Page 21 of His to Take

11

“What do you mean,you’re all servants?” John asked later that evening, the Wolfson family now in the grand living room with the Adamses.

“We’re basically slaves, John,” Stephan said, his eyes down on the tiled floor. “Wolves are seen as damaged goods. Our DNA is not to mingle with non-wolves. If we try to marry, mate with, or create a child with a human, for lack of a better term, we’ll be sent to a firing squad.”

Ann looked over the Wolfson family. They didn’t look as clean as the Adamses did, their arms still had fine hair on them, which meant they hadn’t had that laser treatment thing, and they still had that hunted look to them that the entire group had the last week before they were captured. She didn’t like this one bit.

“But you’re no different to us, you just…” Her words failed, and she awkwardly came to a stop. She thought harder for a moment and carried on, “it’s not like you’re killers, or felons, you haven’t committed a crime!”

“Oh no, and it’s a good thing your dad dragged us down to that hellhole of his too. All wolves that have killed humans, no matter if they were in their wolf form, especially if they were in their wolf form, are put to death immediately. They have some kind of brain scanner that finds out what you’ve done. I didn’t understand it, but it worked. There was a group in with us, that told us all about what they’d done while the world was ice.” Rex shuddered to a stop.

“They’d become cannibals,” Amanda said softly. “And seemed very proud of it, too.”

The Adamses all stared at her before she carried on. “I don’t like it, Stephan doesn’t like it, but we have to do what we have to do. Rex, you’ll get used to it, I hope.” She touched her son’s hand, but he pulled away.

“I don’t want to be anybody’s servant. Especially that shit, mowing grass in this heat.” Rex looked as if he might spit on the floor, but then sat back.

“So, you were assigned to us?” Mary asked. The Wolfsons all nodded, and Mary did the same. “Good, at least we’ll treat you like family. John, can’t you do something about this?”

Her father had been at the writing desk in the corner, his gaze concentrated on the file he’d been given. “No, it doesn’t seem so.”

He looked up, his eyes tired and red, before he came to sit with Ann and Mary on the couch.

“The overlords, as they keep calling themselves, have declared you’re all servants. It doesn’t matter if you killed or not, you’re all considered, well,” her father paused and swallowed before he continued, “well, subhuman.”

“I am not!” Rex shot up from his seat. “I was the captain of the softball team, and on my way to being captain on the football team. I was not some…”

“Shut up, Rex.” Stephan yanked his son back down to the couch as if he was still a child and not a full-grown man.

Ann looked away, embarrassed. But she wasn’t sure if her embarrassment was for Rex, or what his father had done. A prickle of doubt edged at her love for Rex, and memories tried to come back. She stood up and paced over to the glass wall to stare out at the ocean in the distance. It was clear and as blue as pictures she’d seen of the Bahamas long ago. It hadn’t been that way before.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m still going to marry you, Rex. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Uh, you can’t sweetheart,” John said from his side of the couch. “It’s forbidden, remember?”

“Then we just won’t tell them, right, Rex?” She looked at him, but he wouldn’t look at her. She frowned, why wouldn’t he look at her?

Okay, so he’d never actually said he wanted to marry her. That wasn’t a problem, though, was it? He hadn’t said he didn’t want to marry her either, so she was running with the assumption that he would and did want to marry her. “Rex?”

“Whatever, Ann. I’m going back to our quarters.” Rex left the room without another word. Ann stared after him, but she didn’t protest. The way he’d said quarters had silenced her. They were really servants, with their own living area. Quarters, as he’d said.

“I’m sorry, Ann. Rex is taking this hard,” Amanda said, her face sympathetic.

“Oh, of course! I don’t blame him, at all. It’s not like you have a choice in this. It’s a new world, I don’t understand why we have to have these kinds of prejudices still.” She inhaled deeply and let it out. “Well, if we can’t marry, we’ll just have to do the best we can. Maybe we can have a party of some kind…”

“Ann, I don’t think you’re thinking this through,” Stephan started but Ann shook her head.

“I am. We can’t have babies, we can’t get married, fine. I’ll live here, and he can live with you all, and we won’t have babies. That doesn’t mean we can’t still be together.”

“It does, Ann,” her father said with a heavy sigh. “But I know saying no will only make things worse, so do what you feel is right.”

“I will.” She lifted her chin, proud of the way she had stood up for herself and Rex. “They can’t control every moment of our days. I won’t let them.”

* * *

Ann learned how true those words were over the next month. They saw very little of the alien invaders, their overlords, over the days that passed. One delivered some sort of hovercraft to Ann’s father as transport. The vehicles left on Earth consumed far too much fuel, inefficiently, and only a few were ever used. Those were being phased out as workers built more of the transporters the aliens used.

It was little more than a circular bottom, with a glass top that came down, something straight up out of the old Jetsons cartoons she’d watched with her dad when she was a kid. It didn’t make the noise that the crafts did in the cartoon, it was almost too quiet, in fact. A lever controlled which direction the craft moved in, and Ann soon learned to drive it as she squired her father around town.