“The feeling you have right now,” he said hoarsely, “it’s a toxin from my body. It’ll pass. If we just—”
She lunged for him. He dodged out of her way, and she caught herself against the wall of the cavern with a giggle. The sound of it ran over his skin like fingertips. He shivered. Straining for self-control, he moved to put the fire between them again.
Lyra turned to face him, leaning insouciantly against the cavern wall. She watched him with hungry eyes. Heat suffused his entire body. His cock throbbed.
He wasn’t going to make it.
She pushed off the wall and started towards him. She took sedate, exacting steps, her eyes pinned on him. He backed away slowly. Outside the cavern opening, the storm raged. The rain had turned to hail the size of Lyra’s fists. There was nowhere for him to go.
“You don’t want this,” he rasped. The effort of making himself back away, instead of grabbing her and ripping the flight suit off her body, was going to kill him. “You’re under the influence—”
She leapt for him again.
He staggered backwards. His heel hooked against a protruding rock, and he crashed to the ground. Asier was far from a clumsy or weak, but in the last hour, a fragile little human had knocked him on his ass more times than anyone else had done in the last ten solars combined.
Before he could rise, she was on top of him. Her small hands were braced against his chest. Her soft thighs straddled his waist, the hot core of her bearing down on his unrelieved erection.
He groaned and fell back, helpless. He was going to fail. He was going to betray his own honor, betray his principles, betray the laws he upheld. Worst of all, he was going to betray the human he’d meant to protect.
He covered his mouth and nose with his hand. It was a pitiful, last-ditch effort to block the influence of her pheromones, to prevent her from taking in more of his toxin. But the slow grind of her pelvis was a maddening, exquisite torture. The sweet friction of her body would break him. And he would enjoy every second of it.
She gazed down on him with glazed eyes and a crooked smile. He stared back at her, an addled mixture of shame and need. Green flames reflected off her her pale skin in shifting patterns, making her delicate beauty even more ethereally unreal. Their eyes met, and held for a long, taut moment.
Very slowly, the glassiness lifted from her gaze.
She stopped.
Chapter Four
Lyra remained as still as a statue, straddled across the big male. Her body pulsed with need, but the agony in his gaze cut through the intoxicating arousal. She needed him—needed to taste him, to feel him, to have him inside of her.
But she also needed her humanity. He had begged her not to do this. Even with his hand over his mouth, he pled with his eyes.
Moving stiffly, she slid off of him. She let out a pained mewl as her inflamed core slid across the stone-hard contours of his body. On the ground, she rolled away from him. She ached with unsatisfied arousal. Her flesh felt unbearably cold where only a moment ago she’d felt the hot press of his iron skin. She crawled away from him, too shaky to stand, and slumped against the cavern wall on the other side of the fire.
He remained where she’d left him, flat on his back, staring up into the dark of cavern. Lyra’s gaze roved hungrily over him. He was so very big and muscular. So intensely male.
Like the others of his kind, he had skin the color of the landed meteorite—dark gray, but faintly lustrous. His hair was silvery-white, shaved on the sides, long on the top, and braided down the back of his neck to where it reached his shoulders. His eyebrows, thick and straight, were the same color, and he had a couple inches of silver beard growth.
She touched her cheek, remembering the feel of that thick, coarse beard against her skin. His face was brutishly hard, with a hawkish nose and wide, firm lips. Behind those lips, she knew, were wickedly long, sharp canine teeth that would put a leopard to shame. Her lip still hurt where he’d pierced her, but it was a pleasant pain that only made her constantly aware of her mouth. And his.
He continued to lay on his back, panting. His gaze flicked over to her, those unsettling elliptical pupils searching her face.
She needed to say something. She swallowed hard, licked her lips.
At the sight of her tongue, his pupils dilated until the golden irises were only a thin ochre ring.
She swallowed again, averting her gaze, ignoring the bolt of desire that lanced through her. “I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely. “I’m sorry if I…” she shook her head.
There was too much to apologize for. For hurting him, for taking advantage of him when he was trying to help her, to save her. For wanting, still, to ignore morality and use his obvious weakness against him. To overwhelm him with her scent and taste until he was mad with desire. To take him into her body—
She blinked, giving herself a hard shake. “I’m just sorry,” she finished lamely.
He sat up stiffly, slowly, and leaned against the cavern wall opposite of her. He averted his gaze to the fire. Lyra did the same.
“Do not apologize to me,” he said after a long silence. His voice was a deep rumble that she felt in her chest, under her skin. He spoke the Creole with distinct accent—guttural and rhotic. His voice was a low, wicked growl, even when he spoke in kindness.
She shivered, wrapping her arms tightly around herself, as if she could hold herself in place.
“This situation is not your fault,” he continued. “I didn’t—I wasn’t prepared. Scaevens have not engaged with humankind in several generations. Simply reading about you couldn’t prepare me for the reality. I… I lost my head.”
But he hadn’t taken advantage. He’d controlled himself. Tried to reason with her. Asier. She remembered his name, repeated it in her mind like a mantra. Asier.
“I lost mine, too,” she said, apology and forgiveness in one easy dismissal.
Another uneasy silence descended. Outside the cave, rain and hail crashed against the cliffs. The wind roared through the trees. Lightning flashed.
“When the storm lifts, we’ll head out for my ship. It shouldn’t be long.”
Relief flooded through Lyra. He had a ship. She had a vague recollection of his mentioning it before, when she was still in the throes of his venom. Toxin, he’d called it. Intoxication. She still felt it. Still wanted to yield to it. But she stiffened her spine, and kept her eyes pinned on the fire.
She didn’t dare look at his big, hard body. She couldn’t handle the intensity of his golden gaze, or the way his firm lips softened and parted when she made eye contact with him. Kissing him had been like kissing marble—living marble, hot as blood, that shaped to her own mouth with perfect devotion.
She huffed out a shuddering breath. Stop that right now. She forced her thoughts away from him. “What about the others?” she asked.
Asier did not respond.
Lyra lifted her eyes to search his stony face. “There were other women captured. Eighteen in total. We have to free them.”
Asier sighed. “There have been far more than eighteen women taken by traffickers. And there will continue to be many, many more, if I interfere today.”
Lyra bolted to her feet. “My crewmates are being held captive by those monsters! They’re probably being envenomated and raped as we speak!”
Asier got to his feet his feet as well, watching her warily. “I’m certain that that is not happening. Scaevens mate for life with the mother of their offspring. And human females are very fecund. The traffickers would not risk getting their chattel with child. They’d have to pay the cartel for the cost of their mate. And human females are very, very expensive.”
To hear it put in such blunt terms was a cold slap. The hungry heat simmering beneath her skin snuffed out, leaving her feeling hollow. She was no longer a decorated military pilot and highly regarded exploratory navigator. She was no longer a sister, a friend, or a person. To Asier’s species, she was only an extremely high-quality incubator. And her appeal to him wa
s no different. He had the honor to resist, but his desire for her was only a biological impulse to stake a claim on a hospitable womb.
She reached for her zipper and pulled it back up to her throat. She turned away from him, and stared out the cave opening, watching the storm rage. She couldn’t explain to herself why she felt so let down, so insulted. He was being honest with her. She should appreciate that.
They waited in silence for the storm to abate. As he’d predicted, it didn’t take long. When the hail stopped, and the rain had turned to an intermittent patter, Asier knelt beside the fire. Using a knife he’d pulled from his jacket, he slid the blade beneath the fire ring and flipped it over. The flames snuffed out immediately.
When the rain stopped entirely, he picked up the ring and twisted it in on itself until it was no larger than a bracelet. He tucked it into an interior pocket in his jacket. The jacket was made of a durable, rigid material—she remembered the feel of it—and had a close-fitting construction. When fastened shut, it closely followed the broad contours of his chest, down to the narrower tuck of his powerful hips. And yet, from its depths, he’d already pulled an electron gun, a very large knife, and some kind of fire tech that challenged Lyra’s understanding of thermodynamics. None of it showed beneath the smooth fit of the jacket. His trousers were made of the same material, but a darker dun color. And she already knew they concealed something big.
He looked up at her. His elliptical pupils were no longer blown out. His irises were a lovely harvest gold, striated with ochre.
“Ready?” he asked. He picked up the long barreled gun propped against the cave wall and slung it over his shoulder.
“Okay.” She pretended to be deeply invested in re-braiding her hair, looking down so that he wouldn’t see the mordant blush suffusing her entire face.
“I’ll go first.”
She nodded and stepped back, giving him a wide berth. She tied off her braid as he crouched at the opening, assessing. After a second, he exited.
“It’s clear,” he called back to her.
She stepped out behind him. There was no moon, but on a planet so small, the nightside would never get completely pitch black. Even so, in the low light, she could see no colors, and could make out only the vague shapes of the landscape.
Beneath her feet, the ridge was slick with rain, half-melted hail, and wind-blown leaves. Water dripped from sagging trees. Her boot slid over a slick clump of leaves, and she staggered, grasping the rock face for balance. Asier reached for her, to steady her. He jerked back suddenly, remembering himself.
They climbed to the top of the ridge, stepping onto soft soil and into the dense press of trees and bracken.
“Be careful not to touch any plants,” Asier said.
They worked their way back in the direction Lyra had run only hours ago. She recognized the shadowy thicket of thin, whippy canes she’d tried to hide in last night. As they rounded the canes, she felt a sudden tautness in the air between them. An intense awareness of his body, even though she was not looking at him, not even close enough to touch him, overtook her. The chase replayed in her mind, over and over—especially the moment when he’d finally caught her. When he’d hauled her body against his, as easily as if weighed nothing, and pressed his lips to hers…
She had drifted closer to him as they walked. His head turned towards her. She couldn’t read his features in the moonless dark, but the intentness of his posture had gone sharp, predatory.
She had to say something—do something. But all she could think of doing was leaping on him and finishing what they’d started last night. And she wasn’t even intoxicated anymore. This was a different feeling. Her mind was clear, her self-awareness sharp. This was just her very own desire.
She’d never wanted somebody so suddenly and without reservation—let alone a male of an entirely different species. She’d had relationships with human men, and had even enjoyed the cold-blooded touch of a Ravanoth male. But this feeling was potent and primal and—
Asier looked abruptly away from her. “At your pace, the ship is three days’ walk,” he said brusquely. “I could carry you and cut the time in half, but I don’t think that would be wise.”
Lyra smiled faintly. “No. Probably not.” She slowed, putting more distance between them.
They walked on in uncomfortable silence. She followed him through the forest, barely registering where she was walking. She knew better than to be so careless, but she couldn’t get a grip on her mind. Her thoughts raced between worry over the other women, fear that she would never return home, despair that her sister would forever wonder what had happened to her, and a bone-deep physical and mental exhaustion that had her questioning her own judgment.
Had she given her trust to this alien too readily? Was he deceiving her? She couldn’t bring herself to entertain those very legitimate concerns. Because underneath everything, ran a current of acute desire. She wanted to walk closer to the him—to touch him even just briefly. A brush of their fingers, a bump of her shoulder against his torso…
Asier’s deep voice cut into the anxious, racing scatter of her mind. “I’ve been on this planet for twenty-seven days.”
Lyra tried to collect her thoughts. “How long are the days on this planet?”
“Approximately two zeitraums.”
Lyra did the math in her head. Time adjustment was a complex formula, but one she’d worked with nearly every day of her life since before she’d even entered flight school. The computers ran it for her aboard ship, but she always checked their numbers against her own calculations. Systems could fail. Algorithms could be corrupted. After more than a decade as the fretful human backup to the most advanced tech humanity had, she’d managed to condense the most common formulas into fairly accurate approximations that she could do in her head.
After a few seconds of thought—blissful seconds in which all the fear and worry and confusion fell away before the clean, cold clarity of mathematics—she had it. One day on this planet amounted to a little more than half of an Earth Standard day. Their three-day walk here would be less than two days of her circadian cycle.
“This is not a hospitable planet,” Asier continued. “It’s climactically unstable. Much of the vegetation secretes dangerous compounds.” He ran through a detailed list, describing a long series of dangerous plants and the consequences of encountering them. “And then there are the spiders.”
Lyra shivered at his ominous tone. Bipedal anthropoids weren’t the only biological template found scattered across the universe. There were all kinds of alien creatures bearing marked similarities to ones found on Earth—most commonly cats, fish, snakes, and… spiders.
“The spiders?” Lyra echoed warily. “How big?”
“Have you ever seen a Ravanoth kuriel?” Asriel asked.
Kuriels were rusty-orange ape-like creatures that had inspired the Ravanoth slur for humans—kuri. They were slow-moving, docile, fungi-eaters, but they were as big as coyotes.
“You’re about to tell me how adorable and harmless these spiders are, right?” Lyra picked up her pace, closing some of the distance between them. Dangerous attraction be damned—she wasn’t going to march around in the dark on a hostile planet without having help in arm’s reach.
A low rumble emerged from Asier’s throat, and Lyra realized he was laughing. The sound made her feel flush and unsteady, but she didn’t move away from him.
“No. I’m telling you that these spiders are very large. And carnivorous.”
Lyra shuddered again. “Good to know.”
“They prefer wet, dark, lowland. We will stay on the ridges as much as we can. But be alert. They will climb to hunt, if they have to.”
“What am I looking for?”
“They’re colored gray-brown, and blend very well into the forest floor. Eight legs. Armored carapace.”
Lyra instinctively scanned their immediate surroundings. It was still too dark for her to see much. Suddenly every shape and shadow became a giant,
man-eating spider. She shot forward, gripping the back of Asier’s jacket. He stiffened.
“I’m sorry,” Lyra whispered, clutching his jacket more tightly. It was all she could do not to climb onto his back.
Asier reached into his jacket and withdrew a folded black cloth. He shook it out, folded it into a triangle, and tied it behind his head, covering his mouth and nose.
“Is it my scent?” Lyra asked, oddly flattered.
“Yes,” he answered gruffly.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged stiffly. “It is safer if we stay close.”
They walked on through the darkness, with Lyra clinging to the back of Asier’s jacket like a frightened child.
Around them, the twisting, whippy trees rustled and swayed in the wind. Stands of canes rattled dryly against each other. Small, dark shadows scurried across the ground in front of them, leapt from tree to tree above their heads. They passed bottle-shaped fungi that pulsed with anemic yellow light. Insects and night creatures called and whirred and chirped and hooted.
Every once in a while, something in the distance let out a scream like a dying rabbit. Each and every time, Lyra nearly jumped out of her skin. Seconds later, each and every time, she had to peel herself off of Asier, who stood rigidly and made pained noises.
“Stop doing that,” Lyra said shakily as he groaned at the feel of her body against his. “You’re making it very difficult to—” she stopped herself.
“What?” Asier asked hoarsely.
To let go of you. “Nothing.”
They walked on. Lyra’s hand was a cramped claw, fisted in Asier’s jacket, but she didn’t let go.
The darkness faded, bit by bit, until they were walking in daylight. The planet’s sun was as yellow and bright as Earth’s. But the trees around them were nothing like Earth’s verdant forests. Instead, Asier and Lyra walked through a feverish blend of scarlet, cobalt, and gold foliage. The bark of the trees and the woody stems of vines and bracken ranged from shades of pale ash to bone white. The loam-scented soil was charcoal gray.
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