Page 24 of Chased By the Alien Mercenary
“Tell them to stand down and toss away their guns,” Lyra said firmly, solving the problem for me. She might not have realized it, but I was certain she’d picked up what I needed from my mind. She was already getting used to the bond between us, and I couldn’t wait to show her more of its potential aboard theVarakartoom, in my bed. Her muffled laugh told me she’d heard that line of thinking, too, and I found myself grinning, my grip on the situation improving. My instincts wanted me to take over, go on a rampage, and kill them all, but I was firmly in control of them—for now.
The Xurtal wriggled in my grip, testing his bonds, but one arm was sneakily sliding toward the gun he’d holstered not long ago. Did he think I hadn’t seen that, or that I’d already forgotten? Idiot. “Stand down,” he demanded. “Do as she says, please.” He thought he could placate me, then trick me and shoot me himself. He thought wrong.
As guns began to clatter to the ground and hands went up into the air in surrender, my entire body grew tense, ready to burstinto action. When he moved, I moved. I caught his gun, twisted it out of the way, and when it fired, I controlled its direction. Straight into the bastard’s gut. Chaos erupted then, and I shouted in Lyra’s mind for her to dive for cover, striking the nearest guards before they could get their weapons back. Laser fire whizzed by my head anyway.
I growled, abandoning the fight to dive onto Lyra and protect her at any cost. Not quite as I had planned, but I had my priorities straight. I was not a mindless beast. I was not out of control. Unlike before, I would never make the mistake of picking vengeance over the safety of my mate again. The Xurtal wasn’t dead, just wounded, but he could limp away if it meant no stray lasers struck my Lyra.
The dust settled in moments, with not so much as a shout to alert any guards. That didn’t mean they weren’t coming; they certainly would have heard the Xurtal’s initial scream when I caught him by the throat. I didn’t know what had gone down, just knew that more guns had gone off than I could account for. When I slowly raised my head and took stock, it wasn’t exactly a surprise to see Aramon jump down from the top of a stack of crates, guns in both hands.“Need some help, bro?”he quipped.
Around us, the guards had all gone down, dead by the hands of my twin or my crewmates. I saw Tass’s green head pop around the edge of a corner, and Thatcher and the Sineater were holstering their weapons on the other side of the narrow passage we were in. They’d come in time to take everyone out. I should have known that’s what Aramon was up to when he closed his thoughts—he didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Bastard. I grinned at him, infinitely pleased to see him.
Lyra was light as a feather when I pulled her to her feet, and I proudly turned her to face my twin, my hands resting on her slender shoulders in what was certainly a possessive manner. The dead guards were all around us, but my Xurtal target had rolled away and was crawling, bleeding badly from the gut wound I’d inflicted on him with his own weapon. He wasn’t going to make it, I’d see to that, or else Aramon would. “This is Lyra,” I told my brother, and a smile split my face that I simply couldn’t hold back. It was an odd feeling, the way my cheeks pulled, almost, but not quite, a cramp. It felt like I was baring my teeth in a threatening manner, but that was what a smile was supposed to look like, wasn’t it? My mate raised a hand and waved at Aramon as if she’d heard my introduction. I could not see her face, just the crown of her brown hair, but I knew she was smiling at him. Shy, but also friendly, no, perhaps not shy so much as reticent, and I liked that she wasn’t that way with me.
“Nice to meet you, Lyra,” Aramon said, casually stepping over the body of the guard at his feet. He held out his hand in an odd manner, but Lyra seemed to understand it, reaching out hers, and they shook when they gripped hands. Afterward, Lyra shook out her fingers as if my twin had squeezed too hard, so I gave him a warning growl. He had the grace to look apologetic. “Sorry, I forget how fragile humans are!”
“Apologize later,” the Sineater drawled, a crackle of reprimand in his tone. I was used to that; he always talked that way to me. I did not take offense—I knew I was too hostile to the crew—but he could not talk in that tone to my mate. When I glared at him, a smirk curled his gray mouth, and his dark eyes sparked with some kind of inner fire that made a chill crawl up my spine. Everything about him made a male uneasy. He was just… wrong. Not evil, but not right—a predator that slithered in the dark.
He might very well know exactly what I was thinking, and likely I was far from alone in that. Lyra had shuffled back, her body pressing against my front as if she could not control the visceral response to flee from him. It did not seem to matter to him. “We must leave right away, before the authorities descend on us in droves.” The Sineater was the official second-in-command aboard the Varakartoom; when he gave an order, you obeyed. Even Aramon and I did, though we’d known Asmoded longer than he had. When he made a sharp hand gesture, everyone fell into formation around Lyra and me.
My instincts did not like that, making me feel trapped within the circle of armor-clad bodies surrounding us. One of them was my twin, though, and another was Tass, with his amicable smile and friendly eyes. Vines twined along his shoulders, carefully out of the way, but also capable of shielding protectively. I trusted both of them, so I tolerated the others. It wasn’t about me, anyway—they only did that because of my mate.
We moved slowly at first, around the bodies, and I realized it was also because the pace the Sineater set had been adjusted to Lyra’s short legs. Just as I dipped to pick her up, movement from the corner of my eye made me react without thinking. I should have realized that “down” was not “out,” and a cornered beast was twice as dangerous. Though not the only one responding, we weren’t fast enough to stop the bastard from raising the barrel of his gun. A shot sliced between Tass and the big Tarkan Raukash. It would have struck Lyra in the chest, but with a roar, I threw myself between her and the deadly fire.
Chapter 21
Lyra
To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. The past two hours had been a crazy whirlwind of events. From meteors to sex and love declarations, to this standoff with the Xurtal bastard. Now, I was finally meeting Solear’s twin in the flesh, and I was not sure I could reconcile what I knew of him, what I’d expected, with what I was seeing. I barely had time to adjust to this new situation before it all changed again.
It happened so fast that, even afterward, I struggled to put the pieces together. I just knew that I heard a laser pistol go off, and then everyone was moving. The world spun as I was tossed about, and I found myself on my knees, then tumbling to the tarmac. I never struck it with my hands, caught instead around the waist by Solear and buffered by something green and soft, as if my hands had struck a pillow of moss, not asphalt. Blinking at the sight of plants suddenly draped across a previously barren ground, I struggled to get my bearings. Then I heard the pained groan.
I knew that noise, I knew it well, because it had filled those first, tension-filled moments when I’d first met Solear. They’d tossed him, injured and unconscious, into my cell, and he’d made a noise exactly like that several times. “Are you hurt? Solear, are you hurt?” I frantically demanded. I scrabbled for purchase against the soft moss with my fingers, clawing through the spongy surface. It withdrew abruptly, slithering away like a snake, but now I could push off against the firm tarmac and twist to look at my mate. He held me around my waist with botharms, body hunched around mine in what had to be an attempt to shield me from that laser I’d heard. He’d been struck!
“Where? Where did he hit you! That bastard, I’m gonna kill him myself!” I said, but despite the murderous words, I clasped Solear’s beloved face and searched his eyes—searched them for signs of pain, signs that he was dying on me. I was barely aware of the others around us, but a whole horde of men in black armor, just like my mate, formed a shield between us and the space port. His skin felt warm, but not hot; his eyes were bright and full of that heat he always had for me.
“Fine,” he said—and he said it out loud—a rough, broken growl, but understandable all the same. Those men who guarded us? They froze, shifted on their feet, turned to look at us, and some even exclaimed in surprise. That one word was the extent of his attempt to talk, though; the rest came to me along our telepathic bond, and I was so incredibly grateful we had that. “It was not a direct hit,” he explained, which still sounded bad to me, but he shrugged like it was nothing. “But it would have killed you. I’m fine. My armor absorbed most of it.” That was followed, much more smugly, with: “Dead now. Can’t ever hurt you again.”
He twisted his head then, a tilt within the palms of my hands that allowed him to peer past his side, past the boots of his pals, to Heliosor’s body. The Xurtal was definitely dead now, smoke curling from what might have been a dozen holes in his body. Talk about overkill. Possibly every friend of Solear’s had fired at least twice in response to his attempt to shoot me. Solear did not have a gun, though; his focus had been solely on protecting me, taking the blow in my stead. Horrified at the near miss—for both of us—I threw my arms around his neck and clung to him,peering over his broad back to check that his armor reallyhadabsorbed most of it.
The crater I saw right in the middle of his spine made me gasp. “What the hell do you mean your armor absorbed most of it? It made a fucking crater the size of Jupiter, damn it! What the hell, Solear? We need to get you to a doctor right now!” And he laughed—that crazy man—he tossed back his head and laughed. The sound was so sweet, though: that low, husky voice with a belly laugh so bright and happy.
“He’s fine,” the creepy, bossy guy said over the merry sound. And terrifying as I found this man, with his deep gray skin marked with all kinds of ethereal symbols and lines, I glared at him. Glared at him hard. How dare he interrupt the happiness of my sweet mate? If anyone deserved to have a good laugh, it was Solear. Though, granted, I’d prefer he didn’t do that right after he’d been shot in the back. “Get up and move out. Now!” the bossy guy said, despite my glare, ignoring me as if I didn’t exist. He sounded so angry that it made my eyebrows shoot up in surprise. Was he sour or what?
Solear and the others all responded to that order. My mate’s laughter ended, and he swung me into his arms and rose to his feet in a fluid motion. Then we were moving—me carried bridal-style—the others all surrounding us like before, rifles at the ready in their arms, their eyes on the dead bodies and the spaceport visible between the stacks of crates. Alert and making up for not noticing the danger the dying Xurtal bastard had posed, their strides were in sync and fast enough that there was no way I could have ever kept up in my too-large boots. In no time, they’d left the stacked crates and our illicit battle sitebehind, fleeing a scene I had no doubt the port authorities and those military men from earlier wouldn’t like.
“Thanks, Lyra,” Aramon said as they walked, and I clung there in the arms of my possibly injured mate. Solear’s twin was on my right, leaning in a little to wink at me with a wide grin. Sharp canines glinted at the corners of his mouth, but the rest of his teeth were blunter and straighter, like mine, and very much unlike Solear’s sharp rows. “I haven’t heard my brother’s laugh in fifteen years.” He made that sound so light and cheerful, like that wasn’t a punch to the gut—but something that glimmered at the back of red eyes identical to my mate’s belied that. That mattered to him, a lot, and it made me choke up with emotion. Damn it, the last thing I wanted was to start crying in front of all these scary men, even, or maybe especially, if they were Solear’s friends.
“Oh. You’re welcome?” I managed to choke out. Glancing around, I noticed that, on my left, a green alien was peering at me from the corners of his eyes. He had odd green hair that almost looked like thin branches of leaves, like a fern, maybe. Something also glowed on his temple, like an extra eye. But, more confusingly, he had tentacles growing from his back. No, not tentacles—vines—and one was covered with a thick layer of moss. So that’s what I’d landed on in the chaos, and that was probably not an accident.
The others surrounding us were harder to study, as they had their backs to me or were behind Solear, and I could no longer see over his shoulder. I was pretty sure one looked like a gargoyle come to life, one looked distinctly human, and then there was the scary gray dude. They were all different, but all the same too, in their sleek black armor. Tall, insanely in shape,deadly. Yet they crossed through the port smoothly, drawing next to no attention, not even from the guards patrolling the tarmac.
Then a sleek black shuttle came into view, and I knew—without it being said—that this was their destination. It just matched their armor and their deadly vibe. And suddenly, I itched to pull out my stolen comm device and take pictures of these guys lined up in front of the small but sleek and fast-looking ship. If I could convince them to take off their tops… it would make for a fantastic alien take on a fireman’s calendar, and I would bet it would sell like hotcakes, even if I knew nothing about this Quadrant at all. Then I spotted the two women trotting off the ship, guarded protectively behind one very big, very alien creature.
“Humans,” I breathed in surprise. I recognized Evie right away; her bright red hair gave her away. She was Aramon’s human mate. The other woman was more hidden, standing behind a very large alien who wore black armor like Solear’s mercenary friends. I couldn’t see much of her beyond her face peeking out around one muscled arm. And the guy himself? He was more impossible than any of the aliens I’d seen to date, even the ugly warthog, Krektar, and the dude growing plants from his back.
He was half snake, half man, his coils possibly amounting to more than thirty feet in length, maybe more. All of him was black, except for the streaks of green in his long hair and the shimmer of gold along his cheekbones. I recognized his face and drew in a shocked breath when I realized this was the captain Solear respected so much. I’d seen him in Solear’s recollection and on that one comm call, but not enough of him to grasp thereality of his shape.“Naga,”Solear supplied for me, but that was all.
“Lyra! You guys made it!” Evie called out, waving wildly with one hand, while the other rested on the butt of a pistol holstered at her hip. She seemed careful about her own safety, but that wariness faded when Aramon broke away from our little group to jog ahead and sweep her into his arms with a loud, “Hello, mate!”
