by Presley Hall
Then I realize why it let me go, and why it’s so angry now.
Jaro is clinging to the thing’s pulsing, gelatinous body, and as I watch, he withdraws his sword from the creature’s flesh and stabs again. Another screech pierces the evening air, and as it does, I notice a strange echo. With my heart racing in my throat, I glance around.
Shit.
The river has entered a canyon, and the tall rock walls on both sides are what sent the sound reverberating back to us.
Jaro roars, and it sounds like he’s got a whole army with him as the echo repeats the cry over and over. Using his legs to grip the river-monster almost like he’s a cowboy at a rodeo, he grips his sword in both hands and drives it downward into the creature’s open mouth.
This time, the sound it makes is more than a scream. It’s deep and piercing all at once, like a groan mixed with a shriek, and I realize it’s a death cry. The monster thrashes even more wildly, and I duck out of the way of one of its heavy limbs.
But Jaro isn’t so lucky.
With a shuddering movement, the creature rolls, and at the same moment, one of its tentacles lashes out, sending Jaro flying off its body. His head hits a boulder near one of the canyon walls with a hard crack, and his eyes close. He slips beneath the surface of the water just as the river monster’s dying form does the same.
My heart seems to stop beating for a second.
No. Jaro can’t die. He can’t.
My strokes are uneven and sloppy as I kick like a madwoman, slicing through the water toward the spot where Jaro went under. The current is dragging his body onward, so I make my best guess about where he is now and dive beneath the surface. The darkness of the water surrounds me, and fear crawls up my spine as I search blindly in the roiling depths, half expecting to feel another tentacle wrap around me at any moment.
But instead, my fingertips brush against smooth skin. I latch on to Jaro’s wrist, then wrap one arm beneath his shoulders. My lungs burn and convulse as I kick as hard as I can toward the surface. When we break through, I keep kicking, sputtering and gasping as I struggle to keep Jaro’s head above water.
I can’t keep this up forever, and I can’t get us out of the river—the canyon walls are too steep on both sides.
Tears streak down my face, mingling with the river water as I kick and kick, trying to ignore the way my legs seem to be turning to lead. Jaro’s body is heavy and limp in my arms, and he keeps almost slipping from my grasp. His skin is slick with water, just like mine is, and my fingers dig into his muscles as I try to keep our bodies connected. A trickle of blue blood runs down the side of his face. Although I can see his pulse in his neck, he’s out cold.
“Come on,” I choke out, not even sure who I’m pleading with. Whatever forces of fate watch over me have already let me get abducted from Earth and stranded on this godforsaken planet, so I’m not sure I have any faith left in luck.
But as I nearly slip beneath the surface again, something up ahead catches my eye. A large piece of driftwood bobs along on the surface of the rushing water, riding the waves and troughs like a boat on choppy seas.
Hope swells in my chest, rising so fast it’s almost hard to breathe. A fresh surge of adrenaline boosts my flagging strength, and I kick hard toward the large piece of wood. It’s hard to maneuver through the water and keep Jaro afloat at the same time, but I use the current to my advantage, and when the driftwood up ahead gets caught for a moment in a swirling eddy between two large rocks, I lunge toward it, grabbing on to it with one hand.
As the large piece of wood begins to drift down the river again, I do my best to shove Jaro’s limp body onto it. He’s so heavy that the wood sinks below the water’s surface a bit, but it supports him well enough to keep his head from going under, and that’s all I need.
There isn’t room for both of us on the tiny makeshift raft, so I just cling to the edge of it, holding Jaro steady as I kick my feet lightly. With every movement of my legs beneath the water, I brace myself for another tentacled thing to wrap around them and drag me under again, and I pray with everything in me that no more predators will find us.
If they do, we’ll be dead for certain. Jaro won’t be able to save me this time, and I’m certain I couldn’t fight off a monster the way he did—especially not while trying to keep the unconscious man from drowning.
My limbs have gone numb. The water felt cold when I first fell into it, but now I can barely feel the chill anymore. I’m shivering though, and as the fast-moving river carries us through the canyon, I wonder how long I can last like this.
Please let there be a way out of here.
All I want is to get out of this murky, cold water. But the canyon walls rise high and steep on either side, trapping us in the river. I scan our surroundings as we pass, searching for an outcropping or cave or something in the rock wall, but nothing presents itself.
I don’t know how long we float like that, but it feels like hours.
Slowly, the light in the sky starts to dim as the sun sets. The air cools a bit, and my teeth chatter so hard I have to clench my jaw to keep from biting my tongue. My mind feels almost as numb as my body by now, exhaustion tugging at me like the water did earlier, trying to drag me down. The river has slowed a little, but it’s still pulling us along insistently.
Beneath the fog in my mind, panic rises again as I realize that before long, it will be completely dark. Will Jaro and I survive a night in this river? Somehow, I don’t think we will.
But even as dread fills my chest like a heavy weight, I catch sight of something jutting out from the canyon wall ahead of us. It’s an outcropping, just like I had hoped for—a small shelf that sticks out from the vertical rock wall, creating a platform about a foot above the surface of the water.
Forcing my numb limbs to cooperate, I kick toward it as the current carries us forward. As we bump up against the outcropping, I pull Jaro off the piece of driftwood and shove him up onto the rock shelf.
There’s nothing graceful about it. He’s at least twice my size, and maneuvering his unconscious body is a challenge. But I manage to get him sprawled out on the slab of rock, making sure that none of his limbs are dangling into the river as bait to any flesh-eating fish or whatever else might lurk in these waters. Then I haul myself up beside him, flopping onto the smooth rock with a groan.
Now that air is hitting my wet skin, I can feel the cold again. Goose bumps make my skin prickle, and fear still churns in my gut. Even though we’re out of the water, we’re not truly safe.
But even that knowledge isn’t enough to override the pure exhaustion that fills me from head to toe.
My eyelids droop. I force them open once, twice… but the next time I blink, they stay closed as sleep claims me.
6
Jaro
Slanch, my head hurts.
I peel my eyes open, blinking several times as my vision clears. Above me, stars wink in the sky, and I can see the arc of the ring cutting across it all. A throbbing ache pounds on one side of my head, and I lift a hand to feel the lump there.
Akhi. The zygek. I fought the tentacled creature and managed to bring it down, but its death throes sent me flying into a rock.
I grimace at the memory. That was a stupid mistake, the kind I would have paid for with my life in the arena back on Ybretti. I’m a better fighter than that, but in the heat of the moment, I wasn’t thinking as clearly as I should have.
Then again, I’ve never fought a creature entirely in the water before. I’m a better fighter on land, quicker and more agile.
I’ve never seen a zygek before, but I’m certain that’s what it was. At a market in Pascia, I came across a woman selling zygek mandibles out of a small stall once. She described the creature to me, and I recognized it as soon as I saw it in the churning water yesterday. The mandibles are apparently valuable in trade, but that has nothing to do with why I fought the creature with such ferocity.
It almost killed Sadie.
The thought ma
kes me jerk upright, and a blinding pain cracks through my skull at the sudden movement. I glance around and catch sight of the small Terran woman sprawled out on the smooth rock beside me. We’re on a small ledge that juts out into the river, and a steep rock wall rises up beside us.
My brows furrow as I look from her to our surroundings and back again.
She must’ve managed to drag us onto this little outcropping somehow. How long was I unconscious after my head slammed into that rock? And how was she able to keep me from drowning?
She saved my life.
I’m a little surprised by that realization. I dove into the water after her without thought when she slipped off the felled tree, but my honor as a Voxeran wouldn’t allow me to stand by and do nothing when a woman’s life was in danger. And besides, it was my idea to use the tree as a makeshift bridge—my fault she was on the slanching thing in the first place. I owed it to her to try to save her.
But why did she save me?
She’s made it perfectly clear she doesn’t like or trust me or any of the other men. Her blue eyes are always shadowed and closed-off when she looks at me.
My gaze settles on her face, cataloguing her features in the bright starlight. Her skin is so pale it almost appears to have taken on a blue tint like mine. Her lips are parted slightly, and strands of golden hair cling to the sides of her face and her cheeks.
She’s small, delicate. She looks so fragile that I imagine she would break easily—and yet there’s obviously a great deal of strength beneath the surface.
As I stare down at her, I realize that her entire body is trembling. She’s lost in sleep, her head lolling to one side, but small tremors wrack her body. Even her lips look a little blue.
She’s cold.
Without thinking, I move closer to her, wrapping one arm around her waist and tugging her toward my body. I roll onto my side so that her back is pressed to my front, curling myself around her like a shield. Like a blanket.
A soft noise spills from her lips, and I go still, thinking that perhaps she’s awakened. Then she wriggles deeper into my embrace, sighing quietly as her breathing evens out. She shivers for a little while longer, and I feel every one of her tremors in my own body, but eventually, she relaxes completely in my hold.
Her skin, which felt like ice against mine, begins to warm as we share body heat. Her hair smells like river water, but beneath that, there’s a sweet scent that I can’t quite place. It’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled before, and I realize that’s because it’s Sadie—a scent completely unique to her. It teases my nostrils in a pleasant way, and I find my cock stirring as she shifts her weight in my arms, pressing her rounded bottom against my groin.
Gritting my teeth, I push down my reaction, focusing on the pain in my head to quell the stiffening of my cock.
It’s been years since I laid with a woman, and much longer than that since I was with a woman by choice. On Ybretti, I was forced to couple with other slaves from time to time, used as a stud under threat of death. Those memories still haunt me, and I have not felt desire for a woman in a long time.
But as I hold Sadie tightly against me to ward off the cold, blood pulses through my cock, making me feel almost desperate to pull her closer to me, to press myself harder against her soft flesh.
I resist the urge—she’s sleeping, and I would never take advantage of an unconscious woman—but the strength of my body’s reaction surprises and alarms me.
Why does she, of all people, make me feel this way?
I have no answer to that question, so I put it out of my mind, focusing on keeping us both alive. For the next several hours, I doze lightly, keeping myself alert to any potential threats from the water or from above.
When dawn finally begins to lighten the sky above us and the stars fade away, Sadie stirs in my arms. My eyes pop open, my mind instantly alert, but she wakes up more slowly. She makes a soft noise in her throat, a contented sound, and wriggles against me in a way that makes my cock instantly harden again.
Then she freezes.
Her whole body stiffens as her breath catches, and a moment later, she scrambles out of my embrace, stumbling to her feet and turning to face me. I get to my feet too, gritting my teeth at the throbbing ache in my temple. When I reach up to feel the knot at the side of my head, I grimace. I’ve sustained much worse injuries, but I know this will take several days to fully heal.
“You’re…” Sadie swallows. Her voice is rough and husky, and I don’t know if it’s from sleep or from the events of yesterday. Her wide blue eyes fix on me, her posture tense. “You’re alive.”
“Yes.” I nod, dropping my hand. “Thanks to you.”
She blinks at me, not responding to that. Instead, she narrows her eyes a little. “Why did you follow me into the river? Why would you do that?”
My eyebrows rise. Is her opinion of me really so low that she doesn’t know the answer to that questions already? She must know she would’ve died if I hadn’t come after her. What kinds of people has she known in her life that she’s suspicious of my decision to save her?
“Would you have preferred that I didn’t follow you?” I ask, cocking my head slightly as I gauge her reaction. “That I let you face the zygek on your own?”
Her face pales, and I can practically see the memories flashing through her mind. The dark, swirling water and the vicious river beast. The frothing waves. The grasping tentacles. She was below the surface when I found her, and for a terrifying instant, I was certain I’d reached her too late.
“No,” she says slowly. She licks her lips, drawing my gaze to the pink curves of her mouth. “No, I’m glad you did. I’m alive… thanks to you.”
Truth resonates in her words, but even as she speaks, she takes a small step away from me. Her shoulders are rigid, and I can see none of the softness in her that I felt while she was curled up in my arms.
My jaw tightens a little. My own body tenses as I take in her expression, wariness rising in my chest as I remember all the reasons why I was skeptical of the Terrans in the first place.
A wry thought flits through my mind, and I huff a quiet breath.
Well, here we are. We’ve both saved the other’s life, and still, we don’t trust each other.
7
Sadie
Jaro’s cat-like green eyes watch me carefully, and as they do, I can see his expression harden a little. I can’t tell if he’s angry, hurt, or annoyed by my reaction to him, but a flash of guilt rises up in me regardless.
He saved my life.
He didn’t have to come after me when I fell into the river. Arguably, it was a stupid move on his part that could’ve cost him his life. I want to ask him again why he did it, since he didn’t really answer my question the first time, but I don’t.
I’m not ungrateful. When I think about what kind of death I would’ve suffered if he hadn’t shown up—drowned or eaten alive or worse—my stomach seems to drop out of my body. But even though I’m glad to be alive, trust is a hard thing for me to come by.
I’ve been fooled before. I’ve been tricked by what seemed to be honorable actions, lured into a false sense of safety with the wrong person. And everything in me rebels at the thought of letting that happen again.
And because Jaro came after me, the two of us are now stranded alone in the wilderness of Nuthora. I haven’t been alone with a man in a long time, and it makes me nervous. I keep taking half-steps away from him, my body moving of its own volition, but there’s only so much space I can put between us on this small platform.
It didn’t feel so bad to be close to him, though, did it? a little voice in my head murmurs, but I push it away.
I was freezing cold last night, and he probably was too. We both needed the extra heat. The sense of safety and security I felt as I woke up were just illusions, my body’s reaction to finally being out of immediate danger.
“Do you know where we are?” I ask, dragging my thoughts back to the most pressing issue at hand.
“Only vaguely.” Jaro’s strong brows draw together as he glances at the canyon walls around us. “If I could see our surroundings better, I might have a clearer idea.”
“Will Droth send people to find us?” I ask, unable to disguise the naked hope in my voice. Please, let them find us.
Jaro smooths back his shoulder-length brown hair with both hands, wincing as his fingers brush over the bump on his head. The dark blue of his blood was mostly washed away by the river water last night, although a few streaks of it still mar his skin.
“I doubt it.” He must catch my crestfallen look, because his voice softens a little as he adds, “It would be difficult for them to find us anyway. The river split into two paths while I was fighting the zygek. He would have no way of knowing which branch we took, and sending search parties down each one would require too many men. As it is, he has one fewer warrior to protect the women on the journey.”
His words make sense, and I force myself to hear the logic in them, trying to let practicality override my emotions. It’s the same reason the other women and I didn’t go charging through the jungle to try to find Charlotte when that bird carried her away. I was about to race after her, still coming down from my panic attack and nearly hysterical with guilt and worry, but the others made me see reason. Running into the jungle and getting myself killed wouldn’t help Charlotte.
Just like Droth sending people after us won’t help us now.
But Charlotte survived her ordeal. Somehow, against all odds, she managed to make it back to the ship alive. So maybe Jaro and I can manage to do the same thing.
“Okay,” I say, swallowing down my fear as I nod. “Then we’ll need to rejoin the group somehow. Or make it to your village on our own.”