Chapter 3 #2
“Be good,” Freak says to me, snugging me even tighter. He seems worried for me. That makes me a little worried for me. It’s hard to be scared when I am so completely protected by him, though. I already know he would never let anything bad happen to me.
The female approaching is clearly a matriarch.
I don’t know what she is a matriarch of, but there’s no doubt she’s in charge of whatever it is she wants to be in charge of.
She has long silver hair and the kind of eyes that see everything and judge it in an instant, finding that which is wanting, and that which is worthy.
She looks to me like a blue goddess, wearing a golden dress that matches the color of her eyes.
Her face is handsome, broad, and beautiful.
She looks like a statue come to life. The link in this place between living worlds and ancient human art is too stark to be an accident.
I wonder if old human artists came here somehow, or saw the place in their mind’s eye. It’s so familiar, and yet not.
“Tasin,” she says. “We have missed you.”
“Alara,” Freak replies.
She reaches for him and they embrace. I am squished into the middle of it, almost like I don’t exist. I restrain the urge to bite her. It is a feral impulse that comes over me all at once and can surely only be because I have started to regard him being as much mine as I am his.
I do not bite her. I have that much self-control. But I do emit a low, feral growl that seems to not be much better judging by the way she recoils and looks at me, and then Freak, in horror.
“A human. That’s an actual human,” she says. “I thought it was perhaps an artifact of your previous place, but that… that’s actually a human female.”
“Yes,” Freak-slash-Tasin says quite proudly.
“Really, Tasin,” she lectures him, speaking to him in a tone that would be more appropriate if I were a plague-riddled rat as she recoils from the pair of us, drawing her gleaming robes tighter about herself as if they might protect her from me.
“A human. Here. In our realm. How is she even capable of perceiving this place?”
He shrugs. “Maybe humans have more capacity for realm walking than we previously thought.”
“Keep her with you,” the woman says, giving me a disapproving stare that goes right through me. I feel as though every single cell in my body is being found wanting. The very DNA in my cells is upsetting to her, I think.
Fair, I guess.
Now I know how ratty little stray dogs feel when they get rescued and taken home to the dismay of the homeowner. I feel like I need to be bathed and given a flea treatment, which is ridiculous because there haven’t been fleas on our colony ever.
“Let me get the two of you settled before you go before the council, Tasin,” she says. “Come along.”
We follow her through the gleaming halls to a room where there is a large white bed beneath a sparkling arched ceiling.
It is beautiful, and I know I am seeing something humans were never meant to see.
It makes my mind feel like it is being stretched from the inside out.
Strange sensation, but not entirely unpleasant.
“I am going to spread the good news that you have arrived,” she says. “The council will be so pleased to know that you were not, in fact, lost to us.”
“I almost was,” he says. “The DC have developed prisons for our bodies and minds alike. It is not as safe as it used to be.”
I listen with my ears pricked. He has been so cagey about what happened to him. I don’t know who the DC are, but I am guessing they are the bad guys. Maybe they’re on the other side of the war. That would make a lot of sense.
“I am sorry, Tasin,” she says. “That must have been very unpleasant for you.”
He nods. “Thank you.”
“That’s it?” I exclaim. “He was tortured, for years! They hurt him over and over, and all you can say, after sitting here in your little dreamy sand realm, is oh, that must have been very unpleasant?”
She gives me a look that is more puzzled than offended, like I’m a talking parrot that somehow made a coherent sentence, or maybe one of those dogs that can talk with the buttons.
“Easy,” Freak says, rubbing my back in soothing circles. “It’s okay, pet. We have different ways of communicating here.”
“Are they bad and stupid and awful and kind of generally disinterested? Because that would make a lot of sense,” I say.
I look up at him, and see how hard he is trying not to find this interaction amusing.
“I will see if I can find appropriate confines for the animal before we debrief,” Alara says. “We won’t be able to hear ourselves think over all that yapping otherwise.”
“Oh, that’s rich,” I say. “Make a few good points and suddenly I’m yapping?”
I am being pretty combative, but it feels to me like my mate deserves a much warmer and more apologetic welcome home than he is currently getting. He survived something that would have broken most of these pretty psychic aliens, I bet. He’s big and strong and brave, and…
“She’s very fond of you,” Alara says.
In a flash, I realize that she read my thoughts.
“Get out of my mind!”
“I’d love to, but your mind is currently louder than a, how does your species describe these things? Freight train?”
“Archaic reference,” Freak says. “They haven’t had trains in millennia.”
“Pity,” the matriarch says. “I always liked trains.”
Before the meeting can get any more tense, someone decides to interrupt, and I could not be gladder for it.
“Tasin!” Another one of his kind bursts into the room.
This one is younger, male, and entirely exuberant.
His hair is longish and his face is broad, and he is wearing robes much like Greek or Roman ones, and they do nothing to stop me from seeing his rippling alien musculature.
Whatever these creatures are, they are universally hot.
“Miko!” Freak responds in kind. He puts me down for a moment, which confuses me, but then the newcomer physically rushes him and slams his chest into Freak’s, and I realize that I’ve just been saved serious rough contact.
“Easy,” Freak laughs. “You’re frightening my pet.”
I don’t think Miko even saw me until Freak pointed to me and confirmed that I exist. His eyes widen as he looks at me too, but in pleasure, not horror the way the woman’s did.
“Oh, my gosh! Tasin! A human! Can it talk?”
“Of course I can talk,” I say.
He chuckles, as if talking means something else here. I bet it does.
“I love small mouth noises,” he says. “It’s so primitive, but in a good way.”
Then they start to communicate in another way.
I can’t understand it. I can’t even really explain what it is, or how it works.
I just know that they are. I can feel a kinship happening nearby, something in the way their eyes flash and their faces move.
A whole conversation is happening, but not audibly.
“Rude,” I complain.
“Sorry, pet,” Freak laughs. “It’s just a lot quicker to discuss things that way among ourselves. I was just telling Miko how I came to find you, and how good you’ve been.”
He reaches out, takes me by the hand, and pulls me close to him. I kind of want to bite him now. I don’t like feeling as though I am an animal in a human world, but that is how I feel around these aliens.
“Everyone is going to be so happy to see you,” Miko says, switching to a verbal language I can understand, though now that I know they’re basically doing the equivalent of talking down to me it doesn’t feel as good.
“I’m not stupid,” I grumble. “Just because I can’t talk with my brain.”
“Of course you’re intelligent, pet,” Freak says indulgently.
“Do you want to bring her with us? Or do you have a crate or something to put her in?”
“If anybody puts me in a crate, I’ll chew my way out of it and I’ll come and bite you,” I promise.
“She’s pretty violent,” Miko says.
“Humans often react to fear with aggression. Stop talking about her out loud,” Freak says. “It makes her uncomfortable.”
“Don’t talk about me at all!”
Freak pulls me close to him, lowering his voice so it feels like only I can hear him, though I bet his words are going far and wide in this freaky alien place where everyone reads minds.
“I’ve got you,” he tells me. “You are mine. It’s going to be strange for the others to get used to you, but you can help by being a well-behaved pet for me, do you understand?”
“I’m gonna bite them all,” I mumble back.
He laughs, but taps my ass at the same time. “Don’t,” he says firmly. “I need you to be on your best behavior.”
“You barely know me,” I tell him. “Maybe this is my best behavior. Maybe my normal behavior is much, much worse.”
“It’s about to get a lot better if that is true,” he says. “Otherwise I am going to take you into a corner of this place and give you a very thorough training session, pet.”
He is using the same tone as the one he had when he punished me, and every part of my body thrills to it.
“Mmm, yes. Teach me how to be good,” I purr against his chest.
I feel a rumble in response, and I know I am having an effect on him too. He likes disciplining me as much as I like him disciplining me.
“Get a room,” Miko says. “But don’t. Because we’re going to manifest a feast, and you have to be there. Bring the human. If the others are weird about it, let them be weird about it.”
Freak carries me after Miko, and the three of us travel through a city that frankly makes me feel seasick again because when we move, or when their legs move, it really seems more like the city rolls around them, kind of like we’re on an unseen treadmill and everything else is what moves and shifts around us.
There are no plants here. There’s nothing that I would call alive. I don’t see anything growing. I don’t see anything moving. No butterflies. No birds. Just the geometrically carved moving marble structures and a brilliant blue sky.
I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t like this place. It’s sterile. It’s not a place for things like me. That’s why my presence is a scandal.
“I know it seems strange,” he says. “It looks different to me than it does to you…”