Page 45 of Doom

Eyes wide, mouth gaping from shock, Fury was staring at a female with dark brown hair, but whose face I couldn’t see from this angle. He swallowed painfully and an air of wonder settled on his features. With a shaky hand, he caressed the cheek of the female and gave her a reassuring smile.

“Do not be afraid. I have found you,” Fury said, his voice filled with emotion. “You are safe now. I will never let any harm come to you.”

“Your soulmate!”I mind-spoke to him, understanding dawning on me as he swallowed hard again, his mating glands no doubt swelling uncomfortably.

“I could have lost her. Had our unit not split up when it did, we’d have gotten here too late. And had those ravens not alerted us, I would have lost her forever not even realizing she had been so close,”Fury said, still reeling from shock.

“But they did warn us, and you didn’t lose her,”I said in an appeasing tone. “I am so happy for you, my brother.”

And yet, even as I spoke those words and watched him tenderly gather the female in his arms, my hearts ached for my other brothers. Like him, I could have lost my Victoria had Legion not decided at the last minute that we would start fighting north of the city instead of south as we’d initially planned. She would have been long gone, on her way to the General’s breeding ships, like her former colleagues still in their fertile years that we’d never found. How many other soulmates had been forever lost, whether abducted or killed?

But now was not the time to mourn what couldn’t be undone assuming it had even occurred. Another of my brothers had found his mate. Now was a time for celebration.

Epilogue

Victoria

In the end, despite all the hounding by the Warriors, I had a textbook pregnancy. When my waters broke, the panic that seized the entire mothership couldn’t have been worse than if someone had announced Earth had been nuked. After the Alamogordo events, Doom and I decided to name our baby Raven. He entered the world through natural birth with a powerful cry. With both his hearts beating strong, his oversized black eyes shining with curiosity, and his golden scales gleaming with health, our son was the perfect Xian Warrior.

Less than four months after Raven’s birth, the Battle for Earth officially ended with the eradication of the last Drone. Decades of reconstruction and healing awaited my fellow humans. But they would embark upon this journey more unified as a species than ever before in our history.

While most of the Warriors decided to return home to Khepri, a few of Doom’s brothers remained on Earth, mainly to help set up and supervise the Psychic Training Program. With my family’s blessing, I settled with Doom and our child on Khepri where I worked as both a doctor for the human girls, and medical researcher for the Vanguard.

Despite my utter happiness with Doom, things weren’t always perfect. Back on Earth, I’d found his absences difficult over a few days while he battled on the front. But now, with the great distance of space between the various planets and solar systems the Vanguard had to defend, my husband was sometimes gone for weeks, even months, finding himself well beyond my psychic range. But knowing he was bringing the same hope and new lease on life to other worlds as he had done for Earth made it more bearable, not to mention our steamy reunions.

And then disaster struck.

During a mission on the outer rings of Calaixa, while the men were fighting on the surface of planet Todrayn, Kryptid liveships captured the vessel aboard which their Soulcatchers had been located. The so-called attack on the planet had been a trap, with fake distress signals being sent on Vanguard frequencies, and Kryptid DNA planted inside various local insects to fool the Warriors’ scanners. In the space of ten days, using similar traps set up in various sectors of the galaxy, General Khutu managed to capture close to a hundred Soulcatchers, including four of the six X-Girls. Only Doom’s and Legion’s Soulcatchers, Tina and Laura, were spared, having been aboard a shuttle on their way to the surface when their own ship had been attacked.

It had been a severe blow to the Vanguard. All the Warriors took the loss hard, but Chaos was particularly devastated, blaming himself for failing to protect the girls. Never mind that he hadn’t planned the other missions where more Soulcatchers had been taken, and that capture or death were a sad reality of war that every woman in the Vanguard had accepted when she signed on.

Not that it made things easier.

Besides Tina, I had been very close to Meredith and Elisa, Chaos’s and Wrath’s Soulcatchers who had often shared dinner with us, and had become like sisters to me. But even as we mourned their loss, we honored their tremendous contribution by keeping up the fight.

To our pleasant surprise, instead of resigning en masse as we’d feared, the women of the Vanguard rallied and worked together with the Warriors defining increased security measures to avoid the repeat of such a tragedy. On Earth, the loss of the Soulcatchers only galvanized the population in their determination to fight back against the bugs. Rather than plummeting, the number of applications to the Psychic Training Program soared.

Despite that rough start and a few hits and misses, the Vanguard thrived. Last week, the announcement of Selena’s first pregnancy—Fury’s mate rescued from the cave—making it the fifth new Warrior that would be brought into this world through natural conception, continued to fuel hope of a brighter future for the defenders of the galaxy.

Sitting on the beach on Khepri, a short distance from the Vanguard HQ, Doom and I watched our three-year-old boy play with Stran.

“Tina was complaining that she found her first gray hair, saying that this was the beginning of the end. I love that girl, and all the other Soulcatchers for that matter. We get along so well. I wonder how our relationship will evolve in ten or fifteen years from now, when they’re getting close to their fifties, and I still look twenty-nine,” I mused out loud.

“They’ll probably secretly hate you and punish you by saying ‘when I was your age, this is how we did things’ or ‘you should listen to your elders.’” Doom said, chuckling.

I burst out laughing then suddenly sobered as a thought struck me. “Do you realize, by the time Raven is my current age, nobody will believe I’m his mom?”

“Actually, doyourealize that by the time his children’s children are your current age, people will think you are your great-grandson’s girlfriend?” my husband retorted teasingly.

I gaped at him for a moment, then scrunched my face. “That’s messed up.”

“I promised you two hundred years if you bonded with me. Regretting it already?” he asked with a mischievous glimmer in his eyes.

“Hell no, my golden dragon. I love you,” I said, wrapping my arms around him.

“I love you, too, my Red. For eternity.”

THE END.

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