Baring teeth wet with rancid fluid which scorched the weedy soil as it dripped, the crimson plumage feathering the creature’s ruff erected into a fan of bold, gleaming feathers.
Lower mandible splitting from its gnarled upper jaw, a clicking screech pierced their eardrums.
Sìne cringed against his thigh.
Muscles under Beowyn’s eyes and in his cheeks twitched. He remained ready. His focus on the predator remained absolute, and sensing its resolve falter, he snatched the advantage and claimed a menacing stride.
Arms extending, he puffed his chest, and growled.
The creature snapped its jaws but lowered its head as it shrank back. It coiled into itself then spun away and disappeared into the undergrowth.
Beowyn waited until the foul smell dissipated and the birds chittered, small rodents scrambling about in the trees.
He pivoted on his heel, ready to discipline Sìne with a snarling lecture, demand her trust and obedience.
The wreckage he found crumbling at his feet stayed his wrath.
She remained on her knees, a rock loosely clasped in the cage of her fingers. Her face was chalk-white, eyes lightless pools. ‘My baby. That thing is out there with my baby.’ She slapped a hand over her mouth. ‘Oh, God. I brought her from Earth to die.’
‘No.’ He gathered her into his arms. He tried to think of something to reassure her, but he had no pretty words, and he would not lie. ‘You could not have foreseen this.’ He had promised her and her kin paradise and delivered them hell. No words or vows would fix it. He could only move forward and do his best to put it right. ‘Come.’ He set her on her feet, keeping one arm snaked around her drooping shoulders. ‘We must find water by nightfall.’
‘We have to look. She’s in danger.’
He battled the urge to give her what she wanted. ‘Until we have a safe place to rest, we cannot begin our search.’
Back straightening, her face twisted.
Beowyn snagged her chin to stall a tirade. He held her glare with a compassionate stare. ‘You are no good to her dead. That is what will happen if you do not first care for yourself. If we do not do this, where will we take her when we find her? What will we tend her wounds with? Feed her? How can we keep her safe with nothing to offer?’
‘You think they’re dead. Just say it. You think she’s dead.’
Rather than confirm with silence, he spoke to delay. ‘We must find shelter.’
‘My baby is on a hostile world without me.’ She bent at the waist and keened, notes pure and high with grief.
‘Orik is with her. I am sure of it.’ He cupped her rigid shoulders. ‘My One, you must calm yourself.’
Sìne turned on him with a shriek, twisting from his hold and punching at his chest. Her nails scratched his cheek. Her flailing hand caught his side, and he hissed at the debilitating pain.
He shifted his grip to her upper arms, and this time, held on. ‘Calm yourself. Sìne! Calm down now.’
Getting nowhere, she stopped fighting and stalked several paces to stare unseeing into the jungle. ‘This is no okay.’ She whimpered. ‘She must be scared, crying for me. My family.’
‘Trust I will find them. I vow it.’
‘I’ve had enough of your promises.’
Beowyn flinched, wounded, her stare cutting through the heart of him.
Chapter 7
Stripped to the waist, Beowyn’s muscles bunched and flexed as he jumped. He used brute force to wrench a branch from its mooring in the white-barked tree. With a cracking snap, it pulled free, raining bluish splinters from the turquoise inner wood. He tossed it into the pile with the others. ‘It is a good thing these trees are not sentient like those on Drak. A fascinating planet. Many creatures large enough to swallow me whole–and almost did.’ He chuckled at the memory. ‘How comes the ropes?’
Said ropes were strands of orange-brown lichen I’d braided into lengths as thick as my thumb. ‘Fine.’ I’d made poor progress. The mound was twice my size. ‘I have two coils here ready to use.’
I rolled my head back on my neck.
Not surprisingly, there was not an inch of me that didn’t throb or ache.
Although I’d been sucked out of a crashing spaceship and taken an untethered free-fall, I bore no major wounds. I’d been close enough to the tree canopy that I’d landed on a forgiving bed of entangled branches, leaves, and vines, a natural landing pad.
I admit for a long while I’d simply lain there staring at the orangey sky trying to reconcile what had just happened and bracing myself for what came next–bracing myself to accept everyone may not have survived.
Once I’d terrified myself into action in spite of the crawling bugs and curious birds squawking at me for disturbing their nesting, I’d spent hours climbing my way down the knobbly, ashen tree bole, trying to reach the understory and search for the others.
Hundreds of feet from the ground, I’d paused to take a breath, looked over my shoulder, and marvelled at the alien jungle, colourful fauna and vivid flora.
Beowyn found me before the choking panic threatening to overwhelm me set in. I hadn’t a clue how to manage in the exotic environment, but he was authoritative, competent, and my worries about surviving diminished allowing my anxiety over my missing daughter and family to skyrocket.
Using the brightest hours of the day, we’d trudged through densely growing things as Beowyn followed a path known only to him. ‘I hear water,’ he’d said.
The only noises reaching my ears had been legs scuttling and distant roars. ‘I don’t hear it, but I trust you.’ I’d wanted to hear a baby’s cry. Desperately. My composure fractured each step I took and didn’t see Fergie. Seeing me lose hope, Beowyn had encouraged me with talk of his misadventures.
My calves were cramped by the time we reached a naturally sparse, flat of land large enough to make camp.
‘It is sheltered by scrub bush,’ Beowyn had explained. ‘Enough to keep off the worst of the brewing rainstorm.’
‘Okay.’ It was a rough circle ten yards in diameter. It wasn’t filled with monsters trying to eat me. ‘Good enough.’ Off to the side, a freshwater brook trickled across a rocky outcropping. ‘You were right. There’s water. Do you think it’s drinkable?’
‘You are inoculated against infection.’
I recalled the series of injections we’d been given alongside our translator implants and nodded, relieved Fergie and my family would be protected the same way and could scavenge food without deadly repercussions.
My tongue thick and dry, throat burning, I’d hurried to the spring and dunked my head under a cascade. The water was tepid and tasted strongly of minerals. Pooling into a sand-bottomed basin, it was deep enough to wash in.
I’d cleaned my face and felt a giddy sort of relief at the soothing wetness in my mouth and empty stomach.
Ever the independent sort, when Beowyn had thrown a handful of short, sharp commands to sit and conserve my energy while he built our lean-to, I’d bristled. I’d spouted about how women were strong and as capable as men of fending for themselves. Promptly realising I couldn’t spring eight feet in the air as the Verak could to wrench four-foot-thick branches from trees with my bare hands, I determined I would set about gathering material to hold our shelter together.
The rope making task was easy.
Keeping my concentration was not. Near naked, heathen royalty was the root of the problem.
King ThunderClaw didn’t move, he prowled. He didn’t speak, he rumbled. His hair didn’t grow from his head and fall down his back. It rippled from his crown in a glorious mane of shadows that caressed his stupidly handsome face and framed his ridiculous brawn.
I wanted to trace the faint cuts of his abdominals, the straight of his spine. He wasn’t all veins and no neck and overdeveloped muscle. I liked that. The fainter definition allowed his skin to appear biteable under his fur.
His body was a distraction, no doubt about it. For me it would have been easy enough to appreciate
the view then move on. It was his face that got me.
I’d wasted hours staring at it.
Beowyn’s features were bluntly masculine, and his dark eyes fierce, but the way his expression twisted and brightened with his emotions made him rawly beautiful. My concentration was shot, fingers weaving knots where plaits were needed. To my eyes the only male existing with better bone structure was Éorik, whose symmetrical face almost confused the looker with its perfection.
I was not overly impressed with physical attractiveness. Moreover, Beowyn wasn’t the first attractive male I’d encountered. Fergie’s father was good-looking, and he’d caught my attention with charm, dazzled me with his intelligence and focused attention.
Beowyn was the same yet different.
There were no empty compliments about my beauty because I wasn’t particularly stunning, yet he made me feel sexual. I was aware of my breasts, my mouth, my pussy. These places I intuitively knew he’d plunder with savage delight. When I’d first met him my instinct had been to run, and I did, resistant to his allure, and while aroused by the chase, wanting him gone. To my good fortune, my cousin had been smart enough to make me to listen to what it was Beowyn sought to build with his woman. The things he wanted from his wife. My interest had peaked. It had gone beyond the surface feelings of lust and woken scarier emotions like admiration and respect. How could I remain unmoved when he matched my sarcasm with wit? He displayed patience with my reticence and had been noble enough to marry me before we left Earth. He’d shown true joy in adding my family to his own, and if there was one way to win me over heart and soul, it was to embrace my family.
All the strange, proud and intriguing facets of Beowyn ThunderClaw combined with his physical attributes made him ruthlessly desirable and near impossible to ignore.
He was far from perfect, thank goodness, because it kept me from thinking of him as untouchable.
His arrogance already drove me batty and his unapologetic, rampant sexuality was intimidating as hell.
Frightened as I was to begin another relationship, it was clear to me his better side far outweighed his bad.
As he continued with his Me Male, You Female parody, I spiralled deeper under the spell of attraction.
So engrossed was I in the movement of muscle under suede-like skin, the scowls and lopsided smiles, I’d stopped weeping over losing Fergie. My stomach rolled over, and my hands began to shake. Fat tears rolled off my chin unheeded. I could cry oceans, but it wouldn’t get my daughter back. I could throw myself upon the ground in a fit, but it wouldn’t get her back.
I needed my alien husband for that. I needed his knowledge and strength.
Beowyn stressed the best way to go about our search was to find water, build shelter and then gather food.
After these crucial preparations we could then set about looking for Fergie, my family and Éorik in a logical grid pattern using our lean-to as camp.
All this made sense.
Me bawling into my hands didn’t.
So while each bodily cell screamed at me to run caterwauling into the trees, I held back. I swallowed my protests. I sat on my ass and braided rope. I refused to think of my baby alone in the woods calling for me.
I would not let my mind envision one of those feathered, wolfish creatures creeping up on her and devouring her whole.
She’d been in Rowan’s arms then shielded by Éorik the last time I’d seen her. It was likely she was with one of them and doing splendid. I needed to stay strong. I needed to get this done so we could get out there to find her.
Keeping my eyes down, I sucked it up when my fingertips went red then started to blister. The lichen was dry and thin like wire. Bunching thirty tough strands into three larger parts, I was able to make a decent sized plait that would hold the logs Beowyn gathered.
Grunting, the male who was now my husband and protector yet again stole my attention. My tongue smoothed over my bottom lip. My eyes strayed to the firm lines of his thighs and wandered over the taut globes of his buttocks.
Beowyn had stopped trying to keep my sprits up with tales of his numerous sexual exploits across the galaxy, thank you, God, and now stripped leaves and thorns off the branches.
He cursed, and his face scrunched as he sucked a splinter from his finger, pouty scowl making me hesitate.
‘Are you hurt?’ I asked.
His gaze skimmed me. ‘A wound unworthy of mention. Your injury?’
‘I’m fine, Owyn. I did no lie when I said your claws only scratched me.’ Hair blew into my mouth. I hooked a finger around the curly strand to stuff it into the mass tied at the nape of my neck. ‘How long have we been here?’
He walked to the space he’d cleared and set the log down. ‘Not long enough.’ On his way back, he grabbed a length of my rope then another log.
‘When can we start looking?’
‘Soon, my sweet.’
Humming in his deep baritone, he tied the longest two together at an angle. He repeated this with shrinking logs.
I didn’t get it, and I had to bite my tongue, so as to not fall into the womanly trap of haranguing him when I had nothing but a vague impression of what a lean-to looked like. I still muttered, ‘Is it meant to look like that?’
‘And you were expecting?’
‘Um.’ I made a boxy shape with my hands. ‘No?’
‘With more time to spare, perhaps.’ The logs were stacked high enough he needed to stretch to tie the last. ‘This will do until we find our kin and have more hands for more work.’
Beowyn heaved it onto its side, a sturdy, wedge-shaped hut more than big enough for two. There was a wide opening at one end, and inside the slanted roof lowered into a small triangle, too small to crawl out. He disappeared into the trees and returned with an armful of big rocks. He piled them at the small opening to make a stone wall no higher than my knee. He ripped speckled leaves off a bush. They smelt horrible. Even flies avoided the area wherever the foliage grew.
I straightened, realising the medicinal smell represented antiseptic properties, repelling biting insects.
I was dotted in itchy bumps from head to toe, and the worry of contracting a disease or deadly parasite lessened. I rubbed a piece of waxy leaf against the sensitive skin on my wrist, testing for an allergic reaction.
If nothing happened within the hour, I’d roll around in the stuff.
Beowyn leant the leaves against the outside logs, tucking the stalks under the top and bottom knots of lichen to keep them fastened. ‘Gather as much leaf, moss and soft grass as you can and pile it outside the entrance.’ He put the shorter, spare logs inside the shelter against one wall. I returned with the asked for leaves and grass, watching with interest as he shoved handfuls in-between the logs then piled the remainder on top until it was a soft, square platform. ‘The sleeping bough is rough but will keep us safer from poisonous bugs and help us retain heat when the temperate falls at night.’ Outside the doorway, he used his boot to flatten and compress the yellow dirt then lined it with rocks. ‘This will be our fire pit.’ He dumped dry leaves and twigs in the middle. He knelt and pawed at the rocks. Plucking one from the mushy dirt with a rumble of satisfaction, he ripped a metal button off his trousers then struck them together.
Sparks leapt onto the kindling.
Flames flickered amongst the twigs then erupted into a blaze amongst logs.
The campfire was unusual, its bluish smoke nutty, and the blackening wood sounding more like it snapped then cracked, smouldering and twinkling.
I was placed on a soft bed under the shelter, and the smoke kept away the more persistent flying bugs unaffected by the repellant leaves.
Beowyn planted his hands on his hips. He eyed everything with a glower. ‘I would build you something better, but I am conscious we must find our cub.’
I managed a choked noise of agreement then shrieked.
A gigantic insect with dozens of feelers and protected by maggot-white chitin minced its way across the log closest to my hea
d.
Beowyn swiped it onto the ground then stomped it with his heel. It crunched and spewed pus. He picked it up and sniffed it. ‘Good.’ He pierced it on a twig then popped it over the flames.
I stared. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Cooking.’
‘You, uh, want me to eat it?’
‘I do.’ He rotated the skewer. ‘I do not have time to hunt. We will forage as we search for the cub. I promised we would search after we found safety and food. I keep my word to you always, my One.’ Satisfied the bug was cooked, he offered me the twig. ‘Eat while it is hot.’
Pus had charred to a gooey brown. I shrank back. ‘You’ve been working so hard while I just sat here. You eat it.’
‘I will rest easier knowing you are fed.’
Beowyn had done everything he said he would. To throw the food at him and refuse to eat it would not only be rude but irresponsible. Bug was outside my standard diet, but I was hungry and needed energy to begin the hours of searching. ‘So very kind.’ I meant it.
I took the proffered food, weakness spreading from my joints.
I rolled my eyes to the heavens for strength as a smoky pong wafted up my nose and my stomach rebelled.
Gorge rising at the dozens of stiff legs, I shoved it in my mouth and bit down with my molars. Warm innards oozed across my palate. Crisp segments crumbled on my tongue. I slapped a hand over my mouth. I crunched the whole thing until it was a soupy mush mixed with saliva. It tasted sour with a hint of earth. I swallowed, tossed the stick aside then sprinted for the stream.
I drank until my stomach ached.
‘Water is important.’ Beowyn cupped a handful of the liquid and sipped. ‘It will keep you sharp.’
‘Beowyn?’
‘Yes, my One?’
I met his gaze. ‘Thank you for finding me.’
He drank more. When he spoke, his voice was husky. ‘Of course. Wherever you are is where I will fight to be.’
Resting my hands on my knees, I lifted my face into the breeze. I deep breathed and dug deep. I’d survive one step at a time. ‘What next?’
ThunderClaw: Science Fiction Romance (Alien Warrior Book 2) Page 11