Page 29 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid
“I’m not asking you to protect me.” She brushed his hands away from her and took a step back. His tail twitched hard, desperate to reach for her. “I’m not leaving any of my people behind, Rentir. If you’re too afraid to press on, we part ways here.”
“I am not afraid for myself,” he said, correcting her. “You are too stubborn, Cordelia. You?—”
He was cut off by the sound of blaster fire, followed closely by a strangled sound of pain.
“Thea,” she breathed.
Then she ran straight into the heart of danger.
CHAPTER 12
Cordelia pumpedher arms for speed, charging blindly through the forest to the sounds of a scuffle. That pained, half-strangled attempt at a scream could only be Thea.
Three years before their mission departure, she’d been shot through the throat, and her vocal cords had sustained damage. She could rasp words sometimes, could hum if the mood took her, but a scream like that would cost her dearly.
The dropship returned with a deafening sound of roaring engines, sending her hair whipping into her eyes as she finally caught sight of the pair scuffling on the ground in the distance. Thea had gotten her knee between herself and the towering auretian alien and was struggling hard. He seemed hardly phased by her resistance, wrapping some kind of black rope around her like she was a calf at the county rodeo. Thea sank her teeth into his shoulder like a pit bull, thrashing her head, but he didn’t even flinch. A tether tumbled down from the hovercraft, and the alien hooked her into it, yanking hard twice.
“No! Thea!” Cordelia screamed over the noise of the dropship as Thea was hauled off the ground. Thea’s arms were pinned to her sides as the makeshift harness dragged her up into the air,her legs pinwheeling fruitlessly. Blood dripped fast from a gash in her left leg, streaking her pale skin.
The alien turned toward her as she approached, his towering physique and menacing black-visored helmet halting her in her tracks a few yards away. She panted, looking between the alien and Thea’s receding figure as it was dragged up into the treetops.
His head canted in a canine gesture, and he took a step toward her. Her knees trembled, indecision locking up her limbs.
They had been right to question why she’d been instated as Commander of theCassandra. They had been right to drag out her history, her failed simulations, her leaked psych evals. Someone else should have been on the ship. Someone else should be standing there, facing this monster, thinking of some brilliant plan to get Thea back.
Her breaths came too shallow, the panic pressing in on her. Her vision tunneled. Thea was being lifted beyond the trees, pulled up into the dropship as she flailed. The alien took another step toward her as the dropship veered away. He picked up speed, striding at her with his long legs, hand pulling another length of rope from a container at his hip.
Rentir burst through the underbrush, tackling the other alien to the ground and knocking the rope from his hands. There was a blade in his hand, glowing and humming, that looked like it could cut through metal like butter—but when Rentir slammed it tip first into the alien’s chest, the fabric of his suit resisted it. He caught Rentir’s wrists, and the two struggled as he tried to bury the blade, straddling the larger alien. His tail, sharpened to a deadly point, whipped furiously behind him.
“Rentir,” the alien beneath him rumbled; the voice filtered through a speaker.
Rentir stiffened. His arms were trembling with effort as he continued to try to drive the blade home. A tiny hole was burning open in the suit, now.
“Put the blade down,” the alien said. “You don’t have to do this. You have always been loyal to the Empire. Tellefan will surely forgive your transgressions if you bring him the female.”
Rentir growled wordlessly in response, his shoulders bunching as he worked harder to cut into the alien’s chest. The alien beneath him let out a furious, inhuman shriek of pain as the blade reached his skin. They rolled in a tangle of limbs. Suddenly Rentir was on the bottom, a knee pinning his tail to the ground as the alien punched him in the face. His blade had rolled to the wayside, setting a nearby bush on fire.
When Rentir took another sickeningly hard blow to the face, the panic holding her in stasis finally snapped. She lurched forward. Grabbing the length of rope the other alien had dropped, she ran up behind him.
Rentir’s eyes widened, following her as the alien wrapped his big hands around his throat and began to strangle him. He shook his head, thrashing more violently as she approached them. His claws raked fruitlessly over the auretian’s suit.
Cordelia looped the rope around the alien’s neck and threw all her weight back with a cry of fury. Surprise gave her the advantage; she wasn’t big enough to haul the slab of muscle to his feet, but she managed to roll with him, pulling him off of Rentir. She was crushed beneath his weight for a moment, and then he was on his feet, so tall that he pulled her completely off the ground. She didn’t let go of the rope, letting her dead weight keep it taut around his throat.
He slammed her back into a tree as Rentir wheezed and struggled to his feet. Stars skittered across her vision as her ribs and spine barked with pain. When she didn’t let go, the auretian reached down and tugged something from his thigh. A momentlater, he swung behind himself and punched her hard in the side. The pain was blinding, and her grip faltered. She slid to the ground, clutching at the throbbing agony at the left side of her waist. Her hand caught on something, heightening the pain, and she realized the alien hadn’t punched her. He’d stabbed her.
“Cordelia,” Rentir croaked, picking up his blade and staggering toward them. His eyes were brimming with hatred as he turned his attention to the auretian, his lips peeled back from his mouth full of fangs. “You’re dead.”
The auretian laughed, an ugly, bitter sound.
Rentir straightened to his full height just before they collided. He loosed a battle cry as he swung his blade. The auretian dodged back, swaying, and Rentir took the opportunity to tackle him to the ground. His tail wrapped around the alien’s neck, holding him still as Rentir shoved the tip of his blade into the seam of the auretian’s visor. He cranked the blade, ignoring the other male’s frantic blows and clawing fingers.
Rentir wasn’t even blinking. There was a fire in his eyes as he cranked the visor open. His muscles bulged beneath his shirt, somehow twice as large as they’d been before. As the glass slid out of the way, the forest filled with the sound of the frantic beeping coming from within the helmet.
The man inside the visor had ashen skin marked with a black Rorschach-like pattern across his nose and cheeks. His crystalline eyes could have passed for human. They rolled in his head as Rentir strangled him. There was a seam along his bottom lip and chin that she’d seen once before on the towering gray hybrid she’d met in the hangar. Her stomach turned in shock as it split wide open to reveal all his sharpened teeth set into starkly black gums. Twin fangs flailed at the end of each flap of skin that had previously covered his jaw, swinging fruitlessly in an attempt to pierce Rentir’s wrist. They snapped shut again a moment later.
“Mated,” the auretian gasped out.
Rentir pulled his blaster from his hip with his free hand, still holding the visor open as it struggled against him, trying to seal off its wearer once more.
