Page 26 of Alien God

Except for the one currently in the chamber directly above my head.

“You may leave me now. You are dismissed for the night,” I told the father and son. They closed and opened their fists (Ashken doing the gesture with only one hand, his other fist clutching his cane) before quietly leaving the room. As they padded down the stairs together, Ashken’s laugh, choked with emotion, echoed.

“It is just as I always told you and your sister it would be, my boy! Lord Wylfrael has returned! Snows of Sionnach, am I ever glad I lived to see this day...”

I didn’t share Ashken’s joy over this day. In fact, it had been a singularly trying one among all the uncounted days of my immortal existence. First, the fight with Skalla that had left me so weakened. Then, coming home to find the humans here. Surrounding all of that, there was the swirling dread of this new star-darkness spreading and the strange, unyielding silence from the Council of the Gods.

Remembering Maerwynne’s disturbingly starless fist, I checked over my own body once more for signs of the same. But all I found were stars just where they should be and wounds to be cleaned and bandaged.

I’d just bandaged them all – all the ones deep enough that required it, anyway – when a soft call from beyond the doorway caught my ears.

“Lord Wylfrael?”

Aiko was in the open doorway, wringing her hands. Her tail was a bushy orange puff of anxiety, her small upturned nose twitching nervously.

“What is it?” I asked, meeting her at the door.

“It’s the woman. The prisoner,” she corrected herself, clearly still not used to the idea. “She will not eat. She will not come down to see you, either. And... Forgive me my lord, but I do not think it is because she does not understand my words.”

“Of course, it isn’t,” I snapped. The human was choosing to be difficult, I could already tell. What an irritating species.

Aiko’s hands tightened against each other, her ears flattening.

“I am sorry, my lord!”

“Don’t apologize. Not your fault,” I muttered as I began taking the stairs upwards two at a time. Aiko, and likely Ashken and Shoshen, were too gentle to even think of forcing the human to do anything, let alone dragging her down the stairs to meet me.

But I was not.

I burst into the room. The human woman was seated in a chair that was too large for her, glaring at a bowl of Sionnachan stew as if the meal had killed everyone she’d ever loved.

At the sound of my footsteps, she flinched and turned to me.

We stared at each other for a long moment in the low, fire-warmed light.

She looked different from before. She’d shed her outer layers of clothing, revealing a frame that was even smaller than I’d thought, no longer puffed up with odd white fabric. She had hair, too – a revelation. I’d had no idea all of that was under there, trapped under the tight hood she’d worn. It spilled over her bony shoulders and down her back in rich undulations of brown that gleamed reddish-gold wherever the firelight hit it.

Her eyes, however, were the same as before. Snow and honey. Fear, defiance, and accusation, all bound up together under the shadows of curling lashes.

“Aiko tells me you won’t eat.”

She merely looked at me, muted by her lack of understanding. Or by sheer stubbornness.

This day needs to end.

Why, why would she not eat? Did her kind not eat after all? She had a mouth, and teeth, and a throat. I thought of her mad dash into the shelter-less snow of the forest and grimly wondered if she meant to die of starvation rather than stay here with me.

Before I was aware of it, my feet were moving. She scrambled away in her high-backed chair. Too late, she tried to get down, but I was already there, standing between her and the table, blocking her. Her feet bumped my shins, and I noticed that her feet looked different now, too. Clearly, she’d been wearing boots before. Now they appeared to be bare, tiny toes curling inward, retreating at the inadvertent contact with my legs.

“Eat,” I snapped. I grabbed up the spoon from the bowl with one hand, my other gripping the arm of the chair as I leaned over her. Her honeyed gaze darted back and forth from the spoon to my face.

“I did not bring you here to let you starve,” I said, bringing the spoon closer to her lips.

She rolled her lips inward in protest, her mouth thinning into a white line. The infuriating creature would not do it. Something like panic gripped me. I hardened it. Turned it to anger.

“I’ll force this down your throat if I have to.”

I would do it, too. I’d already decided that I would not kill her, and the idea that I’d let a prisoner die on my watch was unacceptable to me. I released the arm of the chair, threading my fingers through her soft, shiny hair. I made a fist and tightened it until her head lurched back, her small mouth opening with a soft cry of affronted surprise.

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