Page 71 of Alien Prince’s Fake Bride (The Tentacle Throne #1)

- Umbra -

The blade hovers over my palm, and I know this is going to hurt a great deal. I clench my jaw and focus on her hand, wanting it gone .

“Oh!” Juriniel exclaims as if amused. “You’re trying to stop me. Shall we see who’s stronger, my hand or your Syntrix?”

The blade touches my skin, one sharp corner slowly piercing it. The pain is excruciating.

“Stop it!” I try the Syntrix again, but it doesn’t help to push the blade away.

Juriniel holds me in a grip so firm that it doesn’t feel natural. No skinny woman should have muscles that strong.

“No, I don’t think I will stop,” she purrs. “Because?—”

The whole ship shakes as if it crashed into something. Juriniel loses her balance and lets go of me. I immediately go for the knife gun, diving into the bush.

A thin alarm starts wailing, and the world spins around me. I reach for the knife and grab it, but when I try to get back up, it works too easily. One push at the floor sends me spinning into the air. The gravity is gone.

I replace the knife in its sheath as I try to get my bearings. A lot of debris from the ground and the soil that the plants grow from starts drifting around in the room. Juriniel is floating too, drifting away, but her icy gaze is focused on me.

I ignore the pain in my arm and throat. This could actually work out for me, if I can only escape from the Empress.

But there’s not much I can do right now — I’m floating towards the hot light panels in the ceiling, slowly drifting upwards.

But they’re still a long way away, and the ceiling is high above me.

The door bursts open and Vyrpy aliens silently flow inside, looking like they want to fight.

The Empress screeches something, and the aliens start climbing up the walls like huge flies.

I can’t do anything but ignore them. I’m slowly rotating in the air, but I have played in weightlessness enough to be able to turn and get ready for the impact with the ceiling.

Although there’s a good chance the Vyrpy get there first. They’re carrying long, nasty-looking spears that I remember from their ambush by the escape pods in the Gladiux.

They are like cattle prods, except much more deadly.

They’re obviously coming for me, but now that I have the knife gun, I can at least take some of them with me.

And I think one of them will be the Empress.

Her feet touch the top of a sapling, starting her slowly drifting towards me.

Her face is expressionless and her eyes as cold as a winter night on Pluto.

She’s far more alien and deadly than any other Khavgren.

And Nerox did say ‘the Empress is dead’.

Did he mean that she’d lost her mind, and that the woman she used to be is dead in a figurative sense?

Her very presence sends cold shivers down my spine. I want her gone. And as I think that thought, it’s as if she gets a push away from me.

Ah. The Syntrix. I do it again, really wishing the Empress was far away from me. She shrieks with fury as she gets another push.

But I don’t get a push in the opposite direction.

It takes my brain a little while to process it.

That’s the main problem with being weightless — when you try to push something away, you get the same push in the opposite direction, unless you can stem your legs or arms against something.

But using Syntrix, it doesn’t seem to happen.

I can push with my mind, but my body doesn’t get a push the other way.

“I guess the Syntrix doesn’t obey the laws of nature,” I mutter as I push off the ceiling in the same way, stopping my slow upwards drift and now floating still in the middle of the greenhouse, for a moment safe from the Vyrpy spears. “That’s a game changer.”

The crackle in the Syntrix is still there, and it takes effort to push through the resistance. But if it comes from Juriniel, she isn't making it as unpleasant as before.

Probably because she’s busy trying to regain control but helplessly drifting down to the floor, crashing into a bush with her back first.

At the same time, the door opens and big Khavgren legionnaires in armor come flying in, roaring deafening battle cries.

I recognize one of them, and a bright warmth fills me. But I’m alarmed that he’s not wearing armor.

“Mareliux! Up here!”

The prince spots me. I can feel his surprise as a jolt through the Syntrix. He’s on the verge of kicking off the floor so he can come up to me. But if he does and holds onto me, that will mean that we’ll both drift upwards to the waiting Vyrpy on the ceiling. So he checks himself.

“Stay there, my love!”

His words make my mind light up more. He came for me!

A fierce fight immediately erupts between the Khavgrens and the Vyrpy.

Swords clang against spears, electric charges discharge with little bolts of lightning and sparks fly as sharp spears hit shields.

The Empress screeches orders from somewhere below me.

All the Vyrpy are going for Mareliux, which is not a mystery.

He’s basically why all this is happening.

The Empress has managed to hide herself in the dense greenery of this botanical garden in space, and I only have a vague idea of where she is. But she’s close — the Syntrix is dirty with her static.

The greenhouse is getting to be a really unpleasant place to be. In this weightlessness, drops of blood and other fluids don’t drop to the floor — they drift around in the air, creating a cold, sickening mist, mixed with the dirt the plants grow from.

The Khavgrens are noisy and ferocious, but the battle isn’t going their way.

The Vyrpy not only move better in zero gravity, they even seem to enjoy it.

Their moves have an easy quickness to them, while the Khavgrens are slower and more clumsy.

Many of them are starting to drift around helplessly in the air, while the Vyrpy easily stay at the walls and ceiling and ground.

The way they move effortlessly in the air reminds me of fish in the ocean.

I’m not surprised that they turned the gravity off in this ship when they realized Mareliux was going to board them.

They have the advantage, that much is clear.

And they do seem to be winning. The Khavgrens have been pushed apart, each one having to defend himself against attack from many sides instead of having the help of his friends.

Two Vyrpy coil up, kick off with powerful legs, and then shoot down from the ceiling, moving so fast they’re just like streaks.

Like living harpoons they hit one Khavgren warrior each, their long spears discharging their energy as they touch their armor or skin.

One of them is cut down, but the other swings his spear around and kills the legionnaire with a hard zap .

More Vyrpy shoot down from the ceiling like deadly rain, and I do my best to push them off course with the Syntrix, throwing a wrench into their plans.

I’m able to ruin the aim for two of them, but the others move so fast, and there’s so many of them, that there simply isn’t time for me to deflect them all when the Syntrix is so full of unpleasant, crackling static.

In the ear-rending chaos, I suddenly notice that four Vyrpy are coming straight for me, two from the ceiling and two from the floor, a deadly X with me in the middle of it.

They move so fast I only manage to deflect one of them before the three others have grabbed my arms and legs and are holding me in iron grips.

“Mareliux!” I yell, although I don’t think there’s much he can do about this. He’s completely swamped in attacking Vyrpy., who are all trying to get at him.

I kick and writhe, but the aliens are so much stronger that it’s a waste of effort.

They drag me to the fake windows on the ceiling.

Those are searing hot, but the aliens don’t put me down there.

They drag me quickly along to the other end of the big hall, then down the wall on the far side until we’re on the ground, surrounded by dense foliage of alien plants.

That’s where the Empress has crawled to, standing in the middle of tall, slender saplings with branches like vines, long and thin and always in movement despite the lack of a breeze.

“Finally some peace and quiet,” Juriniel says, despite the still deafening cacophony from the battle in the room. “We’re not quite done, you and I.” Her robes are in disarray and there’s dirt and green spots on her, as if she crawled through a jungle.

I yank my arms and legs, but the Vyrpy’s clawed hands are like steel. “Oh, you’re done, ” I seethe in English. “Absolutely done. Believe me.”

One of the saplings reaches out a thin vine that curls around a Vyrpy’s gray arm.

The Vyrpy tries to push it away, but the vine suddenly tightens so hard the Vyrpy screeches in pain.

His friends try to cut off the vine, but other vines shoot out and attack them, too.

Now, dozens of vines come shooting, curling around the Vyrpy and lifting them off the ground, easily done in the weightlessness.

They keep screeching as they’re lifted and tossed around by vines that they can’t seem to cut.

The Empress chuckles. One gloved hand shoots out and grabs my upper arm just as the last Vyrpy lets go to fight the vines.

“Don’t worry,” she says with a shrill voice. “That plant is one of my better ones. It won’t let go of them. They’re food to it. It will suck them dry. Perhaps you’d like to find out what it’s like?”

But now I’m finally able to get hold of the knife gun again. I aim it squarely at the Empress’s face. “Let me go,” I demand in Khavgrese. Despite what she’s done to me, I can’t just shoot Mareliux’s mother, the way I should.

She doesn’t even blink. “Ah, you didn’t like that? Well, don’t worry. I have something else in mind for you.”

A deep roar echoes from all the walls of the room. “Umbra! Where are you?”

I feel it in my mind, too. My Syntrix ring shines, lighting up the greenery. “I’m here!” I reply as loudly as I can. “The Empress!”

There’s too many plants in the way for me to see the other side of the room, where the battle is mostly taking place. But it sounds as if it’s coming closer.

The Vyrpy who were taken by the trees have gone still, and they’re now hanging limply from the vines, so engulfed and rolled up in them that they look like green pods and not like Vyrpy at all.

The Empress has a good grip on my arm, but now I have a knife. I put the edge at her bony knuckles. “Take your hand off me or lose it.”

She’s staring up at the Vyrpy in their vines. “I’ve never seen that happen with anyone as strong as them. I have misjudged this plant! Oh, it’s so aggressive, isn’t it? Lovely!”

Losing patience with this lunatic, I apply pressure to the knife. It cuts into one of the Empress’s fingers. No blood comes out. It feels like cutting into wood.

She doesn’t flinch. “But of course there are so many lovely plants here. And one in particular I have never seen work the way it’s meant to.

But you will be a fine test of it.” She turns to look at me, not even noticing my knife.

“I have one here. You saw it already.” With her free hand, she holds up the small, silvery leaf from before.

“Let me go!” I demand, hacking at her hand with the sharp knife. But it has no effect — it goes through the skin, but it’s as if everything under it is all dry and hard. I have seen Mareliux bleed from injuries, so I know Khavgrens work in the usual way. But this Empress sure doesn’t.

She turns her icy gaze on me. “I have never seen this work properly. Only in dead objects and smaller specimens. It will kill you by… oh, but I don’t want to ruin the surprise. You will be astonished. And maybe you will just have time to appreciate the cruelty of what it does.”

I give her hand another hack with the knife, but her grip stays as iron hard as before. And it’s slowly tightening, so that I start to worry about those blades again. “You won’t get away!”

“I think I will,” the Empress says. “Mareliux is losing the battle. I could leave now and be sure the Vyrpy will kill him and you, which if of course the whole point of this. But I don’t want my servants to have all the fun.

This turned out to be just as good a way to get rid of you both as the plan I had before.

I just needed you away from Khav. A Vyrpy attack would lure Mareliux away, I knew that.

And my Caladanians were supposed to kill you.

But I knew immediately that they had failed.

Your Syntrix was still there, so clean and pure and painful.

So I came up here to deal with you both on my own turf. ”

I groan in pain as the blades on her fingertips dig into my arm again.

“But you’re losing the battle,” I tell her as I ram the knife into her wrist as hard as I can. Again there’s no blood, and the knife only goes in a quarter inch before it’s stopped by something hard.

Juriniel ignores what I said and shows me the silver leaf. It’s the size of a coin, and it looks perfectly innocent. “Now eat this.”

I writhe and kick, and I hit her with each one. But it’s as if she doesn’t care or even notice.

She pushes the leaf closer, forcing me to take action.

Aiming at where her heart should be, I push the knife gun’s trigger button. It gives off a flat bang and jumps in my hand.