Kallel: A Sci-Fi Alien Warrior Paranormal Romance (Defender of Earth Book 2)

by Ashley West

  He nodded. "So far, yes. I've killed three Alva during an attack on a human entertainment center. Several humans were damaged or killed before we got there, but it was contained."

  Kellan made a disdainful noise. "Do the humans not know how to fight them?"

  "They do, but humans are small and their weapons are inefficient," Kal explained. "They aren't trained to stand a chance against the Alva, and most of their number are civilians."

  "I suppose that's understandable," Kellan said. "Still, you think they would have learned something from the Randoran."

  "I doubt they hung around for very long to teach them."

  As sad as it made Kal now that he was here and could see what humans were like, humans were not a priority for other races. They had their own people to worry about, their own things to do, and Earth was just too far away, too big, and too populated for them to protect the humans all the time. There were some who had taken up the cause of defending them on their own planet, leaving whatever planet they had come from and making a home on Earth, but that only did so much, honestly. It was a big world out there.

  "How have you settled in?" asked his mother, neatly changing the subject.

  "Well enough," Kal replied. "The accommodations are comfortable, but the food is different, and it's taken some getting used to. Everything is different here."

  His mother looked concerned. "But you're alright, aren't you?" she asked. "You'll be alright?"

  Kal smiled, touched as he always was by how much his mother cared for him. He was a man grown now, a warrior with a mission, and he was on another planet, but he knew that as long as he lived his mother wasn't going to stop worrying about him. That was just how she was, and while that might have embarrassed someone else, Kal liked it. He liked knowing he was cared for.

  "Yes, Mother," he said. "I'm fine. I'm eating, I'm going out." He hesitated and then continued. "And I'm meeting people." If one person counted as meeting people.

  "Humans?" Kellan asked.

  "Yes, Kellan. Humans. They aren't so bad, you know."

  "I never said they were. I was just...surprised that they would talk to you. Unless of course they think you're a human?"

  Kal shook his head. "No, they know I'm not from Earth. And if they didn't before, seeing me take on the Alva certainly let them know. It's fine. I'm even working with someone to figure out what the Alva are planning. She helped a lot when I fought them."

  His mother and brother exchanged glances, and Kal fought the urge to grind his teeth. It was so irritating when they did that.

  But neither of them said anything about the human woman, just moving on with their questions, telling him about how things were on Horu. Apparently there was a lot to do for the Unearthing Festival, and there were many gems being shipped out for a huge order as a clan that traded with them was about to celebrate the marriage of their leader.

  Life on Horu was continuing on as usual without him, and he was glad for it. When he ended the call with his family, he felt that little burn of homesickness, but it was a novel thing. He'd never had a reason to feel it before, after all, having never gone anywhere before, so feeling it now was a good feeling.

  He tipped his head back on the couch and let out a soft sigh. Being on his own felt good, just like he had always known that it would.

  A knock on the door brought him out of his thoughts, and he smiled wider and went to open the door for Haven who was standing there, looking at her phone with irritation. She looked lovely, as usual. She was wearing a dress made of light material in a soft, peachy color. It made her skin look warmer, and her hair was pulled into a low tail over one shoulder.

  When he opened the door, she looked up and smiled at him briefly before returning to her angry look while glaring at her phone.

  "Ah," Kal said, tilting his head to one side. "Are you going to come in?"

  She nodded distractedly. "Yes, thanks."

  He moved aside and she stepped in, gave a huff and then stuffed her phone in her bag.

  "Did it do something to offend you?" Kal asked, sounding amused.

  Haven gave him a look and sighed. "You know, for an alien you use a lot of phrases that people on Earth have already made annoying." He didn't know what to say to that, so it was good that Haven just kept talking. "It's not the phone, it's who I'm waiting to be on the other end of it. Someone wanted me to go over their tax information with them today, but of course they haven't messaged me back, because that would be too easy and too much like consideration."

  He only understood about half of that, but it seemed like the gist of it was that people were being rude. "I don't see how someone could be rude to you."

  She glanced at him and then snorted. "Why is that?"

  "Because you're a bit scary."

  Her face registered surprise, and then she was laughing softly. It was a lovely sound, and Kal was pleased with himself for being responsible for it.

  "Apparently not scary enough. Anyway, I didn't come here to complain at you. Do you have a plan?"

  Kal nodded. Planning wasn't his strong point, but he had put some thought into it since the last time he had seen Haven. Spread out across the table in the middle of his living room was a map of the city and the surrounding areas. It wasn't very detailed, but he thought it was good enough. If this was Horu, it would have been a projection on a holo screen, but this would have to do. "I think we should track the attacks," he said. "Try to prevent them, of course, but track where they are happening. Maybe there's some kind of pattern we can see."

  Haven tipped her head and nodded slowly, apparently thinking. "Assuming they would go with a pattern. Are they the type?"

  Honestly, they weren't. The Alva might have been a force before, but with the death of their leader, the stragglers were unorganized. Or that was what he would assume. Still, it didn't mean that they couldn't be motivated by revenge or some similar emotion.

  "They could be. Anyone could be given the right motivation."

  "Fair enough," Haven replied. "What do you need from me?"

  Kallel explained that he didn't know anything about the geography of the city, and he held out a box full of colored tacks that he'd gotten with the map. "Can you mark where the attacks have been?"

  She nodded, pulling her phone back out and going to sit on the couch. She placed a red tack just off the center of the city and glanced up at him. "The movie theater."

  He knew that one well. As he watched, she consulted her phone and then placed a few more, all outside of the city they were in for the most part, though they were getting closer to it. "The carnival. The outlet mall outside of town. That couple who got ambushed on the road. The concert two months ago. The woman who saw one in her yard one morning."

  With the exception of the couple and the woman, it seemed like the Alva were going for places where there were bound to be a lot of humans.

  "Maybe they want to kill as many as possible to make up for the ones in their number who were killed," Kal suggested.

  "It could be. They were raising a human army, weren't they?" Haven asked. "When they were here in force?"

  He nodded. "That was their plan. But the Champion's human companion put an end to that."

  Haven gave him an amused look. "I don't know if I can follow in her footsteps, Kal."

  "I know you don't think you can," he replied. "But we're going to do this. I made a promise to my queen, and if we work together, there's no reason why we can't bring them down."

  "If you say so. I will say this, though," Haven remarked, looking at the map. "I don't think it's as sophisticated as all that."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, I don't think they have some grand scheme here. Look at it. Already you can tell there's not really a pattern. It seems almost like..." She looked harder at the map, tracing a line with her finger. "Like they're just stumbling around. The couple on the road were probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Alva probably wandered into that woman's yard, and as for the
others...it's chaos. I remember that much from a year ago. They weren't here in Chesley, but it was all chaos in Valley Dale. It's like they feed on it. So maybe revenge is motivation, but they seem to be taking it out on us by just causing as much destruction as they can."

  Kal exhaled and frowned, thinking it over. "Maybe. I just...I feel like there's something deeper here. There was the first time, so there probably is now."

  "That's fair, I just don't know how much we can rely on the assumption that history is going to repeat itself, you know?"

  Honestly, he didn't know. History repeating itself was what he was counting on here. It was how he needed this to go. If it repeated itself well enough, then there would be no more Alvan forces. The veteran warriors would all be dead, and the universe would be better off for it. He'd be a hero, and that would give him the power to do whatever he wanted in life.

  Somehow telling Haven that seemed foolish. "Let's just see how it plays out," he said instead. "We can still track what they do, and it should become clear what their plan is. If they have one."

  Haven seemed content enough with that, and she settled back against the couch, glaring at her phone again before she just huffed and tossed it to the side. "So," she said. "Assuming we figure out the grand master plan for the Alva, what are you going to do about them? I know you can fight and all, but you can't be thinking of taking them on yourself."

  She actually sounded concerned, and Kal smiled. "No, no. Like I said before, I'm just the scout. I have the entire might of the Hakkan warriors waiting for my word. Once I send for them, they will come, and we will fight."

  "Huh," Haven said. "Okay, then."

  That seemed to satisfy her, and Kal blinked in confusion. She didn't seem to have any questions about who the Hakkan were or what they did, how long it would take them to get to Earth, even. Either she just trusted it would happen, or she wasn't that interested either way.

  He...supposed that was fair. She had her own life, and the Alva, and by extension he, had sort of crashed into it and thrown it off track. She was probably hoping for the moment that they would all leave.

  Kal hid the fact that it made him sad.

  Chapter Nine: The Detour

  For all her planning and skill at working a schedule, there was something that always managed to annoy her, and that was the fact that she could plan all day if she wanted, but people could always come in and ruin that with just a few seconds of irritation. Human error was the number one cause of failed plans, and Haven didn't want to brag, but the errors were rarely on her part.

  People were just thoughtless sometimes. Rude and careless and selfish, and as long as they got what they wanted, nothing else mattered.

  So on a Wednesday, Haven slammed the door to her car and then marched down the street to Sheila's muttering under her breath as she went. She was on the afternoon shift, which was already going to be a trial. Honestly, she would have rather dealt with the morning rush in this mood, but if she'd been on opening like she wanted to be, then she wouldn't be in this mood in the first place.

  Haven had scheduled an eight o'clock meeting with someone who wanted her to go over their books with them. The man had called, offered her plenty of money to look at his records for the year and start his taxes, and Haven had taken the afternoon shift to accommodate him. People who had money always wanted to be accommodated, and she wasn't in a position to turn that down or say no to it.

  Of course, he hadn't even shown up to the meeting, because people who had money were also indifferent to the fact that other people's time actually mattered, so Haven had sat in the breakfast cafe for nearly an hour waiting for a phone call or a text or something, and when she'd finally broken down and called the man's office, his secretary had informed her politely and with a voice heavy with long suffering that her boss was out for the day because it had been nice boating weather.

  Haven had nearly thrown her phone across the cafe, but instead she just gathered her things and went back home. Now she had time to do other things on her list for the day that she'd planned to do after work. It was fine.

  Only it wasn't.

  The market had been out of the kind of shampoo she used, and further research had proved that every other store in the area was out of it, too. When she'd asked someone why, it had come out that it was being discontinued. Meaning she was going to have to move to a new shampoo, which was practically unheard of, considering she'd been using the same shampoo for the last ten years at least. Choosing a new one had been baffling, and Haven just knew that she was going to wash her hair with it and it wouldn't come out the same.

  But it didn't end there. The avocados were either too ripe or not ripe enough, which put a damper on her plans of making guacamole for dinner. The cut of beef she wanted to use with her tacos was out, and the man behind the meat counter told her they were waiting for a shipment before there would be more.

  "Yeah," he'd said, leaning on the counter. "I think there might have been some kind of attack out there, so it'll be a while."

  While she wanted to rage, she remembered that they were actually tracking the alien attacks, so she got the pertinent details as the man remembered hearing them and then moved on. She could make due with another cut of beef.

  Knowing how to improvise was just as important as anything else, she told herself as she selected a flank steak instead of the skirt she'd wanted.

  Everything else on her shopping list was where it was supposed to be, but when she got to the registers, her debit card wouldn't work. She checked her balance, and there was money there, but the card kept returning an error. So she was forced to hold up the line to dash over to the ATM (where her card miraculously was working) to get cash.

  If she didn't know any better, Haven would say someone was out to get her or she'd pissed off some kind of luck deity. She couldn't remember the last time so many things had gone wrong in one day, and it was barely noon.

  To make matters worse, when her mother called her while she was making lunch, she was not sympathetic at all.

  "I always thought you opened yourself up for this kind of thing," she said. "By planning your days down to the minute. You have to learn to take life as it comes, Haven."

  And Haven had been left gritting her teeth and refusing to snap at her mother that if she wasn't so good at planning then things might have gone differently at that movie theater. But it was a near thing.

  "You've made that perfectly clear, Mother," she bit out instead.

  "Oh, don't be like that," her mom said. "I'm trying to help, Haven. I don't want you to have a rude awakening some day when you realize you can't plan for everything."

  Maybe she couldn't but she was definitely going to try.

  By the time she was due in at work, the rest of the day was grating on her. The chime over the door heralded her entrance, and Lacey looked up and waved at her with a bright smile that faltered when she caught sight of Haven's face. "Oh no," she said. "Hurricane Haven."

  "Not today, Lace," Haven muttered, going behind the counter and moving past her to go to the back so she could put her jacket and purse away. If she snapped at Lacey, Lacey would probably cry, and then Haven would feel worse, so she took a deep breath and let it out, not wanting to have that be the cherry on top of her bad day.

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket, and when she looked at saw a message from Kal, a little smile spread over her face. Against all odds, her strange friendship with the alien was one of the best parts of her days lately.

  She'd messaged him earlier about her frustrations, just to have someone to talk to about it. She loved Darren, of course, he was her best friend, but sometimes he was a source of stress just like anyone else with his refusal to see things from her perspective, so having someone else was helpful.

  Haven typed a quick message back to Kal and then went to take her place behind the counter with Lacey.

  There were two notable customers during her work shift.

  Darren came in as he usually did since
his office was just two miles up the street. He ordered his usual confection in a cup, this time with both french vanilla and salted caramel syrups, and leaned against the counter to talk to them about his third date with the margarita woman whose name Haven still didn't know.

  Haven was ostensibly on a break, though she hadn't left, and when her phone buzzed, she pulled it out to reply. Kal was enquiring about whether or not he could come down to the cafe, and Haven told him that he should. He could hold her back if she tried to throttle anyone.

  "Who are you texting?" Darren asked, and Haven looked up quickly. He had his eyebrow raised and his head tilted and was in full gossip mode.

  "No one," she said quickly, which was, of course, the wrong thing to say.

  "Uh huh," Darren said slowly. "Right. Because you definitely don't always have your face buried in your phone these days. I'd think you were going wild with some kind of organization app, only you keep smiling and replying to something clearly. You do realize that's normal person behavior, right?"

  Haven blinked, a little stung by the flippancy of his words. "So I'm not normal?" she asked, eyebrows drawn down as she looked at him.

  "I'm going to...go over here," Lacey said, making herself scarce.

  Darren sighed. "You know that's not what I meant, Haven."

  "It's what you said," Haven fired back. "Only normal people text or smile at their phones or whatever, and since I'm a robot with no feelings it's out of character for me to be doing that, right?"

  "Haven, come on. You know I don't think that."

  "Don't you?" she asked, voice raising. "You're always trying to get me to do things I don't want to do. Because you think it's good for me. Or because it's good for you. Or because it's what 'normal' people do. And I ask you to let it go, and you never do. So really, what am I supposed to take from that?"

  "That I care about you, Haven," Darren burst out. "That I want you to be happy."

  She snorted. "And I can't possibly be happy doing the things I want, right? Only way to happiness is to do things your way. Of course."