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“Lorieyn, General, I have seats for you here.” Gesturing toward the table, my mother asked us to sit. “Please. Let’s have some tea.”
Directly across from Dana, who refused to lift her eyes to me, I tried to ignore Johan, his posture oddly indolent and his knees spread wide. Instead, I offered a shy smile to the other elder siblings. “I have been so excited to meet you! Every year, when I would get my birthday letter, I couldn’t wait to hear all about your accomplishments.”
With a scoff, Johan muttered, “The letter Jae was ordered to write?”
Biting back the hiss I wanted to send that horrible man’s way, I set my gaze on my eldest brother. “Gerald, are you still apprenticing at the bakery with our mother?”
Johan rolled his eyes, but Gerald was kind enough to smile back. “Yes, I helped bake your wedding cake. Mom decorated it.”
“I loved it! I never knew cake could be so many colors. We’re not allowed to eat it at the academy.” Leaning forward with a conspiratory smirk, I said, “But I have had a bite or two of chocolate cake over the years. Your kaleidoscope of vorec colors was a fun surprise!”
Proudly, Gerald smiled. “For hybrid rights.”
Johan turned on the teenager, showing teeth. “What rights do they need? They are half animal.”
Verbally abusing my brother set something off inside me I didn't understand. But there was no reigning it in.
Snarling, I leaned forward and put my hideous clawed hands on the table. “Listen here. You have no right to be disrespectful to my brother. I don’t care who you are. Clearly, you have an issue with the fact that this wonderful woman gave birth to me, but you married into my mother’s family, so deal with it. I haven’t seen her in ten years, and you are spoiling a moment I have dreamed of since I was five!”
Trying to smooth things over, my mother's husband put his hands before him, palms up. “Johan, man, come on. Not everyone here agrees with your views. We have an important guest in the house,” he pleaded, gesturing not to me but to the esteemed General Cyderial.
The great arena champion.
With a voice calming and in opposition to my aggression, Cyderial addressed Johan directly. “It's okay, Richard. I would like to hear his point of view regarding hybrids. Please, Johan, share your thoughts with the room.”
The unkind human male was only too happy to comply.
“We have reached a point where humans have an established future on Risa,” he spat, glaring directly at me. “There is no longer a need to corrupt the human genome with prehistoric lizard DNA and give our limited resources to hybrid freaks. Fact is, everyone in this room knows we don’t need to shoulder the expense of maintaining your kind anymore. I fully support the End Date Decree that terminates hybrid life at the age of fifty and imposes a ban on the creation of more lizard abominations! The law will be ratified in a year or two,” he said, smug, nodding as he crossed his arms and leaned back with a smirk. “You have my word on that.”
My back was up, my eyes blazing, but at my side sat a calm, collected, and very dangerous male. With a soft smile just for me, Cyderial shared my accomplishments. “Lorieyn has guarded field workers since she was fifteen. Your resources come from her diligence. Moreover, she has been wounded in the field three hundred and sixteen times but has never lost a single farmhand. She is the only hybrid recruit who can boast such a record. Are you so sure you wish to remove her from her post?”
My unwanted mate defended me to a raging idiot.
Taken aback by how strange it all was, I didn’t know what to say. Not when he spoke of my service as if he was proud of me. The strange bubbling between my hearts led me to wonder if I wanted him to be proud of me. Because it felt really good.
And not just because he was my commanding officer.
There was something positively lovely about his tone when he boasted on my behalf, something that soothed my ruffled feathers and coaxed me to control my breathing.
A strange power he held in that moment to keep me from thrumming, to keep me from crying, to keep me from feeling alone in that room full of relations.
A room that was dead-silent despite his praise.
To my speechless mother, I offered a correction, “The general is exaggerating. I was only in the infirmary a handful of times. We heal so quickly that it’s rarely necessary to seek treatment.”
Cyderial took my hand, placing our joined fingers on the table for all to see. “Not every wound requires surgery or the setting of bones. Vorec are dangerous, and yes, they have sharp claws. Full humans cannot heal from a lacerated abdomen the way you can. You can take twenty strikes, where a single one would leave Johan bleeding out as he tried to stuff his entrails back inside his body.”
Puffing out his chest, if a little pale, Johan boasted, “I have trained in the use of a sword and have killed three vorec.”
Three? That was it? A ten-year-old hybrid would’ve killed at least three. I asked, “All three at the same time?”
“Well… no,” he said, as if my question were absurd.
Seeing how soft he was, how little definition he possessed, I asked, “And you were able to breathe in the fog?”
“Why would I go into the fog when we have high-functioning filters?” Sitting taller, he added, “Every year, we push them out farther. The atmosphere of this planet will be fully converted for human use in a century or two.”
The angry human extremist was delusional. One could not force an entire planet to conform to the whims of a foreign species. Nature would fight back, and a man of his caliber would not make it five feet into the fog.
