head when he rested it there. He'd let himself explore her life and her world, forgetting for a bit that he was here to fulfil a mission and not to be a tourist.
Whatever his reasons for taking this mission had been, there was no doubt about what the outcome was supposed to be. He was meant to save the day, not sightsee, and that was what he was going to do.
One gun went at his hip, his halberd went over his back, held in place by a strap. He would go on foot.
Liz, the woman who lived down the hill had seen enough to know that he was warrior and that he was there to help, and when she saw him heading off, she waved cheerfully, wishing him luck. He hoped he wouldn't need it.
If he could just find something. A hideout, an Alva willing to talk, anything at this point that would let him know what he needed to expect. Anything that would tell him what this lull meant and if he needed to be wary of it.
With the Alva, it was better to be wary of everything, and so he wasn't going to relax until he knew what he was up against here. He would look until he found something.
He took the map with him, rolled up with little holes in the places the tacks had been. They had poured over it so many times that Kal knew where he needed to go, and he started with what was closer, the place where the couple had met an Alva on the side of the road.
Haven had told him the story as she'd heard it, and at the time it had seemed strange to him for an Alva to just be wandering aimlessly. He had written it off as just one of the dumb ones who didn't know how to stick to a plan. But he got to the site, and there was nothing there to see.
It didn't seem like there was anything to find anywhere he looked. No clues, no traces, no nothing. There was no trail to follow, nothing dropped or left lingering that he could piece together with something else. It was just dead end after dead end, and he wasn't sure what to do next.
This was his last shot at this. If he couldn't find anything, he'd have to tell the queen that there was no point in sending anyone and there was no point in worrying about the Earth anymore. He'd be a failure.
Where could the Alva be hiding? Their old headquarters had been torn down, Haven had told him that much, so they couldn't be there, and there weren't really any other places of importance to them in the city as far as he knew.
Nowhere big enough to hide mass quantities of them, nowhere for them to launch an attack from.
Maybe Haven had been right. It was just...chaos. Their last ditch efforts to cause trouble before they realized that their time was over. Maybe they were all gone. The lull had only gotten longer, and there were no signs that anything else was going to happen.
Kal sighed. It wasn't the end he wanted or the end he had expected, but if it was an end, then...Then he would have to be happy about it. Because it meant people were going to be safe, and that was more important than his glory or his reputation or walking in the footsteps of a Champion. People's lives mattered more than any of that.
"So pull yourself together," he muttered and then turned to head towards home.
Before he could take more than a few steps, something whistled through the air and hit him in the side of his head. It was hard, and he flinched, drawing his gun and whirling around to see what had hit him. The shadows were long now, and there were plenty of places to hide where he was, a back alley behind an abandoned building that looked like it hadn't seen use in years.
In the darkness he heard a clatter and then the scrape of nails on stone, and into the dim glow cast by the streetlight stepped an Alva.
Just as ugly as always, tall, hunched, and scaled. Mottled skin and clawed hands, a mouth full of sharp teeth. No matter how many of them he fought, the first sight of one always reminded him of being a child and hiding while the Randoran fought the monsters that tried to take their home from them.
But he wasn't a child anymore, and there was a weapon in his hand. He could fight these monsters as he had been doing since he'd come to this planet.
"Hakkan," the creature hissed through pointed teeth, eyes wild as it looked at him.
"Alva," he replied, arching an eyebrow. His instincts were telling him to shoot first and ask questions never but this was his chance. If he could get this one to talk, to tell him the plan... "What are you doing here? What are you planning?"
It tilted its head at him. "Plan? No plan. Everything is ruined now."
Kallel narrowed his eyes. "You expect me to believe that? You've been-" Before he could get
another word out, he was being backhanded across the face, sending him sprawling to the ground.
His cheek throbbed with the pain of it, and he looked up to see that three more of the Alva had come to join their fellow. They all looked angry, and their eyes were wild.
One of them leaned down and grabbed him by the throat, clawed fingers biting into his skin as it lifted him and held him up high. An Alva had almost a foot on him, so his legs dangled uselessly, and he choked, grappling for his gun, and feeling dismay when he looked to the ground and saw it lying there uselessly.
He grabbed the bony wrist of the creature, trying to break its hold, but it just held on tighter, making him splutter for breath.
With what seemed like no effort at all, the thing tossed him back down to the ground.
Kal had already had enough of being treated like a rag doll. He was a warrior, and he was not going to just lie there and be toyed with. His gun was too far away to grab, so he pulled the halberd down from his back, twirling it before he launched himself at one of the Alva, blade ready to sink into the soft flesh of its stomach, their only weak point.
Four on one was not good odds, and though Kal had determination and strength on his side, he took a beating. The Alva fought hard, desperation and anger in their movements as they tossed him around and slashed at him with their claws.
Not one of them had a weapon, and they seemed not to care, fighting hard anyway.
It was then that it hit him what this was. It really was a last ditch effort. They were scrambling to hold on to something on this planet. There was no plan, no organization, no plot. All there was left for them was chaos and they had been trying to cling to it. This was likely some of the last of their number, and they had nothing left.
Knowing that didn't make it any better when he hit the concrete for the fiftieth time or so, knocking the breath out of him. He'd stabbed two of them already, his weapon drenched in the dark blood of his opponents. Of the remaining two, one was bleeding heavily, ready to drop, and the other was lashing out with fury for its fallen comrades. For everything, probably.
Kal left himself open, inviting them closer and getting his arm cut up in a rush of white hot pain for his trouble, but it gave him the opening and leverage he needed to stab the feisty one and then whirl around to cut down the last one.
Taking on four Alva by himself was so far beyond what he'd been expecting, and his chest heaved with the exertion of it. His arm was just a mass of pain, and everything hurt. Blood dripped down his fingers and soaked into his shirt from elsewhere. Getting back to his house was going to be some kind of feat.
He'd attempt it in a minute.
First he just. Needed to sit down.
Chapter Fifteen: The Way You Look
Haven looked at her phone. She looked at her phone, then made a disgusted noise and looked away, paying attention to the column of numbers she was adding up. Why wasn't she doing this with a calculator anyway? She had always liked to do it in her head and on her fingers first and then double check herself, finding pleasure getting the same sum when she went back and did it on the calculator. She told herself that it kept her mind sharp or something like that, but now it was just playing havoc with her focus, and she kept adding $1007.78 in when she'd already counted it once.
With another disgusted noise, she looked at her phone again.
Usually, it was a loud thing. When it was sitting on the table, it buzzed so loudly that she could hear it all the way through her house no matter what room she was in. If there were dishes on the table it was sitting on, she could hear it rattling them with its powerful vibration, since she usually never had the ringer turned on unless she was in the shower and expecting an important call.
But in the last two days she had checked her phone twice to make sure she hadn't put it all the way on silent. She'd checked to make sure that she hadn't just missed any messages. She'd checked to see if her service had been disconnected, even though other messages were coming in just fine.
When Calvin texted her about covering his shift, she'd been able to get it and send back that no, she couldn't because she had something else to do, ask someone else. When her mother had texted her some link to a recipe site that she was never going to use, she'd been able to see it and then delete it.
But the one person who usually texted her the most, who had the habit of 'blowing up her phone' as people said, was apparently not interested in texting her at the moment. Or something like that because she hadn't heard from him in two days and that was probably the longest lull she'd had in talking to him since he'd gotten her number in the first place.
Kal was the type to text her when he didn't even have anything to say. He'd text to say good morning or goodnight or good afternoon, stretching the boundaries of politeness just because he thought that was how to be polite. He texted her when he saw something interesting on the television in his house or when he didn't understand something he'd heard somewhere. When he needed directions or wanted to come see her and nurse his newly developed coffee confection habit.
Having him not texting her was odd, and Haven couldn't decide if she was worried or annoyed. Anything could have happened to him, but...there was a part of her left over from being younger and knowing that people didn't like her as she was that said he had just gotten tired of talking to her.
The part of her that argued that Kal wasn't like that wasn't able to be louder than the small, silly part, so she sat there in her house, arms folded on the couch like a child who was sulking. She wasn't proud of it, and she was glad there wasn't anyone nearby to see it, but...ugh.
Of course, as soon as she made the decision to put it out of her head, grabbing her calculator up in defeat and adding her numbers together, her phone buzzed.
The sound made her jump, and she swore under her breath as her knee connected with the edge of the table, sending a jolt of pain up her leg. And for all that, it wasn't even a text because the phone kept buzzing.
Haven sighed. Darren. Of course.
For a second, she considered ignoring it, but she sighed again and answered. "What's up, Darren?"
"Haven!" he sounded excited to hear that she'd picked up. "I know you're probably going to say no because it's Thursday and you're probably settled in with your calculator, but hear me out."
Haven glared at her calculator like it had betrayed her. "Five minutes, Darren."
"That's more than I usually get! You must be in a good mood."
No, she was just still relieved that they had managed to repair their friendship. It was still awkward at times, and she could tell that Darren was putting more effort than he usually did into making sure he didn't offend her. He measured his comments now, and some of the teasing she'd come to expect from him was gone. Not that she was complaining, she'd never really enjoyed that bit.
"Time's wasting," she reminded him, sitting back against the couch.
"I know, I know. Anyway, there's this lounge nearby that Vanessa wants to go to, and I thought it'd be nice for you to meet her. Since I met your guy and all."
"Who's Vanessa?" Haven asked, wrinkling her nose. "And when you say lounge, do you really mean club? And when you mean club, do you really mean low end bar that has a dance floor and bathrooms?"
He snorted a laugh. "No, I don't mean that. I mean it's a nice place. Couches, good liquor, soft music. I think you'd like it, actually. And Vanessa's my girlfriend. Miss Margarita?"
"Oh," she said. "I think I forgot she actually had a name."
"Classy, Haven," Darren teased. "Anyway, I'm just saying that you might have a nice time if you come out with us. I want her to meet you, and I know you hate clubs and stuff, so maybe this is a nice compromise? Just...will you think about it?"
It wasn't one of Darren's usual pleas for her to come spend time with him at night. There was no request for her to be his wingman and make things easier for him with the ladies. In fact, there was nothing on her at all to help him. He just wanted her to meet his girlfriend becaus
e she was his friend.
Haven looked at her book full of numbers and sighed. They would still be there in the morning, and she was ahead of schedule anyway. It wouldn't take her any time at all to get through them.
And what would she do with her night anyway? Sit there staring at her phone and coming up with increasingly ridiculous reasons why Kallel might not be talking to her? She could see what was on the movie channel, but honestly, if she watched Titanic one more time, she was probably going to scream. Some people called these years the prime of a person's life, and while she was making progress when it came to her professional endeavors and she had things well under control in certain other areas, her personal life had always been lacking.
If Kal wanted to talk to her, he knew how to get a hold of her. Maybe for once it was time to do something different.
"Haven?" Darren asked, jarring her from her thoughts and making her realize that she'd been zoned out for a good minute.
"Sorry," she said. "Lost in thought. Anyway, sure. That sounds nice."
"Are you sure? I mean, I know you probably have things to do, but-" He cut himself off. "Did you just say yes?"
"Technically I said 'sure'," Haven pointed out. "Not to split hairs."
"You're going to come out with us?"
She laughed softly, amused by his incredulity. "Yes, Darren. Unless you've changed your mind and don't actually want me to."
"No, no! I do!" He said quickly. "I was just...really not expecting you to agree. You never agree."
Haven shrugged a shoulder, even though he wasn't there to see it. "Maybe I'm changing," she suggested. "You never know."
"I'll believe it when I see it. Anyway, I'll text you the address to the place. Say around nine?"
"Sure, sounds good."
That gave her a good four hours to make herself look like someone who did things like this often. It was going to be interesting to say the least.
