Feel Again (6 page)

I asked for a star,

You gave me the moon;

I asked for your heart,

And you gave me the
truth

And it wasn’t your
fault,

You gave me your all;

And I never forgot,

How wrong I was

Once upon a time,

You were a charming
prince;

I told you I was fine,

You sealed it with a
kiss

I asked for a star,

You gave me the moon;

I asked for your heart,

You gave me the truth

And you couldn’t have
thought,

That I wasn’t true;

And you couldn’t have
fought

For me more than I for
you

Once upon a time,

We flipped a sliver
dime;

I said I’d call you
mine,

As long as we lived

It wasn’t a crime,

I won’t pay a fine;

We’re frozen in time,

And there’ nothing to
hide

I asked for a star,

You gave me the moon;

I felt so alive;

And it’s because of you

I asked for a star, heart, time,
and the moon,

You gave me your heart and wonder
and truth

Once upon a time

Nelvak, for a teenager, was not impressed and he shoved her
against a wall, knocking her unconscious.
So much for entertainment, Lionel thought.
As angry as he was at Sam, she was
the only one he wanted right now. He would rather endure worse
torture at the hands of the otherworldly goddess rather than at the
hands of Nelvak or an other Zebdian soldier. Yet, this made him
even more angry at Samakri, because she was apparently such a
coward that she would not actually harm Lionel
herself.

He could hear her voice, even from
far away.

"Have no mercy on the Earth boy,"
she said. But she was lying. He could hear her thoughts now, as she
once did his back in New York.

Please spare the young man, she
thought. I love him with all of my being and all of my loyalty to
Zebda has been in vain; nothing in comparison to what I now
feel.

Was Samakri playing with him? He
had thought that their minds were no longer intertwined, yet he
could hear Sam's thoughts as easily as she had heard his what
seemed like so long ago but had only been a few short days. He
wondered so deeply whether she truly loved Lionel or whether she
had more control over him than he could have possibly
imagined.

What you hear by me is the truth,
Lionel. Wait and see.

With all that he had, Lionel wished
that he could be with Samakri. No matter what her innermost
thoughts suggested, he could not assume that she loved him back.
All he could know for sure is that, most likely, he would never see
his home again. As Lionel began to feel woozy and the Yalmax prison
bars began to separate his heart from his mind, an aging guard with
eyes a different shade of yellow and green hair that was turning
the very color of Yalmax rather than graying, came up to the bars
and let Lionel out of prison.

"Let's go, foreigner. You're going
to show me how to make another one of you."

"What if I can't?" Lionel gulped,
bile rising in the back of his throat.

“Then, you die,” he replied
simply.

The
guard then grabbed Lionel by the arm and threw him down to the
ground in such a way that Lionel could feel the blood draining
slowly from a gash on his leg. The Yalmax of the prison floor was
even sharper and stiffer than any other form of the element on
Zebda. Lionel was even more scared for his very life than he had
ever been in the past. Just when he thought that the guard could
not harm him any more than he already had, the man, who covertly
appeared much more frail than he really was, took a large and
completely transparent needle from the pocket of his Yalmax sheath,
which had been dyed a deep black
,
likely a direct reflection of his dark
personality, and jabbed Lionel’s arm without
mercy.

A clear,
icy liquid began flowing through Lionel Davidson’s veins, and it
was much more potent than any of the other drugs that the Zebdians
had used on him previously. While the first times that Lionel had
been drugged, he had passed out completely and lost all awareness
of his surroundings, this bad medicine simply left him completely
frozen in a state of panic and terror.
Wow, he thought. For creepy aliens who don’t know how to feel
any emotion themselves, they certailnly do know how to inflict the
worst of human emotions in me.

Once again, all that Lionel
could think about was Samakri, the beautiful and likeable, yet
venomous and volatile Zebdian girl. Now that he came to think of
it, Lionel had known Samakri throughout his whole life, even when
she was not on this planet, Earth. Sure, the first time, she was
really there, on that fateful day just before Lionel’s fifth
Christmas, when she had at least partially played a role in the
death of Lionel’s parents, Maggie and Arthur.

Of course, Samakri had been
there after that. She was there every time Scotch and his
girlfriend, Marcy, had bullied him. She was there when Carla and
all of his other foster parents had ignored him his whole life.
Samakri had been there when Lionel was alone, in his room,
listening to music, with no one to care what happened to
him.

He could
hear Sam now; her delicate white feet approaching his nearly
lifeless body (wherever it was) and pushing the guard away.
Good, Lionel thought. She can hear my thoughts.
She will awaken me.

I will
indeed, Samakri thought to Lionel.
Within
moments, Lionel could move his limbs again. He got up. His wounds
were very terrifying to look at. He had bruises the color of
Samakri’s lovely hair, though frankly not quite so lovely as that,
peppered over his entire body. Deep, bloody, gashes uniformly lined
his arms and legs. His head was pounding worse than it had with any
migraine he’d gotten on Earth. Lionel’s vision was blurry; he could
hardly see Sam’s beautiful face looking down upon him from where
she was standing. That was the first time Lionel had realized just
how tall Samakri was for a girl her age.

“How
badly did Ranvoy injure you?” she asked, referring to the older
guard with the temper and strength of a youthful firebrand.

“Pretty bad,” Lionel
admitted. “I thought that guy was going to kill me. And, I thought
you would never come back. Where’s Loretta?”

“I was attending to my
duties, but I came here, to you, as soon as I realized the extent
of what Ranvoy had done. The musical girl has been marphed back to
your home planet, Earth, where she has forgotten her stay here. She
will stand what is there called trial to see if she may be pardoned
of what she has done to her sociopathic fan. Perhaps she will be
permitted to sing for the humans once again.”

“Well,
that’s good, I guess,” Lionel replied. He was sincerely glad that
the pop star, Loretta J, had been sent back home to New York, where
she would hopefully be able to go back to her career, that is, if
she did not face charges for killing her would be assassin.

“I hope that you do not
feel too bad. And, I also hope that you may find the means to
forgive me for what I have allowed to be done to you, perhaps at
least in some time that will pass. Just a heads up, by the way,
time passes in a sequence slightly different here on Zebda than it
does on Earth, at least as far as I know. When I first witnessed
the murder, and also when I traveled to Earth of late to retrieve
you, I progressed one year in age chronologically. It is my
experience that when one travels to Earth from Zebda, this happens.
It does not occur when relocating from Earth to Zebda.”

“What are you
saying?”

“What I’m saying,” Sam
continued, “Is that you have not aged a year yet, and, while you
remain here, you will age normally, but, once you return to Earth,
you will be nineteen instead of eighteen. I turned five when I
first went to New York all those years ago, so I was one year older
than you. When I marphed the second time, I turned twenty. However,
I have marphed two more times since then in order to communicate
with my father, which makes me now twenty two years of age, at
least according to Earth years and laws of aging.”

“Oh, I
see. That’s no big deal, Sam. I’m miserable anyway. It’s not like I
care if I lose a couple of years. I’ll still have a full life once
I’m away from this place.”

Samakri seemed rather amused
by this remark that Lionel made. A friendlier-than-usual grin
formed on her perfect, smooth lips, and she flipped her purple mane
in a seductive, yet conspicuous manner. It made Lionel want her
even more than ever. Then, just as quickly as Sam’s
extraterrestial-style attempt at flirting had passed, so did her
friendly nature.

“Samakri!” boomed the
voice of her father, Armpha Blekrin. “Daughter! I demand you to
report to me at once! Please end your frivolous and revolting
conversation with the Earth boy at once or you will lose your
marphing privileges!”

“Sorry, Lionel,” the
gorgeous alien said. “I really, really, really need my ability to
transport myself between planets in every galaxy across space. It’s
kind of my job. So, maybe, talk to you another time? Hopefully
soon?”

“Sure,”
Lionel replied, all too eager to see Samakri and speak with her
again some time in the near future, despite the fact that a part of
her--the part of her that was loyal to Zebda and to
Blekrin--clearly wanted Lionel to meet his untimely demise. He was
becoming even more of a tool than Scotch.

Lionel spent what seemed
like many dreadful and wasted days on Zebda, in and out of sleep,
tossing and turning; no one to comfort him or pay any attention to
him or his needs whatsoever. After what would have been nearly a
week, at least in Earth years, Lionel awoke fully; the effects of
the highly potent drug completely worn off.

It was peculiar; strange,
really; the way that things worked on planet Zebda. He found
himself that day in the Zebdian version of what most earthlings
would call a hospital, only, of course, everything there was made
out of Yalmax. Lionel was beginning to truly despise the element;
he thought of it as “the element of torture” and “the element of
death.”

Later that day, after Lionel
was released from the hospital, he was sent back to prison, but,
this time, to a much safer and more sanitary part of the prison. He
had a bed to lay on, made of a soft liquified Yalmax. Maybe he did
not hate it so much after all. Especially not after what happened
next.

Lionel was almost asleep by
that time. He was just dozing off when he realized that Sam had
come to see him. She had snuck in against her father’s wishes,
presumably. He looked up and could not believe what he saw. Samakri
looked even more beautiful than she ever had before. She was
dresssed quite scantily in an exotic-looking Yalmax chemise, which
pressed tightly against her skin, showing the lines and curves of
her form.

He looked directly into her
eyes, staring into them like doors to her soul, for what seemed
like eternity. Her eyes turned blue. He walked closer to her and
took her face into his hands; kissing her. She did not fight him.
He let go of her face, moving his hands down the rest of her
perfect white body.

He lifted her strange gown
off over her head, revealing her bare beauty, then he took off his
own garments. She still did not protest. He kissed her again, their
forms sliding down against the wall of the prison cell. He went
inside of her, and then, something strange happened. Her perfect
skin darkened; her hair turned from purple to flaming
red.

Samakri was
human.

The last thing that Lionel
and even Samakri would have expected as an outcome of their
encounter was that Samakri would become human. Yes, she was a
beautiful human; just as much as she had been a beautiful alien.
But, how could she possibly explain what had happened to Blekrin.
If he came to know, he would surely kill the both of them, or, at
the very least, Lionel. However, as Zebdian Armpha, he would also
surely know without being told. So, they devised a plan.

“First,”
Samakri told Lionel when she became aware of the situation, “You
will return to Earth; no questions asked, and you will do so in
secret, lest my father know what is going on.” For the first time
since Lionel had met her, Samakri appeared to be feeling true
emotion. After all, she was human now; she was different, of
course.

“How can I leave you now,
Sam?” he asked her, hoping sincerely that they would not be forced
to part ways so soon, though a little voice in the back of his
head; his conscience, perhaps, was telling him that this just might
be the case.