HASH: Human Alien Species Hybrid Read Online Free Page B

rest of the days after the crash, full of hospital beds and tests.
    The scientists had put me in with a strange boy not much older than I had been, metal shining on his skin just like the woman who had hurt me. He’d been so fiercely terrifying that I had practically screamed the building down. I’d screamed until they’d pulled me out of there, scared that he was doing something awful to me.
    I’d never seen him again. Until now.
    “That was you?” I looked at him closer. It could have been him, yet there was something about the innocence in his eyes that didn’t seem so terrifying. He didn’t seem normal, exactly, but he also didn’t seem like something to run screaming from. On my own, without Em’s coaxing, I took a step toward him.
    What was I doing? He was still one of them. He belonged to that woman who hurt me, who gave me this implant, which was the cause of me living in a white-walled institution.
    “Oh, ignore Jade.” Em moved closer to Aric, walking around him as though wanting to get a good look at him from every angle. “She doesn’t have any manners. Plus, she’s scared of you because you look like the people who put me into her. Well, you would, obviously, since they were your parents.”
    “Em.”
    “What? I’m just trying to make conversation. I mean, I bet that if the two of you tried, you could find all kinds of things to talk about. Being trapped in scientific research facilities, being experimented on, being orphans…”
    “Em, shut up.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry; she’s not normally that tactless. Well, actually, she is, but since I’m the only one who can see her, it doesn’t normally matter.”
    “It’s all right.” Aric looked over at her. “It’s nice to meet you, Em. You, too, Jade.”
    I knew I had to ask. “What Em said, about us both being orphans…”
    He crossed his arms over his chest. “My parents died in the crash. I can remember parts of it, not much.”
    He seemed a lot less threatening when he put it like that, although there was still something strange about him. Maybe it was just that years of nightmares didn’t go away just because one of the nightmares in question happened to be in the same situation.
    “They’ve tested you all these years, too?”
    “Yes. But…” He trailed off and glanced down at the crash.
    “But?” I asked.
    “I’ve never felt as calm as I feel right now.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Usually, there’s this gnawing feeling deep in my gut. It gets so strong that it sends me into fits of rage and that’s when they sedate me. I’ve felt it from the moment…” he stopped and turned.
    If I weren’t mistaken, I’d say he was going to cry, but he was an alien and I truly didn’t know how they cried and if it was the same way we did.
    “From what moment?” I coaxed.
    “Do you remember how scared you were the night they brought us here?”
    “Yeah, I remember screaming.”
    He chuckled. “You had some powerful lungs. But something drew me to you and I reached out and held your hand. Do you remember that?”
    I closed my eyes and let my mind revisit that time in my life. A time when my normal existence as a three-year-old girl was thrown upside down. As I relived that dreadful night, I did remember that comfort I felt when someone took my hand. I just didn’t know it was him.
    “I’ve felt this gnawing rage from the moment they separated us. And today is the first time it’s gone away.”
    “What does that mean?”
    He walked over broken pieces of the spaceship and his long legs had him standing in front of me before I could protest. I swallowed hard, my head tilted up and my eyes staring into his brown eyes. So much loss, so much pain and sorrow and hurt lingered behind those eyes. The same way it lingered behind mine.
    He reached down and lifted my hand, lacing his fingers into mine. His hand was much larger, his fingers thicker and his skin was not quite as warm as mine was. A scream, a protest was