Page 5 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

Her head bobbed limply, and her arms dangled.

He pressed his face to the column of her throat and breathed deeply of her, hoping his sensitive nose might tell him something of use.

There was something chemical burning in her veins, weeping from her pores.

Haerune would have known more about it, might have been able to guess at its provenance just from the scent, but Rentir had not been schooled in such things.

The scent of her beneath the brine, something feminine and unidentifiable, sang to him even through his concern.

His chest was tight, and his head was muddled.

He clutched her closer, murmuring reassurances he knew she couldn’t understand.

Gingerly, he set her down in the front seat of the transport, laying her along the bench.

She took a deep breath, struggling to sit up, but he pressed a hand over her chest to force her back down.

“You’re not well. Just rest. You’ll hurt yourself.”

She shoved weakly at his hand, whining something, but he wouldn’t let her up. Tears spilled from the corners of her eyes as they rolled in her head, and the sight pained him like a needle in his heart. It had been such a long time since empathy had besieged him like this.

It’s been a long time since I could afford the weakness.

“Shhh,” he murmured, smoothing over the wet tracks running down to her temples. “It will be alright.”

Tentatively, he began to purr; he had only ever done so to soothe himself, but he was relieved to see it seemed to have the same effect on the female.

She sighed, and the hand that had been trying to knock him away smoothed over the back of his, holding him in place instead.

Her eyes fluttered closed, limbs going slack once more as her breathing evened out.

The strangest thought surged through him as he watched her lying there, soothed to sleep by his purr.

I don’t want to take her back.

He pulled his hand away, startled by the vehemence of it. The thought of the other hybrids seeing her like this, being near her… it crawled beneath his skin like a legion of insects.

He brought the fingers that had smoothed away her tears to his lips and licked them clean.

The salt and sweetness of her burst across his tongue, and euphoria surged in his veins.

Rentir loomed over her, driven by instincts he didn’t understand, desperate for another taste.

His muscles trembled as he fought the compulsion to drag his tongue along the bared column of her throat.

Disturbed, he shook his head hard and pulled away, smacking one of his horns against the frame of the door in his haste to retreat.

With a ragged breath, he turned his attention back to the task at hand.

Whatever his strange, conflicting feelings about returning to the base with her, she would not be safe unless he did so.

She needed a medpod, food, and rest. He wasn’t some guide from the lodge to be able to procure everything she needed from the wilderness.

It took all of his strength to get the damaged propeller loose, a task made all the more miserable because his stupid cock would not subside.

He’d never had such a problem before. An itch he needed to scratch, sure, but one that persisted even when his mind was on other things? That was new and unpleasant.

He was rougher with the installation than he needed to be, nearly damaging the new propeller in his clumsy distraction. When it was done, he packed up his tools and dropped the back bench seat into place once more.

By the time he was ready to climb back into the driver’s seat, Cordelia had roused. She was sitting up, leaning heavily against the backrest and blinking blearily at him. She muttered something, sliding over so he could sit down.

He shut the doors, ensconcing them in the silence of the transport.

He let her try clumsily to put her harness on a few times before reaching over to help.

His first attempt missed because of his haste to get it done before any other strange impulses sprang up.

Yanking his hand away as though the brush of her soft skin had burned him, he pressed his palm to the biolock on the dash.

The transport purred to life once the scan was complete.

The forest passed by quickly beneath them as they flew in awkward silence. On foot, it would take at least three days hiking over irregular, dangerous terrain at a brisk pace to reach the base of the mountain chain from the beach. By hovercraft, it took half an hour.

He pressed the button to hail the base on approach, and Cordelia sat forward in her seat to watch the massive metal blast door retract back into the face of the mountain.

This close, the purple stone of the mountain glittered brilliantly with mineral deposits.

He lowered them into the dark maw of the base, and the blast door closed behind them a moment later.

It stayed closed at all times unless someone was coming or going, thanks to the Aurillon ship in orbit above them. He released the controls and dismissed them back into the dash, popping the latch on his harness.

Cordelia paid no mind to him, her wide eyes darting all around the cavernous room outside the cab.

He wondered if she’d seen anything like it before.

Her people must have been advanced if they’d achieved space travel.

Though, if Fendar’s testament held any weight, their software had been more than a few centuries behind the Aurillon tech they were running in the base.

He leaned over to pop her harness loose, and she startled at the contact.

“Sorry,” he blurted out, holding up his hands in a gesture of peace.

She still glared at him as she shrugged off the harness.

She didn’t look away as her hands moved blindly over the door at her side.

He hit the release to pop both doors at once.

They flared open with a hiss that made her jump and glare at him again.

The more she came to her senses, the pricklier she became.

That stormy look stayed glued to him until she slid out of the far side of the hovercraft.

Her knees buckled as her feet hit the ground.

He cursed under his breath, hustling out of the far door and jogging around the craft to meet her.

She slid down to one hip on the polished stone floor.

Her head hung, and her long hair brushed the ground as she braced herself on trembling arms. He knelt beside her, hands hovering, uncertain how to help her without the ability to communicate.

He rested a hand on her shoulder, hoping to comfort her, but she batted it away.

Not only was she more annoyed with him as she recovered from her daze, but she was less tolerant of him touching her. His tail wilted at the realization, an uncharacteristic whine threatening to escape the back of his throat. Why did that make him feel such despair?

A series of loud clanks echoed through the hangar as the huge, secondary door to the rest of the hidden base unlocked. Cordelia watched through the curtain of her hair as the door ground open with a metallic shriek, wariness set into her pallid features.

“It’s alright,” he said. “It’s just the others. No one will hurt you here, Cordelia.”

At the sound of her name, her eyes flicked over to him, and some of the tension in her shoulders seemed to ease. His mood rebounded at the tiny display of trust.

Elten came through the door first. His tail lashed behind him, and he wrung both pairs of hands together in front of himself as he stared at Cordelia.

The bioluminescent stripes that zagged over Elten’s blue skin flickered in the dim light of the hangar, another indication of the fervor he’d worked himself into over their new alien acquisition.

Elten’s gaze flicked toward Rentir, and he drew up short; the eager flash of his lights dimmed.

For once, Rentir was glad of the wariness he inspired in most of the other hybrids.

Haerune and Thalen followed closely behind Elten.

“Easy,” Rentir said. “She’s uncertain of us.”

Elten stopped a few feet away—notably just out of reach of Rentir’s scyra—crouching down and craning his head to study her. His long, dark hair spilled over his shoulder. The nervous way his focus kept drifting back to Rentir was enough to curb his desire to issue a more dire warning.

“What is she?” Elten pondered aloud, propping his upper hands beneath his chin as the lower pair braced against his knees. “Has she spoken? Does she show any signs of being part of our genome?”

“Elten,” Thalen rumbled as he approached, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat. “Give her space, as he says.”

Sighing, Elten rose to his feet and took a step back. Haerune stepped around Thalen, his shrewd eyes studying Cordelia with his usual stoicism, but each flick of his tail ended with a rattle of excitement.

A strange sense of territoriality welled in Rentir, despite the fact that he’d only known Cordelia for an hour longer than the rest of them. He shuddered against the impulse to bare his fangs. A familiar dread turned his stomach at the mere thought of harming his batch brother.

As he was busy naval-gazing, Cordelia rose to her feet unsteadily. She pushed her hair back with one hand, straightened her spine, and began to speak in her odd language. Her voice, loud and authoritative, echoed off the cavernous walls of the hangar. Thalen looked to Rentir for guidance.

Rentir sprang to his feet. “She’s worried about the others, I think.”

Cordelia looked at him sidelong, frowning. She began to speak again, pantomiming the other pods as she had in the hovercraft.

“I understand your concern.” Thalen interrupted her, holding up a hand. “The others are being extracted as we speak. You have nothing to worry about.”

She looked at Rentir again, frustration plain on her face. He pantomimed the pods deploying, just as she had, then gestured to the hangar around them. A flicker of hope lit in her eyes. She said something hoarsely, sagging back against the side of the hovercraft.

“She reeks of blood and salt,” Haerune noted, taking a step closer. The tentacles at the base of his neck, usually hidden by his waist-length hair, writhed over his shoulders to taste the air.

Cordelia shuddered, stepping closer to Rentir. Their shoulders brushed, and the contact jolted through his arm like an electric spark. It was a sensation he had no frame of reference for; it left him oddly breathless.

“She’s injured,” Rentir said, looking at the scrapes that covered her body and the blood still soaking into her white clothes. “She was nearly eaten by an ateela.”

All three males grimaced.

“Take her to medbay,” Thalen said. “Haerune will treat her injuries.”

“As best I can.” Haerune canted his head. “I’m not sure we have the biometric data for her species, and she doesn’t seem fond of me.”

He took another testing step toward her, his tendrils reaching up, and Cordelia slid behind Rentir.

Something swelled in his chest as one of her hands fisted in the back of his shirt.

She spoke in a low tone, her breath ghosting over one of his sensitive ears.

The hair at his nape stood on end. He fought the urge to shiver.

His hand came up in warning, urging Haerune back. Haerune tilted his head and frowned.

“Elten, you’re with me,” Thalen said. “We’re going to take the hovercraft and help the others pick up the female’s other passengers.”

“Cordelia,” Rentir said. She looked up at her name. “Her name is Cordelia.”

Thalen nodded sagely, meeting her eyes. “You’re safe now, Cordelia. We will find your crew.”

“As safe as anyone can be when caught in the crossfire of a doomed liberation movement being barraged by air strikes,” Elten muttered, with his lower hands on his hips.

Elten was perhaps the most pessimistic among them about their odds of survival.

It was likely a side effect of how closely he’d worked alongside the auretians as one of the teserium processors.

He knew firsthand how advanced their technology could be.

Rentir understood that better than he’d ever admit.

Thalen shot him a withering look. “Not helpful.”

Elten shrugged with both sets of shoulders. “It’s the truth—not that she can understand it, anyway.”

“I believe I may be able to help with that,” Haerune said.

His big, blue eyes took in the female with a scrutiny Rentir knew was scientific in nature, but it rankled nonetheless.

“The Aurillon have a program for making first contact with a new language. If she’ll cooperate, we should be able to communicate with her in short order. ”

“Good, get it handled,” Thalen said. “Elten, let’s move out.”

Rentir stepped away from the hovercraft, and Cordelia followed, though she let go of her grip on his shirt.

She sidled away as Thalen skirted past her and bowed his head to slide into the hovercraft they’d just vacated.

The door slid shut behind him, and the familiar whine of the engine filled the hangar.

Rentir pressed a hand to Cordelia’s back, urging her out of the way before the propeller blades began to spin in earnest.

“We have to move,” he said over the engine’s growing noise.

She nodded her head as though she understood him, allowing him to rush her toward the door on the far side of the room.