I backed away, my eyes clenched shut.
“Keep away from me! Keep away you freak!”
“Emma. Open your eyes.”
“Not on your life! Just let me go home!”
“Emma,” Vai said, and he placed his hands on my shoulders. “There’s no going home for you. Not until we shake my Shadow.”
There was a change in his voice.
It was deeper, stronger, a faint echo like multiple men speaking at the same time, unable to keep their voices in unison.
It was enough to arouse my morbid curiosity.
I opened my eyes.
And immediately wished I hadn’t.
There are milestones in every person’s development.
From the day we learned to converse with our parents, to learning the meaning of those hieroglyphic-like shapes we call letters and discovering the great wealth of information and knowledge at our fingertips now that we can read.
The discovery of the opposite sex and the interest and the irritation they could provide in equal measure.
The love for a newborn child clutched tightly in a parent’s arms…
And the discovery of alien species beyond this little blue marble of ours.
Vai had green skin.
It was firm and muscular, not dissimilar to a champion bodybuilder, but he carried it with a great deal more ease.
He was tall and had sprouted an extra foot in height.
Atop his head, a striking pair of twisted horns.
His eyes were the same golden glow of a cat, and his smile curled upward at the corner of his mouth and produced a dimple in his chin.
He was beautiful, majestic.
And a total fucking freak.
“Vai?” I said.
“I told you you needed to see the real me.”
“Then everything you told me was true?”
“Every word.”
I was more afraid now than I had been the entire night.
If it was all true and he hadn’t lost his mind…
I shook my head, refusing to accept my new reality.
“I can’t do this… I have a life… I can’t…”
My head struck something hard.
I rubbed at the lump forming beneath my fingertips and turned around to find…
Nothing at all.
“Computer, deactivate cloak,” Vai said.
The air shimmered, waving like someone had thrown a pebble into a lake, morphing and twisting in on themselves, inverting to reveal a spaceship.
“She’s going to be our ride for the next few hours,” Vai said, placing a hand on the ship’s hull. “What do you think?”
That was it.
I’d reached my limit of incredulity.
My eyes rolled in my head and I passed out.
Vai
Well, that could have gone better.
Emma saw what I looked like and immediately dropped like a rock.
In school, they always told us finding your fated mate was an awe-inspiring and miraculous event.
They never said it was something that gave your intended nightmares.
And they certainly never said you would find your partner lying in bed straddling your Shadow who would wear a shit-eating grin on his face as he prepared to spear your fated mate and tear her from you for all time.
They never shared that particular lesson in school.
Or maybe I just missed that one.
I scooped Emma up off the ground and carried her toward my ship.
The underside eased down forming a ramp.
“Might I say, sir,” Computer said. “You certainly have a way with the ladies—”
“Mute,” I said.
The outside of the ship was misleading.
On the outside, it looked small and cramped but since we discovered the ability to warp space to suit our benefit, we could turn any space into one as big or small as we wished.
The universe had an almost infinite amount of space tucked away in little pockets that no one knew were there.
Space was not only bigger than anyone supposed, it was bigger than anyone could suppose.
“Prepare for takeoff,” I said.
Computer didn’t respond.
“Computer?”
When he didn’t respond again, I realized what the problem was.
I rolled my eyes.
“Unmute. Computer? Are you there?”
“Oh, so you want to speak with me now?” he said prissily.
Personality in a computer system was a sign of malfunction, of bugs that needed addressing or else the entire system might fail.
“Can you take off, please?” I said politely. “We need to head to the fallback position.”
Even Computer was taken aback by that piece of news.
It snapped him out of his childish hissy fit.
“Are you sure that’s wise, sir?” he said. “Now you have the girl, your Shadow will follow for certain.”
“Yes. And that’s why we set the fallback position up in the first place.”
“Very well. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Activating systems now.”
I felt the steady and powerful hum of the engines as they came online.
The landing struts pulled up and clicked into place.
The ship turned in midair and began to rise.
The cloaking system initiated.
We would flicker and disappear to anyone who could see us.
I entered one of the guest quarters and placed Emma on the bed.
I sat on the edge of the bed and ran a finger along her chin.
She really was beautiful.
The thought of what Iav might have done to her if I hadn’t entered her room right when I had…
There was no “might” about it.
She would belong to him and that pulsing orb in my chest would no longer be alive.
It would be doused for good and there would be no reviving it.
The fact the human species had never come in contact with another alien species created a series of issues I hadn’t considered.
We would have to work through them when she woke up.
Until then, I needed to prepare her environment so it was less of a shock.
“Computer,” I said, “redecorate these quarters with aspects of Emma’s room back on Earth.”
“Analyzing,” Computer said, for once not giving me any sass.
A beam of light shot out from either end of the room, scanning and reforming it, morphing it into a replica of her room.
Emma grumbled and blinked her eyes.
She opened them and saw me sitting beside her.
I wore my warmest smile but it didn’t help much as she shot up and scuttled across the bed, kicking at the blankets and backing up against the wall.
Her eyes were wide as she peered at the room without really taking it in.
“You!” she said angrily. “I thought you were just a nightmare!”
“Afraid
