Invaders Read online

  He nodded. “I might return when you have had some time to calm down.”

  “You might be waiting a long time,” Navan countered, gesturing toward the hefty door of our so-called bedroom. “So, if you wouldn’t mind, Riley and I would like to be left alone now.”

  Lazar looked instantly uncomfortable, wringing his hands. “I would, but… I haven’t even gotten to the reason why I’m actually here yet,” he whispered. “I am sorry for this, too, though I am certain you will come to understand.” He seemed to be saying that a lot, though I was nowhere near convinced that I would ever be understanding of what they were doing.

  With an awkward grimace, he hurried over to retrieve a briefcase that he had left with one of the guards on the other side of the door. Returning to us, he unclipped the top and plunged his hands inside, bringing out a large needle, the sharp point glinting in the low light of the room.

  Chapter Thirty

  “No way. You can shove that needle where the sun doesn’t shine,” Navan snapped, putting himself between Lazar and me. Undeterred, Lazar kept coming toward us. “I mean it—if you keep this up, I’ll put you through one of these walls.”

  Lazar sighed, as though Navan were a misbehaving schoolkid. “You can either cooperate, or I will have to call for backup. Would you rather I administered this in a calm, civil, quiet manner, or do you want Riley to suffer the indignity of being held down and injected against her will?”

  “You’re not injecting her with anything. I don’t care what it is.”

  “You don’t have a choice, Navan. Ezra and Aurelius want Riley to be injected with this every day, and I have been tasked with ensuring it happens,” Lazar replied. “I won’t disappoint them, so it’s really up to you how this goes down.”

  I peered around the side of Navan’s arm. “Since I’m the one carrying this child you all so desperately need, I have a right to know what you’re injecting into my body!” I growled, feeling my anger rise once more. Today was more of a rollercoaster than I could ever have anticipated. “I mean, for one thing, if you don’t tell me what it is, I’ve got no idea how it might affect the baby. I’m not having you risk its life, even if all you want to do is kill it once it’s born.”

  “You two are determined to make this harder than it has to be,” Lazar muttered, though I could tell he was coming around to my demands. “In truth, you might have been given a slightly skewed version of how much time we have left, before we have to strike against the queens. Believe it or not, Ezra didn’t want to put too much pressure on you, and so he was somewhat flexible with the timeline.”

  “What does that have to do with this?” I asked uneasily.

  “Well, now that you’re pregnant there’s no need to lie anymore. Basically, we need to speed up the birthing process so that the pregnancy will take a matter of weeks instead of the nine-to-twelve months it would normally take, if we were to average out both your species’ gestational periods.”

  I gawped at him, feeling as though I’d just been punched in the gut. Finding out I was pregnant had been confusing and terrifying enough, but this? I couldn’t even imagine the toll it would take on my body, having all those processes sped up artificially. There were enough horror stories surrounding ordinary pregnancy. My skin would stretch, my organs would be shifted out of place, my abdomen would swell, and now Lazar was telling me that all of that was going to be sped up? Frankly, I wasn’t even sure I could survive that kind of bodily trauma. Although, I realized that probably wasn’t important to them. As long as I could hold on long enough for the baby to survive on its own, and they could get the baby out, what did I matter?

  Then, there was the problem of my child being half-coldblood, half-human. Would there be any unexpected differences for me, in the way humans normally gestated? I had a whole list of unanswered questions, which was only getting longer by the moment. I was about to start asking, when Navan took a step away from me, heading for Lazar. From the bitter look on my love’s face, there was violence on his mind.

  “You aren’t touching her with that needle. I’ll fight every guard you bring in here if I have to, but I’m not letting you inject her with that stuff,” he spat. “You want this child, you tell Ezra and Aurelius that they’ll have to wait for it. I’m not putting Riley at any more risk. No way. I don’t care what you do to me.”

  “Lucky for you, Ezra and Aurelius no longer care what happens to you either,” Lazar said coldly. “I tried to barter for an extension on your life, making them agree to spare you in exchange for Riley accepting the injections, but they said that if you didn’t agree, they would rule that you were no longer necessary to the cause.”

  “You’re bluffing. They need me; they said so themselves. A child has to undergo Liberation, freed by the fangs of their father. Otherwise they’ll suffocate to death.”

  “They’re willing to risk it. They already have alchemists working on a tool that can cut straight through the wings themselves, cauterizing the wounds as they go. You have to realize, Navan, they don’t need a half-breed who can fly. The wings aren’t important to them, as long as they can still harvest the blood samples,” he explained, sending a chill of understanding down my spine. Of course they didn’t have to have a fully functioning half-breed child; they just needed one that was alive and healthy enough to be used in the elixir, wings or no wings.

  Navan looked horrified, making me realize how important this Liberation had to be. “You’re not serious. They wouldn’t defy Vysanthean tradition like that!”

  “You forget, in their eyes your child is not a Vysanthean—it is an abomination. It is not entitled to the honors bestowed on a true coldblood.”

  “Is this a trick, to fool us both into agreeing?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat.

  Lazar shook his head slowly. “This is the truth. Ezra and Aurelius are eager to attempt the formula as soon as possible. If they could rip the baby from your stomach and be certain of its survival, I know they wouldn’t hesitate to do it.”

  “They’ll really kill him?” I whispered.

  Lazar nodded.

  Navan and I exchanged a worried look. As changeable as Lazar was in his loyalty, he wasn’t the kind to lie to our faces. If Ezra and Aurelius said they’d kill Navan if he didn’t cooperate, I believed them. It looked like Navan did as well, but he wasn’t about to back down without a bit of persuasion.

  “I’ll take the injection,” I said, stepping past Navan. “If that’s what it takes to keep Navan alive, even for a few weeks more, I’ll do it. I don’t want to have this baby on my own… I can’t.” The last part was purely for Navan’s benefit, my gaze holding his. I didn’t want to argue with him, not when his refusal would mean putting me through this alone. Resignation glittered in his eyes.

  “At least one of you is thinking clearly,” Lazar commended me, coming forward with the syringe. I stared at it, my throat constricting. I didn’t like needles much anyway, but the size of this one was horrifying. It looked like it would pierce right through my arm without any trouble at all, if Lazar wasn’t careful.

  I gulped. “Is it going to hurt?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I was just asking,” I said sullenly, hating every moment. I didn’t want him to administer the injection, but what choice did I have? I was sick of being forced into a corner with nowhere to run.

  He offered a sympathetic glance. “I’m sorry, Riley, I’m under a lot of stress right now. It’s not exactly conducive to good manners. Now, shall we move over to the bed in case you faint?”

  In silence, I moved toward the edge of the bed and sat down, rolling up my sleeve so he could get to the bare flesh of my arm. He seemed almost amused as he looked down at my proffered limb. Navan sat down beside me, fidgeting awkwardly.

  “The needle doesn’t go in your arm.”

  I frowned. “Then where does it go?”

  “I have studied human anatomy as best as possible, using some of the… subjects we had left over from E
arth,” he replied, pointing to the fleshy part above my belly button. “I must insert the needle just above here, and maneuver it around your internal organs, to get it into the most efficient spot. The location will change from day to day, depending on the growth of the baby, but for now this is the prime location. Do not worry, our needles are advanced enough that they cause little to no damage to your human interior.”

  “Okay. Get it over with as quickly as you can.”

  “Please, will you lift your shirt?” Lazar sounded embarrassed, his eyes flitting away as I pulled up the edge of my top, holding it above the place he’d pointed to.

  “Are you sure a medic shouldn’t be doing this?” Navan interjected, making me freeze.

  “I’ve studied the human anatomy in a way these halfwit doctors haven’t. She is far better off in my hands, believe me.”

  My hands were shaking. “Just hurry up!”

  Removing the safety cap from the end of the needle, Lazar placed the tip against my skin. He looked at me for reassurance, before inserting it, moving the impossibly long needle down as far as it would go. The pain was immediate and intense, shivering through me like white-hot electric bolts, combined with the unsettling sensation of someone scratching at my insides. Somehow, he managed to navigate past all my vital organs, moving the needle toward a well at the back of my abdomen.

  A shimmering golden liquid rippled inside the canister of the syringe, waiting to be poured into my body. I tried to focus on it, but the discomfort was too overwhelming. I gripped Navan’s hand, wanting it all to be over. Lazar pushed down on the plunger, and the shimmering liquid disappeared into my body. I could feel a weird, icy sensation where it was collecting, the odd feeling creeping up my spine.

  I held on to Navan’s hand until the needle had made the return journey, scratching at my innards as Lazar removed it. I just hoped it hadn’t nicked anything important on the way out. The last thing anyone wanted was for me to bleed out from an internal hemorrhage before they could get their hands on my baby, though I reasoned it wouldn’t be the worst way to go. Had it not been for my blossoming attachment to the child, I might have welcomed such a thing, choosing to die rather than play by Ezra’s rules.

  Don’t worry, your papa promised he’d protect us, and he’s never let me down yet. I smiled at the thought, allowing it to bring me a dose of much-needed courage.

  “How do you feel?” Navan asked, as Lazar put the enormous needle back in his briefcase.

  I shrugged. “I feel fine.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, a wave of weirdness passed through my body. It felt like the strain of cold muscles after coming in to the warmth of a fire, both shivering and warming at the same time. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine the pathway the golden liquid was taking through me, moving through every limb, making me feel woozy and strange. Brief spasms followed, nipping at my tendons, jolting them with tiny shocks that startled me each time. There was definitely something going on in there. I just didn’t know what. This couldn’t be good for the baby.

  I blinked slowly, my eyes filling with glittery dots. “Actually… maybe I don’t feel so good.”

  “I imagine you’re experiencing a few aftereffects of the serum taking hold, nothing more,” Lazar reassured me. “It’s not uncommon for such things to occur in lesser species; we have seen similar reactions in our preliminary experiments regarding growth serums, though we have not tried it on an actual infant thus far. If you are like those test subjects, I imagine the effects should wear off within an hour or two. I’ll come back at some point to check up on you, make sure you are feeling better. Truly, I am anxious to ensure your health throughout all of this… as are my employers.”

  His words sent me drifting back to Kaido’s laboratory, deep in the belly of the Idrax mansion, where the unwittingly amusing Idrax brother had warned me of the side effects that could come from absorbing Vysanthean botanicals. My mind was wired differently than that of a coldblood, even though we shared similar characteristics. Was that what was in this serum—Vysanthean botanicals? Was that why I felt so strange? Then again, I trusted Kaido. He’d studied the brain chemistry of my human mind in depth—he’d surely have taken the effects into consideration, using botanicals that would boost rather than annihilate me.

  “Riley?”

  I turned to see Navan looking at me weirdly. “What?”

  “You keep muttering things about Kaido. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  I nodded through blurry vision. “I will be. He told me so.”

  “Okay… Please hang in there.”

  For some reason, I saluted. “Will do.”

  “She’ll be fine. I will return later to assess her progress,” Lazar declared. He packed up his things and hurried across the room, out of the blast door of our bedroom.

  “Hey… I wanted to ask him some stuff,” I mumbled, watching Lazar retreat through my bleary eyes. Even with the fog that was settling over my brain, I couldn’t help wondering how the pregnancy process would actually work, given my genetic makeup and that of the baby. Would I start craving blood at some point, to sate the child’s coldblood hunger? What if it was born with wings, like everyone was saying it would be—would there be enough room in my womb for it to grow properly? Or would they have to slice open my stomach to make room? What if it didn’t have wings and it got sick of being in there and it decided to gnaw its way out with its Vysanthean fangs and it tore apart my… Oh, God. I felt sick.

  I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  A week passed by in the blink of an eye, and every day my stomach swelled, to the point where I was now very noticeably pregnant. There was no way of ignoring it, and my feet were becoming a distant memory, half-remembered extremities sticking out somewhere below the rise of my increasing abdomen. Waking up to a stomach that kept getting bigger and bigger was its own type of horror, making me feel like something with gnashing teeth was going to burst out of my skin and kill everyone on board the ship.

  “It’s like this film back home,” I said, trying to explain the joke to Navan for the millionth time. There wasn’t much to do, cooped up in a single room with an ever-increasing belly and a brutal onslaught of other pregnancy symptoms hitting me in rapid succession, so I was trying to get him up to speed on human cult classics. “There’s this creature that’s wormed its way inside this guy. It ends up bursting out of his chest, and nobody expects it, and everyone is screaming, and then this alien goes around dripping acidic goo on everyone. It kills a bunch of them, too. I was just wondering if our little one might do that—take out Ezra and Aurelius before they can do anything to hurt it.”

  Navan stared at me as though I’d just held a puppy at gunpoint. “You think our baby is a monster?”

  I doubled over in hysterics. “No! I’m just saying, I can feel it squirming around in here like that alien did to that guy, and I keep having nightmares that it’s going to burst out. At least if it did that, I’d hope it would take out Ezra and Aurelius too.”

  “Pregnancy is doing weird things to your mind, Riley Idrax.” Navan smirked, though I could see he was still worried I thought our baby was a monster. “How’s the morning sickness today?”

  I’d spent the better part of the week with my head over a basin, heaving up every last drop of whatever had the audacity to cling to my insides. Combined with aching limbs, savage heartburn, food likes and dislikes that could switch at a second’s notice, a longing for the smell of gasoline, and mood swings that would make the bravest of men duck for cover, it had made for an interesting seven days. I was pretty sure Navan was terrified of me now, though he didn’t dare admit it. He just kept saying how well I was doing and how glowing I looked, but I knew he was lying through his teeth. I’d seen my reflection in a mirror. I looked like hell, and that was being complimentary.

  I grimaced, rolling across the bed into a sitting position. “I think it’s eased off for now, but I don’t want to j
inx it.”

  “Cravings?”

  “Good old PB and J. I doubt their little food printer can make it, though. Everything that comes from that crappy machine tastes like plastic.”

  “Lazar said your taste buds might start to change a bit.”

  I glared at him. “It isn’t my taste buds. That machine isn’t as good as Killick’s. It makes everything taste like whatever it was printed from. Speaking of which, what is it printed from?”

  “It’s probably best you don’t know.”

  I was too tired to press him further, and my stomach was way too fragile to discover the truth. It really had been an exhausting few days, my body struggling to accommodate the size of the life growing inside me. I never thought I’d be a teen mom, but the whole experience had been made all the stranger by the sudden realization that I had created, and was responsible for, this very valuable little being.

  In the last couple of days, it had made me pine for Jean and Roger, wondering what they’d make of all of this. I had to wonder what my birthparents would think, too. Weirdly, it made me feel suddenly closer to Sasha, my birthmother. She hadn’t been as young as me when she’d fallen pregnant, but she’d gone through what I was going through, and even though Jean had been the only woman I’d ever truly called Mom, I wanted Sasha to be involved in this, too. I felt her part in my own creation, and by extension my child’s, in some inexplicable, primeval way, strengthening the fibers that bound us, despite our troubled past.

  Wanting Jean or Sasha around for the birth of my child was an impossible idea, knowing where all this exertion was headed. Still, I had all the time in the world to daydream about a better existence, where Navan and I were bringing our child into a safe universe—a place where nobody wanted its blood, and it could grow up happy and loved.