Page 64 of Saved By the Alien Hybrid (Hybrids of Yulaira #1)

“Rentir?” Cordelia shouted, craning in her seat to look for him. Damn it, why had he let go? “Ren!”

She popped her harness and threw it over her head, standing on wobbly legs. Half the soldiers weren’t moving anymore, and those that remained conscious were struggling to find their feet after Cordelia had spent the last five minutes shaking them like rag dolls.

Her eyes fell on a purple hand splaying out from behind a console, and she took a shaky step forward.

“Ren,” she breathed, starting toward him.

A hand in her hair stopped her dead in her tracks, wrenching her head back with such force that she feared her scalp might tear. Tears pricked her eyes. She reached back blindly to try to alleviate the pressure, clawing with her blunt nails.

Tellefan dragged her up onto the balls of her feet and craned her head until they were eye to eye. His hands were empty now, at least. She’d seen the blaster he’d been holding when he lunged for her.

“Females,” he hissed, spittle flicking at her face. “Always you damnable, detestable creatures lead to ruination. Blinding males into biddable idiocy with your pheromones!”

Even as he cursed her, his nostrils flared, his face craning down toward her throat.

This was the man who had shattered Rentir and remolded him in his own image.

He was the ringleader of so much suffering, and he didn’t even have the decency to be conflicted about it.

Kliath had probably done one tenth of the damage this male had, and yet he had been the first to throw himself on her mercy, to beg for some path to redemption.

But Tellefan? He was only inconvenienced.

Rentir’s suffering meant nothing to him. The death, the pain, the cruel control—it was nothing but some nine-to-five slog to pay for his lordly chateau back on Auretia. That’s what all these hybrid lives were worth to him.

“They should have kept you cloistered away,” he ranted, his grip on her hair turning unbearable. “Hidden in the homes of your fathers and mates, where you belong! You have no right to influence things as you have! Parasites!”

This again?

I did not travel so many thousands of light years to listen to one more man spout his fucking misogyny.

Her fury was a cold thing, throbbing in her veins, giving her an unshakable clarity. “Tellefan.”

He leaned back, eyes narrowing on her.

“You talk too much.”

He drew a hand back to slap her, but she pressed the muzzle of her blaster against his ribs and pulled the trigger.

With a crowing sound of agony, he released her, staggering back, buying her the precious few seconds she needed to turn toward the flight controls and shove them forward.

She slammed the thrusters to maximum output.

They all went flying as the Gidalan’s engines turned over with a vengeance, nosediving for the planet’s surface.

For a moment, she was simply floating, drifting in space with no sense of orientation. Then she slammed against the floor as the ship’s gravity drive corrected, sliding toward the tangle of Tellefan and his remaining guards.

“Kill her!” he shrieked, one hand pressed to his ribs. “Kill that human bitch!”

One regained his footing and charged at her, and she pointed her blaster at him, realizing too late that her hand was empty. Her vision darted, but there was no trace of the weapon. She squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for what was coming, too afraid to see it unfold.

Damn it, she didn’t want to die like this.

I don’t want to die at all. I want to live, with him. I want…

There was a spray of wild blaster fire, and her eyes sprang open to reveal a familiar figure hauling the guard into the air by his throat.

“Ren,” she breathed, hope spreading its wings in her chest.

Rentir slammed him down with such force that the floor rattled, and the guard fell still in an instant.

“Stop him!” Tellefan screamed, scrabbling backward.

Rentir’s eyes were starkly black as they met hers, flickering only briefly with recognition. Then he turned, scyra whipping through the air behind him, and she knew no matter what Tellefan shouted, there would be no stopping him.

Another guard recovered, untangling himself and raising his blaster, but Rentir leaned to the side as he pulled the trigger.

The plasma bolt whistled past his head. He leaned down and palmed the visor of the male’s helmet.

With impossible strength, he ripped open the visor, and his scyra plunged inside, cutting off the guard’s brief cry of despair.

Recovering from her shock, she scrambled forward on all fours, snatching up the first fallen guard’s blaster and aiming it at one of the two that remained. They were both totally focused on Rentir, discounting her as a threat.

She fired at the one closest to her, who was aiming his weapon at her male.

The shot didn’t penetrate his armor, but it made his head jerk in her direction.

Rentir tracked the movement, and a moment later, the male’s arm was bent at an impossible angle inside his armor as he screamed, the blaster abandoned.

The final guard fired at Rentir, and Cordelia couldn’t help the scream that bubbled out of her as a bolt tore through his shoulder.

His arm sagged uselessly at his side, and though the wound didn’t bleed, it gaped and sizzled as the flesh around his joint boiled. Rentir didn’t flinch, didn’t slow as he approached the male.

His unharmed arm reached out, claws screeching against the male’s helmet. He bashed him into the floor once, twice, a third time, until the male’s head was resting in a crater. His legs were pinwheeling, hands clawing at Rentir’s arm.

Rentir adjusted his grip, hand locking around the male’s neck, and on the next violent slam, the guard fell still.

When he turned toward Tellefan, the male blanched.

“Rentir, wait, wait,” he stammered, holding out a hand as he struggled to his feet within the snare of his robes. “You do not want to do this.”

Rentir laughed darkly, moving toward him with slow, purposeful menace.

“I command you to stop!” Tellefan shouted, sliding along the row of consoles he was backed up against, pointing at Rentir. “I am your maker, and you will obey me!”

Rentir’s scyra poised over his shoulder like a viper ready to strike.

“I made you!” Tellefan screamed, cringing back as far as the console would allow, causing the holoscreen behind him to flicker erratically. “You cannot do this! You cannot!”

“Are those your final words?”

All the fight seemed to go out of Tellefan at once. His gaze drifted to Cordelia, and he began to laugh. “Fucking females,” he said with defeat.

Rentir’s hand closed around his throat, claws biting so deep that arterial blood sprayed. His scyra plunged into one of Tellefan’s eyes as he gurgled, then the other. Cordelia had to look away or risk losing her lunch all over the deck.

“Cordelia,” Rentir called, punctuated by the heavy thump of a body hitting the ground.

Warily, she looked back at him. His dark eyes found her as he flicked blood off his hand.

“I thought you were dead,” she admitted, her voice cracking.

“I told you, where you lead, I must follow. I cannot leave this world while you are still in it.”

She staggered toward him and threw her arms around his waist, ignoring how the blood he was drenched in soaked into her own clothes. His arm banded around her, and his nose buried in her tangled hair. He breathed like a dragon, lungs working like bellows as he drank her in.

Drawing back, she looked up at him, frowning. “Where’s Thalen?”

His jaw worked, and he shook his head sharply. Her heart plummeted.

“The ship,” he growled so thickly that it took her translator a moment to find the words within the noise.

She looked over her shoulder at the viewport. Flames licked up over the glass, and realization crashed into her. “Fuck!”

She lurched toward the chair, scrambling over the armrest and grabbing hold of the ship’s controls. The ship groaned and shuddered around them as she struggled to pull the nose up, alarms flashing across the head-up display.

“Warning: strain to structural integrity. Please adjust trajectory or ship may inc-c-cur damage.”

The electronics flickered, and her blood turned to ice. For an instant, she was back on board the Leto. She’d had that dream a thousand times, where she was the one who’d gone down burning, and Felix was the one who’d lucked into the last functional pod.

What was it called when you thought about something over and over, and it finally came true?

Manifestation, she remembered with despair.

The gravity drive stuttered, and she drifted out of her seat for a moment before a six-fingered hand shoved her back down. She looked up to see Rentir looming over her, his boot wedged beneath the chair. His tail wound around her like a seatbelt.

“Rentir. I just found you.” Her voice cracked.

“You have not lost me,” he said, his eyes green once more and his voice less full of gravel.

“You can do this.” He pinched her chin and pointed her back to the HUD full of doom and despair.

Leaning down until his lips brushed her ear, he murmured, “Land the ship, Commander. I have plans for you, and I will not be deprived.”

She shivered. Steeling herself, she grabbed hold of the controls and leveled them off, ignoring the groan of metal around her.

This ship wasn’t made for entering the atmosphere; it was too long, too heavy.

“We need to lose weight,” she called to Rentir. “I can’t read half of these fucking buttons. Do any of them say they’ll drop the cargo or something?”

He leaned over her shoulder, reading as the ship rattled violently. A dark laugh filled her ears. “Here,” he said, pointing to a button beneath a glass case.

She wrenched it open and punched it, holding her breath as a sharp grinding sound filled the air—and then the ship finally stopped its death throes.

“Crèche detached. Self destruction in ten, nine, eight…”

“Did it just say…”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t fear. It was empty.”

She blew out a harsh breath, reeling at the implications of the emergency dead weight being an entire generation of children.

Part of her wanted to run the Gidalan into the ground on principle.

Instead, she used the advantage of the ship’s shorter length and lesser weight to bring their course back under control.

Slowly, the blaring warnings subsided as they coasted down through the clouds. Leaning forward, she tapped the button she recognized as navigation from Lidan’s lessons.

“Can you point out the base?” she asked Rentir.

He leaned forward and tapped at it, locking it into the HUD. Cordelia course corrected, skimming off to the right, stirring the clouds in their wake. She recognized the mountain that housed the base and slowed as she approached, searching for the open field they’d scouted in the days before.

Rentir squeezed her shoulder as she ran through her mental checklist to set the behemoth down. Something crunched, and the ship lurched hard as they touched down, sparking a few angry warnings on the HUD, but…

There were no flames. No sirens. No smell of burnt electronics in the air.

Stunned, she let her hands fall away from the controls and into her lap, staring blankly at the green and purple trees outside the windshield. “We’re alive,” she said numbly.

Rentir circled her, kneeling at her side and taking her chin in his hand, beaming at her with sad eyes. “We’re alive.” His hand slipped into her hair, and he dragged her down for a kiss.

She leaned into him eagerly, tears pouring down her face as she hiccuped a sob, clutching at his shoulders. When he yelped in pain, she jumped and pulled back. An anguished sound escaped her.

“Your arm! God, how could I forget? We have to get you to the medbay!”