I woke up screaming,rabid Vepar had chased me through my dreams, not stopping until I was standing in front of the corpses of my lovers.
“Ella,” Thane said frantically, shaking me. “Are you alright?”
My piglet was squealing in a panic on my other side.
"It's just stuck in my head. The attack, your bodies lying on the ground," I said with hiccupping breaths. "I don’t think I'm ever going to get those images out of my mind," I said, as tears started to streak down my face.
Thane lovingly caressed my cheek, his eyes speaking a multitude of words that his lips never would say. "Then I guess we'll need to make it our mission to build a life full of memories good enough to replace yesterday," he said tenderly.
I smiled at him through the tears. "I would like that."
"You need to sleep for a couple more hours," he said to me as he pulled me back into his arms. With Thane’s warm body sheltering me from behind and my piglet’s warm body in front of me, I drifted into a surprisingly dreamless sleep.
When I first woke up the next morning, my mind was blissfully clear. It took me a minute before the previous day's events floated over me. Thane’s presence behind me was gone, and I knew he had probably been up for several hours as the Vepar didn’t need to sleep nearly as long as humans.
Despite the fact that I had to have slept for at least twelve hours, my body felt sluggish and tired.
Thane Junior nuzzled my face as I laid there. "I guess I better get up," I told him as he snorted excitedly. I was not looking forward to the hard conversations that we had to have today.
After getting dressed in a simple purple sheath dress, I walked out of the room. I found the guys gathered around a table, pouring over tablets and other documents. "Is everything okay?" I asked, my voice rising a bit frantically at the thought that they were already having to plan evasive maneuvers to escape from the Council or the Vepar zombie hordes.
Derrial got up and walked over to me, "Everything's fine, pet," he reassured me, brushing a kiss firmly across my lips. I took a moment to lean into his chest, soaking up his warmth. He was here. They were all here. Everything was alright.
Corran came over with my favorite smoothie from his kitchen machine. I took a moment to savor the coconut-chocolate taste before I moved over to the table to sit down with everyone. They were all looking at me with concern and a little trepidation, I’m sure wondering how the conversation was going to go.
“Why don’t we start from the beginning,” I said softly, looking at all three of them while I spoke. “Explain what you did know, and what you didn’t know...and maybe that will help me to understand.” I took a deep breath. “Whatever you say though, it won’t change the fact that I’m irrevocably, forever in love with all of you. I just want the truth.”
My words seemed to soothe them because they settled back into their chairs. Or at least Corran and Thane did. Derrial scooped me up and sat me down in his lap. “I need to have you in my arms for this conversation,” he explained as he ran his hands nervously up and down my arms.
I settled back into his arms, and I waited.
“We told you the truth that we were originally sent to Earth to look for humans that would be compatible with the Vepar genes enough to carry a Vepar child. But we never told you that we had a whole team there,” began Corran. “And one of those team members was a member of the Council, Edipe. He’s dead now apparently, killed by another member of the Council quite a while ago over some kind of dispute. But he was a piece of work. He struck up a relationship with a human woman almost as soon as we got there. The first of our kind to do so. When he wanted to go back to Veon not long after, we didn’t think much of it. It only became an issue when he wanted to bring his human with him. But he was on the Council, so no one argued even though we had tested the girl and she was not compatible in the least bit for our fertility efforts.”
It was shocking to me that a member of the Council had been the first to form a relationship with a human woman. But maybe it shouldn't have been shocking considering all that we had found out about them having certain secret proclivities for human women all this time.
Corran continued. "We didn't think much of it when we didn't hear anything about the human woman causing a stir among her people, we were busy with our mission on Earth. But when the Council issued orders that we were to send one human female back to them once a year, we got a bit suspicious as we knew they weren't related to the fertility experiments..." Corran grimaced and stopped speaking.
Thane continued for him as it was evident Corran had trouble with the next part of the story. I braced myself for what I was going to hear next. Derrial’s arms were like a vice around me as if he was afraid that I was going to bolt at any minute.
“We were busy searching for someone like you, and we didn't want to be bothered with the Council trying to make things difficult for us. So we had members of our team periodically send women to the Council.”
I opened my mouth to respond to that, but Thane hurried on before I could speak. "In our defense, the women were all obsessed with everything Vepar. They had already started to participate in the clubs on Earth that facilitated sexual relationships between the Vepar and humans, and they were eager to get to Veon. None of us knew what the Council was doing with them. And honestly, we didn't ask," Thane said in a shamed voice.
There was silence for a moment as I thought about what he had just said. It made it a little bit better that the women wanted to go. But I'm sure if they knew they were going to be forced into sexual slavery for the alien Council, they probably wouldn't have volunteered.
"Continue," I said, not trusting myself to say anything soothing at the moment.
“The Council wasn’t satisfied with just one woman a year after a while though. They sent another team to Earth to start bringing them back at a more frequent rate. We were told they were performing other studies on humans and Earth for use in further population of the planet. And again...we didn’t look any further into it.”
“That all explains a lot, but it doesn’t explain about my parents,” I said in a terse angry voice. I was obviously a bad person because I could get over the women...but my parents’ imprisonment was another story.
“We didn’t bring your parents to Veon,” said Derrial, squeezing me even tighter. I flinched at how tightly he was holding me, and he immediately loosened up.
“Then who did?” I asked, feeling an immediate rush of relief that they weren’t directly responsible.
“Your mother was originally chosen to be taken by the Council’s other team. Your father fought so hard when they came to get her that they brought him with them, thinking that they would let the Khonsu take care of him since there was a mandate in place against the Vepar killing humans at the time.”
I snorted. “They were alright with taking humans as sex slaves but they drew the line at killing?”