I slumped in the Kulks hold as they spoke of victory to each other. My whole leg throbbed, I could barely breathe behind the crushing hold the Kulks had on my neck and chest.
“I didn’t think it would be this easy,” one said.
“She was right where he said she’d be.”
“Yeah, but—”
A whistling sound cut through the air and the Kulk’s words cut off on a gurgle. I opened my eyes and looked down to see him writhing on the ground in a heap, blood pouring out of this neck where a crude blade was sunk between his armor joints.
“What the—”
The Kulk on the other side of me dropped to the ground on a muffled scream. At my back, I could hear the last Kulk’s heartbeat slamming against his armor. I had no idea what was killing these Kulks. I didn’t see any hunners. Would I be the last to go? The two Kulks on the ground were barely twitching as they lay in pools of blood.
“Who’s there?” the Kulk holding me called out.
Rustling came from above us. I looked up but could only see a mess of blue leaves. The Kulk muttered a low curse and began to run. I thought we would get away from whatever was trying to kill us when he grunted and tripped over his feet.
We hit the ground, his bulk landing on top of me, and I gasped for breath. I caught a glimpse of blue, black, and white just before my head slammed into something hard and everything went dark.
Three
Miranda
I came awake to a pair of black eyes inches from my face. I tried to scream but pained surged up my throat—probably a result of the Kulk’s grip on it. I could only manage a hoarse whine.
The face in front of me jerked back, and I found myself in the presence of a Drixonian warrior. For a moment, my heart leapt thinking I’d been rescued. Until I realized he wasn’t a Night King.
He wore no armband at all, which meant he wasn’t a part of any clavas. A lonas.
I tried to get my feet under me but remembered too late my ankle was non-functional. Pain shot through me and with a cry, I fell back to the green dirt. I gripped my ankle, which had managed to nearly double in size in a short amount of time. Tears of pain streaked down my cheeks as I did my best to breathe through the agony.
Knowing there was no way I could get away, I tried to assess the warrior in front of me. He was massive, easily as big as Gar. His body was streaked with dirt and he wore only a pair of threadbare pants. No boots. His hair hung down to the middle of his back, and was a mass of loose strands, braids, and dreadlocks. Two streaks of white hair started at his temples, giving him a wild look. In fact, everything about him was a little cavemanish. Scars covered him, the most gnarly being a nasty gash at his throat.
I held out my hands to show I had no weapons, as if he couldn’t tell by one look at me I was no threat. “I’m Miranda. I’m with the Night Kings. Please don’t hurt me.”
There was zero recognition in his dark eyes. Shit, of course he couldn’t understand me. All the warriors had to have their implants updated with our language. But I’d be able to understand him, as I had an implant. If he would talk. So far, he’d done nothing but stare at me.
Something stirred beside me, and I let out a little shriek as the Kulk who had previously held me twitched with a groan.
The Drixonian moved fast as lightning. He gripped the Kulk’s head with both massive hands and with a vicious twist snapped his neck. The body fell limp beside me, and I didn’t even flinch. I’d seen enough death and violence since landing on this planet. Seeing I knew what that Kulk wanted to do with me, I couldn’t find it in me to feel sorrow at his demise.
But there was still the little—well, big—problem of the silent Drixonian at my side. I opened my mouth to plead my case and try to get him to speak when my wrists started to tingle.
I ignored them until the irritation turned to a burning sensation. I lifted my wrists and stared in disbelief as two dark lines ran parallel to each other around my wrists, almost like an invisible tattoo gun.
“No,” I murmured to myself. “No, no, no, no.” I rubbed frantically at my skin, but the lines were growing. Just as a pattern began to appear between the lines like an inked bracelet, I heard a growl.
The Drixonian stared at his wrists as an identical pattern to mine appeared on his blue-scaled skin. His nostrils flared and his chest heaved.
I knew what these lines were. The Drixonians called them loks, and the matching pattern on my wrists and this unknown warrior meant we were mates, picked by their karma-like Fatas.
Just as the pattern finished, the loks glowed a bright yellow before dulling to a gold which stood out prominently on my dark skin. My head spun as my mind felt crowded with something else. Someone else. The girls had told me about this benefit of the loks—they could feel their mate’s emotions in their head at all times.
That had sounded exhausting to me. I had enough of my own damn emotions. This warrior’s aura, as the girls called it, appeared like a cloud of gray smoke. It shifted and churned violently. His emotions were hard to decipher, because while I could detect shapes behind the smoke, they were murky and blurred. Fragmented.
He grabbed my wrists and tugged me to his side in a not so gentle manner as he compared our loks. I sucked in a breath at the heat coming off his body, and his utterly dominating presence. Only Gar and Daz exuded an alpha strength like this guy.
I’d been told not all Drixonians could be trusted. Hell, we’d just fought a battle with another clavas who had every intention of harming us women. Where did this guy fall on the good and evil scale? As much as I didn’t want a mate, my first priority was survival, and I could only hope these loks meant he wouldn’t harm me. Right now, his grip was a little too tight on my arms, and his body felt coiled like a spring. I hoped when he set himself free, it wasn’t to my detriment.
Of course, Fatas hadn’t mated me with someone calm like Hap or Nero. Oh hell no. My mate was some scarred loner with a death grip.
For a moment, he didn’t move, and despite the fear coursing through my body like electricity, I met his gaze. Just when his smoky aura seemed to reach a boiling point, it suddenly fell flat. The warrior’s eyes cleared for just a moment, and a curl of purple danced across his black pupils. I couldn’t look away, entranced by the beauty and the sudden calmness of his aura.
He blinked, as if surprised, and reached out a trembling hand toward my face. I was shocked too, because despite my fear, I found I wanted to feel his touch. My fingers itched to chase away that choking smoke of his aura to see what lay behind it.
Suddenly, a rustling sounded in the distance. The warrior’s head went up, and his entire body went still. Then, before I could blink, he picked me up off the ground and sprinted through the forest.
We moved so fast everything was a blur. I wanted to call for Gar, but my throat still hurt like hell, and I was using all my strength to keep from puking as we whizzed by blue trees.
He ran for what felt like miles until he reached the base of a massive tree trunk and launched himself up the trunk. While holding me with one arm, he climbed the tree with his other three limbs. I glanced down, glad for once I couldn’t see well because I didn’t want to know how high off the ground we were.
He leapt from branch to branch and just when I felt I couldn’t take much more, he stopped abruptly and placed me on my one good leg. Thankful for his arm still bracing me, I swayed with dizziness. I blinked a few times before I was able to figure out where we were. Or more importantly, where we were not. We were not safe on the ground. We were in a tree and before us was a structure supported by a web of tree branches. A house, complete with four walls and a room.