Chapter Thirty-Five
Aphrodite woke in an abyss. Dark, thick nothingness that engulfed all her senses.
She sat up in the void and searched across it for any light or life.
Endless. Her hands reached out like she was feeling for the edge of the bunk or the top of the ship.
Nothing was solid around her except the firm pressure keeping her from free fall.
However, the moment she realized nothing was firm, she dropped.
Her stomach flew up into her throat. Legs kicking, arms flailing, she tried to grab ahold of something. Anything.
Then a gust of wind wrapped around her hand, around her wrist and yanked her upwards in the dark. She stopped falling. Her legs dangled beneath her as she stared up into the void. A shadow shifted before her, but she couldn’t see its shape. It is shapeless.
“Help us.” The voice was a whisper in her ear. It was low, raspy, as if drawn from the last breaths of clenched lungs.
“Who are you? What do you want?”
“They infected us. They broke us from our home. We hunger. We can never be fed. We still hunger and continue to hunger till we find a feast. We never used to hunger like this. Insatiable.” There were several voices now, tendrils of smoke and air wrapping around her torso and legs.
They were surrounding her, their pleas growing louder. “Kill us! Kill the hungry ones!”
“What?” she barked.
“Kill. The. Hungry. Ones!”
She was dropped from their smoke into the void.
Falling left her insides tangled as she stared up through nothingness.
Then her body smacked into the bed bunk.
Aphrodite shrieked, twisted and turning.
She caught it, just out of the corner of her eye.
A smokey tendril slipping back through the wall of the ship.
Buddy was at her side in the blink of an eye and his light flashed the whole bunkroom.
Everyone jumped to attention as Aphrodite wheezed, scrambling away from the wall.
She dropped off the bunk and into Xexis’ arms. Her gaze jerked back and forth looking for more of them.
Sweat drenched her skin. Hair stuck to her face and neck, she looked for any other shadows.
Buddy scanned the walls, chirping as he moved along.
Xexis stroked her arm, “My Mate?”
“The shadows…they…” Her mouth stopped functioning as Buddy crawled to the edge of the bed.
Something dripped out of her nose and pure dread filled her belly.
Buddy tapped a tentacle to her data pad.
Her heart thundered as she swiped it out from under her pillow and wiggled out from the crowded bunks. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Xexis followed her as she rushed through the ship and down into the laboratory.
Tears welled in her eyes as she filled the small room with light.
It was blinding, but she didn’t feel safe without it.
Aphrodite, in her sleeper leggings and tank top, sank to the floor, hunched over the data pad.
Breathing was the hardest part. Her heart was racing, making her head spin.
Planting her hands flat against the cool metal, she did her best not to pass out.
Panic turned her blood into a slushy, her body weighing down like concrete.
Her mate knelt beside her, a hand to her lower back. “Aphrodite?”
“They spoke to me in my dreams. They reached out and begged me… They…I didn’t know they could…
What if they’re…” Aphrodite sobbed, swiping at her nose.
Vivian said they enter through the nostrils.
She wiped and wiped and wiped but the droplets wouldn’t stop till there was blood smeared on the side of her hand.
Shoulders tense, she barked the next words out of her mouth. “Buddy, scan me again.”
“My mate—”
“Buddy! Scan. Me. Again!” She snarled, glancing at the drone.
He chirped sadly, floating up into the air above her.
An orange grid of light fell over her. She stared at the empty text screen as Buddy booted up the results to the scans.
The circles spun before her, leaving her insides a swirling mess. Xexis and her watched the screen.
“Aphrodite…”
“If I’m infected,” she growled between clenched teeth. “I’m ordering Buddy to shoot me in the head.”
“You will do no such thing,” he snarled.
“We do not have the means to do brain surgery, Xexis. If they’re inside me, then they’re attached to my brain stem.
I’ll be infected with Lyssavirus and the Brexzkit; there is no cure.
And I won’t turn out like Fqa, fighting for my life until they eventually feed on me to death.
” She faced him, her heart skipping a beat.
His obsidian gaze bore through her. It left her twisted and in knots inside, unable to move or speak.
Please. She ripped her gaze toward the screen. Buddy’s findings finally filled the screen. Her throat closed around a lump as the screen filled with numbers and charts. Finally, his text appeared over all of it.
Aphrodite Kerso is no longer infected.
“What!?” she barked.
The Brexzkit were inside Aphrodite Kerso, they fed on some of her nutrients, but they left. Aphrodite is not infected anymore.
Aphrodite sat up fully before sinking her back against one of the walls.
Her legs kicked out before her. No longer infected.
Her heart beat like angry wings on a bird against her ribs.
No longer infected. Then her dream wasn’t a dream.
It was a brain stem phone call. Cool sweat ran down her spine and pooled at the small of her back.
“They said kill the hungry ones. That they were infected.” Aphrodite finally found the strength to speak. She glued her gaze on Xexis who sat, just as exhausted, against a leg of the table in the lab.
“The Lyssavirus.”
“Someone infected the Brexzkit, or at least some of them. They said they don’t hunger like that, that they’re insatiable.
If Buddy is right, then a regular Brexzkit is like a one night pest. They drop in, feed off your surplus, then leave before you wake up.
And maybe the infected are driven mad by the Lyssavirus, they’re taking bodies that won’t fight back, and they just freak out and lose control like rabies. ”
Xexis nodded solemnly, folding all his arms around him. Then his gaze hardened as he glared at her. “If Buddy is right?”
“Buddy,” she wheezed, glancing to the drone. “You’re not lying, I’m not infected anymore, right?”
His text filled the screen.
Aphrodite Kerso is no longer infected.
She sighed shortly before she was wrenched away from the wall.
Xexis flattened her to the floor, her back pressed into the cool metal.
She swallowed over her tongue as he inhaled sharply.
He let it out slowly, jabbing a forefinger in her face.
“My mate does not get to decide when she dies. We die of old age or on the hunt, no other way!”
His words were dark, but she could hear the wound in them.
It was the second time he was furious with her, and just as it did the first time, it nearly ripped her heart out.
Finger wavering, he glared at her with his pincers curled in agony.
The same curl she’d seen on Reevar’s face when he’d been stabbed.
Her chest panged as she nodded slowly. He growled, pushing off her.
“And do not ever threaten me with your death again.”
“Xexis,” She whispered.
“No! My mate is fated to be by my side for all of our lives. You do not get to ignore fate just because you are human. You are Mphronatch now, and you will be Mphronatch until our younglings fill the station to the brim or we are replaced. I will not have you leave me a moment before we’ve returned home and have retired from the hunt.
You will be by my side until a pyre is lit in our name, Aphrodite Kerso, am I clear?
” He sat back on his calves, glaring down at her.
She nodded again sloppily, tears pouring down her face and whimpering, “Crystal clear.”
“Good, I hate repeating myself.” He dropped back down over her, on his hands and knees.
Hovering over her, their foreheads pressed together.
She weakly looped her arms around him and held him close to her.
Xexis spoke with a heavy rasp, “I would destroy the stars just to keep you by my side. Do not tell me that we are not capable of anything, for I will defy your logic if it means keeping your heart beating.”
Aphrodite pressed a kiss to the space above his mouth, then to the bridge between his eyes. She kissed up his forehead before lingering with her lips against the top of his head. “Xexis, I would stop at nothing to keep your heart beating.”
She didn’t mention that if it meant removing herself from the picture, then she’d do so without regret. There were no stars without Xexis.
They lay in silence, only the hum of the engine and Buddy’s soft, mechanical whirling in the air.
Eventually, Xexis pulled her with him out of the laboratory and onto the command deck.
He sat in the pilot’s chair with her in their lap.
They watched the stars whizz past them as the ship flew through space.
The ship was set to autopilot in hyperspace, and the pilot had an alarm set.
If they’re anything like Max, they have it hung from the ceiling of their room so they can’t accidentally turn it off. She smiled weakly at the thought.
“Xexis, I’m sorry for what I said. I know it hurt you,” she whispered, shifting in the seat. Her back to the arm of the chair, she looked at his face.
“My mate is fearless, even in the face of her own death.” Xexis stared out into the stars, his hands gripping her tight.
“I thought that’s what you liked about me,” she teased. Cupping his chin, she brought him to face her fully. “I never want to hurt you, and I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you, as you have forgiven me many times.” He held a warm expression, but his pincers still told Aphrodite he was hurt. She’d have to make it up to him. Aphrodite snuggled down into his lap more, laying her head against his shoulder. He stroked her arm absent mindedly.
Aphrodite let her gaze travel the command deck. As the silence ate at her, she pulled out her data pad and opened to the book they had been reading. “You know…if you wanted…Xnasis would never know we finished the book.”
Xexis snickered, “Xnasis would sense it.” His finger pressed against the pad and selected the contemporary romance book she had been reading a while ago. “How about this one, you never finished.”
“But you were asleep for that?” She shot him a teasing look.
He shrugged non-chalantly. Aphrodite wiggled to get comfortable and continued where she left off.
Xexis curled around her, closing his eyes and she felt him drift as she read.
The memories of the Brexzkit sat at the back of her mind.
Funny, where they just were. She didn’t stop reading for fear that Xexis would wake.
But she replayed the dream over behind her eyes. They were reaching out to her.
…Buddy said we found you, Aphrodite Kerso the Brexzkit and the Zrexeit…
She would need to continue to think on it, but something was lingering just off the tip of her tongue about them. There was something just not right about how they all came to her for aid.