GWEN

We sat at a table on the side of the dance floor. The lights were dim, and the room had an ethereal quality to it. The dancers seemed to float across the floor as the candles on the tables flickered.

It felt like a dream, except Anders wasn’t talking to me.

As the evening passed, Anders ignored me in the politist way possible. He didn’t ask me to dance again and barely spoke. I had never seen him like this before. He chatted with Lyzette and Mikael until they left and then we sat quietly again. I felt irritated, but I didn’t know how to talk to him. Should I apologize again? What would fix things between us?

“Hey, Anders.” I was determined to start a conversation with him.

“Shh.” He didn’t stop staring at the door. I followed his gaze and couldn’t believe what I saw.

The pirates had tracked us down.

“Come with me.” Anders grabbed my hand and led me to the middle of the dance floor. Everyone was dancing with a partner now, so we could turn and conceal our faces.

Anders put his hand on my waist. Without asking if I knew the dance, he began to move perfectly in time with the music and carried me along. It was easy to follow him, and somehow I got lost in the melody and movement. For a second I forgot killers were looking for us. I only saw a prince who held me in his arms and glided me across the dance floor.

Why was I fighting him?

Soon we reached the other side of the room. Anders pulled me away from the crowd and out onto a terrace. After going down a few steps, we were on the palace grounds.

“I don’t know how anyone could live here. I’d get lost.” I muttered to myself. I was surprised to get an answer.

“They don’t anymore. Their family has a private house outside of town. They don’t like a lot of fanfare.”

That sounded like something I would do. We were more alike than I had realized. Maybe Anders was right when he said royals were just like other people. I felt like I was on the verge of a breakthrough. But I didn’t have the opportunity for self-reflection when pirates were knocking at the door.

Anders pulled me into the shadows of a tree with long drooping branches that almost reached the ground. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me close. I put my hands against his chest, feeling his heart pound.

“I’m sorry.” I looked up into his handsome face. “It’s just that, if I let myself remember that you’re really a prince, I’d know that you couldn’t possibly care about a commoner like me.”

His eyes had been tracking the movements of the pirates. They were a man and a woman dressed in formal wear like everyone else, but they were recognizable to me. It was Dorron and Oona, the two invaders from the docking bay. Anders turned his attention to me. He looked startled.

“Do you really think that about yourself?” He looked frustrated. “I don’t know how to convince you that it doesn’t matter.” He had unconsciously raised his voice, and I put my finger on his lips.

He kissed my finger and took my hand away. “Let’s go.” We ran into the dark grounds as quietly as possible. We held hands, and he helped me when I needed assistance because I was still wearing the dress. I silently cursed the man who decided women should wear ball gowns.

They were still following us.

“Do you think they’re tracking us somehow?” Anders looked frantic.

We came through a doorway into a little courtyard. The smell of flowers was everywhere. Vines covered the high stone walls with fragrant blossoms. It looked lovely, but what it didn’t have was an exit. We searched in vain for another way out.

They appeared in the doorway. We retreated to the farthest corner while they began to look around the area. Dorron held a device and swept it back and forth. It beeped softly every few seconds.

“That explains it.” I recognized the device. “They’re using an energy tracker. Once it has your unique energy signal, it can follow you anywhere.”

Anders raised an eyebrow. “Are you talking about the X9? The one they banned?”

“That’s the one,” I whispered. “Before I worked for you guys, I was a pilot with a security company guarding the paraball stadium orbiting Earth. We caught a couple of guys who were trying to find and kidnap a paraball star. They were using an X9, and I managed to sneak a peek at it.”

“If you’re right, there’s nothing that can stop them from finding us.” He watched them carefully.

“I’m right. We’re trapped.” I looked up at the smooth stone walls. There were no handholds or anything to climb. The trees had all been recently planted and couldn’t hold a child, let alone one of us. “They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?” Now that death was so close, it was easy to accept our fate.

“I think I have a way out.” He spoke quietly as if he were talking to himself. “I have to do it.” He tore off his jacket and began unbuttoning his shirt.

Was he nuts? “We can’t fight them. They have guns. We have nothing. Are you trying to scare them away with your nude body?”

“I have a feeling this is going to surprise you,” Anders said softly. He threw his shirt on the ground. “But it’s our only chance.”

What was he up to?

He searched around for a second and found a broken branch on the ground. “If I look like I’m going to fall over, help keep me up.” He put the piece of wood in his mouth and bit down on it. Then he closed his eyes and the next thing I knew, wings appeared on his back.

Anders bent over and stumbled, teeth clenched around the piece of wood. He looked like he was in more agonizing pain than I had ever seen before.

I risked taking a glance at the pirates, but they were still busy with the X9. We couldn’t elude the tracker, but it took some time to pinpoint an exact location, which was an advantage for us. When I looked back at Anders, he was in a haze of hurt. His body had curled in on itself, and all his muscles were tense with pain. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I made sure he didn’t topple to the ground.

And I waited.

Eventually, he spat out the piece of wood and looked composed again. I hesitate to use the word normal, because if he looked like a normal anything, it was an angel.

“Get on my back,” he whispered.

I stared at him and didn’t move.

“Now.” I couldn’t disobey his command. I climbed onto his back, wrapping my legs around his waist below the wings and fixing my arms around his shoulders.

“Hold on. You don’t want to fall off.” He jumped up and pumped his wings. The pirates heard and came running, but they couldn’t fly. They stared, pointing and yelling, as we flew away into the night sky.

“That should buy us some time. Can the pirates follow our tracks in the air?”

* * *

ANDERS

Gwen clung silently to my back. I wondered what she was thinking. I worked my wings, needing the pain of exercise to remove all the evening’s emotions.

It was a little overwhelming when I thought about it. I had been terrified when the pirates showed up to kill us. And I never thought I would have to tell her about my wings.

My father had issued a royal edict restricting us from telling anyone about them. We had to keep everything hidden. The women from Earth weren’t supposed to know in case the knowledge made them change their minds about having our babies. Dad wasn’t paranoid either. We had approached planets before Earth. The first world that offered their women to us withdrew when they found out about the wings. My father, the king, didn’t want that to happen again. All we needed was a single generation of girls to repopulate our world. The next generation born with wings would understand us in a different way from the humans.

I took the long way back to the fighter. By the time we arrived, I was exhausted. I hoped it would help me sleep. When I touched down on the ground beside the starship, Gwen slid off and stood on trembling legs, looking at me.

“Let me explain everything.” I couldn’t tell how she was feeling.

“Yes, that would be a good idea.” I examined her in the moonlight, trying to figure out the emotions I saw in her face.

“Don’t leave anything out.” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at me expectantly.

* * *

GWEN

“I was just a boy when my mother died.” Anders started pacing back and forth. His big, sexy wings fluttered in the breeze. “It wasn’t from natural causes. She was the first in a wave of deaths from a virus that would eventually kill every female on our planet.”

I knew this story already. I had been on the Auxem ship since they left Earth.

“Can you imagine what it was like watching everyone die around you?”

My eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know how it felt to live through a disaster.

“We thought the men were immune because none of us got sick right away. But when we arrived on Earth, our scientists discovered that we had also been affected, but in a different way. The virus will make us all infertile in the next few years.”

I nodded. “I know that already. Just skip to the part about the wings.”

“I want to make sure you understand. Otherwise, our actions may seem devious. My father left our planet on a quest to save Auxem, but Earth wasn’t our first stop.”

“What do you mean? I thought you went from Auxem directly to Earth.”

“The first planets we approached turned us down immediately. Finally, we thought we reached an agreement with one, but when they found out about our wings, they kicked us off the planet and told us never to return.”

“Were they afraid of heights or something? That must have been a terrible disappointment.”

“Yes, it was. It happened five years into our search, and it was devastating. After that, Father swore all of us to secrecy. He issued a royal edict that prevented us from telling anyone about our adaptation.”

“Like a vow of secrecy, you mean?” Why didn’t he just tell people to hide their wings? They had to make it sound big and official by saying it was a royal edict.

He glared at me. The wings made him look like an avenging angel. It should have been scary, but all it did was make me hot for him.

“It’s not a joke. We’re talking about my world. My people. Earth is our last hope.”

“I know, but what’s the big deal? Are people prejudiced against wings? It might be a good thing if you can turn it around. Find a marketing manager, and it might be a selling point. You look kind of sexy.”

He stopped pacing and came over to me. He seemed a lot bigger with the wings out. They reached above his head and down to his knees.

“I haven’t told you the whole story.”

“There’s more?” He nodded, but didn’t look angry anymore. He looked sad. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to my question.

“You saw me when I took my wings out, right?”

I winced. “Yeah. It looked like it hurt.”

“It’s agonizing every time. And it’s worse when they first emerge. But we understand that it’s worth it. It’s hard for anyone to empathize with us if they can’t fly. We’ve kept this knowledge from you for a reason.”

“You’re afraid we’ll reject you because we don’t want our children going through that? Well, you’re right. What woman in her right mind would want her child to deal with that kind of torment?”

His eyes glimmered with something that looked suspiciously like tears. It was probably a trick of the moonlight.

“That’s right. You can’t tell anyone, Gwen.”

“Are you telling me that you’re keeping this from all the humans?” I felt outrage building inside me.

“What else are we supposed to do?” Anders ran his fingers through his hair in agitation. “We need them.”

“You know the difference between right and wrong. The Auxem shouldn’t be doing this.”

“When we save the transport, talk to Jayne and Elle. They know everything already. They’ve decided that saving Auxem is worth it, and they believe their children will be able to withstand the trauma.”

I stared up at him. An alien prince. A gorgeous winged creature with whom I had been intimate.

All I saw was sorrow in his eyes and a burning need for acceptance. It tore at my soul, and I couldn’t put up any more of a fight.

“Okay, Anders. I’ll keep your secret for now, but I don’t think it is the right thing to do.”

“Thank you.” He looked relieved that I had given him my word. “After you hear Jayne’s and Elle’s perspective, you can decide what you’re going to do.”

I nodded. Suddenly I felt tired. Too much had happened in the past few hours, and we hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before. I felt like lightening the mood.

“I can’t believe you’ve been keeping this from me. Are there any other secrets you’re not telling me?” I said it jokingly. At least I thought I did.

He didn’t laugh. If anything, his face became even more earnest.

“As a matter of fact, there is one.” His voice sounded deeper as he took my hands. “I’ve been holding back something ever since I met you. I don’t think I can keep it from you any longer.”

I was unable to tear my eyes away from his. I knew he was about to say something significant.

He took a deep breath, as if searching for courage, and the words came rushing out. “I love you.”