Mad Panther (Alien Guardians of Earth Book 2)

by Donna McDonald

  “My God,” he declared, staring at her. “You are breathtakingly beautiful. And I’m not just saying that hoping for another shag.”

  “Shag?”

  “Tussle?” Lake suggested. “Another toss between the sheets?”

  The goddess shrugged. “Can you restate your comment for clarity?”

  “Sex?” Lake said bluntly.

  “Oh. Now I understand. We call that a social engagement.”

  Lake laughed. “Okay. Good. Now we’re translating. So what do you say?”

  “What do I say?” Her brow wrinkled, and her eyes went flat with confusion. “I don’t know. Unless I am with family, I only talk when I have something of value to share.”

  His teasing was obviously getting him nowhere with his goddess. “I give up. Point me to the boy’s room. I really have to go.”

  “Go where?” his goddess asked.

  “No, no—we’re not traveling that road again. Hide your eyes, woman. I’m going for it.”

  Lake threw off his covers and grinned as her eyes followed his trek around the room. He found what he sought and ducked inside, chuckling over her social ineptness.

  In a way, he felt sorry for her. He hadn’t been that awkward around the opposite sex since he was a freshman.

  12

  Sugar entered the room and smiled. “I heard he was finally awake.”

  Gina nodded. “He speaks so strangely. Marta and I both think he might be suffering from a head injury.”

  Chuckling, Sugar patted Axel’s sister on the arm. A man’s loud scream from the bathroom got their attention.

  “Shit!” Lake swore as he burst out of the room. He pointed at his chest. “What in bloody hell did you do to me? There’s something metal embedded in my chest.”

  Sugar rose and held up a hand. “You’re fine. There was an injury and then…”

  “Bloody hell,” Lake all but growled. “I don’t care. You should have asked permission before you fucking mutilated me.”

  Sugar turned to look at Gina who now had wide eyes. “Will you find your father and tell him that he’s needed here? Our patient seems to have a memory problem.”

  “Of course,” Gina said. “Should I send a guard to help in case he turns dangerous?”

  “Fucking hell—I’m not the dangerous person here,” Lake insisted.

  Sugar smirked at the statement but patted Gina as if nothing was wrong. “I’ll be fine. Lake and I are going to talk.”

  Gina nodded. She turned to look at Lake. “After your outburst, my answer to your previous query must be no.”

  “Query? What query?” Lake demanded.

  Lake’s body tightened in awareness as his goddess walked to him. She was on the short side but turned her face up to his with a steady gaze and a level look. This was no child he was facing down. She searched his eyes, dropped her assessing gaze to his crotch, and then brought it swiftly back up.

  “I find you physically appealing, but you remind me of my brother who causes me too much stress. For this reason, I must decline your offer of us having a social engagement.”

  “A social…” Lake scrubbed a hand over his face. “Oh. Right. Sex. You’re turning me down for a shag.”

  “I will answer yes even though I do not completely understand that reference,” Gina said. “I do not wish to have any sort of engagement with you at all. I’m too uncomfortable in your presence. I find your mental instability to be problematic.”

  “My mental instability? Get real, sweetheart.” Lake snorted and crossed his arms. “You may be beautiful, but you are no social charmer, princess.”

  “Thank you. I was hoping to repel you in some manner. It satisfies me to have so quickly succeeded,” Gina said bowing her head politely. “Do not worry though. My rejection should not affect your human male ego for long. Females seem fairly interchangeable with you. I heard you trying to make a social engagement with my sister when I stopped by.”

  “Now look here…” Lake said as he reached out a hand.

  He’d intended only to delay her departure so he could better explain himself. His hand barely made contact with her shoulder before he found himself face down on the floor.

  He could feel her foot planted firmly between his shoulders. The pressure she created was pressing just above what felt like a metal band running across his back. The damn metal must wrap all the way around.

  Sugar drew in a sharp breath, stared at Lake on the floor, and then burst out laughing in shock. “Wow, Gina,” she said in surprise.

  She sincerely hoped Lake’s blade had a sense of humor. Apparently, it understood that Lake was being a jerk to those trying to help him.

  Gina twisted the arm she still held to get Lake’s attention. “When you have come to your senses enough to regret our frustrating exchange, I will try to hear your apology with an open mind. In the meantime, I highly suggest you have a cognitive test done to check yourself for brain damage. Even personality disorders that can’t be fixed can be amended enough to help you remain calm in the face of disappointment.”

  Grinning over the burning putdown lecture Lake was getting, Sugar strode across the floor and gently pulled Gina off him. Lake instantly rebounded to his feet to glare at the woman who’d just handed him his ass.

  Sugar was grateful Lake’s Protector blade hadn’t shown up for his dressing down. The fight would have turned out differently if his blade had been activated. She could see that the kid was going to be trouble for them all if he kept making decisions based on his over-eager dick.

  Sugar shook her finger under Lake’s nose. “Don’t start with the whining. You earned that embarrassment, so suck it up, Junior. No means fucking no… or no fucking in this case. Hell, you know what I mean. You’re not that much of a kid.”

  “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but stay the hell out of my business,” Lake ordered.

  Sugar ignored Lake’s comeback and turned a still puzzled Gina toward the door. “Get your father for me, Gina. And do it quickly, okay?”

  Once Gina had exited, Sugar turned back to an angry Lake who was standing with feet spread and arms crossed. Sugar laughed at his naked male posturing and rolled her eyes. Males Lake’s age were so damn hard to deal with. They were drama queens—worse than female ones at times.

  Why did she always end up liking them enough to care? She’d had this problem with her students. She’d always felt the need to set them straight.

  “Gina had every right to kick your ass and you know it. And you’d be a whole lot better off cupping your hands over your naked balls to protect them instead of just standing there and glaring at me.”

  Sugar walked closer to make him uncomfortable. It amused her that her presence didn’t seem to intimidate him much. Maybe the blade had chosen him for just that reason.

  “I’m Dr. Sugar Jennings. You can just call me Sugar. Before I merged with my blade, I was a non-funded archaeologist. I taught Ancient Earth History to pay the bills.”

  “Doctor? Professor or Medical?” Lake demanded.

  Sugar grinned. “Professor, jackass. I just said I taught history. Pay attention. Stop worrying about what I think of your man parts. I’m already taken.”

  Lake ignored her dig. “Are you planning to explain what just happened to me? Or will I have homework to do first?”

  Sugar grinned. “You want me to explain the ass-kicking you just took from a woman almost half your size? You’re a big boy. Figure it out.”

  “No, Dr. Jennings. The metal invading my chest. Explain that in something less than a dissertation.”

  “Why bother? Explaining the origins of our artifacts would take too long. I’m opting for visuals to illustrate my point. I think things will go faster.”

  Sugar watched Lake’s eyes widen when she pulled off her shirt and held her arms wide. Lake’s arms slowly dropped to his sides as he stared past her bra to the golden trident embedded in her chest.

  She touched the center point of the trident. “Since I don�
�t know what happened to me, I tell people that I did this on purpose. They think I had a metal breastplate fused into my body.”

  Lake frowned as he looked into her sincere eyes. He didn’t want to believe her. “But you didn’t.”

  Sugar shook her head as her arms dropped. “No. I didn’t.”

  “What in the hell happened to us then?” Lake demanded. His mind was officially blown. If this was a punk gag, it was a very elaborate one.

  “What do you last remember?” Sugar asked. Lake needed to say it out loud. She hoped he’d say it to her. Talking to Rodu had sincerely helped her adjust.

  Lake cleared his throat. “I remember hearing someone call my name. When I tried to find the person, I got yanked through a solid rock wall that melted while I watched. On the other side of the wall, there was a room with all this gold everywhere, and then I found a talking box.”

  Lake paused to see if she’d interrupt him or try to discredit his accounting, but she didn’t. So he went on spilling the craziness.

  “The talking was bizarre enough but inside the box was a golden blade with all kinds of strange writing on it. After I held it in my hands for a while it suddenly started talking louder to me, only I couldn’t understand what it was saying. Next thing I knew there was a huge explosion. My next memory is waking up today and finding a cat woman leaning over me.”

  Sugar nodded. “Sounds about right.”

  Lake glared at her calm agreement. “How can that be right? Am I being punked? Is this all a dream? Tell me the truth, Dr. Jennings.”

  “You are not being punked, and I wish this was a dream. I’ve wished that many times in the last year,” Sugar said, waving her shirt around as she talked. “There’s another person here with our same dilemma. But no one knows about him yet, especially not his children, so you’re not allowed to tell them anything.”

  Lake waved a hand. “None of that matters because it’s got nothing to do with me.”

  “Actually, it does. You just met two of them. One of them was the cat—that was Marta. The other was Gina who just left. They both took care of you after your accident. You’ve been asleep for over two weeks.”

  “The cat and the goddess?” Lake asked.

  “Goddess? Yeah, guess Gina does look a bit like an Egyptian deity,” Sugar said with a laugh as she sat down in a nearby chair. “Merging with your sentient blade didn’t go smoothly, Junior. You almost died. You’re lucky we got there in time to save you.”

  Lake went to the bed and dropped down on it. How close had he been to joining his father?

  Feeling vulnerable, he gathered up the top cover on the bed and drew it around his waist to cover himself. “I’m not going to like what you’re about to teach me, am I, Dr. Jennings?”

  Sugar shrugged. “The fun’s just getting started.”

  13

  Lake lightly touched the trident point in the center of his chest. “My whole body is vibrating every time you speak. It’s like someone else is inside me and listening to you as well.”

  “That’s not far from the truth. Does the vibration hurt?” Sugar asked.

  Lake shook his head. “No. It just feels…”

  “Like whatever put the metal there has become part of you?” Sugar suggested.

  Lake nodded reluctantly. “I suppose that’s no crazier an idea than me thinking I saw a cat woman today.”

  Sugar leaned forward and pondered how to break the news about the Lyrans. There was no real way to explain aliens other than to just throw it out there and wait for the shock to pass. Lake was going to be exposed to way more surprising things than a cat woman once he left the seclusion of his room.

  “So here’s the deal, Junior. About those women you saw today, Gina and Marta are both aliens. Well, they’re half-alien. Their father is human. Their mother belongs to the Lyran race. Many, many millennia ago, the Lyrans were appointed by some sort of planetary alliance as Guardians of the Earth. Their job here is to see that the people of Earth don’t kill the planet or kill off each other. Up to now, they’ve managed to keep our species from destroying itself.”

  “Aliens? Now I know I’m being punked,” Lake said, his mouth twisting in humor. “Look, Dr. Jennings, if this is some social experiment my friends dropped me into without my permission, I want out. Oxford has rules about this kind of shit.”

  Sugar whistled. “Wow. Oxford, huh? You must be pretty smart.”

  “Not really,” Lake admitted. “I majored in Diplomacy because I had no real ambitions. My father was rich even though he didn’t want me around. Sending me overseas was both expedient and convenient because I couldn’t run home every weekend. Now you know the sad story of my life.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way about your parents, Lake. You’re still pretty young. One day you may come to a different understanding of their motivations.”

  Lake shrugged. “Life is what it is. I don’t expect it to be fair. My father died two weeks before I finished my degree. The trip to Peru was my graduation present from him. Do you think he did this to me on purpose? He was always trying to control what I became, but this is way more convoluted than his usual efforts. I was already interviewing for jobs—good paying jobs.”

  Sugar toyed with the shirt in her hands as she fought not to show too much sympathy. She’d loved her father and knew she’d been loved back. Lake’s story made her sad, and it made her miss her father. She knew beyond doubt that he would be proud of her for making the best of her situation.

  “I don’t know what sort of influence the sentient blades have beyond us in the world. There’s a lot left to learn about them. One thing I have concluded is that their creator was not from Earth—and yes, I mean she was also an alien. The blades were created to assist the humans on this planet in some manner. They are true sentient technology and more advanced than even the Lyrans can understand. The aliens we’re dealing with are light-years ahead of humans in technological progression.”

  “Great. So we’re back to the alien story?” Lake curled his lip as he listened to his storyteller. “You’re good at this. I will say that. I wish my other teachers had been as mesmerizing as you. I might have done better in classes.”

  “I was a damn good teacher. You absolutely would have,” Sugar stated as she laughed at his smirky tone. “And we never left the alien story. I didn’t believe any of this at first either. You need to accept the alien premise as soon as you can. The reality of that golden trident in your chest is far harder to accept than simply believing aliens have lived on Earth for most of its history. Trust me.”

  “Do you actually expect me to believe that we’re on a fucking spaceship?”

  “Well, no. We’re not on a spaceship, or at least not as far as I know. I asked that question several times and in several ways to make sure I wasn’t tripping over my own semantics.” Sugar chuckled and rolled her eyes when Lake grunted over her hedging. “Look, I made some stupid promise to Queen Nyomi never to ask anyone here where I was. These people are keeping me safe. I had to honor my word.”

  Lake looked around again. “Are you sure I’m not being punked? Because this sounds like a punk. I’ve been part of plenty of staged punks, and your story really fits that kind of thing.”

  “Don’t get up my ass over delivering news you don’t want to hear, Junior. I was under a lot of stress when I made that vow. Now, I may be clueless about where we’re physically located, but I'm absolutely straight about every person here being an alien except you, me, and Rodu. Lyrans are a race of ascended felines, but not all of them look like cats. Some lost the feline genes over time, and they look more like us, but they still honor the queen who does look a lot like a cat.”

  “So the alien cat woman I saw got alien cat genes,” Lake said stiffly. “Sure. Why not?”

  “Stay with me here, Junior. There’s more. I’ve seen other alien races come and go in the last ten months, but only humanoid ones. So don’t go getting grossed out thinking about smart insects or reptiles or those little gra
y people dropping by to visit. We’re not living a science fiction movie here—I promise. The aliens I saw live on planets a lot like Earth. They function a lot like us, or they wouldn’t be able to function here. That’s just physics.”

  Lake stared in disbelief until the door to the room opened. In walked a commanding male about his height whose shoulders nearly filled the doorway. Behind him stormed in a much taller replica—one who nearly filled up the entire doorway from top to bottom and who seemed very angry about something.

  Lake tightened his grip on his blanket and swallowed hard. He’d done a bit of boxing in college, which was handy during the occasional bar brawl, but he wouldn’t stand a chance of holding his own against these two males. It was the threatening look in their eyes as much as their size. Going along was not optional, so he said nothing provocative.

  “Greetings. I am Rodu. Welcome to the palace of Queen Nyomi, Leader of the Lyran Guardians on Earth. She sends her regards and looks forward to meeting you later,” Rodu announced formally, bowing to the new blade host.

  Sugar rose from her chair and came to stand beside Rodu. “Remember what I said, Lake.”

  Axel growled when he saw Sugar and her state of undress. “Why is your shirt off? Get dressed.”

  Sugar looked down at herself. “Oh… hey. Guess I forgot to put it back on. I was showing Lake my…”

  “You will show this male nothing,” Axel ordered, swiping a hand through the air.

  Sugar gasped, stepped backward, and punched Axel’s arm to knock him off his self-righteous pedestal. She snorted when he stumbled sideways. Thank you, Artifact.

  Guardian Axel offends?

  In every way possible at times, Sugar sent. “What did I say about you giving me orders? We talked about this yesterday, Axel.”

  Axel pointed at the nearly naked male in the room with his mate. “The man is unclothed. You are unclothed. What conclusion would you draw if our positions were reversed?”

  “Okay, I suppose that’s reasonable, but Lake doesn’t know where his clothes are because someone took them while he was recovering. He woke up seeing talking cats and Egyptian goddesses before I got a chance to explain anything. My shirt was off because I had to do a show and tell to even half-ass convince him I was telling the truth about his sentient blade.”