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

by Lauren Lively

  "Their eyes!" Lynx shouted.

  Pyra and Bannack turned their hands on the handles of their daggers, creating a tighter grip that allowed them to direct the carefully honed tips toward the rounded black domes of the Covra's eyes. The three warriors held their blades out toward the spider-like creatures, and for a moment they seemed to be retreating. As the room fell silent, however, the Covra's splintered limbs and the pieces of their round bodies that had fallen away under the edges of the Denynso's blades grew back and the monsters started to advance toward them again.

  "Where are the other men?" Lynx demanded.

  "They are fighting others of these creatures throughout the rest of the settlement," Pyra told him.

  Lynx noticed that the Covra had stilled when they started speaking, and on instinct, he started again.

  "These are the Covra," he told Pyra, pushing forward slightly with his blade held toward the eye of the closest creature.

  "The Covra?" Pyra asked.

  "Yes. The creatures that we read about in the prison in the compound. The ones that built the prison and locked this settlement."

  "How could these things build a prison?" Pyra asked.

  "I don't know, but they did, and now they are back here."

  The men had managed to force the Covra back toward the door and they were scurrying away from them now, running along the walls and ceiling until they disappeared into other rooms and out of windows. Them being out of sight did not provide any relief for Lynx. He knew they were there, he knew now that they existed still and that they could appear out of seemingly nowhere. He didn't know how they had managed to make them retreat, and it was not comforting to him that he didn't know when they might return or how they could make them leave again.

  The screams and hisses from outside had faded away as the Covra in the house disappeared and soon they were replaced by the shouts and frantic yells of the other Denynso. Pyra and Bannack started to run down the stairs toward the door to the house, but Lynx hesitated. He didn't want to leave Rain behind. Now that he knew that the Covra could return at any time, he felt like she was vulnerable. He rushed back into the room and knelt down beside the bed.

  A moment later Pyra came back into the room.

  "Lynx, come on. We have to find the other men. What are you doing?"

  "I can't leave her," he said, gazing down at Rain.

  "What do you mean you can't leave her?"

  "This woman is supposed to be my mate."

  He glanced up at Pyra and saw the look of confusion and shock cross his face. Finding their mate was something that the Denynso men waited for their entire lives. Unlike other species who may be able to mate with any number of others, the Denynso had one single mate. This was the only woman that existed in the entire universe who they could create a bond with, and the only one who they ever would create a bond with. They would look for that one woman throughout their entire lives, and when they found her, they immediately knew. After that, the bond was for life. This was something that they all knew from a very young age, and it took on even more serious meaning for Lynx now that he realized his mate was someone who may never again open her eyes.

  "Lynx, this woman is locked in time. She has been here since long before you were even born, and she may be here on into eternity. You are just reacting to everything that's going on."

  "No," Lynx said, feeling the defensive aggression building inside him, "Rain is my mate. She has been waiting for me for her entire life, and for mine."

  "Rain?" Bannack asked, stepping into the room behind Pyra.

  Lynx realized that the others didn't have any idea what he had discovered about these people, the Light Ones as the Covra had called them, and he debated with himself whether he should tell them. He worried that if he let them know that he knew they were human, they would not be as inclined to help them. Even though several of the Denynso, Pyra included, had mated with humans, there was still deep-seated controversy about how much interaction and connection the two species should have. The thought that they had been living on the planet all along, and that Creia had either not known about them or had been lying to them, could cause them even more difficulty than they were already facing.

  Not telling them what he had seen, however, didn't seem like an option.

  "I saw her," he said carefully.

  "What do you mean?" Pyra asked.

  "When the Covra were in here, I touched her, and I could see what I think were the last few seconds before she was locked."

  "What did you see, Lynx?" Pyra demanded.

  The force behind the words made Lynx feel even more defensive and he straightened his spine, pressing his chest toward the larger, older warrior. Suddenly Pyra's eyes widened.

  "Lynx, you're bleeding," he said.

  Lynx looked down and saw trails of his own blood sliding down his arm and dripping onto the floor beneath his feet.

  Chapter Three

  "There's something wrong."

  Elianna jumped up from the chair where she had been sitting and rushed across the room to Eden. She dropped down onto her knees next to her and rested her hands on the other woman's rounded belly.

  "There's something wrong with the baby?" she asked frantically.

  There was still so much that they didn't understand about Eden's pregnancy and every tiny twinge or moment of worry could bring panic to the other women. This was the first pregnancy for this generation of the Denynso, and even though Eden had technically become one of their kind when Ciyrs had saved her from near death, there was much of her that was still humanlike and no one knew how much of her pregnancy would resemble each of the species.

  "No," Eden said, rubbing her belly as if to calm herself and the baby resting inside, "There's something wrong with Pyra."

  Elianna's eyes widened and Eden could see the fear in them.

  "What? What's happening?"

  "I don't know," Eden said, straightening in her seat. "I can't communicate with him."

  She concentrated hard on her mate, trying to make the connection that would allow them to speak to each other through their thoughts. It was a precious gift that the Denynso enjoyed with their mates, something that allowed them to connect in a way that was far deeper and more meaningful than the connection that they had with any of the others of their kind. She had learned, though, that this connection was not something that was always available. She couldn’t just glance into Pyra's mind whenever she wanted to. If he was concentrating too hard on something else, or purposely did not want her to be able to see into his thoughts, she would not be able to. She knew the same went for her, but she rarely closed him out. The fact that she could sense that there was something wrong with him but was unable to decipher exactly what it was, or to communicate with him, frightened her.

  "Try Ciyrs," Elianna said.

  Eden looked into her friend's eyes. She could see the lingering pain there that the small woman always tried to conceal, but occasionally made itself sharp and inescapably known.

  "You can't get to him?" Eden asked.

  Elianna shook her head.

  "Try him, please."

  This was another of the extraordinary things about Eden that made her stand apart from the other mates of the Denynso despite them all being quite close. She was not only the first of the human women to come to the planet and find her mate in one of the tremendous warriors who guarded the compound and waged war against other species throughout the galaxy. She was the first to find herself pregnant with the child of one of the warriors. And she was the only human that the Denynso healer Ciyrs had brought back from the brink of death after a gruesome encounter with one of the Klimnu. It was during that interaction that she had been turned into one of them, and in turn she had formed a link with Ciyrs that was just like the one she had with Pyra.

  It was the only such link that existed in the Denynso. Usually only the men and their mates formed the link that allowed them to speak through their th
oughts and feel each other's emotions. Eden and the healer, however, had created that link and still maintained it. Their bond was nothing like hers with Pyra, or his with Elianna. It was not romantic, but rather she saw him as her most treasured friend, like a brother that she had never had during her time on Earth. The link had extended to her and Elianna, but they rarely used it. The fact that she and Ciyrs were connected in such as way was already difficult for their mates, even though both Pyra and Elianna had expressed time and time again that they understood that they didn't represent a threat to their bonds. Out of respect for their mates, however, Eden and Ciyrs agreed to stay away from each other's thoughts as much as possible, only entering them in times of emergency.

  Ciyrs?

  Eden sent out the call to Ciyrs, barely breathing as she waited for him to respond.

  Please, Ciyrs, talk to me. Elianna says that she can't get to you, and I can't get to Pyra. I know that there's something wrong. Talk to me.

  She got no response and the fear that had been building inside her sharpened to an almost painful edge. She hadn't wanted Pyra and the other men to go out into the rest of the planet to explore. The battles with the Klimnu were still so fresh and raw in their minds, and the death of Jem was still so painful. The thought of them leaving the compound, venturing outside of the boundaries for the first time of any of their kind, was terrifying to her, especially as she moved further along in her pregnancy. She was so scared that something was going to happen to them and that she would be without Pyra, a thought that made her feel empty and hollow inside. She had left everything that she had ever known on Earth to stay on Uoria to be with him, something that she would do again in a second if she had to make the choice, but the thought of losing him was far more difficult and painful than walking away from anything she had known in her life before him.

  "They've only been gone a day," Eden said, trying both to convince herself and Elianna that everything was fine, "What possibly could have happened to them? They are probably just sleeping."

  Even as the words came out of her mouth, though, she knew that she didn't believe them. She had reached out to both Pyra and Ciyrs when they were sleeping before and they had woken up immediately. She had learned to enter their thoughts carefully enough that she would be able to tell if they were dreaming, something she did with tremendous caution after some of the dreams that she had stumbled into when connecting with Ciyrs, and she knew that as forcefully as she had just tried to connect with both men, they would have woken up.

  "Where are the others?" Elianna asked, "Maybe they can get to their mates."

  "Zuri said that she, Leia, and Samira would be down by the water. They've decided to do more of their research while the men are gone."

  "They aren't going back to Earth, are they?"

  "Not for any longer than Samira and Ty's wedding," Eden paused, not wanting to say out loud what the worrisome little voice in the back of her mind was saying, questioning whether that wedding would ever actually come to pass. "But I think that it distracts them. Their whole lives on Earth were the university and their teaching or studies. Maybe it helps them not think about their mates."

  The two women had started out of the house toward the water and Eden could feel Elianna staring at her as they walked.

  "Do you ever miss your work?" Elianna asked.

  Her voice was low, as if she was trying to keep what she had said just between her and Eden, though the compound was nearly deserted now that the men were gone. The human mates still had little to no contact with the Denynso women, except for the midwives, and for the most part the five of them existed on their own.

  "No," Eden said honestly, "That job, as proud as I was of it, was awful. My boss was… horrible."

  She realized as she said this that she had never really told the other women how she had made her way into the Denynso compound. As the first to become a part of the clan, she had watched the other women join them one by one, but she hadn't really opened up to them about her experiences before she made the decision to stay with Pyra.

  "What happened?" Elianna asked.

  Eden sighed. She had wanted to leave her past behind her, to keep it firmly on Earth so that she didn't have to deal with it any longer, but she knew that it wouldn't help her to pretend like none of it had ever happened.

  "My boss, Ryan, was not a nice person. He wanted what he wanted and he was going to get it, or make everybody's life miserable. I wouldn't date him, so he decided to send me on what he thought was a death mission."

  "What?" Elianna sounded horrified.

  "Yeah. A bit of an overreaction if you ask me, but that's what he decided to do. He knew that the Denynso had very strict rules about human visitors, particularly scientists, and he sent me here with the specific instructions to go against those rules."

  "What did he want you to do?"

  "He wanted me to bring back a sample of Denynso warrior blood so that he could analyze it and find out what makes them so powerful. Of course, that is the most serious rule that the Denynso have. To Ryan, either I would be successful and he would be able to get to the source of the Denynso power and possibly create his own race of superior warriors through genetic engineering on Earth, or I would get caught and they would kill me. Either way, he would get something that he wanted; success and fame, or revenge."

  "Where is he now?" Elianna asked.

  Eden glanced over at her. She honestly hadn't thought about him in the months that she had spent on Uoria. It was as if he didn't exist anymore.

  "You know, I have no idea. It's possible that the research lab thinks that I'm dead and they've brought him up on endangerment and espionage charges."

  The thought delighted Eden on a level that she didn't necessarily want to admit to anyone, and it made her feel a little less awful about herself when Elianna laughed.

  "That would serve him right," she said.

  Eden laughed.

  "It would. I'm sure that he would absolutely love a few decades in one of the prison tech camps."

  The thought of Ryan chained to one of the expansive computers in the technology prison camps, forced to work from morning until night working systems so basic they would drive him mad, was enough to assuage all of the anger she had for him, and she found herself smiling as they walked on toward the pond at the far end of the compound.

  Her smile faded, however, when she saw Loralia running toward them, her long braid bouncing on her back as she rushed down the dirt road, her compact held tightly in her hand. Suddenly Eden remembered why they were walking toward the water and all of the fear and heartache came rushing back.

  Chapter Four

  Pyra held Lynx down on the floor, pushing his arms down against the wood with nearly all of his strength. Even though the younger warrior was smaller, the ferocity that was suddenly pouring out of him was making it more difficult than Pyra would have imagined for him to control his thrashing. As soon as he had mentioned the blood dripping from Lynx's back, the other warrior had seemed to snap, suddenly becoming aggressive and violent toward him and Bannack. He was hissing in a way that was almost like the Covra, and no matter how loudly Pyra shouted his name, he stared back at him through eyes that looked dark and unrecognizable, as if they were not registering the meaning of the word.

  Behind him Bannack gripped a silver compact in his hand and stared into it. The compact looked like a larger, heavier version of the one that Loralia carried and Pyra wondered what Bannack could possibly be doing with it as he struggled to not only fight off Lynx's violent reaction, but to understand what was causing it.

  "Loralia!" Bannack suddenly gasped.

  "Bannack?" Loralia's voice came into the room and Pyra shot a shocked look at Bannack, "What's wrong?"

  "Something's happening to Lynx," Bannack said into the compact, "We don't know what's going on."

  "What happened?"

  "I can't get into the whole story right now, but he's been injured and now h
e seems like he's completely out of his mind. He's fighting Pyra and we can't get him to calm down. He looks like he's trying to kill him."

  "Show him to me."

  Pyra forced his knee into Lynx's chest to give him more control over him and watched as Bannack came closer and held the compact at an angle as if reflecting Lynx in the mirror.

  "What are you doing?" Pyra asked.

  "If anyone would be able to figure out what's going on with him, it's going to be Loralia."

  "How was he injured?" Loralia asked through the compact.

  Her voice sounded slightly strained, as if she knew something but didn't want to actually say it until she knew for sure that she was right.

  "We encountered another species…"

  "The Covra," Loralia said before Bannack could even continue his sentence.

  "Yes," Bannack said, "You've heard of them?"

  "Yes. A long time ago. I didn't know that they still existed. You need to get Lynx to Ciyrs as fast as you possibly can."

  "What's wrong with him?"

  "He's been infected by the Covra. They are fairly weak creatures. They have their talons, but their greatest form of defense is infecting those they are fighting. If they can get their venom into another creature, that creature forgets what it is and tries to kill anything near it. The effect lasts until the venom is removed, or the infected creature is destroyed."

  "I don't understand. If they can turn whatever they get near into killing machines, how are they weak? Why aren't they able to just destroy whatever comes their way?"

  "They used to, and then other species realized that it takes many, many years for them to reproduce, and that they have a very specific vulnerability. They were once feared more than anything on this planet, but several generations ago they came in contact with an enemy that took that power from them. They found that vulnerability and were able to stave them off."