Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan (22 page)

“Keep him safe,” she asked.

Leveche nodded. “You have my word on it,”
he replied, knowing she didn’t mean Ailyn Harmattan.

Chapter Twelve

“Hello, Ailyn.”

Though he had not seen his mother for over
twenty years, he knew who the woman was who came to stand beside the table upon
which he lay strapped. He would have known her by the haughty glint in her cold
brown eyes but it was the triumphant glare in that chilling gaze that held him
spellbound, unable to look away.

“How does it feel to be home?” she asked.

He had recognized the cell into which he’d
been placed. After all, he’d spent close to twenty lonely, miserable years
there.

“You are looking well, Mother,” he said,
his voice weak.

“No thanks to you,” she replied.

“It isn’t one of my fledglings squirming
around inside you?” he asked.

Elspeth Harmattan-Jost ignored his question
and instead reached out to gently tug on the light blanket that covered him from
waist to foot. “Are you warm enough?” she asked.

If anything, he was too warm. The venom was
still lurking in his body but he was no longer ill from the effects. His head
hurt brutally but that was because he hadn’t been given adequate dosages of
either tenerse or Sustenance. He knew they wanted to keep him weak and as
biddable as possible.

“Where’s Jost?” he inquired.

“Dead as a doornail and rotting if there is
any justice in the world,” she told him. “Your brother took care of the good
vice-counselor before we were forced to vacate Riezell.” Her gaze narrowed into
a pinpoint dart of anger. “Thanks to you.”

“Did Felix know you were an Alliance spy?”

His mother made a rude sound with her lips.
“No and that is something else I have you to thank for, Ailyn,” she snapped.
“Is there no end to the trouble you are capable of causing?”

He watched her pace across the room, her
spine as rigidly straight as he had remembered it from the few occasions he’d
spent time with her as a child. Her shoulders were back, her head high, her
posture that of an important woman who expected her every wish to be fulfilled.
She was lovely with wavy brown hair tastefully streak with gray, her tresses
immaculately coiffed. Though she was in her late fifties, she looked ten years
younger now that her illness had been eradicated by the hellion within her.
Since he had not seen her during her battle with the disease, he did not know
the haggard wrinkles that had made her look far older than her years had
smoothed out. All he saw was a youthful glow to her skin with almost
wrinkle-free features.

“Do you find me attractive, Ailyn?” she
asked.

“I said you looked well,” he replied.

She smiled to reveal white, even teeth of
which she had always been proud. “I was told not to expect the revenant worm to
do anything other than cure me of my infirmity but She granted me a
rejuvenation that was a very welcome surprise.”

“Then it was worth the pain of the
Transference and Transition,” he said softly.

“Aye, it was,” she said dreamily. “It was a
price I would gladly pay again for these stunning results.” She ran a hand down
her shapely figure. “You have no idea how terribly I suffered with that
sickness.”

“So what now, Mother?” he asked. “Has Felix
been given a parasite too?”

“Of course not!” she stated. “I would never
allow that and he does not want it anyway.”

“Just the money.”

She gave him a look that answered any
question he might have had. Her full lips spread into a taunting grin. “We
stand to make a fortune off those fledglings of yours,” she said. “Of course
after you sign over your inheritance to Felix, we’ll have even more capital
with which to work. We will be leaving here within the next day or so to
accompany Dr. Cean to her homeworld.”

Ailyn’s black blood ran cold. “Cean is
here?”

“Well of course she is,” his mother replied
with a careless wave of her hand. “Who do you think performed the Transference?
Do you think I would have allowed just anyone to cut open my flesh, Ailyn? I
wanted the best and she was sent to me.”

Despite being secured tightly to the
stainless steel table, Ailyn shuddered. He had not considered Cean returning to
the scene of her crimes and knowing she was nearby—her cold, scaly hands where
they could touch him—sent tremors of fear down his spine.

His mother did not notice the pallor that
had overtaken his face. She began telling him that Cean and she would be
setting up shop on Cean’s homeworld of Chiaroscuro where they would begin a
full-scale hatchery.

“Hatchery?” he repeated, the word sending
ice through his veins.

“We plan on creating what Perse calls
balgairs
,”
his mother said.

“Reaper rogues,” he said. The thought of
hundreds—if not thousands—of Reapers being created by Cean and her assistants
made him sick.

“Don’t worry, Ailyn. We have plans that
reach far past this part of the megaverse,” she said, her eyes glowing with
reddish sparks. “We plan to take our
balgairs
to Terra where we will
become rulers of our kingdom.”

That was worse yet, he thought, staring
with horror at her. The innocents of Terra had no idea what would be heading
their way and they had no way to protect themselves against the threat. His
mother and Cean had to be stopped at any cost but at the moment he was in no
position to help humankind.

“Where do I fit into your plans?” he asked.

She looked surprised at his question.
“You?” she questioned. “What possible purpose could you serve after we’ve
harvested as many fledglings as we need to begin?” She shook her head. “No,
Ailyn. You will remain here.”

“Alone,” he said, unable to keep the hurt
and hopelessness from his voice.

“Well, yes,” she answered. “Though we will
leave you sufficient tenerse and Sustenance to last until you are rescued.”

He doubted that since they’d given him
precious little of either since this whole ordeal had begun but made no comment
to her words.

“I believe there will be one more
harvesting later today,” she said, and came back to stand at the table. “After
that, I’m afraid we won’t be seeing one another again.”

“
C’est la vie
,” he said in Francach.

She bent over him and placed a dry-as-dust
kiss on his temple. “Cean will be in to see you in a moment. She tells me you
were her favorite Reaper.”

Ailyn’s heart squeezed painfully in his
chest and his scrotum contracted with that news. He remembered all too well
those ice-cold hands of the scientist on him and knowing she would touch him
again and—as it had been before—he could do nothing about it—brought bile to
his throat.

He watched her leave the room and shut the
heavy portal behind her. There were no feelings left for the woman who had
given him life. Those feelings had long ago died. He doubted there ever had
been any for him on her part. But still, she was his mother. He ached for the
love and the relationship that should have been yet never would be. When the
door opened again and his living, walking nightmare entered, he had to force
himself not to scream.

* * * * *

“She is in with him now,” Elspeth told her
younger son. “Are the beakers being loaded on the ship?”

“Did you not give me that job to do,
Mother?” Felix inquired.

Elspeth frowned at him. “Have you prepared
your brother’s Sustenance?”

Felix smiled. “There are two weeks’ worth
of it stored in the main lab’s refrigeration unit. If Command Central takes
longer than that to find him, he’ll Transition and stay that way until they do
find him.” He shrugged. “Of course without tenerse he might well be a raving
beast by the time they think to look here for him.”

“Aye, well, that’s better than him dying, I
suppose,” she said absently.

“What do you care?” Felix asked.

She gave him a withering look. “I may not
like him but he is still of my flesh and blood, Felix Andres. Do not be
insolent.”

“Forgive me, Mother,” he said. “I meant no
disrespect.”

“I know,” she said. “You are a good son.”

“Better than Ailyn ever was,” he said.

She nodded. “Too true.”

“Will he sign the inheritance over to me?”
Felix asked. “Will I be duke of Kentsington now?”

“I imagine when Cean is finished with him,
your brother will have signed whatever she puts before him,” she answered. “And
aye, you will be the new duke when he abdicates.”

* * * * *

Perse Cean’s black-as-pitch pupils seemed
larger than he remembered as she stood staring down at him. Two of her larger
cybot constructs had accompanied her into his cell and they had unshackled him
and turned him over so he lay spread-eagled on the cold steel table, the thin
blanket removed so he lay naked before the scientist.

“You have always been such a magnificent
specimen, Ailyn,” Cean said. Her large teardrop-shaped head tilted to one side
as she observed him. “I believe your muscle tone is even better now than it was
when I left you.”

He could not stop the whimper from escaping
as she laid her warty hand upon his chest. The sharp scales on her slender palm
disgusted him as it dragged over his flesh, the barbs on the scales sending
shivers down his sides.

“It is at times such as these that I miss
having a sheath into which I could place your staff.” She slid her hand over
his abdomen—leaving shallow bloody furrows where her scales passed—to wrap her
fingers around his cock. “It is unfortunate Acklard didn’t come with us this
trip. He will miss out on this.”

Ailyn knew it would do him no good to beg
her. He knew she expected it, wanted it,
craved
it, so he clamped his
lips shut and tried not to look at her sharply pointed face, her slit of a
mouth, the dagger-like teeth that hid within the red pulp of her mouth.

“You know what I want, Ailyn,” she said,
and her prickly fingers began moving upon his flesh.

He dug his fingernails brutally into his
palms until black blood began to ooze from the half-moon cuts. His body was
tense—as taut as a bowstring—as she maneuvered his flesh, and not for the first
time. Many times he had endured her loathsome touch as she milked him of his
sperm, sperm she needed to help make her new generation of
balgairs
.

“I had to leave all those delightful little
gametes behind when I fled the facility,” she cooed to him as she increased the
rhythm of her grip. “Now I can get them back and take them with me where they
will be lovingly cared for until they are used on Chiaroscuro.”

Tears were creeping from the corners of his
eyes and easing down his temples as he tried to keep his treacherous body from
reacting to her masturbation.

One of her cybots was standing across from
her, a beaker in its metal hand as Cean manipulated Ailyn’s cock. Its faceless
head was lowered over him, its long, thick digits curled around the beaker.

“Release your sperm, Ailyn,” Cean said in
her soft, alien voice that sounded like one long velvet hiss. “Let me have your
progeny.”

Though he tried so hard he was trembling
with the force of it, he could not keep his body from betraying him. Sweat
broke out all over him, his shaft leapt and spurted then he cried out, mortally
ashamed—as he always was—by the evil thing she did to him. He could feel his
blood mixing with the cum slick from his cock where her barbed flesh had burred
into him.

“That’s my sweet little Reaper,” she said
as the cybot stepped back with the beaker. She took her hand away. “You’ve
known a human cunt, haven’t you, my dear one?”

His hands were clenched as tight as he
could squeeze them and blood pooled around them. He had turned his face away
from her but she reached out and took his chin, forcing his eyes back to hers.

“Now, unless you wish for me to turn the
’bot loose on you, you will sign the papers your mother wants you to.” She
increased her hold on his chin. “Do you understand me, Ailyn?”

Mortal fear raged through him at what she
had trained her ’bots to do to him. “Aye,” he said.

“Unclench your hands,” she said. When he
didn’t immediately obey, she leaned over him, her dark, pupiless eyes
merciless. “Unclench your hands, Ailyn!”

He slowly relaxed his grip and the paper
and pen appeared out of thin air. His right hand was unshackled and the paper
held for him to scrawl his signature across the bottom.

“That’s a good boy. You know better than to
clench your hands,” Cean said. “Now give me the password.”

Ailyn almost smiled. He could give her the
true password but he had no intention of doing that. He gave her the one that
would ensure the account could never be accessed. By using it, the bankers on
an
Éilvéiseach
would seal the account forever. “Portcullis,” he whispered.

Cean smiled. “Good. That’s all we need from
you, Ailyn. Now, let me tell you what you will need to know to survive until
you are found…”