Chapter Three
Reina
“Kennedy says he’s worried about you,” Willow said as she dug her heel into the side of a steep rocky embankment.
I grabbed the hand of my best friend as she began to slip and hoisted her back up to a comfortable footpath, laughing with the effort. “Kennedy can shove it up his ass,” I said, and a silence grew between us as we continued downward.
“Why?” I asked, eventually.
“He said you’re a runner,” she offered, and I looked down at her, creasing my brows in annoyance.
I scoffed out a laugh and shook my head.
It wasn’t the first time he’d tried to caution me about the outside world during his short time here. “You’re safe here,” he’d said one night when I was asking one too many questions about the alien species. “You have no idea how much.”
I’d shrugged him off, but knew he was probably right.
“He’s just worried about you,” Willow said, half lecturing. “I think he likes you.”
“Oh shut up,” I laughed. “He doesn’t. He can’t stand me!”
“Yeah, but you like him,” she teased in protest.
I laughed. “Not right now I don’t.”
“Your dad would love that,” she spat back.
My father had a full goatee and tired eyes. He looked strong. Everyone could see it. It was one of the reasons that he was made the leader of our camp. He was our protector and had quickly taken Alex in as one of his own. His pre-approval for our would-be romance was clear as day to me, and embarrassingly, probably to Alexander as well.
“Here’s my question,” Willow blurted, interrupting my thoughts. “If life is shit as he says it is out there, why the hell would anybody want to leave?”
Willow was Korean and had gorgeous, shiny black hair and beautiful eyes. It gave her an instant sex appeal that was in stark contrast to my dated, wallflower appearance.
She was tall and beautiful.
But that mouth on her…
“Come on; it can’t be all bad out there,” I said, gripping my fingertips against the wet dust that caked against the jutting rocks. “The Earth was good enough for Kennedy to fight for. To take it back, right?”
Willow stared up at me and vibrated her lips together in a silly protest. She rolled her eyes and hopped down another ledge.
“Right?” I reiterated.
“I’d shrug, but I’m holding on for dear life,” Willow said with her dry wit.
I smiled down at her, following her footsteps along the mountain path.
We were scaling the mountain together, just like I’d always dreamed of doing. We snuck away early, telling Calrin we were going to gather berries for breakfast, if anybody asked.
The truth was we were escaping. Or, trying to. I’d overheard my father, Richard, saying that Matthew Cunningham was spotted down below by some of our lookouts. And if our little warrior was back, I wanted to be the first one to get the scoop.
Plus, it was a great excuse to go see the rest of the world. To see if it was really as bad as everyone said.
It took the entire day to get to the bottom of the hill.
It was deep, deep afternoon and the sky had taken on a warm shade of blue. I knew the sun would be setting soon and it would be in our best interest to get a lay of the land before it was too dark.
“So this is the great outside,” Willow said, unenthusiastically.
“Hey, nobody said you had to tag along,” I mocked.
Both Willow and I had been at the base of the mountain before, looking for supplies. But, we never went without the protection of Calrin or another one of the warrior class in our camp.
I knew my best friend wasn’t eager to run away from camp, like I was, but she was always up for hiking. She was the only person who would jump at the chance to put her body through rigorous exercise for hours on end.
Willow wiped the thick, orange dust off of her legs and we stared at the base of the immense cliff we had called our home.
“Maybe we should turn back,” she said, eyeing the clearing warily.
“Come on,” I laughed and ran my hand up my arm.
“Come on?” she repeated with a giggle. “Something tells me by the end of this, you’re going to come crawling back to me saying, ‘This was a bad idea! You’re right, oh wise and beautiful sage! Be my life-leader from now on because you, and only you, Willow Jeffery, are—’”
“—I get it!” I interrupted.
I had felt so hot on the venture down to the bottom, the exercise overworking my body and making me sweat. But now that we had stopped moving so briskly, all I could feel was the cold spring air hitting my damp skin.
“I won’t abandon you, Reina,” Willow said resolutely, and then winked and said, “But only because I’d need your help to climb back up.”
“I’ve never felt so loved in all my life,” I snorted.
Just then, a light in the distance cracked and illuminated the evening sky. It plummeted across the blue like a shooting star and fell into the distance.
“Was that a comet?” Willow asked, shielding her eyes from the glare of the stare.
I set my jaw and stared off in the direction the star had fallen. “Not sure,” I said slowly—dismissively.
There was a large clearing of red, stony ground. It stretched off into the distance until a mossy forest began. The woods were dense, and red cliffs created archways across the forest.
It was almost like someone had created stone bridges to get over top of the forest canopy, but these were all natural. The rocks dripped with vines and moss: an ominous archway.
That was the area we had never ventured into. It looked like something magical and forbidden.
Normally, the clearing was clean. On occasion, there were debris from a mech or other lander-ships that had been abandoned by other humans, but there was something unmistakably off about the state of it now.
It looked like there had been a fight. The ground looked disheveled somehow: snapped branches and a myriad of footprints.
And though it was hard to tell up against the bright red and orange soil, I could distinctly see bloodspots splattering off into the woods.
We headed into the woods, and it wasn’t long before the blood splatter increased, like a horrifying trail created just for us to follow.
A loud cry sounded off in the distance and Willow looked at me with a white, stricken face.
“It’s Matthew,” she confirmed quickly and cut her heels into the dirt.
I knew she had every intention of stopping then and there, but I kept going and she reluctantly followed.
What we saw next sent a cold shiver through my body that seemed to pulse through me over and over.
It was Matthew: tall, tan-skinned Matthew with his piercing blue eyes, fighting against a creature that was almost seven-foot tall. It was a green creature in the visage of a man.
It had a long face that had indentations down the front in three rows, like fish gills. He had a deep green, scaled texture to his skin. His nose was wide and animal with two thick horns them jutted backward from his temples and met behind his head to form a long tentacle that reached the floor.
“Get out of here!” Matthew yelled stupidly, alerting the creature to our presence.
I looked up at Vithohn, shaking. This is what I had waited my whole life to see, and I was more than overwhelmed.
Willow tried to grab my arm and pull me back, but I was immovable.
The Vithohn looked at me briefly and then turned its attention back to Matthew, who was shooting it with a strange laser pistol. The handle of the weapon seemed to creep and curl around Matthew’s hand.
I watched as Matthew tackled the beast, only coming up to mid-chest, and fired directly into its skin.
The Vithohn had thick black armor on and moved with great speed, forcing Matthew into the creature’s chest through gravity and slamming him against an immense tree root that had crawled up the sides of one of the rock arches that surrounded the forest.
“Run!” Matthew breathed out, a loud cracking of his ribs echoing through my brain with a constant snapping noise.
I turned on my heel and yet my body was still frozen, forcing me back around to look at the scene playing out before us.
“Reina! Come on!” Willow screamed, her words barely decipherable as she yelped into my ear.
I jerked away from her and ran over to Matthew, doing my fiercest war cry as I tried to act as a distraction.
The Vithohn looked confused, annoyed even, as it turned around and looked at me, holding Matthew off the ground with its hand.
Matthew dropped the gun to the ground, and I managed to lurch forward and grab it, firing into the back of the beast over and over as best I could.
The green Vithohn let out a bellowing cry and trampled backward before launching its sharp tentacle forward, sending it through Matt’s center and coming out the other end of him, sticky and spewing.
It made a slick, sloppy noise as it came back out of him, and Matt slumped to the ground.
My hands shook uncontrollably as the creature turned to me, looking winded.
It whipped forward so that I was now face to face with its deep, black eyes. I fired the laser pistol into the black, blinking orbs, remembering always to attack my enemy’s eyes first when cornered.
“Reina!” I could hear Willow scream as the creature fell forward onto me, letting out a low, terrifying hum as its body vibrated against me.
“The knife!” I cried, reminding Willow she had grabbed a blade we used for skinning animals before we left. She pulled it from her belt and ran toward me.
I scrambled to get the creature off and could feel the warmth of the foreign being on my skin, making me want to throw up. I fired the rest of the pistol’s charges into its clammy skin and Willow jumped on the tall creatures back, slashing it and hacking at it like she might an attacking bear.
It cried out again, the noise loud in my ear: a crack of vocals that deafened me.
And then, suddenly, nothing.
Willow grabbed my hand and pulled me up into a firm hug, releasing me from the alien: her arms wrapping around me like a shield.
We stared down at the creature. It twitched and then finally went still.
“What do we do now?” Willow said, gripping my hand so hard I thought both of our palms would be white when they parted.
I exhaled loudly, as though my body had waited the whole time to breathe. “Do they…? I mean… should we get rid of it?”
My friend stared at me, puzzled, and then I explained to her that perhaps they could smell one another, or something about his pain or death might trigger them. I didn’t know whether the logic was mature and sound or incredibly, incredibly stupid. But, I’d never run into a Vithohn before.
What did I know?
“Get rid of it,” Matthew coughed out.
Willow ran up to him and immediately cried out when she saw the state of his wounds. I winced back and couldn’t look.
“You’re sure?” I said, shaking.
“Get rid of it, trust me,” Matthew said.
“We should…” Willow breathed out in a frightened sob and tried to compose herself as she whimpered out, “We should try and get you patched up, first.”
“Hey,” he said, grabbing Willows hands weakly and pointing toward me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Are there any more around?” I asked, trying not to make eye-contact with our fallen friend.
“No,” he said with agony. “No, not that I saw.”
“There’s an old well around the bend,” Willow offered meekly: her breathy voice becoming lost against the wind. “My father and I went there a couple of times. It might be worth a look.”
“Dump the alien body in the drinking water,” I repeated nervously. “Not my first choice.”
“Oh shut up,” Willow snapped, half embarrassed. “It’s abandoned. Come on, let’s just get rid of it before its friends find it and come back for revenge or something.”
I nodded and hoisted one of the sticky legs through my arms. The creature felt cold and rubbery against my skin. Blue blood began to spill out from the long, serrated cuts along its body. The liquid poured out over my forearms, and I lurched back in surprise.
The creature began to rapidly shed its skin: the limp spire coming off the back of its head the first thing to completely disintegrate from the creature: the tentacle falling hard onto the ground and melting into the stone ground below.
“What… the hell?” Willow said with annoyance, trying to secure its arms with her own before dropping the creature along with me, watching the creature transform.
It turned from a human-like form into a thick tube with dozens of eyes, eight tails, and black teeth.
I swallowed hard and looked up at Willow, stricken with fear.
“It was a bad idea,” I finally admitted.
“Thank you!” she exclaimed back to me with annoyance. Then she leaned forward and continued to pick up the creature.
My eyes went wide as its slippery, pink veneer slimed up against her thin fingers. She struggled to get a grip on it before looking up at me in frustration, wondering why I wasn’t trying to help.
I jerked forward, grabbing at the many tails and helping her lurch it along the vague path into the wilderness.
Somehow, we managed to drag the creature down through the forest, creating a trail of goo behind us.
We reached the well: thick, gray bricks piled on top of one another. With a thick huff, I dropped the creature and walked up to the hole, peering down into it. Like a child would, I picked up a stone close to the well and dropped it down into the dark below, waiting to hear the drop.
The rock finally let out a sharp and tinny “PING,” and I was satisfied with the well’s depth.
I had intended to do an ‘easy does it’ lift and slump the creatures body into the well in a smooth, concise action.
Instead, Willow impishly tugged at the alien and began stuffing it down the rock hole as fast as she could. I helped her lift up the clumps of blistered flesh, and we watched as the pale pink heap of body went tumbled down the well unceremoniously.
I was prepared for it: for his screams or for him to somehow float back up and grab me by the neck. I could nearly feel the cold press of his fingernails against my jugular as we threw him down.
But there was nothing.
The woods seemed hauntingly vacant after he was gone.
Chapter Four
Oron
I watched the females run back toward the mountain and wondered what they might do now. I held back on the trail, watching from a far distance as they carried the man they were with back to the mountain’s base.
“There!” the dark-haired woman yelled, letting the male slump uncomfortable onto the wet ground. “Was that enough exploring for you?”
“For the rest of my life, basically,” the blonde said and flung her dampened hair behind her shoulder.
I watched her carefully: her defined jaw and pleading eyes. There was something in her wide hips and smooth skin that made me want to be closer to her. It was a strange feeling that pulled me forward.
A low groan left my throat, and I cursed myself as my foot stepped ahead and cracked a hollow root under-toe. It snapped loudly, and I hunched down like an idiot, waiting to see their reaction.
The dark-haired woman continued to berate her friend, and I cocked a brow, thinking I had gotten away with it.
But, because it’s me, the blonde looked my way.
There was no change in her demeanor as she met my eyes, but we made clear contact.
I inhaled sharply and watched her, standing tall.
“You should head back,” I heard the blonde say suddenly.
“What?” he friend protested, furious. “No!”
“Just go, Willow,” the girl said lowly. “What are we supposed to do? Drag him around together?”
I perked an amused brow, scratching my chin at her plan, scraping my teeth against my bottom lip as I continued to listen in.
“Are you out of your mind? Just leave him!” the brunette protested. Their voices suddenly went low, likely trying to avoid their injured friend from hearing them. But I could still make out the words: “He’s done, okay? Now don’t make me do this, please. Don’t make me leave you.”
“I'm staying. So you can stay with me and watch him die or bring someone back down here. The minute you get back, I’ll leave with you, I promise. But we can't just leave him here to die.”
The breath left my nose quickly, and I hurried up
Good plan, I thought.
She spotted me and was making a valiant effort to spare her friend. Little did she know she was about to make life that much easier for me.
“Go ahead,” I whispered to myself. “Send her away.”
I waited for some time, keeping a keen eye on the blonde in front of me. I figured whatever she was going to do next would be calculated. But besides some scuffling, I didn’t hear much.
My body stayed hidden at the edge of the forest, and I watched as the setting sun dragged out the shadows of the trees until the sky went dark.
I didn’t want to lose track of her and so began to make my move, stepping out of the darkness.
The girl had dragged the wounded man into a nearby cave. I stood at the entrance, waiting for her to come back out, unsure when her ‘reinforcements’ would arrive.
Impatient, I started to walk into the cave but then hesitated: back-stepped. She did have blood all over her.
I wasn’t afraid of a fight, but it was enough to give me pause. The blood was blue: Vithohn blood. Telling me it wasn’t her friends wound that had sprayed her arms and chest, but one of my own. It was enough to give me pause.
Before I had the chance to make my next move, the girl ascended from the cave and let out a loud scream as she accidentally bumped into me.
I nearly made a noise myself and felt my face going red from it.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said, collecting myself.
She gulped back and pressed her body into the side of the cave’s entrance.
“You didn’t,” she breathed, trying to get a better look at me in the darkness.
I laughed at the sentiment and raised a brow, smiling down at her frail body. “Your friend,” I said, gesturing into the cave. “Will he be okay?”
Lower her defenses. That was the plan.
I had seen many Vithohn attack humans throughout the war. A full-frontal assault. But no one ever tried to truly disarm the humans where it was most effective: their minds.
“He’s not my friend,” she snipped back at me, all but slithering away from me.
I took a step forward and gave a disbelieving nod. “Oh, he isn’t?”
“No, he’s not.”
“Your enemy, then?” I gestured to the blood that had dried and stained down her arms.
She rolled her shoulders and in her best nonchalant tone muttered, “None of my concern, really.”
“Then you didn’t lure me to you by coming back out of that cave so I would approach you instead of him?”
The girl stiffened and began to visibly shake.
I could feel a tooth snag my lower lip as I smirked up the side of my mouth.
“Or to prevent me from going after your little friend who crawled up the mountain?” I continued.
The blonde said nothing but looked as defiant as one could when they were absolutely terrified. I looked down at her shaking hand and realized it wasn’t shaking at all, it was clenching and unclenching a sharp rock.
“So you want a fight, do you?” I seethed, knowing I couldn’t hurt her even if I wanted to. Not if I were going to bring her back to Sylas as a prize.
“I’d rather be left alone,” she said quickly. Her voice was high-pitched, but low. She sounded so young, I was almost endeared to her.
“Or throw me into that hole, right?” I said, speaking of the Vithohn I’d seen her drag off to the abandoned well.
She fluttered her lashes and gripped the rock harder. “Your choice.”
“Who was that?” I asked of the deceased Vithohn.
She side-stepped away from the wall and began walking back into the forest.
I tilted my head to the side and smiled.
Taking a step forward and walking along with her, I decided I would play her little game.
“It was a Vithohn who tried to mess with me,” she spat out, trying to sound tough.
I laughed. “Is that right?”
The blonde looked at me, blinking in quick succession. I could hear her heart beating loudly. Thump-thump, thump-thump. The vibration of it sent tingles through my tentacle.
My tongue cascaded across my bottom lip and within an instant, she took off running. Right toward the well.
I lurched forward, knowing I was faster than she was, and ripped her back toward me, wrapping my spire around her and tightening my grip.
Pulling her over to my face, I could feel her scraping her sharp nails against my tentacle. I winced with pleasure. This chase had been the most fun thing I had done in a long time.
“I’m going to make this simple for you,” I snapped. “Either you come with me, or I will march back to that cave and murder that human. Then I will climb the side of that mountain, find your friend, and sacrifice her body to my people.”
“I told you,” she whimpered out, a sob etching up her throat, “I don’t know him.”
“Fine,” I said with a shrug, walking her deeper into the forest. I raised her up with my tentacle so that she was high above me: a beacon in the sky. “But what about the girl?” I said, and she immediately flinched.
There it was. My in.
“So you’ll sacrifice her?” I said, both my brows shooting up impatiently. “Ah. Something tells me you won’t.”
“And why’s that?” she said tersely.
“Humans have this thing about being noble,” I said, swirling my fingers around. “It’s how most of them died in the war.”
I grinned.
The girl craned her long neck to look at me: big, expressive eyes watering with disgust as she bore into me. “You’re a monster,” she said.
“Shall we do this the easy way or the hard way, then?” I ticked impatiently.
To my surprise, the stupid girl managed to wriggle out of my grip. My tentacle went flailing as she fell to the ground. It pushed my body back and took me a minute to right myself.
I grunted at the effort and raced after her, again. It was made easy this time, considering she had given herself an impressive limp from her high fall.
This time I grabbed her by her slender waist and hoisted her over my shoulder.
“Hard way it is,” I said.
My eyes skimmed her body in the dark as I threw her over my shoulder: wanton eyes, wide hips, and sunshine blonde hair. Yes, she would make a perfect present for the Voth.