Sera thought, then said, ‘Help me look for Kira. She might be able to hear us if we call out to her.’
‘I don’t know,’ Theyn hedged. ‘There are a lot of people here, and a lot of minds to sift through to find her.’
‘Are you telling me you wouldn’t know your own daughter? We can find her. I know it.’ She took Theyn’s hand and pulled him back down to sit between them. ‘We have to at least try.’
They sat together, eyes closed, and they connected through their link as fully as they could, amplifying their power. Beno, the lone native telepath in the group, extended his abilities outward, buoyed by the energy his mates supplied. Sera could sense the thoughts of a million minds, echoes of words in multiple languages as their probe searched for Kira. Beno struggled not to hold his breath as he labored, and Theyn squeezed his hand to try to remind him.
The voices kept coming, and nowhere in the noise could they isolate the sounds of their daughter. If she was out there, she was hidden, or sleeping. Sera didn’t want to speculate on the other reasons why Kira might not be thinking or awake.
They finally gave up, and exhaustion set in. Beno’s face was gray with fatigue as he sat back, gasping for air. ‘It’s useless,’ he despaired.
Sera sighed and Theyn squeezed his partner’s hand again. “It’s all right. We’ll find her. We’ll try again when we’re a little more rested.”
Theyn stood again, and he wandered through the room they’d been given, idly looking for drawers or closets or anything else of interest. There was nothing, just blank white walls, the bed, the divan, and the bathroom fixtures.
“Do you think they’ll feed us? And if they do, what will it be? Will I even be able to eat Bruthesan food?” Sera shook her head. “God, I can’t believe I’m on a whole new planet. I can’t believe any of this is happening. I keep wanting to pinch myself to see if I can wake up.”
‘Unfortunately, it’s all too real.’ Beno sighed. ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to eat the food here.’
She smirked cynically. “Well, I guess we’ll find out.”
“I guess so.” Theyn ran his hands through his hair, his fingers combing through the thick golden locks. He dropped his hands again with a sigh and sat on the bed. “I wonder what she said to them.”
“Probably some line of bullshit to lead them farther down the primrose path.” She echoed his earlier actions by pacing slowly through the room.
“Primrose path,” Theyn repeated. “Another of your Earth sayings?”
“Yes. It means to fool people into doing something that they think is easy, but that really will cause them trouble in the end.”
He nodded. “Very apt.”
Beno sat beside Theyn on the bed, then flopped backward onto the mattress. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the birthmark? I didn’t think we had any secrets between us. Frankly, I didn’t think we could.”
The prince shrugged the shoulder in question. “It’s not the sort of thing one brings up. It hardly fits into everyday conversation. It was also a great source of shame to me, since my mother saw fit to erase it as a deception.”
Beno put a hand on the small of Theyn’s back. “That wasn’t fair of her.”
“No,” Sera agreed. “It was downright rotten.”
Theyn smiled at their loving support. “She had her reasons. I was a great disappointment to her. Why do you think she was all right with me going off to that remote science station for years on end? She didn’t want to see me. She wanted to focus on my sister instead.”
Sera walked to him and took his beautiful face in her hands. “I can’t imagine how anyone could be disappointed in you.” She kissed him tenderly, and he gently rested his hands on her waist, then slid them down to her hips.
When the kiss broke, he looked up into her eyes. “Thank you.”
“No need to thank me for telling the truth.”
The door opened, startling all three of them. A female with tawny skin and purple eyes entered with a tray in her hands. She was completely bald, lacking even eyebrows or eyelashes, and it gave her face a stark, staring quality. Her cheekbones were much higher and wider than a human’s, and her chin was sharply pointed. She looked very alien to Sera, like the sort of being she’d seen in the science fiction movies she and Joely used to watch and laugh at. The three armed guards followed her in, the bracelets on their wrists prominently displayed, both for ease of access and to remind the prisoners of the threat in their heads, in the unlikely event that they had forgotten.
The woman put the tray down on the divan. The tray was covered by what looked like a surgical drape, and Sera was instantly on her guard.
“We have medicine to help prevent you from contracting the virus,” she told them, pulling the cover away and revealing three neatly-placed instruments. Her voice was throaty and strangely modulated, but the translator in Sera’s ear provided her words readily enough. “This is an inoculation developed by Lady Tayne. I believe you met her.”
The male Ylians exchanged a glance, and Theyn said, “Yes. We did.”
The woman approached Sera with the first of her three doses, and the Earthling backed up. “No way. You’re not putting that in my body. I heard what Lady Tayne did to the men she experimented on. I’m not having any part of it.”
One of the guards cleared his throat and moved his hand toward the bracelet on his other wrist. Theyn told her, ‘Please, Sera. It’s this or they’ll activate the probes.’
Beno stepped forward. “Give it to me, first.” ‘Watch me,’ he added for his bond mates. ‘If I have a negative reaction, then you’ll know it isn’t safe.’
There was nothing they could say. The woman pressed the tip of the instrument to the inside of Beno’s wrist and pressed a button. A hiss of air escaped the back of the instrument as the mechanism injected the vaccine into his bloodstream.
Sera and Theyn watched him anxiously, but he showed no sign of rejection or any other bad reaction. He nodded to them and said, ‘It burns a little, but not that bad.’
Theyn was the next recipient, and he accepted the shot wordlessly. When it was done, he rubbed the spot on his wrist where the woman had injected him, and he looked at Sera. She nodded to him, signaling her intention to cooperate, and held out her arm. The alien woman injected her, as well, and for the briefest moment, it felt like fire spreading under her skin. She pulled back with a frown.
“Now you are protected,” the woman said. “This is the good vaccine. The one that works.”
“I hardly think you would bring one that was harmful or useless,” Theyn told her. “Thank you.”
She looked surprised but smiled as she gathered up the tray. “You’re welcome, Your Highness. Welcome to Bruthes.”
She walked out of the room, practically gliding, and the armed guards followed her out. The last one, the one who had reached for his bracelet, smirked at Sera before he left. She clenched her fists at her sides but said nothing. It was the hardest silence she had ever held.
Chapter Fourteen
Asa and Joely were taken off of the ship and trundled into a hovercraft, where they were dumped unceremoniously into the seat before the hatch was sealed shut. They were barely inside when the pilot lifted off, and they felt the craft careening through space, dodging and banking like an F-15 in a dogfight.
“Aw, sweet Jesus,” Asa moaned behind his hood. “I’m gonna ralph.”
“Don’t you dare!” Joely cried. “You don’t want to do that inside a hood, and I don’t want to smell it.”
The hovercraft swerved again, and she toppled over, unable to catch herself with her hands bound behind her back. She landed in someone’s lap, and strong, masculine hands righted her in her seat.
“Who is that?” she asked. “Who are you?”
The man she had landed on spoke in a language she didn’t understand, his voice lilting and strangely musical. She shook her head.
“I don’t understand you.”
They bounced through a patch of tur
bulence, then the pilot dove toward the ground. Joely’s stomach leaped into her throat, and she hoped that Asa could hold it together. She was almost on the verge of hurling; she didn’t need her boyfriend adding to the experience with his own technicolor yawn.
The little craft landed with a hard bump, and the alien seated to Joely’s right made what had to have been a disparaging comment, because the pilot snapped an irate response. The first alien laughed amiably enough, and his large hand closed over Joely’s arm. He guided her out of the hovercraft and onto her feet.
He gave her a moment to steady herself, a kindness she appreciated, before he pulled her after him. She had no idea where he was taking her, but she felt bright sunlight and dry heat on her face. It was like being on Asa’s ranch in the height of summer, and she started to sweat. She could hear the scuffling as her boyfriend was dragged along, too, despite his efforts not to cooperate. She shook her head, not knowing if she was annoyed or impressed with Asa’s bravado.
The heat and sunlight gave way to cool shadow, and she felt her feet scraping over concrete or stone. Her toe hit something hard and she stumbled, but the alien holding her arm held her up, dangling her for a moment as if she was nothing but a rag doll. His obvious superior strength made her gasp, and not for the first time on this astonishing trip, she felt afraid.
She wondered if this was how Sera had felt when Beno and Theyn had kidnapped her. Somehow, she knew that her own kidnapping wasn’t going to end in the pleasant experience her friend had enjoyed.
She was pulled along for several long moments, and though she tried to keep track of the turns and steps, she was hopelessly muddled by the time the dragging stopped. Her alien captor picked her up and put her down gently but firmly on something cold and metallic, and then she was left alone.
The room she was in was silent and smelled of chemicals. Whatever she was sitting on, it was high, and her feet didn’t reach the floor. Joely was still hooded and bound, and she just knew that if she tried to step down, she’d splat like a broken egg. She had no choice but to sit quietly and wait and try not to shake too much.
The cold from the metal and the aggressive air conditioning system cut through to her bones, and soon she was trembling from cold as much as from apprehension. She leaned forward, leaning her torso against her thighs, trying to huddle up as much as she could for warmth. She wondered if the aliens were trying to freeze her to death.
In spite of her anxiety, the cold began to numb her senses, and she found herself nodding off. Joely shook herself, trying to stay awake, but it was a difficult fight. She closed her eyes inside the dark hood and resigned herself to a miserable death. She fell into a fitful sleep darkened with nightmares of alien atrocities and Sera’s missing child.
Joely was startled awake when someone with hands so warm they nearly burned grasped her wrists above the energy manacles and pressed something against her skin. A terrible burning spread through her bloodstream, so painful that she could trace its passage through her veins. She whimpered in the back of her throat.
Her hood was pulled away, and an alien woman in a white smock stood before her. She was the spitting image of the aliens from science fiction, but her skin was brown instead of grey. The woman’s large eyes blinked at her once, and then she slipped a translator earring like the one Sera wore onto the shell of Joely’s ear.
“Do you understand me?” she asked, her voice strange, as if it was coming through a synthesizer.
“Yes.” She swallowed a lump in her throat and said, “What’s going on?”
“You were just given a vaccine that will protect you from the virus.”
“Which virus?”
The woman looked at her in confusion. “The virus. The one that damages Ylian merging.”
“I’m not Ylian.”
“It has negative effects on everyone, human, Bruthesan and Taluan alike.” She took a small, flat instrument out of a pocket and ran it over Joely’s body. “Your vital signs are within normal parameters, although you have an excess of adrenaline in your bloodstream.”
Joely bit back a sarcastic comment. Something told her that this was not the time for snark.
The alien woman looked at her as if she expected an answer, but when none was forthcoming, she went about her business. She drew another instrument from her pocket. This one was shaped like a cigar with black dots on the business end, which she pushed against Joely’s arm. A sample of the human woman’s blood rushed into the instrument, sucked out through her skin, and then the alien pocketed the tool once more.
“What was that for?”
“Simple study,” she answered. “Are you too cold?”
“Yes. And uncomfortable. Could you do something about these manacles?”
The alien’s large eyes blinked. “No. But I will adjust the temperature.”
“Thanks.”
She watched as the alien left the room. Once she was alone, she looked around, trying to get her bearings. The room was small and oppressively white and featureless. She was seated on a medical exam table, and it was the only furniture that she could see. There was no chair, no charts, no stupid posters reminding her that diabetics need to check their feet. Otherwise, it felt sterile and impersonal like every other medical examination room she’d ever seen.
She wondered where Sera and her men were, and what the aliens had done with Asa. Not knowing the whereabouts of her friends made her feel very small and alone, and she leaned her torso against her legs again, this time for comfort.
The temperature of the room gradually increased so she was more at ease in that regard, even if every other kind of comfort was completely elusive. She wished there was a clock so that she could watch time pass, but then again, she probably didn’t want to know.
After an eternity of waiting, the door opened again. She hadn’t even been able to see it before then, so well were its borders concealed in the white material of the walls. Now that it had moved, she saw an unexpected darkness on the other side, as if the bright room she was in was the only light left in the universe.
A familiar man came into view. It was Itan, the Ylian/Bruthesan alien she had helped back in Siberia, and the same man who had participated in their kidnapping. His extraordinary eyes searched his face as he approached.
She straightened and growled, “I ought to kick you in the nuts.”
He smirked as he closed the door behind himself. “I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Maybe you don’t get to pick.”
The smile on his face faded, and he stopped well out of range of her feet. “Do you want those manacles off, or don’t you?”
Joely sighed and demurred, much against her preference. “Off.”
“I thought so.” Itan came to her and deactivated the manacles, freeing her arms at last. Her shoulders and elbows ached, and she glared at him as she tried to rub feeling back into her hands.
“If I lose a finger, it’s your fault.”
“If you say so.”
“Where is Asa? Where are Sera and her boys?”
Itan snorted in amusement as he stepped back out of range. Joely hopped down from the table. “‘Her boys?’” he echoed. “That’s a strange way to talk about the prince and his Companion, but I suppose you don’t have to respect them. They’re not from your people, after all.”
“Damn straight.” She glared at him and stalked toward him. He backed away. “My people are missing, and you’re gonna help me find them. Capisce?”
He frowned and tapped the communicator unit in his ear. “I didn’t understand the last word.”
Joely crossed her arms. “Good.”
Itan backed away another step, then gestured vaguely toward the door. “Would you like to see Asa now?”
“Yes. Where is he?”
The hybrid opened the door. “Follow me.”
Joely was grateful for the sudden liberty, but she was suspicious. “That’s it? Just ‘follow me’? Aren’t you afraid I’ll just club you over the head and r
un away?”
“No.” He walked away down the corridor, and she scrambled to keep up.
“Why not? Do I seem that trustworthy to you?”
He glanced over his shoulder, his unique green and purple eyes flashing with amusement. “You’re in a subterranean bunker. How far could you possibly run? Besides, you’re from a comparatively primitive civilization. You’d have no idea how to make anything work. I’m not worried. Even if you ran away, we’d find you and get you back within the hour.”
She huffed, “Fine. We’ll see about that.”
“Feel free to test me if you’d like.”
Itan led Joely through a dark stone corridor, the walls rough with what seemed to be chisel marks made with something hot enough to melt the stone. There were no lights, and she realized that with the way Ylian eyes glowed, they made enough light of their own to get around. She was jealous, because with her human vision, she could barely make out her hand when she held it in front of her face.
Their progress down the corridor ended abruptly, the hallway itself dead-ending into uncarved rock. Itan opened the door to his left, again one that she didn’t see until he moved it, and he stepped aside. White light poured out into the hall, and she squinted against the glare.
“Joely?”
It was Asa’s voice, and she rushed toward him. He was standing in the middle of another blindingly bright white room, looking strong and healthy. She ran to him, and he caught her in his arms.
“Oh, my God, you are a sight for sore eyes!” she exclaimed, her head resting against his shoulder. He lifted her from her feet, then put her down again as Itan closed and locked the door behind her.
Asa took her face in his hands. “Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”
“No, not really. They left me in those damned cuffs for hours, so I’m sore from that, and they injected me with some sort of vaccine that burned like the dickens. They took blood, too. What about you? Are you okay?”
He nodded and pulled back, taking her hands in his. Her fingers disappeared into his much-larger palms.
Ignition: Alien Ménage Romance (Phoenix Rising Book 2) Page 12
