Maybe the flight took longer than she anticipated and she did not feel comfortable making the return flight until morning. We packed provisions in case of such of a possibility.
There is no reason to be overly fretful about it. No reason to think the worst.
Yes, it is true that scenarios in which Giselle arrived at the craft and discovered a way to use the plasma console’s communication relay to make contact with her friends does continue running through my head… I gave her no such instructions, but she is cunning…
Perhaps cunning enough to have fooled me this entire time. Did I myself not state how foolish it would be to send a captive to the very shuttle where she would have every opportunity to escape and trust that she would return to me?
And yet I was blinded by a few generous tumbles in bed, losing myself in her luscious body. It is the oldest trick Draci women have used for millennia—to seduce fools into doing their bidding.
By mid-morning, when there is still no sight of my mate—I think the word with bitterness—I know I have been cuckolded. She slept with me, willing even to become implanted with my kit, all so she could escape. Likely also so she could go save her friends and warn them against me.
And I thought the females of my planet were cold.
None can match the iciness of a seductress so cold she could twist even the innermost thoughts she shared with me, focusing only on the pleasure she sought to wring from me in order to mask her true motives.
While we fucked, yes, she focused on the pleasure of fucking, but it was never more than that for her. She was able to do what she needed to get her task done. Oh, it is ironic, for she is exactly the sort of scheming female my own mother would have approved of, though Mother hated the humans, of course.
There is nothing more but to take the salvages of what are left of my pride and continue forward. I told her this was my path and I will return to it.
Anger at her betrayal ought to fire me with fury anew, but as I pack my own satchel and head out across the desert toward the ridge so far in the distance I cannot see it even with my superior sight, I feel only exhaustion at this endless existence.
To have glimpsed a perfect life and… and what I thought to be love, only for it to disappear like a mirage in this desert that surrounds me on all sides… It is another blow in a life full of betrayals.
I continue, one foot in front of the other on the long trek across the desert because I must. Because there is no other choice. But now I know that life truly is only an unending series of brutal events and pain after pain. I will be better prepared for its onslaughts in the future and seek what power and empty pleasures I can to numb away the eternal throbbing ache of existence.
Twenty
GISELLE
I am so screwed. I’m in a cage on an alien spaceship. In space.
I tried to make a run for it around the large alien back when I was—you know, on planet Earth, but I barely got as far as the door to the shuttle before the giant alien was yanking me backward by my wings.
That hurt like a sonofabitch, lemme tell you. I managed to throw my satchel with the device in it out the door before being yanked backward, which was good because the next thing I knew, the she-bitch behind me was shoving something against my neck and I passed out.
When I woke up, I was here.
I pull my knees to my chest and look through the flaking bars of my cage. I’m in a large room that looks like the interior of the shuttle did. Rippling metal walls that once might have shone a brilliant silver but now are a dull, flaking gray enclose the space. Plasma consoles are lit up throughout the room and large Draci of different hues manage different stations here and there.
No one speaks to me and other than the casual glance and occasional laughter pointed my direction, I’m ignored.
A large door panel slides to the side as the one who kidnapped me walks in and my fists clench. I should be scared more than angry right now, but I can’t help it. Just when everything was starting to go right for once in my life, she swooped in and did what bullies always do. She thought her agenda was so much more important—no matter the damage it did to others—to an entire world, even.
“Oh good. It’s awake,” she says as she comes closer.
She crouches down to look at me in my cage. “Hope it’s cozy in there. We were going to fashion kennels for your kind but then discovered you already have buildings full of cages locking yourselves up on your planet. Strange species. We’ll use those to begin with and build more, as many as it takes until your kind learn who their true masters are.”