3. Chapter 3
three
Hue
I slip on a slick patch of floor as I veer around a corner, my knee jarring painfully against the metal.
My shoes offer little to no help in the form of traction, thanks to their long years of abuse before I surge back to my feet.
My pulse is whooshing in my ears like drums as I choose the halls and turns without rhyme or reason aside from I didn’t fucking sign up for this.
Desperation fueling each twist, turn, and pumping of my burning legs.
I can’t go with him, not like this. Memories of soft fur and even softer words brush against my mind.
A Xyrelith. Death omen, one of the most dangerous species known to the wider galaxy.
He said I’m his mate.
I’m not, though.
I’m not anyone’s mate.
I’m nobody.
Human 74-B.
Hue.
“Female, please. I would never harm you.”
His voice shakes me as it sounds close, way too close, making my pulse jump. My eyes catch on a tech closet, the opening just wide enough for a small maintenance bot to slip through.
Or a small human.
I hit the opening with such force that my shoulder lets out an agonizing pang as it’s jerked at an odd angle, scraping more of my already abused flesh.
The blood from my arm smears across the pipes and wires, but I don’t stop, wiggling, panicking as I try to force myself deeper into the compartment.
I try to kneel, squeezing myself through a particularly small section when I get caught.
A pained whimper escapes my throat as I force myself in just a fraction more as the door to the compartment wrenches open, a pair of opaque white eyes finding me.
My breasts scream in protest as I empty my lungs, trying to make them fit, my chest a vice around my pounding heart.
I don’t move more than a hair when the sound of his growl fills the small space, making a shudder break out across my spine.
I still, my own hyperventilation restricted in the tight space. Where they often brought comfort and sanctuary before, there’s none to be found now. I’m a sitting duck, trapped and defenseless. So far from Lunareth.
Stupid, so fucking stupid.
A Xyrelith who has just laid his claim on me stares back from behind his veil.
I watch in horror as he dismisses the holographic illusion tech.
The Xyreliths are known for many things, and yet also nothing at all.
They're an isolated people by force. They’d tell tales of them in the education pods when I was a cub, warning that little ones who run astray would be snatched up by them, never to be seen again.
They’re the space equivalent to the fucking boogeyman.
Their death-touch, an ability to secrete oil-based toxins from every inch of their obsidian flesh, causes everything from hysteria to instant violent death.
That’s not what bothers me most… It's said they can see how close a person is to death by a simple look.
There are a lot of things that make me uncomfortable.
Big, open, empty spaces.
Crowds.
Empty, unfeeling, unseeing eyes.
But mostly… death.
“You’re in pain. Let me help you,” he offers, his voice calm but pinched in worry, like unending velvety night. “You don’t need to run from me.”
“I don’t want you to take me, please,” I plead.
Yeah, I’m not above begging. I need food, a safe place to sleep tonight, and credits.
A ride as close to the eighth quadrant as I can get.
Not to be whisked off to some isolated planet with a death-omen species.
This day was screwed from the jump when I stubbed my toe getting out of my bunk.
I should’ve taken that as a sign that the plan was doomed and fucked straight off Vortara.
Oh, this is karma. Ripe, stinking karma if I’ve ever seen it.
He dips his head again, the odd coloring of his skin sucking the light from the already dank maintenance corridor, so deep down in the bowels that not even the ship's AI bothers to venture. His skin is as inky as the darkest voids in space, save for the white highlighting, resembling a vaguely humanoid skull on his face. A cluster of short, growth-like horns rises like a crown from around the top of his forehead, giving way to the whitest, palest hair I’ve ever seen.
Pristine, long as it gathers around well-built shoulders.
He’s not bulky like a lot of other species, toned but lean and tall, lanky but not in a frail-looking way.
Awkward, though, as hunched over as he is, to terrorize me from inside my hole in the wall.
“Very well, Draya’la.” I watch him in silent horror as he sits just in front of the compartment, not bothering to hide his face again. His void-colored hands rest on equally as black pants as he leans against the wall.
I just stare at him because, well… now what? I’m stuck in a hole, and he’s just going to… wait me out.
“I’m Sor’en,” he offers, unhelpfully.
I play the name over in my mind a few times for good measure.
“I saw you come out of the panels. You shouldn’t be here,” I whisper, hating how scared my voice sounds.
It’s not necessarily him that’s scaring me, although he is scary as all hell.
You get used to that as a human. Pretty much everyone is scary when you’re smaller, weaker, and easily breakable.
It was a huge issue in the education pods.
Even the other kids were a danger. Didn’t bode well for little Hue making fuck all for friends and resulted in injuries everywhere, from scrapes to days spent vomiting up toxins, and broken bones any time I tried.
It’s the brashness of it all, the pivot from a long-debated, long-agonized plan.
It’s the loss of recourse. Control. A choice.
It’s Lunareth and the fang tied around my neck.
The ending of everything I’ve fought for years, casually sitting outside the hole he just chased his prey into.
He nods, only once. “Yes, that is true.”
I wince as I shift in the small, awkward space, unable to go further in or retreat out now that he’s sitting there. Footsteps sound down the hall, making my pulse spike. “Someone’s coming. They’ll see you.”
He faces me, offering a soft smile that looks strange on a boned, sharp face like his. “That is likely.”
My shocked expression turns to irritation quickly. Irritation is good; better than fear. “What are you doing then? Just going to get caught?”
“You asked me not to take you out of your spot. I will not.” His hands clench, my heart stumbles a beat at the concept that he wants to. I bet he wants nothing more than to rip me from my dank safe space and leave to who knows where with me in tow.
“You can’t just stay in the hall!” I hiss as the footsteps draw closer. My eyes keep trying to dart behind him, but he eats up the opening, obscuring my view.
“If I cannot take you, and I cannot go without you, then it leaves few viable choices, little gift.”
Little gift.
I ignore the odd way my belly flip-flops.
“You can go without me, asshole.”
The somber look in his eyes tells me he doesn’t agree. The brief furrowing of his ridged brow tells me he probably doesn’t understand my insult. Which is likely for the best.
“What if you get arrested?” I hiss again.
What if you get executed? It goes unspoken but hangs in the air as if it had been said. A class D species caught sneaking around the maintenance corridors of a popular space station, they’d kill him on sight.
He doesn’t answer either way. He simply sits, content to watch me, his lanky form sprawled out on the floor of the inner rim of Vortara like he’s got nowhere else to be. Like he’s not a prohibited species illegally accessing a highly populated space station. Like he’s not trying to kidnap me.
The alliance would see his presence here as a threat. Was he? That occurs to me a fraction too late. Why else would he be here, unguarded by an escort, as is customary with any species considered too dangerous. “Were you here to hurt someone?”
He shifts closer every time I speak, as if I’m hard to hear. “I do not enjoy violence. Neither do the rest of my species. Despite popular opinion.”
That’s a non-answer if I’ve ever heard one.
I try to wrap my head around that. There are plenty of dangerous species that are pretty chill.
It’s not like I didn’t spend most of my childhood sneaking in and out of ports; pot meet kettle.
“You need to go now,” I urge him a little louder than I dared before, my chest loosening... but only barely.
He doesn’t move closer this time, nor does he move to leave.
“Seriously, you need to go. Someone will see you!”
Nothing.
“Fine!” I grit. “Move, I’m coming out. If you touch me, I’ll scream for Port Authority!”
A few winces later, I break through the opening just as someone rounds the corner.
My heart flips as a pair of warm, soft… but gloved hands knot in my now-stained dress, tugging me gently down onto him.
His movements are fast, so fast. Something odd and uncomfortable flutters to life in my stomach as my face hovers inches from his, my red hair making another veil hiding him as footsteps stomp by, hissing something in a language I don’t understand.
The smell of him… masculine but in a floral way that makes my stomach clench.
My breath feels choppy in my lungs as I’m pressed tighter against him.
“You can’t stay here, and I won’t come with you,” I breathe, suddenly all too aware as a strange vibrating sound softly hums from somewhere nearby.
I jerk, trying to pull away, but his hands stop me as they band around my waist. Oh God, he shudders against me.
There’s an uneasy desperation in it, and I feel his heart, whatever version of one he’s got pounding.
My own heart resumes its thundering in response, like twin runaway drums.
“What’s your name?” he breathes.
“I don’t have a name and I’m not your mate.”
“You do not shimmer. There is no death aura, and that is only possible with mates and the dead. You are breathing, living, speaking, but your soul is quiet, like a corpse passed to the ground. It’s beautiful.”