When Trazen let out a low hiss, she shook her head, clenching her jaw.
“I don’t mean it like that. The stinging part. I...” Hesitating, she glanced up at him, letting him hear the sincerity in her words, hoping he could hear it, anyway. “Something happened in there, Trazen. In the library. I need to show someone. I’d rather if it was you. I think she wanted it to be you...but I want that, too.”
His frown deepened. She saw something behind it that time though. Glimpsing some flicker of vulnerability that lived behind his harder look disarmed her entirely.
“I love you,” she said, feeling her jaw jut forward slightly.
He flinched, his eyes widening.
Looking away, she went on stubbornly, focusing on her grass-stained feet.
“But this isn’t about that...not entirely.” She shrugged, forcing herself to look up again, to hold his gaze. “I don’t want someone else to sting me...so how I feel about you is part of it. But the message wasn’t only for me...it was for you, too. It was for all Nirreth. I need to share it with somone. I need to share it with someone soon, or it might cause problems.”
When she looked up at him that time, she couldn’t read his expression at all.
“Can you just tell me?” he said, his voice low.
She thought about that, then shook her head. Then, thinking some more, she realized that wasn’t entirely true. “I can tell you part of it,” she admitted. She looked up at him again. “Some of it’s not really that kind of message. I’m not sure I have words for some of it.”
“Tell me the part that is. The part where you can use words.”
Jet sighed, leaning back on the bench.
Then, still thinking, she conceded defeat, combing her fingers through her hair. She thought about what the female Nirreth said to her before she’d blacked out on the library floor, trying to decide which parts would make sense with only words.
After a few more seconds, she felt her defenses drop even more.
“I’ll just tell you all of it,” Jet said finally. “Everything I can. If you want to know more, you can sting me. But maybe just telling you would be enough.”
She said the last part with more than a little embarrassment.
It had already occurred to her by then that maybe he was right. Maybe she’d been trying to manipulate him into stinging her.
Pushing that out of her head, she started talking, her voice matter-of-fact.
She relayed all of it, word for word where she could, including her thoughts and impressions as she remembered them...including her impressions of Alice. Her memory didn’t really work as well when it came to conversations and people as it did with maps and underground tunnels...but it all happened recently enough that she was pretty sure she’d gotten most of it.
When she finished, she just fell silent, leaning deeper into the back of the padded bench.
Trazen just sat there for a few seconds too, not looking at her.
Then he exhaled, coiling his tail tentatively around her arm. The contact made her jump, but she only looked down at it, trying to decide if she should touch him back.
“And you think she was talking about me?” he said, before she could make up her mind.
Jet shrugged. Reaching out a hand tentatively, she stroked her fingers along the silky skin of his tail, feeling him shiver.
“I don’t know who else she would have meant,” she said, not looking up. “Do you?”
He turned his head, looking at her.
She could almost feel the indecision on him, like a low vibration through her fingers as she continued to stroke his skin. She felt other things too. She wished she could feel him well enough to have the slightest idea what any of those feelings really meant. All she was left with was some distant intensity of feeling, buried behind that more cloying indecision wrapped in something like anger that might not have been real anger at all.
She was still trying to think her way past those glimmers of emotion when he slid closer to her again on the bench. That time, he wrapped his arms around her, wrapping his tail around her waist and hip, pressing his leg against hers. He held her tightly, startling her enough that she flinched a little, looking up at him.
“Trazen––”
“Do you really love me?” he said, his eyes on hers.
His mouth firmed while she watched him look at her.
Sighing a bit, maybe in defeat that time, too, she nodded. “Yes.”
“What about Laksri?” he said, his voice softer. “Does he know that?”
She leaned into his side, nodding. “He does now.”
That indecision on him worsened, growing intense enough that she winced. She found herself looking up at him again, firming her jaw.
“Trazen,” she said, a little at a loss when she couldn’t read his expression again. “...Relax. Just relax, please. We don’t have to talk about this now. I just didn’t want you to leave the way you did, not after everything. You told me to choose...so I did. But you don’t have to do anything different with this information. Definitely not right this second.”
She met his gaze at the end, and saw him watching her.
Something in his eyes looked different again, but again, she had no idea what it meant.
“Trazen––” she began.
But he cut her off before she could get any farther.
“What if I want to?” he said. “What if I want to do something about it right now?”
She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes. “Like what?”
Leaning down, he kissed her, pulling her tighter against his chest. When she softened against his mouth and body, he wrapped his arms further around her back, pulling her into his lap. She felt enveloped in him when he kissed her again, even before he started working his way down her throat with his lips and tongue, wrapping the jointed fingers of one hand into her long hair. It felt like a long stretch of time before they paused.
When they did, she had one of her legs wrapped around his and he was stoking her bare skin past where the shorts ended, pulling on her leg to bring her deeper into his lap. He let out a low, rumbling purr as he kissed her neck again, nipping her lightly with his teeth before he raised his head, meeting her gaze.
When he spoke that time, his voice was gruff.
“I want to sting you now,” he said.
Feeling a little dazed, she nodded, caressing his neck and feeling the vibration in his chest when he let out another low growl.
“Yes,” she said.
“You remember what I said?” he said, kissing her cheek as he tugged her closer against him. “On the ramp, Jet. What I said I wanted the next time I stung you?”
Shivering a little, she nodded again. “Yes,” she said.
“It’s at least a few hours’ flight, Jet.”
His fingers tightened on her. She felt the question there, even as her hand began exploring the smooth skin under his shirt. He let out another low growl when she didn’t stop touching him, but the question she’d felt there lingered.
“I understand,” she told him, somewhat belatedly. “I know, Trazen.”
“Tell me you love me again,” he said, his voice a heavier growl.
“I love––”
Before she could get it out, he’d already stung her.
He’d lifted her shirt to do it and let out a low gasp as he did. She gripped his arms, feeling her jaw clench the longer the venom let go. He’d barely finished with the first one when he stung her again. And again. He was kissing her by the time he stung her the fourth time, and then she was in his lap for real, trying to think past the flood of information that reached her through his skin, pretty much the instant his venom hit her bloodstream.
I love you, he told her.
Emotion bloomed out of him, a tangible force in her hands and chest. It ripped through whatever remaining walls lived there between them, causing her breath to catch, her fingers to tighten on his arms...then his shoulders. She kissed his face even as his features transf
ormed in front of her, growing so expressive she almost couldn’t recognize the person she’d met in that restaurant that first day, the muscular Nirreth with the sad-looking woman clinging to his arm. Jet hadn’t seen it then, but the woman had been holding onto him for dear life that day, like a life raft in the middle of a violent sea.
Sometimes, maybe needing someone wasn’t such a terrible thing.
I love you, he thought at her again. I think I’ve always loved you, Jet...always...
He stung her again while she caressed his face.
...And then her mind pretty much went somewhere else entirely.
She didn’t mind, though.
For the first time since she’d been stung by a Nirreth, she didn’t mind one bit.
EPILOGUE
The Shinkara
Jet stood on a high platform overlooking a landscape that looked unlike anything she’d ever seen. She couldn’t remember anything quite like it even in the picture books she’d half memorized as a kid in Chiyeko’s lighthouse.
Even the buildings didn’t look like those from the Green Zone she knew from Old North America...although they came the closest to familiar of anything she could see.
The very air smelled different here, wet in a way unlike the monsoon smells she knew from Vancouver. The air here smelled like rich earth and mud mixed with a chalky, living dust, like somehow, someone had taken life and earth and packed it with water into a single smell, one with texture and water and powder and living things all wrapped into it.
Before they’d landed, she’d glimpsed a few familiar sights, mostly from what she remembered of Anaze’s Retribution on Astet.
They’d been moving too quickly through the sky for her to know for certain, but she’d seen a lake and a high wall...or really, she’d glimpsed them as they sped past...seeing just enough to make her wonder if either or both provided the inspiration for those parts of Trazen’s maze.
Yes, Trazen told her, wrapping his arms tightly around her where she stood and nuzzling her neck and jawline with his face.
“This was my home, Jet,” he murmured.
He pointed, aiming his finger to show her a distant part of the horizon. Through his skin, she got more details in his mind of what he wanted to show her.
“...I got aspects of that underground river from your run with the captive there, too,” he said, adding to the pictures he showed her though his skin. “And the small village there, it was a combination of human villages I’ve seen here, and some that are from a different culture that remained behind after those settlers left...”
She watched the pictures in his mind, fascinated...then got pulled back to the present when she glanced back over the quiet valley with their empty buildings below.
“Do you really think they left?” she said, frowning a little.
He pulled her closer, and she softened into his chest without taking her eyes off the landscape in front of them.
“Yes,” he said, kissing her throat. “I suspected as much, truthfully...after you showed me what my old teacher said.”
Jet nodded, still looking out over the quiet landscape.
The Shinkara had left Earth.
They’d left the Green Zone they’d once inhabited filled with freed animals and humans, along with a scattering of empty buildings and parks. Trazen had already spoken to a few of those left behind and found the local humans had even been trained to run the atmosphere-cleaning machines before the Shinkara left.
The landscape below Jet was something she would have thought a paradise growing up. The very fact that it existed at all made her feel like she was dreaming, even apart from having Trazen wrapped around her, exuding warmth and love from his very pores.
“We can do this there,” he said, quieter. “Where you grew up, Jet...I know it is too late for you to grow up like this, but it can be done in other places.”
“Why do you think they left?” Jet pressed. The question nagged at her. Her mind turned over possibilities, coming up with both good interpretations and bad ones.
Trazen shrugged. She felt different layers of meaning shifting through his mind via the venom, a more complex level of thought than she’d experienced through him before now. Feeling aspects of that joy-filled female Nirreth Jet remembered from the library, she fought with a strange pulse of jealousy. Not sexual jealousy...not even jealousy of the female Nirreth, per se. More a jealousy at an understanding she could feel that Trazen and that female Nirreth shared, something that still lived just outside of Jet’s own mental reach.
He kissed her again, smiling as he pulled her against him.
“I will show you,” he promised. “You will understand.”
Jet did understand one thing, though. One thing she hadn’t before.
“That’s why you went to them,” she said, leaning into his chest. “You made those vows because you wanted to learn from them...”
“Yes,” he said, surprise touching his voice. He wrapped his tail tighter around her. “Of course. Why else would I do it?”
She shrugged, letting herself melt into him more. “I don’t know.” She glanced up, studying his face. “There’s not really a human equivalent. The closest would be a monk or a shaman or something, I guess...and people did that here for all kinds of reasons. They were chosen at birth,” she said, thinking about what Chiyeko told her. “Or their parents wanted them to do it. Or they were lost...even in trouble sometimes, like it was that or jail. Women did it sometimes because they had a baby with the wrong person...”
Trazen let out an amused snort. He held her tighter.
“Why does it bother you that they left?” he asked softly.
She twisted around to look at him again.
“Why doesn’t it bother you?” she said.
He purred thoughtfully from his chest, resting his chin on her shoulder.
“Should it?” he said finally, his voice more matter-of-fact. “I have no regrets, Jet...not for what I chose in going to them. Not for what I choose now. As for the Shinkara themselves...I did not live among them for very long. I did a job for them, because I felt called to do it, and I struggled with the corruption and cruelty I saw every day. I am grateful for what they gave me, and what I learned from them...but I do not feel slighted that they left.”
Thinking about his words, she nodded, relaxing slightly.
She realized some part of her had wondered that, if he would have felt left behind.
No, Jet. No. I believe they meant it as a gift. Possibly even a reward...
Jet sighed again, relaxing more as she snuggled into him. “And the Shinkara themselves? Where do you think they will go now?”
He let out a short laugh. “I have no idea, Jet.”
“None at all?”
“None at all.”
“But why? Why would they go?” Jet said, frowning as she looked over the grassy plains. “Aren’t the Nirreth their people? Will they go to some other Nirreth colony now?”
“I do not know,” he said simply. He pressed his face against her neck. Kissing her cheek, he added softly, “But if they do not think they are needed here, how is that anything but a compliment, Jet?”
Smiling, she let out a low snort, watching as the sky grew darker. They’d flown so far that it was nighttime here, even as it was midmorning in the place they’d left behind. Jet had never been in a part of the world where it was night while at her home it was day.
“No,” Trazen smiled. “You’ve just been to a whole other planet entirely.”
Jet smiled at that too. Another thing to tell Biggs and her mother.
Her eyes drifted up as she leaned her head on Trazen’s shoulder.
Staring at the stars, she realized she could see the real ones here.
The Shinkara had cleared enough of the dust and smoke from the air in this part of the world that she could see past the dense brownish haze that kept the stars from her eyes most nights back home, in Vancouver.
She thought about bringing her family here.<
br />
Then she realized she’d rather be able to see the real stars in the lands around her old home. For the first time in her life, that didn’t even sound like wishful thinking. It sounded like something that might really happen...something she might get to witness.
At the very least, she could watch progress in that direction, even if she and Biggs and her mother saw most of that from beneath a Green Zone dome’s wall.
“Maybe we don’t need them anymore,” Jet murmured, still watching the stars.
Contentment seeped off the Nirreth’s skin, even as she felt a low ripple of desire off him, right before he wrapped his tail around her waist.
“Maybe we don’t,” Trazen agreed.
Of course, Jet would still have to explain her Nirreth boyfriend to her family.
That could get ugly, in more ways than one...and not only with Uncle Draven.
Pressing his cheek against her neck, Trazen laughed.
They just stood there for what felt like a long few minutes, watching the night crawl over the remaining lines of light and color that lingered at the horizon.
It had been a long trip, just to watch a sunset in another part of the world.
Still, right then at least, it felt pretty worth it, Jet thought.
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THE ALLIE’S WAR SERIES is a dark, unique and gritty psychic romance involving a young woman grappling with her role in bringing about the end of one world and the start of a new one. Follow Allie Taylor and her antihero partner in crime, Dehgoies Revik, as they fight terrifying enemies and one another in a passionate story spanning centuries, and filled unpredictable twists.
Alien Apocalypse: The Complete Series (Parts I-IV) Page 89
