Alien Romance Box Set: Uoria Mates II Complete Series (Books 1 - 10): A Sci-fi Alien Warrior Invasion Abduction Romance

by Ruth Anne Scott

  "Us."

  Lynx turned sharply, startled to see one of the men from the other kingdom standing as he looked out over the rest of the group. Whispers swelled around them as members of the crowd shifted uncomfortably.

  "You?" Pyra asked incredulously.

  The man nodded and recognition finally set in for Lynx. This was Rey, the leader of the kingdom who had offered himself and his own men to come back with Pyra and the Denynso warriors so that they could help the people of the settlement.

  "Yes," Rey said, turning his eyes back to Pyra.

  "You told me that you knew nothing of the Covra," Pyra said, his voice low and the familiar growl of his anger bringing edge to each word. "You said that you had heard the name and that you knew of the war that they had with the Li—" he stopped himself short of using the phrase for which Rain had shown so much disdain, "the people of this settlement, but that you didn't know anything about them and that you never even got to find out anything about them before your communication with them cut off."

  Rey's face looked sad and strained. He nodded again, his hands coming in front of him as if imploring Pyra to listen to his explanation.

  "I know. I'm sorry that I lied to you, but the history with the Covra is something that is extremely painful for my kind. When the last of the elders who were alive during our conflict with them died, our kind hoped that the memory and history of that time would die, too. Very few of us now even know the whole story. I do only because I am the leader and come from the same line that led then. That was nearly two hundred years before the crash that brought the first humans here. I didn't want to dishonor the memory of our ancestors by recounting those dark times."

  "I asked for your help and you lied to me," Pyra said. "You might have been able to help us save more of these people."

  "No," Rey insisted, shaking his head, "it wouldn’t have mattered even if I had told you. We knew that the Covra locked people, yes, but we didn't know how to save them. None of our kind that were taken by the Covra survived."

  "Taken?" Pyra asked.

  Rey nodded.

  "When the Covra attacked, they didn't kill immediately. Instead, they took the strongest, both men and women, and forced them to work. They spoke of visions that they had for the future of the planet, compounds and buildings that they would use to conquer anything and anyone that stood in their way. They forced the captives to build the first of the buildings that they planned."

  "What was it?"

  "A fortress."

  "A prison," Gyyx said.

  "What?" said Pyra, looking up at the massive warrior who had stood and was moving down the steps toward the platform.

  "The building that they forced the captives to build. It was the prison. Remember how we thought that the Covra had forced the humans to build the prison for them because they didn't have the hands to do it themselves?"

  "They couldn't have," Lynx said, his thoughts starting to align with Gyyx's. "That prison is far older than the length of time that that the humans have been here. Rain and the others couldn't have been the ones to build it. It had to be someone else, someone who had been here longer but had the same abilities. Like them."

  He pointed at Rey, who nodded.

  "When the building was finished, our kind never saw the captives again. The war between the species had been hard on both sides, but the Covra had become weaker as the years progressed and soon after the captives disappeared, the rest of the Covra were either killed or died off. By then there had been turmoil amongst our kind. After the final battle with the Covra, our kingdom split and a group left."

  "You told me that," Pyra said, "but what happened to them? Where did they go?"

  "I told you that we didn't know what happened to them after they left, and that was the truth. After the division, our kind didn't hear from the traitors or the Covra again. Everything was quiet."

  "For how long?" Lynx asked.

  "Nearly two centuries. When the humans crashed, our kind reached out to them. They didn't seem to pose any threat, and when one mentioned the name of the Covra, something that they had heard from the species that sent them here, our kind knew it was essential to protect them as best we could."

  "We had no form of communication," Rain said. "The Valdicians had made it so that all of our equipment on the ship was completely destroyed when their weapons took over control. When we crashed here it was a planet that none of us had ever heard of and even our personal communicators couldn't make contact with Earth. There was no way for us to let anyone know that we were here, or to travel off of the planet."

  "Our kind didn't leave the planet," Rey continued. "We originated here, had always been here. We had the technology to travel to other planets, but all of our ships had been destroyed during the war with the Covra and we never built another."

  "And even if there had been, we wouldn’t have known how to get back to Earth. On a planet that we hadn't even known existed, we had no way of orienting ourselves or figuring out where to go. It was pretty soon after we got here that we decided it would be a waste of our time, energy, and resources to try to find a way to get back to Earth. So we just stopped and focused on surviving. We settled in, assimilated to the planet, and built up a relationship with the people who were already here. We were here for ten years before we saw the first Covra."

  "Ten years?" Lynx asked. "Why didn't they come sooner?"

  "Rey, you said that the Covra were weak by the time you had your last battle with them, but that they said a new generation was coming."

  "Yes."

  "And that was just after the captives finished building the prison."

  "The cells didn't have chains."

  Elianna was gripping Ciyrs's hand and Lynx could see the look of fear in her eyes as painful memories swept through her mind.

  "They didn't?" Pyra asked.

  Elianna's eyes lifted to meet Pyra's and she shook her head.

  "Some of them did, but they didn't look anywhere near as old as the rest of the building. When I was escaping I looked into a lot of the cells, and I didn't see chains. No hooks, no bars except for the ones on the main doors. There wasn't anything to hold a person there."

  "What if they didn't need to be held?" Lynx asked. "What if the people who they were holding in those cells couldn't have escaped even if the Covra left the doors standing wide open all day and all night?"

  "They were locked, just like us," Rain said, her voice powdery.

  "Not just that," Lynx said, looking over to Rey where the man stood with his hands now gripping each other as if trying to let out the pain and frustration he was feeling through the tension. "They were locked for the same reason."

  Chapter Seven

  "Rey said that the Covra were weak when they were fighting them and that there was another generation coming. That means that they had to have somewhere to protect their eggs and something to feed their hatchlings," Lynx continued. "They took the strongest men and women from the kingdom because they would be able to build the prison that the Covra planned to use when they were fighting other species, but first it was going to be a hatchery. The reason that those slaves never came back is that they fell victim to the hatchlings."

  Rey's hand lifted to cover his mouth and several people around Lynx gasped. It was horrific enough to think of the people in the settlement getting locked by the Covra and used as incubators for their young. Now they were realizing that this was not the only time that it had been done and that even more lives had been lost in the gruesome way.

  "Was it those hatchlings that eventually came and attacked the humans?" Elianna asked.

  Loralia stepped forward into Lynx's periphery and he noticed that the shimmering glow from her skin seemed fainter than usual as if it were reacting to the tense emotion swelling through the room.

  "No," she said. "It couldn't have been. The Covra have long lives, but not two hundred years. If they did, they would have more than one set
of hatchlings. The young who were born from that group had at least ten years before they would need to lay their eggs and then another century before they would become weak and die off. These people," she gestured toward Rey and the others of his kind that had gradually moved toward him as they spoke, "are not the only species that was on the planet at the time that the Covra were at their most powerful. There's a reason that they chose that particular spot to build their prison fortress. It wasn't an accident. They had begun their plans to take over Uoria long before they became allies with the Valdicians so that they could conquer them as well, and they made sure that they set up their strongest building close to the species that they intended their hatchlings to conquer first…my kind."

  "Your kind?" Bannack asked, obviously shocked by what he was hearing his mate say.

  She turned to him, nodding.

  "We didn't always live under the ground," she told him. "The caverns where I grew up were a refuge, an escape from a war that had waged for far too long and was claiming far too many of us. My grandmother told me when I was young that going below ground to live was one of the most painful decisions that our kind had had to make. They loved the land where they had lived. So deeply, in fact, that they created a mirror within the cavern that would make their new home a reflection of the home that they had lost."

  "The Denynso compound," Zuri said softly.

  Loralia nodded, turning back to Rain and Pyra on the platform.

  "The war with the Covra was only part of what they were fighting. A plague had broken out among them, killing off members of the community seemingly indiscriminately. People were dying faster than the healers could find ways to help them, and more often than not, as soon as a person died, the Covra would take the body and drag it away so they didn't even have the opportunity to honor those who were lost. My kind fled beneath the group, hoping that the Covra would simply forget about them. It seemed to work. Going below ground even seemed to rid the clan of the plague that had tormented them."

  Loralia fell silent and Lynx shifted uncomfortably. He knew that she was thinking of that plague now. The illness may have disappeared when they first went below ground, but two centuries later it would return, rising up in the caverns and killing every one of her kind except for her.

  "You knew all of this and didn't tell us when we first started talking to you about the Covra?" Pyra demanded.

  "I didn't make the connection until now," Loralia insisted. "I only remembered the stories that my grandmother had told me about how our kind ended up in the mirrored world beneath the ground, but she never called the enemies by name. When my grandfather spoke of the Covra, he only said that they were vicious and hated, never that they had been the cause of our kind going beneath the ground or that they had been the source of such devastation. He did tell me, though, that they had come into contact with an enemy that weakened them. That after years of fighting enemies with the cruelest of their weapons and taking some domination over the planet, they had encountered a species that forced them back and took some of their power." She took a step forward, looking directly at Rain. "It was you. You were the first humans that the Covra ever encountered and it was your voices that weakened them to the point that they knew they couldn't defeat you. There was no way for the Valdicians to know that when they sent you thinking that they would be able to take control of you so easily. You are the reason that the rest of us survived. If you hadn't fought them off…"

  Loralia's voice trailed off and Lynx saw Bannack step up beside her, wrapping his arm around her waist tightly as if in an effort to hold her up. Lynx's mind was spinning. He was having difficulty putting all of the pieces together as they realized little by little just how intricately connected they truly were.

  "We didn't fight them off," Rain said. "They came slowly at first. Coming into the settlement a few times and then leaving. Then they descended on us. Rather than fighting against us themselves, they wounded the men. Something in their talons made them lose all control. They fought against each other with viciousness that I can't even describe."

  "We've seen it," Lynx said. "They did it to me right after I found you when we first got here. Then to two other men during our last battle with the last generation before the hatchlings. Ciyrs saved us."

  "We couldn't save any of them," Rain said, the emotion catching in her throat. "What started as a team of more than 200 on one of the most advanced clandestine mission StarCity ships of the time became a group of fewer than 100 in a settlement built from the wreckage."

  Lynx looked around him at the room where they sat and thought of the houses where they had been living. It sent a chill through him to think of the survivors of the crash dismantling their ship, knowing that they were taking apart the only hope that they had to get off of the strange and completely unknown planet. He couldn't imagine having to move aside the bodies of those who hadn't made it through the crash and wipe away the blood before using the pieces to cobble together the buildings they knew would be their homes for the rest of their lives.

  "You survived," he said, climbing to his feet so he could step onto the platform and take her hands, "You fought off enough of them and weakened them to the point that they were forced to lock you in place and use you for their hatchlings rather than keeping you as the slaves that they intended." Lynx leaned forward and kissed her, resting his forehead against hers. "You survived."

  Rain pulled away from Lynx and looked over his shoulder at Zuri.

  "What happened after the war units released the prisoners? Where did they go?"

  "They dispersed back to their original planets, mostly. There weren't many left by the time the war units got there."

  "And none of them mentioned that we survived getting there?"

  "The official story is that they said a group came to free them but the Valdicians forced them off of the planet."

  Rain pushed around Lynx and stepped to the edge of the platform.

  "When did the people of Earth find out about Uoria?"

  "They first recognized that the planet was here sixty years ago. The only species that they could make contact with was the Denynso and it wasn't until ten years later that any humans received permission to visit."

  Lynx felt his chest constrict as he thought of the only stories he had ever heard of those first visitors. It was a small group, a collective of journalists and scientists who received permission to be on the planet for one month to bring back whatever information they could about Uoria and the Denynso to the researchers on Earth. It was one of these women, a journalist in her early twenties who fell in love with a warrior and was cast aside, who became the grandmother of the woman who nearly led to the destruction of the entire clan. The flight attendant who had served Eden, Leia, Elianna, Zuri, and Samira on their way from Earth manipulated a traitor from the Denynso and cooperated with him to aid the Klimnu and help them to wage battle against the warriors. It was a sensitive topic, but one that was even more painful to them now.

  "Humans have been coming to this planet for 50 years," Rain said, her voice so low now that they could barely hear her, "Fifty years that we have been lying here. Fifty years of people telling stories about us and turning us into these legends when we were right here. All they had to do was leave the compound and they could have found us."

  "They weren't allowed to leave the compound," Pyra said, sounding slightly defensive at Rain's accusatory tone. "That was the part of the restrictions that applied to people who wanted to come here. They were very well controlled and could only move in certain areas of the compound. Every visitor had a warrior assigned as guard and protector so that they stayed in the constraints of their visitation permissions. If they tried to move beyond those constraints, they were kept in custody until a shuttle could bring them back to Earth. At that time it was a more than 10 day journey. Certain rule violations warranted more than rescinding of permissions. Very few people ever tried anything."

  "Even if they had found y
ou," Ciyrs said from where he stood next to Elianna, still gripping her hand tightly, "they wouldn't have been able to do anything for you. Humans even now know nothing about the Covra. They wouldn't have known what had happened to you or what to do to help you. If they hadn't assumed you dead and buried you alive right here in the settlement, they would have brought you back to Earth to memorialize you and the Covra young would have hatched there. The entire planet would have been at risk."

  Silence fell over the room and Lynx could feel Rain tense further beside him.

  "What do we do now?"

  "It's up to you," Pyra said. "The warriors left the compound to explore the planet and this is as far as we've gotten. I have decided that we should move on as soon as possible so that we can continue our original mission and get back to the compound with our findings. You are free from the Covra now. You can do whatever you want to. You can stay here and continue life the way you had been living before the war and rebuild your connections with your allies, or you can come along with us. We will see to it that a shuttle will come and return you to Earth when we get back to the compound."

  Though it seemed like this would be exactly what Rain wanted, her face suddenly darkened at Pyra's suggestion.

  "Stay here? Go back to Earth? And do what? We don't know anything about this planet or that one anymore. How much has changed? Would we even have a life to go back to? And if we stayed here, what would we do?"

  For the first time since the meeting started Lynx became very aware of the children in the room with them. Obviously born in the years after the crash, some of them were young enough to be playing in the corners and running along the top edge of the well, oblivious to what was going on around them with the adults."

  "I can't answer that for you," Pyra said. "We did what we could. It is up to you now what you do. Everyone is dismissed now. Please take some time to make your decision as quickly as possible. We leave in two days."