Dazzled by the Alien Daredevil
The Kurians Book Five
Ashlyn Hawkes
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Other Books By Ashlyn Hawkes
About the Author
Special Author Note
1
Strol
The day is hot, the air heavy and oppressive, but I don’t mind as I stare at Sarah, my twin. “Are you sure?”
Sarah lifts her chin. “Why are you still here?” she asks. “I thought you wanted to actually go out and do something for once.”
“What do you mean for once?” I retort. “We’re always doing something.”
Her lips curl into a smirk. “You mean that you’re always doing something to get under Father’s skin.”
I roll my eyes and put my hands on my hips. “Father needs to lighten up. He’s too uptight. He acts as if we’re children still.”
“He doesn’t trust you,” Sarah says.
I wince. “I don’t care what he thinks. I do what I want.”
“And that’s why he doesn’t trust you. He thinks your irresponsible.” Her blue eyes are barely neon, but they’re sparkling, and her grin is wide.
“You’re terrible, you know that, don’t you?” I grumble.
“Then what are you waiting for?” she demands. “You said you were bored, so I said I could suggest a dare, and you were all for it up until I said what the dare is. It’s a simple little thing, taking down a nealander.”
Nealanders are a strange animal native to Kurian. They’re a bit ugly since they have minimal fur, their bodies all wrinkled. They eat rocks, more specifically the moss that grows on rocks here, and then spit out the rocks. They’re about as smart as those rocks.
While each one is roughly triple my size, they aren’t that hard to kill. The issue lies in how skittish they are. They tend to stampede, and the location of the pack is rather close to a small settlement. If I cause a stampede, Father might actually kill me this time.
I survey the field below us. Sarah and I stand on the ledge of a mesa. If I head around and come at them from the southwest… If they do stampede then, they should hopefully go northeast, and if that's the case, the settlement should be safe.
Should is the key word.
“You’re too afraid of Father. I get it. He is the almighty overlord. I mean, he hasn’t at all been a bit of a softie lately, considering how many Kurians have found love on Earth, and he isn’t even forcing them to return to Kuria like he originally said.”
I grit my teeth. “Oh, yes, love. That’s all Father cares about.”
Sarah blinks a few times and crosses her arms. She really does favor Mom. I look so much more like Father.
Overlord Nestrol. Nadia. Our parents. They’re legends here on Kuria. Father has been the leader of the Novans for so long that he doesn’t know how to do anything but order people around. I guess, to some extent at least, that’s a good thing because if it weren’t for everything Father’s ordered, the Novans would all be dead already.
For hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years, the Novans lived in peace on Nore. There was the occasional killing of an overlord, which lead to there being a new overlord, but other than that, peace. We never had a civil war or anything like that.
But then, we did face a war. Nore was one of three planets in close proximity, and one planet stole aliens from the other. Once the Novans learned about this, they swept in to free the slaves. Again, there was peace, although this time, the peace was broken from outsiders. Invaders.
The Grots.
I don't know why the Grots came, but they came, and they tried to vanquish the Novans as they had so many others. Whenever I think about them, I grow so furious, and I can't see straight. When I learned my history, I didn't bother to ask or learn what precisely motivated the Grots. In my mind, they were greedy and evil, power-hungry to the point of believing themselves to be gods.
But even gods can fall.
And they did.
We brought about that fall, or I should say the Novans did, but only after the Grots made the Novans pay a terrible price.
The Grots slaughter every Novan woman and girl. Even the youngest boys were also killed.
My father organized the Novan males, the survivors, and they did what they had to. They fled, but they did not give up. For two years, they survived in their spaceships, and they developed new weapons, more powerful ones. Once they were ready, they sought out the Grots.
The fiends had their eyes set on another planet—Earth. The Earthlings fought alongside the Novans, and the Grots were killed, every last one of them.
But for the Novans to not die out and the Grots to win despite their own extinction, my father convinced the leaders of Earth to send females to Kuria, the new home planet of the Novans. The children resulting from Novan-Earthling couplings are Kurians.
My twin and I are among the first Kurians to have been born. As much as our father tried to have more children, he never did. I think that has always bothered him. He wanted to do his part to help ensure the Novans didn’t die out, but he is extremely happy to have two children.
Well, he had been when we were younger. Now, I seem to be more of a burden than a son to him. He’s a bitter old man, if you ask me, too hardened by his long rule. He doesn’t understand that sometimes, you have to live a little in order to truly experience life.
All he does is have meetings and love Mom, and I suppose he’s happy, but I can’t stand the thought of all of those meetings.
“You’re stalling,” Sarah says, almost singing the words. “I never knew you were a coward.”
“I’m not stalling,” I inform her. “I’m trying to determine if I should use the shuricutter or the krislasher.”
“The krislasher without a doubt.” She gives me a look. “Come on now. There’s no contest between the two. The shuricutter is best for—”
“Yes, yes,” I grumble, hating that she saw through my diversion. I’m not stalling. I just…
I don’t know what it is with me lately. I think I’m done here on Kuria. There’s a part of me that isn’t happy here, and I’m beginning to think that I can’t ever find happiness here. Is that because of my father? I wonder if that’s the case. He casts a long shadow, and I’ll never get out from under it.
But where can I find happiness then? Earth? I don’t know about that. Honestly, I think I might want to be a pilot, but my father would never allow that. He’ll want me here, stuck on this red rock for the rest of my life. What I really want is the chance to make my own decisions, whether that’s to go to Earth after all or to seek out other planets. There’s more to the universe than these two planets, even if my father acts as if Kuria is the best place in the entire existence of everything.
He can be a bit pompous.
Then again, if I’m honest with myself, I probably would hate it if I had a son just like me.
I remove my krislasher from inside my boot. “You’re going to watch?”
“Yes, of cou
rse,” she says.
“Why do you want me to kill a nealander anyhow?”
“I heard that they are rather tasty.”
“You can get a cook to make you some meat.”
"I hear they're actually best raw," she says impatiently.
“What?”
“Earthlings eat raw fish,” she says.
“Who had the idea to eat nealander raw?”
“You don’t need to ask a bazillion questions. Get on with it!”
“You’re just as pushy as Mom,” I grumble.
“That is not true.” Sarah lifts her head, her long black hair falling behind her shoulders.
“You’re exactly like her!”
“Am not.” Sarah narrows her eyes. “I’m as much like Mom as you are Father.”
Ouch.
Not wanting to hear any more, I slip down the side of the mesa. The nealanders don’t pay me any attention, and I slide into position. There’s at least thirty of them here, and if one of them were to knock me down, all it would take would be one step, and I would be dead.
My breathing slows even though my excitement rises. It’s when I’m doing something like this, something reckless, something my father wouldn’t approve of, that I feel most alive.
This is living—making my own choices and not living out the life dictated for me.
I never realized just how much nealanders smell until now. Ugh. The stench is enough to churn my stomach, and I put my hand under my nose, my krislasher glinting in the sunlight.
A nealander neighs and rears, going up onto two legs and then just one. It nearly topples over and jars into the one beside it. The nealanders start to grow restless, and I creep forward, between them, and slash the throat of one of the ugly beasts.
Dark red blood seeps out from the wound, coating the front of its naked skin. The blood darkens the red stone beneath its hooves, and the nealander collapses.
Slowly, I inch backward until I hit against something.
Another nealander.
I whirl around. The nealander rises onto two legs, and I dash around it before it can knock me down. I’m past the line of the creatures, but they’re turning around, facing me.
And they’re charging.
Ovian!
I rush back to the mesa. Sarah reaches down to haul me up, and it’s all we can do to watch the stampede. They aren’t heading toward the settlement at least, but they’re slamming against the mesa. If they keep doing that…
A lot of the mesas here on Kuria contain water. We’ve been introducing water on the surface, but that’s not native to the planet. Still, if the mesa breaks…
A trickle sounds faintly over the crushing hooves and falling rocks.
“What’s that?” Sarah shouts.
“I think—”
A spray of water gushes out of rocks directly beneath us.
“—they caused the mesa to crack,” I finish grimly.
What’s worse than a stampede?
A flood.
“You’re careless and irresponsible. You never bother to think about anyone other than yourself!” Father is beside himself. He actually pulls on his dark blue hair as he paces.
I’ve never seen Father pace before. Normally, he stares me down with his neon blue eyes. His glower is impressive, and it’s no wonder that none of the Novans have ever thought about taking him on to try to steal the mantle of overlord from him.
“The settlement evacuated,” I say. “No one was hurt.”
“No one was hurt, true, but the damage to their houses! Who is going to repair them? Who is going to take responsibility for this?”
I roll my eyes. “We have builders—”
“And why should they have to redo work that never should have had to be redone in the first place?”
Father's shouting so much that his face is turning an even darker shade of blue. I've noticed from Mom that humans' faces turn red when they're upset, and that makes sense because they have lighter skin than ours, and their blood is red. Well, some of them have lighter skin, a peach color. Some have darker skin, brown or black. They're actually beautiful in their diversity.
But Novans and Kurians both have blue blood. Kurians tend to be a lighter blue shade, but I'm the darkest Kurian there is. That's not too surprising because my father is the darkest blue Novan there is. I can pass for a pure-blooded Novan if one doesn't know our history.
Our blue blood doesn’t change our complexion much except to make us look even bluer when we’re upset, and my father is ovian furious with me.
“If you want me to help the builders—” I start with a sigh.
“I don’t know what I want from you,” Father grumbles.
His tone is one I’ve never heard before, and I swallow hard. That look in his eyes, that glint, I’ve never seen that either.
Ovian. I’ve really done it this time.
2
Isabella
My smile is wide, and I check the straps again. I’m so ready for this. Maybe I can finally use my daredevil ways for good. I never really thought about this before, about wanting to do something like this, but ever since I heard on the radio about a chance to join the military for special, dangerous missions, I knew it was for me.
The military used to have all kinds of formal training and schooling and jumps you had to hop through in order to get in and then to rise through the ranks. That’s not the case anymore. With the advent of every nation on Earth uniting under the Global Countries of Earth, there’s now one government and one military, but that doesn’t mean that there’s peace every single square foot of Earth. There’s peace compared to before the Grots, yes, but peace is never absolute.
I’ve never experienced peace in my life. Not for one second. I prefer it that way, though, and I’ve always done what I can to chase thrills, to seek out new adventures. All I want is to feel alive, and sitting around in a boring ass job just isn’t for me. I’m twenty-one years old, and I feel as if I’ve lived a hundred lifetimes already because I’ve could’ve died a thousand times already.
But I haven’t.
“Why did you sign up for this training exercise?” a man asks.
I glance over at him, but he’s not talking to me. The speaker is bald, but he doesn’t look much older than I am.
The one he’s talking to has longish brown hair and dark, piercing eyes. He looks straight at me.
“I saw her sign up,” he says, jutting his chin toward me.
“Fuck off,” I say good-naturedly.
He laughs and leans forward. “The name’s Diego.”
“Isabella, but I don’t think you’ll be touching this.”
“No?”
Diego grins and shifts over to stand beside me. There’s a group of ten of us, and we’re all cramped in a small room, waiting for orders to go onto a plane, the one we’ll be jumping out of. It’s a training exercise, yes, but we haven’t even been given much instruction yet, and I’m getting anxious and ready to go.
“Want me to double-check your gear for you?” he asks, his face inches from mine.
“No thanks.” I glance over at Baldie. “Sorry that this one doesn’t seem to care that you wanted to make nice.”
“I don’t make nice,” Diego says, brushing a hand along my neck. “I fuck nice, though.”
"I already told you to fuck yourself," I say, giving him the once-over. The way he's acting, I'm willing to bet his dick is five inches at the most, and that's because I'm feeling generous. I've always thought that length doesn't matter so long as you know how to use it.
Baldie shrugs. “I don’t care so long as he isn’t bothering you.”
“I can handle myself.” I inch away from Diego, and he stands beside me, a hand grabbing my ass.
He can touch, but he can't have. I'm bored with him already. Coming on too strong. A guy like that probably has mommy issues. I've had more than my fair share of one-night stands, but I don't think I even want him to have that much.
“Listen up,”
a loud, sharp female voice says.
Immediately, the conversations from the other would-be militants all fall to a hushed silence.
“You are to listen to my directions and not veer from them an inch. Do I make myself clear?”
She eyes each of us and waits until every single one of us says yes. This woman does not accept nods.
“Good. I’m General Janius Jackson. Your objective is to jump out of the plane and complete the obstacle course. The point isn’t to leave anyone behind, not to be first, and you do have a time limit. What’s more, there is an additional objective. You have to save a woman from a dangerous monster. Do not kill the monster. You can bind it, restrain it, what have you. Nothing and no one is to be killed during this training exercise. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, ma’am!” we all say more or less at the same time.
“Very well. Load them up.” The general stands to the side, and we file through.
Diego tries to stand next to me, and I slip by next to Baldie, who smiles at me, not in a coming on kind of way, and I notice a ring on his left hand.
“I’m Greg,” he says.
“Isabella.”
“I overheard.”
“Why did you sign up?”
Greg purses his lips. "My wife died two days ago. I heard about this after the funeral. It felt… I don't know. Like destiny, maybe. Like I can maybe find meaning again because I'm lost. Two days and I'm lost. It feels like I haven't held her in years and years, and I… I need to do something."
“Didn’t you have a job?” I ask.
Greg nods. “At a bank as a teller. I don’t want that. It’s not me. It never was. I just wanted a job to support her, to start a…” He looks away, his voice cracking, and I let him have a moment to recover.
Dazzled by the Alien Daredevil: An Alien Abduction Romance (The Kurians Book 5) Page 1