by Amanda Boone
“Because you can’t take that pressure off of me. Every moment of every day that I spend with you, I will be thinking about the fact that our survival relies on me.”
Coel turned her around to face him. “No it doesn’t. It relies on us. Our Kaharan destiny is no different in nature than what we feel for each other. This is our project. This is our life. Won’t you rebuild with me?”
And suddenly, Sarah did understand. He hadn’t just given her life. He had given her purpose. No longer was she reduced to outsider status, recording the events around her with a removed eye. This was her chance to be a part of something with someone who truly cared for her.
They were each other’s only hope for life, for love.
“Okay.” She nodded.
He released a sigh of relief, his arms wrapping around her.
Her eyes stung with tears as she listened to the thud of his heart. “I’ll stay with you,” She whispered.
THE END
Chosen by the Alien Lord
Kahara Lords
Book 5
(Can be read as a standalone book)
By: Lindsay Blanc
Chosen by the Alien Lord
Prologue
Sweat fell onto the polished marble. The soundless impact occurred over and over again, one drop in front of the other. One step in front of the other. One breath after another.
Frigid, sterile air nipped skin. Toes pinched and muscles burned from strain: the calves, and then the thighs and the abdomen, the chest, rising and falling, expanding and contracting.
A cramp shot through Kalas’s stomach as he ran. His heart slammed against his rib cage in a rhythm that matched the beating of his tracer, a small neogeographical locator implanted in his left arm.
He was being summoned.
The hallway extended out in front of him, lined with windows that projected identical images of black space punctuated with stars. His breath was the only thing audible in that empty hallway on this, the third hour of the circadian clock.
His stomach turned over and over with nerves as he propelled himself down the hallway, the door only growing larger and larger.
Finally.
With a loud “umph,” he skidded to a stop and yanked it open, letting it slam against the wall as he hopped over the threshold.
The commander turned at the sound of his entrance, his sapphire eyes scanning him from head to toe. “I called you one hundred and forty-seven seconds ago.”
Kalas opened his mouth to utter some kind of response of faux-respect, but a piercing scream stole the words from his mouth.
Jenna lay in her own pool of sweat. A body-contouring cot had been prepared for this very reason, for she writhed in pain. Her nerves pinched her olive skin. Busted blood vessels surrounded her emerald eyes, the gorging mass that was the child she carried taking on a sickly gray color.
“When did this begin?” Kalas crossed the room to her and knelt, scanning her body for any irregularities he could find. He focused on the belly and the baby inside it. He caught a heartbeat—small, faint, but there nonetheless. He traced the blood through the fetus’s body, into the placenta and then the mother’s body.
“Don’t just sit there like a dunce! DO SOMETHING!” The commander stalked across the room with his fists clenched and his teeth barred.
Kalas flinched but, other than that, tuned him out.
He went to the small chest directly under the cot, a collection of medical supplies suited for emergency use. He retrieved a small needle, collected the Kaharan woman’s arm and pricked it. Deep dark red blood pooled on her slick skin.
He gazed at it as hard as he could, his eyes picking up the red blood cells suspended in the plasmid…and something else, a toxin, an infection. He collected the blood with a white strip and…
“Kalas Naja, I will end you if you do not take action!”
Kalas glanced at the commander, catching one quick look of the worry in the Kaharan’s eyes. He could understand his impatience, but he could waste no time explaining himself. He stuck the blood into a small analyzer and set it down…
No sooner had he done this did the commander’s wife seize. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets, her skin stretching taught across her face, and her hands petrified, her fingers bent at uncomfortable angles.
“Jenna!” the commander yelled, stalking to her other side. He reached out toward her but was afraid to touch her.
Kalas acted fast, retrieving a precise amount of channel blocker with a syringe. “Help me turn her.”
The commander obeyed him, turning his wife onto her side in one swoop.
Kalas sucked in a deep breath and injected the serum into the back of her neck, allowing the substance to diffuse into all of her nerves. Her body melted into the cot, her face settling into a calm expression. But Kalas could see that her blood flow had slowed to near stagnant.
He took a shock baton out of his kit and pressed it into her chest, delivering two shots precisely to her heart. He waited, releasing a sigh of relief when she returned to normal function.
“Commander.” He rounded the cot.
The commander shot him an even expression. “I will call a meeting with the council.”
***
Kalas didn’t get a wink of sleep after that, and, four hours later, he sat before the surviving members of the Kaharan council. He struggled to keep his eyes open and his stance upright as he turned toward the projector and attempted to explain high order inter-species medical phenomena to a bunch of bureaucrats. “It is time that we reconsidered the search for Unice,” he said, an apologetic frown on his face.
“I don’t understand.” Councilman number 478 spoke first. “We have performed this argument many times before.”
Kalas nodded, opening his mouth to speak, but the commander took the words right out of his mouth. “Yes, and before, my wife was not hanging on to life by a thread.”
The council assumed identical looks of horror and surprise.
Kalas spoke first. “So, as you can see, this is a very sensitive situation. A woman will die if we do not enact this mission.”
“What of the child? Can it survive without the mother?” That was 467.
The commander shot him a deathly glare. “Are you suggesting we kill my wife?”
The council members shifted in their seats.
Kalas took a deep breath. “No one has to die. It is a simple operation. You discharge me to Earth, I find the antibody and I come back.”
“It is a rare antibody. What makes you think you will find it in time?”
“A Kaharan gestation lasts two Earth years. I am certain I am efficient enough to meet that deadline.”
“So we waste time and resources we don’t have on a mission to Earth that will surely fail?”
Kalas refused to be swayed. “She is a Kaharan just like her baby, and thus, just like her baby, she is just as important. I cannot sit by and let her die when I know what will save her.”
“But—”
Another council member raised his hand. “Let’s just vote now.”
Kalas’s heart fell. Premature votes never ended well.
But the commander stood, a determined glower in his eye. “There is no vote. I, and I only, am the commander of this ship and of the remaining Kaharan population. I decide what’s best for us. My wife is the only known woman of our kind in existence. She is the future…not just her unborn daughter.”
“But rovers on Kahara are much more likely to find female life than…”
The commander raised his hand. “It is decided.”
He turned his gaze on Kalas. “Tomorrow, you will be dispatched.” With that, he left the conference table, pausing with his hand on the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a sick wife to attend to.”
Kalas had only just begun to understand the breadth of responsibility that had been placed on his shoulders when the door slammed behind him.
Chapter One
A scream of frustration rolled up the
back of Olivia’s throat, but she held it down, sucking a gulp of water out of the water bottle she kept in the back of the EMT truck.
“You have to let me go! This hurts! You’re hurting me!”
Olivia glanced at the woman tied to the stretcher. A steak knife protruded from her right lung, a soft stream of crimson blood seeping into her white sweater.
“Ma’am, I am going to have to ask you to sit still.” Ben, her partner, struggled to keep the woman still.
“LET ME GO!” she screamed over him.
Olivia rolled her eyes at Ben’s unnecessarily polite stance. She stood up and maneuvered her way around Ben and the stretcher just as the ambulance screeched to a stop. She barged through the doors, hopping out of the back and pulling at the hem of the stretcher.
“What do we have?”
“I don’t want none of these DEVIL DOCTORS. You’re all DEVIL DOCTORS.”
“Yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t have stabbed yourself, lady,” Olivia said, being the only one brave enough to talk over her deafening screaming.
“Olivia!”
Olivia glanced at Dr. Kal, the surgeon who had been running the ER for the last six months. Even though it had to have been his twelfth hour on duty, his black hair was still perfectly slicked in place and not so much as a wrinkle of fatigue disturbed his marble-like olive skin.
One look at his even, black stare tugged at Olivia’s nerves, but she ignored it because this woman, however stupid she apparently was, was eons more important than the ongoing feud she had with the man who had stolen her job. “It’s simple, Doc. One stab to the right lunch. One broken rib, two fractured ones. An obvious puncture to the lung and disruption of the cardio-thoracic cavity.”
Dr. Kal gave her a curt nod before hastily delivering instructions to prep an OR and grabbing the second side of the stretcher. “We have to pull the knife out,” Olivia said as they lifted her onto a bed. “It moves every time she does.”
But Dr. Kal just shook his head in that infuriatingly calm way and turned to the patient. “Hello, my lady. What’s your name?”
The woman just stared stupidly back at Dr. Kal, fixated by his gaze.
“Look, none of us have time for this.” Olivia reached over to the tray for a pair of scissors, using them to cut right down the middle of the sweater.
The woman shot up. “That was a gift!”
Kal placed his hands on either one of her shoulders. “Miss, you are very hurt. You need to relax.”
Olivia couldn’t wait for Kal to make some kind of personal connection with this woman. She jumped in. “All right. I know this sounds crazy, but I am going to have to remove the knife from your chest.”
Dr. Kal shot her a stern look, his black eyes piercing her. “You will do no such thing.”
Her face flushed bright red at this. “Every time she moves, that blade digs deeper into her. After I take it out, you can take her to surgery.”
Kal rounded the stretcher to face her, his jaw set. “An OR hasn’t been prepared.”
“Well, if we don’t get one in time, we’ll just have to operate right here then,” Olivia said. Being an EMT and ER doctor for over eight years had given her plenty experience in unlikely conditions.
“I don’t have to listen to you.”
Olivia raised a brow. “Oh really?” Then, in one quick motion, she reached over and ripped the knife out of the woman. “Because I don’t have to listen to you.”
“Olivia!” he hissed.
The woman cried out in pain.
“I’ve contained the damage. You’re welcome.”
Dr. Kal shot her a glare before turning to the nearest nurse’s station. “Page Jeffries. I need an OR stat!”
The nurse gave a hysterical nod before ripping the pager off her belt.
Olivia turned to the woman and stuffed the wound with sterile towels, preventing blood flow. Kal took to the head of the stretcher and shoved it toward the double doors that led to the rest of the hospital.
“I cannot believe you just defied me,” Dr. Kal said, leaning over the woman’s head.
Something about his gaze made Olivia want to kiss him and punch him all at once. “Wow, would you look at the size of that ego.”
Disbelief morphed his face. “You are a ridiculous person.”
With that, he had reached the doors leading to the sterile chambers that surrounded the main amphitheaters. Three scrub nurses met him there, and he shoved the woman through the doors and let them slam behind him.
***
Olivia straightened her posture at the sight of Dr. Kal approaching. It was always just that much harder to keep her focus around him, but she was determined not to let him jumble up her thoughts.
“Well, she survived, no thanks to you.”
Olivia scoffed. “Okay. Why do you have to do that?”
Kal’s only response was that same even stare.
Olivia nodded, a humorless smile on her face. “I guess you don’t have to answer that either.”
“You could have killed her,” he said, resting his hand on the wall above Olivia’s head.
She glowered at him. “I neutralized the threat and got you an OR. We’re constantly backed up; it could have been hours with your low priority.”
“Why are you so dissident?”
“Why do you expect me to blindly follow you just because of your arbitrary title?”
Dr. Kal raised an eyebrow. “If it was so arbitrary, why did you want it so bad?”
Olivia flexed her jaw. “You have no idea what I want.”
His lips folded into a crooked smile. “You’re transparent.”
Olivia broke her one rule: She breathed him in, scanning his body from head to toe, taking in everything about his essence, but somehow missing something vital. “But somehow, you’re not.”
He rolled his eyes. “Not this again.”
She let out a chuckle. “You can’t be surprised.”
“Why are you obsessed with me?”
Olivia’s hands clenched into fists. “Why are you so secretive?”
Kal took his hand off of the wall and stepped away.
“I mean it! You’ve worked here with me for six months and I don’t know anything about you. You don’t come to gatherings, you don’t really know anybody and yet you just boss everyone around.”
“This isn’t about me. This is about your sour feelings.”
“No, it is about you. Look at you. You can’t even meet my eye.”
“I don’t owe you any information.”
“Yes, you do. You stole my job.”
“It was never yours!”
Hearing someone discount what she had been working toward for months on end drove Olivia mad. “How dare you say that to me? You must have done something to bewitch the chief into making you head of the ER, because there’s no way this is fair.”
He stepped away from her. “You keep thinking this way and you might actually kill someone one day.”
But Olivia couldn’t just let him walk away. “I made the right decision.” She grabbed at his arm to stop him, but something like a spark shot up her spine. She dropped his arm.
He stared back at her with eyes wide in an expression that showed he had felt the same thing. “What you did was reckless and immature.”
“Well at least I MAKE decisions! You think about everything so much you never wind up doing anything.”
Kal took a step toward her, towering over her. “I may be a little bit calculated, but that is only because I can recognize the true risks associated with every wrong turn. You lack the ability to take responsibility for anything you do.”
“You don’t know a thing about me.”
Kal scoffed. “No. You’re the one in the dark, remember? I would appreciate it if you didn’t make assumptions about my character or defy me in my ER, Olivia.”
Frustration boiled in the pit of her stomach as he walked off. “It’s Dr. Jones!”
He didn’t even turn at the sound of her voice.
Chapter Two
Olivia waited for Dr. Kal’s scheduled 2:30 surgery before she wandered into the hallway in the administrative wing that housed his office. None of this made any sense. Six months ago, she had been told that she had been promoted. Then, all of a sudden, the job was given to some outsider who had never worked in that hospital or any other one in the area for that matter. To make matters worse, he happened to be the most authoritative, arrogant person she had ever met.
She tried the door to his office. Of course it was open. She stepped inside and shut it behind her, ignoring that warning flutter in the pit of her stomach, the one that told her there was something very wrong about how she was handling this whole thing. Nevertheless, already being in his office gave her no choice but to continue.
She swept the familiar place with her eyes, scanning the robust bookshelf, the stacks of papers, clearly organized on his desk, the telephone and the mounted pictures that looked like they had been pulled right out of a JCPenny catalogue. None of this held any value.
She went straight for his drawers. The top one held an in-drawer divider that kept his copy of Grey’s Anatomy, his collection of pens and his supply of paperclips and thumb-tacks separate. But she could see through the divisions and the clutter to something just underneath it. She lifted the organizer and slipped the piece of paper from under it, turning it over to its front.
What she saw made her jaw drop. It looked like some kind of high resolution, three-part Polaroid picture…if that were at all possible. She peered into it.
The first compartment held an image of what looked like Kal but wasn’t Kal. His skin looked different…almost green. He knelt on what looked like a desert or a canyon, she couldn’t tell which, tending to what looked like victims of a natural disaster. The middle compartment was an image of him, still a little green, standing with what she could only guess was some kind of Eastern European, Western Asian warlord, receiving a metal. And the last one was him in what looked like the control room of a submarine.
Olivia’s heart fluttered in her chest. This wasn’t a lot, but if she could use it as grounds to get the chief to launch a more rigorous background check, they might find something they missed before.