Tamer- King of Dinosaurs Book 6

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “Nomi does seem to have a really powerful ability. Being able to keep someone else from using their powers is a good angle, but I’m hoping we don’t have to ever use it.”

  Emerald gestured to the fire and then touched her hair and eyes.

  “Oh, shit. That is a good idea, we can use Nomi to cut Gee’s power. Then Gee can probably infiltrate behind enemy lines and cause some damage.”

  Emerald smiled in her predatory way, and then she pushed her fist into the palm of her hand again before she gestured up to her forehead and made a horn shape.

  “Fuck yeah,” I laughed. “Nomi turn’s Gee’s flame powers off, Gee grabs a bucket full of Keefaye’s blessed water, and then she sneaks behind enemy lines. That would be a pretty amazing explosion.”

  Emerald nodded as she finished off the last bit of her fish, and then she threw the stick she’d been eating her meal from back into the fire. I finished a bit after her, and then the green-skinned woman slithered across the cool sand so that her slender body was laying against mine.

  “You feel good,” I whispered as I put my arm around her slender shoulders.

  Emerald nodded, and her fingers traced around the light beard on my face for a few moments. Then she leaned in and gently kissed my earlobe before she slid her tongue inside. The sensation sent a shock of pleasure down my spine, and I let out a moan while she continued to kiss and lick my face.

  “If you keep that up, I’m going to make love to you,” I whispered to her between kisses. “I didn’t get a chance to last night with both of you.”

  Emerald nodded, bit her lip, and then stared into my eyes with her white ones. I was about to ask what she was thinking, but then she brought up two of her fingers and raised an eyebrow.

  “Uhhh, well, the whole ‘twin thing’ is kind of every guy’s fantasy, yeah.” I chuckled and then ran my fingers down her back. “Only both of them would be you, so that sounds super fun.”

  Emerald tapped her heart, nodded, and then gestured up to the stars, then she pointed at the dinosaurs around the fire and shrugged.

  “Okay, yeah, I can wait till tomorrow night. My people always say sex on the beach is supposed to be awesome, but it just seems like sand would kind of get everywhere.”

  Emerald held up her hand to her lips to hide a mirthful smile, and then she leaned her head down on my chest and let out a long breath. I could feel her heart beating against mine, and I absently ran my fingers down her spine while I inhaled her scent.

  Her heart began to slow in time with mine, and our chests heaved together while we took breaths simultaneously. I felt my eyelids grow heavy, but then her body twitched gently as deep sleep took her. The motion didn’t quite bring me fully awake, but it made my eyes blink open, and the status menu for my Eye-Q turned on. I moved down to the Women sub-menu, opened it, and then looked at the list.

  Emerald still wasn’t on it, even though she was blissfully sleeping in my arms beside a burning fire in the middle of a prehistoric wilderness.

  Maybe we had to become lovers first? Maybe there was something else to it? Hell, I didn’t even know exactly what the list even meant. Galmine had been on it before the two of us became lovers, but the other women had appeared roughly around the time when we had sex. Part of me thought that the Eye-Q list didn’t matter, since it seemed more like a bedpost notching system than anything substantial, but if it did mean that the women were loyal to me, should I be worried that Emerald wasn’t?

  Should I be worried that the other women on the tribe weren’t on the list?

  I almost laughed at the last part. I trusted Quwaru and my new family, and I knew that they trusted me. I didn’t need to have some list tallying my ownership of them.

  But then again, the list did make me feel a lot better, even if it was just a placebo, and I hoped that Emerald’s name would show up on there after we did make love.

  Chapter 12

  I woke up with Emerald still in my arms and the dawn light creeping out across the ocean waves. I raised my head slightly to glance around the bowl where we sat, and I made eye contact with Bruce across the fire. The big pteranodon let out a happy honk when he saw that I was awake, and then he frog hopped sideways around the fire so that he could push his head against my shoulder.

  I didn’t know if the other dinosaurs had also been sleeping, but Bruce’s honk was a cue for everyone to come to me for their morning pets, and soon Emerald and I were covered with five feathery troodons. Then the pachys rolled over, so that they were wiggling on the ground next to us, and Bruce had to jump back so that he wouldn’t get squished by the heavier animals.

  “Hey, hey!” I laughed as Emerald and I tried to escape the dogpile. “Everyone is gonna get pets!”

  We eventually freed ourselves from the happy crowd of dinosaurs, and then we gave everyone their morning hugs. Even Grumpy got a hug from me, and he let out a surprisingly happy rumble when Emerald put her hand down on his massive head and patted him.

  Breakfast was a big fish that Bruce caught, and once we had eaten our fill, we climbed out of the sand bowl and glanced westward. The sun was three quarters over the ocean in the east now, and I could see that in the distance there were a series of cliffs that jutted into the ocean like fingers. The tops of the cliffs had a thick blanket of trees on them, so it was a bit hard to tell exactly what their topographical layout was, but I thought they looked promising.

  We jumped on Nicole and began our journey across the cool morning sand. The jungle trees to our right were thick, but every four hundred or so yards there was another band of grass that seemed to extend all the way up to the hilltops that overlooked the ocean. We spotted an assortment of grazing dinosaurs getting their breakfast in each open plain, and on the third set, I saw the impossibly long necks of four brontos. They were all gathered together on the plain, but they were feasting on some large jungle trees that ran the perimeter of the grass area. The brontos were a good quarter of a mile up the slope, but they paid us no mind when we rode by.

  It was hard to guess exactly how far away the cliffs were from us, but I was a bit surprised when ten minutes of trotting passed, and they hadn’t seemed to get any larger on the horizon.

  “They are farther away than I thought,” I said to Emerald, “and larger.”

  Emerald nodded and then stuck her thumbs up in the air. I could tell that she was excited about our destination, and her enthusiasm was raising my hopes of finding our new home.

  Then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye slightly behind us, and I spun my head around.

  It was gone almost as soon as I looked, and my eyes searched the jungle line where I thought I had seen the movement. We were two hundred yards away from the trees, so there might have been a possibility that I had imagined the movement, but I’d lived this long in Dinosaurland by trusting my gut, so I sent an order for Bruce to circle around behind us for a bit.

  The pteranodon followed my order without honking, and I slowed Nicole’s trot a bit as I turned back forward.

  “Don’t turn around to look, but I think something is following us,” I said to Emerald just loud enough for it to be heard over the wind. “I think it is the woman from the tree yesterday, but I have no idea how she is keeping up with us.”

  Emerald nodded without turning around, but I did see her white eyes glance down at the spear sheaths on the saddle.

  We continued on for another ten minutes, and I tried to fight the urge to turn and look behind me the entire time. Then, just as I was starting to twist my head around, I heard Bruce let out a honk of alarm, so I twisted around and glanced behind us.

  At first, I didn’t see anything, but then Emerald tapped on my shoulder frantically, and I spun around to see a woman standing out in the sand some hundred yards ahead of us. She had obviously come from the line of trees north of her position, but she was also about a hundred yards from the jungle, and I had only turned my head around to look behind us for a few seconds, so I guessed that she had some sort o
f teleportation power.

  “Woooah,” I said, and my group of dinosaurs all slowed to a halt as I studied the woman.

  It was hard to tell from the distance, but I guessed her to be about my height. She looked almost human, with twisted brown hair that hung long down her back to her waist, olive-tanned skin, and small firm breasts that were held tightly against her chest by a well-worn gray bikini top that reminded me of Sheela’s attire. The woman’s face also looked human, but her nose might have been a bit too sharp, and her eyes were maybe a bit too large and far apart on her face. I could tell they were a light green color that reminded me of mint flavored ice cream.

  Her torso was slender, and she had an obvious washboard stomach over a narrow waist that flowed down to her wide hips.

  And that’s when the illusion of the woman being human kind of broke.

  Below her hips, the woman’s incredibly muscular legs stood coiled and tense. They were smooth and hairless, but an almost inconceivable amount of muscle pushed up against the tan skin there. Each of her thighs were probably wider than her narrow waist, and I imagined that the guy who designed Chun-Li’s character from the Street Fighter videogame would have had a fetish melt down if he saw this woman. The legs looked like they could kick through a cement truck, so I wondered if she actually didn’t have any teleportation powers, but had instead just sprinted to this location in a few seconds.

  “You-should-turn-back-there-is-danger-ahead,” she said in a machine gun rapid fire staccato of words, and it took me a few seconds to piece together what she had just said.

  “Uhhh, hi,” I said as I waved one of my hands at her. “What kind of danger.”

  “A-group-of-men-not-nice-at-all-you’ll-be-in-their-territory-in-ten-minutes-at-your-current-rate-of-travel,” she spat out like a firehose.

  “Can you talk a bit slower?” I asked. “It’s a bit hard for me to understand what you are saying.”

  “Sure,” she answered as she nodded her head. “There is a group of bad men up ahead. I’ve watched them kill a bunch of survivors. They will kill you too, even if you have dinosaurs as your pets.”

  “You know they are called dinosaurs?” I asked her as I patted Nicole.

  “Yes,” she replied. “We have them on my world-and-most-of-them-are-really-dangerous-so-we-do-our-best-to-avoid--”

  “Too fast!” I interrupted her. “Sorry, but--”

  “No, no, that’s fine,” she interrupted me as she raised her hands. “You should go, though.”

  “How many of them are there?” I asked.

  “Ten,” she answered. “They are strong. You should just avoid them. That is what I do.”

  “How long have you been on this world?” I asked.

  “Hard to know for sure,” she said as she glanced up at the sun. “I think four months.”

  “Alone?” I asked as I raised an eyebrow. “That’s impressive.”

  “I am hard to catch,” she said as she took a careful step away from us. When she moved, the muscles in her thighs rippled slightly and seemed to echo up to the curve of her ass. Her legs actually did look human, but just way thicker and loaded with more muscle than a woman body builder would ever be able to put on. I could easily see the reason for her wide hips, since her thighs did seem to have enough space between them to move.

  “We don’t mean you any harm,” I said before she could sprint away. “I’m Victor, the lovely lady at my side is Emerald. The beauty we are riding on is named Nicole, and that is Scoob, Shag, Fred, Velma, Daphne, Bevis, and Butt-Head. Behind us is Grumpy, and Bruce is flying up in the sky keeping watch on everything.” I pointed up when I finished, and her mint-green eyes floated upward so that she could see the pteranodon.

  “Okay,” she answered as she took another step away from us. “I’ve warned you, so now I’m going to go--”

  “Can you answer a few more questions for us?” I asked before she could run away.

  “Maybe,” she replied, and then she cautiously looked over her shoulder toward where she warned us the other men’s camp was located.

  “You said there are ten,” I started, “Do you know any of their abilities?”

  “One can shoot nets out of his hands,” she said. “One can fly for short distances. One can turn into moving gemstones. One has tentacle limbs, and I’ve seen them get chopped off, but then they regrow in a few moments. That’s all I know. You should stay away from them.”

  “I might have to fight them,” I said.

  “Why?” she asked as she raised a foot a few inches off the sand. Her feet actually looked like a normal human’s, but the arch was a bit higher than normal.

  “We need a new home,” I said. “There is another tribe filled with bad people who know where we live. We have to go before they attack us.”

  “I see,” she replied as she lowered her foot back to the sand and turned her torso around to face us.

  “We were looking at those distant cliffs,” I said as I pointed in the distance behind her. “They seem like they are easy to defend and have a good view of the coast. Have you ever been over there?”

  “I have,” she answered without looking in the direction I pointed. “It will be difficult to get there with your dinosaurs, though. There is a wide river in the way.”

  “Fresh water?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she nodded. “That is where their camp is. Where the river meets the ocean. On this side of the beach.”

  “Wait,” I said as I tried to draw the map in my head. “So, they aren’t up on the cliffs? They are below on the beach?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Huh,” I replied with a bit of worry, since it seemed that these men would have set up camp in the higher spot if they could. I could only guess that something was wrong with the location, and I felt my hope deflate a bit.

  “Can you tell us your name?” I asked.

  The woman’s green eyes flickered to Emerald and then back to my face. For half a moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she nodded at Emerald.

  “Why doesn’t she speak?”

  “She can’t,” I replied. “Her race communicates with these gems on their foreheads, so we have to talk to each other using hand--”

  “I’ve watched you talk to each other,” the woman interrupted me. “I just didn’t know why she didn’t speak. She looks like a hunter.”

  “She’s my friend,” I said as I patted Emerald’s shoulder. “We’ve hunted food together, and--”

  “No,” the woman interrupted me as she shook her head. “They are the master race on my world. They hunt us for food. They lead the dinosaurs.”

  “Uhh, well Emerald isn’t one of them,” I said.

  “They have different skin color, and claws instead of nice hands,” the woman continued. “Your friend isn’t one of them, but she looks a bit like them. The same eyes. They are predator eyes. I want to run from her. You have gentle eyes. Kind. So, I am still talking with you.”

  “Emerald and I really appreciate your help.” I kind of wanted to argue with the thick-legged woman, but I knew that it wouldn’t get me anywhere. “We are on a mission, and we need to check out those cliffs. Is there a way around these men and across the river? If there is, we can come back with all my people, and then eliminate them.”

  “How many more people do you have?” she asked as her eyes narrowed. “I told you there are ten of them, and they are very dangerous.”

  “We have more than ten,” I said, “but we are only dangerous to those who try to harm us first. If you want, you can live with us once we find our new home. We all take care of each other.”

  “I’m fine on my own,” she said as she crossed her arms. “If you want to get past them, you’ll need to do it at night; cross the beach by the shore so they don’t see you, and then swim across the river where it meets the ocean.”

  “Okay,” I said as I nodded.

  “Not okay.” She shook her head. “The river is as wide as the distance between us, and
there are hungry creatures in there. Swimming at night is dangerous.”

  “Is there another way?” I asked.

  “You can cut through the jungle to the north of them,” she said as she pointed in that direction, “but there is a hill slope that opens to a plain. They will see you unless you go at night, but then the plain leads to a rocky embankment that will be too hard for you to make it down without light.”

  “Let’s say we can do it, is there a narrower spot on the river where we could cross?”

  “There is,” she said as she nodded. “A mile and a half up river, there is a rocky canyon. It’s only half our distance wide there, and the water flows quickly. It will still be dangerous to cross because of the current.”

  “But you’ve swum across there,” I said as my eyes drifted down to her muscular legs.

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I run and swim fast. Nothing can catch me.”

  “You haven’t told us your name yet,” I said as I gave her my most charming smile.

  The woman turned her mint colored eyes to Emerald, opened her mouth, and then closed it. Then she shook her head and took a few steps away from us.

  “I do not trust your Emerald.”

  “Look, she’s not dangero--” I started to say, but the other woman continued.

  “I have given you the warning. Do what you like. If you go forward, the men will kill you and then rape her. I’ve seen it before. They are horrible. I am done warning now. Goodbye, Victor.”

  Before I could answer, the woman spun on her heel, tensed her legs, and then sprang away from us across the sand.

  To say she “ran fast” would be like saying that the SR-71 Blackbird could “fly fast.” Her legs pumped and tore into the sand like shovels, and her long tangled hair flapped behind her head like a long flag. She almost seemed to blur across my vision like The Roadrunner in the Loony Toons cartoons. There was just the spray of sand, the long stretch of her hair, and then she was gone.

  The trees in the jungle parted at the line where she had faced, but I couldn’t even see her move through it. She had to have gone from zero to a hundred miles per hour in just a blink, and I realized that my mouth was hanging open a few moments after the trees had settled back down again.