by Tracy Lauren
But I smell that wooden counter and hear the hum of the fridge in the corner.
“Get your lazy buns up, girl. Don’t you have some studying to do?” My grandpa’s voice is gravelly and rich, just like it always was.
“Why are you always making me study anyway, Grandpa? Wouldn’t it be more fun to go cast some lines?” I ask him, pushing out of the folding chair behind the counter to go look out the window at the sparkling lake.
“It’s just my way of helping you, girl. It’d break my heart to see a smart thing like you spend your life in a chicken shit town like this one. Kids gotta grow up and move on out in the world.”
“What about Daddy? He doesn’t live but two miles from you and he seems plenty happy.”
“Working in the garage six days a week, breaking his back for you kids. Yeah, he’s happy. It’s easy for a daddy to be happy. But I’m telling you, you’re smart, Faith girl. There’s so much more for you out there. So, let me help you,” he says, shoving a book across the counter at me. A few seconds tick by as I try to stare at it, but my eyes struggle to focus on the words. Nothing makes any sense.
“Tell you what, if you hang on a little longer, I’ll put these bobbers on the lines and we’ll get out on that lake just as soon as you wake up.”
“Wake up?” I question, finally looking over at my grandpa. But we aren’t in the bait shop anymore. I can’t really see where we are. It’s like there’s all this bright light and it’s hard for me to keep my eyes open in the face of it. But I can see my grandpa’s outline and I can feel him holding my hand.
“What happened, Faith girl?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, letting a sob hit me. I clutch my hand to my stomach, worrying that it will hurt, but it feels numb now. “I think…I think I was stabbed,” I tell him, searching my memory. I remember the blood pooling at my feet. I remember it seeping through my fingers.
“No, you weren’t,” he tells me. “You were helping someone. Just like I always tried to help you, just like your daddy always tried to help you kids, because that’s what we do in this family. Isn’t that what I taught you, Faith girl?”
“Yeah, Grandpa,” I admit. “It’s just…it isn’t always so easy.”
“No, but when it matters it’s the only choice you can make.”
“I’m ready, I am. I just…don’t know how anymore… I don’t know where to start.”
“Cast a wide net and you’ll catch something worthwhile. Anything else you can just throw right on back.”
I nod, knowing the work ahead of me won’t be easy. No one ever promised it would be. I wipe away my tears and blink harder against the light, trying to focus on my grandpa. I want him to know that I get it, that I know he’s right.
“Thank you…” I begin, still blinking, trying to force my eyes open.
Slowly, the figure over me comes into focus. The bright light is still behind him, but it isn’t my grandpa standing there. It’s a massive alien man, with green eyes that seem to shine a little less brightly than they normally do.
“Rylan?” I ask. “Where did he go?”
Rylan breathes a sigh of relief. He clutches my hand harder and his eyes twinkle back to life. “Who? Are you talking about Visakha? You do not have to worry about anything, Faith, I took care of him.”
My memories start to sort themselves out. My grandpa wasn’t here with me. He couldn’t have been. I try to sit up but wince at the pain.
“Stay where you are, Faith, you’re healing.”
“Stay where I am?” I repeat, slowly letting the words sink in. “Rylan! Where are we?” I ask frantically, hoping it isn’t too late.
“I cloaked the ship and moved it to a valley on the far side of the hunting grounds. I had to get you stabilized before we moved on,” he tells me. “Faith,” he chokes, “for a moment there I didn’t think you were—”
“Stop, stop, stop! Not now! Rylan, they’re running out of time! Oh, thank God we’re still here!” I try to sit up again, already forgetting the severity of the pain in my gut, but that stabbing sensation has me dropping right back onto the medical table.
“Careful! Faith, what are you talking—?”
“The others, we have to help them. Anyone else that’s still down there, before it’s too late, before the hunters get to them,” I tell him desperately, clinging to his hand.
“You want to help the others? To bring them aboard?” Rylan asks, shocked. “Just the humans?”
“Everyone. Please hurry, Rylan. I’m sorry I made you wait so long to help them. I was scared. I still am but…” I trail off.
“We have to try,” he finishes for me, and I smile up at him as tears slip down my cheeks. “Anything for you, Faith,” he tells me as he stands, but I keep my grip tight on his hand, pulling him back.
“Rylan?”
“Yes, my Faith.”
“I love you. You know that, right?” I ask him. He looks down at the heavily bandaged wound on my stomach as medical equipment beeps and chimes in the background.
“I don’t know how I ever could have doubted it,” he says, leaning down to kiss me gently.
Epilogue
Faith
Four years later
“Wake up, you lazy thing!” Rylan says as he rips the curtains open, letting the sunlight spill into our bedroom.
“Lazy? If that isn’t the worst joke I’ve ever heard in my life,” I complain, pulling a pillow over my head. “Between my insatiable husband and my teething baby I don’t think I had even one hour of uninterrupted sleep last night.”
“That is true, my wife,” he says plopping down on the bed next to me. “I don’t know how Tomar and I ever got so lucky,” he tells me with a gentle tug to my hair.
I toss the pillow aside and smile up at my husband. “Thank you, a little appreciation goes a long way. Where is Tommy?” I ask, sitting up.
“You wouldn’t believe it. You know the large nut tree behind the house? Tommy climbed all the way to the top. I came in to get you so he could show his momma what a good climber he is.”
“Oh my God, Rylan. You’re such a goof. Where is he really? Taking a nap in the living room?” I ask, rolling my eyes at my comedian of a husband.
“No, I speak the truth. Listen,” he says, gesturing out the open window. On the breeze I hear my son’s giggles.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I shout, jumping out of bed and running through the open French doors which lead to the rear of our property. Luckily our closest neighbor is over three miles away, so I don’t have to worry about anyone hearing me shouting curse words. When I make it to the massive tree that shades our home I see something moving up in the canopy. Sure enough, there’s my baby, 15 feet up, in a damn tree.
“Tomar Graz Bregen, I do not care if you are half Aragrandani, you get your diapered little butt down here right now!” I shout up at him, but as advanced as my sweet son’s motor development is, he’s still just a baby. Well, a toddler now, I suppose. And even though my words are stern, he just laughs at his momma’s angry face.
Rylan joins me at the base of the tree and looks proudly up at Tommy. “Rylan, I’m about to have a damn meltdown. You get my baby out of that tree right now.”
With a gentle caress down my back and a wry smile, Rylan whistles up at Tommy and to my shock and horror Tommy lets go of the branch he was dangling from and drops through the leaves at an alarming speed. I scream out, but my baby falls deftly into his father’s arms.
“You two are trying to kill me!” I scream, clutching at my chest. But the men in my life just laugh.
“This is normal, my wife. I promise you. All Aragrandani children grow up climbing trees, they get messy, they even swim in lakes,” he says gesturing at the sparkling water a skipping stone’s throw away from our home.
“Yup, you’re definitely trying to kill me,” I tell him, pulling Tommy into my arms with a grunt. Tommy’s not quite a year and a half, but he’s already over 50 pounds. Apparently the Aragrandani don’t make sm
all babies, which is okay with me. It just means I have that much more chubby cheek real estate to plant my kisses on.
“Don’t you scare Momma like that,” I coo into my baby’s ear as I rock him, but he just covers my mouth with his fat little fingers and laughs.
“I have an idea,” Rylan tells me as we make our way back inside. “How about we leave Tommy with his aunts this afternoon and you and I head down to the lake…”
“Oh, I like where this is going,” I tell Rylan as he sneaks up behind me to wrap the baby and me in a big hug.
“We can go to the hammock and take a nice long nap before dinner.”
“A nap, with you, in the hammock? With no 50-pound baby crawling on me?” I ask. It sounds like the best date night a mother could ask for. “But this won’t work," I lament. “We haven’t even called your sisters yet, who knows if they’ll even be free.”
“I already talked to them this morning, my love. They will be here before lunch.”
“Really? Who’s coming?” I ask, just as excited to see my sisters-in-law as I am for that nap in the hammock with my husband.
“All of them of course. One mention of their little nephew my sisters come running, you know how they are.”
“I do,” I sigh. “That’s why I love this family so much.”
“Mmmm, and we love you. Now go eat your breakfast before it gets cold. As soon as my sisters get here I am whisking you away to a shaded hammock with your name on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Later down at the lake, I take my shoes off to let the water lap at my feet. It feels so cleansing, in a deep and soulful kind of way. I always loved the lake by my grandpa’s bait shop when I was a kid, but now, as an adult and after everything life has thrown me, I appreciate this body of water behind our home in a way that is beyond words. Being here, I feel at peace.
But it isn’t just the water. It’s the feeling of safety. It’s having a home and a family. A long time ago I thought having these things again would be too frightening, that I would live in constant fear of having it all ripped away from me once more. But that hasn’t been true at all. Instead, my family gives me strength above all else.
Rylan was true to his word when we settled here on the Iredescan colony, he didn’t make a fishmonger out of me—though he still loves to joke about it. Nor did we open up a bait shop in our beautiful airy cottage on the hill. But he did find a lovely valley, with a lake in the middle, loosely surrounded by five little homesteads where his sisters and their own new and growing families now live. A dream couldn’t be more beautiful than the life we have here.
It’s a modest life, with most of what we need coming from our property. The rest we get a few miles away, down in the rustic but bustling town. That’s where most of our work is too.
Together, Rylan and I help the colony with all the tech jobs they need done. Sometimes it’s simple stuff, like mechanic work on hover carts. Other times it’s more complex infrastructure or security measures for the planet.
Working with Rylan really is a joy. The man’s an honest-to-God computer genius and he’s still trying to teach me everything he knows about all this alien technology. With each job we complete together I send up a silent prayer of thanks to my grandpa for making sure I got my education, otherwise I’d never be able to keep up.
I love my job out here and I love that it’s something I get to do it with my husband. Even when I was on Earth, the tech industry never left me with the same sense of accomplishment that I get from setting up a safety relay system in the satellites surrounding our new planet or running upgrades at the hospital in town. But the best part of our work is the respect I see Rylan getting. Whenever the planet needs his services, the governor himself contacts my husband and is never slow to sing his praises whenever Rylan pulls off some encryption miracle.
Rylan spent so long living like a second-class citizen, a struggle that I too know the pain of. But here on the colony, all are treated as equals. Well, that’s not completely true… When we first arrived with Rylan’s five unmated sisters, they were treated like queens. Males even came as far as the surrounding moons and planets in the system for a chance to flirt with the beautiful Aragrandani women. Needless to say, my sisters-in-law did not stay single long. I smile at the memories, loving my life, my family, and even our planet. I definitely took the long road getting here, but I’d take any road that led to Rylan, so I can’t say I have regrets.
Regrets, it’s another thing I think about often. If it weren’t for the loving guidance of my husband at the most difficult time in my life, I would be heavy with them. I remember being so scared when we escaped The Hunt. Terrified really. But still, we went back, inviting anyone we could find to escape with us. There was a danger in that, a vulnerability. But it was a fair trade, because that was the day I felt I was no longer a slave. I was me again. Although I only spent 10 days with Jesek Lahan, that time had changed me, scarred me. It took away pieces of who I was and I thought I might never get them back. But Rylan helped me remember who I am. He helped me find myself again.
For a long time after, I worried that someone might come looking for us. But time passed and no one ever did. Finally, I packed up that stage of my life and put it away. I’ve been able to move on.
“What would you like to do first, make love or nap?” Rylan calls to me from the hammock. I shake my head and laugh as I step into the shade under the trees along the bank. My darling husband is lazily sprawled out in the net we’ve hung between two trees, looking so comfortable I just have to join him.
“Who knew parenthood would be so tiring?” I ask, letting him wrap his arms around me as the hammock lightly rocks us. Gently, he toys with the straps to my top with his talons.
“It all comes in stages, my love. We will be tired for a long time to come. Then, when we finally feel rested again, that is when we know it is time to have another baby.”
“Whoa, not yet though!” I laugh. “Let’s at least let Tommy finish getting those terrible molars in.”
“No, not yet,” Rylan agrees. “Still, I think we should practice for when the time comes.”
“Hmm, I think I can agree to a little practice,” I agree, giggling as I climb onto my husband’s lap, and hike my long skirt up around my waist. With great love and care, he tugs my shirt over my head. Appreciation fills his eyes and he stares up at me for a long time before running his talons through my hair. “Have I told you lately how beautiful you are?” he asks. All I can do is smile, because yes, yes, he has.
“In all my days before I met you, my perfect Faith, I never dreamt I could be so happy. No, by far, this is better than any dream.”
“I was just thinking the same thing,” I say, leaning down to kiss him.
Author’s Note
Thank you so much for taking the time to read Hunting Faith. I hope you enjoyed the story. Please take a moment to leave a review, everyone counts for us indie authors.
Special thanks to Aquila editing, cover artist Maria Spada, author JM Link, my wonderful beta and ARC readers, and to all my friends in the science fiction romance community.
If you’d like to stay up to date on my work, find me in my group page on Facebook: Lauren’s Lair.
Read on for an excerpt from HUNTING PURITY!
Excerpt from HUNTING PURITY
Purity
I jerk awake suddenly. My last conscious thought was of a figure jumping out of the trees and lunging at me. I didn’t get a good look at him, but he was wearing some kind of Halloween mask, I think. All I have in my mind are flashes of mottled skin and a hairless head.
“I swear to God. Fucking freshman,” I say aloud, breathlessly. My heart is still pounding in my chest. I take in my surroundings and my dismay only grows.
“Oh no. This is not okay,” I say firmly, looking at the wooden cage I’m in. It looks like they’ve brought me into a clearing within the thicket of trees. Judging by the night sky, I must not have been out for very long. That thought makes me b
ite back anger over the fact that I was out at all. I mean, what the fuck did they give me?
“Hazing is a crime!” I shout. “It is punishable by law and can shut down an organization permanently and I’m not just talking about your chapter! This is unacceptable! I am an active member of the campus’ Fraternity and Sorority Judicial Board and I can tell you right now, you’re in deep shit!”
Beyond my enclosure I hear someone scoff and I peer through the bars. I see a row of cages just like mine, stretching out in both directions, forming a half circle.
“Who’s there? Emily? Hannah? Is that you?”
No answer.
Bright flood lights have been set up outside and it makes it difficult for my eyes to focus on anything in the shadows. “Hello?” I call, but still, there is no reply. I hear only the sounds coming from the trees, they rustle in the breeze and some type of night bird screeches in the distance causing me to jump. Faintly, I detect someone sobbing.
“Completely unacceptable,” I say to myself, crossing my arms over my chest. I suddenly remember my fanny pack. My hands fly to the zipper and I pray for the pepper spray to still be inside, but it’s gone. Luckily, I think I might have an even better weapon… my phone.
I’m about to call the police on these assholes. But when I swipe the screen it doesn’t light up. I hold down the power button and a picture of an empty red battery flashes at me. I frown at it, this doesn’t make any sense. I made sure my phone was at 100% before I left the dorm, there’s no way it could have run out of battery in less than an hour.
“I don’t know if tampering with a person’s phone is criminal or not, but if it is you better believe I’m going to press charges!” I yell at whatever douche bags are hiding out there.