by Maia Starr
Copyright 2018 by Stella Sky - All rights reserved.
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Warriors Of Cadir Collection
(Books 1-4)
By Stella Sky
Korus
(Warriors Of Cadir)
By Stella Sky
Chapter One
Brooklyn
“Did you hear? Did you hear?” came the jovial cry of Maddie Layna, my nurse.
I spilled coffee all over my lab coat, stifling a curse and looking up at Maddie with mild annoyance. She didn't seem to notice the brown liquid dripping down my front, or that she had been the cause of it. I loved this girl, but her high-pitched exclamations were known to ruin many a uniform since I had started at Randor Heights Hospital.
“Oh my gosh, isn’t it horrible?” another nurse, Liz, exclaimed.
“Not you!” Maddie said, looking pointedly in my direction. “Brooklyn! Did you hear what they found?”
I smiled but offered a mild eyeroll in her direction.
“What?” I scoffed, pointing to the television with a laugh. “That? The thing that’s been all over the news and radio and lighting up every notification on my phone?”
“Well, I just heart of it this minute!” Maddie argued back before leaning against the counter of the break room. She looked deeply into her black coffee and poured in a cream, watching it swirl around like she was in a trance.
Maddie was my eyes and ears around the hospital. We’d been friends for five years, ever since she was hired. She had short blonde hair that cuffed at her ears and expressive brown eyes.
I looked up at the television once more, turning up the volume from its closed-captioning state to hear what the reporters were saying about the crash.
A spaceship exploded in a field just north of our big city and all the media cheered with delight, believing it was aliens.
I shook my head.
“Have we had any intake?” Maddie said, asking about the potential crash victims.
“Us?” I said, holding off a frown. “Not that I know of. It’s sort of far from here, isn’t it?”
“No!” Maddie exclaimed, and we both paused momentarily to watch as Chris, another nurse, walked in and marched straight toward the coffee. “Didn’t you hear? North Harbor Hospital is down.”
“What?” I said.
“Yeah, since Friday,” Chris piped in. “Massive power outages all throughout the north end of the city.”
“Ah, yeah,” I said with a nod, sipping my coffee. “I heard about that, but I didn’t connect the two.”
“What do you think?” Maddie said, finally taking a seat at the lacquered table that sat in our small coffee room, craning her neck to look up at the looping footage of the crash. “Think they’re alien like the news is saying?”
“Nah,” I said, waving a hand and sitting down as well.
“Hey!” Maddie laughed. “Don’t dismiss it so quickly.”
“I’m sorry,” I shook my head and wrapped my hands around the base of my coffee mug. I loved my mug. Having coffee was one of the only moments I had for myself. I enjoyed coming in and slipping my hand through the black, shiny handle.
The cup had a picture of a white cartoon cat doing its best shrug. The bold, capitalized text read: IT’S A CAT’S LIFE.
I liked that, for some reason. I didn’t have a cat, but the mug gave me the idea that I could have one if I wanted. And that he would be sassy as hell.
“I don’t buy into all that,” I said finally.
“The Parduss?” Chris said with a scoff, joining us at the table and staring straight into me. “Come on, don’t be insane! This isn’t the Loch Ness Monster. This is fact.”
Chris was handsome and tall, still in med-school looking to be a doctor. He had dark skin and a cut jawline. But, he was a stickler for science and would fight you to the death on a topic if he believed in it.
I raised my brows, incredulous at the fact that the Loch Ness Monster was actually being used as a talking point in an argument.
“You don’t believe in Nessie?” Maddie scowled.
“Oh boy!” I said with a chuckle. “Now you’ve got her going. Can we please talk about something else? I’m mid fourteen-hour-shift, and my mind can’t take the madness anymore.”
“Whatever you say, Doc,” Maddie said with a sigh, still narrowing playful eyes at Chris.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Chris demanded, looking at me with a broad smile and leaning far over the table, arms propped up on elbows. “You’re actually refuting this?”
“I’m saying it’s something I’d rather not think about,” I said, taking another sip of my coffee. I licked my bottom lip and looked up at him as if to dare further questioning on it.
I hadn’t slept in what felt like days. One surgery after another kept cropping up, and with Dr. Michaels out for an extended mental health leave, it only left me and a handful of other doctors.
I was a trauma surgeon. For the life of me, I wished now that I’d gotten into something with a happier ending most times, like an OB-GYN. But no, I had to go for something fast-paced.
“Why don’t you want to think about it?” Chris started up again, removing me from my thoughts.
“Um?” I shrugged. “Because I’m not the Secret Service?” I laughed, and Maddie joined me. “Come on, Chris. Doesn’t the government already have some sort of ban on the Parduss? Wasn’t this discussed before?”
The Parduss were an alien species that had wreaked havoc on the Earth 10 years ago.
I’d never seen one in person, but I’d looked at photos. They looked mostly dragon-like, with broad scales, thick spined spikes crawling down their necks, and thrashing tails.
The first time I’d heard about them was while I was still in college. News reports of dragons filling the skies were everywhere, but we all thought it was some sort of hoax. It wasn’t until NASA confirmed it that my spine stiffened and my blood ran cold.
We’re told stories as little girls about knights saving princesses from terrible dragons, but you never actually expect to see one.
Their wings were massive. I remembered seeing them on the news and wondering how the hell we were going to deal with them. It turned out they could morph into a hybrid human: a man with scales.
“They’re saying there were women on the ship,” Maddie piped up again, pointing to the television once more.
“Then…I hope they survived?” I said unsurely.
“Where were they going?” Chris said, cocking a brow as though he’d just won his own argument.
“What…the story now is that they were being kidnapped by the aliens?” Maddie’s eyes widened in terror. “Why? What do they want from them?”
“No, not cool,” Chris said, irritated. “Terrifying! What happened the last time the Parduss came to the Earth?”
“I’m not in the mood to get into your conspiracy theories with you,” I snapped, standing up from the table and pouring my cold coffee into the sink.
When the Parduss came to Earth, war broke out. What’s now referred to as the War of L7 was about preventing the Parduss from kidnapping human females and trying to take
them back to their planet.
They’d been successful, too. With a few groups of women, anyhow. By the end, they were saying that twenty-seven females were taken from Earth, though it’s speculated that the true count was nearly double.
My sister was one of them.
She was part of a terraforming project, and her ship was ransacked by the Parduss. The first glimpse of those monsters was what the security footage in her ship showed.
So…imagine that. My sister was taken from us, and I had to watch the footage of it day in, day out. For months.
The space program she was a part of paid us off after five years of never finding her. Gave us some life-insurance payout to keep our mouths shut.
My parents and I had reporters at our house daily and harassing phone-calls that were nonstop. Everybody wanted to get a quote for their blogs and newscasts about what it was like to lose a loved one to the monsters.
They all wanted us to say something profound about life and loss and how the Parduss had to be stopped.
I wouldn’t give them anything.
“People shouldn’t close their eyes to this shit,” Chris said with a labored sigh.
“My eyes are open,” I snapped. “I’m just not fond of the subject.”
The species suffered a great loss at the hands of our tech during the war and fled, and while vigilant watch-groups still existed, the threat wasn’t as urgent as it once had been.
Not unless you were one of the unlucky to lose someone at the hands of those creatures.
So…it was understandable, I thought, that I wasn’t fond of thinking about them. Or talking about them. Or wondering about them.
But, Chris didn’t know that about me, so I would give him a free pass.
“They were in the middle of Camden field, B,” he urged to me. “Camden.”
“The center of all aliens,” I mocked with a breath.
“No, but it was the last landing site.”
“And as you can see,” I pointed up to the angled, too-small-for-the-corner television that hung in our private lunchroom, “They didn’t land. They crashed. It was probably some prank or…”
Sirens rang outside the building: ambulances. It was a noise we were all used to hearing on a daily basis, but for some reason, this alarm sent us all into a death-like silence.
Penny, a lovely older nurse from our ward, came rushing in the room. Her salt and pepper hair bounced as she flung the door open and announced. “Doctor Smith,” she said, referencing myself.
I raised my chin to signify I was listening and held my breath as she said, “You’re needed immediately for a trauma victim intake.”
“Okay,” I said dismissively before turning back to my friends. “When I come back here, I don’t want to be talking about this anymore.”
Chris laughed. “B, when you’re done in there, you should be going home.”
“Home?” I said, edging toward the door. “What home?” I mocked with a laugh. “I live here now.”
“Doctor Smith,” Penny urged with widened, panicked eyes.
“I’m coming!”
“Hey!” Penny said, stopping dead in her tracks as she pointed up to the television. “That’s it!”
“Not you, too,” I sighed.
“That’s the guy in the ER!” she mused. “The lone survivor, they’re calling him!”
I swallowed hard and felt shivers run down my arms. I didn’t even want to make eye-contact with my friends as the statement sank in. “You’re kidding…”
“Be careful out there,” Penny said with a playful nudge. “We’ve got security holding back reporters left and right. Everybody wants to know if he’s…you know. One of them.”
“Is he?” Maddie bounded at the thought.
Penny drew her brows together in an irritated decline. “No,” she snapped, drawing out her vowel.
I rolled my eyes and began to head out of the room before Chris called after me.
“Brooklyn!” he yelled. “Take samples!”
I laughed. “Shut up!”
Their idle gossip didn’t bother me. Performing emergency surgery didn’t bother me. In fact, I was up for the challenge. It was the reporters…it was the sight of the reporters clamoring down the hallway that sent a familiar sickness down into the pit of my belly.
I rushed past them before making my way to the patient. They were vultures, as far as I was concerned.
What happened to my sister was hard enough without always having to answer for what happened. People would ask sick and twisted questions like: did we know this was going to happen? Did my sister have any contact with the Parduss before the war? What did we do with the money we received from her death?
I washed up and pulled the medical grade gloves onto my fingers, feeling the familiar squeeze of them as I rushed into surgery.
And then I saw him. The so-called beast.
Chapter Two
Korus
Memories came up in flashes. Running through the field and feeling the damp, wet grass, deathly cold. The fire erupting and screams: high-pitched screams.
Darkness blanketed over the rest of my memories, suddenly come to in a wild inhale of breath—a gasp for reality.
I shot up in the bed I was placed in, scratchy blankets covering my body and tubes shooting out of my arms. I could hear voices, but they were muffled.
My vision blurred in and out until finally, I could see clearly. A woman with curly black hair was barricading her body up against a thick yellow door with another woman, short, light hair and freckled skin.
“Security, for goodness sakes!” the black-haired woman shouted, absolutely furious.
I swallowed hard, tasting a metallic tinge in the corners of my mouth.
The security called for finally arrived, pulling two men away from the other side of the door. Their feet squeaked and squealed against the tiled floor, making it apparent that the men weren’t leaving of their own accord.
“What’s going on?” I said, my own voice sounding foreign and hoarse.
“Sorry about that,” the dark-haired woman said with a sigh. She consulted a thin, electronic chart that she was holding between her hand and thumb. She sounded irritated as she finally stepped away from the door. “We’ve got some insane reporters out there. Apparently, you’re a celebrity now.”
Celebrity?
“Oh…” I said, unsure what she meant by that. “Uh, good?”
I took a stab at an answer and, while she offered me an unimpressed gaze, seeming to accept my response.
“And all you had to do was almost die,” she mused, still looking at my chart. “How are you feeling?”
I took a deep breath and felt my chest tighten, my arm ached, and there was a deep heat that seemed to burn and swell with each breath I took. “Never better,” I wheezed out, and the beautiful woman offered me a smile.
“So, you were in quite the crash out there,” she said nonchalantly.
I looked around the room, and it was clear I was in some sort of medical facility. The walls were gray with a blue stripe ground around the room. A flickering light was bolted to the wall above me, and there were monitors and stands all around me.
To my right, there were two windows, draped fabric preventing the bright outside light from spilling into the room. Just to the left window were two chairs and a table, for visitors, I supposed.
“You had a lot of damage to your arm, but surprisingly not a lot of burn damage considering the state of the wreckage,” she said quickly. “You should be feeling a tightness in your chest for a few days, but that will go away. Lighter colored skin will start to replace your wounds, and you may have some scarring, but we didn’t need to do a skin graft. Otherwise…frankly, you’re lucky to be alive.”
She was so beautiful I could barely catch my breath. Her long hair was pulled up in a string of falling curls, and she had square glasses framing her oval face.
Green eyes looked up at me, and I exhaled loudly, realizing I hadn’t responde
d to her yet.
The woman looked over at her blonde associate and shrugged.
“Sorry,” she said stiffly. “Should I talk slower?”
“I just…need a moment,” I stammered.
“You’re probably still in shock. We want to keep you here for a few more days to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t have any internal bleeding and then die on the spot.”
I swallowed again, loudly, and looked to the nurse standing next to her worriedly.
“Um,” I mumbled.
“Sorry!” the blonde said with a soft smile and a little giggle. “Dr. Smith has a terrible bedside manner. You’re going to be fine!”
“Thanks,” I said, though still not entirely reassured about what was happening with my body. It was certainly different than the last time I saw it.
The dok-tor looked embarrassed at that, her face flushing a bright pink as she looked down at her chart.
“Right…sorry,” the doctor said. “The police are waiting to talk to you, but I can hold them off if you want some time to get your story straight,” she snorted.
I cocked a brow and felt my hands moisten. “Oh,” was all I could stupidly say.
The crash site…I remembered now. I’d been spotted by the humans. My mouth drew open in a wild array of fire, a deep heat rising up from the pit of my stomach and raging out through my bared teeth.
I could hear sirens in the distance, and I knew the humans were coming. My best bet for survival was to shift, to transform from my true self—a powerful, winged warrior—to a human.
Transformation wasn’t something I did often. It was painful, bones shrinking and scales melting into solid skin. The bones that sprouted my wings felt like the impaled me as they returned to my flesh. And all I was left with was a human body, weak and ravaged by the elements that I had created.
“Thank you for uh…” I gestured to my torso, my muscles wrapped in a thick layer of bandages. “Saving me.”