by Abel, Regine
Chaos frowned and looked at Legion questioningly. My father narrowed his eyes at me, then at Legion.
“What did we miss?” Father asked no one in particular.
“We were discussing the women’s mission assignments,” Legion said.
“Ah…” my father said, turning back to look at me with an unreadable expression on his face.
“If Liena consents to join the mission,” I said without preamble, “I will take your place.”
“Son—”
“Don’t,” I said, my tone hardening. “My soulmate does not go to battle without me.”
My father’s face took on a troubled expression.
“We cannot afford to lose both you and Liena if things turn sour,” Chaos said in that reasonable tone I always hated the older Warriors using with me.
“Don’t patronize me,” I snapped.
“He’s not patronizing you, Son. He’s trying to reason with you,” my father said. “Whether or not your mate comes with us, we would never send you on such a high-risk mission.”
“Am I not a fucking Warrior?” I shouted, slapping my chest with both hands. Hurt, anger, and humiliation burned like acid in my gut. “Have I not proven my strength and my courage on the field of battle?”
“You are and you have,” my father said, advancing towards me. “But you are an even greater symbol that cannot die.”
“What?” I asked, rage and confusion warring within me.
My father placed his hand behind my nape. I tried to jerk my head away, but he tightened his grip, forcing me to face him.
“You are the first trueborn Warrior, the embodiment of the Xian Warriors’ future, the symbol of hope and of the continuation of Dr. Xi’s legacy,” Father said. “Right before they launched their attack on Earth, the Kryptids destroyed the original Incubator, with all the fertilized Xian eggs, and most of the research on how we’d been made. Our creator died trying to save egg samples so that more of us could be created.”
“I know all this,” I growled, wondering what his point was.
“What you don’t know is that none of the scientists who tried to pick up Dr. Xi’s work managed to create a viable egg,” Legion said.
“We were dying, Son, by the hundreds with each battle,” Father continued. “Not only were our Hulanian Soulcatchers not as reliable as our human women are today, half of us had no Shells left after the Kryptid raid. In the two years that followed Earth’s rescue, our numbers dropped by a third without a single new Xian soul to replenish our ranks. And then my Red became pregnant with you. The news of your conception caused celebration throughout the allied planets.”
My throat tightened with emotion, not only to hear my father use his pet name for my mother, in honor of her fiery hair, but at the realization that my life had held such meaning to my brothers. It explained so much in the overprotective way in which they always treated me.
“Victoria threatened to shoot us if we didn’t stop hounding her,” Chaos said with a fond smile. “Every one of us wanted to touch her belly and touch minds with you. You were our miracle. We took turns standing vigil throughout her pregnancy, ready to intervene at the first sign of distress.”
“And after your birth, we all kept watch so that no harm would ever come to you,” Legion concluded, rising to his feet. “Yes, we baby you. And yes, we know it chafes you. But it is your burden to bear like it is mine to be the face of the Vanguard. Symbols aren’t only important to those we protect, they are important to us as well. You are every Warrior’s son and little brother. We would all die without hesitation for you.”
“I didn’t ask for this,” I grumbled, moved far more than I would ever admit. “And there are other trueborns now.”
“There are many things that land in our laps that we didn’t ask for,” Father said. “We just have to learn to cope. But we cannot risk losing the first trueborn and the great-granddaughter of our creator in the same battle.”
“I have no intentions of getting killed, much less allowing my mate to get hurt. But if things do go belly up, like you said, you’ll all just have to learn to cope,” I said, holding his gaze unwaveringly.
Chaos and Legion snorted. But it was the look in my father’s eyes, sad, troubled, and yet gleaming with pride, that turned me upside down.
“Looks like our boy is all grown up,” Legion said.
With those words, he had conceded for all of the Vanguard.
“Your boy has been grown up for years now,” I snarled back without any real anger. “I guess your old age has already started affecting your eyesight,” I teased, looking at the three men.
“Not so old we can’t still put you across our knees,” Chaos said.
“Assuming you can—”
“RAVEN! COME NOW! IT’S LIENA!”
I felt the blood drain from my face hearing Tabitha’s voice shouting in my head.
“Liena,” I whispered, my voice filled with dread.
“What’s wrong?” my father asked.
I didn’t respond and rushed out of the apartment. A single thought occupied my mind: reaching my mate. I wanted to touch her mind, but if she were having a psychic crisis, I could make matters a lot worse.
“What’s wrong with her?” I asked Tabitha.
“She was shielding Diane’s vessel when her eyes went blank, and then she collapsed. She’s just staring off in the distance, not responding to anyone. Her vital signs are through the roof and so is her neural activity. Nathalie says she’s displaying all the signs of having a nightmare.”
“Fuck! Do not touch her mind. In fact, do not touch her at all. I’m on my way.”
“Okay.”
The pounding sound of my three companions’ footsteps resounded behind me as they followed in my wake. Judging by Legion’s muttered curse, I assumed Ayana had mind-spoken to him what was happening. I jumped into the lift and selected the Incubator. The other three men rushed in, and Chaos almost got squished by the door closing.
A tense silence filled what little room remained in the elevator cabin. Beyond the worry that gnawed at me, anger also bubbled beneath the surface; anger at myself and at the Vanguard for pushing her so hard and, especially, anger at that bastard who had violated her mind to begin with.
The lift finally stopped. As soon as the door began opening, I squeezed through and made a mad dash for the Incubator at the end of the hallway. I found Liena sitting on the floor, her legs to the side, and her back resting against the side of a rebirth table, as if she’d slipped down in front of it. Her naturally pale skin had lost its usual glow, looking ghostly instead. Lips parted, she drew in the typical quick, shallow breaths of one facing intense fear. Eyes wide, she stared ahead, unseeing, her slender body trembling.
The other women surrounded my mate, while Nathalie ran a handheld scanner over her.
“Liena, it’s me, my love,” I said softly, crouching next to her.
She didn’t respond. I carefully took her hand in mine. It felt cold and clammy. I kept calling out to her, shook her gently, but she was too far gone into whatever residual, horrible reality Silas had planted in her mind.
I need to replace it with a better one.
Nathalie had assumed wrong. Liena wasn’t having a waking nightmare but was indeed dream walking. Except, Silas hadn’t drawn her into it; my mate had trapped herself in those dreadful memories.
Pulling my woman into my embrace, my cheek resting on top of her head, I created a scene on the beach of Wyngenia, a stunning, primitive planet where the too-few bonded Warriors often took their mates for their honeymoon. Then, I brushed against Liena’s mind, creating a psychic door between her dream walk and mine, which I prayed she would open.
Chapter 9
Liena
The girls and I were making amazing progress. Our power turned out to be every shade of badass. We, Asians, had waited so long to finally discover our ability, and it had been well worth it. And Raven… Even though we hadn’t bonded, last night our relationship had
moved to a new level, and not just on the physical front. It disturbed me that I should have ‘regressed’ into having a full-on nightmare after mind-melding with my mate. But then, my shrink had warned me that the day I decided to get back in the saddle of psychic communication, probable relapses would be part of the healing process. Raven had been amazing through it all, giving me exactly the kind of support I needed.
I wasn’t in love with him, and yet, I was. There would be no going back to Earth for me. I still had a long way to go to be fully healed from Silas—if I ever was—but with Raven by my side, I would get there, and we would have the same kind of loving future his parents had.
But that cloud in the otherwise perfect sky that had become my life was messing with me big time. As I was shielding and unshielding the women’s vessels and portals, or Wrath’s soul—our guinea pig yet again—dark flashes that I couldn’t quite explain started appearing before my eyes. I recognized them as relics of my terrible past with Silas. I refused to yield to them, casting them away each time they popped up. You’d think someone was flicking the lights off, and, every time they did, the room turned into an ominous place before they flicked the lights back on seconds later.
Steele lay down on a rebirth table, readying for his soul to get ping-ponged between the vessel within Diane—his Soulcatcher—and my shield, before Ayana would start flinging him about while the women walked around the room. The usual nauseous feeling settled in my stomach as I reached for Diane’s psychic void. I still couldn’t touch minds with any male other than Raven, but at least I could do so with other females, as long as I kept my burgeoning panic in check.
Ignoring my unease, I focused on the glowing, tear-shaped cradle beneath the silver sphere shielding Diane’s soul which served as vessel for Steele’s soul. As I began pushing my power around it to form the shield, the top parted like the petals of a flower. I froze in surprise. This had never happened before. As I stared in shock, the ‘petals’ of the vessel turned to an ashen color, their previously sleek and shiny outer shell cracking like excessively dry dirt.
And then a dark, chitin-covered hand shot out of the vessel and caught my consciousness, dragging me inside it. I felt myself screaming, but my consciousness had no form, no vocal chords. Darkness surrounded me as I fell, but instead of the Breeding Swamp I had expected, my surroundings gradually took on a burnished red tinge. The familiar, musty, slightly rotten scent of a liveship struck my nose. Seconds later, sticky, slimy membranes wrapped from behind around my arms and legs, slowing my fall like a bungee. Except, the rebound didn’t have me bouncing back up, but to the side until my back hit the humid texture of the liveship’s membrane.
Most of the Kryptid fleet consisted of liveships. The creatures—if they even qualified as such—were basically a network of tissues, muscles, and nerves grown over a number of years into vessels that responded to various nervous stimuli. They had no intelligent thoughts and merely reacted to pleasure and pain.
The room lit up. My horrified cry died in my throat as my gaze landed on two dozen other human females—or what had once been human females—caged like me by the membranes of the ship. Organic tubes, one on each side of their necks, undoubtedly provided them with necessary nutrients to keep them alive. Their skin had a sickly, whitish-blue hue to it and looked almost translucent, with bluish veins standing out starkly against their paleness. Patches of dark scales covered parts of their arms, legs, and faces. Most of them had bellies swollen with what I could only assume to be their unborn child.
Not a human child.
A slapping sound drew my attention. I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat as I saw, far to my left, the dark silhouette of a massive Kryptid, fucking one of the females. The liveship’s membranes held her like a sex swing for the Kryptid’s convenience. From a distance, she seemed completely amorphous while he rutted over her, staring blindly at the white, wart-like domes on the ceiling that lit the room. I averted my eyes, fear rising in the pit of my stomach when I realized that I was naked, like all the other women.
I pulled on the membrane that held me to the wall. It immediately tightened with punishing strength, cutting off my circulation. I silenced a pained whimper and stilled. The membrane automatically relaxed around me.
And then something dawned on me.
I’ve been here before.
And yet, it was different. I couldn’t recall ever seeing one of the Kryptids rape any of the females before. I’d never been strapped naked to the wall either. I’d been held in a cage from whence Silas would ‘rescue’ me right before one of the Kryptid soldiers was supposed to come fetch me for the General’s pleasure.
This isn’t real. I’m creating these nightmares with my own fears.
I ordered myself to wake up, to snap out of it, but this didn’t have the sluggishness of a nightmare. This felt real. Too real.
My head snapped left at the sound of a loud grunt. The Kryptid, head thrown back, had visibly climaxed. Heart pounding, I watched him slowly pull out, his thick, pitch-black cock still half-stiff. As if he sensed me staring, he turned to face me. The large mandibles on each side of his thin, wide mouth opened, and his lips parted, displaying an evil grin filled with sharp, pointy, white teeth.
While he marched towards me, the membranes of the liveship tilted the female’s pelvis up, as if to increase the chances for the Kryptid’s seed to successfully implant. My fear rose with each of his steps, my lungs unable to draw enough air.
Wake up, Liena, WAKE UP! This isn’t real.
As he closed the distance, I realized this wasn’t just some Kryptid, but the rogue General Khutu himself. His oversized, multifaceted eyes, akin to an insect version of those of the little grey men, hypnotized me. Measuring at least seven feet tall, the upper part of the General’s head resembled that of a rhinoceros beetle, with small spikes all around his forehead. A thick, black, chitin armor entirely covered his humanoid body, although he possessed a waist far narrower than a human’s. To my relief, two chitin panels closed before his cock, covering it in a loin plate similar to the scaly one of the Xian Warriors. The three segments of his legs gave his steps an odd bounciness as he came to a stop before me.
“Hello, little human,” the General said, the irritating clicking sound of his voice making me grind my teeth. “How kind of you to voluntarily join my harem. I haven’t seen one of your kind in too long.”
The razor-sharp claws of his chitin-armored hand flicked one of my nipples. For a moment, I feared he would slice it out of pure cruelty.
“Too bad you aren’t ready to be bred, yet,” he said with a greedy smile. “There’s still plenty of my seed to go around, but it would be wasted on you.”
He emitted a shrill sound that painfully pierced my ears. Seconds later, part of the ground behind him opened like the iris of a lens. A female Kryptid appeared, lifted by a platform through that opening. Although similar in overall appearance to the General, she was smaller, with a much tinier rhino-beetle horn, and baby-sized mandibles framed her mouth. There was something sensuously alien in the way she swayed her hips with that unnaturally narrow, ant-like waist of hers as she approached us.
“Prepare my bride,” Khutu said to the Kryptid female. “I want her ready for mating by the time I return from my visit with the Queen.” The female nodded, and the General turned back to look at me. “I will visit you often. I have too few sons with those slanted eyes. You are still young. You will bear me many.”
He caressed the skin at the edge of my eyes with the back of his claw before snapping his mandibles over his malevolent grin. He turned and marched towards another of the females who didn’t appear pregnant. As he approached her, the liveship positioned her in a swing.
Wake up, damn you! Wake up!
The Kryptid female stopped in front of me and lifted her hands. Unlike the male Kryptid Soldiers who only possessed three digits on each hand, she had five. She held them in front of me as if she were carrying an invisible bowl. When she moved them c
loser to my stomach, I knew what would follow wouldn’t be pleasant. The fear that had somewhat ebbed when the General had confirmed he wouldn’t rape me—yet—returned with a vengeance. The tips of her fingers lengthened into thick needles that pierced my stomach and sank deep inside me.
I screamed and, even though I had a body in this ‘nightmare’ world, not a sound came out of me. The only thing that could be heard in the room was the slapping sound of chitin meeting flesh off to my right.
Acid burned me from the inside out, shredding my innards like so many shards of glass swirling within. I gagged and a membrane from the liveship settled over my mouth. I wretched, bile and vomit rising in my throat. With a slurping sound, the liveship absorbed it all. Nothing ever went to waste on these vessels. Anything organic, even bones and feces, would be absorbed by the ship to feed, maintain, and repair itself.
My body shook, wrecked with agony, but still my mind wouldn’t free me of this torture. White lights flashed before my eyes. I’d be losing consciousness soon. But what did that mean in a dream walk into which I’d trapped myself? Was this pain a sign that my body in the real world was going through irreversible trauma? Was my psychic mind fracturing? Was I lying in a pool of my own blood as my brain sustained severe neural damage?
The membrane lifted from my mouth, I had nothing else to expel.
“Liena!”
I knew that voice. Faint and distant at first, it grew in strength as it kept repeating my name in a pleading litany. But was I truly hearing it or imagining it? The lights intensified before my eyes, one of them pulsating brightly beyond the Kryptid female’s shoulder. Just as I thought I would pass out, she pulled out the needles from my stomach. The pain didn’t go away but abated sufficiently for my head to clear somewhat. As she repositioned her hands in a straight line along my pelvic line, the lights behind her coalesced into a luminous archway.
