Callie chose that moment to leap gracefully from my lap, padding over to Beck and winding herself in tight circles around his legs.The look on his face told me he wasn’t a fan of feline affection.In fact, he looked like Callie might make a tasty snack.
That thought burned away my remaining patience.Not that Beck would ever dare hurt her.He knew the unspoken rule.Anyone who so much as glanced at Callie in the wrong way would find themselves shuffling on their stomach searching for their arms and legs.
I’d had enough.If I wanted King and Beck to survive the rest of the day, I needed to leave.“Tell it to King,” I snapped, practically leaping off the bed.I snatched my grandmother’s leather journal from the nightstand, scooped Callie off the floor, and charged from the room.
I needed space, desperately.The only place I knew I could find it was one of the pools beneath the citadel.It wasn’t Callie’s favorite spot, but too bad.She was stuck with me for the time being.
My stomach growled, hunger clawing at me, but I ignored it.My hasty retreat wasn’t just about Beck, the motor pool, or the women’s demands.It was everything.Leadership had been thrust upon me the moment I morphed into Beast mode on steroids, aka Nova.
King was supposed to be the leader.The King.Now, that burden sat squarely on my shoulders, and nothing about it came naturally.I did have my moments, but those were when I didn’t think about being in command and simply shouted out orders.The biggest problem I had was overthinking.It drove me crazy.My days were a blur of frustration and mounting tension, and no matter how hard I tried to find my footing, it felt like I was falling further behind.
I trained relentlessly, pouring every ounce of energy into mastering the weapons at our disposal.A few months ago, I hadn’t known the first thing about guns.Now, I could glance at a firearm and rattle off its make, model, and caliber like it was second nature.Each day, I spent hours with a sword in my hands, sharpening skills and perfecting my ability to cause damage.King and Beck drilled me constantly on military strategy, cramming so much information into my head that it felt like it might explode.And yet, despite everything, I still felt inadequate as alpha of the Shadow Warriors.
How long would it take before I started taking this role for granted?How long before I stopped losing sleep over the lives my decisions could destroy?
I carried my grandmother’s journal with me.Deciphering it had been an uphill battle.While the male Warriors’ history had been conveniently translated from the original language of our home planet, the women’s texts had not.Of course, the female Warriors would preserve their connection to their roots through language, but for me, that meant reading this journal was painstakingly slow.If it weren’t for a rudimentary dictionary one of the female Warriors had cobbled together, I’d still be stuck on the first page.
The problem didn’t stop there.My grandmother, Veda, had written in a tiny, shaky scrawl that turned each line into a puzzle.Every single foreign word had to be deciphered and then translated.I’d barely made it a quarter of the way through the third chapter, and most of that progress had been trial and error.
The beginning of her journal recounted the fall of the home planet.Her insight added a layer of vivid detail I hadn’t seen in the male Warriors’ history.The men had glossed over the violence, maybe to make themselves seem less monstrous.But Veda’s account, passed down from her grandmother, didn’t hold back.It was raw, unfiltered, and far more damning.
The male Warriors had been brutal; a vicious species that annihilated everything in their path, including each other.They had killed Veda’s mother shortly after Veda’s birth.I’d known about the wars but reading it through the eyes of a woman whose grandmother had lived through it made the atrocities sit differently.
There was also an underlying unrest in Veda’s words, a subtle but unmistakable tension among the women.It was a stark contrast to Nalista’s account, the only other female Warrior’s text I’d managed to read.Nalista had been a fighter, a Warrior who had fully embraced her nature.Her history reflected that, stoic and almost detached.But Veda’s journal was something else entirely.
I found myself impatient, desperate to understand the woman behind these words, and I did my best to translate and read an hour each night.Veda passed down accounts of the women’s day-to-day life on the home planet and brought her closer to me, turning her from a vague figure into a real person.Maybe, just maybe, I’d finally get the answers I desperately needed.If only the island Warriors and disgruntled human women would give me a few days of peace, I might actually find those answers.
The rooms below the citadel were a maze of storerooms, the medical bays which had grown from one to three, along with our extensive armory.Among these spaces was the aquatic area.Each room featured a different pool, some transformed into tropical rainforests while others had a serene, reflective quality.The pool I headed for was special.It was the one King had brought me to the first day we met.
That day, I’d overheated, through no fault of my own, and lost consciousness.King had carried me to the Olympic-sized lap pool to cool my body down.The memory made me smile despite my current mood.
I set Callie down near the edge of the pool and rubbed the spot between her shoulder blades.It was her favorite, though I doubted King or Beck knew that.I’d never share the secret either.At that moment, I didn’t care if I was acting like a petulant child.I needed a break from the adult world, somewhere I could be a whiny baby if I wanted.
Callie lasted all of sixty seconds before she leaped away, abandoning me in favor of exploring the far corners of the room.Her small body pressed against the wall as she prowled, likely looking for nonexistent prey.Whatever went on in her tiny, furry head was beyond me, but I let her have her space.
I kicked off the Doc Martens, peeled off my socks, and rolled up the cuffs of my stretchy war pants that allowed me to shift without going naked.The cool water felt incredible as I dipped my feet in, and the tension in my body eased slightly.With a sigh, I opened my grandmother’s journal to the last section I had translated.
The words weighed heavy on me as I read.
The women knew what was happening.They saw the complete annihilation coming.The men saw it too, yet they continued their wars, their revenge, their murder.This was the beginning of our end.
The weight of those words hung over me like a dark cloud.I stared at the page, running my fingers over the faint, shaky script.It wasn’t just history.It was a warning.
I lifted my eyes and stared across the still, calm water.Violence had always followed the Shadow Warriors.After their ships landed on Earth, their women abandoned them, a decision that forced the men to finally make the changes needed for their survival.They became farmers, feeding humans instead of warring with them and themselves.Their physical characteristics made it believable: blond hair, blue eyes, and massive builds that gave them the appearance of good, corn-fed farm boys.
The Warriors married human women and began procreating, much like their female counterparts.Males fathered male offspring, and I knew now that females bore females.The males somehow managed to raise their sons to embrace a pacifist way of life, mirroring what the Warrior women had done.For the most part, it worked.But not entirely.
Greystone, King’s uncle, remembered the old ways.He secretly trained an emerging group of young men to fight against the pacifist mentality that had taken hold.King was one of those men.
Then the hellhounds came, and the world as we knew it began to crumble.
Hellhounds.Our name for the monstrosities that looked like hounds dragged straight from hell.Scientists, in their brilliance or madness, genetically modified formaldehyde; more specifically, they altered a protein within it, setting off a chain reaction that created these creatures.They were formed from the bodies of the human dead, melded into four-legged, hunched beasts with poisonous claws capable of tunneling through dirt and razor-sharp teeth dripping with toxic saliva that killed humans without exception.
The hellhounds ravaged the human world, and Greystone and his secretly trained Warriors rose to meet them, rescuing what was left of humanity.
But salvation came at a cost.The new U.S.Federation, which had taken power after the government collapsed, betrayed the Warriors.Their reasoning?The Shadow Warriors were a threat.The Federation wanted them contained, studied, and ultimately controlled for experimentation or some other nefarious reason.It didn’t matter that the Warriors had saved them.The Federation saw only the nine-foot monsters with colossal teeth and claws—beings they believed could not be trusted.
Another war broke out, this time between the Federation and the Warriors.More lives were lost, including Greystone, the Warriors’ leader.When the dust finally settled, a fragile treaty was reached.As part of the deal, the Warriors were granted the island of Cuba.King became their new leader, a role he took on until I barreled into his life and changed everything.
