Exodus: Extinction Event

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  She sent him a searching, uneasy look, knowing where this was likely leading, but not as certain as she had been when he’d kissed her that it was where she wanted to go.

  He swept her doubts aside when he tugged her head back with the tether of her braid. For a breathless moment in time they merely stared deeply into one another’s eyes as if each was searching for something there.

  Acceptance?

  Desire that transcended their differences?

  Slowly, he lowered his head and opened his mouth on her throat, sucking lightly, tasting her with the light stroke of his tongue. The moment he did a heated lassitude filled her, flooding through vein, tissue, and nerve endings to raise her body tempt so fast it was dizzying. The muscles low in her belly clenched as he drifted upward in his exploration, nibbling ever so faintly at the tender flesh of her throat, and finally matched his mouth to hers and teased her lips with his own.

  She stilled, hardly breathing for a long moment for fear he’d stop, and then sucked in a shuddering breath as his taste and scent invaded her senses, drugging her with his essence.

  As if he had only been waiting to see if she would deny him, he pressed his lips more firmly to hers in an open mouthed kiss. Easing the pressure after a second, he caressed her lips lightly with the motion of his, nipping at the tender surface teasingly for many moments until it seemed hunger and need overwhelmed a desire to be slow and tender.

  Or perhaps that was only in her mind because she felt a rise of need? Hunger unlike anything she recalled feeling before?

  Or they fed one another even as the hunger for more built with each touch and each taste of one another?

  He shifted and she found herself on her back, his welcome weight pressing against her.

  That time when he matched his mouth to hers, he kissed her deeply, exploring the tender cavern of her mouth with bold, fervent strokes that displayed a fevered need that pushed her passions to new heights. She reached the point where all she could think about was penetration and she was too far gone to figure out how to get there beyond pulling at him a little desperately and groaning.

  Instead of penetrating as she’d been demanding, Dar stood abruptly, taking her with him. She swayed dizzily when she was on her feet, struggling to lock her knees to keep from melting into a puddle as he tugged at the front of her suit to open it and then dragged it off her shoulders, leaving her in nothing but the panties and T she wore under it. He solved her dilemma then by lifting her and guiding her legs around his waist. Weak, desperate, she settled her head on his shoulder as he strode around the fire.

  Warmed fur met her chilled feet when he lowered her.

  And Kael.

  It was Kael who steadied her when Dar released her to push his pants off his narrow hips.

  She was so fevered with need by that time, though, that it barely caused a ripple of doubt when he carried her down onto the fur and covered her mouth in a deep, hungry kiss almost in one motion.

  Confusion dominated for a handful of seconds, distress that Dar had handed her off to Kael, and then she was submerged in sensation, awash with it, and too disoriented to know or care about anything beyond what Kael made her feel.

  And then it was Dar pulling her against his length. Drawing her leg up and draping it over his hip, he reached between them, grasped his cock and dragged it along her cleft. Excruciating shards of pleasure quaked through her when the head of his cock met her clit and she dug her nails into him, letting out a hiss at pleasure that bordered pain. He slid the rounded knob back, wedging it into the mouth of her sex, and then grasped her buttocks to use as leverage to pry her down over the monster shaft she’d been too high to realize was actually his cock.

  She uttered a groan of protest.

  He responded by rolling to his back, grasping her hips and trying to shove her down over the thick log of flesh. That effort threatened to buckle his cock and shove the skin of her knees into her coochie and he backed off after one teeth grinding moment. Huffing for breath, he rolled again, this time putting her on her back. The move dislodged him for a moment, but before Monica could decide that retreat might be in order, he found the sweet spot and rammed the head of his dragon into it again. That time, through growling effort, he managed to stuff enough meat into her that Monica decided to help him since the backstroke she’d been trying frantically to use to escape didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere anyway.

  They were both hot, sweating, and wet by the time they achieved the deep connection they both craved.

  Dar set a pounding pace that threatened to pop her head off of her neck.

  Kael decided to chew on the breast he could reach.

  She came so hard she thought she was having a heart attack.

  Dar kept pounding away, ignoring the muscles in Monica’s passage that were trying to lock down and pull the skin off of his cock. Her orgasm began to feel like an actual crisis before he finally drove deep, let out a throaty groan, and went rigid as his body pumped his seed from him.

  Dar leaned to one side when his body finally stopped trying to turn his guts inside out, struggling to find the strength to dismount. Kael gave him a shove that sent him sprawling and damned near landed him in the fire.

  He thought he might have taken his bond brother’s head off if he’d been in any condition to do so.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t.

  And he was so deeply satisfied from having expended himself that all he really wanted to do was curl against Meeka and go to sleep.

  At the moment, however, she was screaming and trying to shred the flesh off of Kael. He debated whether to cover her mouth or not and finally decided, dimly, that a kiss would be just as effective and possibly less offensive.

  That decided, he inched toward her and wedged his head between her and Kael.

  She fought him, but he managed to plug the hole that was making so much noise.

  He kissed her until her convulsing finally ceased and Kael fell off of her on her other side. Lifting his head, he studied her until he was certain she was still breathing and then gathered her against his length.

  She protested, but he ignored it, drifting toward oblivion with a sense of well being more profound than anything in his memory.

  There was also a faint niggling of uneasiness, of something not entirely right, but although he searched his mind sluggishly, nothing specific occurred to him so he finally dismissed it and dropped into the depths of oblivion.

  He was aroused some time later by the answer that had eluded him previously.

  Something was in the cave with them that had no business being there.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dar knew instantly what was wrong. What he did not know was just how bad he had fucked up.

  But he was on his feet and in a fighting/defensive stance the instant it connected in his mind that something, some danger, had come for a visit and things were about to get ugly in a hurry.

  He had no clue where his weapon was.

  The fire had died back until there was virtually no light to see.

  But he could see a shadow near the entrance.

  Even with limited vision, he knew from the smell that it was a kunga.

  Standing, it would be nearly as tall as he was and considerably stronger.

  Bellowing—a challenge to the threat as well as a warning to the others—Dar bent down to snatch a charred piece of wood from the campfire and bounded toward the beast, hopeful that the challenge would be enough to scare it off.

  It wasn’t. The beast was hungry and had smelled the remains of their dinner.

  No doubt it had already eaten the rest of the carcass—meat they had thought would feed them for the better part of a week.

  Anger and a sense of helplessness and disgust over the loss of food they needed for survival lent him strength, hardened his sense of purpose.

  He didn’t pause when the feint didn’t have the desired effect. He uttered an enraged bellow and attacked, driving the fire hardened stick into t
he kunga’s neck.

  It was unfortunate that he missed the mark, the main artery in the beast’s neck, because all he really managed to do was piss it off.

  Or maybe not.

  The kunga tended to grab its prey and crush it with its superior strength. Instead of grabbing Dar it slapped at him, sending him flying backwards.

  Kael surged forward and drove his sword into the beast’s chest in the region of its heart. He, too, was flung back and then the beast focused on Monica. Monica screamed, ear-splittingly, and began to throw everything close to hand at the beast in a barrage that seemed to thoroughly demoralize and confuse it.

  The beast hesitated, seemed inclined to retreat but debating the wisdom of giving them its back. It did stumble toward the opening it had used to enter, but it ran out of steam before it could climb out.

  It stopped at the entrance, wobbled and then dropped to all fours. For a handful of seconds it seemed almost to steady itself and then abrupt crashed as its legs gave out.

  Kael and Dar both leapt upon it, stabbing it with their knives until it ceased to struggle.

  They fell back then, breathing gustily from the battle and laboring to catch their breaths.

  Fighting the urge to burst into tears, Monica rushed to Dar and tried to examine him for injury. “Are you hurt?”

  He stared at her in bemusement as she searched him for hurts, performing an internal examination on himself to see if she knew something he did not. “No broke, no bleed.”

  She grasped his head between her palms and searched his eyes. Thankfully, his eyes looked clear and neither confused nor filled with pain.

  She pressed her face against his with a sense of gratitude and relief.

  He responded by drawing her into his arms and dragging her down on his lap.

  She resisted but yielded readily enough and shared a brief kiss before she pushed him away and struggled up.

  Kael also seemed to be little the worse for the battle—no doubt bruised and scraped as if he’d been through a blender as Dar was, but she didn’t think either was in any real danger.

  She hoped they weren’t.

  Kael chuckled when she sat back from examining him and she looked at him questioningly.

  “Next time we should just get her to scream at the beast,” he responded to Dar’s questioning look. “Did you see the look on its face when she screamed?”

  Dar frowned thoughtfully and then chuckled. “It looked as if it had hit some sort of … invisible wall.”

  Monica glanced from one man to the other. “What’s so damn funny?” she asked with more than a touch of irritation.

  Kael touched her arm. “Meeka scream—“. He made the sound since he didn’t know the word and then made a motion with his hand in front of his face and mimicked the expression on the beast’s face. “Kunga scare.”

  Monica frowned, trying to recall the image he’d suggested and remembered vaguely that the beast’s eyes had certainly widened and it had turned to go. She seriously doubted if it was her scream or even the barrage of objects she’d thrown that had encouraged it to retreat but rather a combination of the attacks it had endured—poor thing. She managed a chuckle.

  And then burst into tears and covered her face.

  Dar and Kael exchanged a long, uncomfortable look above her head.

  “We should get the kunga out if we can,” Dar said quietly.

  Kael nodded. “It is probably the dead thing that has upset her.”

  Dar glanced at her doubtfully. “Maybe.”

  They discovered that even with the two of them they couldn’t move the dead weight.

  When they began cutting pieces off and tossing them out of the entrance hole, Meeka retreated to the pallet they’d made and lay down with her back to them.

  Mildly annoyed, Dar focused on the task, stopping periodically to see if they’d removed enough to move the carcass. Finally, when they’d removed the head and both hind legs, they managed to maneuver it outside.

  Dar was relieved to see that his ploy of burying their food deeply in the snow seemed to have worked. It didn’t appear that the kunga had dug it up and he supposed that was why it had come inside. It smelled the food they’d cooked earlier.

  They gutted the carcass and then buried the meat and scooped up the entrails to move them as far from their camp as seemed reasonable. Then they returned, cleaned up the best they could and moved the rocks into place that they’d gotten the day before to cover the entrance.

  That was what he’d realized the moment the kunga woke him—that he and Kael had forgotten to block the entrance to prevent anything large from getting inside.

  Exhausted, sore from the battle, both of them dropped with gratitude to the pallet and curled around Meeka.

  Monica had exhausted her emotions and fallen asleep.

  She let out a startled, angry yelp when the two half frozen males made like bookmarks and draped themselves over her. “Oh my god! You two are like … popcicles! GET OFF!” she growled.

  Dar and Kael both leaned away, examined her angry face, and then, after exchanging accusing looks, rolled over and put their backs to her.

  They were still radiating frost, Monica thought indignantly, but she wasn’t about to get up and let them have the warm pallet! And she thought it doubtful that she could convince them to leave—particularly when it was theirs to start with.

  It took quite a while to go to sleep again, but she persevered until she was successful.

  Ironically, it was the chill she felt when Dar and Kael got up the following morning that woke her later.

  She squeezed her eyes tightly together.

  They were up most of the night battling that monster bear-like thing! Why in the hell were they up so early?

  She decided she didn’t care. She rolled into the furs and dropped off again.

  Very little time had passed when she was wakened again by the noise the two men were making and the constant drafts they created moving in and out of the cave.

  Finally, she was forced to abandon all hope of resting any longer.

  She struggled and eventually managed to heave herself up to a standing position, but she almost went to her knees again when she took her first step. Pain shot up both thighs and even her poor choochie felt as if someone had spent half the night pounding on it.

  Well, two somebodies.

  They managed to wipe their smirks off when she looked up accusingly, but not before she saw.

  God! Men were men wherever in the universe they came from!

  “Very funny! You wouldn’t think so if you were me! That was two against one,” she said tightly, holding up two fingers.

  They looked at one another blank faced, as if they didn’t have a clue of what she meant. She plunked her hands on her hips. “Liar! You know exactly what I’m talking about!” she growled, and then hobbled out with what dignity she could muster.

  The frigid air blasted her the moment she managed to get halfway out.

  It was snowing again. It had finally stopped the day before shortly before dusk, but it had layered a couple of feet on the ground before that.

  As insane as she knew it to be, she almost felt a sense of wonder as she looked out at the vast blanket of white. It covered much of the ugly scars from the asteroid impact and the fires that followed it.

  Mostly, though, the wonder was because she’d grown up in global warming and she’d never actually seen snow, although her parents had plenty of old photos that showed mountains of snow from their own childhood.

  It was ice, she told herself irritably—the stuff that could freeze off body parts if you were exposed too long. It might look like soft, fluffy clouds that would be fun to play in, but it was freezing cold.

  She headed toward the igloo outhouse, trying to ignore the fact that Dar and Kael were trying to discreetly follow her.

  Or maybe just giving her room in case she felt like throwing something at their heads?

  They were about as discreet as a zit on t
he tip of your nose!

  Sighing, she relieved herself.

  It was when she braced herself to clean up that she made the discovery.

  At first, she was horrified because she thought the rough sex the night before had … well damaged something.

  But she dismissed that almost instantly.

  Nothing that felt that good could cause damage—well, beyond the soreness.

  It was her time of the month.

  “Omg!” She didn’t know what was more horrifying—the fact that she’d had sex or that she had nothing to use as a pad.

  She felt like crying with embarrassment.

  A rag hit the snow in front of her.

  She looked up to see Dar hanging over her ‘stall’.

  “For woman ting.”

  She gaped at him in stunned dismay for a moment and then snatched up a fistful of snow and threw it at him. He ducked and didn’t appear again.

  She looked at the strip of cloth furiously for several moments and then burst into tears.

  He was next door to naked in the snow now! But she could clearly see he’d torn a ‘bandage’ from his clothes for her.

  The thoughtful prick!

  It took her ten minutes to figure out how she could use the thing. She finally just ended up tucking it into her panties—trying not to think about how filled with germs the damn thing probably was. And then she dragged ass getting in to her suit and adjusting it.

  When she was at the point of frostbite and her teeth chattering, she finally left cover, ignored the men and stomped back inside.

  It would’ve been a stretch to say it had been transformed, but there was certainly a big change, much of which, she supposed accounted for all the bumps and thumps and traipsing in and out that the guys were doing that woke her up.

  She would have flounced down on the pallet, but it had vanished and she suspected Dar and Kael were wearing it.

  The beast that had tried to eat them alive the night before was gone and the puddle of blood that should have been on the floor with it.

  The meat that had stewed most of the night was bubbling and she saw that one of the guys had found something to use as a ladle.