Ruler's Concubine (4 page)

Lysett considered the implication and decided. “Every effort is to be made to encourage the fertile females to come to Meridia. Every effort, Bast. We’ll sort out the ethical issues later but won’t waste any more time. We are fighting an invisible enemy at this point, and must take every advantage.”

“I thought you might say that, Master. I advised Liaison Ashtun already, and he ordered his troops to land on Earth some time ago. We should have reports in shortly.”

Bast had never overstepped before, not in all their years together as Master and first servant. He anticipated but hadn’t superseded his Ruler’s authority. Lysett bit back his immediate reaction to dress down the other male for his temerity, then accepted how the urgency of their situation transcended the chain of command. This wasn’t only about him and his House, although no one wanted civil war—he hoped. This was about countless other males who wanted a concubine for procreation and therefore the perpetuation of their species.

The remaining Meridian females would no doubt feel both relieved and unimportant, but Lysett already had some thoughts on that subject. One thing at a time. All the same, he added another order, spelling it out carefully. His first servant blinked, then accepted it without comment, his clever brain obviously processing and drawing conclusions.
 

Chapter Two

The Searchers didn’t show at Johann and Laurel’s place, although Celeste supposed they could have come and gone, or even held a meeting in the very room she had slept in, without her knowing. The stress and tension, her heavy thoughts, as well as the cold, exhausting trek to her neighbors had taken its toll, and she’d been oblivious until Laurel woke her late morning.

“Johann went to check your home, Celeste. There’s no one there.” Laurel looked hollow-eyed with anxiety.

“He shouldn’t have done that. What reason could he have given? What if they had hurt him?”

Her friend couldn’t meet her eyes, and set a cup of the erstwhile coffee on the rickety table, paying an inordinate amount of attention to her action.

“Laurel, what happened? What’s wrong? Is Johann all right?” All of her questions tumbled out, fraught with fear and worry, but she thought she already knew, and resigned herself to hear the answer.

“He’s fine.” Laurel absently rubbed the ears of the dog, who’d crept in to lean against the other woman’s legs. Finally, she looked Celeste in the face. “There’s nothing left of your place, honey. They burned it. It’s pretty clear they don’t want you to have any place to hide out.”

For a long moment, Celeste held still against the news before taking note of her crumbling innards, and the sickening feeling of despair. “God.”

“You’ll have to stay with us.” Laurel moved away briskly, perhaps recognizing that Celeste required a little space and time to put herself back together.

All she had were the clothes on her back and a small trinket of her mother’s she always carried in her pocket. The chain of the locket was broken beyond repair, but the filigreed silver heart held her family’s painted visages and was always on her person. There wasn’t much of worth in her home, but it had provided shelter, and the land, sustenance. It was quite the final blow, insofar as strikes against her went, and she didn’t know if she could weather it. But what choice did she have?

“I can’t stay here, Laurel. Johann will protest, and he’s right to think I’ll bring trouble down on you. I’ll have to go into the town.”

“But that’s probably what the Searchers want.”

Laurel was likely correct, but maybe Celeste could mingle and fit in, and find out why women were being targeted. Hopefully, there was safety in numbers and they might think she’d already gone in for that processing if she learned more of how to behave. She might be able to circumvent whatever was going on and stay out of it. She could act like the Brownlee girl.

“I’ll take my chances.”

“But what about Dupuis?”

Well, crap. She didn’t want to consider him in the mix. “I won’t have anything to do with him.”

“He’ll see it differently, Celeste. He treats all women under thirty like they’re his personal toys.”

And gets away with it because he’s handsome, well built, still has all his teeth, and washes frequently. Plus he makes a living and can feed himself.
Celeste smothered an inappropriate laugh and realized she was over her teenage infatuation with the man. It had been a stroke of luck to see him with that redhead back of the store, the woman on her knees before him while he had oral congress with her. The graphic tableau had shattered her young, inexperienced dreams and hurt her pride, causing her to eschew the town ever since.

“I won’t fall for his sweet talk,” she said, determination lacing her tone.

Laurel looked at her assessingly. “You’re over him.”

Celeste belatedly wished she hadn’t confided anything about Roy to her neighbor, even the little she had, but Laurel had been the only woman she felt she could talk to, and being lonely was a true hardship. “I think I’ve been over him for a while. I learned a good lesson anyhow.”
Not to fall for the superficial.

“Well, that’s a good thing. Hanging onto a lost love isn’t healthy.”

Snorting, Celeste said, “Well, it’s not like I’m spoiled for choice, Laurel. How many available men are there anyhow?” And she wasn’t inclined to fall in love—or even consider it—when she recalled how devastated her mother was when her father died. In fact, her parent had followed soon afterward, having no interest in carrying on. If that was what love did to a person…

“Good men are few and far between,” the other woman agreed, “though the strong and clever have survived. It’s still hard to believe that the population took such a hit because of the plague and then the wars in reaction to the aliens. I sometimes think it was meant to be. I mean, we’d overpopulated our world and consumed so much of its resources. Not to mention the pollution.”

Celeste didn’t want to get into a discussion about the olden days, and who knew what the stats were now, in truth? It
was
true that those still alive and functioning were made up of strong, determined stock to get this far, but at a terrible cost. Life still pretty much sucked, and she had a future to plan. Sipping at the coffee drink, she accepted another plate of potatoes and venison from Laurel, sharing a few bites with the hopeful dog, before making her way to the outside toilet.

The bucket beside the shack was rimmed with ice and she shuddered as she washed up, drying off with the clean rag her friend must have hung out for her that morning. Her brain churned, just as it had over breakfast, but came up with nothing other than heading into the town and looking for some kind of work. She could sew, after a fashion, she could cook and clean, numbers came easy to her, and she was a good gardener. She wasn’t above doing any kind of honest work. Maybe her prospects weren’t so dim.

Laurel was sorting through some clothing when she re-entered the house and held up an old denim jacket. “This should fit. And there’s a sweater, as well. I’ll find you some gloves, but it’s good you have your boots.”

Winter was coming, and Celeste was glad she’d stopped to shove her feet into her heavy footwear before scrambling out of the window—was it only the day before? “I appreciate it, Laurel.”

“If things don’t work out in town, you come back here. Johann will just have to accept it. I can’t see you struggling when you’ve been so good to us.”

Johann hadn’t been adverse to accepting produce from her when he and Laurel had first moved here, but he wasn’t as inclined to give back. He was a morose individual, but one who clearly cared for his wife. If Laurel
was
his wife. The chances were they’d met up in the refugee drive from one of the defunct cities, and connected. It didn’t matter. They were a loving couple in a time when there was little enough of that commodity. She quickly steered her thoughts away from her parents again. It scared her silly to think of loving—and being loved—like that and having it torn away. Definitely not for her.

“He’s protecting you, Laurel. I get that.”

“You’re so mature for your age, honey.”

“Not much choice. I’ve been on my own for a long time.”
And it would feel incredibly awesome to have somebody ease my burden and look out for me.
Like that would happen, and how perverse was she in her thinking anyhow? Only people who loved another did that.

Shrugging into the jacket, and tying the sweater around her waist, she accepted a small packet of food from Laurel. With an impulsive hug, she whispered her thanks in the other woman’s ear, before skirting the dog and heading out the door.

The fallen leaves crunched beneath her feet as she walked the deer path toward the rutted foot trail that signaled the approach to the town. She’d taken a quick detour, finding her way far more quickly in daylight, to see her house with her own eyes. Johann hadn’t lied. The place was nothing but an unwieldy pile of charcoal. There was nothing at all left to salvage unless she wanted to sift through the smoldering ruins, and she didn’t have the time. The loss made her heart clench, just another in a long string of them.

Her borrowed jacket was open over her shirt as the afternoon sun warmed the soil, and she should have been picking up the pace. Instead, her boots scuffed and dragged in the debris, while she willed herself to be optimistic. Surely there was a place for her in the town. She had to eat, and she required shelter, so despite the abject poverty of the area’s inhabitants, so hopefully there would be someone to offer her work. She resolutely didn’t think about the Searchers and the rumor and speculation around what might be in store for her, yet her survival instincts desperately pushed her to turn back and run pell-mell to Laurel and Johann’s. Except it would cause strife between the couple and in the end, Johann would see her gone. Returning there would only prolong the inevitable and bring trouble down on her friend’s head.

Squaring her shoulders, she traversed the last few yards and trod up the grade to the road, squinting ahead to see if she could sight the town of Belford. And stumbled to a dead halt, the dust around her boots eddying out in the sudden silence. Not that it was actually quiet. Her footsteps no longer sounded, but countless others seemed to reverberate in the distance, and there was no mistaking the muffled feminine protests and deeper, more masculine shouts. Her heart began to beat again, pounding in her temples as the blood surged throughout her veins, and she stole one, then two, cautious backward steps, trying to take in enough oxygen to make her lungs work.

In her shock and fear, she forgot about the steepness of the grade, and her left foot scrabbled for purchase, seemingly independent of the rest of her body before it turned under her weight. With a stifled cry, she toppled sideways and rolled down the slight hill, each and every stone and protruding root imprinting on her skin, wherever the fabric of her clothing was vulnerable. Her little packet of food skittered away in her peripheral line of vision, the ends of the tied-off cloth fluttering as if in farewell.

Coming to rest at the bottom, she lay, disheveled, and paralyzed with fright. Holy hell. She hadn’t seen a lot of them, and she’d been really young, but the memory of those vids of Meridian ships wasn’t something that faded with time. Spaceships were supposed to look like saucers, or maybe like the Earth rockets, and not such a graceful, yet menacing, mode of travel. And the figures surrounding the ship were obviously taller than most men on her planet, despite the distance from her present position and them. Her mind had cataloged the entire scene in that moment before her retreat and wrestled with the fact there were other humans amongst the aliens, struggling as they were escorted, or dragged, toward the spaceship. Female forms, primarily.

Celeste stared up at the autumn sky, such a bright blue, with wispy mare-tails of clouds, an impossibly clear view of normalcy, when one considered what was going on just down the road. Her heart continued to pound within the confines of her chest, although her breathing was more within the normal range, and she carefully moved all her extremities, wincing at the pain in her ankle. She eased to one side, pulling her knees up, then rolled onto all fours. Unwilling to risk standing on what might be a sprain, not to mention anyone—any alien—seeing her head pop up alongside the road, she began to crawl for the shelter of the trees. This was fast becoming an unfortunate turn of events, and she didn’t care for it at all.

She didn’t hear him coming, not over the crackling of leaves beneath her hands and knees, nor over the pounding in her temples, but surely someone of that size couldn’t have moved so quietly. One minute the line of trees beckoned, the next they were blocked by a pair of enormous black boots and heavily armored legs, a type of long weapon pointed down beside the right knee. Scrambling ignominiously sideways, she risked a shove to her feet, the abused ankle protesting mightily as she did so, but her attempt at flight was for naught. A big gloved hand caught her bicep and hauled her against a wide, solid chest, her face smacking into some kind of belt across his shoulder. She cried out as her ankle absorbed the additional pressure and her cheek met the unforgiving armor. The alien stilled.

“My apologies, female. Where are you injured?” It was a deep voice, speaking in halting English, and she could feel it resonating from his chest, his breath feathering across the top of her head.

She couldn’t respond, too busy trying to manage the loosening of her bladder. She wished she remembered how to pray.

“You must answer,” he insisted, and she detected a note of concern despite her fear, and remembered he’d apologized. This was so the
Twilight Zone
, those strange black and white movies recovered from the archives—back when there was technology.

“My ankle and … my cheek. Mostly.” Her response sounded breathless and rife with terror, but she was past pretending.

The alien set her slightly away from him while supporting her weight, and green eyes scrutinized her face. She cast her own gaze down, trying to breathe, and searched for more words.

“I’m fine. I’ll just get going.” She made herself look him in the eyes.
Never show fear in front of a predator.
Who had told her that? Or had she read it somewhere? Maybe it was one shouldn’t stare at them lest they interpret it as a challenge. Heaven help her.

“That is not the plan, female,” he said formally, with a deferential nod. How could he appear respectful when she was so obviously at his mercy? “I will carry you to the ship to spare your ankle. It and the slight abrasions on your skin can be treated immediately.”

“No, it’s okay. Really. I don’t live far from here and … and my mom will help me out…”