YAHIRO

She woke up like any sane person would who found themselves stranded on an alien planet that wanted to kill them woke—with a panic attack. A scream tore out of her throat. She fought the hands holding her, knowing it was the alien she’d met the night before, but it took a long time for her mind to catch up.

She screamed again as she fought her way out of a cocoon of strong arms and feathers. A winged alien, at that!

The hands that held her tightened before letting go as she scrambled away, terror and stress clogging her mind.

“Yahiro?” The familiar voice did little to soothe her as she reached for the gun that was not there, her body refusing to give up its past life. When I was a better person. Tears streamed down her face while panic rose like bile to suffocate her.

She looked up sharply when the edges of two wings caressed the sides of her body.

A man stood slowly, his hands outstretched to his sides. She remembered him, and the strange way he said her name, but she barely recognized him.

He looked far different in the morning light.

She doubled over, chest tight, trying to find a breath that wasn’t there. She was picked up before she had a chance to fall in on herself as though she were nothing more than a disgusting vibrant orange puddle on the ground.

The ground. Stay grounded, stay grounded, stay grounded.

Large, warm hands clasped her back as she was pulled hard into a chest that felt too good to be true.

Her body thrummed, her pulse raced, sweat was on the verge of pouring out of every pore, and yet as this strange alien’s embrace tightened, her panic ebbed.

He caught her up in his arms, holding her into him, throwing her off-kilter when her body responded with something other than panic. It responded with heat.

“Are you unwell?”

She understood his words and whimpered. His piercings rubbed her chest as he situated her, the tease turning her whimpers into mews. Yahiro shakily pressed her hands against his chest and pushed some space between them.

Her mind raced, her body twitching, erratic, heart-pounding, breaths thin, but her thoughts were straight, although not continuous.

Has he poisoned me? Mind control powers? I don’t know anything about him or his species... Does he have a people? She pushed herself further away, his hold on her receptive, but he didn’t let her go.

Yahiro pressed her hand against her lips and screamed in frustration and continued to do so until her throat ached and she came down from the cliff of her panic attack.

When it was finally over, she looked up to Quist watching her with twisted, horrified features.

“Yahero!?”

She swallowed and wiped some of the sweat from her brow. “I’m okay now.” She felt like she needed to explain herself to this alien. She sniffled and pressed her forehead to his torso. I would want an explanation. Hell, I’d have run if he had an attack like mine.

“What is wrong? The noises you made were...” He stopped and lifted his eyes to the skies as if he were trying to find the right word. “They were like the distant echoes in a cave, ones that get closer with each blink.”

“So,” she sniffled again, watching him. “Not good?”

“Scary.”

She smiled in spite of it all. He didn’t look like a being that scared easily. The slight sway of his feathers caressed her.

“Am I scary?” she asked.

His golden eyes shot back to her. “Scary? No.” His accent reminded her of waves crashing against rocks, hoarse and airy, and so... inhuman. “Description eludes me.”

“Escapes me too,” she grumbled and he cocked his head, his eyes questioning. She repeated the words in his language, “Eludes me too.” His lips are so close. They were a light bronze, pouty, and wide. Wider than any human lips but not obscene. They were sexy. They make his smiles devilish.

Her hands, still on his chest, pushed some more. If she didn’t get away from him soon, her faked insanity wouldn’t be so fake anymore.

Yahiro peeled his fingers off her skin, and Quist, unmoving, let her with a curious glint in his eyes. Until her belly rumbled loudly, and he let her feet touch the ground.

She grimaced as her torn up foot mated the dirt with its wound.

“Oww! Goddamn it,” she hissed and using his arm as support, lifted her sole up to look at what she didn’t want to see. It was mud encrusted, inflamed, brown with dried blood, and thickened with swelling. Quist whistled above her as she lowered herself back to the ground to inspect the gash further.

“You’re hurt,” he groused, taking her limb from her hands and bringing it to his nose.

“Ech, don’t!” She cursed herself and repeated it in his language. “From last night,” she gasped out. His fingers swiped across her raw instep. He smelled her foot deeply before she could jerk out of his grip and stop him. The damage was done and she was mortified.

“Did I do this to you?”

“N-no,” she stuttered, still trying to tug her foot back. “I cut myself on the stone.” Her eyes widened.

The stone! She looked around frantically, forgetting her foot. “Where’s the stone?” It was nowhere to be seen. Her body squirmed until he let her go, and she moved away, searching on hands and knees. “Where is it? I can’t lose my light! I need it to see.”

“It disappeared.”

Her eyes snapped back to him. “Did you take it?”

“No. It faded as the sun rose.”

“That’s not possible. Stones don’t fade.” Yahiro turned back to scour the ground within her vicinity. “I had it in my hand, right here! It has to be here somewhere.” She tried to convince herself but she only saw strange plants, moss, and dirt.

She was lifted off the ground and into the air, her hands still reaching out to search.

“No! Put me down!” The need to have her talisman back was almost too much, and she felt her panic swiftly returning. She fought Quist until the ground got smaller and smaller and the spot became hidden by the tops of strangled trees that were covered in veils of lime-green moss. The air whooshed out of her throat. “Quist!” She screeched, “Don’t drop me!”

“Never.”

Her fear stopped her from moving. Her heart broke as the spot where she had been looking faded into the distance. The hands holding her tightened. She never got the memo to Not Look Down, seeing as she was already doing so after being lifted into the air.

“I’m scared,” she whispered to the wind.

“Look at me.”

“I can’t.”

“Look at me!”

Yahiro clenched her eyelids shut and gulped down a deep, chilly breath. The sound of wings hammering through the air, slicing the wind in half as if in battle did little to soothe her.

I wish I never woke up this morning. Damn. She wished she had never woken up after the ship crash. If wishes were possible truths, she wished she had never woken up the day after William and his Snake destroyed her soul.

“Look at me.” The lilting words repeated far off, beyond the walls of her memories.

“Baby-doll, why hide in the dark?” he laughed, excitedly. It made her nauseous; it made her alert. Any moment he would switch on his flashlight and burn it into her eyes.

She cowered like the scum she had become. She deserved this. She had gone too deep. And when one went too far, there was no turning back. What had been another undercover job had become her entire life. A clammy hand shot out and took ahold of her hair.

It dragged her across the shit-stained cell, abrading her naked skin. Yahiro yelped and cried. Every day she thought she couldn’t be brought lower, and every day was a rude awakening.

“Yelp, piggy, yelp! I’ll give you the pigpen for another yelp!” Light flooded behind her eyelids, but she squeezed them shut. The hand in her hair pulled, yanking her head up painfully. “Open your eyes, piggy. Today you’re broken.”

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She didn’t dare refuse Snake. Her puffy lids opened and the light shot daggers into her eyes. It had only been a day since she last saw it, but spending twenty-two plus hours in the pitch still made it painful. Her hair was pulled. Snake waited, patiently, for her sight to return. He gave her time. He played with her head. Yesterday had been quicker. A month ago had left her sobbing. Three months ago, they had shared a pleasant conversation as he commended her on her witty mind.

Yahiro always got to name the new drugs. The new dregs. The erotic stank of used-up pussy. It turned some men on. Spend enough time around it, it’d begun to turn her on too.

“Cheez-its, man, Cheez-its. Can’t just eat one. Fuck, Smoothie, what’ll be the next one? Puppies?”

“Look at me, Yahiro, see what I see. It’s a sight to behold.”

She did what she was told, but not before she moved her head toward Quist’s voice.

When she opened her eyes this time, there wasn’t pain, only a golden-haired man with a face alight in rays. He was so beautiful, so handsome, this alien; it hurt her more than Snake ever had.

It was beautiful and it didn’t involve a fist. Nor the choices, or eventually, the drug-induced coma afterward.

His lips quirked down at her and she threaded her arms around his midsection. His skin was warm wherever she touched. She could find herself addicted to it, to him, if she didn’t keep the brittle walls around her heart erect.

But when the morning sunshine hit his face, caught up and absorbed, like she was by his looks, she remembered the poignant truth: she had an addictive personality.

Yahiro licked her lips. “You are a sight.”

His wings flapped through the air behind him, and wayward feathers fell away and disintegrated into golden dust in the sun’s rays. They rained down on them and yet she couldn’t look away from his face.

She had convinced herself that she would see Snake’s fist when she opened her eyes, or worse yet, the ground coming toward her. But what she got was bright, glorious gold.

She suddenly realized they had stopped moving.

The golden daggers of his irises pierced her and his lips lifted into a smile. “Look.”

“I am,” she whispered.

“Not at me,” he said, nodding his head. “At that.”

It took all of her willpower to turn away and look. First, her eyes roved over the vast, bizarre landscape, and the green forest that vined out like weeds throughout it all. Around were plateaus and giant mountains that roiled outward for eternity, some so high they rose up far beyond, even at their altitude. The colors were the same as Earth, green foliage and blue skies. The only thing that was missing were the miles upon miles of metal cities and grey cement.

On one side there was an ocean, as blue as the oceans she had grown up next to, bluer even. The coastline held a ping-pong of waterfalls leading away from it, as inlets and rivers flowed from the watery expanse. Far, far in the distance, there was a purple and grey storm hovering above it. The water rose up in a tempest toward the threatening clouds.

“So beautiful,” she choked out, her eyes taking in the view, afraid that if she didn’t it would vanish.

“Not that.” A single finger tapped her chin, gently turning her head. “Home.”

That’s when she saw it. A dinosaur. One that had an unsettling amount of dirt in its wake. “Oh my god—”

“—Lusheenn.” Luchen. The name still had no translation.

“What is it?”

The creature was huge, beyond comprehension huge. It looked like a brontosaurus but far taller and wider, many miles in its expanse. It was as tall as the tallest mountains, and even at her height with Quist keeping them adrift, they were barely level with it.

After her initial shock, the only thought going through her head was what that beast ate. What and how much. She didn’t think there was enough forest to feed it, let alone if it was a carnivore. Her grip on Quist tightened, and she leveraged her body to straddle his waist.

“That’s... home? What’s on its back?”

You’re definitely not on Earth anymore, Hiro.

She continued, “It won’t eat us will it?” The beast stood unmoving in its position, its head lifted toward the sun.

“It absorbs the light. Like my brothers and I. My home is on its back. The City of Dawn isn’t following dawn, though, and I think I know why.”

“It eats light?”

“Absorbs it. Do you not absorb it?” He turned in the air until more of the sun’s rays hit her. They were intermittent as the sky slowly swayed with clouds from the ocean storm. “I feel your stomach against mine. It aches for nourishment.”

“I don’t eat light.”

He stiffened, bringing her gaze back to him. He was looking at her sharply.

“You... don’t? What do you need for nourishment?”

Her pulse thrummed. She became aware of how close they were, and how much she clung to him. The only barrier separating their skin was a little cloth and a lot of polyester.

“I eat meat, vegetables,” she tried to find the right words in his language as options flooded her head. “Flowers?”

“You eat Sonhadra?”

“Yes, maybe, what’s Sonhadra?”

His eyes sharpened further, narrowing. “This,” he flourished his arm, loosening his hold and making her screech before he re-banded it around her, “is Sonhadra. Did Lusheenn not tell you so?”

“I don’t know who or what Lusheenn is and I-I—” Yahiro squeaked as Quist pressed her flush against him and the hand that had tilted her chin now curved her ass. A thick erection sat between their plastered pelvises and she promptly forgot what she was going to say, choking on the words.

When she finally had the gall to face him again, he stared down at her, curious and horrified.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a human.”

She gripped him tighter, not liking where this conversation was going, that they were having it so high up in the air, and that her only escape was death.

“Huuman,” he repeated, his lips pursing as if tasting the word. “Lusheenn never mentioned this word to me. But you found his—our heart. It sparked for you. Human.”

She licked her rapidly chapping lips. “Can we land please?” The hand that was around her back snaked up into her messy, mottled, and quickly tangling hair. It made her skin prickle as he pulled it enough to keep her facing him. His wings flapped and moved upward until they blocked her view of the world. “That doesn’t help. I don’t know you. I don’t trust you to not let me fall—”

“—Do you want to know me, Yahiro?—”

“—I thought I wanted to die, but not like this!”

His face shifted back into the golden sinister look he’d displayed earlier. It frightened her almost as much as being a mile above ground did, where her only seatbelt was the arms of a strange alien man with a large erection. The hand in her hair gripped tighter. Her nails dug into the muscles under the stems of his wings.

“Death isn’t an option for you. Not while you’re in my sight.”

Yahiro licked her lips as a breeze snapped loose tendrils of hair between them.

She didn’t know this being. In fact, she didn’t even know whether or not they were compatible, but it didn’t stop her from wanting him and it didn’t stop her from considering his words.

He doesn’t plan to kill me, but... he’s an alien. An A.L.I.E.N. If she hadn’t seen a world beyond her imagination, illusions conjured by drugged hallucinations, she considered that a sane person would’ve had a nervous breakdown.

Oh, wait.

“Quist...”

They remained hovered far in the sky, her breaths short for many reasons, but he continued to look at her as if he’d spend enough time at it, he’d understand her.

“We’ll figure it out.”

The words caught her off-guard and instantly put her at ease. Maybe he can read me? Yahiro studied him as thoroughly as he studied her.

“We will?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you...” The wind whipped their hair in a torrent around and between their faces.

The dinosaur let out a long, low groan, like a deep vibration, and startled her gaze away from Quist and back toward the creature. Its head had turned in their direction and from as far as they were, she could tell the beast was staring at her.

“It found me,” Quist answered before she could muster a response. “Sundamar, my brother, had it look for me. I never would’ve thought he’d let it off the world-path...”

Yahiro glanced back to him but he was facing the dinosaur. Nothing you say makes sense.

“You live on its back?” she asked.

“No.” He licked his lips, catching her eyes, and making her tummy drop between her thighs. “I live among Sonhadra now. I’ve never lived on Dawn.”

The beast released another long vibration, straight at her and Quist. She decided she didn’t like it focusing on her with such intensity. “Why not?”

“I lived in Light, the first city of Lusheenn, where I was created, deep in the Sonhadra deserts, but it was destroyed by the Psions and our Creator did nothing to protect my brothers and I. He vanished before the slaughter and has never returned—the coward. Afterwards, when we left the deserts behind and Sundamar took the last of Lusheenn’s creations and started anew, I left them and stayed in the wilds, searching endlessly for our Creator.”

“Oh.”

“I feel him being near you.”

He gripped her tighter and moved her farther up his body until their faces were aligned. She had never held onto another being as hard as she held onto Quist. The golden beads sparkled like ocean sand across his face. His stern face.

“I don’t know him. I have nothing to do with him!”

“Are you a Psion?”

His eyes narrowed and went dark all the sudden. Yahiro plastered her body as close as she could against him regardless, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms over his shoulders, her hands still clinging to his stems.

“I promise you, I’m not. I’m nothing. I’m not from any part of this world. Please...”

The molo vibrated again but this time it went ignored.

Their battle of wills raged and she felt him reading her once again. Her own will begged for him to see the truth. Not all the truths of her... but the truth that she had nothing to do with his past.

“You’ll stay in my sight, Yahiro of Quist,” he said at last. Her heart fluttered with equal parts of both terror and relief.

Quist rolled his wings, lowering them toward the ground. She couldn’t see it, his grip in her hair tight, but she felt the shift in altitude, the oxygen levels changing, her breaths becoming easier.

I’ll live if I stay in his sight.

Her eyes flickered over his symmetrically unnerving face and the golden piercings that dotted it. I can keep one vow if I stay near him. I only... have to stay where he can see me. I don’t have to trust him. She felt the shock of landing but not the shadow of trees above her. The babbling sounds of a creek replaced the gusty wind.

I could always find my way back to the Concord. But that thought depressed her. Choosing captivity was not in her nature, not after she knew what true captivity felt like.

She wasn’t a saint. That ship had sailed years ago. William had broken her, piece by piece, until she became an entirely different being. Until she bowed down to the devil in reverence and found enjoyment in doing so. She didn’t care about the others, the corrupt doctors, the pervish guards, the brutality of those who lived on the Concord. She cared a little bit for the girls who had suffered beside her, but she didn’t know them, she knew nothing except the fact that they did something that landed them in the highest security prison in the history of mankind.

Even if Charlie and Preta were innocent, I’ll never know now. Liars were bred, not born. Her parents hadn’t begotten a liar, at least they tried not to.

She would stay with Quist. But even as the thought swelled in her mind, she realized how easy it was to choose an alien and leave behind her own race.

“I don’t want to die,” she admitted after Quist began walking, his hand still forcing her to face him. “I want to live.”

“You no longer had that choice.” He glanced away, breaking the beguilement he had on her. She sucked in an easier breath, knowing she had come to a decision. One she wasn’t happy about, but one that would increase her odds of survival.

“What upon Sonhadra do you need for nourishment?” he asked, turning back toward her.

Her stomach caved at the thought of food. She couldn’t remember her last nutrient bar. “Fruit, vegetables, meat. If you kill a creature and can make a fire, I can cook the... meat.”

He made a face but sat her down gently next to a crystal brook. “I have no control over fire. The blazings have dominion over it, gifted to them by their Creator, sister to Lusheenn.” Quist stepped into the water with a flinch, his loose pants swaying and swirling to the flowing water. He crouched down, soaking himself, and slowly lowered her torn foot into the water.

It didn’t feel like the swamp water from the night before; it felt like bliss, and she leaned forward to watch him handle her. The dirt and blood fell away from her wounds, lost to the stream while probing fingers cleaned them. There was no pain, only numbness, and she wondered if she had an infection.

“Lusheenn isn’t sovereign?” she asked.

“Only to the light.”

Yahiro brushed her fingers through her tangled hair while Quist slipped off her remaining shoe and lowered her other foot into the water. She knew she was going to take advantage of it soon and bathe, whether or not he kept her in his sight.

“Like a god of light?”

“God?”

“Errm, deity? No? Muse?” She tried to find the right word to translate to him. “Divinity?”

“Divine, yes. Lusheenn is divine. My eldest brother is made in his image.”

“I don’t understand? Made?” she tasted the word, not liking it. “Like out of clay from the Earth, like Zeus and his bronze humans?”

“I don’t know this Zeus, but yes, like clay but with sunlight, he formed us whole. He said he made us out of loneliness but I never believed him.”

This was getting weird. “He made you. Then you didn’t believe him? Doesn’t that go against... his ability?”

“I told you he left us to die!”

She flinched as he shot up, releasing her feet. Quist stepped out of the water and stormed back and forth. She had upset him.

“Why?” she couldn’t help but ask despite his sudden anger.

“I don’t know!” he roared, his wings thrusting out and crackling. The clouds thickened overhead, allowing only scattered sun rays to shine behind him. “He left,” Quist spat. “Without a word and vanished like the sun does at dusk! He gave us his loneliness and subjected us to bear its burden until his power fades from our veins and we return to the abyss from whence we came. Only cruelty would do that. And I have vowed to hunt him down and destroy him.”

Yahiro threaded her fingers in her lap and forced herself to ignore the growing pain of hunger and lightheadedness. “That’s why you want to kill him?”

“Yes!”

“A god?”

He shook his head. The band at his nape fell to the ground. His hair spilled over his shoulders and caressed his skin. Yahiro pressed her fists into her belly and tried to stop the knot of arousal that formed. The knot only tightened as his wet pants plastered to his legs and groin, leaving little to the imagination. Her eyes dropped to his apex, trying to see what she had felt but he was no longer erect.

“God. No, one of the Creators. I won’t stop until either I or he is dead. I want to feel his pulse melt like wax under my fingertips until he feels what he had excreted so long ago from his ass. What I am now!”

She lifted her feet out of the water and tucked them beneath her legs. “Do you know why he left?”

Quist caught a fallen feather in his hand and crumpled it. “No.”

“Maybe it wasn’t by choice then?”

“Human. Whoever made you did poorly in giving you Sonhadra’s history. The Creators did nothing that wasn’t by choice, and Lusheenn, beloved of the sun, was never told no. His men never uttered the word in his presence, knowing what it would cost them.”

“You spoke his name last night when you found me? Why? I thought you were going to kill me so I ran, but the tone of your voice was raw.” She continued to rub the ache in her belly. “I’m not even from Sonhadra,” she added, wanting to remind him again.

He stopped and looked at her sharply, his eyes roving over her huddled form, smoldering yet questioning. He plucked a feather that still floated in the air and stalked toward her until he kneeled at her side. “Last night, the dead inside me returned to life, and I was pulled to you. You held that stone, our fabled heart, one that Lusheenn often goaded us with but never showed us. I felt it and him again. When I came upon you in the dark,” he bit out the last word, “all I saw was my vengeance coming to completion. If you are on Sonhadra, you are from Sonhadra, human Yahiro. We’ll find who made you and get the answers.”

She shook her head, but Quist ignored her as he retook her aching foot and placed his feather over the wound like a bandage, plastering it with water. She immediately felt better, however, the knot of arousal now had a fish hook through it and pulled. Each tug begged her to open her legs to touch herself... and touch him.

“What stopped you from killing me?”

“I don’t know.”

Yahiro deadpanned.

“You weren’t him.”

“No... I’m not a man or a god.”

“Divinity,” he amended, saying it in her language, but it came out coarse. “You had my heart.”

“It’s gone now...” she whispered, uncertain. “I couldn’t find it. It’s gone.”

“I still feel it.” Quist reached forward and pushed back a lock of her hair, freeing her face for his perusal. The simmering emotion within his gaze was too much. Too much and too fast. She tried to see herself in the glassiness of his eyes but couldn’t, and didn’t know if she reflected the emotion. The ropes of her knot pulled. “We’ll see it again. But first, you need nourishment.” His hand left her and she missed it.

Yahiro watched as the alien looked around them as if the food she needed would magically appear. She followed his gaze, disheartened not because a cheeseburger didn’t sprout from the ground, but because he’d only protected her because of the stone.

He stormed around the glen, tugging and pulling any and all berries, roots, and flowers into a pile under his arm. A damning thought presented itself: there are other humans. They could be nearby. They could’ve also found stones that called to him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that but quipped up, “I’m not the only one.”

Quist dumped his gatherings by her side and she moved to pick through them although keeping her eye on the alien.

“You weren’t created alone?”

“Ehh. We weren’t created. We fell. And no, I didn’t come here alone.” She eyed a purple globule that looked rotten but smelled sweet, deciding whether or not to risk more stomach pains. “Before you found me, I was with the others but we were scattered, chased down by these monsters that screamed—”

“Ak’rena?”

“Sure. We got split up but there are others. Men and women, some old, some not, that survived. We fell together.”

“From what?” The curiosity was back.

Yahiro looked up at the sky, seeing only clouds but pointed up anyway. “The sky.”

“Hmm.” He sounded like he didn’t believe her. She grumbled inwardly and out, the strange fruit poised at her lips when she turned back to the flowing water and saw something akin to a fish. Yes! Food. Any longer without it and she’d be a zombie, one that would look at Quist and his honed, tight skin in an entirely different fashion. She didn’t want to find out what alien angel flesh tasted like.

“Quist! Can you capture that, that... swimming creature and give it to me?” She pointed at the silver streak before looking around for two sticks she could begin a fire with.

“A phena? Why? They’re unable to live outside the wet.”

“I know. I know,” she mumbled, dragging her exhausted body across the moss, gathering supplies. She once made a fire during one of her drug-induced states; if she hadn’t, the gremlins would come out of the shadows and eat her. She still had burn scars where she had gotten to close to it.

“What will you do with it?” he asked, and she heard him step into the water. She found two choice sticks, one with a divot, and using the random foraging he brought her, began to rub the wood together. Her fingers shook but she could already smell the cooked fillet. It’s either that or gnawing on Quist’s neck... or something else. She squeezed her thighs together, refusing to look at the alien splashing around in the water behind her.

“Eat it.”

A spark came forth and she almost squealed with laughter. A phena fell on the ground beside her, flapping chaotically on the moss. She reached for her switchblade but her hands closed over nothing. Her lips quirked, wondering how she was going to sacrifice the creature for food.

When she turned her attention to Quist, he stared, eyes wide in wonder at the small fire simmering at her side. His mouth parted.

“Quist?”

He dropped to his knees in the dirt and the excess water shook off him, hitting her face.

“How’d you do that?” he asked in wonder.

Her stomach grumbled. “I rubbed the sticks together...”

“And it created the blaze?”

“Is that so strange? Did you never discover fire? Cause, like, humans discovered it an eternity ago. Do you know what a wheel is?”

“I know what it is. Are you a blazing valos, Yahiro?”

She sighed, annoyed. “I’m a human. I said this several times. I came from the sky.” She pointed her finger back up.

Her vision grew hazy as she returned her attention to the suffocating phena-fish. She saw food but she felt a barrier erect itself between her and what she needed. Her energy waned rapidly and it took more willpower than she thought she had left to ask Quist for a blade.

When he handed her another feather, she didn’t ask, only took hold of it carefully and positioned its threads against the creature’s neck. With barely a thrust, its head came clear off. Yahiro, with shaking limbs and a one-track mind, gutted and skinned the beast before spitting it over the weak fire. After washing her hands, she lay down on her side to wait.

The alien continued to watch the phena cook. She wondered if her customs disgusted him when a hand with long, strong fingers threaded through her hair. She found comfort in the petting.

Her hand was too heavy to lift before long, and hunger clawed at her belly.

“What do you need?” he asked softly, bending over her suddenly, his voice hoarse against her ear. Shivers struck down her limp body. Even starvation hadn’t ebbed her arousal.

“You,” she murmured sleepily. “Food. You.”

“You have me.”

Her eyes closed and she gave in.

When she next opened them, the sky was completely overcast and the pings of raindrops filled her ears. Giant wings covered her from the rain and Quist held the semi-cooked fillet to her mouth.

She took it in her hands and ate like nobody was watching. Especially the alien who saved her life. When the meat was gone, she slurped on the bones, never having tasted something so delicious. That was until her stomach decided to fight her and punched her in the gut. A wave of nausea knocked her back on the ground and she curled into herself.

“Tell me what you need, human. I promised you your life!” Quist cursed somewhere behind her and she moaned in answer, refusing to let her body win.

“Just... a stomach ache,” she gasped as another wave clutched her by the throat demanding release. Yahiro refused to let the food go to waste.

“Why does it ache? I see no flesh wounds.” She felt his fingers on her foot, checking her feathered bandage.

She laughed softly. “Eating too fast made it hurt. I don’t remember the last time I ate meat.” Already the cramps were subsiding.

“Does this always happen when you do?”

“No. Thank god.”

“Hmm.”

She sat up slowly, feeling twice her age, her stomach bloated but no longer clawing at her. She looked at her alien. His hair fell like silken snakes over his broad shoulders. She wanted to touch it but held back. Yahiro had to remind herself she knew very little about his culture.

“How do you eat?” she asked, diverting her thoughts.

“Not like you, human. We absorb. Our sustenance comes from the light of the sun.” He eyed her. “It’s less messy.”

“Hah. What about when there’s no sunlight like right now? And at night? Do you just go hungry? Do you feel pain too?”

Quist absently twirled one of his lip piercings. “We go without but will indulge in second-light from fire if the need comes upon us. The darkness saps our energy, the shadows slime our skin, but pain? No. I haven’t felt pain since I was born... until you.”

Yahiro looked away and watched the phena swim in circles under the water. She was envious. Pain was part of her daily life, so much so that she could tolerate high levels of it without much effort. Though she knew the difference between real pain and that of a gashed foot.

When her... family didn’t come to her trial to support her after she had escaped, that was pain. The day her body crawled out of the drug den had been painful, knowing her life would never be the same and that every lurch forward would never get her farther away. That nightmare had slithered up onto her back and bowed her down. It whispered horrible mantras into her ear and when she looked over her shoulder at it, it grinned down at her with sharp, syringe teeth.

She could never stop herself from looking back, having become addicted to it in a self-harming sort of way. A stomach ache, tired muscles, and a swollen foot were nothing compared to what lurked behind her.

“I don’t like the dark either.”

“Are you sure you’re not of Lusheenn?” He smirked down at her, teasing. She smiled back.

“No, I promise. I’m not. I can even prove it.”

The coy twitch of his lips deepened, and her eyes fixated on his lips. Quist looks almost human. Almost. Too dangerously beautiful though. He looked like a cosplay angel who led a lurid cult where each member had to alter their appearance with liquid gold, copper, and bronze until every inch of skin was branded by it. His features were too symmetrical, too perfect to be human, and she suspected that his piercings weren't piercings at all. There were rows over his face, star-points and barbells through his nipples, and now that it was day and he was no longer distorted by night, she saw a row of dots that started on each side of his neck and followed the outline of his body down to the armbraces, coming out on the other side to end at the tips of his middle fingers.

“How?” he asked.

The question startled her back to the present but his eyes were pursuing her body as she had his. Yahiro shivered, wondering what he thought of her. Dirty most likely. Dirty and gruesomely orange.

“The crash site will have the proof and the wreckage will have objects from my world intact. Technology not of this world, and even some charged electronics...” Yahiro had come to the conclusion Quist’s world held no modern day appliances. “Guns,” she said grimly. “And the men who caged me.”

“So your Creator’s temple?” he asked, leaning back. She huddled closer to stay within the shelter of his wings.

“Sure.”

“Good. We’ll find this place and make your Creator finish their job.”

“Job?”

“To teach and train you in the ways of Sonhadra.”

Yahiro rubbed her eyes and didn’t stop Quist when he pulled her into the shelter of his arms. His cock swelled and hardened beneath her. She leaned her head against his bare chest, letting the moment happen, too tired to stop it.

I don’t think I want to go back. I don’t want him to know how messed up I really am.

She liked the idea of a clean slate.