Learning to Blush (23 page)

For a moment, Ellie couldn't even recognize the man in the middle, and wondered who it was. It was Graham, but she couldn't be blamed for the moment of confusion; he looked nothing like himself.

Graham looked like he had had better, smoother times. His shirt was stained with blood, and his eyes looked horrible. One eye was burnt and swollen closed, and that was the one she could look at. The other… The other looked like something used for a startle-factor from the worst of all horror movies. The eye wasn't even there—it had been completely burnt away.

Her throat clinched shut as she watched him get hauled towards her. Graham could barely keep on his feet. He leaned forward like he would hit the dirt at any time without support. A broken “Graham!” left her lips and her eyesight blurred with thick tears.

“Why'd you bring her with you?” Graham asked in a barely recognizable mumble. He sounded so weak, so unlike himself. Even mangled, when he heard her, he seemed so ashamed.

“Long story,” Thorton replied, but then looked at Ellie with actual sympathy as she approached Graham, unsure of how to touch him in a way that wouldn't give him pain. “Don't touch him until we get him to a medic, Kitten. He's in pretty bad shape,” he instructed, and Ellie trembled in response.

“Let's just get him back to the ship. We have a medic standing by,” Jack promised her. He looked over at Mike and appraised him. He probably decided that Mike was quite large indeed, for a human, and cut from a different cloth than his shrimpy sister. “You want to lend a hand, son? Make yourself useful.”

Mike came up and Jack carefully pulled himself out from under Graham's arm and put Mike in his place. Mike was far less weary than Jack or Thorton, and soon the twins came to help, too, on Thorton's end.

Ellie swallowed. “I’m so sorry, Graham,” Ellie sniffed.

Graham grumbled, “It’s not as bad as it looks, Honey,” and he did his best to give her a hopeful smirk, but it came out gruesome.

“Graham,” Thorton said quietly as he walked along. “There’s something that if I don’t say now… I may never get to say…”

“Thorton,” Graham groaned, too pained to have the embarrassment of any awkward mushy brotherly-stuff being said.

But Thorton didn't have any mushy stuff to say. He merely did a horrible job at hiding a smirk and decreed, “
I told you so
,” as he adjusted his gun strap over his shoulders.

Graham let out something that did, indeed, sound like a chuckle. Ellie didn’t understand what was so funny. “What did I say? That I could take out several Alamar Lees?” Graham gargled.

“Forty of them, I believe, is what you said,” Thorton clarified smartly.

Jack grabbed Ellie’s hand and tried to escort her up the stairs, but she was so transfixed and unsettled by Graham's appearance, that she was trembling as she walked and unsteady on her feet. He gave a sigh and swooped down to pick her up and set her on his hip, hugging her close to him and rubbing her back soothingly.

Thorton turned and pointed to the boys, walking backwards as he did so. “Let’s hurry. I want to get home. I just married your sister, so maybe as a new-family-member gift I may not actually kill you idiots when we get there. I’m still thinking about it.” He turned back around and stomped up the steps.

The boys stood, holding Graham and looking stunned, and then hastened to follow. Finally, Tim said, “Mike?”

“Yeah, I know,” Mike said, guessing what his cousin was going to say. “Hands-down weirdest day ever.”

* * *

Penny had been drugged, only this time she didn't mind. That giant outside didn't take his time with giving her a sleep-serum either. She was panicked as soon as Thorton divulged that he thought Tim, Tom, Mike, and Ellie were out trying to get themselves killed!

She would not be calmed down, either. She knew full-well that there was a big possibility that after tonight, she would be on her own, in space, with no family, no friends, no husband, no nothing.

Fie, the giant who also fancied himself some sort of doctor, made it sound like a shower was all she needed to calm her nerves. Maybe it would have worked if her problem was the last three hellish days under Yule. Instead, her alone-time in the shower merely gave her the opportunity to become more worried than ever.

“The question is, why aren't
you
worried?” Penny charged Fie, who'd been trying to shush her. “You said you're good friends with Graham, Thorton, and Ellie!”

“I am. I also am a believer in luck. I believe those who have it tend to keep it. All three of them have an abundance of it,” he said, as if he expected her to also believe in luck.

She couldn't recall having luck at any point in her life, and the last couple of months had seemed very unlucky. “Luck isn't a pet that ever followed my family home,” she firmly stated.

Fie had seemed unconvinced by that statement.

“You think luck is going to bring them home? Luck?” she cried. She wanted more than luck on their side.

“Luck and a very big gun. But if you've been out in the universe as much as I have, you would have seen a lot more done with a lot less. So I need you to calm down.”

“There's no calming! What do I do if they don't come back? Huh? What?” she had continued to cry. She gave a sob and put her face in her hands.

Fie walked up to her and took a deep breath. “Breathe in, breathe out. You'll feel better. Breathe with me?” He took another deep breath in and out.

She swallowed and shallowly breathed in, and out.

“You can do better than that.” He gave her a friendly smirk. “Big breath now.”

She took a deep breath in, breathed out, and Fie stabbed her arm with a needle she didn't even see in his hand! Unknown liquid was rushing through her veins before she even had time to react. Penny looked at Fie with a hurt, betrayed expression. “What did you…?” But she was too tired, suddenly, to even finish the sentence. Then she lost the energy to stand at all, and fell forward.

Fie caught her in his giant arms and picked her up like a baby, cradling her on the way as he located a room with a bed. “Shh, little human…” he cooed to her. She felt he must have viewed her as a toddler who was all tuckered out from her own birthday party. “After going missing for three days, what you need is to take care of yourself, not worry about the others. You'll feel better when you wake, and you'll save yourself from fretting up a storm about the unknowns, eh?”

She couldn't respond; her eyelids were too heavy. Whether she wanted to sleep or not, by the time he even laid her on a bed, she was completely out.

* * *

“Is he going to be okay?” Ellie asked pathetically in a quiet little-girl voice even before Fie had a good chance to look at Graham yet. The half-breed boys were still laying Graham carefully onto a cot.

“Everybody out of my way,” Fie demanded firmly, trying to keep from accidentally touching the boys, who were caked in mud from head-to-toe.

Graham didn't look good. He didn't even have to be a doctor to decide that much. He turned to the admiral, who was holding Ellie out of Fie's way by gripping onto her shoulders. “We need to head to the mothership as quickly as possible,” he told him.

The admiral nodded and disappeared to the front of the ship, leaving Ellie alone to watch Fie as he tried to stabilize Graham.

Thorton was even becoming concerned as he watched the serious expression on Fie's face. “I want her out of here,” Fie said as soon as Ellie broke into the quietest of sobs.

“No! But I—” Ellie complained, shaking her head back and forth severely.

“I have no plans on dying today, Sweetheart,” Graham assured her. His voice sounded like he hadn't drunken anything in the last three days; his voice was practically a crackly groan. “It'll be okay. Thorton? Bring her and the boys outside?” he requested.

Thorton stepped forward, took her upper arm in his hand, and escorted her out of the medical room. The boys reluctantly followed.

Thorton brushed his hand over Ellie's shoulders and bent down to her. “Graham's gonna be fine. He's been worse.” Not very much worse, but that was true. Still, he hated to see her so upset. “Why don't you go get cleaned up? Fie's the best, and he'll do everything he can for Graham.”

Ellie eventually nodded, very reluctantly.

“There's a good girl,” Thorton said, ushering her to the hallway soothingly.

The boys tried to follow her towards the back of the ship, probably all anxious to clean all the mud off themselves. As soon as Ellie disappeared into a room, Thorton put his arm across the hallway and blocked Mike from passing. “I wanna talk to you,” Thorton snarled.

Mike backed up a step. “Look, I… I don't think this is the time for a lecture, Thorton.”

“Too fucking bad.”

The boys winced, mostly because they didn't hear Thorton swear very often. He and Graham had made such a big deal on how 'words are so sacred' in their culture, since speaking with one's mouth was optional.

Thorton took a giant step forward and pushed Mike so hard he fell back a couple of feet before he could find his footing again. “What the hell is wrong with you? I gave you direct orders before I left:
Stay put
.
Get the radio working. Have Ellie call for help
. And I thought you were
smarter
than a piece of cheese! You could have gotten your sister shot! After all that's happened, after all we've done to get her back! Did you know what those guys would have done to her if they caught her? Besides rape? They'd have sold her, killed her, or found out that she was a half-breed and sold her to a Frian as a science-project!”

Mike locked his jaw. Hopefully he was beginning to really feel the shame. “Look, it was her decision and her idea to—”

“Her
decision
? She couldn't decide shit! I put
you
in charge of this group of monkeys! You.”

“She's my sister, she was worried. What was I supposed to do?” Mike demanded. “She was going to do it whether I wanted her to or not!”

Thorton looked over Mike with an incredulous look. “You are twice Ellie's size and five years older! You lock her in her
room
if you have to! Her compliance is not required! What the fuck is the matter with you?”

“I thought you were going to give us a pass on all this shit because you fucked my sister,” Tom said so casually that Thorton immediately heated even more.

He walked up to Tom, and when he was a mere two inches from his face, Thorton growled, “I
mated
with her. There's a difference, a big one.”

“Shouldn't we be lecturing
you
on that?” Mike quipped snootily.

Thorton turned. “If you only knew what happened to her, Mike, you would not think you were so funny. Besides,
she
touched
me
. That's all it took—one touch.”

“Where is she?” Tim asked from the side quietly. “What happened to her? Was she…?”

Thorton squinted his eyes and finished Tim's thought; had Penny been used. “Probably, judging from the man who was holding her against her will. I killed everyone involved,” he added. “She's hopefully sleeping now.”

“You saved her just so you could have her,” Mike judged boldly.

Thorton tried to take a calming breath. Mike was obviously embarrassed about their failure that evening; and Thorton knew that a lot of men, when they were embarrassed, just wanted to lash out. Thorton replied crisply, “I saved her because it was my responsibility to save her. And now it's my responsibility to keep her from harm which, from the sound of it, is a lot more than you boys have ever done for her.”

Mike held tall; it was only Tim and Tom that shrunk at that. “Look, you don't have to lecture us like we ever decided to come along in the first place. It was your fuckup that the Frians even knew you were on Earth.”

“Sorry to deprive you the ability to hide your head in the sand,” Thorton seethed. “If you saw what they were doing to Ellie
right in front of us
… You wouldn't have been a pain in the ass since we got you onboard. Or maybe you would have. Protecting women is not your boys' strong suit.”

That seemed to be a sore-spot. Mike's lips puckered. “Think I care about your opinion? Go to hell and fuck your mother.”

Thorton had gotten into fights for a whole lot less. He wondered when the last time was that had gotten him so wound up with people he didn't actually want to go so far as to kill. Every now and then, he would wrestle with Peyton… And Peyton would normally win, in fact, but they weren't out to actually cause each other pain.

Thorton didn't hold back with Mike. Mike was big enough to take a punch to the head and walk away, but Mike didn't like it. Thorton was still brawnier than Mike was, and after a couple of punch attempts, Thorton was pounding on him while Mike put up his arms to cover any further shots to his face.

Tom suddenly closed his lean arms around Thorton's neck and Thorton turned and gave him a couple of hits, too. Tim? He was standing up against the wall, looking stunned and extremely uninterested in joining in the violence.

“What the hell is going on out here?” Jack boomed, his hand suddenly pulling Thorton away from Tom, trying to create some distance between the two.

“He's an asshole,” Tom eventually said in rough Swarii, pulling himself from the floor. “He's all…” he searched for the word, “in our face!”

“Why? Because you're idiots?” Jack countered. Thorton was surprised to see Jack on his side. “You're lucky as stars not to have gotten shot today. I know three-year-olds with more sense. You owe this man your life and you boys, from what I hear,” he pointed at Tim and Tom, “should be thanking him for saving your sister's life, too. How long do you think she was going to last out there? He tracked her down without rest for three days before having to rescue your sorry asses. And if Ellie had gotten shot today because you let her talk you into going on a maneuver that idiotic, Thorton being in your face would be the least of your worries! I have half a mind to take my belt off to strap each of you until you can't see straight,” he added with disappointment. “Get to bed before you do something
else
to embarrass your species.”