Page 7 of King from the Sky

Chapter Five

Alex awoke with a start. The room was dark and he smelled a scent that sounded very familiar. The smell invaded his nostrils and made him feel secure and safe. Had he been dreaming? He wasn’t sure. Everything was so confusing. The darkness beckoned to him to greet it as if it contained all of the secrets that he wanted to know inside of it. Was he still lost inside of a dream or was he awake? There were so many strange thoughts going through his head.

He had been shot. It was burning deep inside his guts, working its way through his body. It was like hot lava coursing through his veins. How had it happened? He couldn’t remember right then. The pain was unbearable. It was eating away at him and he could not control the shift. No matter how hard he tried it kept going back and forth. The pain was forcing the shift even as he tried to hold it back so that he could work his human fingers. He needed them to get the medicine that would kill the pain. But the shift would not stop. It kept coming over him, repeatedly.

Then he had found help. A woman had helped him. She was beautiful. She had taken the pain down a lot and allowed him to keep the shift at bay. She had been frightened, but she had helped him anyway. She had done her best to make sure he was ok and had taken him to get more help.

She was waiting for him. The doctors had put him under sedation, but he still felt it. He was not able to be fully sedated. The pain was awful as they wrenched the vile slug from his body. Then the shift began to come over him and his body awoke from the temporary paralysis that it had been in.

He could not let them see him this way. He had to hold it back. He tried, but it would not retreat so he had leapt off the table and ran out of the room and down the hall to the door in the back. He did not see people there. He could not compromise his mission; he could not let them see the shift happen, have them see what he was. He had to retreat.

He had burst through the doors and as he bounced off into the dark night something grabbed him. He felt a momentary pain in the back of his skull and then it was all dark. Darkness engulfed him as it did now. There was no light in his new world.

But he was not in pain. The pain in his stomach had gone and the pain in his head had vanished as well. He opened and closed his eyes several times to confirm that he was indeed awake. He had to get out of there. He had a mission to complete.

Alex moved sideways and feeling the soft mattress and springs beneath him he realized that he was in a bed. Whose bed was he in? Where was he? Had he been abducted? Did they find him? No if they had found him he would be dead. He was very much alive, he thought as he inhaled a huge gulp of air.

Alex stumbled out of the bed in the dark and reached around the room looking for a light switch. His shins bumped something hard and he cried out in pain as he felt the pinch on his skin. He decided that shuffling his feet might work better, which he did as he moved cautiously through the dark.

Reaching out with his hands he suddenly felt the wall beneath him. And then he felt the familiarity of a light switch. He flicked it on and the room was awash in bright light. His eyes, not able to adjust in time, felt the bright sting in his retinas coursing backwards in to his brain. Even with the power of the lion the eyes could occasionally be shocked, especially after all of the trauma he had been through in the past twenty-four hours.

As his eyes adjusted he realized that he was in his own room. His room. On Zuha. He was no longer on Earth.

“What the hell…” He muttered to himself at the shocking realization.

How the hell had he gotten back home? He was so close to completing his mission. NO!

“Why?” He said out loud to the empty room as he slammed his fist against the wall.

“Those morons have no idea what they’ve done,” Alex muttered.

He had to get back to Earth as soon as possible.

Alex grabbed his robe and walked out of the room and into the bright hallway. The sunshine was pouring through the windows that lined both sides of the hall. He wished that the doors were similar to the way on Earth where you could see light coming in under the door. Perhaps that would have woken him up sooner. He also missed the wonderful invention of windows in the bedroom which his people did not believe in because it was supposed to be totally dark when one slept.

Alex realized more and more how much he had enjoyed his little stay on planet Earth and how much he was looking forward to visiting there again, but he might have needed a better disguise. Or he might seriously have to understand that him going there ever again was a surefire danger to his life. He had been there less than a day and had been shot and almost killed.

When he came downstairs he saw several of his assistants sitting around the large table getting ready to enjoy breakfast. They smiled as he entered the room from the stairs as if they expected him to sit down.

“Hello, King,” Beth said. Beth was the first assistant to the king, which as of one week ago was Alex. His father King Frances had died of heart failure in his sleep. He was a great king and Alex knew that no matter how well he did in the role he would never come close to being as good of a leader as his father was. But he had to pretend that he was just as competent and that he was prepared to rule. His father had groomed him for the part since he was a small boy and he had tried to learn as best he could because he realized that no matter what, he was never allowed to get out of the job of king unless he was killed.

“Don’t greet me so kindly. I want answers!” Alex said standing at the head of the table.

His assistants looked down sheepishly as he yelled at them. They knew they had angered him greatly.

“My King, we were simply following protocol set forth by your father King Frances— “

“My father is gone. That means the protocol and all decisions related to it go through me. I was on a very important and very sensitive mission. I had a reason for being there.”

“You were supposed to be meeting with me to go over the schedule for the upcoming days. The people need to know what changes—if any—you are going to make to your father’s most recent laws. You have to instill in them that they are under the leadership of a very capable king. Skipping out and going on some crazy mission does not do any of that. It accomplishes the contrary.”

“I am the king. I know what my responsibilities are but there are things that I have to do that I can’t explain to everybody. If I did then I would put them in jeopardy. You have to understand that. The people will just have to trust that I am the king now.”

“The people don’t just trust that sort of thing; even though you were given the title of king simply by birth you have to earn their respect through your actions. You have yet to even get started on that,” Beth said as she started her breakfast.

It made Alex angry to have one of his underlings speaking to him that way, but he knew that she was right—to a point.

“I don’t have to explain my actions to you,” Alex said as he sat down in front of his breakfast. He was suddenly starving and tired of standing. His full on strength had not yet returned and he found himself feeling weak and dizzy. He played it off and did not let on to his subjects that anything was wrong. They would never see their king show any signs of weakness.