“She was addicted?”
“She almost perished. How did you not notice that? How did you not know?”
The scythkin sounds particularly aggrieved by my negligence, and I admit that internally, I am berating myself for my foolishness. I took so many liberties with my human when I had her. I used her for my pleasure, and I fed her for my enjoyment. I did not try very hard to find her alternate sustenance. I wanted her to be my little suckling, my pet human, my kept mate. I wanted her to exist only within the realm of my existence. I wanted her dependence.
“I wasn’t trying to get her hooked. I didn’t know it was addictive to humans. I thought it was just food.” My words fail to express any of my feelings, as is right and proper.
“That’s because you didn’t do any research. When you abduct a human, you have to learn how to properly take care of them.”
I have never, in the course of my entire existence, put up with anything like this. Scythkin are not known for being officious. I don’t even know where they managed to dig up one like this. I don’t like its tone. I don’t like the way it isn’t afraid of me. There is something wrong with it. Something… off.
But I don’t care about this scythkin. I care about getting Ariel back.
“You were an improper human owner, and you barely qualified as a consort. If you wish to take possession of the human again, you will need to prove your commitment. You could have killed her with your carelessness, and yet you strut in here, breaking the furniture and demanding access to a woman who you would have killed in a matter of weeks if she had not been confiscated from you.”
“I know that I failed her. If I ever have her in my arms again, I will not fail her in the same way. Believe me.”
“It would be fun to believe you, but a human life hangs in the balance. I need proof.”
“And how I can prove something to you, scythkin. What would you take as proof?”
“You could tell me how you feel about her.”
“You would take words as proof? What scythkin wants to hear talk and feelings as…”
And then it occurs to me.
I make a dive for the scythkin, who squeals and darts away with a very high pitched cry in a not very scythkin-like way, followed by a thrilled giggle.
“Ariel! Ariel, you get out of that thing now!”
“I don’t want to,” she laughs, her face sharp and ridged and yet suddenly somehow recognizable. “I like being a scythkin.”
“Well, I don’t want to tell a scythkin how much I love her.”
She fiddles about inside herself, and suddenly the scythkin suit is splitting down the middle, and she is emerging. I have missed her face so much, that beautiful visage which has never left my memory. The lower half of her body still looks like a scythkin warrior. She remains inside it, staring at me with tears in her eyes.
“You love me?”
“Of course I love you. I have loved you from the moment I met you. I love every part of you, and I love even more that you appear to have stolen an entire scythkin ship and somehow worked out how to use their technology and constructed a suit and found me and then…”
“Fucked with you? Dude, I did a hard detox on a scythkin vessel. They let me go because I made them.”
“You were such a pain in the ass they gave you this vessel?”
“Well, I threatened to… never mind. I did all of this just to hear that you love me,” she says. “And maybe that’s pathetic, but I had to know. Because I’m not going to be your alien side chick.”
“I can’t imagine you being a side anything,” I tell her. “Come out of that thing and kiss me.”
She does as she is told and sinks into my arms with a soft sigh, her face lifted to mine, her lips presented for the kiss I have been dying to give her from the moment I lost her.
It is long, and it is passionate, and it is gentle and it is tender. It is all the things I wish I had been with her before this point.
“So I got you, huh?” She smiles up at me when we break the kiss. “You really had no idea.”
“I knew there was something going on.”
“No, you didn’t, you idiot,” she laughs.
I will have to teach her respect again. Humans return to a baseline of being wildly disrespectful if they are not being disciplined regularly. Or at least, mine does.
“I still haven’t answered your question,” I say, letting her little jab lie for the moment.
“No, you haven’t.”
“I love you, Ariel. I love you more than anything in the universe.”