Chapter 4
Mark
What nobody, not even most Vampyren men understood about Vampyren women was that they too just wanted to be loved.
It was the harsh brutality of Vampyren life that made them yet more brutal than their men.
Mark always thought they were wrongly dismissed.
Vampyren women often killed their mates and ate their young after a combination of being treated badly and when a syndrome that came from the pregnancy which they could not control overwhelmed them.
Since living on earth, Mark had learned it was something similar to postpartum depression for human women.
How to solve that during an invasion though?
Mark had no idea. But it explained how he had been able to have a mate back on Vampyren.
Though they had never gotten around to bearing children.
They had tried. It was difficult to breed at the best of times.
But he had loved her and she had loved him.
They watched the brutality of those around them with some bafflement.
But now his mate, Calinda, was dead. She died in the first sweep of the invasion.
Mark mourned her and now he thought of her when he saw Vampyren women on the battlefield, all of them seeming more brutal even than the men.
Calinda had been brutal too, but she saved it for those who deserved it.
She had never been brutal with him and he had never been brutal with her.
Why would you be violent with those you loved? He had never understood it.
He saw it with humans too. They beat and they raped.
Mark thought you could conduct war without that kind of behavior.
He didn’t say so often. He was savvy enough to know how easy it was to be dismissed as “soft” when he considered himself pragmatic.
His friend, Loren, called him “gentle.” Mark didn’t dislike the word.
Most of the time life felt hard, painful, fast, and too hot.
Gentleness meant warm, tender, and perhaps a little slow.
Gentle didn’t sound bad at all but Loren said it with a smirk.
He’d told no one this and threatened to kick Loren’s ass when he’d called Mark gentle because that’s what humans did when they were insulted.
He found humans pretty amusing.
But the Vampyren, he thought, were making themselves monsters. Their approach was harming them as a species, making them emotionless brutes, and if they went too long in that direction they would be unable to find their way back.
Everyone needed to just settle the fuck down, was Mark’s attitude.
It was hard to sort out how to do that, though when he had to take out an entire horde of rampaging humans in the most bombed-out part of what the humans called “Chicago.” He liked the name actually.
He had found himself covered with blood, trudging back to his unit’s base, saying the word over and over.
“Chick… ah… go.”
Human names were cute and strange.
The word Chicago sounded like a fuzzy animal.
The other men wanted to go to the nearest breeding farm, and he kept his mouth shut.
They were supposed to be for breeding but that’s not how anyone used them.
They were for letting the soldiers get their rocks off.
He didn’t know why anyone pretended otherwise.
If anything, when women got pregnant everyone seemed pretty annoyed by it.
Though plenty of babies had been born. They were raised on floors below in the creche as if secreted away from their mothers.
They were hidden and contained. It put a bad taste in Mark’s mouth, but he was only distantly related to the royal family, and that only held sway with certain people.
He wasn’t military leadership either, though he was a unit commander.
If he had a plan it was to work his way up and change things from the inside. But he wasn’t holding his breath.
He had taken up the human habit of smoking every once in a while because that too amused him.
Humans put little sticks in their mouth and lit them on fire and it killed them, eventually.
He found this mildly hilarious and had tried it.
When he’d had an inexplicable urge to try it again, he’d understood why humans kept doing it.
There was something so relaxing about leaning against the low stone wall next to what had once been a decorative garden in front of the big, glassy office building where the breeding farm and the creche were.
The other men were heading inside now as they hooted and slapped each other on the back, riled up and ready to take what they wanted, by force if necessary.
Mark thought he would just hang out and perhaps see how it was going in a few minutes.
If things got out of control, he intended to quell the violence.
But at the moment, he was thinking of nothing at all as he leaned and smoked. Which was when Loren found him.
“Markole!” Loren said. It was Mark’s real name back on Vampyren and he had taken to going just by Mark because it was apparently a human name. Not that they all had to assimilate, but Mark thought that if they started with small concessions, maybe they would get somewhere.
“It’s just Mark,” Mark said, unmoving. He took another drag of his cigarette. Why was that so relaxing? It was some drug, of course. But they’d had nothing so mellow and yet so addictive back on Vampyre. “How are you?”
“I’m being careful,” Loren said warily as he sidled up to Mark. “Come with me.” He nodded up at the creche.
Mark stubbed out his cigarette and immediately wished for another.
Stupid human addiction sticks. “I don’t use those rape pits,” he said darkly.
Loren knew as much. Or he should have. Mark was sure he’d mentioned that before.
He was certain Loren wasn’t using them anymore either, if only because he’d fallen in love with Keira, a human girl, in one of them.
That happened now and then. Mark considered it a good sign of things to come.
Mark was tall but not quite as broad and beefy as some of his fellow warriors.
He also hunched just slightly, though it was more because he’d found that the asshole alpha-type Vampyren who were always looking for a fight avoided him if he kept his head down.
Vampyren were constantly challenging each other.
Mark wanted no part of it. The invasion of this planet had been quite challenging enough, thanks very much.
But he had a long dark braid that reached his waist and giant dark eyes that had made women swoon before, and his leaner muscles were just as sculpted as anyone else’s.
One of his men, upon learning the phrase from the humans, had called him “pretty boy.” Mark had been forced to lay him out for that one. He was “gentle” sure, but he had to maintain some kind of reputation or he’d get killed too.
“I know you don’t use the breeding farms,” Loren said, seeming a little impatient.
It seemed like one of those little behaviors he picked up from his human lover as he bounced on his toes.
“I need you to save a girl from this place.” He tugged on Mark’s hand, yanking him toward the creche’s front entrance.
“Sooner rather than later. Before one of your men shows her a bad time.”
“What are you talking about?” Mark mumbled.
But out of curiosity, he followed Loren inside.
Because Loren was a reasonable person. Mark had a shortlist of people he considered reasonable.
He was almost optimistic about the possibility of the list lengthening, though shortly after a slaughter of resistant humans, he couldn’t remember any reason he had to be optimistic.
“She needs a protector,” Loren said. “Some of the girls, they know what they’re doing. Don’t even seem to have a problem with being taken. This girl is new, young, fresh blood. She needs somebody to claim her.”
“You’re…” Mark wracked his brain as he followed Loren up the stairs to the fourth floor where the breeding farm was. What was that phrase humans used? It didn’t really apply on Vampyre where you just sort of ended up with people. “You’re setting me up? Like a… matchmaker?”
“Yes,” Loren said. “She needs your help. There’s a particularly brutal unit commander after her. He’s attacked her once already. Drake?”
“Ugh. Drake.” Mark made a face. He’d come across Drake before. Drake was perhaps the most brutal of his kind he’d ever met. He kept hair from the woman he raped. “Alright. I’ll help if I can. I could certainly protect her.”
“Obviously, it would help if you two could actually breed,” Loren said as Mark followed him down the corridor to the open lobby of the creche. Mark swallowed at that.
In his most private moments, after some battle or when he was alone with his thoughts, he did fantasize about finding some woman to love again.
He had mourned his mate, and he missed her.
But he’d had love once, unlike so many of his kind.
He understood it and he knew how to maintain it.
He wanted it again. Although it always seemed like some impossible feat with the way life was during colonization.
“Do you love your mate?” Mark blurted out.
His arms felt too heavy suddenly. This season in Chick-ah-go was horribly hot, they’d told him.
They weren’t wrong. It was miserable. He thought his armor might melt into his skin and he wanted it off.
He shifted uncomfortably as Loren pushed open the glass doors.
“Yes, I do,” Loren said, smiling, softly. It was not an expression Mark saw often from his kind.
He wanted that. Thinking he might find it with this girl who needed protection seemed like a long shot. But he could try it, he supposed.