Page 5 of Into The Rift

Chapter Two

Waiting for morning to come can be kind of exciting when you have at least a reasonable expectation of being killed as soon as the aliens who kidnapped you finally showed up.

I glanced over at Rakkur, who was beside me, and unlike me, he had his eyes closed like he was falling asleep again. Come to think of it, that was probably a good thing, though I hoped it wasn’t because of that hit I saw him take to the head. The savage bastards who captured us and threw us in this cell inside their ship had been total assholes to us so far, so I didn’t have high hopes for humane treatment.

We still hadn’t seen or heard from their leader, though. At least I didn’t think so. I hadn’t had a chance to question anyone about it, because I’d just finished fighting one or two of them over the fact they had thrown a hunk of what looked like bread down on the filthy floor expecting us to grovel around and eat it. I’d buried my boot in the groin of the lead guard, and that put him in a less than talkative mood. He had jerked me up by my hair and thrown me across the full length of the cell in retaliation, in fact, which was taking me a moment or two to come back from.

I had heard Rakkur cry out, but by the time my vision finally cleared, my ears stopped ringing, and I’d wiped away most of the blood from a split lip, the guards had gone, slamming the door behind them. Rakkur was leaning over me, staring down with a worried look.

“Oh, thank the gods, I thought they’d kill you. You have to stop fighting them, Jago. It’s only making them worse.”

That was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, but I nodded to humor him. “Take your own advice then, please, Rakkur. You have to think of the child.”

“I know.” His eyes welled up with tears that I knew he hated. The hormones were making him so emotional now and he’d been complaining about it. Though I thought he had plenty of reason to be emotional at the moment.

“All right, look,” I said. “Don’t upset yourself. Try to rest until they get back. Maybe they’ll tell us what they want with us then.”

He’d leaned back against the wall beside me, but he’d sighed, and I knew he was worried sick.

“We already know what they want, don’t we? No one else was taken but us. They know who we are, and they’ve taken us as hostages.”

“Then they need to start treating us better. But let’s not borrow trouble. We’ll wait and see. In the meantime, try to sit over there and rest.”

He nodded and I went back to pacing up and down the length of the cell and worrying for both of us.

I knew for sure by now that these were no pirates. I was sure that they were Pton, who had been the aforementioned “big threat,” though personally, I had always thought they should be the ones quaking in their boots at the idea of facing the Axis and my formidable grandfather, King Davos, not to mention his son, the Bloody Prince.

Of course, none of this occurred to me then, as I was too busy staring at the Pton soldiers who had just walked back into the cell. I thought this might be it and they were there to kill us, so I pulled the knife I kept strapped to my ankle, the one they’d completely overlooked before throwing us in this cell. But before I could swing it at them, the tall alien in front of the others launched himself at me and grabbed my hair again, like it was a handle. He whipped it around his fist, yanked me to the floor, and put a knee on my chest to sneer down at me, gibbering at me in that incomprehensible language of his. During the various struggles with the guards, my hair had come unpinned, and it had been getting on my nerves, hanging across my face and sliding around my shoulders whenever I moved. And now this bastard was using it to control me.

But I still had my hand on the other knife I’d strapped to my thigh, so I whipped it out and buried it in his neck as he screamed in agony and slapped me hard across my face. Some vein or artery was spurting, so when his eyes rolled back in his head, I shoved his unresisting body off me and rolled to the side just in time to meet the fist of another guard who had come running in. This time, I got hit so hard, I was stunned by the blow. I waited for them to kill me, but no killing blow ever came.

Maybe Rakkur was right, and I should just stop fighting them. My omak said I had a penchant for violence, which he blamed on my father, Renard, and he probably wasn’t wrong. The General was well known for his temper, but so were all my uncles and cousins, not to mention both sets of grandparents. I think a bad temper was well represented on all sides.

It was freezing cold in this cell they’d thrown us into, just this side of bearable. Rakkur started shivering, and I thought it might be from nerves, though it could be his human sensitivities to the cold. At least we were still together. It would be nice to have some company on what could be the last moments of my life. The soldiers stood there glaring down at us, looking mean and antagonistic, and I took Rakkur’s hand in mine. I figured if this was it, then we had to try and die well.

They say your life flashes before you in such a time, and maybe it’s true. I did think of my parents and how they would feel when they heard the news.

Then the cell door suddenly clanged open with a bang and a man strode in and stood by the door sneering down at me. Two more guards crowded in behind him and all of them stared at us.

I tossed my hair back over my shoulder. “Gods, what is it now? Go ahead and shoot us if you’re going to or else leave us alone.”

“Shh,” Rakkur, who had scrambled up to his knees beside me, whispered fiercely, squeezing my hand. “Don’t. Stop taunting them.”

The new alien pulled off the kerchief from around his forehead and threw it to the one I’d stabbed in the neck, so he could staunch the blood, I guess. And I gasped. I couldn’t help it.

After all, I’d never seen a devil before in real life.

My omak, Anarr, practiced the Tygerian religion, though the General and I didn’t actually practice much of anything at all. In that religion, there was no such personage as the actual devil, though there were various demons. In my grandfather Blake’s religion, however, there definitely was a main devil called Satan, and the old Bible stories he used to tell me were what I immediately thought of when I looked at this newcomer. The horns were a dead giveaway.

They were black and cut off to a kind of nub right past the hairline. His hair was long and black and looked like it had rarely seen a comb before in its life. The man had pale skin, marred only by some green scales, which covered one entire arm—along with a large patch in the same color that angled down from his jaw but was soon lost under his sleeveless vest. I hadn’t noticed scales on any of these other jokers.

After staring at us for a few seconds, he lifted his nose in the air and sniffed at us, which I thought was rather extraordinary. He thought we smelled, huh? He should get a whiff of himself.

He reached down and jerked the front of my robe into his hand and dragged me out the door to the corridor outside. I could hear Rakkur protesting loudly behind me, but the guards had swarmed over to block him from trying to help.

Once outside, I was shoved against a wall, and the devil person leaned in close.

“What are you?” he demanded, in a growly voice. This time he was speaking heavily accented Tygerian. His breath smelled of some spicy food he’d recently eaten.

---