by Celeste Raye
“Some things just can’t be helped,” I said and Marques looked entirely pleased with me. She looked between the two of us as though she expected some kind of romance: a chemistry to bubble forth.
I smiled, as did Fiona, and the guard gestured toward us as though we were supposed to do something. To solidify our union somehow. Then it hit me. She was waiting for a kiss.
I looked down at Fiona and her strange human face: its carefully constructed curves and edges. I looked at her almond-shaped hazel eyes and swallowed hard: nervous. I leaned down and grazed my fingertips against the bottom of her chin and pressed my lips against hers. She took them eagerly, pressing softly and closing her eyes, opening them only when our lips parted with a small smacking sound.
The exchange lasted just a moment, but it felt like it lingered there forever. We looked back to the officer for approval and she looked positively smitten with our exchange.
“So sweet!” the woman exclaimed and then took our paperwork, waving us off. “Let me sign off on your ship clearance so we can get you out of here. If I have to see another kiss from you lovebirds I might remember I haven’t been on a date in five years.”
“Right,” Fiona said absent-mindedly with a laugh as the officer handed our papers back with a seal of approval and directions on where to park our ship.
“Well,” Marques began again, looking me square in the eyes. “Welcome to Earth. We’re thrilled to make relations with Dobromia. We know there’s a lot of turmoil that’s been happening there.”
“Yeah,” I said, uncomfortable having this stranger pretend she knew what Dobromia was made of. I felt an immediate spike of hostility rise in my stomach.
“What do you think so far?” the woman asked and then clarified, “Of Earth?”
Her question drew out some accidental honesty in me as I looked out the windows of the beautiful spaceport. Green and blue as far as the eye could see. Sun.
One sun.
Perfect temperatures hitting my arms and a unique scent of heat and flora and fauna.
“It’s… it’s beautiful,” I stammered out. “So green.”
The officer gave a belly laugh and began walking back to her post. She turned once more in a motherly fashion and said, “Wait until you have pizza.”
My eyes shot to Fiona’s, as though they were speaking of a secret weapon. She couldn’t help but smile at my confusion and she nodded her head, confirming, “It’s amazing.”
“Oh!” Marques said, turning yet again.
Would this woman never leave?
“You’ll have to show him the DET once you two are done…” The woman’s face went red and she raised a suggestive brow to both Fiona and Christina. “Honeymooning.”
“What’s DET?” I asked, too quickly.
“Oh, Marques!” Fiona said, locking eyes with me as though it were a dare. Her voice was all sugar as she batted the woman off, giggling, “You’re spoiling the surprise!”
“You’re right!” Marques said, laughing at her own revelation. She put a side hand to her mouth as though she were about to whisper, but her tone stayed even, saying, “It’s been our secret project here. I guess I shouldn’t have said anything!”
I smiled and nodded to the woman and then looked down at Fiona, feeling utterly sick. My guess was that they did have a weapon ready for the Weredragons. DET. If anything, this human just ensured another couple cycles of life. Just until I could find out what the hell they were talking about.
Chapter 6:
Fiona
“Wife?” came the sturdy tones of Gandadirth as he approached a long stretch of cave Libby, Christina and I had been cuffed into. I watched him numbly and grunted my response.
“Come on,” he tilted his head, free from his usual levity. “We’re leaving.”
I blinked at this and then stood. Even with ropes tying our hands together, the shifter soldiers still grabbed us by the arms to guard us as they brought us into the thicket of the woods.
After leaving the space port, we’d spent weeks traversing the thick forests. We’d made contact with several secret shifter camps, all little armies waiting for orders from their leader, who we determined to be Jadirel, the yellow shifter with the big red eyes.
We’d followed a pack of twenty or so Weredragons, flown for hours in a storm that left me shivering and terrified of being dropped every five minutes. Now I didn’t know where we were. North America. South America. Europe. The continents eluded me. All I knew was that these shifters had likely been planning this a long time after seeing how advanced their bases were: how many had arrived already and sought the lay of the land.
We walked through the dense forest and I traced my fingertips along the bark of the trees as we walked.
The red shifter, Tesyduss, had me by the arm as we marched. I was directly behind Gandadirth. My eyes traced the outline of his body: built and tall. He wore a burgundy cloak overtop of his armor. He had dark hair that trailed with blue threads; an extension of his shifter coloring, I assumed.
My eyes stopped at his hand, and I noticed that he was still wearing his ring. The other half of our false ‘marriage’ in the form of Marques.
“Why so quiet?” he asked me.
I made a show of looking around the march, as if that should be explanation enough, and then I shrugged. “I’m just not feeling all that chatty.”
“Isn’t that what women are supposed to be known for?” he asked, biting into a red apple with apparent delight at the texture and taste. It was clear he’d never had one before.
I used two fingers to bump the apple from the bottom, and it flew out of his hands, and I caught it swiftly, taking a step back away from him. I raised a brow and bit the apple smugly.
“And I suppose Weredragons are known for being sexist?” I nipped.
He looked at me with a tense expression that told me he didn’t know whether to laugh or be furious.
“Why are you walking behind me?” he frowned and looked to Tesyduss, who offered his palms in confusion.
“Like I said…” Ropes of juice sprayed from the apple as I took another bite and finished, “Sexist.”
Gandadirth looked at the red shifter once more and snapped to him. “Bring her here,” he said and motioned to the space next to him.
I walked up next to him, and he loosened my ties until they were clean off. He swiped the apple from my palm and finished it off with one giant bite before tossing it to the ground.
“Don’t try anything stupid like that again,” he said. “I’d hate to make a human barbecue out of you.”
“Nice,” I lectured.
“Just don’t do anything stupid,” he said with exasperation.
“Um,” came the small, hushed tones of the red shifter as he marched up beside us. He threw his hands behind his head and motioned toward their leader, who was leading the pack with wildly splayed wings in the distance. “Humans have legs, you know.”
Gandadirth turned to face him with a brow shot straight up his forehead. The man smiled and shook his head as he asked, “And before I resort to the obvious interjection of: Uh huh? First, I want to know what the hell your point is.”
Tesyduss rolled his eyes but looked embarrassed. “She’ll run,” he snapped. “And if she does, it’s on you.”
Gandadirth looked at him as though to judge whether or not he was being serious. It seemed like he was, yet Gandadirth still resorted to a loud laugh.
“Right,” the blue-and-yellow shifter waved him off. “I forgot a human could outrun the wings, flight, power, and the speed of a shifter,” he said, counting on his fingers. “My mistake.”
Tesyduss stared straight ahead and grunted, “It will be.”
With that, Gandadirth grabbed my hand into his as he did when we’d first arrived and raised it in the air so Tesyduss could see it.
“Happy?” Gandadirth asked with a weak sarcastic droll.
“Delirious,” his friend responded with a roll of the eyes and immediately flared his
wings and sped to the front of the pack.
The camp we arrived at was deep in the forest with trees as tall as I had ever seen them: green spires with plant life crawling up to the tippy tops like it was a race for sunlight.
I could hear two more shifters, who I hadn’t met yet, talking about the humans. The ‘females.' And how we were more trouble keeping than we were worth. They joked about flying us overhead and dropping us into the woods, hoping the fall would kill us.
I knew they were probably right, too. It wasn’t worth it to keep looking for ways to guard us or to keep us from leaving. My heart began to race as the shifters turned their heads to us and smiled, their hatred evident.
Whatever Diana Montanari had done in her brief rule mated with a Weredragon, it wasn’t favorable.
I used the brief kindness Gandadirth was showing to my advantage and squeezed his hand before rubbing my thumb across his. I knew he was the type to follow orders; I could tell the group of them were tight and loyal. But I also knew he was curious about me. Hopefully, it would come in handy.
The makeshift steel cage was the first thing that came into view as we happened upon a clearing, hours later. A new camp for the Weredragons.
The cell looked like it used to be an old sea container, or some kind of large animal cage, sitting in the midst of the clearing, which I was immediately sent into. Tesyduss closed the door, and Jadirel walked by us with his arms crossed, glaring at us. There was a black shine to his eyes that told me he didn’t care for our appearance in their camp: a deadness where I knew he would be the first to snap and get rid of us.
It scared me more than anything else.
I grabbed Libby’s hand and quickly let go as she crumpled to the ground like an old leaf.
The shifters went about their business, starting fires and eating everything they could get their hands on: rabbits, deer.
Gandadirth found his way to our cage and slipped his fingers around one of the damp bars.
“Gandadirth,” I said plainly, and his ears perked up. He watched me carefully then and looked like he would respond, but he didn’t. As soon as another shifter caught him watching us, he left.
It wasn’t until four days later when a group of Weredragons inexplicably left the campsite that I finally got a chance to talk to the irritatingly handsome shifter.
It was the dead of night, and the girls were sleeping behind me, somehow. Sheer exhaustion, I thought. Gandadirth was in charge of maintaining the fire and keeping watch. He watched me from across the camp, making eye contact through the blaze of fire. The forest hummed with wildlife: crickets, birds, and frogs all lighting up the night with their orchestra.
Suddenly, the shifter rose from his wooden trunk he had been using as a bench around the fire and approached me.
Tesyduss and another orange shifter sat by the fire and continued to watch me like a hawk, all the more as Gandadirth walked up to me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he nodded and walked to the latch that opened the cage, pulling the levy and pulling my arm out. He locked the cage right behind me and grabbed my arm, pulling me close to him with a mischievous smile.
“You looked like you could use some company,” he grinned.
“Glad to see you obliged,” I flirted and walked back up to the fire with him.
Tesyduss hunched over like a spoiled child and gave a giant show of his eyes rolling as I sat down with them, warming my hands against the fire.
Gandadirth watched Tesyduss in some male show of dominance and grabbed a plate of game they had cooked over the fire. He picked at the meat, still standing, before handing me the plate. I took it and fingered through the meat, helping myself.
I looked awkwardly between the three shifters and then set my gaze on Gandadirth.
“Tell me something about you,” I said.
“Aw, are we sharing?” he teased lightly. “Is this human? Am I being inducted into human speak?”
Tesyduss and the orange one laughed at the comment and Gandadirth followed along, mocking me in an undertone.
“Just a way to pass the time,” I said sweetly. “Like… was the famine already happening when you were born?”
Tesyduss’ face went dire then, and he looked over at the orange shifter and then to Gandadirth with a weak laugh. Seeing that the blue-and-yellow shifter was considering the question, his friend scowled at me and lectured, “Ganda, don’t answer that.”
“She already knows about the famine,” Gandadirth shrugged with a laugh.
With a huff, Tesyduss set his hands on his thick thighs and stood from our company. “I said say nothing,” he warned and spun on his heel, heading into an oversized tent.
Gandadirth sat down then, close enough to me that our legs were touching. I continued to pick unsurely at the meat. I set the plate down next to me once I was satisfied and turned back to the man next to me. He leaned towards my face and said, “We were burning.”
I blinked. “Pardon?”
“The suns,” he explained of his planet. “They burned everything. I crawled out of my hatch pod like meat over a fire.”
“A little Gandadirth kabob,” I jeered.
He stared at me, confused, before breaking out into a smile and shrugging. “That’s me,” he said, “A kabob.”
“You remember being born?”
He nodded. “Don’t you?”
“No, of course not!” I laughed and shook my head. “We don’t remember things until… maybe a couple years in?”
“Wow,” he breathed, kicking dirt into the blazing fire. “Humans are dumb.”
“Just another reason why we’re better off with Earth,” the orange shifter said with a self-assured laugh.
I bit back my anger but glared at the man with the long face. “Another planet for you to ruin,” I snapped.
“Not the way we plan on running it,” the shifter argued.
“Hey,” Gandadirth raised his hand casually, calmly to his friend. “Can I get a minute?”
Annoyed, the remaining shifter took his leave from us and Gandadirth looked into me then. “Yes,” he said, as though we were already mid-conversation. “The famine had started when I was born.”
“That must have been hard,” I empathized, watching his small eyes squint at me through the heat of the fire. They were close together and exotic somehow.
He shrugged, leaning back some. “It’s just the way it was.”
“And now?”
“And now… what?” he asked with a small puff of breath. “We’re in complete darkness. It’s hard to roast under the suns when there’s ice everywhere.”
“How’d you make it out to begin with?” I asked.
“Jadirel,” he said simply. “He’s our leader. I was under attack and he, well, he made sure he dealt with those who were after me. I was more useful as food back then, I guess.”
“But not to him?”
He shook his head, eyes lost to my face and skin. The weather was balmy, especially with the fire beating hot against our skin. I’d removed my military jacket and just wore a small undershirt. I thought this might benefit me when talking to him and it looked like I was right.
“No,” he said simply.
I nodded and met his eyes. “Well, he must really care about you.”
“I don’t know,” he said, scratching his arm. “I don’t know if he cared about me or if he was looking for loyalists. He was starting a rebellion, after all.”
“Even so, I can see why you’re loyal to him. You owe him your life. It’s hard to find someone like that,” I offered.
The silence came over us then, and he didn’t stop looking at me.
“Something else?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, awkwardly now. “Since we’re sharing and all.”
I wanted to ask him why he took me out of the cage; why he took Benjamin out from the cells; why he let Libby go back to her room. I wanted to know why he seemed so interested in me. Instead, I asked, “Yes?”
His words hung there, and I felt my face grow hot and red. I smiled instinctively and looked down at my hands. “Oh,” I exhaled. “You did?”
“Strange, you humans…” he said suddenly, as though he were defending himself as he tilted my head to him. “That face,” he whispered with a vulnerable lust that I couldn’t quite read.
“Strange,” he confirmed again. “But… enjoyable.”
I felt a lilt in my heart then, and I reached my hand to the smooth, slick scales on his face, pulling him into my lips and slipping my tongue into his mouth, moving it easily against his. He tasted like sex and sweat in the best way possible. His body froze as my lips made contact and then he warmed into me, diving deeper into my mouth and licking the tip of my tongue before biting my lip with a hungry, desperate need for more of me.
The kiss broke naturally, though just in time as we heard another shifter start rustling around the camp.
Chapter 7:
Gandadirth
A military base, expansive and to the south. It was one of the biggest military space posts we could find in our research, and the newest target to take over. No more living amongst the trees.
I looked over the building and marveled at the infrastructure: the architecture that covered the cities and towns on the Earth. I’d spent so much time living in a hole underground, and then on the run, it was hard to think of what it might be like to feel grounded.
“Come on,” Jadirel said, flicking his yellow tail behind him stiffly like he was about to toss something heavy with it.
The group of us kept low to the ground as we approached the base. Jadirel had his sights set on this location since day one. It was easily defensible with its tall stone walls that moated around the building.
Plus, it would give us immediate access to the humans’ strange laser weapons.
It would be the perfect spot to operate out of.
Tesyduss ushered me forward. We’d all been buzzing with the excitement of our mission for cycles now.
The Earth had supplied my wildest dreams and then some. My belly had never felt so filled; my muscles felt tight and taut with energy, and my mind had cleared of the fog that the endless dark of Dobromia swept over it. And then, of course, there was Fiona.
