Page 48 of Her Alien Prince
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Trent
ALL IT WOULDtake is one touch, and I knew my journey would end here. Queen Kai's efforts to enter my mind thundered at the back of my mind, a constant battering seeking a moment of weakness to take control. Images of Mabel glaring at me intertwined with moments where she let me give her pleasure surged to the front of my thoughts. How could I expect my kansa to let me inside her mind, and accept our bond when I’ve done nothing but cause her discomfort, and showed her with my actions that all I cared for was her body. Of course her mind protected itself from me. I was a parasite leeching the warmth from her very soul.
Something in me snapped, and I knew the best I could do for her was be the Black Prince that everyone expected of me… the Queen’s Revenge.
"Why?" I begged of Queen Kai, still struggling with the decision I made to come here and end this with the venom dripping down my ki, readied at my sides to plunge into one of her hearts. It wouldn't matter if we shared blood, or that her blackened hearts somehow survived the wound... without my nectar in her system the poison would take her.
"You are too young to understand, but the shol did." She looked down her nose, shaking her head with that all too familiar disapproval in her darkened eyes. With a sigh, she decided to enlighten me with her twisted reality before she gave me the final push into the waters of Lenkal's embrace. "The shol knew." Pausing for a long moment, she gazed off as if she were reliving the haunted past of decimating an entire species when she was not much older than I was now.
"What does this," I motioned around us, but my reach was farther than what we could see, reflecting on her recent decisions to control the hive, to attack the estrelds, and even to kill her own spawn, "have to do with the shol? You've already seen that the planet is uninhabitable, and whatever is left of them is scattered so far into the universe that they will all but die off."
"Everything, my son—"
"I am not your son," I cut off, not wishing to have anything to do with her. I was disgusted with my own black veins, given to me from a queen that cared little for me or our hive.
She ignored my outburst and continued, "I will honor your essence by taking you into my body from once you came. Did you ever once ask yourself, son." She called me son pointedly to get under my skin, and I held firm in my attention to keep her out of my mind. I couldn't afford to let her rattle me further. Focus, I repeated to myself as pain radiated through my kan, down my neck, and webbed out to the very fiber of my bones at the tips of my fingers. "Why did we take over Sholonus? Why be so unrelenting with the shol?"
"They were resistant to our musk, and the bonds they shared with their mates healed them from those with venomous ki. Their teeth could pierce through our thick scales, and their strength could rip our wings from our backs. Everyone knows they were designed in perfect harmony to destroy krelins."
"And yet, we outnumbered them, and infiltrated their planet for a successful eradication. I ask you, why?" She insisted with an air of annoyance that I hadn’t questioned things sooner.
She wasn't making any sense. The obvious answer was that she was greedy for Sholonus resources and didn't like the risk they posed to the hive, but I was missing something, so I allowed her to continue.
"My naive spawn, you think I destroyed a species because they were a threat? No, I destroyed a species because they infected our hive! They came to our planet under the guise of peace! I was young, and as naive as you are now. I let the molt fever into our hearts."
"How?" I shook my head, unbelieving of her explanation, and still irritated she would even try to excuse the choice to destroy the shol, long before I was spawned.
"Do you think the krelin were always stunted in our fertility? We were the threat tothem, and they acted accordingly, infecting our nectar reserves," she said this last part quietly, a deathly and palpable heaviness to her claims that was filled with anger that never left her since the day her kindness was torched with betrayal. "We flourished. Just look at the many hives Krelis used to have, all but abandoned.”
A crazed intensity lifted her features and her eyes all but glowed as she continued, “Ordin Crystal will change everything... Leahme's spawn will change everything. I've already seen how it's cleansed our nectar and given us a queen unaffected by the molt fever. We will rebuild. Our hives will grow."
"You expect me to believe any of this?” I took a step forward, ready to end her madness. “You killed Queen Leahme, and you are killing this hive!" A nagging voice begged to hear her out, to know her truth, even if it was twisted with hate. My eye twitched, but I relented.
"I am saving our hive! Leahme died the moment she refused to accept any other mate but her estreld. She was dooming us all. I won't make the same mistake with her spawn. Ordin Crystal is not enough to cleanse our planet from the molt. You can't be selfish! For the future of our hive, I can't let you ruin everything by keeping our only hope to yourself! Even if that means I must destroy my own blood, I won't let you doom us as Leahme did."
"Doom us," I repeated with every bit of restraint I could manage. "Are you so blind? So consumed with your own savior complex that you can't see what you're doing? You are the one dooming our hive," I seethed. "I've seen it, no," I corrected quickly, "I've felt it myself. Estrelds' radiation can cure our blight without the need for this,this," I shook my head, "death, and manipulation. Was it even the molt fever that took Queen Leahme to the heart of Goddess Lenkal?" I had to know, I needed this confirmation to help push me to what needed to be done. I still couldn't bring myself to kill my own mother, even with that crazed glimmer in her eyes that spoke of a future of death and chaos.
"She was going to leave us," she said under her breath, her gaze far off like she couldn't even see in front of her own nose. I approached, my ki readied at my sides while she was distracted with the ghost of the past. "She was going to leave me just like him..."
I paused, stunned by her last words and the way they tugged at the very center of my gut. There was pain there, and loss. Her eyes locked onto mine and she found my moment of weakness within her own, recalling how it felt to have Mabel retched from my grasp. It was love, however twisted it had become. She may never have loved me... yet she loved our Queen Leahme, loved thishim. I could only assume she meant Gho-ran’s father… the hooman.
Tendrils latched into my mind, hearing her words resonating through me, "I did my duty to the hive, sacrificed to bring about prosperity and new life." Queen Kai gripped at her leather scales across her chest and closed her eyes. I could feel it within, burning through my veins... her ache. Her suffering throbbing and stabbing through my skull, crippling me to my knees. "She was the warmth after years of frost. She gave me strength to rejuvenate our hive. I tried to stop her..."
Her hands turned over, this way and that, as she examined them like they were separated from her body. Perhaps they were. Whatever connection she had with the hive was fading, and though she still had the strength to keep me on my knees, her hold on the hive was not what it used to be. She was not what she used to be. Her eyes lingered on her own ki, where poison dripped off the tips of the stingers. It wasn't hard to connect the dots. Queen Leahme didn't die of the molt like the stories were told.
Did it matter if it was an accident, or out of anger?
Did that erase all the wrongs she'd committed since?
I bowed my head to face what fate she had for me. I was no better than her. Driven by hate... and love, the line between them was so gray and shrouded in darkness. Then her ki pressed into my chest drawing a drop of blood as she hovered there. Her head rested atop my own, kan touching kan, as she filled my mind with her final gift of pumping my body with a queen's euphoria, blinding me with a pleasant warmth before the end.
I saw the memory she latched onto when she gave pleasure to the hive.
A man laughed, and in his eyes I saw the same cheeky humor of Gho-ran. How could mother not see the similarities between them? He was smearing dirt across his brow as he raked a garden of strange planets that I’d never seen on Krelis, then the leaves crumbled and turned to ash. The light from the man’s eyes dulled to a milky gray, and signs of molt fever colored his once dark skin. How was this possible? A hooman dying of the molt?
The pain I expected to feel when the poisoned stinger entered my hearts never came.
