When she sat back on her heels and gazed across the water at the woods on the other side, her eye fell on a patch of low-growing moss wedged between the rocks. Tiny blue balls dotted the grey-green surface, and Chris held her breath to stop the apparition from vanishing before her eyes.
She picked her way across the treacherous riverbed. She stepped from one teetering rock to the next. She dragged her eyes away from those tantalizing blue beads to place her feet at each step, only to lock her gaze on them again.
Closer and closer they drew, but still she dared not hope they were what she thought they were. They might be poisonous, and she’d be dead out here in the middle of nowhere. No one would know where she was or how she died.
But she didn’t care. Her stomach told her to hazard everything on this one slender chance. She tiptoed across the river, and her hands shook when she plucked the shiny blue berries from their bush. They dropped into her palm, hard and taut with juice, and pearls of river foam clung to their dusky skin.
She popped the first three into her mouth and bit down. The juice squirted down her throat and pricked her tongue. Oh, she never tasted anything as good in her life! She clawed handfuls of the berries off their bushes and crammed them into her mouth as fast as she could. She would probably give herself a gut ache, but she didn’t care. She would suffer any torture to satisfy her hunger—and what a way to satisfy it!
She ate as many of the berries as she could find, and at last her hunger faded. She drank some more water to wash down her meal and sat down on a rock to rest. Her legs and feet burned from walking. She sighed and looked around the canyon.
These sheer walls wouldn’t let her follow the river bed very far. She would have to hike back up to the tablelands to follow it. But at least she could come down to the water’s edge for a drink and something to eat. She could follow the river wherever it led her.
But right now, she had a different problem. Where was she going to spend the night? She couldn’t spend it down here, and she didn’t care much for the idea of spending it inside a pile of leaves again. If she was going to spend any time near this spot at all, she would build herself a sturdier shelter, something more like the Lycaon’s dwellings.
She hated to imitate them, but they must have learned a thing or two about living in this landscape. Marissa said they were nomadic and moved around. They kept their dwellings simple and temporary. In retrospect, with the benefit of a full stomach, their practicality made sense. How could she think them squalid and dirty? Wasn’t Marissa’s food good enough for her?
The sun sank below the cliff rim, and the canyon fell into shadow. In an instant, all the warmth vanished from the world. Chris definitely couldn’t spend the night down here. But she couldn’t force herself to stand up. She would rather freeze to death than to take one step away from the precious water and berries. She might wake up in her leaf pile again and find out it was all a dream.
Then, out of the shadows across the pool, two glistening black stars pierced the gloom. She stared at them, but they never wavered. She blinked, but they didn’t. Her scalp prickled. Would some fearsome creature leap out and tear her limb from limb?
The last light sparkled on those two unblinking points. Dense foliage surrounded them on all sides so she couldn’t make out the shape behind them. But the longer she stared at them, the more certain she became that two eyes watched her from a hiding place beyond the water.
She tore her gaze away from them just long enough to look around. A stick stuck out between some rocks nearby, but it was too far away. She would never reach it before the creature attacked. Instead, she bent down and picked up a baseball-sized stone from the riverbed at her feet. She kept her eyes locked on the creature the whole time.
She hefted the stone in her hand. It was perfect; round, smooth, and heavy. It sent a surge of adrenaline through her. She squared her shoulders and gritted her teeth. She would have one shot at this, but if she hit it hard enough, it would probably run away without a fight.
She did this once with a brown bear in the mountains near her home. One good hit with a rock stopped it in its tracks and sent it running for the hills. Most wild animals didn’t want to fight something that would fight back. They wanted easy prey.
She wouldn’t be easy prey. She never had been, and she wasn’t about to start now, not when she finally found food and water to help her on her journey. She eased herself up off her rock and planted her feet wide.
The eyes narrowed at her in malicious rage. The branches swayed around it. Chris pulled her hand back and cocked her wrist. She wound up all her strength to send the rock smashing through the undergrowth.
But at that moment, the creature broke cover and charged toward her. It rushed at her so fast she never got her weapon launched before he struck her with all his weight. Chris recognized him halfway across the pool, but the sight of him only enraged her even more. It was Turk.
He’d followed her. He was probably laughing all the way at her hunger and thirst, at the night she spent in a pile of leaves. He probably got a good chuckle out of her staggering halfway across hell and gone trying to find her way out of that wilderness.
And now here he was, attacking her the way she always knew he would. He was dangerous. She knew that the moment she laid eyes on him. She didn’t care what Marissa said about him and the rest of the Angondrans. She would never trust him. He was a killer, and here he was to prove it.
The moment she recognized him, she changed her strategy. She didn’t hurl her rock at him. There wasn’t time. Instead, she gripped it tighter and waited for the impact. His arms closed around her, and he knocked her backwards onto the ground.
A stick stuck in her back and sent a lightning bolt of pain through her, but she paid it no heed. She brought her rock up and slammed it with all her might into the side of Turk’s head. He bellowed in rage, and his lips peeled back from sharp pointed teeth. He snarled and snapped in her face, but she didn’t waste an instant. She drew back her hand and hit him again, harder this time.
Turk roared into her face, but he kept control of himself. He reared back just enough to get hold of her wrist. He smashed her hand down on the gravel, again and again. Chris shrieked in pain, and her hand fell open. The rock tumbled out of her grasp and joined all the other rocks in the riverbed.
Chapter 7
The fire crackled, and sprays of sparks floated up through the trees into the star-speckled sky. Chris studied the face across the fire. “How long have you been following me?”
“Since you left,” he replied.
She looked away.
“You made quite a racket,” he mused. “I never heard anybody make so much noise just walking out of the house.”
Her head snapped around, but he wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even smiling.
“Why didn’t the others come after me?” she asked.
“No one would come after you,” he replied. “You’re not our prisoner. If you want to leave, you can leave.”
“Wasn’t anybody worried about me going into the woods by myself?” she asked.
“Only Marissa,” he replied. “But when she told Caleb to follow you, I asked him to let me go alone.”
“Why did you do that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I wanted to see what you would do. I wanted to see if Marissa was right about you, that you couldn’t survive out here by yourself, or if you would be able to handle yourself. I was curious.”
Chris stared into the fire. “I suppose Marissa knows enough to be able to handle herself in this wilderness.”
“Marissa would never be foolish enough to go out into the woods by herself,” he replied. “She knows enough to stay in the village.”
Chris frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? Doesn’t she know how to survive out here?”
“Marissa has certain capabilities we don’t have,” he replied. “And we have certain capabilities she doesn’t have. Mar
issa, and you, and all the other human women, don’t have the adaptations we have for survival in the deep woods. You’re a different species.”
Chris dropped her eyes. “Oh. I see.”
He regarded her across the fire. “You lasted a lot longer than I thought you would. I thought you’d be dead within the first day. I didn’t think you had the stamina or the wits to find your way this far.”
“Would you have let me die out here, then?” she asked. “I suppose you would have stood back and watched while I walked over the edge of that cliff, or frozen to death during the night, or died of thirst if I couldn’t find water.”
He cocked his head to one side. “What did you think was going to happen? If you wanted help from the Lycaon, you never should have left the village. You had no idea where you were going or how you would survive. You left the village purely out of spite.”
“And it was out of spite that the Lycaon wouldn’t send anybody after me,” she grumbled.
He smacked his lips. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re not our prisoner, or our slave, or anything else. You’re free to come and go as you please. If you want to throw your life away, go ahead. None of us will try to stop you. We have better things to do. Marissa told you the same thing. We aren’t Romarie.”
She couldn’t look at him. His words stung her heart. “So now you’re here. What are you going to do?”
“The question is what are you going to do?” he asked. “You found the river, and you found the berries. You can go on if you want to. I won’t stop you.”
She turned her head to one side, but as he said, he had capabilities she didn’t understand. He could see her well enough in the dark to read her mind. “I won’t go back to the village.”
He sat up straighter. “Alright.”
Her words burst out in a rush. “You and your people and Marissa shouldn’t have been so nice to me. It would have been easier.”
His ears swiveled toward her. What could he hear in her voice that she couldn’t hear herself? “Do you want to go to another faction? I’m sure we can send word to the other Alphas. They’ll be happy to take you.”
Chris’s shoulders slumped. “It’s not that.”
“Marissa said you were disgusted by our village,” he went on. “You’re probably used to a different standard of accommodation. Maybe the Felsite city would suit you better.”
Chris clamped her eyes shut. She couldn’t listen to this. “She said that?”
He tossed a stick into the fire and sent up another plume of sparks. “Marissa has been with the Lycaon long enough to learn from us. She notices more subtle body language and facial expressions now than when she first came to live with us. She can read a person’s thoughts and feelings almost as well as any of us.”
“I’m sorry,” she moaned. “I never should have done that.”
“Done what?” he asked.
“I never should have been disgusted by your village,” she replied. “I should have been grateful that you took me in when I needed it. I shouldn’t have turned up my nose at your food and your houses and your clothes and everything else about you. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“Why should you be?” he asked. “Anybody could understand why you would be surprised. It wasn’t what you’re used to, and after the crash, you were shocked at what you found. Marissa told us you were asleep in bed and then woke up on the Romarie ship as it was crashing. Is that true?”
She nodded down at the ground.
“That explains everything,” he told her. “You were in a state of shock at what happened. You were in the crash, and then you found yourself stranded on an alien planet. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re in a state of shock now. That explains why you hit me in the head the way you did.” He touched the side of his head with his finger.
“I had to protect myself,” she replied. “I couldn’t let you attack me and not fight back.”
“I didn’t attack you,” he countered. “You were about to throw that rock at me. I had to protect myself from you.”
Chris opened her mouth to say something else, but she stopped short. “I guess we both read each other wrong.”
He shrugged again. “Anybody who had anything to do with the Romarie could be forgiven for thinking everybody else in the world was as bad as them. They’re the lowest form of life in the galaxy.”
“Do you know much about them?” she asked.
“Everybody on Angondra knows about the Romarie,” he replied. “That’s one thing we all agree on. We don’t want to have anything to do with them. I’m one of the few people on the planet that’s seen them up close. I fought them off our planet when they brought Marissa and her friends here, and I’ll fight again to keep our people free of them. I don’t care how many females they have to sell.”
Chris cocked her head to one side. “The Ursidreans must have been really desperate to let them land here.”
“Everyone was desperate,” he replied. “Being desperate is no reason to open our doors to the Romarie. We’re still desperate, but even the Ursidreans learned their lesson. Anyway, now that Donen has a human mate, he won’t invite the Romarie to Angondra again.”
Her eyes widened. “Are you really desperate? I saw plenty of females with their children in the village.”
“They are exceptions,” he replied. “We keep our females in the Alpha village, at the center of our territory to protect them. The other villages aren’t so well off.”
“What about you?” she asked. “You’re a member of the Alpha’s family. You’re Caleb’s own brother, but you live with your mother and sisters.”
“Now you know why,” he replied. “Caleb couldn’t find a mate until Marissa came. I will stay with my mother until I find a mate of my own. Maybe one of the new women will choose me.”
“Choose you?” she repeated. “Isn’t it you who chooses one of them?”
He studied her with his head tilted to one side. “Me? No, I don’t choose. A female must choose a mate for herself.”
“That doesn’t sound very Alpha,” she remarked.
“I don’t know how it is with the other factions,” he replied. “Maybe the other Alphas pick their own mates and the females have to go with them. But I don’t think so. We might be different factions, but we’re all Angondrans. We have a code of honor, especially when it comes to mating with females. No Angondran male would take a female against her will. The Alphas uphold that code more than anyone else. The others follow our example.”
Chris humphed. “It all sounds a little too flowery and chivalrous to me.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Does it look to you like Marissa is Caleb’s mate against her will? Do you really think she would stay with him if she hadn’t chosen to do so of her own free will?”
“I suppose not,” she replied. “But appearances can be deceiving.”
“When you’ve been here a while, you’ll realize it’s true,” he told her. “You’ll come to trust us the way Marissa and her friends have.”
“I told you I wouldn’t go back to your village,” she snapped. “I don’t care what happens, I don’t plan to stay here long enough to trust you. I’m getting off this planet and going home to Earth.”
He didn’t bother to tell her it was hopeless. He only gazed at her. “How are you going to do that?”
Chris blushed. Her flimsy plans sounded ridiculous coming out of her mouth now. “I thought I’d find the other women—the ones in the other factions—Marissa’s friends, as you call them. I planned to ask them to help me find a way back to Earth.”
“They don’t want to go back to Earth,” he replied. “They’re happy with their mates and their lives here.”
“Just because they’re happy with their lives here doesn’t mean they don’t want to go home,” she argued. “If they had a way to get back, they just might take it.”
“So what will you do when you find the other women?” he asked. “What
will you suggest you do to get back to Earth?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Maybe the Ursidreans have some technology we could use. I know, I know. The Ursidreans don’t have any space flight capable technology that still works. But maybe we could adapt it to serve our purpose. Maybe Aria knows something that could help us.”
He studied her with his direct, inscrutable eyes. “Anything else?”
The words rushed out of her before she could stop them. “If even one of those women wants to leave Angondra, I have to find her. I have to find one person who feels the way I do and won’t keep telling me I’ll be happy here and come to trust you people.”
He didn’t react at all. His eyes never wavered from her face. He sat in silence so long she wondered if he’d abandoned the conversation. Then he shot up to his feet and strode to the edge of the circle of firelight. “Alright. So you want to find the other women. Do you have any idea where you’re going to find one of them?”
Chris stared down at her shoes. “Well, no. I hadn’t planned that far in advance.”
He nodded. “Hmm. Yes. I have to admit I think Marissa was right about you. If I leave you out here alone, you’ll be dead in a few days. You made it this far, but I can’t let you go on alone.”
She stole a glance at him. “You won’t take me back to the village, will you?”
He shook his head. “I won’t take you back to the village, but you can’t stay out here alone. Look. You couldn’t even get a fire going until I showed up. If you’re determined to go on, I’ll go with you.”
Her head whipped around. “You... you will?”
He nodded again. “It’s the only thing to do. Besides, you can’t show up in one of the other factions’ territory without some plausible explanation for why you’re there. If I go with you, I can explain the situation.”
“Won’t the other factions mistrust you?” she asked. “Won’t they consider your presence in their territory an incursion?”
He paced back and forth in front of the fire. “That is possible. We’ll have to be cautious in our choice of which faction to visit. Of course, it would be more helpful if Marissa went with us. She could explain everything to her friend.”
Rohn (Dragons of Kratak Book 1) Page 25
