Page 6 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

Cordelia allowed the alien—Rentir—to guide her out of the hangar by the small of her back. Once they were clear of the heavy door, she shrugged his touch off, trying to ignore the lingering heat on her skin.

“Where are we going?” she asked as though he would understand.

They entered a cavernous hall. The whole facility seemed to be only dimly lit by strips of soft white lights set into the walls.

Doors lined the halls, labeled in more alien text she couldn’t make sense of.

The air was cold and crisp with a faintly metallic bite to it.

It smelled wet to her, like a cavern dripping with stalactites rather than some state-of-the-art alien facility.

The stone floor was like ice beneath her bare feet.

Rentir said something to her, catching her elbow as she almost walked straight through a four-way intersection in the hall. He tugged her to the right, guiding her down a narrower hallway. She shook him off again; it was becoming a reflex. The alien was seriously touchy.

She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the other alien following them.

He looked so much less human than Rentir, though there were similarities in their bone structure, and they both shared the same scaled tail.

His eyes were more ovoid, too large in his face to be mistaken for human, with huge irises and a horizontal slit for a pupil.

He had long, black hair that would have done a metalhead proud, but somewhere beneath were tentacles that seemed to move with their own will, poking out from beneath the curtain of his hair like snakes tasting the air.

Where his ears poked through his hair, they resembled spiked fins, the membrane thin and iridescent where the light poured through it.

He met her gaze without glancing away in awkwardness, studying her without any reservation. There was a keen glint in his eyes, something shrewd and calculating that turned her stomach over nearly as much as his writhing tentacles did.

One of those tentacles rose up and wagged at her as she stared, and she tripped over her feet. Rentir caught at her arm again, this time pulling away faster than she could shrug him off. The corner of the other alien’s mouth tugged up, and she got the distinct sense he was mocking her.

“Very cute.” She turned away, grinding her teeth.

Rentir said something over his shoulder to the other alien in a tone that sounded reprimanding.

Good.

They stopped at last, and Rentir held a hand up to a black square in the center of a door. A robotic voice chirped something, and then the door before him whispered open.

It was clearly a medical facility. There was some kind of huge pod along the back wall, and all around were various pieces of gleaming white equipment.

Holographic posters on the wall depicted different kinds of anatomy, sifting slowly through some kind of slideshow that emphasized different organs and systems.

Pandora would have a stroke when she saw this place. No doubt it was decades ahead of anything she had handled on Earth.

Worry twisted Cordelia’s gut. Where were the others? Had their pods worked as they were meant to? Had they landed close enough to each other to find one another?

She watched Rentir, who was smiling encouragingly with those too-sharp teeth and trying to beckon her toward the pod at the back of the room. Though they’d been accommodating so far, she had no way of guessing these aliens’ intentions.

She was suspicious of men as a rule; the depletion of resources on Earth had only worked to hasten the breakdown of relations between genders.

She’d had to claw her way to the opportunity to fly in the first place, butting up against the shifting political tide that believed women would be better served making way for men in the workforce.

Without the powerful endorsement of Lyra Albrecht, heiress to the Last Frontier fortune, neither she nor any of the others on the crew would have ever seen space.

The Cassandra had been Lyra’s brainchild.

The settlement on Lapillus had stacked up enough requisition requests to warrant a delivery mission, and the heiress had purportedly sunk a hefty sum of her own money into the construction of the Cassandra and her crew.

The woman-only crew had been part of a media frenzy for a year before their departure, bad enough that Cordelia’s ugly history had been dragged out to help pad the twenty-four hour news cycle for months leading up to launch.

She scrubbed a hand over her face, weariness tunneling her vision.

The Albrechts were going to eat her alive for this.

Lyra had been one of the Cassandra’s passengers.

Lyra was going to be the first of the Albrechts to step foot on a colony world, the first to see the fruits of Last Frontier’s labor with her own eyes.

Cordelia shook herself. No—they wouldn’t come after her, would they?

For as long as they’d been drifting, Lyra’s influential father must be long, long dead.

When she crumpled, strong arms looped around her back and legs, lifting her off the ground as the room spun. Rentir and the other alien spoke rapid-fire to one another as he carried her over to the pod. It opened with a sigh of cool air that stirred the loose hair around her face.

Her eyes rolled in her head as time drifted away from her.

The lid of the pod closed over her, muffling Rentir’s reassurances.

A soothing alien voice filled her ears with words like water tumbling over stones.

Mist that stank of chemicals filled the pod, stinging as it sprayed over the myriad wounds she’d incurred during the crash.

She shifted in discomfort, and the voice said something she was sure was chastising.

“Shut up,” Cordelia mumbled, her eyes going heavy again. She’d woken too fast from her cryosleep and had been subjected to too much stress so soon after.

She needed to pull it together. Needed to find the others. There had been ten passengers on the Cassandra, including herself. A quarter of that number was crew, the rest a mix of colonists and security. And, of course, the heiress who’d made the mission possible.

They were supposed to land on Lapillus, dispense their supplies, drop off their colonists, and prepare the Cassandra for her return journey.

Several of the women would have stayed on.

They’d been the most somber at launch, leaving behind everything they’d known and loved for a world they’d never seen.

On Lapillus, they would have had the opportunity to write home, to send video messages back to whoever they’d left behind, even if years had transpired in the meantime.

Now… there was no question that everyone any of them had ever loved must be dead.

Guilt churned in her gut, stoking the nausea sparked by the chemicals filling the air.

She was the Commander of the Cassandra, an honor many argued she should never have been granted after the disaster of the Leto.

It didn’t matter that she’d been in cryo, that they couldn’t have foreseen the hack, that something horrific had clearly gone down on Earth.

They were her responsibility, and she’d failed them.

Scissors arched over her, dangling from a mechanical arm, and began to cut away at her shirt between her breasts. Yipping in surprise, she reached up and grabbed at the arm, battling to keep it away from the remains of her shirt as it threatened to fall open over her chest.

“What the fuck!” she shouted, trying to squirm away.

Angry beeping filled her ears, and the chiding voice spoke over her snarled curses.

A different smell swept through the air, sweet and oddly soothing, and her lids drooped as it swirled in her lungs.

Her hands fell away, too heavy to hold up, and the scissors went back to their task.

Cold mist sprayed over her bare nipples as the scraps of her shirt slid aside.

Something blocked the light above her. She pried her fluttering eyes open to take in the alien craned over her. There was plain concern in his features as he pressed his hand to the glass. His lips moved, his eyes darting over his shoulder and back to her.

His eyes, though strange, were so kind. Felix had eyes like that.

Eyes that made you trust him, eyes that beckoned you in to lean on him, laugh with him, rely on him.

Eyes that had dared her to fall in love.

If she hadn’t, maybe he would have listened to her when she’d commanded him to get to safety that day.

She moaned, emotional pain cutting through the haze of sedation. Cursed. She was cursed—or she was the curse. Everything she cared about fell to ruin at her touch.

Her eyes flitted over Rentir. He was staring down at her, but he was still arguing with the other alien. His gaze softened as their eyes met, and though she couldn’t hear him, she was sure he was soothing her.

“I’ll ruin you,” she rasped, a tear tracking down her temple, and then she knew nothing at all.