by Pearl Foxx
She hadn’t had the chance to really check him out back at her crash site, but now she couldn’t help but stare. His chest was bare, his shoulders broad above tapered hips. Roping muscles corded his forearms. His ash-blond hair was disheveled like he often shoved his hand through it. He was burnished bronze and slinking muscle, and moved without rustling the leaves around him. He took a deep breath, expanding his broad chest even further. He wore tight pants made of some dark material that glinted when it caught the light. He had knives strapped to his legs, but Jude figured they were just for show.
He seemed the type to use his hands.
She shivered at the thought of those hands …
“The patrols saw us,” Gerrit snapped, looking first to her than to Swanson. “We have to go. Now.”
A sick look swamped Swanson’s face. “They scented you.”
“Yes,” Gerrit said like the word damned them all.
“What the hell is going on?” Jude demanded. She waved her wrists toward Gerrit. “And can you untie me?”
A crack screamed through the air. Gerrit leaped toward her and snagged her around the waist before she could even look up to see what was going on. They rolled into a heap of surrounding ferns, hiding them from his men and whatever horrid thing flew overhead.
She landed on top of him, straddling his waist with his large hands on her hips. He looked up at her, eyes wide, before bucking his hips and sending her flying off to the side. Jude scampered to her feet and looked back at their camp. Behind them, where she had stood, what remained of a massive tree sizzled beneath dripping white fluid.
All the other men had ducked and rolled like Gerrit and Jude. They met Gerrit’s gaze. “To the pass,” he said, nearly growling. “Swanson. Thompson. Stay with me and the girl.”
Jude choked. “I’m not a girl—”
Gerrit took her bound hands and hauled her into the jungle. The men ran alongside them, Swanson on Jude’s right and another man on Gerrit’s left. She could barely keep up. A hidden, rotted log sent her stumbling, but Gerrit wrenched her back upright, jerking her injured shoulder.
Above them, the canopy splintered and screamed as great hunks of wood snapped in half. Where there were gaps in the foliage, more of that dripping fluid rained down, along with a hellfire of arrows that Gerrit and the other men wove around. One thwacked into a tree right beside Jude’s face before Gerrit jerked her forward.
“Untie me!” she shouted, struggling to keep on her feet as she practically free-fell through the waist-high plants. “I can’t run like this!”
As he ran beside her, Gerrit drew a knife—her knife—from a sheath on his pants. Without pausing, without looking to see where her hands were, he slashed it down, twisting her around at the same time. A scream lodged in her throat as the knife glinted from a burst of fire above them. But the blade went neatly through the silk material.
Jude almost fell on her face from the sudden freedom.
Gerrit shoved the knife into her palm before she’d even recovered her balance. “Don’t let them take you alive!”
The words sent a spike of fear straight through Jude’s gut. If these men were afraid of what swarmed overhead, it had to be bad. They were all huge and covered in the kind of rippling muscle that only came from hard work and real fighting, not weights in a gym. And they were afraid. Afraid enough to return her knife.
Somehow, she ran even faster. She wanted to ask what those things were, what rained sizzling liquid and arrows down on them, but she held her tongue for once and focused solely on keeping pace with Gerrit.
The jungle fell away. As thickly as it had suffocated them only seconds before, it now opened into a massive clearing that sizzled beneath a swath of that white liquid. The thick rubber soles of her boots gave off a putrid burning smell as soon as she stepped into the clearing. Jude remembered how the Draqon’s bite had left a heat deep within her shoulder that had burned from the inside out right before she passed out.
Acid, Jude thought. Those things spit acid.
She’d only just looked up and caught the faintest hint of scales and wings and teeth above them when Gerrit twisted, slamming into her and knocking her back into the jungle.
No one had been ready for the sudden lack of cover. They’d run straight into a trap.
Over Gerrit’s shoulder, she saw one of his men lift into the sky. He shouted and swiped at the lizard thing with his knife, thrashing against the grip of a great flapping beast. Its talons pierced his side and leg, and blood dripped from the sky. It was a replica of the creature she’d fought at her ship, only bigger. Much, much bigger.
The beast was as large as the trees around them, and atop its back sat a woman with flowing blonde hair and skin-tight armor. As her ride lifted the screaming alien high into the sky above the clearing, the demon rider aimed a wicked-looking crossbow at Jude.
And fired.
6
Gerrit
What in the name of Avilku was that woman doing? Staring up at a Draqon like that? While its mate fired directly at her?
Gerrit shoved her aside just as the arrow whizzed between them, close enough that he felt a breeze against his bare arm. Farther in the clearing, his guards doubled back. But it was too late. Thompson was nearly a mile off the ground, lost against the sunlight and the Draqon’s shadow. For his sake, Gerrit hoped they killed him fast. Death would be a better fate than what waited for him at the Draqons’ hive.
More Draqons descended into the clearing. Gerrit watched their necks rear back and their mouths stretch wide. They’d blast the space with acid any second, and he and everyone around him would be reduced to bubbling skin and seeping wounds.
He let out a piercing whistle.
His guards reacted instantly, shifting into their Vilkan forms. With a rip of Arakid cloth and a deafening howl, his guards became wolves. Swanson raced past, his silver and white fur glinting beneath the scant patches of sunlight and Draqon acid.
Beside Gerrit, the pilot gasped, her breath stolen and locked up in that pretty mouth of hers. She’d seen them shift. She knew what they were.
He grabbed her hips mid-stride and slung her over his shoulder. He followed his Vilkas straight into the clearing and raced toward the jungle’s edge on the opposite side. The fastest way through was across. His legs pumped hard as he ran, keeping pace with the wolves surrounding him.
Acid splashed behind him, and arrows flew around him, punctuating the air with whipping smacks as they connected with fallen trees, wet earth, and living hide. The Vilkas took more than a few in the haunches and shoulders, but still, they kept running. Toward the front, a Vilka with gleaming brown fur ran straight through the fire and emerged with three arrows in his neck. He ran two more strides before he fell.
Heat tore through Gerrit’s shoulder. The arrow blasted straight through the muscle and skin and out the other side of his body to lodge in a stump four feet away. He howled in agony and stumbled, almost losing his footing.
Over his shoulder, Jude screamed.
No, it wasn’t a scream. She was shouting something.
“Put me down! Put me down, you fucking asshole!”
He snarled.
He didn’t put her down, but he yanked her off his shoulder and into his arms.
Her eyes peeled wide at the sight of the blood coursing from his shoulder. She stopped shouting.
She slapped her palm against the wound, causing him to grimace in pain, but her instincts were right. Stopping the blood flow would keep him running faster and longer.
They leaped back into the jungle. Around him, paws and claws scratched over the foliage. A Vilka could outrun a human form hands down, especially in the jungle, but his wolves slowed to keep pace with their Alpha. They circled around him, watching his flank, and Swanson darted in close, his panting breaths hot against Gerrit’s back.
The young guard whined. Up, the Vilka said.
Gerrit didn’t need to look; he already knew. Through the patches of clearing in the ca
nopy above them, he’d seen the first peaks of the mountain range appear.
They were almost to the pass.
A narrow, winding path between two sharp embankments with the occasional rocky overhang to protect from above, the pass was too twisting and tight for a Draqon to get low enough, and the rocks came together at the top, narrowing the space they could shoot down through. For the Vilkas, it was like running right into the barrel of a gun, but it was the best option. It was their only chance.
When they broke free of the jungle’s edge and Gerrit and his wolves crashed across the pebbled ground, he spotted the tallest mountain on Kladuu among the mountain range.
His home. His mountain.
They were so close.
“Go!” he shouted to his guards without a second’s hesitation. They’d make it. They had to. For Thompson. And the pilot in his arms. The instinct to keep her safe drove him to run faster.
As soon as the pass narrowed around them, more Draqons than he’d anticipated descended from within the cave-like pass. They had set this up, herded them here while others waited for them to charge in. Gerrit and his men were trapped from above, behind, and in front. More Draqons lined the pass, nearly ten in number, their hulking forms bathing the rock-covered trail in darkness.
The women sitting astride the hulking beasts keened and filled the rocky cavern with their high-pitched voices, the sound reverberating through the rocks and Gerrit’s skull.
An arrow struck the heart of the Vilka racing in front of Gerrit. He had to leap over his friend’s body. Around him, his men fell to arrows and acid and claws and teeth. The Draqons showed no mercy. They executed the Vilkas around Gerrit with precision, saving him for last.
“Retreat!” Gerrit shouted. Only Swanson heard. He was the only guard left.
They tucked tail and turned back toward the side of the jungle they had just come from. There, along the clearing’s edge, Gerrit spotted Ivers, a young Vilka in his first year of service.
“Grab him!” he shouted to Swanson.
With his mountain looming over their shoulders, they scrambled back into the jungle, Swanson dragging Ivers behind him.
They set up camp beneath an overhang of vines and moss and river rock.
In the sky, the Draqons circled. The canopy was too dense, and their numbers were too small to launch a full-scale assault on the Vilkas while they were holed up in a dense part of the jungle. They’d wanted the wolves racing through the open pass where they could pick them off one by one until only the Alpha remained. Then they probably would have taken him to their hive and tortured him in front of their queen. Bled out all his secrets, his pack’s secrets. And then they would have executed him and hung his body high in the sky for all the clans to see.
And Gerrit had led his pack straight into it.
He should have known better than to try the pass. But he’d flung himself and everyone else straight into it. And they’d all paid the price. All except Swanson, the unconscious Ivers laid out next to the fire, and the woman huddled on the opposite side, as far from them as she could get.
He’d nearly gotten the human killed today too, and he didn’t even know her name. He felt a toxic mixture of anger and shame, so he focused on the anger. Through gritted teeth, he asked, “What’s your name?”
She looked up. Her tattered uniform was covered in fresh blood, most of it his, though she’d received a few new cuts during the run through the jungle to add to the ones from her crash. But her shoulder didn’t smell infected. One good sign, at least. “Why do you care?”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“You’re that stubborn? You won’t even tell me your name after I saved you?”
“Saved me?” she sputtered. “When the hell did you save me? It seems to me like you need to be saved.”
Swanson stiffened at the words, and Gerrit snarled. The woman’s harassing scent flared with a touch of fear.
She wrapped her arms around her waist and looked away. “Jude,” she said like she had to dredge the word up from her marrow.
What kind of name was Jude? “Fine. I’m going on watch. Keep him alive,” he commanded Swanson with a nod toward Ivers.
“Sir,” Swanson said, “I should treat your shoulder.”
Jude’s focus latched onto the seeping wound from the Draqon’s arrow. He rolled the joint and fought back a hiss of pain. It hurt worse than he’d expected. But the woman’s fast thinking had probably saved his life. She stared at him, her brown eyes unblinking.
“It’s fine.” He stood and slipped into the foliage.
As he went, he heard Swanson say, “He’ll be okay.”
“Did I ask?” the woman—Jude—fired back.
Jude. A stupid name.
He hated that it suited her so well. That he liked it.
7
Jude
They were wolves. Wolves.
As in alien shape-shifting wolves. Jude got light-headed with the knowledge, the world spinning a little from everything she had seen and learned over the course of the last day. One minute, they’d been men and the next … wolves.
This couldn’t possibly be real. Maybe she had finally reached that stress point where the mind broke and went insane. Or maybe her body was still lying next to her ship, bleeding out while her mind hallucinated about super-hot, shape-shifting wolfmen.
She almost preferred those two options over her current reality, because her present reality had huge fucking mosquito things the size of her fist that left massive welts on the bare patches of skin showing through her tattered flight suit.
Hours passed. The sun hung brightly in the sky above them, or at least Jude assumed so based on the slivers of light cutting through the canopy. Down here, everything green surrounded her, tinting her vision and shading her from the blazing sun. In the jungle, it was almost cool. She worried about the coming night and how low the temperatures would plummet.
She worried about a shit ton of things while she waited, biting her cheek to keep from demanding answers from her captors—or saviors. She still hadn’t decided on what side of that line they landed.
Did her ship’s locator work? Did Warren’s family know he had died, that it had happened because of her distraction? How would her sister, Linnea, fare on the space station alone without Jude to look after her? Could she find a way to get comms back to the station? She also found herself worrying about Swanson and Ivers, who Swanson kept tending to with a grim face. And dammit, she worried about that fool Gerrit’s shoulder. He should have at least wrapped it before heading into the jungle like a stubborn asshole.
She’d nodded off into a partial state of rest, half awake and half asleep, when Gerrit appeared through the leaves. She jumped and blinked quickly to clear her vision.
He didn’t spare her a glance as he crouched beside Ivers.
“How is he?” he asked Swanson.
Swanson ran a hand covered in dried blood through his hair. “I hear his blood slowing.” He peeled up Ivers’s tight shirt to reveal a distended and slightly discolored belly. “He’s bleeding on the inside.”
As Jude watched, Gerrit cocked his head and leaned closer to Ivers, as if he was listening, as if they honestly could hear the wounded man’s heartbeat. Perhaps alien shape-shifting wolves had excellent hearing.
Yep, definitely going insane.
Then Gerrit sniffed the air, and Jude had had enough. “You’re not really wolves, are you? Like, seriously? And stop sniffing at him like that. It’s creepy as shit. I know you can’t really smell his blood.”
Gerrit glanced back at her, his face blank. “We’re called Vilkas, and yes, our second forms are wolves. I can smell his blood. I can hear his heart. And I know he’s dying.”
Jude sucked in a breath as Gerrit turned back to Swanson, ignoring her as her mind reeled from his matter-of-fact declaration of being a freaking werewolf alien.
They leaned over Ivers and spoke in low voices.
Jude didn’t try to e
avesdrop. She knew what it felt like to tend to a dying comrade. They were probably saying something along the lines of keeping Ivers comfortable, though he was unconscious and would probably never wake up again. Not without medical assistance very, very soon. And Jude got the impression they were far from help of any kind.
Swanson went on watch after consulting with Gerrit. He folded into the vegetation almost as quietly as Gerrit had.
Sexy, ninja-like, shape-shifting wolfmen aliens.
Gerrit sat beside Ivers, his hand on the man’s arm. His eyes drifted closed, but Jude could tell he wasn’t sleeping. His posture stayed alert and his breathing shallow. Even still, Jude jumped when he spoke. “How’s your shoulder?”
She flexed the joint and grimaced at the stiffness. It hurt, but hell, she’d been bitten. She would be more concerned if it didn’t hurt. Her back was sore, but she could manage. Whatever medicine they had put on her wounds worked wonders. “I’m fine, but I need a radio.”
Without opening his eyes, he said, “I need half my army here and a doctor who can save Ivers’s life. Do you see any of those around?”
“You have an army?”
At the skepticism in her voice, he opened his eyes and stared blankly at her. “I’m Gerrit, son of Kaveh, and Alpha to Clan Vilka. Of course I have an army.”
Jude was used to men overstating their status to try to impress her. People said she was pretty with her thick brown hair and brown eyes, long legs, and decent curves. She could tell what it sounded like when someone used their various accomplishments and exaggerated lies to impress her. But Gerrit spoke so flatly, and with such disinterest, that she actually believed him. “You’re the Alpha? Is that like a king?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
She’d be fascinated and maybe a little impressed if she wasn’t so damn alone out here. “Well, I still need a radio.”
The silence stretched for so long that Jude was about to press her point further, when Gerrit finally said, “We’re within range of the Hylan base. They disallow all technology in their area. In the interest of peace, we brought no radios. Nothing.”