Starbleached by Chelsea Gaither Page A

started chewing on him before—”
    “Was he on the enzyme?” Adry asked, her heart pounding even
harder.
    The team leader nodded.
    “Okay.” She grabbed one of her nurses. “Get a scanner, get a
nanite registrar.” She couldn’t help the excitement in her system. “And then
call Shawn Miller. Tell him that the enzyme got tested and our man is still
here. Okay?”
    “Do you want to tell me what’s going on, Doc?” the soldier
asked.
    “First stage feeding only lasts one minute. Totally draining
a body takes fifteen. You are absolutely sure he was fed on for thirty
minutes?”
    “Yes.”
     She couldn’t help but grin. “Okay. If we can get your
friend through this next hour, he should be okay. Get him to the ICU.” She said
to her team. They nodded and rushed off, the soldier jogging after. Seconds
later, her communicator beeped. Shawn Miller. She answered it.
     “Adry, what the hell is going on?”
“Bryan’s legacy, sir. It works.”
     
    *****
     
    Now :
    Blood from Galina’s shoulder spilled over Adry’s fingers. I
can’t afford this, she thought. It’s going to kill her. But she
couldn’t move. Galina might die, and for right now, this minute, it did not
matter. Because the monster had turned to her without its mask, and the face it
had hidden so long was Bryan’s.
    Four eyes with off-white irises and milky pupils. Skin pale
as snow white paper, shark teeth, high cheekbones, a nose with four slits for
nostrils. How anything in that alien expression could be human was beyond her,
but it was Bryan. The eyes were confused, she thought, but also horrified. He
knew enough to know this moment was terrible.
    Galina moaned softly. Adry was going to have to ask for the
unthinkable.
    “I’m going to lose her.” She said, shaking. “He hit an
artery. She’s bleeding out.”
    “That man,” Galina said, then her eyes fluttered closed.
    The alien with Bryan’s face took a deep, ragged breath.
It—no. He was holding his left side, blue-black blood running between his
fingers. And she didn’t like the look on his face. Not the hungry glare she’d
expected from a wounded Overseer. More like a man trying desperately not to
pass out. More like what she felt. “How much…do you trust me?” he asked.
    That awful, breathy voice. Now it sounded like a leaking
balloon. The same thing that takes life can give it, under the right
circumstances. She nodded. “We are right in the middle of the infection
zone. Be very careful.”
    He smiled, then bared sharp and terrible teeth. But with his
eyes—even four horrible alien eyes—in view, she could understand. Not a sneer.
A grimace of pain. He moved to Galina without most of the grace he’d had
before. She supposed that, too, had been a mask, hiding some weakness from
challenging eyes.  Sweat ran down the sides of his face. He did not bother
moving Galina, just placed his terrible hand over her wound.
    It was quiet, save for his ragged breathing, Galina’s moans,
and the whisper of the swamp. Adry’s hands itched to be suturing veins, putting
pieces of bone back together. She could only sit here and watch as a monster
with her lover’s face did something inscrutable to a dying woman’s arm.
    Then, finally, he withdrew, falling backwards to the marshy
ground. But a small glimmer of old humor came back into his eyes. He held up
the bullet, nematocyst teeth still clinging to it. “We can move her. I would
recommend the village, but—”
    “It’s the last place someone with a paper cut should be, let
alone a gunshot wound.” She checked the injury. Something like a silver thread
held the wound together, and it wasn’t gushing anymore. Good enough, for now.
“We’ll go back to the outpost.” She looked back at Bryan. The flow of blood
from his side had not slowed in the least. “How badly are you hurt?”
    “It will heal,” he said, which wasn’t an answer at all. He
scooped up Galina as if she weighed nothing, cradled her against his chest.