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D arax releases a sheet of flame at the nearest Veseli. I can’t believe how many of them there are, especially after the warlords decimated what seemed like an army of the creatures a few seconds earlier.

The entire room is filled with Veseli.

“Wait.” I take hold of his arm, tugging on it. “My friends are here, and so is your brother. If you burn it, you burn them.”

Darax looks over at Dante, who is a green-yellow color from what I can only surmise is the blood of the Veseli.

“Weapon,” he growls.

Dante glares at him for a second before reaching behind his back and pulling a large sword free, tossing it over to Darax, who catches it deftly, spinning it in his hand.

I’m surrounded by giant cockroaches, on a space ship, in the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in, but bloody hell, Darax is hot !

This is the wrong time and the wrong place for such a thought, but I can’t help it. Darax’s nostrils flare, smoke escaping in a long thin tendril.

“Little mate,” he rasps. “If you wanted to find a way to send me into insanity, it is the way you scent in the midst of battle.”

I could apologize, but his eyes are filled with lust and with danger. The one thing which is not happening here and now is Darax descending into madness.

It’s difficult to see how he ever thought this would be true. Not after meeting Deus, a male who if anything, has allowed grief to take over his entire being rather than him losing his mind because of some physical unrequited rut.

Deus wasn’t mad because of his rut but because he lost his mate.

I know the same can’t happen to Darax because I’m here with him.

“Then you’re going to have to prove how much you want me, in order to have me.” I nod at the Veseli hoard.

Darax looks back over at his fellow Sarkarnii. Driok pulls a laser gun from his belt and tosses it to Darax. My huge mate hands it to me reverently.

“Shoot them in the thorax,” he rasps. “And shoot as many times as you need.”

Darax lifts his head and roars. He’s joined by the warlords before, as one, they plunge into the battle.

The first Veseli comes at me. I let rip with the laser gun, and it blows me off my feet, skidding across the floor on my bottom.

“Woah!”

It certainly packs a punch, and my lucky shot has downed the creature, which lies, twitching and steaming.

Hopefully I’ve killed it.

With the rest of the Sarkarnii otherwise engaged, and now I’m armed, I guess it’s probably up to me to find my friends. The Veseli keep coming at the warlords, but they don’t seem as interested in me.

I take a leaf out of a cockroach book and scuttle between the egg structures, calling out for Rosalie.

One or two times, I’m sure I hear her calling back, but each egg looks exactly the same. It’s impossible to tell where the sound is coming from.

“I can hear you, but you’re going to have to do something to identify where you are. Hit the walls or something,” I yell over the noise of bugs splatting.

The Sarkarnii are making progress, despite the number of Veseli.

Two eggs over, I see a wobble in the buff wall. I’m immediately over to it.

“Stand back. I’m going to use the laser gun,” I shout.

But before I can fire, a sword slices past me and through the egg.

“You’d kill every living creature in there,” Dexx growls at me before he strides off into the melee.

I peer inside. Rosalie, Scarlett, Maggie, and Lydia all stare back.

My pounding heart can finally rest.

“Hey.” I give them a nod, folding my arms with the laser gun on display. “How you doin’?” I lift my chin and nod my head.

Rosalie bursts out laughing.

“Better now, you fool.”

I shove the gun in the waistband at my rear and hold out a hand. Rosalie grabs it and I heave her through the hole. Together we pull out the rest of the women who stare around, wide-eyed.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” Lydia says, her voice hardly audible over the battle going on.

“You expected a beach resort or something?” Maggie says.

“I saw something different when we were being brought here, that’s all,” Lydia responds. “More metal, less…” She pokes the papery side of the ruined egg.

Rosalie flings her arms around me. “We thought you’d been eaten,” she says.

“Did you?”

“Not really, but when you didn’t come back, I was so worried.” Rosalie hugs me tightly.

“So, there are a couple of things to note on our magical mystery tour of cockroach central.” I let rip with a couple of bolts to hit a Veseli which is coming in our direction. “One, I have a laser gun now.”

“We noticed,” Maggie says. “It’s cool.”

I nod, cooly.

“Two, the Sarkarnii are here to kill all the Veseli and find Deus, one of their own and Darax’s brother. As well as us.”

“Fair enough.” Scarlett shrugs.

“And three, there’s an evil professor out to get us.”

“A what what ?” Rosalie gives me a concerned look. “Did you hit your head?”

“No, that’s where the Veseli took me. I think he’s controlling them.”

“Another human?”

I shake my head. “He was human-like, but I don’t think he was human. I don’t know what he was. All I know is he had an unhealthy interest in human-sarkarnii relations, and he has somehow been able to raise the Veseli from the dead.”

“Explains why they smell so bad.” Scarlett waves her hand in front of her face.

“And all of this means what?” Rosalie studies my face.

“It means…” I spot another Veseli heading our way, and something else too.

Something I hoped never to see again. The humanoid head and high shoulders of the evil professor.

“We need to run. We need to run, now. ”