Page 12 of Chased by the Alien Mercenary (Monster Mercenary Mates #6)
Lyra
I must have napped for a little while, but the warmer air inside the cave and the lack of wind meant I was beginning to warm up again.
That was good news and a stroke of luck.
Something about this cave was very good at trapping heat.
I touched the hard rock I was lying on and had to conclude it was a property of the stone itself.
It had felt icy when I’d lain down on it, and it should have sapped my strength, cooled me further as it took my heat.
Instead, the stone had heated beneath me, as if I was lying on a hot pad.
I wriggled my toes beneath the blanket, against the rough surface.
Firm and unyielding, it definitely felt like rock, only rock that had been warmed by the sun for a couple of hours.
That freaking rock had saved my life; I had no doubt about it.
I was loath to abandon it, but now that I was awake again and feeling slightly better, I knew I had to investigate.
It was dark inside the small cave, but a bit of starlight filtered in through the opening—enough to show me that my beastly protector was not here.
He’d vanished without a trace, leaving me behind.
Either because he couldn’t be bothered to haul my ass around any further, especially if I was dying from the cold, or because he’d gone to get supplies.
Maybe he’d just lost interest. That was a possibility, too.
After all, I knew absolutely nothing about him.
No, that wasn’t true. I did know one very important thing.
In his nightmares, he dreamed of being a child, trapped beneath the rubble of a devastated world.
Call it foolhardy, call it naive, but I was convinced I’d seen his dreams, and that they reflected an actual traumatic event he’d gone through.
My poor feral alien really had been trapped as a young boy, with only the moans of the dying to keep him company.
And knowing that...well, it made me want to believe he needed a friend. That I could be that friend, even.
“Don’t cool down while I’m having a look,” I warned the rock I was lying on.
Then I slowly rose to my elbows and then my knees.
I kept the blanket wrapped tightly around me as I carefully scuttled along the edge of the cave to the sliver of starry sky I could see.
The stars were bright and very clearly visible—millions upon millions of them—the dark outside unpolluted by lights from massive metropolises or spaceports.
I saw the shiny cap of a snow-covered mountain in one direction and dots of glowing bioluminescence that had to be the strange, carnivorous flowers that dotted the hillside.
If I squinted just right, I thought that perhaps I could see the lights of the mansion in the distance below, but I wasn’t sure if I was seeing that right or not.
Nothing civilized nearby then, no place to walk to for help.
Unless I wanted to scale a mountain just for the chance to peer down the other side of it.
Not an appealing thought. At least my feral companion had not trapped me, he had left me behind, but I was free to leave if I wanted to.
Now that I wasn’t in danger of dying from hypothermia, I was pretty all right with that situation.
The ground was oddly shimmering just in front of the cave opening, and when I ducked down to inspect, I took a hasty step back.
That looked like broken glass, crushed nearly to a powder but possibly still dangerously sharp.
If not glass, it could be some kind of quartz, but I was not taking chances with my bare feet.
One could think this was on purpose—a method of trapping me here after all—but I was pretty sure my companion hadn’t done this.
I didn’t think he was a local either, so it was unlikely he’d known about this location beforehand.
Besides, it had been an impulsive decision to go here when I’d begged for shelter.
No, my companion hadn’t known about the scary ground. This wasn’t on purpose.
I retreated into the cave and grimaced when I realized it had gotten colder in there.
I hurried back to my rock, perching on it like a chicken on her nest. It felt silly, especially since the rock had absolutely not listened to me and had cooled down considerably.
At least I wasn’t so freezing cold right now that I was shaking, and I could literally feel the stone heating up beneath my butt.
Neat trick, that. I hoped my alien came back soon, though.
Warm it might be, but it wasn’t comfortable, and I was really hungry and thirsty.
My head was a bit achy and foggy, my mouth dry, and my stomach cramped painfully at the thought of food, edging toward nausea.
I was so hungry I’d scarf down anything he offered me at this point.
He? I was still hopeful that my beastly alien had come back to me, not just hoping, but fairly certain that he would.
I couldn’t explain why I felt that kind of faith in his reappearance, but I did.
Still, when I heard the faintest sound of something crunching outside the cave, my heart rate skyrocketed with fear.
What if it was a predator? I needed a weapon, and I hurriedly cast my eyes about the small cave to search for one.
It was a curiously bare place: smooth rocky walls, a smattering of sand and dirt across the floor, and several bigger flat rocks like the warm one I was sitting on.
Along one wall, there was a meager stick that had blown in, barely visible in the minimal light of the stars.
When I picked it up, it felt flimsy and insubstantial in my hand, but I held onto it anyway.
The crunching sound came again, a bit louder, and then the light from the stars was abruptly blocked out.
I stumbled back, caught off-guard, and pressed myself against the wall at the back of the cave.
Raising the flimsy stick in front of me seemed utterly ridiculous in the face of a huge, black shadow.
Then a pair of red, glowing eyes blinked inside all that darkness, and my belly did an odd, swooping thing.
Heat tingled at the back of my skull and slid over the top of my head, until even my forehead seemed to glow with warmth.
A growl rattled through the darkness, clashing against the walls of the small cave and echoing back at me.
Chills shot down my spine. My hand trembled, the stick crunching as my fist squeezed around the brittle wood.
So much tension filled my body that my muscles ached with it.
A monster had entered this cave, was it the den of the beast?
A much more likely possibility also occurred to me, but fear still prevailed.
I felt hunted, cornered, trapped in the red glow of that gaze.
Then, abruptly, the growl cut off and something clicked before a soft, pale light illuminated the darkness.
A light source cradled in the large palm of a hand.
My eyes flicked from it to the pale features above it, the ghoulish mask of a face marked like death.
I knew him now, and any fear vanished like snow before the sun.
Yes, this was the den of a beast, but it was my beast by now, wasn’t it?
“You came back!” I exclaimed, dropping my stick with a clatter to the ground and rushing to close the distance between us.
There was a moment of awkward hesitation as I got closer, a worry niggling at the back of my mind that he might bite my hand off rather than let me pet him.
I went anyway. My hands collided with his wide, armor-clad chest, cold fingers stroking heat.
My mind seemed to be on fire, and I blamed the beginning stages of dehydration for that.
Maybe it made me reckless and irrational, but I was just so relieved to see a familiar face.
To have my dangerous ally back at my side.
He did not say anything—of course not—because I didn’t think he could talk.
He was frozen beneath my palms. The light only seemed to throw more shadows over his alien features: the way his red eyes glowed in the deep-set eyesockets, the needle-sharp teeth and fangs in his mouth, drawn into an angry snarl.
He appeared to be glaring at me, but he did not move away, did not make a single sound.
The heat against my head seemed to grow even stronger, as if a giant hand had grasped hold of my skull and was gently squeezing.
It wasn’t painful, not exactly, but it wasn’t comfortable either.
“I’m so glad you’re back,” I said to him, and I meant it.
He hissed—a furious sound—and then he did something that made my heart somersault inside my chest. His free hand lifted from his side, and with one calloused, claw-tipped finger, he gently stroked the curve of my cheek.
It was a caress, the gentlest of touches.
A greeting, but one that felt tender and caring, like I was precious and delicate, and he feared breaking me if he got too rough.
For a long moment, our eyes seemed locked together, time drawing out between us with every thud of my heart.
Then, abruptly, he was the one turning away, retreating to the other side of the cave.
The light clattered to the floor but did not break, shadows bouncing along the walls before it settled.
My feral companion was pacing back and forth, his long legs crossing from one side and back in just a few strides.
If he’d had a tail, I was certain he’d have swished it around like an angry cat.