Beasts and Burdens (7 page)

She nodded and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. The t-shirt that she was wearing lifted enough to remind her that she was being a little too informal. She looked back in the bedroom, but the clothes she had dropped on the floor were gone.

“Bathroom.” Belus pointed to the door between the bedroom and the office. She expected to find her clothes piled inside on the hamper, but instead she found a duffel bag filled to the brim with random clothes. As happy as she was to have clean clothes, she realized that they were expecting this to be more than just a one night stand.

Once properly clothed, Cori joined Belus in the kitchen. She sat on a stool across from him and watched him flip pancakes. “How’s your leg?”

“Fine.” She looked down at the offending area; she had all but forgotten it. There were so many aches and pains from her pregnancy, one more was no different. “Where’s Danato?” She looked up horrified that she hadn’t thought to ask sooner.

“He’s fine,” Belus said not looking up from his pancakes.

“Is he at the house?” Belus nodded. She took in a sharp breath, trying not to get angry that he wasn’t offering her more information. “You promised me the truth.”

“You mind if we eat first?” He held up a pancake on his spatula. “Sleepover special.” He winked at her, and she smiled.

“Bed
and
breakfast, careful you might never get rid of me.”

He smiled, but he cleared his throat. “Speaking of that, I’m sure you’ve guessed, but you can’t leave.” He frowned and handed her a plate of pancakes after adding a few sausages.

She took the plate and started buttering her pancakes more vigorously than necessary. “How long?” He didn’t answer, which meant he didn’t know. Cori dropped her knife on her plate, letting it clank loudly. “Can I even go to work?” She scoffed.

“You can go to the greenhouse, but anywhere else you’ll need to be escorted.”

“What about the bubble? I have crops to harvest.”

Belus’s eyes widened nearly unperceivably, but she was getting better at reading his subtle social cues. “I don’t think that’s wise either.”

“Why is she doing this? Why is she so mad at me?”

“Short answer…because she’s jealous.”

“Of what?” She said dumping far more syrup on her pancakes than any human should consume.

Belus looked at her, but didn’t answer. She must have been missing something obvious. Her pregnant brain was leaving her moody and a little dimwitted. Then she caught on. Only one thing had changed in the last eight months. The house was jealous that she was pregnant.

Cori touched her belly and acknowledged the scrutinizing gaze that Belus was giving her. She wanted to ask a hundred questions, but since her pancakes looked so good, she took a different direction with her mouth.

15

Cori took her plate to the sink and immediately started to fill the basin with soapy water. Belus smiled at her from his stool against the island. “You don’t have to do that. My house has no rules for tidiness.”

She glanced back at him. “Habit, besides, I know your probably uncomfortable having me here to begin with, so I don’t want to make this any harder.”

His brow dipped and he took in a steadying breath. “Don’t try to discern my feelings or opinions Cori, please. I don’t usually like your blunted interpretation.” She continued to gather up the dishes unsure of whether an apology was necessary, or if she even wanted to offer one.

“When you first came here, you looked like her daughter.” Cori glanced back to verify that he was talking about Olivia. His glassy eyed reminiscence answered her question. “You were a little shorter, your hair was longer, similar facial structure, but I think it was your anger that brought back more memories. Olivia was feisty,” Belus smiled, “she had to be, Danato was pretty full of himself back then.”

Cori wanted to get to the heart of the issues, but since Belus was the one with all the answers, she didn’t try to rush him. She got the sense that this was the first time in many years that he had spoken about her.

“I worried that Danato was trying to replace Olivia with you, but it soon became clear that he had more paternal feelings for you.” Cori cringed remembering the kiss Danato had given her in her wish reality. She imagined a little older and with shorter hair, that she looked even more like his Olivia. “Little did I know, that would be worse.” Belus winked at her and she smiled.

“Was she really a prisoner?” Cori asked trying to steer him back to the main topic.

“Yes, she was a very talented telepath, and as per her afore mentioned feistiness, she got in trouble with a few high end political figures. Her prison sentence was as much an exile as a punishment.”

“How long ago was that? I mean when she arrived.”

“Oh, about ten years now.” Cori quickly calculated that Olivia had died less than three years after she came to the prison. “She arrived in a piss poor mood and was demanding to speak to who was in charge. Danato, naturally, was more than happy to oblige her and had she been a rodent faced troll, he might have succeeded in knocking her down a peg or two, but instead they just went head to head in an argument that lasted nearly an hour.

“I actually had time to grab coffee and come back. By that time the volume had come down, and the guards no longer had to hold her back.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“She was insistent that it was within her rights to utilize her God given skills to
help
in war negotiations. She was one of those geopolitical, world peace or bust, type of women—American of course. She was actually training to be a lawyer, when her abilities came on full strength. The trauma of it threw her off track for a few years, until she decided that being a human lie detector would come in handy for a news reporter.”

“Oh, no,” Cori said already imagining what damage a telepath could do for someone’s reputation when they had a camera crew backing them up.

“Oh, yes.” Belus nodded in agreement. “She started out simple, uncovering a few criminal operations here and there, but she started to realize that chopping off the head of the weed, doesn’t guarantee that it’s going to die. She moved up to corrupt business men, and lazy politicians, until eventually on live television she all but accused a very rich man of pouring funding into an undercover nonmilitary sanctioned project in Russia.” Belus peeked up to see if she understood him. As her mouth dropped his smirk grew.

“Olivia found out about the prison.”

“Yes, she did. Unfortunately, what she didn’t account for was that the man she was accusing was only one of many rich and connected men responsible for keeping the prison a secret. He laughed off her accusations, but within two hours of the interview, she was captured, placed on a plane, and shipped here indefinitely. The cover story back home was she was fired and sued into submission.”

“So, she arrived here, fresh from capture spouting about the rights of an American citizen, while Danato basically told her she no longer had any rights,” Cori summed up.

“Obviously, that went over about as well as a brick on a little toe.”

Cori drained the sink and left her towel to dry on the stove handle. She leaned over the slightly too short island propped up on her palms. “I assume that fight led to some mixed feelings that eventually blossomed into love.”

Belus shook his head. “No, I believe that after that fight they did truly hate each other. Much like your first introduction to the prison, she found the idea of indefinite a little too consuming. She hated Danato because he represented a forever that she didn’t choose.”

“You mean she wasn’t the Zen, accommodating woman that I was when I arrived.”

Belus looked like he was trying to glare at her, but it was ruined by the grin he couldn’t quite keep control of. “No, kid, she wasn’t all rainbows and bumper sticker t-shirts like you,” he said nodding to her 70’s floral design t-shirt that said, “Pick your nose, not a fight.” She laughed at his disapproving head shake.

“What happened in the days, weeks, and months following that fight?”

“I fell in love with her,” he said casually, as if it was no more an admission than leaving the toilet seat up.

16

Cori cleared her throat and followed Belus to the couch. He sat on one end and she on the other. She tucked her bare feet under her and sat facing him. “Were you two…I mean…how close…”

“No, it wasn’t like that. At first, I was just the guy to ask questions, so she didn’t have to interact with Danato. Then our conversations extended beyond the walls of this prison. It was a revelation to me to be able to speak to someone about something new. No offense to Danato, but when two people spend a majority of their lives in the same place together, the quality of conversation wanes…a lot.”

Cori chuckled. She had struggled with that as well. Feeding new life into the dinner conversation usually involved reading more and since she wasn’t an avid reader, she had to get creative.

“Did you ever tell her that you loved her?”

“I had only begun to realize that I was feeling more toward her than a mutual respect. That’s when we had an escape. It was a simple mistake, but one that almost cost her, her life. Unencumbered by metal hinges, our beloved Ork ripped off the door to her cell and attacked her. He had only just begun to beat her senseless, when Danato arrived and offered a little quid pro quo.”

“I don’t remember any Ork,” Cori murmured.

“That’s because Danato killed him. It only took a few blows to the head. Orks aren’t quite as thick headed as one might think. He didn’t really mean to kill him, but he never was a big fan of seeing a woman hurt.” Belus eyed her carefully. “She had been with us nearly a year, but that was her first taste of our bizarre world. She realized that we weren’t just a bunch of mad scientist creating hybridized animals. She was finally scared.

“She was torn up pretty bad, so Danato carried her to the infirmary. I saw her clinging to him and I knew… He saved her life. That was going to be hard to compete with.”

“I’m sorry.” Cori frowned.

“Don’t be.” He shook his head indifferently. “We had a wonderful relationship, it was just plutonic.”

“Danato and Olivia started to fall in love. You can spare me the details.”

“I’m not sure I have many. I only know what Olivia told me and frankly, that was enough to get Danato and me into a buck fight or two. He was jealous of our friendship, and no matter how many times I vowed my loyalty as a friend to him, he just didn’t like it.”

Cori nodded remembering Belus explain why he was keeping such a distance between them. Danato would have been wounded deeply if he thought Cori was getting too close with Belus.

“Within a few more months they were married. It was against every protocol imaginable, but I didn’t fight letting her out to move in with him. I moved out, into this place, to give them privacy. They lived happily ever after for about a year. They were trying to have children, but it was proving difficult.” Belus paused staring down at the coffee table. When he looked back up his story renewed. “Then the radio arrived.”

17

Cori vaguely remembered Ethan telling her about the radio that helped them discern her from the other transmorphs. What was very memorable was how viciously Belus destroyed the device.

“It’s hard to say if the house created it. It should have been outside of its abilities. Creating music I mean. I still suspect that it was planted by someone, but who and how are so dizzyingly complex that I’ve stopped asking the questions.” He paused possibly thinking over those questions once again. “She didn’t know. She picked it up to move it and it played a delightful song she hadn’t heard in years. She hadn’t heard any music in months, so she was thrilled. She danced and laughed, and when Danato came home and saw the radio, he threw it against the wall, shattering it.”

“But I thought you used it to help me.”

“We did. I was very surprised to see it. To my knowledge the scraps had been thrown into the incinerator. I was most unhappy to see it again. I’ll be furious if it returns a third time.”

“What happened to Olivia?”

“Nothing…so far as we could tell. Life continued as normal. Olivia still couldn’t get pregnant so they did some tests.” Belus frowned. “Everything came back blank.”

“No problems.”

“No, no results. The pap and blood tests showed nothing, they might as well have been testing water. The ultrasound showed up as a blank white image. It was being blocked by something. Olivia denied knowing anything, and at the time I don’t think she did know, which made every decision that much harder.”

Belus stood up and paced for a moment. Cori already knew how this story ended, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be hard to hear the second time. “You couldn’t extract the entity?”

He frowned and shook his head. “By the time we figured it out, it was already entrenched. Removal was not an option and believe me we entertained far more options than we ever thought we would.”

“Couldn’t you have just, left it be?” She waited for him to glare at her, but he didn’t offer anything. He was barely in the room with her at all. “I mean if it wasn’t hurting her. Couldn’t she just be a host or something?”