by Roxie Ray
Saved By The Warrior Hero
Lunarian Warriors: Book 3
Roxie Ray
Contents
1. Alyse
2. Nion
3. Alyse
4. Nion
5. Alyse
6. Nion
7. Alyse
8. Nion
9. Alyse
10. Nion
11. Alyse
12. Nion
13. Alyse
14. Nion
15. Alyse
16. Nion
17. Alyse
18. Nion
19. Alyse
20. Nion
21. Alyse
22. Nion
23. Alyse
24. Nion
25. Coplan
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Saved By The Warrior Hero
1
Alyse
Call me crazy. Strap me up in a straitjacket, send me to a mental institution or slap a tinfoil hat on my head.
It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change anything.
I’d always known aliens were real.
The night I first realized, I was six years old. I remember that because of the number of candles that had been on my birthday cake earlier that day. Six tiny flames flickering away over a pink unicorn cake two times bigger than I was. Mom and Dad had bought me a pony and there was envy in the eyes of every other gold-class little girl in attendance.
Even twenty-two years later, it was the last birthday I ever enjoyed.
“Go back to bed, sweetheart.” My mother was pouring the last dregs of a bottle of champagne into a glass when I wandered back out into the kitchen that night. “Even little girls need their beauty sleep.”
“But you’re not sleeping,” I whined as I lingered in the doorway. “And I want to ride Cinnamon Bun. Puh-leeeese?”
“In the morning, princess. It’s too dark out now. Cinnamon Bun is sleeping—you should be too.” My father came in from his study and wrapped his arms fondly around my mother’s waist. I’d always been proud of how in love they were. The parents of all my gold-class friends always looked at each other like they hated each other, but not mine. They were a team. Elegant, polished and always making googly eyes at each other.
Even as I made my signature yuck, gross face, I knew that their relationship was exactly the kind that I wanted for myself someday, too.
I padded back into my room, hanging my head with my little fists balled up tight. It wasn’t fair that I had to go to sleep while Mom and Dad were out in the kitchen, giggling and having fun. I could hear their laughter echo all the way up the stairs and down the hall.
But when I crawled back beneath the pink silk canopy of my big, comfy bed, I felt something that distracted me from everything I was missing out on. The curtains off my balcony fluttered in a dark summer breeze that kissed my face and played with my long, white-blonde curls. I’d always been a night person, lying awake in bed until the first beams of sunrise started to color the sky the orange-pink of a salmon fillet. And now, it felt like even the night itself was beckoning me out into it.
The night…and maybe something else, too.
“Pretty girl.” A haunting purr joined the breeze. It made my arms turn to goosebumps beneath my little white nightgown. “Pretty, pretty girl.”
“Cinnamon Bun?” I scrunched up my face and turned my head to the side. I’d seen lots of talking ponies on the television before. They were the whole reason that I’d wanted a pony of my own to begin with. “Who’s there? Is it you?”
“Pretty girl,” the voice said again. It was deeper than any of the voices of the talking ponies on TV, which were all sugary and high-pitched and sweet. But maybe Cinnamon Bun was a boy pony? I lived in Sector One, after all—Sector One, where anything was possible. “Pretty girl, come out and play.”
I hesitated. Just for a second. There was a strange, icy-cold feeling prickling on the back of my neck. It was telling me, Hey, dumb little kid. Maybe you shouldn’t trust talking horses that lure you outside after bedtime. But instead, I rubbed it away and hopped down out of bed.
If there was one thing I was better at than hearing my own intuition, even back then, it was finding exciting new ways to ignore it.
Outside on the balcony, the evening was as black as I’d ever seen it. If the moon was out, the clouds must have gobbled it up and hidden it away. When I leaned up against the railing, I couldn’t see the stables—even when I squinted.
But when I looked down, I could see something. The tall, huge shape of a man was standing in the rose garden beneath my balcony, even darker than the night itself.
“You’re not Cinnamon Bun,” I called down accusingly. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Our estate had guards posted all along the perimeter, and guard dogs, too. They always sniffed my hands approvingly when I went to pet them and rolled over so I could scratch their bellies when I fed them stinky, melty cheese from the fridge. Dad always said that they’d keep me safe. I believed him, too.
Maybe I shouldn’t have.
Maybe if I’d trusted that safety a little less, everything that happened after could have been prevented. But there was no way I could have known that at the time.
After all, I was only six. Six years old and dumb as a sack of bricks. I didn’t even feel fear when the man in the garden raised his head and his shadow grew. Now I could make out the shape of two long, sharp horns at the top of his head.
“There you are,” he said. I could hear the sound of a smile in his voice. It was sharp and metallic, like the big knife our chef used to chop grapefruits with. “I have been watching you for a long time.”
“That’s creepy,” I pointed out. “Watching people is rude. Mom always says so.”
The man chuckled. It wasn’t a nice noise. Again, that cold feeling on the back of my neck, like icy fingers pulling me back into bed, returned.
Not that I paid attention to them. I was completely caught up in the moment, like I was in some kind of curious trance.
“Do you want to come away with me?” the man asked. He held a hand up toward the balcony, like he meant for me to take it. Each of his fingers was tipped with a long, sharp claw. “Come away with me, and I will give you everything you could ever desire.”
I clenched my jaw and crossed my arms over my chest. I was a gold-class Sector One girl. I already had everything I wanted—except, maybe, to be allowed to go out and ride Cinnamon Bun through the forest that surrounded our estate.
“Mom says I shouldn’t go anywhere with strange men,” I told him sagely. That should have been the end of it. Going places with strangers, Mom had told me time and time again, was a good way to get kidnapped.
“But I am not a man,” he countered.
That piqued my interest just enough that I leaned over the balcony again, squinting my eyes into little slits so I could try to see his face.
“What are you, then?”
“I come from a planet far, far away from here. There, I am king.” His fingers moved slowly, beckoning me to him. “My people have been observing yours for a very long time. Dabbling in your politics. Shifting your world so we can make the best use of your species. Soon, many of your kind will live among mine and bow to our will. But if you come with me now, I will teach you how to hold yourself with Rutharian dignity. I will train you to fight with fury and pride. You will not be a slave like the others. Then, when you are older, I will make you my queen. You would like to be a queen, would you not?”
I stared at his hand, considering it. I didn’t want to be a slave, and Dad did call me his little princess. Even though there were no queens in the sectors, I couldn’t pretend like it wouldn’t be nice
to be one anyway. For a moment, I was caught up in a daydream of sparkling tiaras and fancy dresses, glamorous balls and a palace even bigger than the mansion I lived in now.
“Maybe…” I started. But then I thought of Mom and Dad downstairs. Yes, I was little grumpy that they’d sent me to bed, but if I went to a planet far, far away, I’d probably never see them again. “Can my parents come? And Cinnamon Bun?”
“No,” the not-man in the darkness said sharply. “No. You must come alone.”
I rolled my eyes. Being queen wouldn’t be fun if my parents couldn’t be there, too.
“You should probably go,” I called down to him, haughty as I’d ever been. The prickling on my neck was only getting worse and worse with every minute, and now, I was starting to feel like maybe I should have listened to it from the start. “I don’t want your stinky kingdom, and I’ll never be your queen.”
That would show him. Or at least, I thought it would.
But instead, he only laughed.
“You are an insolent thing. Even for a little girl,” he said. “Such a shame. I would have liked to educate you in the ways of Rutharian royalty. Now I see that to do so, I would have to break you—and then, alas, you would be no good to me or my people.”
“I’m not insolent,” I snapped back at him. I knew a threat when I heard one, but in that moment, his insult hit me harder than any fear I should have felt. “I’m Alyse. And I’m not little. Mom says I’m very tall for my age.”
“Alyse.” He hissed my name like it was some kind of special treat. “Mm. What a pretty name.”
That was finally enough to send me racing back to my bed. The cold feeling on my neck was crawling all over me now. Even when I pulled my covers up over my head, I couldn’t stop shivering.
But even all of my thick, fuzzy blankets couldn’t drown out the sound of his voice as it wafted through the window one last time.
“Mm. Perhaps you are not ready yet—but someday, you will be. You, and so many others of your kind. You cannot hide from me, Alyse. Someday soon, I will return for you—and when I come for you then, you will be mine. Whether you like it or not.”
I didn’t let his threats draw me out of my little blanket cocoon, though. I stayed there for what felt like hours, until finally exhaustion took over and I drifted off to sleep. All night, I had nightmares so vivid, it was hard to separate what had just happened from what was just a bad dream.
But the next morning when I woke up, it was to the shrill sound of a scream.
I threw my covers back immediately and thundered down the stairs with my little bare feet. Our cook’s wide, soft body blocked the doorway of the kitchen. She was shaking even harder than I had been last night. When I drew a little closer, I realized she was crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked as I came up behind her to tug on the side of her apron.
Immediately, she turned and grabbed hold of my shoulders. Her round, red cheeks were streaked with tears.
“G-go back to bed, Alyse. You shouldn’t…”
She tried to guide me away from the kitchen, but I craned my neck at the last minute and caught a glimpse of what she didn’t want me to see.
A champagne glass shattered on the sleek white tile of the kitchen floor, surrounded by a pool of dark red.
For a second, I thought maybe it was wine…but my parents didn’t drink red wine.
And that wouldn’t have explained the sight of my father’s hand curled next to it, the face of his gold watch still ticking away as his wrist lay limply on the floor.
The police called it a home invasion gone wrong. Double homicide, not counting the guards and the dogs who were meant to protect our home from exactly that. Later, I learned that they suspected the perpetrators were some gray-class thugs trying to break in and steal whatever they could.
But nothing from the house had been stolen. No murder weapon was ever found. And worst of all, no one was ever caught and tried for the crime.
When a nice policewoman brought me into the station to take my statement, I tried to tell her about the not-man in the garden that night. I recounted our conversation to her, as best I could. At first, she seemed interested. She even brought in a sketch artist, so I could describe the not-man to them and they could try to get an idea of what their only suspect looked like.
They gave up on me the second I started trying to describe his horns.
The rest of my childhood was spent in exclusive private boarding schools that only some with a gold-class fortune could afford. During the summers, when the other girls were whisked away by their parents to exciting vacation homes, I was shut into the mansion of my dying grandmother and left to my own devices. The medical staff she had on hand there were my only friends for those long months away from school. Sometimes, they would entertain me by listening to my tale of the alien king who had tried to steal me away with him that night—the one who, by then, I was so sure had killed my parents. More often than not, though, they would only chuckle and pat me on the head.
“You’re quite the storyteller, Alyse,” my grandmother’s private doctor told me once. “But you’re getting too old to be telling fibs like that now.”
I balled up my fists, called him a jerk and ran away in a huff. But three days later, when I finally emerged from my room again, I’d already made up my mind.
If people weren’t going to take my story seriously, then I wouldn’t tell it anymore. I knew what I saw. I knew what had really happened.
But if all anyone was going to do was laugh at me when I told them, I’d find some other way to get them to take me seriously instead.
“You’re kidding me, babe!” Felicia’s voice blasted out from the speaker of my phone like a firing squad. “Come on. Jace is funny and sexy, and he owns a mega yacht. What’s not to like?”
“He thinks dogs can’t eat chocolate because it makes them fat.”
“Yeah, and you think an alien king killed your mom and dad.”
Ugh. I let my silence be all the answer Felicia needed for that one. I knew I shouldn’t have told her my theories about my parents’ murders. But then again, when we first met at Gallant Glade School for Girls, we’d only been six at the time.
Felicia rode the silence out as I jogged up the steps to my apartment. With my trust fund, I could have gotten a much nicer place than the one I’d chosen after I finished med school. But I wanted to do my residency at a hospital where my help was actually needed. In the gold-class neighborhoods, the only interesting cases that ever came in were complications from botched nose jobs and imploded butt implants. In gray-class areas like this one, I got to face a new challenge every day. The only doctors who worked at Saint’s Gates with me were there because they genuinely cared about people.
It was a nice break, at least, from dealing with my wealthy private school friends and their melodramatic vacation plans.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” Felicia finally relented. “But still, this ski trip is going to be a bummer if you insist on throwing off the group dynamic, babe. It’s supposed to be me and Brink, Chantel and Rayner, you and Jace! And you know if you don’t couple up with Jace, Rayner is going to hit on you again—which means Chantel will throw a fit because you know they agreed he’s only supposed to sleep with her and his tax attorney now that they’re exclusive and—”
“The last time I talked to Jace, he asked me what country Sector Six is part of,” I groaned, jiggling my key in the lock until it finally popped open. “Just spending time around that guy makes me feel like I’m losing IQ points. Can’t I just skip out of it? The snow is all fake anyway, and I can’t be within three feet of Jace without getting high off his hair gel fumes.”
“But then we’ll have to invite Bianca,” Felicia whined. “And I haven’t talked to her since she made out with my dad at the Unification Day fireworks last year, remember?”
I closed the door behind me and locked it tight with a sigh. Everything about the gold-class life was fake, from the friendships to the m
en to the manufactured quaintness of our vacation destinations. The only thing that felt real to me at all anymore was my work and my patients, and those wore me thin enough that I didn’t have a lot of energy left for anyone else. When Felicia called, I was already exhausted from coming off a twelve-hour shift. I hadn’t even gotten out of my scrubs yet. I wanted a shower, a hot meal, and such a long sleep in my bed that I was able to completely forget that people named things like Brink and Chantel even existed. Dealing with Felicia’s social planning issues wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind for the night.
“Can we table this?” I asked. “I’m beat, Leesh. I need to grab some sleep before my next shift starts.”
“Ugh. Fine. But call me back first thing in the morning,” Felicia insisted. “Because we still need to figure out what rooms in Daddy’s lodge everyone is getting, and if we’re going to use the hot tub, I need you to recommend me someone who can do a tummy tuck on short notice, because after last weekend in Sector Four…”
I placed my phone on my bedside charger and let Felicia talk to the air while I showered and scarfed down some food. By the time I finally poured myself into bed, I was relieved to see that she’d finally hung up.
Sleep came easy for me now that I was a doctor. For a long time after my parents were killed, I’d struggled with bad dreams and night sweats. I’d lived in fear of the day when that horned creature I’d met on my sixth birthday would return to collect me. Claim me. Just like he’d promised. But now, I was going to bed so exhausted, I didn’t even have the nightmares anymore.
The memory was never far from the back of my mind, but with every passing day it seemed a little less real. I wasn’t that scared little girl trembling beneath my blankets anymore. I was twenty-seven now. I had a job that mattered to me, nurses who respected me, patients who depended on me.
