Sail

“Absidy!” Ellison shouted.

“No!” Mase’s cry ended when he threw himself against the door again and again. “Captain, open the entryway door right now!”

I wanted to call out to them, but I couldn’t breathe let alone move. The Saelis’s green-rimmed eyes locked onto mine. It heaved a low guttural growl that blew putrid breath into my face. It reared back with two of its arms, and I rolled out from underneath it before it plunged them into my skull.

The ship’s engines wound down but not fast enough. Mase punctuated his calls for the captain to hurry with his fists on the door. Ellison simply wailed the word please over and over.

Doctor Daryl rounded to the wall behind me. Tap. Tap.

I backed into the first entryway door, away from the advancing Saelis, and hoped the world didn’t fade to black before I could reach a hand into my pocket.

Because this would not happen. Not today and not ever. I would die of old age with Mase and Ellison at my side, not a pissed off ghost and a Saelis. I let that thought course through my veins and fight off the pain that threatened to pull my head into unconsciousness.

I gripped the ice pick as tight as I could, then lunged at the Saelis.

It jerked back with a rough howl. I’d punctured it through the eye. I swung my arm again and sank the pick into the other. The Saelis spasmed and twitched backward, blood streaming from its eyes, and sagged against a side wall.

“Just hang on!” Mase yelled. “Hang on!”

Doctor Daryl circled around to the final wall, then he’d likely charge straight at me. A growl sounded from between the Saelis’s razor teeth as it blindly stumbled toward me. Blood had settled into the cracks between its black scales along its snout, making it look even more malicious than before. More blood gushed from gunshots in two of its arms and one in its shoulder. It was hurt enough to be pissed off, but maybe I’d bought myself time to take care of the doctor.

The ship’s engines stuttered to a stop.

Plucking the iron from my tongue, I sidestepped in front of Daryl who’d nearly finished his tapping. “Go inside,” I said.

His mouth yawned open in a deafening scream as his body morphed into dark smoke. I inhaled him, my gaze pointed at the Saelis. Burning spikes stabbed down my throat. Memories flashed through my head. A deep, penetrating hunger for my blood. Saelis Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Daryl, alone, clutching his medical degree.

Before I could lift my fist to my mouth, black movement slammed into me and knocked the iron to the floor. I tried to breathe, I tried to move, but the force on top of me was too much. Teeth ripped into my neck. Claws from every direction shredded through my clothes and into my skin.

Doctor Daryl wormed farther into me to take root. Everything inside me thrust aside to make room for his spirit. He was taking over. He was killing me from the inside out, while the Saelis attacked from the outside in.

“I’ll slurp it from your insides,” a voice that wasn’t my own growled between my clenched teeth.

Fingers crushed around my heart. The titanium entryway began to melt into darkness, but if I let it take me, I’d be finished. But I wasn’t finished. I wanted so desperately to begin this new life without fear because it was a life worth living. Truly living and not hiding. Not dying.

The pain focused me, made me sharper and more in control of my body. I clenched the ice pick and stabbed the Saelis between its blinded eyes. Its endless slicing at my body turned into convulsions, its heavy weight sealing me underneath it.

Tap, tap, tap. Doctor Daryl’s Mind-I clicked on in his memories with the serial number 1215005 flashing on the bottom of its screen.

My body bucked. My arms and legs flailed while my heart echoed between my ears in faltering beats. The tip of my finger grazed the iron piece almost within arm’s reach. So close.

The pounding and shouting outside the door faded. Ellison and Mase. So close.

With what I was sure would be my last breath, my fingers brushed iron again. I gripped it tight and dropped it into my mouth. A dying moan wailed from somewhere deep inside me. My heartbeat surged to life, and my next breath washed the pain from my body. It was mine again. Damaged and exhausted, but mine.

With hisses of pain, I squirmed out from underneath the Saelis just as the door swished open.

Maybe Ellison and Mase had been preparing for what they might see on the other side because they rushed forward with both their mouths set in firm lines of determination. But when their gazes settled first on me and the bloodied and tattered state I was in, then on the dead Saelis, their steps wavered.

“Oh,” Ellison rushed at me again, a mess of emotions playing over her face.

All the color drained from Mase when he moved to my side. His hands hovered over my arms, my neck, my face as if he didn’t know which gash to compress first.

I pointed to the twitching Saelis without looking at it. “That one needs to be dumped off this ship if it goes all…ghosty.” I swallowed on the word, savoring the fact that I couldn’t taste the fear I usually associated with it.

Captain Glenn turned the corner, gazing at Mase and Ellison, before his dark eyes fixed on me with a look that reminded me so much of Pop. “I’ll take care of it.”

I nodded, and instead of succumbing to the darkness of death, I submitted to my own darkness where strong arms were sure to catch me and never let me go.