one
Callie
Itwasmyheadthat woke me.
The grinding, pounding pain pressing behind my eyes pulled me from what had been stark blackness into sickening consciousness. My stomach flopped around as I tried to blink. My left eye would not open. The tight pull of swollen skin was hot and uncomfortable along the left side of my face and my mouth was dry enough that my tongue was swollen and painful. I smacked my lips trying to generate some moisture and tasted blood as cracks formed.
Not good.
What in the hell had happened? Bile rose when I tried to shift my body and the eerie familiarity of a time I tried my damndest to suppress ghosted up my mind like a bad dream.
The surface beneath me was cold and hard… a floor instead of my tent bed, and the whir of the ship engines I could hear all around me wasn’t the near soundless purr of my Fang. I shifted again, wriggling a small fraction of an inch and discoveredthrough the pain of movement that my hands were bound behind me. My shoulders screamed in agony with every twitch until I admitted defeat and laid still again.
Oh, yes. This was all too familiar.
At least this time I still had my clothes on. The black flight suit was a small comfort and they’d even left me my boots. I still had to work hard to swallow the fear that swelled up my throat in the form of vomit and shuddered as a chill swept over me, my skin pebbling. Muscles cramped as I shook, my teeth clamped tightly together to keep the screams inside where they belonged.
I had been taken again. I didn’t know when, or by who, but this wasn’t the kind of treatment the Korsals dished out to their allies, and Jack would have ripped someone apart if they’d tried. The thought of my friend loosened my shoulders a fraction. If I had been taken, she would be coming—and she wouldn’t be coming alone. I wasn’t helpless this time either. I was stronger… changed. This acknowledgment strengthened me, shored up my spine and pushed the fear down. My good eye opened and the darkness filtered through phases of gray until my vision cleared enough to see. I breathed deep and slow until my heartbeat returned to a semi-normal rhythm as the panic faded to a manageable level.
A tired sigh escaped as I spotted the bars of a cell. The scent of badly filtered stale air assaulted my sensitive nose and I had to work hard to suppress a sneeze. I still wasn’t entirely pleased with the new changes my body had undergone to save my life, but seeing in the dark was, at the very least, convenient.
Abducted again, but by who? And why? The Unity didn’t seem too keen on taking prisoners. The full scale assault on Korsal and the orders to kill Ohem and Jack rather than capturing them gave me a pretty good grasp of that fact. Another chill swept over me. My head throbbed in time with my once again rapid heartbeat as I tried to remember just what exactly had happenedto land me here. The last thing I remembered was flying into a squadron of Unity Insects and turning them to burning ash in a dog fight that would have made the WWII era Army Air Force proud.
The teeming armies on the ground had smashed together like two opposing ant colonies, writhing and tossing much like the waves of the ocean behind them. I’d soon lost focus of the ground as the swarms of Insects had taken offense at my killing of their comrades and I’d been targeted by at least five of them. My squadron had done their best to get the Unity off my back… but I’d been hit. The memory clicked into place like a light bulb turning on.
I’d been shot down, my left wing broken off and burning. I’d just managed to get the Fang level when I’d hit something, probably a tree, and heard a splitting crack followed by a jerk so violent that I blacked out.
I’d crashed and then I must have been taken some time afterwards.
Goddamnit.
What was it about me that attracted aliens and prompted them to abduct me? I’d been one of the first women taken, along with my roommate, by the Vrax all those months ago, and now it would seem I was back at square one.
Well, not exactly at square one.
The binding at my wrists pulled tight as I twisted my hands together, and with gritted teeth against the new wave of pain at my temples and shoulders, I pulled and twisted sharply, smiling to myself as the metal gave way. Fire spread from my shoulders to my fingertips. I rolled to my back to bring my hands to my chest to rub at my wrists, hoping to bring the feeling back faster. I hissed quietly as the burn intensified, spreading like molten metal. My joints ached, deep inside the bone, and my stomach clenched with nerves.
How long had I been here?
My hands had been completely numb, more numb than they’d ever been in my life. I was desperately thirsty and producing no saliva. To get to that level of dehydration, I had to have been out for at least forty-eight hours. I muttered a bitter word of thanks that I’d been changed. I wouldn’t have been able to free myself when I’d been strictly human, nor would I have been seeing in the dark, and I’d have probably already been dead from the lack of water, if the crash hadn’t killed me.
On the Vrax ship, it had been total darkness. The fear of the unknown pressing hard around my naked body until horror had replaced it when I’d caught my first glimpse of an alien. How silly my fear of the Vrax’s strangeness seemed now. I've seen so many aliens much stranger since then. I even counted some of those aliens as family.
I grunted at myself, slightly annoyed at feeling levity in a situation where I should be laser focused on the situation at hand. I fully blamed my time with Jack and Patty for this new change in my personality.Stick in the mudthey called me, but I’d just had a moment of internal smiling while I lay in a cage in an unknown ship, taken by an unknown enemy, and I hadn’t even attempted to get to my feet yet. And just like that, the fear faded entirely, the panic evaporated. Leisurely. That’s how I almost felt. Like I had all the time in the world to figure this out. That no matter what it was, I could take it on and win.
Oh, god. I was turning into Jack. Entirely too much confidence packed in with assured violence and a willingness to take things as far as necessary. I sighed as I got to my feet, dizziness making me sway, and I put a hand out against the bars to steady myself.
“At least I won’t eat anyone. I have that going for me,” I murmured to myself, my throat was so dry it hurt to speak and the words sounded scratchy to my ears. With another sigh, I pressed my forehead against the bars and chuckled withouthumor. “So, there are some principles left. Barely.” I should probably save my voice, but hearing myself talk was comforting.
Once upon a time I’d been so cool, collected. I’d been by the book. As much as it annoyed me to admit to myself, Ihadbeen a stick in the mud. My whole life I’d been about achieving my goals with a single-minded intensity that my mother always said came from her. And now look at me, not entirely human and halfway to nuts.
Bad influences, my friends—more like sisters—were.
Crazysisters.
Except for Sam, the only normal one left in the group, the lucky girl. Though, even if she had been changed, I don’t think anything could make Sam violent. She’d think herself out of her situation, calmly. I wanted to revert back to my old self and do the same, but now that the initial panic was gone, I waspissed.
Who in the actual fuck had the brass balls to not only enter into our airspace, undetected I might add, but then to take one of us. Not just any of us either, but one of the ‘humans’ in the core group of Jack’s closest friends. Fucking morons. They’d just declared themselves enemy number two in our clan’s eyes.
