Page 7 of Treasured By the Hunter

Usually, I’d never fly uncloaked at noon, but I’d manage. Returning to my shuttle, I plotted a course back to my camp, making sure to catch the attention of the flyers in the area so they’d follow me instead of her.

Once close to my base, I cloaked again and called in. Mo, the humans’ de facto leader, picked up.

“I’m coming in hot,” I said, using the Xarc’n version of the human lingo I’d picked up since working with the human warriors. “Flyers, three of them.”

The human language was colorful compared to our own, and I found their slang and expressions amusing.Coming in hot. Hot on my tail.Flyers did not breathe fire, but this phrasing worked very well.

The numerous turrets mounted around our base had been taken from defunct Xarc’n shuttles and adapted to their new use and were manned by human warriors. White-hot beams of energy shot out from them, whizzing past me to hit the flyers. They didn’t stand a chance.

I landed in the parking lot in front of the converted grocery store and then stepped outside. This was home.

I’d parked next to Haax’l’s ship, and the other hunter had his arms around his mate Aanya as they shared a meal, sitting on a park bench next to their shuttle. They were so engrossed in each other that they hadn’t even noticed my arrival. The two were so much in love it was almost sickening.

I turned away from the couple only to catch Nov’k and Heather doing the same thing.

Krux! There was love everywhere.

Even Kan’n, the one the humans here had nicknamed Loose Cannon because of his initial professed hate for humans, had a mate. Sam, our Tech Wizard, had fallen in love with him and his sentient shuttle Pip.

It was beginning to feel like I was the only lonely hunter left on the base. I knew it wasn’t true. Bael’k, the hunter who had come in with Nov’k from the Jasper group, was single, too. And so was Max’n, the hunter who’d joined us from the East Coast.

“Harb’k!” Heather waved. “Any luck finding those anomalies?”

Oops. That had been the original reason I’d gone out. With so much love in the air at the base, I volunteered for the job. I’d ended up distracted by the female instead and lost sight of my mission.

A few months ago, a shipment of supplies heading for Earth was hijacked by a new form of scourge life. It had attacked one of our motherships. We’d managed to stop the possessed ship from landing on Earth, but not before it fractured into many pieces.

If any of them had made it down to Earth, we’d be seeing the effects on this hemisphere now as the weather warmed and the days got longer. Worried about the unknown mutations reaching Earth, the humans working with us had scoured the videos we’d had of the attack, trying to get a view from every single angle. There were several locations where they believed a tiny piece of the mutated ship could have made it through to the planet’s surface. One such location was south of our base.

I’d been on a mission to look for anything strange when I found my feisty fighter of a female instead.

“Not yet,” I admitted. “But I did find an interesting female who you might know. I believe she is traveling to Sanctuary—”

Heather perked up at the mention of her old home.

“—alone.”

She frowned. “That’s dangerous.”

I grunted. “That’s why I tried to convince her to come back here with me.” That, and because she smelled like the first breath of spring, and I wanted to roll around in her essence.

I brought up the image my shuttle had taken of the female and turned my communicator around to show her.

“Oh! I know her!” Heather exclaimed. “She belongs to one of the nomad groups. One of the good ones, not the assholes. Joey. Or was that Zoey? Or something like that.”

“Her group now hunts her. They may be good to humans, but they are not Xarc’n friendly. They shot at me when I approached.”

Heather put her lunch down, looking very serious. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

I showed her another image, this one of the three males hunting her.

Heather shook her head, her brow furrowing. “That’s not her group. That’s their vehicle, but that’s not them.” She squinted at the image. “That one there, he reminds me of someone, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

I moved my communicator closer to her so she could reach it, but she did not, in fact, put her finger on it. It must be another one of those strange human sayings.

“You’re saying she’s on her own, being chased by these assholes, and you didn’t go save her?” Heather looked horrified. “How could you do this?”

Nov’k, her mate, just shook his head. He’d “rescued” her from a less than ideal living situation, and the humans had called it “kidnapping.” Now Heather was horrified I hadn’t done the same for Zoey/Joey.

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