She soon found that she was justified in being suspicious, since Fie had lied. He didn’t have cake, or anything like cake. He gestured her to a seat and gave her a lumpy Frian pastry that had nuts in it. “This is not cake. This isn’t even a scone,” she griped, turning it around in her hands with distaste. “It would have to improve before we could call it a crumpet! I doubt that even peanut butter and banana slices could make this thing edi…” She looked down in the middle of her tirade and saw that Fie had poked her arm and was already pulling out a small vial of blood! When he poked her, she had no idea. She hadn’t felt it at the time, but she didn’t like it now.
“Hey!” She tried to flinch back, but in that moment he got a tight hold of her arm and kept it where he wanted it. “I didn’t agree to that.”
He made a ‘mmhm’ sound, but it was a horrible pretense of being interested in her protest.
When he was finished putting a small patch over the injection site, he finally straightened and lifted his eyebrow in a lackadaisical way. “It’s not like you felt it.”
“That’s not the point! The point is that you came at me like a gigantic bloodsucking mosquito or something!” Although she had been quite surprised that it hadn’t hurt. It certainly had when she was growing up…
“Besides,” she added, “surely you know all about humans. Haven’t you probed us yet or whatever? Isn’t that what aliens do?”
He stared at her with a very blank expression, and for a long moment she wondered if he had heard her at all. “Probe you where, exactly?”
Now she was wishing she hadn’t mentioned that. She frowned, and then rubbed at her arm awkwardly. “You know… everywhere?”
He suddenly looked thoughtful. “Maybe we should change the subject for now?” He then shone a light into her eyes, again without asking.
“Agreed.” She gave a singular nod. She even let him look down her throat, and when he told her to drink something down, she did without too much fuss. “Why are we doing this?” she said, smacking her lips after drinking the sour liquid. “And what did you just give me?”
“Basic routine checkup. It’s very strange that a Swarii would be able to have an actual Union with an Earthen human, so I’m just checking for unique results in your tests that might set you apart. And do you really want to know what you drank?” he asked, his conversation distracted.
She frowned at that question and had to think about it before answering with a simple, “Not really.”
“That’s what I learned about Earthen humans when we were in the mines with them,” he said a little more conversationally, although he didn’t make eye contact. At this point, he was scrawling something down onto an electronic tablet. She tried to look at what he was writing, only to see a bunch of scribbles that she feared was the Swarii’s written language. “They hate silence. They love filling the air with a bunch of questions they don’t want to know the answer to. I’d say that you are all obsessed in one sort of philosophy over the other, but after a week of listening, I realized that Earthen humans are psychologically disturbed. They all have fears, make decisions that don’t make sense based on those fears, and are stubborn about the most random of things.”
“I’m not stubborn!” she argued.
“Open your mouth,” he ordered in his bored doctoral tone. “I need a saliva swab.”
“Not gonna happen, scooter,” she assured stubbornly.
“You wanna bet?” Somehow he said this without looking threatening. He was more matter-of-fact than anything else, as if he had every confidence of getting everything he needed.
“You can’t force anything into my mouth.”
“You want me to force things into other places instead?” he asked serenely.
“You…” She was about to say ‘wouldn’t,’ but she didn’t know Fie that well, and she didn’t actually want to be probed today. She finally opened her mouth, her expression designed to assure him that she didn’t like acquiescing to his desire to examine her.
“Thank you,” he said after taking the swab. “Now, drop your pants.”
She frowned. This was already a long, long day. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“It’s just a skin and tissue analysis. The commander is concerned that he’s surpassing your limits in his attempts to keep you under control.”
“Just take my word for it that he is,” she snapped.
He looked her over, a quick perusal of her person. She suddenly felt just as small as she was in comparison to him. “Would you like to do this the easy way or the hard way?”
She went ahead and chose the hard way. Not with words, but by trying to get up and sprint past him, not realizing that for a man of his size he was actually quite quick.
He grabbed her, picked her up like a rag doll, and took his time sitting down, settling her body over his lap, and pulling down her pants and panties.
She was about to scream from the indecency, but then she realized the likelihood of anyone aiding her even if her scream was heard. They’d probably just sit and stare at this spectacle. So she gritted her teeth and curled her nails into Fie’s hip.
“You aren’t even bruised,” he told her with an unimpressed cluck. She felt something metal slide across her bare bottom and then pinch a flank.
She flushed at his words. “It feels bruised,” she assured him sullenly.
He grunted in a very disbelieving sort of way.
“It does,” she pouted with assurance.
“You could try behaving, then. I’ve never seen anyone speak to Commander Masterson the way you do—well, and live, at any rate. He just lets you walk away most of the time, too. He’s got his work cut out for him.”
“Are you calling me ‘work’?” she asked, prickling.
“Absolutely,” he replied without any apparent regret. He lifted her off his knees and held onto her until she regained her footing on the floor. “I’ll run some of your bloodwork, but so far it seems that you’re hardier than you look.”
That wasn’t the first time she’d been told that. She felt she was tougher than she looked both inside and out; she had to be to survive her family, and she only got tougher after she’d been ripped away from them and made a slave on a backwater planet on the other side of the universe.
That being said, she was certainly glad that this examination seemed to be over. “I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure.”
“Me too,” the giant alien replied, distracted by something he was reading on the tablet in his hands.
She pressed her lips together, feeling like some of her dignity was also bruised by the whole experience, and marched away.
She knew that the Swarii so far weren’t extremely taken with her, including Graham. It was obvious that they were all liking Mary and Peyton much better than they were liking her.
She was busy grinding her own axe, she told herself. After all, she didn’t want to be here. She hadn’t asked for any of this and she really just wanted to go home, smoke a bowl of weed, and pretend that this was all a very long and horrifically vivid bad dream.
Unfortunately, Ellie knew that going back to Earth was not on the menu. She was away from Jazeel, which was a blessing, but they were heading lightyears in the wrong direction from her planet. It might be many years before she was able to go back home, if she ever could at all.
Still, the idea of having to adjust to living among the Swarii seemed extremely daunting. Ellie didn’t want to do it, although she was already telling herself that eventually she’d have to. Her instincts and hormones were all over the place, still drawing her daily to Graham, and her head was still rebelling against the finality of their relationship.
She really missed the days of just working, being herself, and hanging with her family. She shook her head and tried not to let her throat clench as she thought about everything she’d lost. Would her world ever be anything like that again? Would she ever even see her family again?
* * *
Graham was running diagnos
tics on the ship’s navigation program when he saw Fie running out of the hallway, his eyes bright with excitement. Graham frowned, not used to the sight. Fie wasn’t normally the sort of man who showed his emotions on his sleeve.
“What’s wrong?” Graham asked, preparing himself to hear something that he didn’t want to deal with.
“I finally got your mate’s bloodwork tested,” Fie replied, sounding slightly out of breath, like he had run all the way there from the lab. “Commander, this is incredible. You were right.”
Graham’s eyebrows furrowed with concern. “About what?”
“Eleanor’s not fully human.”
* * *
“Then what am I?” Ellie asked, trying to swallow down her fury about all this. She knew it was some serious news since Graham and Fie had approached her with unreadable expressions.
“You’re one quarter Swarii,” Fie replied, looking like he would stake his life on the fact. His shoulders were squared back as if for argument.
She blinked. “How convenient,” she huffed. “One quarter Swarii, my little white ass! All the creatures in all existence and all the way across the universe from Earth and I’m one of you?”
“Fie was pretty excited about that discovery,” Graham said, gesturing to Fie. He seemed calm, but apparently he’d had half a day to digest all this information. Ellie couldn’t even wrap her head around it yet.
“How would that even be possible?”
“Sixty years ago, there was a scientific expedition to your planet. Most of them died from a virus, and after a period of quarantine the uninfected ones returned home. According to their logs, there was one infected male that hadn’t died yet, but he was severely ill and was left for dead, since the others didn’t want to become ill as well. What might have happened is that he recovered and found himself stranded. He must have blended in and mated with the locals. The result being your whole family.”
Fie cut in to add with fervor, “It’s extremely rare to find something like this in nature—two different species similar enough to breed. Not only to breed, in fact, but to breed a fertile generation. I’m guessing it had to have been your paternal grandfather, looking at your test results.”
She blinked, and then her stomach flipped as if she had just dropped twenty feet. She had remembered sitting on her grandfather’s knee, pressing her hand against his large hand and marveling at the extra finger.
She pressed her hand to her forehead. Duh! Her grandpa hadn’t even fit in well! The whole town thought the guy was from a different planet—figuratively, at least—but he was so useful as a mechanic that the town just accepted him as one of their own. He had died when she was about five, but she remembered that he was even taller than her dad—when meant he might have been as tall as Graham. After that, he’d become yet another subject her family never talked about.
“Grampa Shel.” There was a long silence where the room looked pointedly at her for explanation, even the couple who didn’t speak her language. She slowly dropped her eyes to the floor, feeling numb. She shook her head. “I should have fucking known. Tim used to say that for a first-generation American, the dude didn’t ever bore us with tales about the ‘old country.’”
“You met him? You met a Swarii and you didn’t even know?” Peyton asked, amazed.
“So he was tall!” she replied defensively, leaning toward him just so he could see her eye-rolling. “Did you play twenty questions with your grandpa when you were little? Because I didn’t. His memory sucked at the end, anyway. He couldn’t remember what he’d eaten for breakfast.”
“That’s actually not odd at all. I’m surprised he lived as long as he did,” Fie admitted, shrugging his large shoulders. “Earth is not friendly to our species. We have to eat certain vitamins that aren’t grown there. You probably need them, too. Our brains need Ribon to thrive, or else they will eventually deteriorate.”
She rolled her eyes toward Fie and said wearily, “One thing at a time. This is not a time to add alien words into my lexicon.”
“Look,” Graham said, adjusting himself in his seat and then leaning toward her to put his hands on her knees. His thumbs began to rub circular patterns on her skin, apparently in the hopes of calming her. “This explains why you and I are together. Why we mated. You have Swarii genes. You and I must be a good genetic match, after all. Humans are one of the most contagion-reluctant species Fie has come across,” Graham continued. “If your kind had been hit by the same plague that had hit mine, you probably wouldn’t have even gotten a headache. You have all the antibodies necessary to resist that virus.”
“Genetically speaking, your children will be extremely hardy and resilient,” Fie added, and Graham nodded to this like he was relieved to hear it.
Suddenly, the fact that she’d had all the sex she’d had for the last week was extremely jarring. They hadn’t used a stitch of protection, and she wasn’t on the pill. Honestly, she hadn’t even thought about this before, since pregnancy wasn’t a worry on her plate back on Earth. She had been so stupid!
She was on the cusp of freaking out when Fie distracted her by saying, “She just needs to be kept on a strict rest and food regimen and an injection of Ribon every month until her levels straighten out, and she’ll be as healthy and strong as any female of ours—she’ll still be far below average height, but…”
Whether it was the care instructions that were just given to Graham or the mere word ‘injection’ that was worse, she wasn’t sure, but it certainly snapped her out of fretting about what she’d done or who she was.
She shoved herself out of her chair and pointed at Fie. “Let’s get one thing clear—there will be no injections,” she informed. “And don’t talk about me like I’m a pet or something!” She looked at Graham challengingly and he sat back, lowering his shoulders and looking like he was trying to be a relaxing influence. She wanted to fight with him right now—fight with someone!—but he apparently was far from taking the bait. It was extremely frustrating, and so she glared at him, and then at everyone else, before she felt keen to stomp off.
“Ellie, wait…” Mary called from behind her somewhere. Ellie didn’t look around as she continued her march down the hall. It wasn’t as if Mary was going to make her feel better. How could she even relate to what was going on? Mary was at least a full human. Ellie wasn’t even that. She felt unsettled, as if Earth wasn’t her home anymore; her whole species lived under one roof.
As soon as she settled in the engine room, hiding and picking machines apart one by one, Mary eventually stepped in and plopped down in front of her, sitting Indian-style. “Whatcha doin’?” she asked casually.
Ellie shrugged. “I’m doing what a ‘Swarman’ does best, I guess,” she grumbled.
“Is that word supposed to be a clever mix between human and Swarii?” she asked, looking like Ellie had just served her a big bite of Spadooki on a spork.
Ellie snorted. “It sounds dumb to me, too,” she assured, but it is better than ‘Humarii’ or anything else I’ve come up with so far.”
“Look, Ellie, when you think about it, this isn’t the worst thing. It explains a lot, actually. You told me a million times that you and your family never seemed to fit in except with each other. You were just more right than you could have guessed. I’ve found that often it’s comforting just to know ‘why’ something is, and that it’s not your fault. This is just you. It’s not like you’ve been changed, though. Remember—this has always been your identity. You just didn’t know it. But now that you know, you get to really figure out who you are and what you’re capable of. You’re not defined anymore by the people around you. You get to set all new standards. I mean, you get to blaze this trail! Fie’s already up there talking about this finding being revolutionary; that this might change history. Hell, Human-Swarii relations might become extremely common in the future, especially if the next generation is as strong and as smart as you are.”
Ellie thought about this quietly as she worked. She knew
Mary was blowing a lot of smoke up her ass at the moment, but she found she’d liked that sensation. And in fact, as she looked Mary over, she could see that she was clearly rather excited. “You’re not going to want a blood sample next, are you?” she asked with a wary side glance.
“Of course not,” Mary said, waving her hand, but then added, “Fie will let me use the samples he collected—no need to do it twice.”
Ellie looked up at the ceiling and shook her head.
“Hey, I’m a doctor, and this is a whole new field. Don’t ruin this for me,” Mary said with a smirk, jabbing a playful elbow into Ellie’s arm.
Ellie groaned and combed her hand roughly through her long hair. “I still have a feeling that this is not going to be as awesome as you’re painting it. They were already talking about injecting me with shit. I just want to clarify—at home, my parents didn’t even get me vaccinated. This is a little too much.”
She squinted at Ellie. “What, were your parents hippies or something?”
“No, they were just lazy. And my uncle had this thing with the town doctor… Long story. Noses got broken, the police got involved, and now there’s this restraining order… They’re not the type that would take us all the way to Medford for something they didn’t give a shit about…”
Mary put up her hand in a ‘halting’ motion and said, “Never mind, I recant the question.”
She often said that when Ellie opened up about her family. Ellie hadn’t really thought about how amazingly imperfect her family was until she listened to the way Mary was raised. Mary was raised in a world of regattas, summers on the lake, winters on the slopes, ballets, and private schools. She wouldn’t have lasted three minutes into a Jonas Sunday morning pancake breakfast without her head exploding from all the fart jokes.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Ellie conceded, looking back down at the small motor she had taken apart. “It is what it is.”
Mary nodded and clapped her playfully across the back. “Make lemonade out of lemons, Ellie.”
His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1) Page 18
