8. Chapter 8
eight
Hue
Males are stupid across all species, but this one is an excellent cook.
It takes me a few all too brief moments to lick the bowl clean of the odd, mushy white stuff inside.
Sweet, but in the same strange floral way most of this planet seems to be.
I peek outside my tent, ensuring the coast is clear before wrapping one of the sheets from the bedding around me again.
I’m brave enough to flaunt around here naked, but maybe not so brave to do it outside.
Outside.
Holy shit, I’m about to go outside.
And my head won’t explode.
Probably.
Damn.
I only get halfway to the doorway that seems to lead out of the wide house before I pivot and head back to my tent.
A surprising amount of anxiety fills my chest at the prospect of crossing that threshold.
A not at all surprising amount of guilt that I’m…
excited about it. I shouldn’t even be obeying the dumb kidnapping jerk, but then again, he said we needed to discuss something.
For some bizarre reason, I want to know what that is. Probably because the food was good.
My hand flies to my chest, gripping Sofaxi’s fang.
I was supposed to wait for her. At least that’s what I’ve always done.
We were going to see a planet together. It was always our…
or well, my plan at the least. I shouldn’t even be planet-side unless it's on our planet, our chosen place. Laying her to rest with the respect I failed to give her the first time. Assuming the Silvarri people would’ve accepted us, which they sometimes do.
This cool-toned, eerie planet is a far cry from the vibrant, lush woodlands of the outsider settlements they have there.
Sure, the Silvarri people are known to be harsh, unforgiving, and downright hostile at the best of times, but that was her place.
I made a promise. The most important kind one can make to a Nysharil.
The weight of my betrayal weighs on each step, making my feet feel like they're locked in iron as I head back for the door. If I’m going to figure out a way off this planet, it’s probably better to have some locals on my side. Perhaps even better to have a mate on my side, right?
Okay, new plan.
Play nice, get more information, and get to Lunareth.
My chest aches from the violence of my pounding heart as I make it to the odd, shimmering door, rippling like cloth in the breeze but deceptively hard. I can see the planet outside the strange door, the waves of fields, the glowing flowers inside them. I can see everything I've ever wanted.
Grass.
Dirt.
Air.
I press my hand into the strange, glittering door, surprised when it doesn’t part but thins, my hand popping free from the other side, making a startled gasp leave my throat.
It tingles where it touches me, but not unpleasantly, just like static.
Like when you sit on your legs for too long and they go numb.
I jerk my hand back in, studying the skin to find it utterly unchanged.
Alright well…
Sucking a deep breath into my lungs, I slam myself through it, stumbling dramatically toward the ground as it does nothing aside from letting me through. The strange see-through electric curtain door remains thinned for the rest of my sheet dress still on the other half of the threshold.
I shove my thick hair out of my face, righting myself before jerking my sheet dress through the opening, watching the shimmering black and silver bleed into place.
Turning back toward the fields, I casually, and not at all because I actually care if I embarrass myself in front of my annoyingly attractive freakazoid alien captor, check to see if I’m alone.
That he nor anybody else saw me hurl myself through the door as if the building was on fire.
Definitely don’t care.
Not at all.
For the first time since waking up here, I look.
You know, the type of looking where you actually see the things around you.
The effect is immediate, tears burst into my eyes unbidden at the thick floral scent, the rolling fields of flowers as far as the eye can see.
My hands are shaky as I fist the sheet tightly, jerking it up so I can watch my toes curl into the cool grass.
Each tiny blade tickling my skin. Before I fully decide to, I’m falling onto my knees to sink my fingers in too.
Letting the blades tickle and cool the skin between them, a soft smile appears through my signature grimace because it turns out I really like the way it feels.
My red hair mingles and brushes the long grass as I press my face into it, inhaling deeper than I ever have before.
Taking a breath because I want to feel it, and not just because inhaling keeps me alive.
Strange pale grass tickles my nose with its sharp, bitter smell, not quite citrus but not unpleasant either.
The only thing that gets me back on my feet is the sudden desire to see the rest of this planet, my guilt taking a backseat, at least for now.
The cool breeze sends tendrils of my hair dancing across my face, each strand swaying like the flowers I find myself in front of now.
It takes nothing, no thoughts on my part, to gather the enormous sheet that billows around me higher, hiked up just under my sex as I take off into one of the many winding paths through the field.
And then I do something even stranger.
I run.
A full-body, chest heaving, face flushed run. No corridors, no halls, no twisted wires. No bustling bodies crammed together to slip between. Just an open field and pretty, glowing flowers that seem to reach for me with each breeze. Tickling at my rushing ankles to say hello to their new admirer.
An even stranger thing happens next.
I laugh.
And I don’t stop.
Not to cry.
Not to worry about where I’m meant to be or the fang hanging around my neck like a noose.
I hit another patch, giggling like a muddy madwoman as the sky opens up above me, sparkling drops of liquid splattering my flushed skin. My feet tangle with the dampening sheet, sending me falling to my knees, scraping them on the soft dirt.
And I love it.
Something soft and warm brushes over my shoulders, urging me back to my feet, urging me further. Deeper into the strange flowers, upsetting bioluminescent dots that lift like a blanket of stars into the crying sky.
I pause only long enough to study them more closely.
Bugs!
Another unhinged laugh leaves me.
I’ve never seen a bug before.
That soft warmth finds me again, taking my attention from the swarming, buzzing creatures.
It softens my chilled, goosebump-littered flesh.
Like a breeze that’s only for me. I spin, ready to take off deeper into the field, when I stumble, stopping short at the massive shadow that hovers in front of me, blocking my path.
Sheer terror injects itself past the elation as it dances closer, mirroring the involuntary step back I’d taken.
Its swathing darkness is interrupted by crackles of deep, violent purple and two bright, glowing white eyes.
Daring to take my eyes off the creature, a new dread settles in my gut because on all sides, there is nothing but the same glowing flowers. I can’t even remember the moment I lost sight of the house, Sor’en’s house.
“Sor’en—"
As soon as his name forms on my lips, the thing rushes me.
A scream bursts free from my throat, scratching at the walls, leaving them raw as I bolt back the way I came.
In an instant, he’s there, a panicked cry escaping me as I run full-bodied into the death-touch alien himself.
I’m swooped into his arms before my brain has a chance to process that I’m no longer on the ground.
My hands are panicked as I cling to him. “Run! We have to go!” I plead helplessly as he stays rooted in place.
“Calm Draya’la, it is noth—"
He’s cut off by another of my screams as the shadow rushes us from the side, effortlessly gliding past the twisting flowers.
Another sound finds me past my pleading and struggling to be free from the useless alien's arms.
His laughter.
I stop short, a fistful of his silken white hair, crumpled in my palm as I’d attempted to steer him away from the threat, falls limp back around his shoulders effortlessly.
Sor’en laughs, and the sound does something entirely odd deep inside my chest. Like the rarity of it demands some kind of unspoken reverence.
“My mate, meet Melion, our Vena’lel.”
My lungs are still intaking and expelling air at an alarming rate, and damn me, I find myself clinging to the beast holding me as the shadow, the Vena’lel, shoots closer again, a long tendril outstretched in offering.
My hand is shaking like the flowers as Sor’en threads his palm in mine, his oil slickening where we meet, making my skin all warm and tingly as he guides my arm out against my will.
I don’t know if it’s the laugh, the wistful longing on his strange, morbid face, or the oil he is keeping nestled between our flesh, but I don’t fight him.
Not even when the thing, Melion, sends its shadows slowly forward, slipping them over our connected arms. It tickles, more static warm air, and it occurs to me suddenly that my special breeze felt… the same. My head snaps up as the realization dawns on me; it was… it.
Them?
“You will find no being in the universe who will protect or adore you more fiercely than Melion, my brave human. Well, except for me, that is.”
“What even is it?” I breathe, ignoring him and the way his words make my stomach feel.
The shadow shifts coyly, making an uneasy amusement bubble in my chest. Before it abruptly surges closer, swarming us.
The only thing that keeps the budding scream lodged in my throat as darkness surrounds us is the sound of Sor’en’s deep, billowing laughter as the shadow clouds and swirls, picking our hair up and twisting it in a haze of crackling violet and ink so dark the field itself disappears.
“Enough now, Melion.” Sor’en chuckles, and as the darkness literally bursts apart only to reform at our front, I barely pay it any mind. Because my eyes are glued to dancing milky opaque ones, and my chest feels impossibly tight.
Perhaps the food hadn’t set right with me.
But I keep watching him, watching the strange sprinkling rain pattering across the bones on his strange face.
My entire body shudders. Suddenly, perhaps even violently, I’m aware of every inch of me. Every inch that’s pressed against him. A soft buzzing fills the air, breaking whatever weird moment we were having. My attention goes back to the creature in front of us.
“Pheor'aya, Fam'ora… help me,” he breathes before clearing his throat.
My cheeks flush.
“I’d like to go back to the house now,” I whisper before remembering what he said earlier about his hearing.
I repeat it louder, watching the strong column of his neck jump with his feverish pulse.
“Of course, my mate.”
He doesn’t sit me down to walk, nor does he tell me what he called me out here for.
He doesn’t answer my question about the strange shadow that now seems to have left us.
But he tells me about the flowers.
That he grew them.
And I don’t ask to be put down.
How odd.