Miranda winked. “Stand back and watch this.”
Esme took a healthy step away, and with the flick of her thumb a raging ball of fire spurted from the end of the torch and lit up the hunter’s body. His clothes and hair immediately caught fire followed by his skin which sizzled and crackled as it melted from his bones. Black smoke billowed into the air.
Mental note. Salvage everything.
“As much as I would like to sit around and roast marshmallows over his corpse, we have to go. The smoke will attract other hunters, and they’ll home in on this area. That means we can’t go back to our hiding spot for a while.”
“You have a place nearby?” Esme asked.
“It’s a little spot that we’ve been calling home ever since we were dumped in this hell hole.”
“It’s the North Pole!” Adam giggled.
Miranda winced, then she whispered. “I told the kids we’re on an adventure in the North Pole. We’re looking for Santa and his elves. The hunters are trying to keep us away from them.”
“You guys can hang out with me for a while. Follow me.”
Esme donned her snowshoes and led Miranda back to her cave. They traveled in silence and as quickly as possible, sure not to leave visible tracks. Wherever they could, they walked along the bank of the stream to hide footsteps and throw off any scent they left behind. It took longer than it would’ve if she were alone, but Esme was happy for the company and making it back without bumping into any hunters was a plus.
Esme ushered Miranda and the kids through the tunnel first, then made sure the entrance was hidden again before following. When she came out of the other side, she was greeted with darkness and heat.
“Hold up.” Esme fumbled with her comlink, and when she had the fire sticks in hand, she activated them. She spread them around so there was plenty of light and she didn’t have to worry about Adam accidentally falling into the hot spring and drowning.
When the cave was finally illuminated. Miranda glanced around. “Wow. This is a helluva lot cozier than my spot. Warmer too.”
Esme opened her make-shift satchel and emptied her fish on a rock she’d been using as a table top. “I lucked up and found this place. It’ll take me a little while to get the fish cleaned and cooked. You guys get warm while I make us dinner.”
Miranda edged toward the hot spring. “The water? Can we get in it?”
“It’s deep in some spots so watch Adam. I’ve been using that stone there on the ledge to scrub out my clothes. It’s not Tide, but it’ll do for now.”
Miranda began stripping out of her snowsuit. “Sweet Jesus. We haven’t had a bath since we got to this place. I smell rank. I swear a hunter would only have to follow the stink to find us. I’m not entirely convinced that’s not how fireball back there keeps finding me.” When she was undressed, she unbundled Lexi. “Strip Adam. We’re taking a bath.”
Adam crossed his arms and pouted. “A bath? But I don’t wanna.”
Miranda cradled a naked Lexi in one arm and crouched to Adam’s height. “Remember how I told you we have to be smarter than those men who don’t want us to reach Santa’s workshop?”
Adam poked his bottom lip out and nodded.
“Well, being smart means we don’t make it so easy for them to find us.”
“But if we take a bath, we’ll smell clean and not like outside anymore. You said it was good that we smelled like the outside because we,” he frowned as if trying to find the right word, “blended.”
Miranda pulled the hood of his snowsuit down. “Honey, right now we smell worse than outside. We smell like a pack of animals. We have to clean up.”
Esme took off her coat and stepped out of her snowsuit. She didn’t smell the best either, but her bath could wait until Miranda and the kids had theirs.
“When I first got here I couldn’t reach anyone for roll call. I didn’t know who was left or who’d been taken,” Esme said as she set to work on scaling and cleaning the fish. “I’m glad you’re still here. Well, not glad, glad, but you know what I mean.”
“We had roll call, and you didn’t answer. We all feared the worst.”
“Yeah, I got an instant ticket to Level Two. So what did you have to do to get here?”
“I guess they recognized that being a single mom to two kids takes some epic survival skills. It’s just a damn shame I had to come to an alien pl—I mean, the North Pole for my particular skills to be recognized.”
Adam stopped undressing long enough to frown at his mom. “I like the North Pole. Maybe Santa will let us stay.”
Miranda smiled playfully. “Why would we ever leave this place? Oh! No childcare, no viable jobs, no schools, and as far as I can tell, no good pediatricians. We can’t stay, hon.”
Esme chuckled. “But they do have a good transportation system. You have to give them that.” She snapped her fingers. “Here one minute and gone the next.”
“One morning I had bugs crawling all over me, and the heat was unimaginable, and I was thinking, ‘I wish I was anywhere else but here’. Then the ground opened up, and we fell into a pod.”
“And it spit you out to this wonderful place.”
“We went from sweating buckets to freezing.”
“It’d been raining, and I was running through water and mud trying to get away from a hunter.” Esme scrunched her nose. “Oh, and I was covered in blood when I came here.”
Miranda opened her eyes wide. “Shut. Up.”
Esme nodded. “I killed—” She glanced quickly at Adam to see if he had caught her slip up, but he was busy nosing around the cave. “Er, I mean I helped one sleep the long sleep. I had to call for an emergency pod, and it brought me here. I was so cold. I was sure I was going to die.”
Miranda eased into the hot spring, holding Lexi against her side. Lexi immediately began splashing and kicking the water excitedly. “And I thought we had it hard. But at least we were dry.”
“I came up in the middle of nowhere. I was in shock and had an arrancar on my tail.” Esme glanced at Miranda. “Have you run into one of those yet? Lovely animals. Not.”
Miranda frowned. “What does it look like?”
“Rows and rows of sharp teeth. Red mouth dripping drool. It has large dark eyes; one in front, one on each side where its ears should be. White fur. And kinda has the build of an alpha wolf on steroids.”
“Oh, yeah. We call him the wolf that tricked Red Riding Hood. I ran an arrow through his leg yesterday. Hopefully, that’ll teach him about stalking me and my kids.”
Mental note. Learn how to make and shoot arrows.
“So what happened? I mean, you obviously survived. But how did you pull yourself together?”
“Xrez found me before the evening bell rang.”
Miranda went still. “The same alien from the lake?”
Esme nodded and set one ready to cook fish aside and started cleaning the next. “He found me and gave me his coat.”
“And he didn’t capture you?”
Esme raised her eyebrows at that. “Again, we know how this story ends. I’m here with you.”
“But we don’t. Not really. What’s his end game, Ez?”
Esme went over to a part of the hot spring that fed out into the underground stream and thrust her hands in the water. She felt the water rushing past her hands and out. She rinsed the fish and her hands. “He doesn’t have one.”
Miranda helped Adam into the hot spring. “Can you throw me the baby wash from Lexi’s diaper bag, please?”
Esme set the fish down and rummaged through the bag and found what she looked for and handed it to Miranda. “Can I use a smidge? I’ve been using pebbles from the bottom to scrub grime away.”
“It’s the least I can do for you letting us use your bath.”
Miranda finished washing the kids, looking like a pro managing a wet squirming infant and a less than happy toddler while Esme looked on longing for her turn to use soap.
Who would’ve thought she would’ve been env
ious of someone because they had soapy suds in their hair? Esme scratched her scalp, and she bet that if she checked her fingernail, it would be full of dirt. Even though she’d “washed” her hair nightly, it still dried hard with film coating the strands.
When Miranda was done, she ushered Adam out and carried Lexi to the sled. She sat them both down, spreading the toys from the baby bag around them. “Back to Xrez. I think he does have an agenda and it’s right there staring you in the face.” She gathered their clothes and got back into the hot spring to vigorously scrub the dirt out of them. “He wants you.”
He wants me.
The thought made her giddy.
Flashbacks of what they’d done, what she’d done, made butterflies erupt in her stomach and her cheeks to grow warm from embarrassment. They’d done things she’d only seen in videos. Not that she’d watched those types of videos before, but she may have been curious once or twice and had wanted to see what all the hype was about. She’d acted so wanton and cried out so many times, pride and self-esteem abandoned. Spending that time with Xrez had been everything that she’d hoped for and more.
She wanted him too. What was there not to want? He was handsome in his own way. Strong. Nice. Helpful. And if it wasn’t for him, she might’ve been captured in Level One.
But.
He did tell her he wasn’t looking for a mate. In reality, she shouldn’t be looking for a mate either. She should be remembering every episode of Naked and Afraid and applying that knowledge to escape this planet.
Esme shook thoughts of mates out of her head. She took the fish over to the small circle of rocks and laid them across the top. “We talked about it. He doesn’t.”
Miranda stopped scrubbing long enough to glance at her. “You sound disappointed.”
“Pft. I’m hardly disappointed. Although, if I was captured and ended up as someone’s mate, I wouldn’t mind if it was him.” There. She’d finally said it out loud.
Miranda stared at her in shock. “Wait. Are you seriously thinking about giving up and staying here?” She glanced at Adam. He was playing with Lexi and not paying attention to their conversation. Despite that, Miranda maneuvered closer and dropped to a whisper. “What about going home?”
“Seriously?” Esme whispered. “Of course, I want to go home. No one in their right mind would want to stay here. But I’m talking about, if I didn’t have a choice. I wouldn’t mind exploring new planets. I mean, this is a scientist’s dream come true. The exploring new planets part, not the being hunted down part.”
“What about your friends and family? Don’t you miss them?”
She activated the fire sticks and arranged them to heat up the rocks and cook the fish. She thought about how her mother and father would never give up hope on finding her. They wouldn’t believe she was dead unless the authorities produced a body. The pharmaceutical company where she’d worked probably had already replaced her. They couldn’t risk losing viable research just because she’d gone and got herself kidnapped. New medications had to be discovered and clinical trials had to go on. They wouldn’t put everything on hold just because she went missing.
But while her family would be devastated, at least they would have good memories of her. “They would get by,” Esme finally said, her voice cracked as she spoke. Her heart pained as the words came out. Was she really thinking about never returning home?
“So you would give up everything for Xrez or any alien who promised to take you on a sightseeing adventure?” Miranda’s voice had a hard edge to it.
Esme lowered to sit next to the food. As the filets cooked, she turned them over with her knife, making sure they were thoroughly done before removing them. What they didn’t need were alien parasites in their guts.
“I’m not saying I would agree to be one of these hunter’s mate. That’s not what I want. I already killed one who tried to claim me, and I would’ve killed your friend back there too. I don’t want to be hunted down like some kind of…”
“Prey.”
“Exactly. Xrez is different from the hunters. He said he’s not one of them and I believe him.”
Miranda got out of the hot spring and spread their clothes around on any available rock to dry. “Then what is he doing here then?”
That was a good question. One she’d asked Xrez before, but he’d never really answered.
“Mommy, me and Lexi are hungry,” Adam whined.
“And I’m going to feed you.” Esme pierced the filet closest to her and peered at the meat inside. Nice and flakey. “These taste like catfish. I know they’re black and all, but if you can get past the color, you’ll like it.” She used her knife to move the fire sticks out of the way. “Miranda, I don’t know how you want to do this. I’ve been eating off these rocks like a savage.”
Miranda brought out a child’s dinnerware set made of hard plastic and had a picture of a cartoon truck on it. “We look high-class next to you.” She held out the plate and Esme loaded it with three filets.
“It’s still pretty hot. I don’t want the kids to burn their tongues.” Esme leaned over a rock, trying hard to avoid burning herself and used her knife to cut into her food.
“You know, Xrez helped me out too.”
A spark of jealousy made its way through Esme. “He did?” She tried to sound like she didn’t care.
Miranda nodded. “In Level One he came out of nowhere and told me there was a trap set for me on the path I was on. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or lying, but he’d told me and left. I didn’t have a reason to believe him, and I also didn’t have a reason not to. So I took another direction. Did he save us from being caught?” Miranda shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“See? He’s here to help us out. That’s all he’s been doing. He said he can’t interfere when we’re confronted by a hunter, but he’s been giving me survival tips.”
“But what’s his motive, Esme?”
Esme let out a breath. “Why does he have to have a motive to be nice? Not everyone is out to do us harm.”
“That first night you met him, he’d told you that aliens came to this planet to hunt. Now ask yourself, why would he be here if he wasn’t one of the hunters?” Miranda took a bite of her fish then closed her eyes. “Mm, this is so damn good.”
Esme chewed her food thoughtfully. No, that couldn’t be. Miranda had it all wrong. Xrez had had plenty of opportunities to take her, and from what Miranda just said, he’d had the chance to take them too, but he hadn’t. He’d helped them.
“Before I was taken from Earth, I read an article about how a group of people had infiltrated a sweatshop in China. They went in there as supervisors, even though they were against the practices, to film and document the conditions of the workers. They’d tried to help out as much as they could without blowing their cover. They’d spent five months there, and when they were done, they had enough evidence and footage to shut that place down. Those workers ended up with a nice settlement from the company.”
“And you believe Xrez is some vigilante who came to save us from this place?”
Esme lifted her chin. “I think that’s more plausible than what you’re suggesting.”
The evening alarm rang out, and both Esme and Miranda glanced toward the exit.
“We survived another day,” Esme said.
Miranda raised her water canvas. “Here’s hoping we survive tomorrow too.”
Esme raised hers and tapped Miranda’s.
“You know that we’ll have to leave as soon as our clothes dry,” Miranda said, a hint of sadness to her voice.
Esme heart dropped. “I know it, but I don’t like it.”
Miranda held out her arm and Esme did the same, comparing the countdowns on their con links. Miranda’s was moving at a much faster pace.
“If I thought staying wouldn’t slow my progression into the next level I would stick around a bit.”
“I just have myself to look after. You have the kids. You’ll make it out of here in no time.�
�
“I better see you on the other side, Esme.”
“You will.”
They ate the rest of their meal in silence.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Xrez willed himself not to look at his comlink yet again. He hadn’t intended to stay as long as he had on Ceriun, but the bureaucrats who had governance over the AC-141 XM3 sector had insisted. He’d planned to crash their meeting, lay out his plan for the future of The Hunt, which was in line with what his father had envisioned, assure them their scheduled credits would continue and be back on Turolois to spend time with Esme before the evening bell.
But the bureaucrats wouldn’t let him speak. As he was told—not so politely—since he’d invited himself to their meeting they would hear him in their time, so he’d waited.
And waited. And waited.
Their meeting was scheduled over two Ceriun days which were three standard days on Turolois. At first he’d balked at the idea of spending that much time away from Esme. Anything could happen to her in three days.
Bradliix had reminded him that he’d had two choices; leave without being heard or stay to smooth things over. Leaving would surely present more problems.
His father had ignored the bureaucrats once. That show of defiance had cost him dearly. The authorities had received an anonymous alert that an illegal hunting operation was in process in the AC-141 XM3 sector and the Galactic Federation of Planets had sent patrols to the area, making it impossible for trackers to bring in prey. His father had shut down the space station and gone dark.
After not finding any hint of illegal activity, the Federation had turned their attention to more pressing matters, and The Hunt was able to light up the space station and welcome trackers and hunters again. But it had been an expensive lesson. His father had given into the bureaucrat’s demands, depositing more credits into their accounts as they had requested and even more for their troubles.
The Game Warden's Mate: An Alien Abduction Romance (The Hunt Book 1) Page 20