Loved by a Bear (Legends of Black Salmon Falls Book 1)

by Lauren Lively

  Lynx stopped when he reached the top of the wall and gazed out over the land that lay on the other side. It looked much like the far areas of the compound where there were no buildings or roads, but somehow despite its similarities, it still seemed sparser and unwelcoming.

  Not wanting to be the last to be off the wall, Lynx dropped down on the other side of the wall and went through the same procedure as all of the other men, recoiling their hooks and attaching them back to their bags for use the next time that they may need them. Pyra didn't say another word, but waited until all of the men had come over the wall, and then started further along the open field. Lynx could see his gaze focused intensely on the stands of trees that dotted the field and the tall, coarse grass to either side of them. It was as though their leader were on edge with every footstep, just waiting for something to come out at them.

  Pyra consulted the map in the book in his hand every few minutes, occasionally calling back to the rest of the men about which direction they needed to go, or about how far he thought it would be. Lynx followed silently, preferring to keep himself vigilant about what may be lurking at any corner rather than responding when any of the men spoke.

  They had been walking for what felt like hours when Pyra suddenly slowed and all of the men followed his gaze to a towering, ivy-covered stone archway a few yards ahead of them. A worn, crumbling stone wall very similar to the one that they had crossed to leave the compound but older and of darker-colored rocks stretched out to either side of the archway and Lynx could see that it, too, had been taken over by the plants of the area that seemed to be trying to reclaim that space.

  "This is it," Pyra said almost under his breath, "I can't believe it's actually here."

  The men stood in stunned silence for several long seconds, not entirely sure of what they should do from there. They had come this far looking for the kingdom to see if it actually existed, and now that they had found that it did, and that it was still there, they didn't know what to do next.

  "Are we going inside?" Ero asked.

  Lynx watched Pyra nod.

  "The only way to find out if all of this about the Covra and the Light Ones is real is to go in there and see if we find a kingdom that has been locked in time."

  "How do we know that if it is all real, that we will be able to go in there at all, or that if we can, that we won't get locked too?" Ty asked.

  "We don't," Pyra responded simply, "We don't know any of that. We can't just walk away from it, though. The whole point of us leaving the compound was to find out what else existed on this planet. Well, this is what else exists here. We can't stop now. We have to keep going and find out exactly what happened in there, and what is still happening, whether that means that all of the stuff in these books was just a bunch of made-up stories and that is an abandoned archway to an empty kingdom that no one has lived in for centuries, or that it is all absolutely true and waiting right inside there is an entire species that hasn't changed in longer than any of us have been alive."

  "What if something does happen to us, though?" asked one of the warriors from the back of the group, "What about Eden and the baby?"

  Pyra's eyes flashed at the mention of his mate and their unborn child and Lynx saw his back straighten and his shoulders square forcefully.

  "My mate trusts me. She put her faith in me to find out more about Uoria so that I will be able to protect her and our baby well into the future. As for the baby, my child will know that I didn't stop at anything to make sure that my family was safe, and that I never cowered away from a challenge or a risk. I never want to look my baby in the eye and know that I didn't do absolutely everything that I could to complete my goal out here."

  "And if we do find the so-called Light Ones in there," Ciyrs interjected, "there is a possibility that we could help them. They might not have to be locked forever."

  As if this conversation propelled him, Pyra suddenly took off running, closing the space between himself and the archway in a matter of seconds. Ero, Ty, Gyyx, and Ciyrs followed closely after. That is when Lynx started running. Closing his eyes briefly against the fear that had settled into his stomach, he pushed himself to run as fast and as hard as he could, crossing through the archway mere seconds after Pyra had disappeared beneath the stone.

  As soon as he passed through the archway, Lynx slowed and stopped. He looked up and for a moment he was afraid that Ero had been right and that they had all been locked right along with the kingdom and the Light Ones within it. Soon, though, he realized that he could think and move and he took a few more steps into the kingdom, gazing around with a sense of absolute awe. It was as if he had stepped into a painting.

  Chapter Eleven

  The kingdom somewhat resembled their compound, with what looked like rows of houses along a main road and a larger building positioned in the distance. Everything seemed more tightly positioned than the compound, however, and there was a greater sense of formality. Rather than the soft dirt that covered the roads in the Denynso compound, the roads here were covered in broken rocks that had been smoothed around the edges to fit in close together. The houses looked larger and more elaborate, too, with strange design elements that Lynx didn't understand.

  What was undoubtedly the most fascinating part of the kingdom that they now wandered into, however, was the people. All around them were still, silent people, their bodies shaped into the postures of normal life, but none of them moved or breathed. It truly looked like they had been stopped, crystallized into a single second of their existence, and had not moved since.

  "Everyone spread out," Pyra said evenly, slipping the book that held the map to the kingdom into his bag so that his hands were free, "Explore as much of the area as you can, but make sure that you keep contact with at least one other of us. We don't need anybody getting lost."

  At that command, the men slowly dissipated, wandering in their own direction further into the kingdom as if each of them were drawn toward a certain place. It was unnerving to see the people scattered through the space, their eyes open but unseeing, their bodies primed for action but unable to move. There was a large garden in the center of the houses and Lynx saw several people in it, tending to crops that were still perfect after all this time. One woman leaned over, her hand just cupped around a vegetable she intended to pick while a man nearby rested with his arms crossed on top of a tall gardening implement. Lynx sighed, musing that that man could not have imagined how long his break was actually going to be when he stopped his work on that fateful day.

  To one side Lynx could see a small group of children playing, locked in their laughter and joy, and he had to turn away. It was too painful to see the innocence of little ones stolen from them because of a war between adults, a conflict that they would never understand.

  Turning his back toward the children, Lynx walked toward one of the houses. It drew him in in a way that the others didn't, and he felt compelled to go inside. He called out to Ty who he saw walking along at the end of the street, letting him know that he was going inside the house so that someone knew where he was should the rest of the men decide to leave the kingdom before he got out of the house, or if there was something inside that might threaten him.

  He didn't expect the door to open as easily beneath his hand as it did. When it opened fully, he stepped inside the cool, airy house and looked around. Just as the outsides of the homes were more complex in their design than the Denynso homes back on the compound, they were more complex on the inside as well. Multiple rooms stretched out from the front entryway, and a set of stairs headed up to another floor. He followed his instincts and let them pull him to the stairs, keeping him focused on the landing above him as he climbed them.

  At the top of the stairs Lynx let the strange, tight feeling in his belly guide him toward a room at the center of the hallway. The door was partially open and when he pushed it the rest of the way open, he felt his heart constrict.

  It was a bedroom with pale yell
ow walls, airy white curtains on the window, and a large canopy bed tucked in one corner. On that bed lay the most beautiful woman that Lynx had ever seen, and as soon as his eyes rested on the long strands of coppery hair spread across the pillow, her pale, delicate face, and full, pink lips, he felt everything inside him unravel as an overwhelming sense of love, desire, and the need to protect her took over.

  Lynx walked cautiously to the side of the bed and gazed down at her face, so perfect and calm in the sleep in which she had been locked. It made no sense, but he felt completely and inarguably in love with her, the same intense, immediate feeling of soul-wrenching attraction and need that the other men had described when talking about meeting their mates. This was a woman who had lived generations before he was even born, and yet Lynx felt inextricably connected to her, as if all this time she had been lying here sleeping, waiting for him to come find her.

  Something on the nightstand beside her bed caught Lynx's eye and he picked up a silver-framed picture that looked like a younger version of the woman in the bed standing with two older people in front of a large house that resembled the houses along the main street, but much larger. Lynx flipped the frame over in his hand and released the brackets that held the picture in place. When the backing came off of the frame, he rested it carefully on the nightstand and took the picture out so that he could look at the back.

  Visit to the homeland

  Earth

  Rain, 22 years

  Lynx gasped as he realized what the inscription meant. These were not some strange, unknown species that they had never encountered. These were creatures with whom the Denynso were becoming quite familiar.

  The Light Ones were humans.

  Taking the picture with the intention of showing it to Pyra, Lynx took a final look at the beautiful woman, whose name he could only guess to be Rain, and then turned to the door to leave. Before he could take another step, however, a series of deathly sharp black spikes came around the doorframe, cutting into the wall as they gripped into it to pull massive black bodies like gruesome spiders into the room and toward Lynx.

  (To be continued in Part IV…)

  Book 4 – The Alien’s Love

  Chapter One

  Lynx's mind was spinning. He didn't know what to think or how to react. He could hear the walls cracking and tearing as the massive creatures pulled themselves into the room, following each other so closely that they filled the doorway and crawled over one another grotesquely as if they couldn't wait to get to him. Lynx could only relate them to the spiders that Zuri had shown them pictures of while she was describing Earth and some of the types of life that lived there, but these were far beyond the small, scurrying bugs that she had shown them. Even the largest of those were miniscule compared to the gleaming creatures and their sharp, spiked legs that dug into the walls and ceiling as they crawled into the room.

  As they moved toward him, Lynx stepped closer to the bed where Rain, the human, lay frozen in her calm, sleeping state. He had to protect her. He knew that this beautiful, delicate-looking woman, this lovely human that at once baffled and intrigued him, was meant to be his mate. It didn't matter to him that she was from a species that was not meant to have even visited Uoria before they started to arrive at the Denynso compound to research and learn, and even then were supposed to have been limited just to their area of the planet. It didn't even bother him that she had been lying here, frozen in her sleep, for longer than he had been alive. It was confounding and beyond his realm of comprehension, but at that moment the only thing that mattered to the warrior was making sure that the woman that lay in front of him was safe from these fearsome creatures crawling toward him.

  There were seven of them now, leaving deep gouges in their wake as they moved across the walls and ceiling. He had seen gouges like that in the lower portion of the house when he had first arrived, but he had thought nothing of them. He had been far more concerned with the fact that in their desire to explore the planet of Uoria and discover what types of beings might share it with them, the group of Denynso men had found that there had been a long-running feud between two species that ended in one of them, the Covra, locking the beings they knew as the Light Ones, and that Lynx now knew were humans, in time, and that they were then roaming through that locked kingdom discovering everything that had stopped in the span of a breath, decades before.

  Now what he worried about was Rain and how he would protect her. She couldn't move. As far as he knew, she had no awareness of what was going on around her. It was his responsibility to ensure that she was safe and that these creatures didn't harm her. He could continue to process the fact that she was human later. Right now he had to think quickly and get rid of these monsters.

  Lynx stepped back toward the window that overlooked the street and could hear muffled screaming coming from the rest of the settlement. The creatures seemed to have found the rest of the Denynso men. Like the others, Lynx rarely carried weapons. They preferred to fight with their bare hands. And like the others, occasionally he carried a dagger that he had crafted himself. This dagger, however, he had left tucked in the bag he had been carrying as they walked from the compound, and he had dropped that bag to the floor near the door to the room.

  He heard another scream from one of the buildings across the street and the frantic sound mobilized him. Lynx took a long stride across the room and dove toward his bag. He could feel something sharp grazing his back as he grabbed onto the bag and pulled it up against his chest. A fearsome hissing sound above him told him that he had angered the creatures, and he felt the sharp, piercing feeling in his back intensify.

  Lynx reached into his bag and pulled out his dagger. In one fast movement he rolled over onto his back and slashed at one of the creatures. The tip of his dagger bit through the leg that was digging into his back and vibrantly green blood splattered down on him as the leg splintered off of the rest of the creature's body and skittered across the floor. The injured creature let out a horrific screeching sound and pulled back away from him, but even as Lynx saw the gleaming black thing withdrawing away from him, he watched as the open wound in the leg healed itself over and the limb started growing back.

  Out of the corner of his eye Lynx saw one of the larger creatures climbing over the smaller one above his head, moving toward Rain where she lay on the bed. Lynx tightened his grip on the dagger and scurried backwards across the floor toward the edge of the bed. The large creature came toward him and he slashed at it with his dagger. Since he had watched the other creature heal itself so quickly, he didn't know how the larger one would react to his threats, but it was all he could do.

  The creature took another step toward Rain and the fury built inside Lynx with an intensity that he had never experienced. He pulled himself up higher and changed his grip on his dagger so that it was pointing directly at the bulbous black eye at the front of the rounded body. He could see the reflection of his blade in the surface of the eye and as he leaned toward the creature, it stepped back. Lynx took another step forward and lay a protective hand on Rain's leg.

  As soon as his hand touched her, Lynx felt his entire body tingle and saw a flash of bright, vibrant light. The room around him disappeared in the light and then reappeared, but it looked different. Sunlight, the type of dark, rich light that came with a late afternoon, made the room appear to glow. Out of the corner of his eye Lynx saw movement and he turned. Against the wall stood a vanity table with a large, curved mirror and at the table sat Rain.

  Chapter Two

  Lynx started to reach toward Rain, and saw her look up into the mirror as if she could sense his presence. In the reflection in the mirror he could see just how beautiful she was, the sparkling blue of her eyes like nothing he had ever seen. As she looked into the glass, however, he realized that she wasn't looking at him, but something over her shoulder. He hadn't noticed anything, so he continued to watch.

  Rain drew a brush through her long hair and then settled it onto the
surface of the vanity table. She stood, the thin fabric of her nightgown skimming the curves of her body and brushing against the floor as she walked the few steps to the bed and slipped beneath the covers. Just as she settled her head onto the pillow and her body relaxed, he saw one of the massive black creatures climb out from under the bed. Lynx screamed, but it didn't do any good. The creature lifted one sharply pointed leg, the tip glinting even more gruesomely in the sunlight, and plunged it into Rain's stomach.

  As suddenly and inexplicably as the vision had appeared, the room around him seemed to melt and Lynx found himself standing back where he had been. It must have lasted only a few seconds, but Lynx felt like it had changed him completely. Something like that had never happened to him before. He wasn't even entirely sure what had happened, but those few moments had confirmed to him that these spider-like monsters were the Covra.

  "Why?" he screamed at the one closest to him, and he saw it recoil as if it wasn't accustomed to hearing a spoken voice.

  Lynx slashed at it with his dagger and the creature stepped backwards. He lunged forward and drove the tip of the blade toward the Covra's eye. It scurried backwards more quickly and Lynx rushed around the edge of the bed. The few moments of seeing Rain awake and vital had infuriated him to a level that was almost blinding, and he roared as he went after the Covra.

  The louder he got, and the harder he slashed toward their eyes, the faster the creatures scurried toward the door.

  "Lynx!"

  Lynx heard Pyra's voice shouting up to him from the lower floor of the house. The deep sound of the lead warrior was encouraging. He knew that Pyra had survived and that he was not alone. A moment later Lynx heard Pyra's footsteps pounding up the stairs toward him, accompanied by another set. The horrific screeching of the Covra filled the space as Pyra and Bannack came into the room slashing at them with their own daggers. Green blood splattered the room and pieces of the creatures littered the floor.