Marked By Fire

by Meg Ripley

  At first glance there were no obvious severe injuries, but when she carefully pushed a lock of pale brown hair away from his face she realized it was damp underneath. Moving the hair further, Alexis discovered a large cut along his head, stretching from his forehead to behind his ear. She touched it gingerly and her hand came back wet with a hot green liquid. Alexis pressed her hand to the cut again and more of the liquid seeped through her fingers.

  "Dad," she said, not looking away from the man's face.

  "What is it? Is he hurt?" James asked, rushing back toward them from the top of the hill where he had gone to look and see if more of the colonists had heard the crash and were coming to help.

  "I think so."

  James crouched down beside her and Alexis held her hand out to him. It shook slightly and her father grabbed onto it to look at it more closely.

  "What is that?" he asked, examining the green liquid that stained her fingers and dripped onto her palm.

  "I think it's his blood."

  On the ground the man suddenly groaned, writhing in the dirt as if waking up.

  "We need to get him somewhere safer," James said, leaning down to lift the man again.

  "But what is he?" Alexis asked.

  She had encountered other species before, but not like this. The man now draped across her father's strong back looked completely human, and breathtakingly beautiful.

  "I don't know, Alexis, but that doesn't matter now. What matters is that you are the only doctor on this planet, literally, and therefore the only one who can help him."

  Alexis nodded, knowing that what her father said was true. She had had little opportunity to use any of her medical training since arriving on the planet, but this was exactly why she had come.

  "Bring him to my house," she said, "We never finished the clinic and I wouldn't be able to take care of him properly there."

  James nodded and carried the man over the hill and down toward Alexis's house. She followed behind them, one hand on the man's back to keep him steady. When they got to the house, James carefully lowered the man onto Alexis's bed. The stranger groaned again and stretched against the covers.

  "I'm going to go back to the ship and see if I can find anyone else. If you need me, use your messenger."

  James rushed out of the house, leaving Alexis alone with the stranger. He thrashed again and she worried that he had injuries she could not see. Trying to keep her focus on his medical needs rather than his unworldly beautiful face, she brought her hands to the buttons on the front of his thick green canvas jacket and released them. She moved quickly, removing the jacket and tearing away the shirt he wore under it so she could examine his torso.

  His body was equally as beautiful as his face and she let her eyes drift across it, searching for wounds even as she drank in the planes and curves of the muscles beneath his golden-tinted skin. She didn't see any signs of other injuries, and turned her attention back to the cut on his head. The bright green blood was matting in his hair and she went into the bathroom to fill a basin with water.

  Setting the basin on the table beside the bed, she dipped a cloth in the water and gently dabbed the cut. The blood loosened and washed away, revealing the extent of the cut. Alex dried the area carefully, then opened her medic kit to retrieve a needle and thread.

  ****

  The needle plunged into the stranger's skin and his eyes snapped open. Expanses the color of honey with streaks of blue met hers and Alexis's breath caught in her throat. He was most certainly not human.

  Placing a hand on his shoulder, Alexis gently pushed him to counteract his attempts to sit up, pressing him back down into the mattress.

  "I need you to lie still."

  "What's happening?" he asked, his voice powdery and strained.

  "You were injured in a crash. I'm a medic, and I need you to calm down while I fix you up. Just relax. It will be over in just a minute."

  The man nodded and Alexis went back to work stitching together the long, jagged cut. She was nearly finished when she heard him draw in a sharp breath and felt his hand reach over the edge of the bed and grab onto her thigh. His fingers dug into her, but she kept stitching, drawing his skin together and closing it. When she finished, she snipped off the thread, knotted it, and tossed the needle into the basin.

  He had his enticing eyes squeezed closed and kept them that way as she wrapped a strip of gauze around his head to protect the new stitches.

  "I'm finished," she said softly to him when she secured the end of the gauze and tossed her scissors onto the bedside table.

  "Who are you?" he asked through gritted teeth as if trying to distract himself with the words rather than focusing on the pain.

  "My name is Alexis. I'm the colony medic."

  He opened his eyes and looked at her questioningly.

  "Colony?"

  "We traveled here from Earth almost two years ago to colonize this planet. My father is the commander of the mission." She paused, trying to choose her words carefully, and finally deciding to go with the ones he had used with her, "Who are you?"

  "I'm Tyrok."

  He stopped without elaborating any further and she looked at him.

  "Are you…." she trailed off, not wanting to offend him.

  "Human?" he asked with a hint of laughter in his voice and she nodded, "No, just a stunning facsimile."

  He laughed but Alexis found her heart beating a little faster. Stunning was absolutely right.

  "Where did you come from, Tyrok?" she asked, fighting the urge to look at his bare chest again.

  "A planet not too far from here. You've likely never heard of it."

  "Where were you going when you crashed?"

  Tyrok didn't respond and Alexis turned her attention from the medical kit she was organizing in her lap to his face. His eyes were wide, his mouth partially open. The color had drained from his skin and his body was shaking.

  "Tyrok?" she said, reaching out to touch his arm, "Tyrok? Are you alright?"

  His convulsions became more intense and Alexis dropped the kit to the floor. She took Tyrok by his shoulders and looked down into his eyes. They stared blankly back at her and she heard faint gurgling sounds coming from his throat. This was something she had never seen before, but had studied in her intensive training program before leaving on the mission.

  Leaving Tyrok on the bed, Alexis scrambled out of the house and ran as fast as she could toward the partially completed clinic on the other side of the village. It was a small building she had insisted they build in the first few weeks of being on the planet, but one they had used only a couple of times to handle the illnesses and minor injuries they had encountered. It was not equipped to handle the severity of what Tyrok was facing, but she knew that somewhere in the containers that filled the back room were the supplies she needed to hopefully get him through.

  "Alexis!" James's voice called to her from outside the clinic.

  Alexis dug through the dust-covered containers, desperately searching for the small black box she knew was on the inventory list. She heard her father call out her name again and she screamed back at him without removing her attention from her task.

  "What are you doing?" James asked, coming into the room.

  "He's crashing."

  "What?"

  "Tyrok, the man I found on the ship. He's crashing. I stitched him up and he was absolutely fine, and then he started convulsing and is unresponsive."

  "What does that mean?"

  Alexis finally wrapped her hand around the black box and brought it out of the storage container with a sigh of relief.

  "It means that I need to get this to him as quickly as possible if he is going to have any chance of survival. Then I need you to come back to the ship with me."

  "I didn't find anyone else."

  "Exactly."

  Alexis pushed past her father toward the clinic door.

  "What do you mean?"

  "The ship wasn't burning anymore, was it?"


  "No."

  She nodded.

  "Just wait for me."

  James nodded in agreement and she ran out of the clinic and back toward her house. She could hear Tyrok gurgling in the bedroom as she ran through the kitchen.

  "Hold on, Tyrok," she said when she got into the bedroom.

  His eyes were still fixed on the ceiling above him and his body arched and thrashed with such violence it sent her pillows skittering across the floor. Alexis spread the contents of the black box on her bedside table and scanned them, trying to draw the instructions from her training back to the front of her memory. Tyrok made another strangled sound and she grabbed a large syringe from the pile. Lifting it above her head, she brought the needle down into Tyrok's heart.

  ****

  James was standing outside her house when Alexis ran back through the door and out into the sunlight. Without a word, she started back toward the crash site. The bag over her shoulder contained several of the items from the black box and she stayed silent to steel herself for what awaited her at the mangled ship.

  Her father fell into step beside her and Alexis allowed herself to find comfort in his presence. As long as she could remember, it had been just the two of them. She had followed in his footsteps going into the military, taking a medical path rather than the combat duties he assumed, and even as an adult still admired and looked up to him.

  As soon as they crested the hill she could see the changes that had come over the crash scene. The flames were gone and only shadowy remnants of smoke remained in the sky. They drew closer and she could hear strange clicking sounds coming from deep within the metal. Reaching into the bag, she withdrew a long knife. The edge of the blade sparkled with the tiny microchips embedded along the metal. She turned the hilt around in her palm, feeling the heft of the weapon.

  "I need you to stay out here and watch the ship," she told James, "Call in to me if you notice anything strange."

  "Like what?" he asked, a hint of both confusion and concern in his voice.

  "You'll know," she told him, ducking down to enter the ship again.

  Around her the crashed vessel was eerily quiet except for the clicking. She moved along the hallway cautiously, watching the red glow from the emergency lights for any sign of shadows or movement. The sound of a piece of metal falling to the floor ahead of her startled her and Alexis pressed herself to the wall. Sliding around the corner, she saw what made the sound.

  A panel lay on the floor beneath an exposed section of the internal components of the ship. Tiny lights flashed within the components, occasionally joined by a small spark. She watched the section in silence for a few seconds. Nervousness rolled through her belly and her hand twitched on the hilt of the knife. A moment later, the flashing diodes within the components disappeared as something dark slithered across them.

  Alexis surged forward, pushing herself off the wall to propel her body toward the open section of the wall. She brought the knife down into the thick black tentacle with all of the strength she could put behind it. It bucked against her, nearly shoving her back against the wall, but she held her ground, keeping the knife deeply buried in the rubbery, muscular creature.

  A strangled animal scream reverberated through the ship and Alexis finally withdrew the knife. Oily-looking blood obscured the glitter from the microchips and she carefully returned the knife to her bag. The tentacle coiled, then shot down toward the floor, extending from the wall as it slithered toward her. Alexis jumped away from it and began to run.

  She could feel the creature hitting the backs of her heels as she ran, pushing her to run faster and harder until she finally burst out of the ship into her father's arms.

  "Alexis! What was that scream?"

  "Come on," she said without answering his question, "we need to get back to my house."

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw the end of the tentacle dip out of the door, then recoil back into the ship. She met James's eyes, then started back toward her house.

  Tyrok was quiet on the bed when she entered her bedroom, but she knew that was only an effect of the drug she had injected into his heart. It would not last for long without the next step of the treatment. She pulled the knife out and let the bag drop to the floor. Coming to the side of the bed, she gazed down at him. He was gorgeous, more beautiful than any man she had ever seen, and she felt drawn to him.

  She paused long enough to run her fingers along the curves of his face. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she felt tears starting to form in the corners of her eyes.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered and reached forward to draw the knife from the base of his throat down the middle of his chest.

  She stopped right above his heart and tilted the knife, pushing the tip deeper into his skin. Bright green blood slicked across his body and he arched toward the pressure of the knife. Alexis watched as the microchips glowed, lighting up as if drawing power out of Tyrok's body. When they went dark, she pulled the knife away and dropped it on the floor, no longer wanting to see it.

  "Alexis? Are you alright?" James asked from the doorway.

  She hadn't realized that he was standing there and felt self-conscious in the way that she gazed at Tyrok. Wiping the tears from her eyes, she dipped a fresh cloth into the water basin and started carefully washing the blood away from his chest.

  "I'm fine," she said, putting as much conviction into the words as she could.

  "No, you're not. What just happened?"

  "I'm fine, Dad. I'm a doctor. This is what I trained to do. I can't get emotional about it."

  "But you are. What did you just do to him?"

  "There is something in the ship. It embedded Tyrok with control chips so that he and the ship were linked. He was the only one on it because he was all the creature needed. When the ship crashed, it lifted some of the control, but the creature is trying to fix it, which means interfering with the components directly linked to Tyrok. It must have damaged them, because he was crashing. As the creature tried to repair the ship, it was killing him."

  "I don't understand."

  Alexis finished washing Tyrok and dried him carefully.

  "I need you to help me lift him so I can wrap his chest and change the sheets on the bed. He's going to have to stay here for a while."

  James allowed the conversation to drop as he helped her lift Tyrok off the bed and place him carefully on the sofa in the living room so that she could replace the bedding that was now soaked in blood and water. He continued to prop him up as Alexis wound long strips of gauze around him to cover the wounds on his chest, then lowered him carefully to the sheets.

  "I had to deactivate the control chips," she said softly as she brought the cool, fresh sheet up over Tyrok.

  "Is he going to be alright?" James asked.

  "I hope so."

  ****

  For days Tyrok lay still and silent in Alexis's bed. She knew his body was fighting to regain control of itself and restore order now that the chips were no longer controlling him. She found herself talking to him as she went about her duties, telling him about herself, the mission, her worries, and anything that came to mind.

  Rather than asking for her father's help, she changed his bandages herself, cutting the strips away to reveal his healing wounds and then allowing his body to rest against hers as she propped him up to wrap him in new gauze. Each time she looked at him she felt herself falling harder for him. He was startlingly attractive, but she felt a connection to him that went beyond just the smoothness of his skin, the curve of his full lips, and the long eyelashes curled against his cheeks.

  It had been more than a week since the crash when she came in from a particularly difficult day, bathed, and stopped by her bed to touch his face before going into the living room to sleep on the couch. As she stood there, however, the empty space beside him on the bed seemed to call out to her. The expanse looked cool and soft. She had had James help her change the sheets again the day before and she could still smell the fresh sce
nt clinging to the fabric.

  Her entire body seemed to release its tension at once as Alexis lowered herself to the mattress and rested back into the pillows. After a week sleeping on the couch the bed felt heavenly beneath her. The sensation of Tyrok so close to her only increased the feeling of calm and she curled onto her side with her back to him so she could drift to sleep.

  Alexis didn't realize how deeply she was sleeping until she suddenly snapped awake. For a moment, she didn't know what had awoken her, then she felt the movement beside her again and realized that Tyrok was stirring. She remained still, not wanting to startle him any more than just waking up beside a stranger probably already would by turning over to face him.

  She expected him to jump out of the bed and start asking questions, but instead he surprised her by sliding closer. The warmth of his body wrapped around her, drawing up against her back to tuck himself into all of her curves. She gasped slightly and felt him touch a hand to her hip, then draw it up and drape it around her waist.

  "Tyrok," she started, but didn't know how to continue.

  His face nuzzled her hair at the back of her neck.

  "I could hear you," he said softly, the sound of his voice sending a shiver down her spine.

  "When?" she asked.

  "Every day. I could hear you talking to me. It is the only thing that kept me going."

  He touched a kiss to the back of her shoulder. She sighed at the feeling and rolled over so that she faced him. Their bodies touched lightly and their faces were so close Alexis could feel his breath on her lips.

  "Tell me more," Tyrok whispered and she smiled.

  "About what?"

  "About you. I want to know everything."

  She laughed and cuddled a little closer to him, tucking her hands under her cheek.

  "There isn't much to tell. I have been here for almost two years and before that I was in the military back home, and before that I was raised by a military man, which basically means I was always in the military."