Page 22 of Guardian's Legacy
I was wrong.
He spun around, his features tensed in anger. "Don't try to make excuses for the little frygg, and don't try to humor me."
"Alright," I raised both hands in the air to show I didn't mean any harm.
He ran his hand through his hair, stopped at the top, and moved it down to rub his neck. "I didn't mean to frighten you."
Now, that was funny. "You didn'tfrightenme. I just didn't want to watch you kill someone."
He cocked his head to the side, "That's what I do."
I shrugged, "I know. I watched you kill plenty of Cryons."
He stepped closer to me; his face was still set in an angry mask. My heart hitched slightly, but I refused to let him see that he intimidated me.
"How come you're not scared of me?"
"Who says I'm not?" I countered.
He leaned in closer, and his eyes pierced mine as he studied them hard. I swallowed but forced myself not to take a step back.
"You are a strange creature," he finally decided. He walked to the table, sat down, and began digging into his food. "Come, eat."
I wasn't hungry anymore, but I sat down, not wanting to aggravate him any further. Nothing about the mush on my plate did anything to bring my appetite back, but I dug my spork into the mess and forced myself to chew and swallow. No matter what, it was still food and nourishment.
XYREK
A murderous furystill raged through me the next morning when the lights began to brighten. I hadn't slept much, and that made me even angrier. I wanted to blame it on the padded chair, but it was comfortable enough. Not even the human female who had taken my bed could be blamed for it. No, this was all me.
I didn't even understand myself any longer. I had nearly killed a human male last night for using a filthy word. Alice didn't seem to care, so why had it worked me up so much?
Tom didn't have a dark aura around him; it wasn't white and innocent, but he was a far cry from the type of person I usually was sent after on a job. Last night, I would have terminated him just for the pleasure of it, and that thought didn't sit well with me. Not at all. It made me no better than the other criminals I had dealt with all my life.
The rage that had fueled me, though, was beyond anything I had ever experienced before. Still was. I worried if I laid eyes on him again today, I would give in to my murderous desires.
Only one thing calmed me—Alice's steady breathing on my bed. I wasn't even mad anymore that she was in it and I was not. It was the opposite. It soothed me, just like her steady breathing in and out, a sound I thought I could get used to.
My comm activated. I had set an alert for any new messages or information on the networks. Curious, I activated it. On my feed, Nock, the holostreamer I had watched before when I was bored, appeared. He could be entertaining, especially when he went off on a rant about Space Guardians. For whatever reason, we had this little Kred truly riled up.
I didn't understand why his new holocast would alert me, though. I fiddled with my settings and missed the first part, but when he mentioned the wordsSpace Guardian, I stopped and focused on the stream.
Don't mind him. He's a bit shy today. It's not every day that he's being called a hero! But that's what he is. You all know I'm not a big fan of the Space Guardians, but Zaarek has opened my eyes to the fact that these brave males are more than just extermination machines. We just returned from Astrionis, where we unloaded eight humans Zaarek rescued. Eight!Zaarek was one of the traitors I was supposed to be hunting down right now.
Let me tell you, the work Lord Protector Garth and Lady Silla are doing is invaluable. Those poor humans are being used for slavery and medical experiments, and the gods only know what else.
Is this live?A voice demanded in the background.A voice I had never heard before, but for some reason, knew belonged to Zaarek.
Unperturbed, Nock continued,from what I understand, Emperor Daryus has not shied away from paying a fortune to hire four Space Guardians to rescue even more of these humans. We should all follow this shining example of Emperor Daryus.As entertaining as this was, I was about to turn it off when Nock mentioned mating marks.
Something completely unrelated. I want to follow up on my mating marks show, especially the ones that emerge unexpectedly.What did Nock know about mating marks? My interest was piqued, especially by the mention ofunexpected. I sat up to listen.Zaarek has offered me a ride to UX938, where I heard of an outbreak of unexpected mating marks affecting the most unusual couples. Couples of different species! You know me, I need to investigate this a lot further. I'll be sorry to leave Zaarek, but this new development is calling me, and this holostreamer has to go where fate takes him.
The screen went blank. I checked the time and date of the holocast. Strangely, it didn't give me a location. Not so strange, it was a few days old; our paths must have, unbeknownst to me, crossed somewhere in the past few hours. Otherwise, I wouldn't have received this message at all. UX938 was a few days from where we were.
Unexpected mating marks, I mused. A coincidence?
I wanted to put it off as such, but I had a nagging feeling that it wasn't. Nothing that had happened since I took the humans aboard had been a coincidence or random. I wasn't a believer in a greater power or gods, but something was happening that defied regular logic. For some reason, I was also sure that it was related to my strange dreams. Dreams that had become more intense over the last few days. I wasn't simply running through a forest any longer or seeing myself reflected in the water of a lake. No, there was a town, almost a city, with many people who looked just like me, though dressed in clothes I didn’t recognize. Same silver skin, same black hair, just longer.
I wasn't sure what I would do after I dropped the humans off. I had defied Moddekdum's orders—a crime I was sure would not be magnanimously overlooked. Which reminded me, I hadn't heard from him since the last comm.
