by Lucy Snow
“Melissa!” I shouted, as the beast shook its head from side to side, trying to throw me off. “Get inside the ship!”
Melissa looked up at me, a mask of abject fear and terror etched across her beautiful face. She backed up against the ship, standing up from her kneeling position, but she didn’t take her eyes off the beast as she felt around behind her for the controls to the shuttle’s door.
Good, at least she was moving away from the fight. The beast grew angrier by the second, and I could feel the force at which it was trying to shake me off. I knew that I was needlessly tiring myself out like this trying to hang on, so the next time it moved toward the right, away from Melissa, I let go of its neck at the end of its motion, and let it throw me as far away as possible.
As I flew through the air, I whipped out a smaller blade from my leg pocket and threw it right at the beast, hoping to draw its attention.
I was successful.
The beast promptly forgot about Melissa, who just managed to find the shuttle door controls and use them, disappearing to my satisfaction inside the shuttle and sealing the door behind her. That was a relief - now it was just the two of us.
The beast came after me, gnashing its teeth and leaving a viscous blue bile-like fluid behind it. The knife had landed and punctured it. That was a good sign - despite its other worldly appearance, it could be hurt by a sharp blade.
That put us on a much more equitable footing, despite its size.
The beast was not about to go down without a fight, though, and though it towered over me, I could tell that it was not about to mistake me for some easy prey. Instead, it jumped toward me, claws and teeth out, hoping to take me down in one shot.
I did the only thing I could do in the moment. I dove backward and shifted, feeling my natural skin harden and my wings come out. The beast could not stop its forward momentum despite how surprised it clearly was that I had changed form in front of it, but by then it was too late.
Flapping my strong wings as hard as I could, I flew toward the beast, blade out, ancient Kreossian war cry escaping from my lungs, designed to disorient the beast further.
It took the bait, and as I flew I drove the blade straight into one of what I thought was its eyes.
I thought that was enough, but the beast had other ideas. The ethereal roar of pain it emitted shook me to my very core, and as I landed it swiped out with one of its huge paws, knocking me to the ground and taking the wind from my chest.
Still howling in pain, the beast advanced on me, but I was not about to let it have the advantage again, and I rolled out of the way of its next attack, drawing my final hidden blade and flying forward again. First I passed directly under its neck, raking across the underbelly with my blade, and finally I curled around and landed on its head, striking downward with all the force I could muster.
The beast staggered and went down, crashing to the ground with a thud that seemed out of place given how it looked to float upon the ground before. As it died, the blue glow that had unnerved me dissipated, and the creature stopped absorbing all the light around it.
I had won. More importantly, I had protected my mate.
CHAPTER 07 - MELISSA
I was huddled up in the back of the ship when the door opened. I scrambled around for whatever I could, closing my small hands around a pipe and holding it in front of my face, intending to go down fighting as best I could, and wondering how the beast would fit into the small shuttle.
The attack never came, and I realized my eyes were shut as tight as they could be, and I was swinging the pipe back and forth from side to side.
There was no sound, except a low chuckle. I opened one eye and then the other. There was no beast.
Ark stood in front of me, looking down at the cuts on his survival suit while laughing at me. “Is that your plan of defense, Melissa? Swing the pipe around till the trouble gets…bored?”
“Shut up! I was scared, you ass!” The fear turned to anger as I picked myself up. “I didn’t know what else to do!”
Ark stepped backward and looked around. “Well, you certainly chose correctly.”
“Jerk! I haven’t been in as many battles as you!”
“How many have you been in?”
“Including this one?”
“Yes.”
I thought about that for a moment. “One,” I said, with a mixture of shame and pride in my voice.
Ark leaned back and laughed, long and loud. I stepped toward him and punched him in the stomach. “Keep it up, Ark, and it’ll be two, really quick!”
He held up his hands to show that he was unarmed. “I would not want that, Melissa. No more battles for me today.”
“That’s a relief.” I looked him up and down. He was gorgeous as always, covered in sweat, and I could see green blood oozing out of several cuts. “You’re hurt! Are you alright?”
Ark again looked down at the survival suit. “I will be fine. The suit will take care of me, and these wounds will heal shortly.”
“Are you sure you’re OK?” I was concerned; he seemed like the type of man who would downplay his injuries just to seem more manly and tough. Not to say that didn’t hold some appeal to me, because it totally did, but at the same time it wouldn’t do either of us any good if he suddenly keeled over from some internal injury he wasn’t willing to tell me about.
“I will be fine, Melissa. What happened here?”
“I finished with the inventory and I was relaxing in the sun waiting for you to come back, when I heard this sound coming from the trees. The same direction you left on. I thought it was you, so I got up, I was so excited to see you…”
“And it was the beast.”
I nodded. “It came out of nowhere and just started making those awful noises. I didn’t know what to do so I tried to run, but it cornered me against the ship. I was looking for a weapon but all I could find was the small knife you gave me, and I didn’t know how to use it so I didn’t know what to do and-“
Ark stepped forward and cut me off, throwing his huge arms around me and pulling me toward him. I jumped up and wrapped my arms around his neck, hugging him with a ferocity I didn’t know existed. “I missed you so much, Ark, I should never have let you go without me.”
As soon as I said it, I knew that I shouldn’t have, and I could feel my face turn bright red with embarrassment. Of course, this was a tense situation and I had let out more information than I should have. I looked into Ark’s deep, dark eyes and expected him to ignore me.
Instead, Ark leaned his head forward and kissed me. Softly at first, and I kissed him back, but soon the intensity grew and we were both thrusting our faces toward each other. I let his tongue in as I felt the muscles around his neck and upper back tighten up, and he gripped me tighter.
Ark pulled back after a few seconds. “I missed you as well, Melissa Crane of Earth, and I will not leave you behind anymore.”
“Promise?”
“On my honor as a Kreossian warrior.”
“Good enough for me,” I whispered, and we went back to kissing. I loved being in his arms, and I lost track of time as we kept kissing.
Finally, we separated as Ark set me back down on the ground. I looked up at him woozily, still a little discombobulated from the attack and being in the air so long clinging to my hulking alien brute of a man.
“Come outside,” Ark said, pulling me back toward the door. He must have seen and felt my hesitation - I didn’t move, looking at the door with a mixture of uneasiness and dread. Ark’s gaze softened. “It will be alright, Melissa. There are no more of them out there.”
“How can you tell? How can you be sure?” I asked skeptically.
“They are very clearly solo hunters. If they were not, they would have attacked as a group.”
I shuddered to think of what that might have been like, how it would have gone down. I could be dead right now! Of course, I wasn’t, and that was because Ark had saved me. I knew I could trust him to keep me safe.
/> “Alright, I understand. If you’re sure…” I tried to read Ark’s face.
He stared back at me. “I will not let anything happen to you, Melissa.”
We walked toward the door, and I took a deep breath as Ark pushed the button to open it. Ark stepped outside first and I followed, letting the warm wind of the evening wash over me. I shuddered, sighing and breathing out deeply.
Aside from the body of the beast lying nearby, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was funny that we had only been here a little longer than a day, but already this place was starting to feel familiar to me. It was interesting how quickly one’s world shrank when in a strange situation.
I sat down near where the fire was while Ark knelt down and lit it back up. I sat back and fanned my hands out in front of it, warming myself up despite the mild heat all around. The fire made me feel safer, even though the creatures might not be as scared of it as they should be.
Ark stood up after the fire was stable, and without speaking, he stood in front of the beast’s carcass, investigating it. “What’re you doing?” I asked.
Ark didn’t respond at first, just looked closer, running his hands over the body and turning over so he could get a better look.
My stomach dropped. “It’s not…still alive, is it?” I was suddenly gripped by fear, and I wanted to either run toward Ark’s muscles or back into the ship, despite Ark being even closer to the body than I was.
Ark laughed, still not turning around. “No, it is very much dead. You have nothing to fear from this one.” He glanced at me over his shoulder. “And from any others, Melissa, not while I still draw breath.”
That warmed my heart, even though it sounded dramatic and heavy-handed. Of course, Ark was nothing if not dramatic and heavy-handed, and I couldn’t deny that I loved it. He was so different from any other man I had ever met. There was no guile or artifice around him - he was the most straightforward man I had ever encountered. “I believe you, Ark,” I replied, and he smiled and went back to staring the beast’s body down.
I watched him as Ark took his blade out and began to slice into the body, pulling away large parts of it. He did it without glee, and it was almost surgical in precision. I was fascinated. Ark carefully set the limbs and organs he pulled off the creature off to the side, and kept going till he had completely disassembled it the same way a mechanic took apart an engine.
When he was finished, Ark stood back up and surveyed his handiwork, wiping the sweat from his impressive brow. He turned around and came back to the fire, considering it before walking off to the edge of our encampment at the crash site, where the trees began.
I watched further while Ark cut down several branches with his blade and came back to the fire, driving branches into either side of the ovular fire and suspending branches between them. By now I knew what he was doing.
“You’re cooking it?!” I gasped, incredulously. “Seriously? You want to eat it?”
Ark nodded. “It will be a good change from emergency rations.”
“What if it’s poisonous to us?”
Ark furrowed his brow. “I had not considered that. I am naturally resistant to all known poisons, but you will undoubtedly not be.”
I crossed my arms under my chest, letting out a little discontented sound. “Gee, thanks for thinking of me.”
Ark thought for a moment before he picked up one of the beast’s discarded limbs and took it into the shuttle. He left the door open and I heard him ask the computer to analyze the flesh and determine whether it was same for human consumption. A minute later he emerged, a smile on his face. “You will be fine.”
“That’s a relief,” I said, still skeptical that the recently-frazzled ship’s computer would know what a human could and couldn’t neat. “You sure that thing knows what it’s talking about?”
“It knows everything that our advanced scouts have reported back to us about humanity,” Ark said. “I am confident that you will be safe, or I would not offer the meat to you.”
That satisfied me, and we sat back down and Ark suspended the meat over the flames, turning it slowly and steadily. I had to admit the smell made my mouth water, and after a couple days of chalky emergency rations I was starting to get sick of the slightly peanut-buttery flavor and I wanted something else to eat.
When the meat was ready, it was dark, and Ark pulled it off, breaking off a piece and handing it to me. I looked at it for only a moment before greedily attacking it, almost burning my tongue in the process. Ark watched me with a grin on his face as I tore into the meat like I hadn’t eaten in days.
It tasted good, but honestly, even if it had just tasted like chicken, as long as it didn’t taste like peanut butter and chalk I would have been thrilled. I vaguely noticed Ark tear off a piece for himself and start eating, but in truth I was so hungry from the attack and the anxiety it had caused that all I could focus on was getting that meat into me as soon as possible.
When I was done with my first piece and looked up, Ark wordlessly extended his hand holding another one, which I gratefully accepted and immediately went to work on. We sat there next to the fire, eating our fill of the beast that had been menacing us for the last day.
It felt like we were really roughing it, and finally starting to get the better of this new planet. I could feel my spirits rising dramatically. All we had to do was survive till the ship was fit for spaceflight again and we would be well on our way home.
‘Our way home’ suddenly sounded funny to me, and I looked up from the bones of the beast as I discarded them and watched Ark eating hungrily. “Better than the nutritional supplements back on the ship?” I asked, chiding him a little.
Ark kept eating, but glanced my way. “Better than some,” he finally admitted. “Different.”
“You have such a way with words, Ark.”
“I am known among my people as very eloquent.”
I laughed out loud, so hard and long that I could feel tears starting to well up. Ark watched me and I realized very soon that he was being serious. “Oh, wait,” I said, trying to wipe the tears away. “You were being serious.”
“I would not joke about such things.”
I was still giggling as Ark went back to eating like nothing had happened. When he was done we both tossed the bones into the fire. We both looked into it for a minute or so before Ark broke the silence. “Well?” He growled, looking at me. “Are you coming closer?”
I smiled and got up, moving closer and sitting down against him again, just like last night. Ark leaned back against the ship, and I snuggled against his warm body, breathing in his deep sandalwood scent.
Neither of us said another word, but Ark kissed me on the head as I got into position, and I signed contentedly. He was so much bigger than me, but I really loved how well I fit into his arms like this.
I could get used to this.
After a few minutes more of just lying against him and feeling his heart beat inside that massive chest of his, I realized that I still had a question for Ark. Well, to be fair, I had tons of them, but this seemed like the right time to ask just one of them.
“Ark,” I said, resting my head against his chest. I felt him stir underneath me as his head turned, but he said nothing. “When the shuttle was crashing…” I trailed off, not sure of what to say next.
“Yes?” I saw his eyes cloud over as he remembered the traumatic events that led to us being stranded on this planet. “I remember it.”
“You said something that I didn’t understand.”
