Текст книги "Alien god"

Автор книги: Ursa Dox

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“I will not attempt to parse the meaning of that particular phrase now. Maerwynne is waiting.”

“If you’re so certain I’m not going with him, why even bring me to him at all?”

He sighed deeply, like he was bone-weary of this conversation, of me.

Well, right back at you.

“Because Maerwynne needs to see you for himself. He needs to confirm in his own mind that which I already know to be true. That you are not meant to be his.”

“Not meant to be his... because I’m meant to be yours?” The heat inside me went bitterly cold, the sweat on my body turning clammy. Had I been wrong about this new alien posing a different kind of threat than Asha Wylfrael? I’d originally wondered about Asha Wylfrael’s potentially sexual intentions when he’d first brought me here, but he hadn’t seemed interested in forcing me into anything like that. But then I remembered the way his gaze had snagged on my nipples. The way he’d caught my hair in his hand just now, for no other apparent reason than to stroke it.

“Don’t be absurd,” he said, looking at me like I was, well, an alien.

“Well, excuse me for not knowing what the hell is going on here!” I cried. “Alright. Fine. Let’s just go get this over with.”

We continued through the tunnel. It was the first time I’d been in here during daylight. There was no bright sun filtering through the crystal, though. Everything outside was a haze of white, wind howling against the suspended walkway as if trying to tear it out of the sky.

“There’s no chance this could collapse, is there?” I asked, trying to keep the waver out of my voice. I knew from the clear night I’d last been here just how high this tunnel was above the snow below.

“You won’t fall,” is all Asha Wylfrael said, his wings rustling.

“Great, thanks,” I muttered.

We went back the way we’d first come – through the tunnel then down the many stairs to the entrance hall. I’d hoped we’d go somewhere else, so I could learn a little more about the layout of this place, but when I saw Aiko standing with a tall stranger before she quickly flattened her ears and left, I knew we wouldn’t be going any further.

This must be Maerwynne.

Maerwynne and Asha Wylfrael were a study in contrasts. Where Asha Wylfrael’s colouring made me think of snow, sky, and wind-swept rock, Maerwynne was onyx and magma. He was a little leaner than Asha Wylfrael, lithe and long-limbed, with black hide and crimson hair and wings. He had the same glowing dots and lines strewn across his body and wings that Asha Wylfrael did, but his glowed like orange-red flame instead of blue. His tail, when I caught a glimpse of it, was smooth, black, and long, with something that looked like a barb at the end.

Maerwynne’s attention locked onto me as we descended the last steps and came to a stop before him. His eyes, too, were different from Asha Wylfrael’s. Instead of columns of roiling blue flame, he had a slim circle of scarlet in each eye, almost like each eye had two razor-thin red crescent moons touching each other at their tips, stamped on the background of a vast black sky.

The two of them were so different but undoubtedly similar in ways. They both had wings, and both had the same glowing markings strewn across their bodies. What kind of creatures are they?

“Greetings,” said the newcomer to me, “I am Maerwynne.”

“So Asha Wylfrael tells me.”

As soon as I heard it out loud – Asha Wylfrael – the words were freshly translated, and I realized with consternation that I’d been calling my captor Lord Wylfrael this entire time.

“Has he told you why I wished to see you?” Maerwynne asked.

“Yes,” I replied flatly.

Not sure what else to say, and not wanting to speak further anyway, I remained silent after that, feeling tiny and strange and like I was on some sort of display between these two strange alien giants. I crossed my arms once again, hunching slightly backwards, only to find that Asha Wylfrael – no, just Wylfrael – was immediately behind me. When my back bumped him, I straightened up again reflexively, as if burned by the contact.

Maerwynne watched me with unblinking eyes.

“I would have some time alone with her, just as I have had a chance to speak alone with Aiko.” He said it to Wylfrael, though he was still looking at me.

I felt a flare of indignation at the fact that he was asking my captor's permission to speak with me alone instead of mine. Wylfrael's answer was so instantaneous that I didn't even have a chance to feel afraid of being alone with this new, unknown alien.

“No.”

Finally, Maerwynne’s probing gaze left my face, flashing above my head to Wylfrael.

“No?” he repeated. There was no mistaking the threatening growl that had entered his voice. But Wylfrael did not back down.

“No. You asked to see her and now you have seen her. I sense no change in you, so clearly you do not starburn for her. You should be satisfied.”

“You and I both know it can take time to starburn, to feel the bond settle into place,” Maerwynne replied. “Perhaps I will stay here a few days, just to be sure.”

“If you believe that is a wise use of your time with your star map going dark. I cannot help but notice my prisoner has not brought it back,” Wylfrael said cryptically.

Even though I could understand their words now, I was rapidly losing the thread of the conversation. I’d considered myself intelligent back home, and I’d worked hard to earn my Ph.D. in astrophysics. But now, here, I felt the true depth of my human ignorance. There was so much I simply didn’t understand about the situation, about these beings. Unknown history and biology and culture swirling around me, as opaque and impenetrable as the blizzard outside.

Wylfrael’s comment seemed to have struck an uneasy chord in our visitor. His wings shifted tensely and his jaw tightened. He and Wylfrael remained silent for a long moment, tension growing in their locked gazes above my head. Maerwynne looked away first, his eyes finding my face once more.

“What is your name, human?” the visitor asked.

I hesitated.

From how close he stood behind me, I felt a new tension enter Wylfrael’s body. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I assumed it was some sort of anticipatory anger that I wouldn’t answer Maerwynne’s question. That I wasn’t showing enough respect or performing as he wanted.

I decided that it wasn’t worth staying silent. All that would earn me was more of Wylfrael’s ire.

“My name is Torrance.”

Wylfrael went very, very still at my back before suddenly bursting into movement. I yelped in surprise as his huge hand closed over my shoulder, moving me briskly behind him. His wings snapped open, a dizzying, star-speckled span of bone and black blocking my view of Maerwynne.

“Is there anything else you require before you leave, Maerwynne?” Wylfrael asked. The words seemed cordial enough, but the frosty message beneath them was obvious. Something akin to, you’ve overstayed your welcome, now get the fuck out of my house.

“No,” Maerwynne said, clearly taking the hint. I thought he’d walk out the door after that, but he added one more thing from the other side of the wall of Wylfrael’s wings.

“I will warn you now, Wylfrael, that I may come back again and ask to see her one more time, just to be sure. I expect that if and when I do, she will still be healthy and alive.”

Thanks, I thought sarcastically. I didn’t much appreciate being kept alive solely in case this guy decided he wanted to come back and marry me after all. But then again, at least it was something. Somebody else out there who knew I was here, who would notice if I died. It was a threat hanging over Wylfrael’s head that hadn’t been there before, a potential consequence if I was badly injured or killed or starved. Though, considering how intent Wylfrael was on making sure I ate, that last one didn’t seem very likely...

“And I will warn you, Maerwynne, that unless you starburn for her and lay claim to her as your mate, you have no power over her.”

Wylfrael’s voice got louder, harsher, booming in the space like thunder crashing through snow.

“Her life is not your concern. It is mine.”

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Wylfrael

I was acting unreasonably. I knew it, and so did Maerwynne. The tilt of his head as he regarded me told me he was trying to work out why. Why I was limiting his contact with a mere prisoner. No doubt he wondered if, like Skallagrim, I’d started going mate-mad.

Perhaps I was going mate-mad. I certainly did not feel as steady as I once had. But there was nothing for it now, even if that was the case. I’d never be able to seek out my mate and stave off the madness now that I knew what would happen to her.

I had no control over my future.

But I could control this situation. At least, I could try. And right now, retaining control meant keeping Torrance within my grasp, no matter how unhinged it made me look to Maerwynne.

The half-Vizhiri god seemed to come to some conclusion. Whether that conclusion was in favour of my sanity or not, I could not say for sure.

“Alright, Wylfrael. I will leave you now. I plan to visit the Sionnachan villages in case my mate is somewhere else in your world.” His red brows drew together. “I presume you will not hinder me in this, the way you have hindered me with Torrance.”

“Correct,” I grunted. It bothered me how little it bothered me – the idea of Maerwynne speaking to Sionnachan females – when the thought of him alone with Torrance made me want to smash something. It wasn’t as if I thought Torrance needed to be kept safe from him, either. Maerwynne, like the Vizhiri males of his mother’s culture, adhered strictly to stringent codes of honour. He’d trained his body and his mind endlessly, as males in his mother’s world had to, to hold back the Vizhiri urge to drain a female of her blood. He was a master of control and paragon of near-puritanical nobleness. Unlike most stone sky gods who took lovers before they found their fated mates, he, as part of his Vizhiri training, was celibate. I knew he wouldn’t harm Torrance in any way.

I realized with a lurch of loathing that I’d likely already hurt Torrance far more than Maerwynne ever could. I was not sure, though, whether that loathing was for myself, or her, for making me care. I remembered her panting in pain after I’d put the webbing in her ear. The arching agony of her body, writhing beneath mine, while something very close to terror seized upon me. Terror at her frailty, the tortured twisting of her form, the way she’d hurt when I had not meant for her to hurt. I had not anticipated, had not intended –

“I bid you farewell then, Wylfrael. After I visit the villages, I will depart Sionnach.” Maerwynne’s voice cut into the whirl of my thoughts. “As you so rightly pointed out,” he added archly, “my disappearing star map limits my time here. I will see you at the gathering.”

He pulled open the door and launched into the air, disappearing into the storm.

I stepped forward and closed the door once more, snow scattering across the floor and my boots, before turning around to face Torrance.

Her left ear was mostly hidden by her long hair, but the soft curl of flesh at the bottom was slightly visible. The skin there was bright red, a human sign of inflammation, perhaps. A corporeal reminder of the torment, brief but terrible, I’d inflicted.

Am I the weak one?

Disoriented by her reaction to the webbing, and trying to beat back my shame, I’d cut any sense of mercy for my prisoner to the quick. I’d sneered at her when she’d called me a monster, and I’d mocked the very frailty that had made me so afraid. I’d tried to turn her agonized response into a symptom of her own human weakness, rather than a consequence of what I’d done.

Part of me wanted merely to say that she deserved it and be finished. To use her own guilt to absolve myself. But it seemed that what she did or did not deserve mattered less and less every passing moment. I’d seen her suffer, made her suffer. Been the cause of it, and condemned by it, all at once.

Those eyes of hers condemned me, too. Looked at me like I’d somehow betrayed her even though I owed her nothing.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I ordered her before I could stop myself.

“Like what?”

Like I’ve somehow failed you, I said inside my own head.

Her hate I could withstand. Easily.

Her hurt, it turned out, was something else entirely.

I’d never felt less myself than I did in that moment, in the entrance hall of my childhood home with Torrance, her eyes so warm yet so wounded. Never felt less sure. Less strong.

Am I the weak one? I queried myself silently again.

I found that I could not confront the question.

And perhaps, in that, I had my answer.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Torrance

“So, is it interrogation time now?”

My question seemed to surprise Wylfrael, as if he’d forgotten all about that.

“No. Tomorrow,” he said. He dragged his hand down his face in a bizarrely human gesture of agitated weariness. “I will take you back to your room to rest now.”

“Rest,” I said sarcastically. “Ah, yes. It’s so easy to rest while I’m being held prisoner by the one who killed my friends.”

His wings pulsed.

“Your friends started firing on me the moment I appeared. They wanted to kill me on my own land. Should I have let them do it?”

“I don’t mean the soldiers!” I cried. “I mean the other civilian women! The ones without weapons! The ones like me.”

He stared at me for a long moment before saying, “I didn’t kill any of the weaponless ones.”

I swallowed hard, my heart slamming. Could that be true? Could I have been wrong about what he’d done? Could my friends still be out there somewhere after escaping on the ship?

“Are you lying?” I asked, squinting at him as if I’d somehow be able to see the truth on him, in him, if only I looked hard enough.

“What reason do I have to lie?”

“To make me trust you.”

He smirked, but it was a cold, mirthless expression.

“I don’t particularly care if you trust me.”

“Well... alright, good. Because I don’t.”

“We understand each other, then,” he seethed. “You do not trust me. I do not trust you. Why are we still standing here discussing this?”

“Patience isn’t one of your strong suits, I take it,” I muttered under my breath.

His jaw worked.

“It used to be.”

His words from earlier echoed. This day has worn my control thin. Something was bothering him more than my comments and questions.

“What happened while you were gone today?” I asked slowly. I was terrifyingly aware of how far I was pushing. But the idea that he hadn’t actually killed my friends, that he might not be quite as evil as I’d once thought, emboldened me. I didn’t think I could hold back the question even if I’d wanted to. Something about him had changed for the worse, which I hadn’t even known was possible.

I knew I was right on the money when his eyes flashed and his nostrils flared. His hands jerked forward and then closed into fists, as if he wanted to throttle me and barely stopped himself.

“It’s none of your concern,” he bit out.

“It is my concern,” I countered, my voice cracking, “if it makes you more violent in your dealings with me. You’re angrier since you got back. Rougher. My ear...” I resisted the urge to reach up and touch it. “You could have warned me. At least tried to communicate with me about what you were doing. You can obviously understand me now, which makes me think you had to do the same thing to yourself. Why couldn’t you have done it in front of me? Put the thing in your ear where I could see it so I could get some context!”

“You forget yourself,” he warned. “You are not here to get context. You are a criminal, here to give me information.”

“You’re punishing me for something I’ve had no hand in!”

He cast a meaningful look at my hands. “Did you only grow those now? Did you not have hands attached to your wrists when I found you where you should not have been, plundering my world?”

“Well, yes! But I had no choice! I didn’t choose to come here. I was forced to! The people with the guns who were firing at you, they kidnapped me. Took me from my home. Brought me here against my will, along with all the other women on the ship.”

“Well, isn’t that rather convenient,” Wylfrael said flatly. “You want me to believe that you have absolutely no responsibility and can be blamed for nothing. You are an innocent victim, wronged both by your own people and now, because I have imprisoned you unfairly, by me.”

I wanted to cry hot, raging tears at the way he so easily dismissed the truth. My truth. The trauma of what had been done to me becoming a fake sob story in his eyes, something cobbled together to save my own neck.

My eyes filled, but I bit down on my tongue as hard as I could, using that sharpness to distract from the distraught panic rising inside me. My throat was too tight to say anything more, so I simply stared at him, refusing to blink and let even a single tear slip out.

Wylfrael faltered, a slight furrow forming between his brows.

“Shoshen said he heard you wailing last night. Why?”

I swallowed, feeling like my throat was full of stones. It took a moment before I could force out a reply.

“Why do you even care?” I said hoarsely.

“Because you are under my keep and my control. If you are ill, or injured, I need to know about it.” He left the door he’d just closed and crossed the space to me. “You may not have understood me before, but I already told you I will not kill you.”

“How very generous,” I whispered. But there was no bite to the words. My fury was fading into something more like melancholy. Or maybe even numbness. “Is that why you woke me up and stayed in my room all night?”

“Yes. Your breathing didn’t sound right.”

He cares if I eat. He cares how my breathing sounds. It really doesn’t seem like he wants me dead...

Maybe he was telling the truth. Maybe he really had let the other women, my friends, live, just like he was letting me. That was a tiny spark, a flicker in the numbing dark descending all around me. It gave me enough energy not to give up entirely. It wasn’t exactly hope. But it was something.

“I wasn’t wailing,” I muttered, sniffing hard. “I was weeping. And I like to think I kept it quite quiet and dignified.”

“Loud enough to be heard through the crystal door,” Wylfrael replied, looking unconvinced. “Weeping... Why do humans weep?”

For a moment, I wanted to scream, to say that it was all because of him. But instead, I just looked down, down and away from eyes that both demanded and beseeched.

“We weep for what we’ve lost.”

Though I watched his boots, I could feel his gaze raking over my head and face, like a physical drag. One of his black boots twitched forward, like he was going to take a step and collapse the final distance between us.

I wondered if he’d touch me. Hold me the way he’d held me upstairs when I’d been hurting.

In a vague and distant way, as if this were all happening to someone else, I wondered if I’d let him.

His foot stilled. He didn’t move except to say, “I have lost things too, little human. More than a mortal like you could ever even hope to fathom.”

He’d called me a mortal... Did that mean he wasn’t?

I am not a monster, but a god...

“The length of someone’s life doesn’t tell you anything about how much is in it – how much there is to lose,” I retorted, ripping my gaze up from his boots to his eyes. “I’ve lost my family, my friends. Everything!” I gestured wildly about the space. “This is all yours, isn’t it? Your castle, your servants. Your world.”

His face darkened, and for a moment I thought it was with animosity. But I realized with a small, startled cry that it wasn’t. It was agony.

“What I lost today was worth more than any world.”

Seeing this side of him – something other than moody arrogance and icy control – shocked me to my core. It cracked my defences, and left me with the absurd desire to take his hand and say, “I’m sorry.”

But I filled in those cracks, refusing to feel for the man who’d trapped me.

“Maybe you deserve it,” I spat.

That was a mistake. Maybe he really will want to kill me now.

But he showed no anger. The twisting grief in his expression deepened for a split-second, then suddenly vanished, replaced by wintery distance.

His gaze fell to his hands, which he looked at oddly, as if he didn’t recognize them.

“Perhaps I do.”

A hushed beat passed. Weariness flooded my limbs. I absolutely hated it, but all I wanted now was to crawl right back into my beautiful jail cell of a room and sleep.

Without another word, Wylfrael led me there.

Without another choice, I let him.

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