Page 61 of Resisting the Alien Rider

This was not a question. It was a statement.

It struck me like a whip. Like my father’s belt on my back.

“How could you possibly know that?”

“Because I came upon you at the lake and you did not even stir for staring at her!” he exclaimed. “Because you held her – just as you hold her now – as if she means more to you than your own life! Because when you told me about the ardu bite, you did not look and sound like you were giving me bad news about my own bride. You sounded like you were telling me your entire world had ended!”

“He does love her!” Killian sprang up from his crouch in the corner, clawing spit-dampened hair away from his mouth. “He was an idiot and said no to the bride program. But then he met her and he loves her now. And she loves us, too! At least, she loves me,” he said stubbornly. “She told me that I could have her shit in a bottle.”

“Shipin a bottle, Killian,” I groaned.

“Oh.” He looked slightly less enthusiastic now, but rallied admirably. He leaped out of his spot, putting himself between my chair and Oaken.

“If you try to take her from us,” Killian said, his eyes massive and murderous white, “I will kill you. And no one but Garrek will ever know because they’ll never find your body.”

“It’s a little scary how much I actually believe that,” Oaken said, regarding Killian warily. Then he looked over Killian’s head to me once more. “Let’s get her somewhere comfortable,” he said. “It sounds like we have a lot to talk about.”

Oaken’s mountaincabin was not large. There was only one room with a bed in it.

His.

This is where I carefully laid Magnolia down. As I did so, I thought that her complexion looked a little better, and that her breathing was not quite so rapid as before, but I could not be sure.

Oaken and I dragged our chairs into the bedroom so that we could watch her for any changes as we spoke. Killian, who had begun anxiously climbing the walls as if they were the bars of a cage, was given the task of retrieving the shuldu and leading the bracku into one of Oaken’s empty pastures. At first, he did not want to go. But when I told him how much Magnolia would appreciate it if he brought her bag back for her, he was off without further complaint.

“So,” Oaken said from his seat beside me. “Start at the beginning.”

I’d said that to Magnolia once. When she’d been trying to tell me her story. Her laugh came back to me as real as the woman in the bed before me now.What, then? The day I was born?

“I tried not to love her.” I did not know what else to say, where else to start. “It didn’t work.”

Oaken absorbed this in thoughtful silence. Then, hesitantly, like the words might make him bleed if he said them too quickly, “And does she love you?”

“Yes.” There was no point in lying. In delaying the inevitable. “Don’t ask me why,” I added, and to my surprise, Oaken laughed. It was not a fully happy laugh. There was an edge of sadness to it. But it was real.

“She told me she loved me right before she was bitten. She’d resolved to break off the engagement to you. She wanted to apologize to you.”

Oaken shifted, grimacing when his right boot bumped the bedframe.

“I’m glad you are not dead,” I said suddenly. I’d been so focused on Magnolia, on loving her, and then thinking I was losing her, that I had not had the chance to tell him. “The warden did not know if you were still alive. I’m happy that you are.”

A cynical sort of amusement glinted in Oaken’s eyes. “Really? You did not hope I was dead so that you would not have to give her up?”

“I never wished for your death.” Then, a pause. “That was Killian.”

Oaken laughed again, a hearty sound that boomed through the room.

Magnolia stirred. Oaken and I both froze.

“Did she just…”

“Move?” I asked breathlessly. “I think so.”

Her lips parted. Her strange and beautiful eyelashes fluttered.

I did not even realize I’d left my chair until my knees hit the wood boards of the floor beside the bed. My hand went to her face, caressing. She felt warm. Not too hot.

She did not open her eyes. But she did say something. Something so quiet that no one but a Zabrian with excellent hearing would catch it.

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