Chapter 42
She had to speak with the unsympathetic Halian. The one who gave her chills. At least the barely controlled fires didn’t burn in this one’s eyes, but the coldness in them wasn’t very encouraging.
“I need to rescue Jia and Cici,” she insisted, pleading her case while Nahash coiled around her protectively, eyeing Halian with a new level of dislike and distrust, despite the fact that Halian had come to their rescue.
Halian’s impassive expression showed no sign of softness. “No.”
“They’re prisoners on Iridua,” she said. “They deserve their freedom!”
He tilted his head slightly, as if she were an interesting insect he contemplated before smooshing it beneath his boot. “They’re Iriduan females, living the lives they’ve been raised to live. Would you call it ‘rescuing’ you if someone snatched you away from everything you knew on Earth and took you to an alien planet to live out the rest of your life amongst an alien species, knowing you would never be able to return to your own people and the life you left behind?”
She sagged into Nahash’s coils. “Touché, you bastard.”
He shrugged at her insult. “I figured that would clear things up for you. Your desire to ‘rescue’ Jia and Cici is more about selfishness than anything else. You want them to be with you because you care about them—which is a mistake in itself—but you aren’t really thinking about what’s best for them.”
“Show some respect to my mate, traitor,” Nahash hissed, insinuating himself between Cass and Halian.
“I really despise that word, so I’ll ask you not to use it again.” Halian’s voice had dropped to a low, deadly tone that made the hair on Cass’s neck stand on end as he stared at Nahash. “Or perhaps I should remind you that you also share the label, Nahash?”
Nahash wouldn’t be cowed, but Cass could tell by the quiver of tension that went through his tail that Halian had struck his mark, despite the fact that Nahash didn’t back down.
“My mate cares about her friends. She’s only trying to reunite with them. You should learn from her compassion, since you clearly lack your own.”
Halian shifted his cold gaze from Nahash to Cass, and she didn’t like the thoughtful expression on his face at all. “Perhaps I should. I believe I would enjoy learning from her. Are you volunteering her time to teach me?”
Before Nahash could kill Halian, which was what he might do based on the sudden shift in his coils, Cass held up both hands. “That’s enough! You’ve made your point, Halian. I won’t try to interfere with Cici and Jia’s lives. Maybe there will be a way I can send them a message to let them know I’m okay, and find out if they’re okay too, but I’ll worry about that later. Let’s go, Nahash.”
Nahash wasn’t so easily convinced to move. He continued to glare and hiss. “Don’t come near my mate, or I’ll skin you alive.”
The first real expression Halian’s face took on since the discussion began was amusement at Nahash’s threat. “Or perhaps it’s I who will skin you. I assure you, I have more experience, and your skin would fetch a very high price.” He cocked his head to the side, his mocking smile widening. “Or perhaps I’ll just have a pair of boots and a belt made from it.”
Somehow, despite Nahash being deadlier, Halian’s threat worried Cass more. For one thing, it was a threat against her lover, and for another, she had no doubt the Iriduan in front of her would be perfectly capable of cold-bloodedly skinning someone alive.
She didn’t think Nahash would be able to do that, despite the fact that he was the one who’d said it first.
Panicking when her tug on Nahash’s arm wouldn’t budge him, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her head. “Could you guys finish your dick-measuring competition so I can go lie down and rest?” Her fear lent an extra edge to her tone.
They gave her equal looks of surprise, and something flickered in Halian’s chilly green eyes like a banked fire stirring to life, making his irises brighten. As he blinked in growing confusion, staring at her as if he was startled to see her, she hissed at Nahash to take her back to their cabin in a low whisper.
This time he relented, perhaps sensing her desire to get away from the other Iriduan.
He wrapped her up in his coils and left the recreation room where they’d confronted Halian.
Neither she nor Nahash spoke as they made their way back to their cabin. Some of the Akrellian crew members stared at them as they went past, but most just went about their business, though Cass had no doubt they were aware of her and Nahash’s every move.
The Akrellians had tapped into a vast network of spies and double-agents in a plan to smuggle her out of the city and onto a stealth shuttle at a remote extraction point. The arrival of Nahash had not only thrown all their plans into disarray, it had also presented an opportunity to take both of them. The fact that he’d shut down the Iriduan’s defenses had made it easier to extract them closer to the city, which allowed their medic to get Cass onto the warship and into the medical bay to complete her treatment.
They weren’t prisoners. Yet. Cass’s brief meeting with the commander of the main war ship where their shuttle had docked while she was still unconscious told her exactly what type of position they were in. The Akrellians were willing to give them a chance—an opportunity at a normal life. Nahash and her son would not be forced to use their abilities, but the Akrellians hoped they might someday wish to assist of their own free will. Prime Commander Tirel promised Nahash he wouldn’t be required to kill his own people, even if he did agree to help the Akrellians.
Their offer sounded almost too good to be true, but it had its caveats. They would be bound to the colony world they’d be living on until they’d proven themselves to the Akrellians. If they ever posed any kind of threat, the Akrellians would destroy them without mercy.
Nahash could kill them all first and take over the ship, but they both acknowledged that they had nowhere else to go, and neither of them wanted to be on the run with the baby coming in a month or so. In fact, they needed to be around a medical team. The Akrellian offer was too good to pass up. So they’d accepted.
Now, the crew watched them with wariness, but Tirel had already said this crew was familiar with strange sights. There’d been two other test subjects on this very ship, and they were each strange and unique in their abilities. Unlike Nahash, though, they had hated the Iriduan Empire as much as the Akrellians did.
Nahash might be angry at the Iriduan leadership, but he still loved his people. Because of his previous loyalties, the Akrellians were slow to warm up to them. They were also very busy and on-edge while in Iriduan space.
That left Nahash and Cass mostly alone in their own cabin, which suited them both just fine. They had a lot of catching up to do.
He laid Cass on the bed and then uncoiled his tail from around her. When his tail swept to the side, exposing his groin area, she saw that both of his cocks were everting. She watched the process with curiosity. They were usually already out whenever he approached her with sex on his mind.
“Do you have something to measure them with?” he asked.
Cass blinked at him in confusion. “What?”
He looked down at his two stiffening erections. “I’ve never competed in such a manner before, but if this is what it will take to win my mate from another male, I will do it.” He looked up again, pinning her with a warning gaze. “I will be the one to verify the length of his shaft. I don’t want you to see it again.” His tone brooked no argument with that pronouncement. “I swear I’ll be the one to win this competition. Should I add the lengths of both of them together?”
Cass’s mouth dropped open. “Nahash, what are you talking about?”
He studied his stiff dicks as if he could will them to stretch a little longer. “You wanted us to compete by measuring our shafts, did you not?” He looked back up at her with a crease between his brows. “The word you used—‘dick’—it translated as ‘shaft’ which is our word for our—”
“Nahash, it was just a saying! I use it to chastise guys who get all up in each other’s faces trying to prove how manly and badass they are.”
“Then you don’t wish to know the actual length of our shafts for comparison?” He looked like he wasn’t sure whether he should be relieved or disappointed. No doubt disappointed, since he was certain to win—especially if he added the lengths of both of his dicks together.
Cass tried not to laugh hysterically, given how seriously Nahash was taking this. It meant something to him that she chose him over Halian. Not even a contest as far as she was concerned. “Listen, I have no idea how long his… um, manhood is, and I don’t even care. I wouldn’t touch it or him with a ten-foot pole. The guy scares the crap out of me. I’m not sure if he wants to kiss me or kill me, or do both, in either order!”
Nahash’s eyes widened. “You never saw his shaft? Did he not present it to you before you made use of his talents?”
Cass narrowed her eyes on him, ignoring his eagerly jutting erections, ruby red against his pale belly scales. “You thought I actually slept with him? Oh, honey, no! It never got that far. Not even close.”
Nahash sagged on his coils, sinking down until they were eye-level as she sat up on the bed. “That’s a relief.” He frowned deeply. “I do think it might be dangerous to treat him as a parlor pet, though. He doesn’t seem like he’ll accept that lifestyle. Perhaps we should just kill him.”
The fact that he said that in complete seriousness didn’t surprise her. “He’s not imprinted on me. He only pretended to be, to get close to me so he could abduct me for his own ends.” She wasn’t even sure what those ends were, since she’d thought Halian was working for two different sides, and now, apparently a third side. The eerie thing was, she didn’t think even Halian knew who he was working for—or even knew who he was.
Nahash looked incredibly disturbed as his frown deepened into a scowl. He turned his gaze away from her. “That’s not good. He must have imprinted on someone. So where is she?”
Of course, Halian must’ve been safe from imprinting on her or Jia or Cici because he was already imprinted on someone. “I never saw another female. Oh, maybe the doctor? No, she was supposed to be a null.”
Nahash shook his head. “No, it’s likely he wasn’t getting regular exposure to his mate and some mental deterioration set in. That explains a great deal about his current mental state. Deterioration undoubtedly caused him to fracture.”
Cass held up a hand, all thoughts of Nahash’s jutting cocks forgotten in her curiosity. “Wait, is this kind of thing normal for Iriduans?”
Nahash wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Not completely normal. It’s still a rare occurrence. When an imprinted male deteriorates, his mind isn’t always damaged in its capacity to function, but rather it’s changed in the way it functions. It’s something the doctors at the clinic call fracturing. The mind struggles to survive without exposure to the female, so it creates a disconnected part of itself that doesn’t need her. That part lacks empathy, sympathy, compassion. Scientists believe it is incapable of love in any capacity. It’s extremely dangerous, because that part of the fracture won’t show any mercy or remorse.”
“And that’s what’s happened to Halian?” The coldness in one version of Halian made sense now, but she wondered about the barely contained fires in the other version. She wondered what that meant, and if he had even more “fractures,” or just the one.
“It has also happened to me.”
“What?” She stared at him, hoping she hadn’t heard him right.
He ran a hand over his scaled head. “I thought I heard a voice, and then I became that voice—The Great Serpent. It taught me how to truly use my ability, but it also urged me to destroy everything in my path. I was going to do it, too. I had forgotten who I really was.”
She leaned towards him, touching his face, cupping his cheek as she forced him to meet her eyes. Looking into them, she saw only Nahash—his pupils dilated only slightly, though she knew he was aroused. He’d already satisfied his engorgement with her earlier. “Honey, I don’t see anyone else behind your eyes. It’s just you.”
“That part of me won’t come out again,” he said, his fingers brushing over her lips as he drew closer to her. “I swear it. As long as you’re with me, my mind will always be flooded with the happiness that keeps her at bay.”
“And if something separates us?” She worried for him. Worried he would lose himself again to the serpent.
He shook his head. “I’ll never let it win again. I would die first.”
“Is Halian dying, Nahash?”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. As Kotesri, he’d kept himself at too much of a distance from her to care about him beyond her usual concern for people in general, and she’d never known Halian at all—except for briefly as a threat to her life and freedom. Still, it seemed tragic that he was dying because of the imprinting.
Nahash shook his head. “If he was still deteriorating, his body would be much weaker. Even in a clinic with mitigation, his body would still be frail and undernourished. He’s somehow found a way to survive the separation, but it hasn’t saved his mind from fracturing.”
She would pity Halian, then, though she would also keep her distance from him. She wanted nothing he had to offer, especially not now, knowing what she did.
She hugged Nahash, pressing her lips to his for a long, hungry kiss. Right now, she had her beloved. Her future was uncertain, and a dark, fractured intelligence lived in the back of his mind that he might never be truly free of, but he was hers, and they were together again. She could overcome any other obstacle.