Kol: Alien Abduction Romance (Alien Raiders' Brides Book 3)

by Vi Voxley

  It was hard to feel any remorse when Jackie's ominous promise had made his heart grow cold.

  "No," Jackie said. "There won't be. You can have your damn lifetime of missing me. But I won't hold out hope that you'll realize there would be more to miss if you hadn't chased shadows instead of actually being with me."

  "Jackie –"

  "Get the fuck out," she said quietly. "I don't want to see you. I don't want to see your damn face, I don't want to see your eyes. I don't want to hear your voice and above all, I want to forget you ever existed."

  "You don't mean that," Kol-Eresh said, his heart thundering in his chest. "You're just hurting."

  "Of course I'm hurting and your response to that is to leave me alone!" Jackie yelled, her soft hands curling into fists. "Get out! If you don't want to be here, then I want you gone!"

  The look in her eyes told the harbinger that she wasn't joking.

  He considered staying there nonetheless. The female couldn't physically force him to leave her be, but she had wounded him too. Kol-Eresh couldn't believe anyone would choose not fighting for themselves. It was like lying wounded on a battlefield, sword in hand and not raising it to defend themselves from the approaching enemy.

  The chance of survival was slim, but it was the principal that mattered.

  Jackie was right about one thing. They simply didn't understand each other.

  Kol-Eresh stood, and left.

  Twenty-One

  Jackie

  Her fated was gone.

  Jackie had no idea where Kol-Eresh was or whether he was even in the ship. She knew for sure that the small vessel was standing still.

  On paper, it looked like she'd won. Jackie couldn't believe that Kol-Eresh had dared to insinuate that she was getting the easier deal out of it all. She was staring oblivion in the eye and the harbinger had the gall to tell her how she was supposed to handle it. Not to mention the fact he thought dying was the simpler fate. Kinder, even.

  None of that explained why she felt so terrible.

  More than that, Jackie felt terribly alone.

  The room that had been nice and warm until then was cold and miserable now. She'd thought that it was the ship that had become homey to her, but Jackie knew now that she'd been wrong. It had been love that had kept her going for so long, burning deep in her heart, giving her courage and strength to go on.

  Since Kol-Eresh was gone, so was the comfort he'd brought with him. The room was just four walls and a roof now, wanting to crush the last of her spirit.

  Jackie wanted to call out. She wanted to apologize for driving him away, anything to make the harbinger come back. The words just refused to leave her mouth.

  Until then, she'd suffered through all the blows life had dealt her, as best she could. At times Jackie had been close to despairing and giving up, but she had pulled through and kept her head as high as possible. That was mostly because physical torture was nothing compared to when a person's soul ached.

  The harsh look in the harbinger's eyes wouldn't leave her. Jackie knew there was truth in Kol-Eresh's words, but there was so much else as well and she couldn't forgive the last part.

  So I am going to spend the rest of my life hating the man I love and stewing in my sadness.

  This time, Jackie hit the wall with her head on purpose.

  "This can't be it," she whispered through gritted teeth. "I don't want it to end like this."

  Even the coldness in her veins seemed to dissipate a little when she said that, as if her words had the strength to force the deadly poison in her blood to submit.

  Jackie pushed herself up. It felt like she weighed a million tons. Her hands were definitely filled with lead and her legs felt like she was walking in pants made of metal.

  She didn't know what she was going to tell Kol-Eresh. The bond between them was broken, or at least mortally wounded. There was absolutely no way they could talk through it and fix what had gone wrong, but on the other hand – she didn't have much time to give.

  Jackie refused to die without seeing her fated again. Without being in his arms again, knowing that she was loved.

  "Kol," she called, terrified how weak her voice sounded. "Kol!"

  Her voice didn't rise above a whisper. Jackie had to make her way forward grasping the wall for support. She stumbled to the console and tried to see what was going on.

  The clock caught her attention first. She'd thought that she had just closed her eyes after Kol-Eresh left the room, but apparently hours had passed. Not just hours, but a whole day.

  Jackie steeled her courage. A day was gone, a whole day when she was certain her remaining time could only be counted in days and not, say, weeks.

  The diagnostics were still running, but one of them was flashing red. Jackie had no idea what it meant, but if Kol-Eresh was running them, it had to mean something to do with the Eternals, though.

  She gripped the console hard for support, trying to discern something from the readings, but it was all in the weird Nayanor writing that she couldn't read. Their version of the common tongue was heavily influenced by their isolation from the rest of the galaxy.

  "Kol!" she tried to call again, but there was no answer.

  Jackie couldn't bring herself to believe that the harbinger would simply ignore her if he heard, so that could only mean one thing. Kol-Eresh wasn't there. He was out there somewhere, running after a thread that was leading nowhere.

  Or perhaps it was. The blinking red line on the screen was promising. It was something. Only that Jackie couldn't imagine it being anything other than the beginning of a line that was way too long for her.

  Her loneliness weighed heavily upon her shoulders.

  She turned around and started heading for the central part of the ship where the hatch to outside world was. If Kol-Eresh came back, Jackie wanted to be right there, greeting him.

  With every passing second, the words that she would have told him got more desperate. She began fuming at the harbinger for his brutal policy of never giving up, even when it was clear she was past the point of no return.

  It quickly descended into a hopeless plea for him to come back.

  The cold was back now, gripping Jackie's heart hard. She slumped down on the floor, trying to keep her eyes on the hatch. Fear took over so fast it was like she had breathed it in with one of her sharp gasps for air.

  If I close my eyes now, will I wake up?

  Jackie opened the comm device she'd brought along. Her fingers were slipping on the dials, but she couldn't find the frequency to Kol-Eresh.

  "Kol!" she whispered into the device. "Kol, where are you?"

  There was no response. Jackie's mind instantly filled with all the gruesome possibilities. She tried again and again, until it seemed she had called out to every part of the planet except for her fated.

  "Gods," she breathed. "Gods, please don't let me be alone. Let me see him, let me just see him one more time –"

  If there really were five stages of grief, Jackie was feeling them all for herself in advance and she was going through them as fast as she was going through the symptoms.

  It was there, on the floor of the little ship Rosena that Jackie's will to live returned with a vengeance. Staring at the door for what seemed like hours, she quickly became bored and then she became mad.

  She had no idea if life was unfair to her or all her suffering were part of some great divine plan. All Jackie knew was that she was growing tired of Kol-Eresh doing all the work. The more she thought about it, waiting for him to return, the more Jackie came to realize how horrible it had to be for her fated.

  All the pain was hers to bear, but the responsibility was all his.

  "Damn it," she whispered to herself, gripping the comm link in her hands. "That is why. That is why he can't give up."

  Jackie thought about what she would have done in his situation. Or if it was her child, begging her to let them be, let them just slowly fade away while she sat there, watching. The horror of merely ima
gining it was too cruel.

  Thinking of children made her come to another realization. Nayanors were adamant about them, but Jackie had never been opposed.

  She wanted to live and to have kids. The vision was so vivid before her eyes, of a small silver-haired boy standing in front of her, smiling with her eyes and Kol's mouth. Jackie reached out her arm and almost touched the boy, but then it was gone.

  Seeing hallucinations can't be a good sign.

  That didn't matter to her as much as it should have. Jackie wanted to meet that boy more than anything in the world and she knew he was out there somewhere, in the future, beckoning to her, imploring her not to give up.

  Jackie poked the diadon in her chest.

  "Work," she told it. "You are the creation of those same bastards who did this to me. Hold on, just keep me alive until Kol finds them. I know he can. I know he will..."

  She took a deep breath, trying to calm her breathing.

  "Hold on," she told herself, closing her eyes. "Have faith."

  Her mind was working at a rapid speed. Perhaps it was a sign that she was nearing the end, but Jackie pushed that thought firmly away. It had done enough damage to her already. If her last words to Kol-Eresh were going to be "get out", she would find herself in the afterlife and kick her own ass.

  "I'm on an alien planet," Jackie continued. "I was brought here by an alien warlord. They cured me with a device that has killed almost everyone else. And now I'm here.

  "No god or fate would have done this to me if they planned to actually let me die here. There are so many of them in the galaxy and fate is guiding the steps of us all. I have to believe there is a way out of this. There has to be."

  There has to be.

  It was getting harder to hold on, however. Jackie gripped the floor to stop herself from falling over. She felt like she was living a Murphy's Law. It said it was impossible to fall off the floor, but it took toddlers several years to figure that particular rule of physics out.

  She was no toddler, but Jackie's body was starting to fail her at last.

  If Forack was to believed, her end was going to be painless, so that was good. Jackie grinned, thinking of how low her criteria for "good" had gotten.

  Her legs were going numb. Very soon she wouldn't be able to walk.

  It was the hardest trial yet, but Jackie held on. She pressed her lips together, biting her tongue not to cry out in horror as she fully expected to just pass out and pass on.

  She wished she knew what the warning signs were, but unfortunately there wasn't a soul in the galaxy who could tell her what that was like. The Brions had killed the only regenerating creature in the known existence. Jackie had been meaning to read up on how they managed that, but the chances to do that were growing slim.

  "One moment," she begged. "I just want one moment. I can be mad at him for all eternity if I can have a chance to tell him I love him one more time..."

  The door slid open.

  Freezing, biting wind swept in, rushing over her so violently that Jackie almost fell to the ground. She held on, trying to see through the hail.

  The doors closed and Kol-Eresh dashed for her, pulling her into arms. His face was ashen, matching the Fermanoli coat around his wide shoulders.

  "My love," he whispered into her hair.

  Jackie clung to him, her hands buried into the fur of the coat, pulling the harbinger closer to her. It felt like his presence was giving her some of her strength back, but maybe she was simply imagining it.

  "I love you," she cried. "I don't care about anything else, I only need you to know that."

  "I know," Kol-Eresh said, pulling back and taking her head between his hands, pressing a kiss on her lips. "And I love you. The whole time I was out, I couldn't stop thinking about what I said to you. It was only because I can't imagine living without you. I've been waiting for you my entire life, I can't let go until you're torn from my hands."

  Jackie nodded, shaking from emotion. The gods had answered her prayers. It was everything that she needed. At the very least, she had her goodbye, she was with the man she loved.

  From there, everything could only go better.

  "Jackie," Kol-Eresh said then and the smile on his lips was so wide it had to hurt. "Jackie, I found them."

  Twenty-Two

  Kol-Eresh

  Jackie was shaking in his arms.

  "You – what?" she asked. "How?"

  "Not all of them," Kol-Eresh said. "I knew I couldn't stumble upon the lair that we've been looking for years, that they've been building for centuries. There was only one way to track the Eternals and I did that. I followed the ones who attacked us."

  His fated looked unbelievable at that moment. Kol-Eresh had never seen anything like that. The life that had almost bled out of her was slowly flaring to life again, but the hope in her eyes was such that it made all options of failure impossible.

  "And you found them?" Jackie asked, so quietly he barely heard her over the storm rising outside.

  "Yes," Kol-Eresh said. "The trackers did, I mean. After Forack brought me the ship, I have been running diagnostics on every little thing that moves around here. I started from the site of the attack and worked as far as they could have gone. That was why the ship is so cold and there is no food. I've channeled all the power into the core to make sure it's following absolutely everything."

  The words were pouring out of his mouth now that he could finally tell her.

  "I couldn't tell you, forgive me. I have been tracking the Eternals for three days now, but I wasn't a hundred percent sure so I kept it to myself. Your hope had already been dashed once before, I wasn't about to let it happen to you again."

  "Gods, you can't apologize for that," Jackie said.

  "I can," Kol-Eresh said seriously. "I almost lost you because of it. I told you terrible things since you didn't see anything else but me leaving you alone when I went outside to check the leads. And you were right to do so. You were alone and if something had happened when I was gone..."

  He couldn't continue. Jackie hadn't been the only one who'd had problems sleeping. The harbinger had spent sleepless hours, living through the waking nightmare before his eyes – imagining coming back from a trip outside, to find Jackie...

  "This time, you were sleeping so deeply I couldn't wake you without hurting you," he finished. "I set the ship to the course I thought was the most promising, betting everything on it and I found them. I came back as soon as I could and when I saw you sitting here – I don't think I've ever been happier."

  Jackie's lips were trembling as she nodded.

  "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm sorry I yelled at you. I didn't want to give up, I just couldn't handle it anymore –"

  "Don't," Kol-Eresh said, shaking his head. "I won't hear another word from your mouth if it's to apologize for being afraid. I have been taking you for a Nayanor, but you are not."

  He took a deep breath.

  "You have to be brave now, my love," the harbinger said. "We have to go out. The Eternals are hidden in an underground cave system. This year, the long night has come early. I think it's comforting to know that even the Eternals can't predict it. They're pinned down by it for some reason.

  "We have to reach them before they move out, which they have to if they don't want to get stuck there."

  Jackie tried to nod and shake her head at the same time.

  "Kol, I don't think I can move," she said in a broken voice. "The serum has gone too deep into my system. I can't walk, especially in that weather. The gust alone almost knocked me down."

  The harbinger considered. It was true, he could see it. Jackie's body was oddly limp like her limbs couldn't muster enough energy to move.

  "I will carry you," he said. "Where is the other coat?"

  "In my room," Jackie replied. "Kol, you can't carry me and fight. It's madness."

  "I'm not going to have you anywhere near the fighting," Kol-Eresh replied, retrieving the coat and returning to Jackie. "Here, mak
e sure it's properly tied. If you lose this out there, we can't waste time looking for it."

  Jackie was looking at him with deep sadness in her eyes.

  "We should call for back-up," she said. "Forack, your warriors. There are three Eternals and three Abominations, if it really is the same group that attacked us. You got pinned down by them the last time. What makes you think this time will be different?"

  "I have so much more to lose now," Kol-Eresh replied. "And that makes all the difference in the world to a Nayanor.

  "But we can't call the others. The storm is rising. The communications are messed up and the fortress will not be able to pick up. It will be mayhem there. We thought we had more time."

  He kissed her deeply and lovingly.

  "This is our only chance, my love," the harbinger said. "The two of us, against it all."

  Jackie smiled. It was good to see her spirit rise again.

  Kol-Eresh was starting to believe that it was going to work. The moment he let the slightest doubt into his heart, it was over. The Eternals were no joke and he stood to lose everything if he lost focus.

  "Those odds aren't bad," she said. "Alright. I trust you. One chance. And at least we will be together, come what may."

  The going was tough.

  The long night hadn't started yet, but the narrow corridor between two enormous cliffs turned the canyon into a wind corridor. Kol-Eresh heard Jackie sucking in desperate gasps when the wind became so violent it was hard to breathe.

  She was on his back, holding on to the Fermanoli coat as hard as she could. Kol-Eresh trudged on through the falling rain, trying to see the tracks of the Abominations. The falling deluge was threatening to make quick work of them, so he had to be fast. They weren't going to get so lucky again.

  There were a thousand fears and doubts in his mind, trying to dig their roots deep into him, but he kept them all at bay. With Jackie by his side, Kol-Eresh believed he could do the impossible.

  No one had ever taken on the Eternals before, not like that. They were mystical creatures and the facts Nayanors knew about the Abominations could be counted on the fingers of one hand.