And now it turned out she wasn’t all right at all, he thought, looking down at the puny human male who had apparently just given up both girls without a fight or even, as far as Vorn could tell, a harsh word for the Varians who had swooped in and stolen them.
“You mean they’re gone?” he demanded again. “What exactly happened?”
James lifted his chin and gave Vorn a disdainful look.
“How many times must I repeat myself? These alien creatures who looked like mutated crocodiles broke into the apartment—doing considerable monetary damage to the kitchen window, I might add—and took both Jodi and Melinda away with them. End of story.”
“And you just let them?” Vorn looked him up and down. “Look at you—not a scratch on you! Did you even fight for them at all?”
“Most certainly not. Those brutes were armed.” James made a face. “I make it a point never to get involved in any kind of violent altercation.”
“So you just stood by and let them go?” Liosh seemed almost to be unable to comprehend this. “I don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “How could you not at least try to save the female you love and her kin? Have you no sense of honor at all?”
James flushed, apparently more shamed by Liosh’s honest confusion than Vorn’s wrath.
“I might have had more of an inclination to try and do something if the woman I thought I loved hadn’t admitted she’d been cheating on me all week with your extremely hirsute friend, there,” he snapped.
“Look, buddy, just because you’re going bald and you look like a hairless cat when you’re naked—yeah, Jodi told me that—doesn’t mean you get to call me hairy,” Vorn snarled. “According to her, I have just the right amount of hair, unlike you, you hairless little asshole.”
“Vorn, we’re getting off the point.” Liosh grabbed his arm earnestly. “Where did they take our females?” he asked James, who was still simmering—though if he was angrier at the fact that Vorn had called him a “hairless cat” or mad because Vorn actually knew the meaning of the word “hirsute” was anyone’s guess.
“I don’t know where they took the girls,” James said sulkily. “I only know that they said they wanted ‘vengeance’. And when Melli told them that the artifact they were looking for wasn’t available, they said they knew it and that Jodi and Melli would have to pay the price.”
“Pay the price? Goddess!” Liosh groaned. “This is terrible! They must be taking them to the Varian home world.” He looked at Vorn, who nodded grimly.
“Wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Then we have to go—now! And we have to call Commander Sylvan and ask for backup.”
“Backup against a whole planet?” Vorn said flatly. “Do you know how big and populous the Varian home world is? They outnumber the Kindred of the Mother Ship fifty to one.”
“What are you saying?” Liosh gripped his arm harder, his eyes narrowing. “That there’s no hope? No way we can save our females?”
“No, Brother.” Vorn looked him in the eye steadily. “There’s always hope. Come on—let’s go.”
Forty
“What is this stuff they gave us to eat?”
Jodi poked with her strange, two-tined eating utensil at the mass of long, slimy, white cylindrical things that looked a little like really thick noodles in the center of her plate.
Melli brought her face close to her own plate and took a deep sniff.
“Smells a little like Pad Thai,” she said hopefully. “Maybe we should taste one and try it.”
“Pad Thai doesn’t try to crawl off your plate,” Jodi pointed out grimly. “I think these are some kind of worms—there’s no way any of that is going in my mouth.”
“They are yerger slugs and you may count yourself lucky to eat them,” a voice from behind them said.
Jodi whirled around to look at the invisible barrier that separated them from the outside world. If this strange planet could be called a world, that was.
Standing on the other side of their prison cell was a female Varian. At least Jodi thought she was female.
She was different from the male Varians they’d seen because of the large, colorful ruff that surrounded her elongated alligator face. The ruff stood out around her head and changed colors slowly, sliding from vivid crimson to brilliant orange to lemon yellow and then back again to crimson. She was also dressed differently—her long, scaly feet were exposed but her tail had been carefully wrapped in a wide band of cloth and tied at the end with a strangely jaunty sky-blue ribbon, so that only its shape was visible.
Jodi wondered if maybe the tail was considered an erogenous zone somehow, and so had to be covered in females. The same way it was acceptable for males to go topless most places on Earth but not for females to do so.
“Excuse me?” she asked, approaching the barrier, but making sure to stay well back from its faint shimmer of the energy field that kept them imprisoned. She and Melli both had gotten nasty shocks trying to get out earlier, and she wasn’t about to subject herself to that agonizing pain again for no reason.