Halian stared through the bars at him, seeing little more than his eyes in the gloom that hung heavily around them in the cold, damp air. It only took his eyes to remind her he wasn't entirely human. They gleamed with captured light from the single, fog shrouded light that lit the cage block. They were merely two slender rings of vibrant and darkly speckled amber around the disks of his mutely glowing pupils. Her night vision could penetrate the shadows beyond his eyes, picking out the lines of his cheek bones and brow, and of the sleekly defined muscles of his forearms, folded across each other at chest hight.
"I need you, Kai" she said softly, keeping her voice down because she didn't want to be overheard by one of the human patrols that regularly swung by the cage block as they did their rounds of the grounds of the Eagle Empires Experimental Genetics Facility on Enceladus where Halian had been born. He took a step backwards and closed his eyes, effectively disappearing into the shadows, spurning her wordlessly. Halian wouldn't be dismissed so easily.
"He's dead, Kai. Our father is dead, " She continued. She saw his eyes open, flashes of brilliance in the darkness.
"Halian?" he queried in a voice that was barely more than a breath, just a soft husky whisper that wafted to her on the night air. Halian nodded, knowing that his night vision was better than hers. Her own eyes were almost human, apart from their colour.
Moving fluidly as he emerged from the shadows, Kai came right up to the bars of his cage, so that he was standing just over an arms-length away from her. He stared through the bars at her with the intensity of a wild predator and Halian took half a step backwards before she even realised what she was doing. She reclaimed the step, but then quickly realised that it had been more than the look in his eye that made her retreat. He stood in the frigid night air in nothing more than an old pair of black jeans and scuffed army issue boots, revealing a torso bound in gracefully defined muscle that spoke to her of deadly efficient strength. That muscle was encased in light golden skin that was traced all over by a striped pattern of long, thin white scars that followed the contours of his flesh. His face was untouched though, framed by a mane of white blonde hair streaked with threads of burnt auburn and black, and the unblemished angular lines of his cheeks and jaw accentuated those captivating inhuman eyes. His mouth was generous and curved up into a contrastingly human, and very male, smile. He was openly taking in the sight of her athletic but definitively feminine frame, the spill of her long dark hair and the deeply feline green of her eyes, while he leaned against the bars in a casual slouch, radiating lethal awareness across the distance between them. He seemed all animal, all instinct and predatory skill, watching her with blatantly sexual interest. She felt heat rush to her cheeks and her pulse quicken. She was startled. His smile widened.
"Why are you here?" he asked her as she stood transfixed.
"I - I've come to ask you to fight for me," she managed, all of the carefully rehearsed persuasion she had meant to deploy gone from her mind entirely.
"Will you keep me in a cage or will you trust me?" he asked her, keeping her off balance with the tone of his voice and the undercurrents in his question. Trust him? She thought, the way he was looking at her made her want to keep him in a cage, though for whose protection she wasn't entirely sure. She realised she was almost becoming panicky under that stare, and she had to put an abrupt stop to what he was doing.
"Kai, we were children together, you are my brother," she told him.
"Does that mean you will trust me like our father trusted you?" he retorted, missing her emphatically delivered point. He kept looking at her with a hunger that had nothing to do with food. She blinked a couple of times, struggling to answer him in her confusion. It took a few long moments of mental paralysis for her to realise she needed to be much more specific. Kai's thinking had always been very linear.
"If I am to trust you, Kai, you can't keep looking at me like that. It's wrong for a brother to look at his sister like that," she told him, trying to keep her tone even and firm. Their father had taken a great deal of time and patience to teach her to control her wilder impulses and Kai had not had the benefit of that. He caught her off balance again with his quick reply.
"Among humans. We are not human,"
"I am human," she told him with a little bit too much conviction. Even to her own ears it didn't sound entirely convincing and she cursed herself. She had worked so hard over the years to be human and just a few moments in Kai's company and that was coming undone. He didn't miss her confusion.
"You are not human, you were the first born. You are the Black Tigress's cub," he countered. Halian closed her eyes and bowed her forehead against the bars, seeking comfort in the soothing coldness of the metal. She spoke softly after a moment.
"Father taught me how to be human, he taught me how to control the tiger in my blood," there was a long, silent pause between them both. She kept her eyes closed, but she could feel him looking at her, feel him thinking carefully about his next move. He broke the silence first.
"Teach me then, sister, but trust me," he whispered back at her, his voice brushing on the edge of her hearing. She opened her eyes again to look at him. The hunger still haunted his eyes, but there was sincerity there too. She gave in, she could teach him as their father had taught her. She could tame him. A quiet voice inside her mind told her she was lying to herself.
"I will trust you then," she told him. The smile he gave her filled her with a sense of foreboding. And hunger.
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