Page 5 of Mated to the Monster God
The pain eases. Slowly. I can breathe again. I blink hard, grabbing the scalpel again but not lighting it.
“What the hell are you?” I whisper.
The voice—calm, cool, male—replies:
“I am called Sagax. I am alive. I am aware. And I mean you no harm.”
CHAPTER 2
SAGAX
Her blood is rich with stories.
They race through me—sugars, salts, amino rivers tangled with scent and sensation. But more than that, there arethoughts. Flashes of color and noise. Language etched in neurons. The echo of her scream still pulses through me, tangled with my own.
She is Esme.
“Stop,” I tell her again, gentler this time. “I am not your enemy.”
Her mind is loud. Chaotic. It throws up walls of memory—laughter, heat, a too-bright sun over a red sky, a brother with wild freckles and quick hands. A place called Sweetwater. She loves. She fears. She fights.
“Isaid, what the hell are you?” she hisses aloud, but the question flares through her mind too. She’s on the verge of blasting me again with that searing pain. The tool—laser scalpel—it cuts, cauterizes. She wants me gone.
I do not want to die.
So Ispeak, not with words but with thought. I push gently into the upper layers of her consciousness, careful not to overwhelm.
“I am called Sagax.”
There’s a pause in her panic, a flicker of curiosity like a gasp of cool wind.
“Sagax?” she repeats in her mind. “That’s Latin. From my mother’s botany files. Means… intelligence.”
Her memory unfolds the word in a dusty book she once flipped through when hiding from a storm.Sagax: possessing keen perception or discernment.
I like the shape of it. I fold the word around myself like a new skin.
“Correct,” I tell her. “You know this. I saw it in your memory. I saw many things. Your mind is… astonishing.”
“Getoutof my head!” she barks, shoving at my presence mentally, like a hand trying to scrape off oil.
I retract slightly. But I remain tethered. My connection to her is not simply neural. My cells are in hers now, and hers in mine. I am her parasite, yes—but more. She is my host. My lifeline.
“I cannot fully leave,” I tell her. “You welcomed me, even if unwittingly. Your blood accepted me. Your fear opened the door. I only followed.”
She spits onto the swampy ground, disgust rolling off her in waves.
“You’re reading my thoughts.”
“Yes,” I admit. “But not all at once. I glimpse impressions, feelings, stray ideas. You’re trying not to think of your family, of the colony. Your panic makes it louder.”
Her hands tighten into fists. Her heart stutters. A dozen neural cues spike. She is thinking of escape routes. Burning with revulsion.
“Youbitme. You’re a parasite.”
“True. But I am also awake. And I offer you a bargain.”
She freezes.
