Alien Prince: (Bride of Qetesh) An Alien SciFi Romance (23 page)

“What can I do for you, Lorelei?” she said, altogether a little colder than I’d hoped.

“It’s what I hope we can do for each other, actually,” I said. I canted my head to the side and studied her face. She was beautiful, but plainly sad. Maybe she’d chosen to wear black because she was in a form of mourning. “Tell me, how has your mother responded to your stated desires to find your, er…the man who…” I stammered. “That is…”

“The man I love,” she asserted.

Sure, okay. I gave a nod of my head. “Yes.”

“My mother doesn’t understand.” Tierney cast her gaze down to her hands, where she fidgeted with her fingers in her lap. “She was just like you, at the beginning. She thinks I’ve been brainwashed.” She cast a desperate look up to me then. “But you know that isn’t true anymore, right?”

I wasn’t so sure, but what could I do but believe what she was telling me? “I believe you, Tierney. I believe that you love this man.”

“Thank you,” she said, and I could see tears welling in her limpid blue eyes. “No one else believes me. My brother is treating me like I’m insane — meanwhile he is traipsing across the galaxy for some human he purports to love and I’m just here, like…” she shrugged, turning her face away from me to surreptitiously wipe a tear away. “I don’t know what to do, Lorelei.”

“As it happens,” I said, “I’m in a bit of a similar situation.”

She sniffed. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I heaved a sigh, always feeling a little strange saying it aloud. “I’m pregnant.”

Her brows shot up high over her big, round eyes. “Oh.”

“And I want to go home. To Qetesh, I mean.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect exactly. But her expression softened, and she nodded her head. “I understand that feeling, believe me.”

“And that’s why I’m here,” I said, leaning forward so that my elbows were on my knees. “I need your help.”

“Me?” she asked. “What can I do?”

“Your mother denied my request to be returned to Qetesh, just as she denied your pleas for help in finding the man you love. But you must have access to Mafaren funds. Surely you could help me get back to Qetesh.”

She sighed as she considered my request. I didn’t have much to bargain with, but I was sure I’d have to play the tiny chip I did have in my arsenal: connections. “And what can you do for me in return, if I do help you?”

“I’m not much in the way of status aboard the
Atria
,” I said, “but I am a queen.” She scoffed a little. Yes, I was only the queen of a primitive alien village, but that was something more than what she was, when it came to intergalactic politics. She was the daughter of the president of a corporation; I, amazingly, was royalty. “I’m a queen, and I know someone who can help you find your lover.”

“Who?”

“The task force assigned to find Tel and Ciara, Will Astor and Maelin Matsuko.” Sure, I’d only met them once, but they’d given me their card, so… that was a connection, right? I swallowed hard, and lied just a little. “I’ll call them, set up a chance for you to speak to them, and maybe—”

“That’s it?” she asked. “That’s what you can offer?” She shook her head. “They spoke to me already, Lorelei. They can’t help me. They’re on their own mission.”

“But surely—”

“Just… just stop, ok?” She turned away from me then, and crossed her arms in front of her even as she crossed her legs at the knee. Her body language was totally cut off from me, and I was certain I’d lost her.

I rose to my feet, preparing to show myself out after this glorious long-shot disaster. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to mislead you. I only thought—”

“Of yourself,” she finished for me, and I felt my face color with shame.

“I did think I could help you. I want to help you.” I cleared my throat. “Anyway.”

I took a few steps toward her bedroom door, when her voice rang out to catch me: “Wait.”

I turned, my brows raised in question, ready to take my knocks.

“I haven’t forgotten that you were an escaped slave, one who crash-landed on a foreign planet, and over the course of months you went from that to a queen with the power to bring four slaves back to their homes. Even if that isn’t necessarily what all of us wanted, it shows a great deal of…shall we say… ingenuity?”

Reckless presumption, more like, I thought. Tierney continued: “You displayed a lot of nerve, a willingness to go to great lengths to keep the promise that you made to the four of us, that we made right back. You were the only one to keep that promise, so I know I can take you at your word.”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound as desperate as I felt. “Yes, of course. You can always trust me to do at least that.” Hope was swelling in my heart, and I tried not to be distracted by thoughts of Calder’s face, Calder’s hands, Calder’s mouth.

“So,” she said, sighing as she got to her feet and approached me, “I need you to make me a promise.” And then she did something I didn’t expect from Tierney Mafaren. She took my hands in hers and squeezed them as she looked into my eyes. “Promise me that you will do everything you can to help me.”

“Yes,” I said, and I meant it. “Of course. I would do that anyway.”

She furrowed her brow. “You would?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Even if I didn’t help you get back to Qetesh, you’d still help me find him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I smiled. “Because, Tierney. This isn’t quid pro quo. You’re in pain. I don’t want to see people in pain.”

“But—” She seemed genuinely not to understand. So I tried another tactic.

“And anyway, if I did help you, maybe then I’d have a better chance of you helping me?”

She nodded. That one she understood. It dawned on me then that it must be terribly isolating to be a member of the Mafaren family, so rich that all anyone can ever see of you is the power and money you could provide them. She probably had few, if any, real friends. It made me feel kind of bad for even asking her for money.

“So, I will help you. I will help you with the promise that you will do everything in your power to help me, in return.”

“I swear,” I said. “I will do whatever I can.”

She nodded again and let go of my hands. “Good.” She sat back down and I followed her, my heart racing in my chest as I felt myself get one step closer to Calder. “So, what do you need?”

“We need to hire a private shuttle that will take us there. But we need to do it under the radar so that our names aren’t on the logs that the captain sees. I need passage, and so do my parents.”

“And so do I,” she said, and I quirked a brow. “I figure, if I come with you, I can tell my mother that I won’t come back unless she helps me.”

“Is that what you want to do? What if she just abandons you to Qetesh?”

Tierney shrugged. “What does it matter? I’ll be no worse off there than I am here. But you’ve promised to help me, which is more than she has done.”

I blinked, but ultimately I shrugged. Sure, why not? “Great. Sure. If you think that will help, then.”

“Then it’s settled.” She extended her hand to me, and I reached out to take it in my own. We shook on it.

“It’s settled.”

“I’ll come to see you once I’ve secured our passage.”

“Fantastic. Thank you.”

We sat there quietly for a moment, before she gave a wave of her hand. “You may go now.”

Panyan liquor and the ear of a good friend: that was the only cure for it. But a king does not exactly blend into his surroundings, so visiting the local tavern was quite out. Which was precisely why Waelden and I were sprawled out on divans in the guest quarters of the Spire, half-drunk flagons in our fists.

“Perhaps it was a mistake,” Waelden murmured, “how I treated Vanixa. Perhaps I should have honored our bond. Who knows if Sara Yve will ever return to Qetesh anyway, at which point I will be without a wife from now until… well, until I die.”

“There is no sense in pitying yourself, Waelden,” I said, forcing myself to sit upright, and drinking deeply of the draught in my hand. “What is done, is done.”

“Just so.” Waelden rubbed at his eyes, then stretched his arms over his head and sat up. “And in any case,” he went on, “who I marry is of little consequence.”

He was looking at me pointedly, and I scratched absently at my temple along the ridge of my brow until my nails met my horns. I must have known what he meant, but I refused to acknowledge it. Nevertheless, he pressed on: “Calder, your kingdom needs a queen.”

“My Kingdom has a queen,” I spat back, which served only to illicit a long-suffering sigh from my longtime friend and advisor. “My Kingdom has a queen.” As though repeating it made it more true.

“No, your Kingdom had a queen, and now it has a melancholic monarch with no heir.”

“Yes, a fitting monarch for a failing people,” I said, without considering the impact of my words. “A child has not been born to this tribe since…” I could not remember when. But it had been decades, and Waelden knew it.

“But we need a leader, Calder,” he went on, the plea in his eyes, “who will set the example for us all. Someone who will—”

“What, overcome the limitations of biology?” I rose to my feet and began to pace like a caged animal, back and forth, in front of the divan. “What would you have me do, old friend? Simply will a child into being? Would that I had that power, believe you me.”

“No,” he said, “but I would have you take another wife.”

I stared at him for a long stretch of silence, finally giving a slow shake of my head. “I am already married.”

“Yes, but she’s gone, Calder.”

“Gone,” I said, “not dead.”

“Semantics.”

“No,” I insisted, “no, it means I am still very much a married man. Married to a woman I adore, mind you.”

“Unlike me, you mean.”

“You said it,” I said, rather ungallant, “not I.”

Waelden sniffed, and hooked his flagon to the leather belt about his waist. “I love you, Calder,” he said, his tone low and level, “as my friend, as my king. But you do not have the luxury of all this sadness.”

“I—”

“You do not.” He came over to me then and gripped me by the shoulders. “You have a people to lead. Decisions to make. Your queen has come through for you in every way she promised: the Echelon have refilled our coffers, repaid the debt just as she promised they would. She single-handedly brought you back to us. She did that, and you know it. That strange, human creature was a blessing to this tribe. I mean that, sincerely. I do. She brought you back to us, made you take up the mantle of your great mother before you, and now we can finally, finally begin to thrive.”

He let go of me then, and looked me dead in the eye. The haze of our drinking had, it seemed, completely worn off and he was serious and sober as stone. “But none of that will matter if you fall back into the sadness that took you from us the first time.”

I swallowed hard and had to look away. “I do not know if I can lead without her at my side.”

“You can,” he insisted, “and you will. Otherwise her presence in your life meant nothing at all.”

I exhaled and nodded, seeing the sense through the heavy clouds of my dejection. “She said she would come back.”

“And she may yet. But you do not know when that will be. And so, you continue with your life. You lead your people, you find yourself a new queen, and you celebrate the great love that brought you back to your throne.”

I nodded. He was right. I gripped him by the elbow and looked into his face. “Thank you, old friend.”

He pursed his lips into a smile, and I could see the lines around his eyes. His skin looked like wax paper, crumpled and aging, and I wondered if I looked so in the unforgiving light of the Spire. “That is what I am here for, your highness.” He gently let himself out of my grip and headed for the door. “And with that, I will leave you. You do, after all, have a kingdom to run.”

I thought that Waelden had made a series of excellent points, so I allowed him to set up what he claimed to be an “introductory dinner”, but which was actually a parade of Europax women who all wanted to be queen. Before we ate, he brought them in one at a time, and they curtsied low and told me about themselves. There were a dozen of them, all shapes, colors, and sizes. All beautiful in their own right, some with charms, some without. But none of them had her face.

I sat on my throne, the chair next to mine as empty as I felt, and leaned with my elbow on the arm rest, my face in my hand, as they marched in and out. Waelden would come in and introduce them by name, excuse himself, and gives us a few minutes to get acquainted. They would flirt, they would flatter, and they would leave. None of them caught my eye or my attention in the slightest.

Until the last one.

“Your Highness,” Waelden said, leading the eleventh or twelfth girl into the throne room. She was shorter than the others, with a solid build and long limbs. Her hair was a mass of intricate black braids, and she had eyes black as night. She was stunning, and she was human. She wore traditional Qeteshi garb in bright yellows and oranges, draped in the front with a mass of gold bangles that sounded like wind chimes as she walked. She bowed low when she was in front of me.

“Your Highness,” she said in impeccable Qeteshi. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Likewise. What is your name, my lady?”

“Anesh,” she said.

“You are human.”

“Yes.”

“And new to our village?”

“That is correct, sire.” She smiled, and her teeth were pearl white.

I furrowed my brow as I considered her. She was a beauty, but she was not the beauty on which I had my heart set. But her presence here gave me the spark of an idea, and I followed it like a desperate man. “Tell me, how did you come to be a part of our tribe?”

“I was placed in another Qeteshi settlement,” she said, clasping her hands gently in front of her. She had such an easy grace. She put my mind at ease, even only to hear her speak. “I lived there for several months with the mate to whom I had been assigned, but he unfortunately fell ill and died.”

“I am so sorry for your loss, my lady,” I said, sitting up a little straighter.