Page 8 of Family Found

It went for Nokim and he yelped. He was close to me, and I reacted without thought. My blade almost cleaved the thing in half, cutting deep into it behind its shoulder blades. It spilled blue blood, which I knew wasn’t right for Earth. Like ours, Earth creature blood was red, except for a very few and strange exceptions.

The beast fell to the side, and I moved my blade to a ready position after flicking the blood off it, tense and alert.

Nokim jumped back, stumbling and landing on his butt on the ground. Fellisse held out a hand to help him up.

“Good thing the forest floor is soft,” Nokim mumbled.

“Technology?” Lissir asked, staring at the green thing as it bled and spasmed.

The thing’s muscles jerked, and I rammed my blade into the head to end its death throes.

Vergis walked up to the corpse and squatted next to its head. “This… No. This isn’t right.” He pulled his electronic phone device out and did something with it.

While I knew the blood was wrong, the creature itself didn’t strike me as out of place. I knew some Earth fauna, as animals of all kinds were called, but I wasn’t familiar enough at the time to understand that the reptilian head of the beast was too large for anything found in Ireland, that its color was an unnatural shade of green and the wrong texture for something native to Earth. Even if I didn’t understand all of that yet, I saw the wrongness reflected in Vergis’s eyes.

He excused himself to “make a phone call,” and when he returned, we learned some of what had happened on Earth while Aër had experienced the Lagasar. A terrible catastrophe had befallen all humans.

Chapter 5

Inkiri

Vergis’s expression was that of someone who’d been dealt a great shock when he came back, his eyes wide, his pupils wider, and his mouth a thin line.

“They’re all dead.” He spoke in English. He blinked, eyes going to the corpse. “I mean, not all of them are dead, but…the magic did something different here than it did back on Aër. A lot of them died.”

Lissir cocked his head. “I’m not sure I understand correctly.”

“He says all the humans are dead? Or most of them. Vergis, are you joking?”

He looked at me, his mouth working as if he had the words but couldn’t say them out loud. “No, I… This isn’t a joke. It’s like the magic just killed them. I don’t know why, but…there are newscasts about it. Of course, some survived, but no one knows what’s going on and…I don’t understand.”

Fellisse put a hand on his shoulder, clicked, and spoke in soothing, familial Lugarran. “If you need to rest, we can do that. May I ask, is your family well?”

Vergis looked at him. “Oh. Yeah. They’re—” He switched to Lugarra. “Yes. They’re well.”

Lissir came closer to me. “You still feel the mate call?”

“I do.”

He looked at the dead beast. “That’s good, but maybe we should find your mate quickly?”

“Yes.”

I was full of worry then, but I knew my mate was still out there. I thought it would be very easy to find him and make sure he was safe before anything else. At the time, I had no idea how long that would take.

Earth was strange, as I had expected, but the fear in the few people we met made it all the stranger. We offered to help where we could, of course. We were still protectors, whether we were on Aër or not. But more often than not, the survivors just ran when they saw us.

“Most humans are assholes,” Vergis said when that happened. It was something he would remind us of near constantly. “They see horns and blue skin, and they freak out, call you names, or throw shit at you.”

I tried to ignore this particular opinion of his and focus on the mate call, which pulled me, but not like I had expected.

I quickly found myself enormously grateful for the presence of my sentenmen and their willingness to stay and support me, especially since I couldn’t seem to find my mate, at all. I knew he was somewhere close—somewhere in Ireland. It was an island, but still large, and every day that I went out and searched but found nothing, I was all the gladder to come home to my sentenmen.

In between all of that, we did what we could for the humans we met, those who would accept our help.

Whatever had happened on Earth in seemingly the blink of an eye, it had changed everything about that world, everything I had once hoped I would get to see and understand better. The humans called it the apocalypse sometimes. It was not a word that translated well, but it meant loss, in so many ways.

It also meant worry for the mate I only knew was alive because I felt him.