Page 18 of Captured By the Dragon Warlord
Kerra
Has he told you yet you are his mate?
I contemplate what to say, what any of this means. I wish with all my heart I was with my friends, so we could really talk this out, so I could try to make a decision without the swirl of weird emotions which I don’t think are right, not so early, not when Dexx deliberately stole me away without gaining my agreement to anything.
He did me wrong, I shouldn’t be falling for him.
I don’t know, Kerra. I really don’t know.
DEXX
I’d have given anything to stay with Scarlett. To spend my shifted hours curled around her warm body, to not think about the tattered remains of my warriors in the mines and the cries of the injured as we got them free.
It is true, they will survive, providing they can maintain their shifts long enough to heal. But if they cannot, our death toll will rise.
And the lack of correct propping worries me. We’ve been mining long enough to know the risks. Such a simple mistake smacks of sabotage.
But until I’ve completed my time shifted and working, any investigation will have to wait. The star fuel won’t extract itself, and as I have warriors taken away from their work in order to clear the cave-in, I’m going to have to work harder to make up for it.
Star fuel in the form of the crystallinegygementis highly prized on any planet which has the capacity to launch space craft, including Vorostor, and by the warlords.
Our product is in demand, and whilst there are other places those who need it can go, ours is the purest.
I won’t let the other warlords accuse me of slacking.
My heart is warmed slightly from its icy slumber by the fact Scarlett hasn’t passed any information on to Darax via her comm device and that she considers itourbusiness.
Once again, I don’t want to shift but instead return to my quarters and be with her.
But I know what will happen if I don’t. The rage, the fever, the sickness.
The death when shifting no longer becomes a possibility.
I won’t let it happen to me, like I won’t let it happen to my warriors. We shift, we work, and we do it all over again. That way we stay alive until I can find a cure.
I want my rut to be the cure. I want to find the changes in my blood and make a serum which we can use.
But I don’t know if I rut for the little female in my quarters, who calmed my soul after I returned from the mines, who didn’t run when she could have done. Who considers what happened here to beour business.
I should be rutting for her. She’s the reason I risked everything, my reputation, my crew, my ship, and even a war with the Sarkarnii.
But the rut seems to be absent. Perhaps it is not meant to be. Perhaps a cure is impossible.
Shifting out the rest of my form into Sarkarnii, I drop into the shaft leading to the mines. My sight is better in the dark and the ability to ‘see’ in infra-red, something most Sarkarnii have but which was enhanced significantly by our mutation, means down here, in the depths, we are at home.
The air is still full of dust mixed with star fuel. I do my best not to pull it into my flight lungs. In my Sarkarnii form, I can usually resist most noxious gasses, but although we can survive even in the vacuum of space for short periods of time, there are still things which can kill us. Like being buried under a thousand tonnes of rock.
I shake my head to get the images of the dead Sarkarnii from my mind. Still shifted, their limp forms were dragged out, broken and lifeless.
We will honor them.
I throw myself into the digging, mindlessly tunneling through all the rock until I reach a rich seam of gygement. Usually such a find would lift my spirits, but I find my head wandering back to my little mate, to my den, to her soft body and my warm aquium.
My hips swing and my skin itches so hard I want to rip it off, even though I shed not so long ago. The mere thought of my mate, my Scarlett, sends my head spinning.
All I needed was an incentive. Time away from her. Time where her scent wasn’t in my nostrils and her face not close to mine.
I need Scarlett. And she will be mine.
