Page 3

Nala

My head ached, nausea clung to the back of my throat, and my mouth was dry as ash.

I tried to swallow, but that only made the ache worse, and then I was coughing.

“Easy, it’s okay,” a voice said, low and male.

It came from afar. Very far, as if whoever that was had been separated from me by a thick fog.

Something pressed against my mouth; a straw. I drank deeply of the sweet, cool water, but all too soon that straw was pulled away. I blinked, protesting, but the straw didn’t come back, and my eyes wouldn’t focus.

Where was I? What had happened? There was white above me, the kind that was all smooth and polished, indirect light brightening everything without any sign of a lamp. I was certain I’d opened my eyes, but until I managed to turn my head, all I saw was this endless ceiling. It had to be a hospital.

Oh no, my baby! Alarmed, I struggled to reach down to feel my belly, where my child had been growing for the past few weeks.

It was still so new, this baby, but I couldn’t lose the little one before I’d even had the chance to hold her in my arms. How had I gotten hurt?

Why was I in the hospital? An accident, a car crash, maybe?

Something with the pregnancy? I groaned in frustration. Why couldn’t I remember?

There was a warm but slightly rough hand pressing against my wrist. Heat shot up my arm as those strong fingers circled my flesh, then my hand was lifted and pressed against my belly, just like I had wanted to do.

“Your baby is safe too. You are both safe,” the voice said again.

He sounded closer this time, as if the fog had lifted.

My head moved at last, limply falling to the side.

Now I wasn’t staring at a white hospital ceiling but at a medical monitor instead.

It was oddly shaped, with sinuous edges, and whatever words were on it, I could not read them.

That was strange, so I blinked twice, but the curly symbols did not resolve themselves into words.

I’d worked as a cartographer. I had visual implants as well as audio implants, this made no sense.

All known written languages were translated for me into UAR Standard English.

Then, movement shifted in the corner of my eye, and I tracked it, my head slowly twisting along with the motion.

I was beginning to feel a little stronger, a little more in control of my body again.

My hand was pressed against the gently curved mound of my belly, only the slightest evidence that I was expecting a baby.

I was lying on a soft bed that curved oddly; I could see the edge, which was round.

I saw him a moment later, my eyes growing wide in shock as I took him in.

Gold and silver hair hung in waves around alien, foreign features.

Golden eyes glowed at me from beneath ridged brows, cheekbones sharp and elegant beneath fine white scales that glimmered opalescent beneath the pale light.

He wasn’t smiling, but somehow his expression was kind, warm, a glimmer in his bright eyes that was excited and intelligent.

I drew in a deep breath, and my gaze dipped lower, trailing along his body.

Wide shoulders, covered in thicker white scales with the same multi-hued shimmer.

His neck was draped with several golden chains—some thick, some thin—all of them finely crafted and clearly old.

Below the chains, his chest was wide and muscular but tapered into a narrow waist. Then, there was a blue sash around his hips.

My eyes got stuck on the rest of him, the impossibly long tail that coiled down to the floor, looping around the bed I was on, the tip raised at the foot, waving gently in the air. A snake tail. A snake man… Where the hell was I?

The improbability of him, when I had seen and learned so much about the Alpha Quadrant, where Earth was located—did something to my brain.

It kicked it into a spinning turmoil of memories I’d rather not recall.

They danced before my eyes in rapid succession, my head aching, my stomach protesting.

The water I’d just drunk wanted to come back up, and I fought to keep it down.

The money appearing in my bank account like magic, sometimes just credits in an envelope on my pillow.

The arrest. The cold, dark cell, and the even darker, more horrible experience in the courtroom shortly afterward.

Then there’d been the sentencing and the sentence itself.

I remembered vividly how I’d pleaded for the life of my unborn child, but they hadn’t cared.

They’d told me I had no rights after the crimes I’d committed and that they didn’t need another orphan on an overpopulated planet.

Death had supposedly followed, but this didn’t seem like death.

This was different. The man beside the medical bed was waiting cautiously, calmly waiting for my attention to return to his face.

An alien man, a male, as they so often preferred in their own language.

An alien of a species I did not know, possibly from a place I’d never heard of.

“You are safe, human,” he said when our eyes met again. He offered me a smile and raised a hand to touch the sharp angle of his jaw, scales whispering as his fingers slid along his own skin. Maybe that wasn’t from his hand, but from the gently moving coils of his tail, sliding together.

“Am I?” I asked, testing my voice out loud for the first time with proper words.

“Am I really?” I didn’t know where I was—but not dead, and still pregnant was better than the alternative.

I tried to sit up, but my limbs were weak.

He hesitated a moment, his body growing tight with tension, and then he slowly moved forward, hands out to help me.

But it was his tail that did the lifting, literally.

It slid behind my back gently, a curled loop of sinew, muscle, and strength.

It was warm and surprisingly soft, easily leveraging me into a more upright position.

“Yes, truly,” the male said gently. Like Athol, he had sharp fangs that glinted at the corners of his mouth.

Unlike Athol, his were delicate and thin, the kind that could break your skin and make you bleed before you noticed.

His hair was long and lush, silvery gold, hinting at the pinks and blues that wanted to shimmer along every pale scale that covered him.

He was pretty—so very pretty—that I could barely wrap my head around it and struggled to make my mouth form words.

“I am Artek, the Shaman,” he explained, as if that meant something to me. He swept a hand around the room we were in, a medical room, a hospital room maybe, like I’d first thought—though the beds were all circular and bowl-shaped, made to fit the long coils of his serpentine body, not a human’s.

“Shaman”—that was such a tribalistic word, I had trouble connecting it to the sterile medical room I was in.

It was high- tech, modern: screens, robotic surgical arms, healing devices lined up on one table; a wall of vials and bottles with medical supplies, neatly tucked away behind glass-pane doors.

Not a place that would be home to someone called Shaman, surgeon, doctor, but not Shaman.

“I’m Nala,” I said, and then I wondered if I should add that I had a PhD in cartography and a master’s in botany.

I’d worked in star labs all my life until one day I lost my job and ran into a stranger.

Then everything had fallen apart, one crazy event after another.

My hands shot to my belly again, cradling the barely-there bump of my unborn little girl.

“Hello, Nala,” he responded, and the deep, husky drawl of his voice made my skin break out in goosebumps.

Suddenly, I was intensely aware of the alien’s maleness, of my small size compared to his, and of my ever-so-vulnerable state.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a surge of sharp attraction.

That voice… the way he said my name, it was like music, like honey and sweetness.

A caress for both my ears and my body. He said my name like it was his favorite word in the world.

Abruptly, that reminded me that I understood him, which meant my translator implants had his language in their database. He wasn’t speaking UAR English, but it appeared that way to my implant-aided brain. If I had his language in my database, then why didn’t I know his species?

“What are you?” flapped out before I could censor myself. Then, rapidly, as if the floodgates had been opened, more questions tumbled out. “Where am I? What happened?” He smiled gently, and the fangs didn’t seem quite so sharp anymore. I liked his amusement.

Something shifted behind my back, and I jolted, twisting to glance over my shoulder—only to realize it was the coil of his tail still supporting me.

A soft glow, like silver light, emanated from the scales, radiating gently up his tail, along the many coils of his body, under his sash, and up his chest. Bioluminescent; a silver light slashing across his body in savage stripes and lines.

“You are on Serant, home to the Naga and part of the Zeta Quadrant,” the Shaman said, drawing my attention from his scales back to his mouth and his decadent voice.

“I am Naga, a shaman to my people, and you, Nala, fell from the skies in a skyship. I found you in a stasispod and brought you to my home.” He picked up a glass from nearby, a straw dangling over the edge, and held it out to me.

“And you are safe here. I promise you that.” His eyes dropped to my belly. “Both of you.”

I believed him, but my head spun with the information, so neatly provided, so succinct yet precise. Zeta Quadrant, Serant, Naga. I knew only one of those terms, knew it meant I’d been transported far, far from Earth. Why? How?