Page 2 of Consume
“Two...?” I asked, and my voice faded into Saelis gibberish I couldn’t understand.
I blinked at Captain Glenn in the video. But he’d been missing for a month. Taken right off this ship, along with Ellison and Mase, my love, the father of my unborn daughter. Just...gone. Ellison’s boyfriend, Josh, had whisked everybody away during my and Poh’s kidnapping adventures on Ring Guild Station 144, and we’d had no idea where they’d gone when we came back to the ship. We’d guessed Josh had taken everyone back to the Black, the rogue planet hovering near Earth’s remains. Yet Captain Glenn wasn’t on the Black. According to the video, he was at a hospital on the planet Wix, which was less than a day from us.
I zipped my gaze to Poh. “Is”—I concentrated hard to get the words out—“anyone else with him? Ellison? Mase?”
She shook her head, her high, white-blonde ponytail snaking behind her. “Not them, no.”
I sank back into my seat. “Th-that’s where the captain’s family is. A hospital on Wix. We have to go there. We have to go find him and ask him what...what happened.”
Pop grasped my hand on the gurneytop. “Keep watching, Absidy.”
I briefly searched his face for a sign of what was to come and then, coming up short, trained my gaze on the screen again. Poh zoomed back out and resumed the video. Captain Glenn paused outside of a hospital room door and then pushed it open. Several moments later, another figure came out. Stocky, a trench coat swaying around heavy boots, a bald, alabaster head. He locked eyes with the camera, blue and cracked like starbursts, and smiled.
Parker Donatrough, the drug baron who’d decided he loved Mase almost to death.
“If you ask me,” Poh said, “that’s a strange combination of characters in one hospital room.”
“No.” I stared down Parker on the screen and tried to explain why, but only nonsense words fell out. Squeezing my eyes shut briefly, I tried again. “The...baron offered to pay the captain’s family’s medical bills if he turned over Mase to him.”
Right before all of them had vanished off this ship.
“The captain would do that?” Poh asked.
It sure looked that way, but if I’d learned anything about videos lately, it was that they only told surface-level truth. There had to be more to this, although honestly, I wasn’t sure if I could blame Captain Glenn for putting his own family first. He lived and breathed only for them, but at the same time, he’d made Mase his daughter’s godfather. Mase was family to him, too. But if the captain had given up Mase to the baron, then Mase was in even more trouble. Parker was the source of Mase’s drug addiction, as in Parker was the drug himself. He produced She and He, electrical energies that when combined underneath the skin, produced an extreme high.
And he was in love with Mase. I was a lot of things, but a man-sharer wasn’t one of them. Especially since Mase didn’t even know he was about to be a dad.
I turned to Crispin across the gurney. “Get— Get us in the air. We’re going to Wix.”
He flicked his gaze to Poh by the wall. “Okay, but then what? Waltz into the hospital and wait? We don’t even know when your captain will be there again.”
“Get us up,” I snapped.
“And just wait for him to show up? We’vebeenwaiting.” Crispin threw his hands in the air and sat back in his chair, his brown eyes ticking between Poh and me. “Meanwhile Saelises are out there somewhere counting down the seconds before they finish us off. It’s maddening, all this waiting.”
Poh sent him a death glare down her scaly nose. “Are you done freaking out, Crispy?”
“No.” He shook his head at the gurney. “Not even close.”
The room fell quiet, all of us probably thinking the same thing. Where were the Saelises? They’d beaten us to Ring Guild Station 144 to force their way through the rings to end the Black War—and end humans—once and for all. That had been a month ago, and then...nothing. We’d had our eyes and ears on high alert since we’d hunkered down on the edge of a forest on Mayvel, searching for our lost crew and any sign of the Saelises. The aliens had waited two hundred years after blowing up Earth; they could likely wait a little more, which trickled unease, thick as blood, down my back. The Saelises were cold, calculating, and ruthless as anything I’d ever seen.
We were so screwed.
Pop put his hand on my back. “Are you sure about this? You want to go to the hospital?”
“Before you answer that, just know that this is most likely a trap.” Poh blanked the Mind-I screen and pocketed the small device. “It’s to lure you out and silence everything you know about the Saelises and the Black War.”
I shook my head with a frown. “What I know...isn’t going to matter when the Saelises get here.”
“Maybe not,” Poh said, “but if enough people start to believe you and mobilize off of Mayvel and Wix before the Saelises come... Well, there goes the Saelises’ plan to wipe out your entire species.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo for them,” Crispin muttered.
I leaned back, attempting to drill into Poh’s head with the force of my stare. “Parker and Captain Glenn at the hospital...was a Saelis idea? That’s what you’re saying?”
She shrugged, pulling one of her guns strapped to her waist free and checking to see it was still loaded. “Or someone controlled by the Saelises through a Mind-I. Someone had to know we’d be searching for the captain, and drawing you into a trap is exactly what I would do if I wanted to take you out.”
Spoken like an assassin once hired to kill me. Which she was, hired by the Saelises themselves. She didn’t, in case that wasn’t obvious. I’d like to think it was because of my winning personality, but it was more likely because I was pregnant. Hurting babies crossed the line with Poh, since the Ring Guild had murdered her young son and her husband. It might also have had something to do with her religious belief that I was...other. Based on my ghost magnet past, I was inclined to agree with her.
