Page 18 of Guardian's Legacy
"What do you mean?"
He stretched his arms in front of him and interlaced his fingers; his entire posture suggested that he was uncomfortable talking about this. Thanks to my very volatile parents, I was quite adept at reading other people. "I mean, I don't know whomypeople are."
My eyes narrowed, and my forehead creased as my mind worked through his words. The best I could do, though, was ask the same question again, "What do you mean?"
He sighed and stared off toward a window that didn't show anything but blackness. It was weird; I had always imagined there would be millions of stars, suns, a comet—something other than this endless blackness in space. But it was all I ever saw whenever I looked through one of the windows.
"Why is there only blackness?" I wanted to know.
He gave me a funny look, as if surprised by my change in questioning.
"Because we're in hyperspeed. We're going so fast that you can't see anything besides the universe's blackness. You'll be able to see more once we slow down."
"Okay," I nodded as if that made perfect sense, just like everything else he’d said so far.
"I'm a Space Guardian," he picked up our conversation—maybe that wasn't really the right word, but I didn't know what else to call it, so I went with that—back up. "I work for the Ohrurs. They give me missions, and I fulfill them."
"What kind of missions?" Little alarm bells went off in my head. Was he going to tell me he was some kind of assassin for hire? No, that was just my imagination running wild with me. Had to be, right?
He shrugged, "Anything from protecting people like you or high-profile beings to terminating criminals."
"Terminating… as in…" I moved my hands back and forward, unsure of how to finish that sentence. I didn't want to make a gun with my fingers and say pew, pew.
"As in permanent termination," he nodded.
I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. This day wasn't at all what I had pictured it would be. Then again, the last time I pictured how a day would go had been right before the Cryons invaded Earth. Nothing had gone to plan since. And now it seemed I was the fated mate of an intergalactic assassin.Yay me!
I read enough sci-fi books to know what being a fated mate entailed. I tilted my head when one word, well, actually two, came to my mind—incredible sex.
Surreptitiously, my gaze wandered over to the alien hunk across from me. His tight uniform didn't leave much to the imagination. He was exceptionally well-built. I wasn't a sex addict, but I hadn't had sex in… let's say a long time. Not that I was contemplating having sex with Xyrek; it was just something my mind went to because of the fated mate stuff.
"That's who I am, who I always thought I was," Xyrek continued the conversation, hopefully clueless as to where my internal monologue had taken me. That was good. However, his expression and tone of voice suggested a deeper secret, and I found myself intrigued.
"Who youthoughtyou were?"
"I have no idea what species I belong to?" He admitted.
I blinked a few times. "You're not an Ohrur, I take it?"
He got off his chair so fast that it nearly tipped over. "Didn't I just say that?"
"Grouchy," my head bopped up and down, "and touchy."
He glared at me.
"Okay, so I still don't see why…" I trailed off because suddenly I realized what he was saying. "Oh. You have no idea what species you are, or if your species typically has this mating marks fated bond?"
His glares didn't intimidate me as much as they had at first. He was very much like the Pitbull my brother Damon had for a while. The beast was used in dog fights; he was all scarred up, one of his ears was bitten off, and he had a large tear over his snout and eye. The dog would bark and growl something fierce, but he never bit me, probably because I was the only person who would sneak outside where Damon kept him and bring him food and water. Without me, he would have starved to death. Anyway, Xyrek reminded me of that dog: all bark and no bite. Unless you counted the Cryons, heterminated… now that had been a massacre; not that Xyrek had any scars… alright, I was rambling again.
Oh, the dog? As far as my brother knew, he vanished one day. Damon was livid. He was supposed to go to another big dog fight that night. Lucky for the dog, Damon never spent any time with me. Otherwise, he might have known that my one and only friend’s parents were dog rescuers. They found a family for him, and I smuggled him in the middle of the night to his new home, where for the first time in his life, he got to go inside a house, sleep on a bed, and guess what—he got a sister, Chihuahua.
"Yes," he pressed out an answer to my question.
"Shit, that must be…" I searched for the right word, "unsettling, not knowing where you came from."
He sat back down, put his elbows on the table, and rubbed his neck again.
"What's wrong?"
