Page 115 of Alien Prince's Fake Bride
“Mareliux!” I yell, although I don’t think there’s much he can do about this. He’s completely swamped in attacking Vyrpy., who are all trying to get at him.
I kick and writhe, but the aliens are so much stronger that it’s a waste of effort. They drag me to the fake windows on the ceiling. Those are searing hot, but the aliens don’t put me down there. They drag me quickly along to the other end of the big hall,then down the wall on the far side until we’re on the ground, surrounded by dense foliage of alien plants.
That’s where the Empress has crawled to, standing in the middle of tall, slender saplings with branches like vines, long and thin and always in movement despite the lack of a breeze.
“Finally some peace and quiet,” Juriniel says, despite the still deafening cacophony from the battle in the room. “We’re not quite done, you and I.” Her robes are in disarray and there’s dirt and green spots on her, as if she crawled through a jungle.
I yank my arms and legs, but the Vyrpy’s clawed hands are like steel. “Oh, you’redone,” I seethe in English. “Absolutely done. Believe me.”
One of the saplings reaches out a thin vine that curls around a Vyrpy’s gray arm. The Vyrpy tries to push it away, but the vine suddenly tightens so hard the Vyrpy screeches in pain. His friends try to cut off the vine, but other vines shoot out and attack them, too. Now, dozens of vines come shooting, curling around the Vyrpy and lifting them off the ground, easily done in the weightlessness. They keep screeching as they’re lifted and tossed around by vines that they can’t seem to cut.
The Empress chuckles. One gloved hand shoots out and grabs my upper arm just as the last Vyrpy lets go to fight the vines.
“Don’t worry,” she says with a shrill voice. “That plant is one of my better ones. It won’t let go of them. They’re food to it. It will suck them dry. Perhaps you’d like to find out what it’s like?”
But now I’m finally able to get hold of the knife gun again. I aim it squarely at the Empress’s face. “Let me go,” I demand in Khavgrese. Despite what she’s done to me, I can’t just shoot Mareliux’s mother, the way I should.
She doesn’t even blink. “Ah, you didn’t like that? Well, don’t worry. I have something else in mind for you.”
A deep roar echoes from all the walls of the room. “Umbra! Where are you?”
I feel it in my mind, too. My Syntrix ring shines, lighting up the greenery. “I’m here!” I reply as loudly as I can. “The Empress!”
There’s too many plants in the way for me to see the other side of the room, where the battle is mostly taking place. But it sounds as if it’s coming closer.
The Vyrpy who were taken by the trees have gone still, and they’re now hanging limply from the vines, so engulfed and rolled up in them that they look like green pods and not like Vyrpy at all.
The Empress has a good grip on my arm, but now I have a knife. I put the edge at her bony knuckles. “Take your hand off me or lose it.”
She’s staring up at the Vyrpy in their vines. “I’ve never seen that happen with anyone as strong as them. I have misjudged this plant! Oh, it’s so aggressive, isn’t it? Lovely!”
Losing patience with this lunatic, I apply pressure to the knife. It cuts into one of the Empress’s fingers. No blood comes out. It feels like cutting into wood.
She doesn’t flinch. “But of course there are so many lovely plants here. And one in particular I have never seen work the way it’s meant to. But you will be a fine test of it.” She turns to look at me, not even noticing my knife. “I have one here. You saw it already.” With her free hand, she holds up the small, silvery leaf from before.
“Let me go!” I demand, hacking at her hand with the sharp knife. But it has no effect — it goes through the skin, but it’s as if everything under it is all dry and hard. I have seen Mareliux bleed from injuries, so I know Khavgrens work in the usual way. But this Empress sure doesn’t.
She turns her icy gaze on me. “I have never seen this work properly. Only in dead objects and smaller specimens. It will kill you by… oh, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise. You will be astonished. And maybe you will just have time to appreciate the cruelty of what it does.”
I give her hand another hack with the knife, but her grip stays as iron hard as before. And it’s slowly tightening, so that I start to worry about those blades again. “You won’t get away!”
“I think I will,” the Empress says. “Mareliux is losing the battle. I could leave now and be sure the Vyrpy will kill him and you, which if of course the whole point of this. But I don’t want my servants to have all the fun. This turned out to be just as good a way to get rid of you both as the plan I had before. I just needed you away from Khav. A Vyrpy attack would lure Mareliux away, I knew that. And my Caladanians were supposed to kill you. But I knew immediately that they had failed. Your Syntrix was still there, so clean and pure and painful. So I came up here to deal with you both on my own turf.”
I groan in pain as the blades on her fingertips dig into my arm again.
“But you’re losing the battle,” I tell her as I ram the knife into her wrist as hard as I can. Again there’s no blood, and the knife only goes in a quarter inch before it’s stopped by something hard.
Juriniel ignores what I said and shows me the silver leaf. It’s the size of a coin, and it looks perfectly innocent. “Now eat this.”
I writhe and kick, and I hit her with each one. But it’s as if she doesn’t care or even notice.
She pushes the leaf closer, forcing me to take action.
Aiming at where her heart should be, I push the knife gun’s trigger button. It gives off a flatbangand jumps in my hand.
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- Umbra-
