“I love you,” Reza whispered as stumbled toward a hole in the wall, a doorway to the Hell that lay beyond.
“I love you, too, baby,” Camilla choked.
As her only son crawled through the hole to the street beyond, Camilla turned her attention back to the waiting Kreelan. “All right, you bitch,” she sneered, her upper lip curled like a wolf’s, exposing the teeth that had once illuminated a smile that had been a young man’s enchantment, the man who later became her husband. But there was no trace of that smile now. “It’s time for you to die.” The blade of her knife glinted in the fiery glow that lit the horizon of the burning city.
Together, husband and wife moved toward their enemy.
Reza stumbled and fell to the ground when the blast lit up the night behind him. The knoll of debris that had been his parents’ stronghold vanished in a fiery ball of flame and splinters, with smoke mushrooming up into the night sky like the glowing pillar of a funeral pyre.
“Mama!” he screamed. “Papa!”
But only the flames answered, crackling as they consumed the building’s remains with a boundless hunger.
Reza lay there, watching his world burn away to ashes. A final tear coursed its way down his face in a lonely journey, its wet track reflecting the brilliant flames. Alone now, fearful of the terrors that stalked the night, he curled up beneath a tangle of timbers and bricks, watching the flames dance to music only the fire itself could hear.
“Goodbye, Mama and Papa,” he whispered before succumbing to the wracking sobs that had been standing by like friends in mourning.
Not far away, another lone figure stood watching those same flames through alien eyes. The priestess’s heart raced with the energy that surged through her body, her blood singing the chorus of battle that had been the heart and spirit of her people for countless generations.
The two humans had fought well, she granted, feeling a twinge of what might have been sorrow at their deaths. It was so rare that she found opponents worthy of her mettle. The humans would never know it, but they had come closer to killing her than any others had come in many cycles. Had she not heard the click made by the grenade, set off by the mortally stricken male while the female held her attention, she might have joined them in the fire that now devoured their frail bodies. Some of her hair, her precious raven hair, had been scorched by the blast as she leaped through the wall to safety.
What a pity, she thought, that animals with such instincts did not possess souls. Such creatures could certainly be taught how to make themselves more than moving targets for her to toy with, but her heart ached to give something more to her Empress.
Standing there, nauseated by the acrid stench of the burning plasticrete around her, she heaved a mournful sigh before turning back toward where the young ones lay resting. Her time here was terribly short, but a single moon cycle of the Homeworld, and she had yet much to see, much on which she would report to the Empress.
She had just started back when she heard a peculiar sound, an unsteady pulse under the current of the winds that carried the embers of the fire. It came at once from one direction, then from another as the fickle winds sought new paths over the dying city. She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind, her spirit flowing from her body to become one with the scorched earth and smoldering sky, using senses that went well beyond any her body could provide.
The child.
She hesitated, tempted simply to let it go, to die on its own while she returned to the young warriors who awaited her. But she found herself overcome with curiosity, for she had only seen their children in death. Never had she seen a live one. She debated for a moment what she should do, but in the end her curiosity demanded satisfaction. To blunt the pup’s whimpering misery with death would be an indulgent, if unchallenging, act.
Reza blinked. Had he fallen asleep? He rubbed his eyes with grimy fists. His cheeks were caked with a mortar of tears and masonry dust. He glanced around, unable to see much in the dim glow that filtered into his hideout. Not really wanting to, but unable to help himself, he looked toward where his parents had died.
He sucked in his breath in surprise. A shadow blocked the entrance to his tiny hideaway. With arms and legs that felt weak as stalks of thin grass, he crawled forward a bit to see better.
“Mama?” he whispered cautiously, his young mind hoping that perhaps all had not been lost. “Papa?” he said a little louder, his voice barely rising above the wind that had begun to howl outside.
The figure stood immobile, but for one thing. Extending one arm, the fingers slowly, rhythmically curled back one by one in a gesture he had long been taught meant come, come to me.
His teeth chattering with fear and anticipation, he gripped his father’s knife, his fingers barely long enough to close around the handle. He crawled forward toward the gesturing apparition, still unsure if it was a man or woman, or perhaps something else. He was terrified, but he had to know.
Coming to the last barrier of fallen timbers that formed the doorway to his hideaway, Reza gathered his courage. He fixed his eyes on the shadow hand that continued to call him, mesmerizing him with the thought that help had arrived and that his parents might yet be saved. Placing his empty hand on the bottom-most timber, the other clutching the knife by his side, he poked his head out the hole.
The shape seemed to shimmer and change in the light. It moved with such speed that Reza’s eyes only registered a dark streak before an iron hand clamped around his neck and plucked him from the hole with a force that nearly snapped his spine. He cried out in pain and fear, never noticing the warm flood that coursed down his legs as his bladder emptied.
His cries and struggling ended when he found the cat-like eyes of the Kreelan warrior a mere hand’s breadth from his own. Her lips parted to reveal the ivory fangs that adorned the upper and lower jaws.
For a moment, the two simply stared at one other, Reza’s feet dangling nearly a meter from the ground as the Kreelan held him. Her grip, strong enough to pop his head like a grape with a gentle squeeze, was restrained to a force that barely allowed him to breathe. His pulse hammered in his ears as his heart fought to push blood through the constricted carotid arteries to his brain. Spots began to appear in his vision, as if he were looking at the Kreelan through a curtain of shimmering stars.
Then the alien closed her mouth, hiding away the terrible fangs. Her lips formed a proud, forceful line on her face, and Reza felt the hand around his tiny neck begin to contract with a strength that seemed to him as powerful as anything in the Universe.
As his lungs strained for their last breath through his constricted windpipe, a voice in his brain began to shout something. The words were repeated again and again, like a maniacal litany, the rhythm surging through his darkening brain. As his body’s oxygen reserves dwindled and his vision dimmed, he finally understood.
The knife!
With a strength born of desperation, he thrust the knife straight at the Kreelan’s face.
Suddenly she released him, and he fell to the ground. His feet crashed into the brick rubble over which he had been suspended, his legs crumpling like flimsy paper rods. Stunned, he fought to get air back into his lungs, his chest heaving rapidly. His vision returned at an agonizingly slow pace through the fireworks dancing on his retinas. He groped about, desperately trying to get away from the alien warrior.
His hand smacked into something, and he knew instantly what it was. He had felt it before. It was the Kreelan’s leg. He looked up in time to see her kneel next to him, her mountainous form overshadowing the world in his frightened eyes. He tried to push himself away, to roll down into the flat part of the street where he might be able to run, but a massive clawed hand grasped him by the shoulder, the tips of her talons just pricking his skin.