The Alien's Future: An Alien Warrior Romance Read online

  After Shep dismounted, he grabbed his cane and approached us slowly, gaze scanning us. He didn’t say a word as he approached Tark and picked up his wrists. Rotating them, he ran his fingers over the golden tattoo-like markings. “Unbelievable,” his whispered. “I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime…”

  “Does he know what this means?” I asked Tark, holding my own wrists out.

  “I think he does,” Tark answered.

  Shep’s body jerked. “And you found the chip for her implant? I wish I could understand her.”

  “I did.” Tark’s chest puffed out. He produced the implant updater he’d stowed in his pants. He held it up to Shep’s ear and pressed a button. The male flinched, before his eyes shifted to me.

  I waved with my fingers. “Hello.”

  He grinned. “Hello, Enna.” Shep cupped Tark’s cheek and patted it a few times. “Fatas chose well.”

  “What does that mean?” Tark asked.

  “Your Enna is your fated mate, your cora-eternal. Those bands on your wrists are unique only to you two. Like fingerprints. Back on Corin, they were rare. One or two in a generation.”

  “A generation? For Drixonians wouldn’t that be… every five hundred cycles?” I stared in awe.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Shep said. “For us, we worship no God and believe only in Fatas, who alters her plan to allow us to prosper.” He shook his head, and his voice shook. “For so long, many thought she was punishing us. But this…” He gestured to our wrists. “This means she has given us hope again.”

  “By giving us something to live for? To protect our females?” Tark asked.

  “Not only to protect them, but to continue the procreation of our species.” I sucked in my breath at procreation as Shep went on. “Those wrist marks proving she’s your cora-eternal means you are compatible to breed.”

  I nearly choked on my own spit. “I can have Drixonian babies?”

  Shep nodded, and then his expression turned dark. “Tark, it’s even more important now that you separate yourself and hide her away. Maybe the Uldani know already, but if they get their hands on a human female… It won’t be long before they find out.” He pointed to the bike he’d ridden on, and I now recognized the second bike he’d towed. “I brought your bike.”

  Tark looked like a kid who’d been reunited with his puppy. “You did?”

  Shep held out a small screened device. “Here is a comm. If you ever need anything, I’ll be available. Anytime, anywhere.”

  Tark took the comm and slipped it into a pouch on his belt. “I will, Shep.”

  “Maybe you can come visit us,” I said. “You’ve done so much for us.”

  Shep gathered me in his arms. Tark stood nearby, tense but allowing the touch. I rolled my eyes at his anxiety over another male touching me. Shep pulled away and ran his hand over my hair before releasing me. “Maybe I will. I’ve decided to go lonas as well. Take some time to travel around. This… This changes everything.”

  Tark nodded. “I will let you know where we settle. Come by and see us sometime, old man.”

  The two males hugged, and then Shep untethered Tark’s bike from his own. I didn’t miss a large pack on the back, which Shep must have packed for us. With a final wave, he took off into the distance, leaving us with a crashed spaceship, a hover bike, and still many more questions. Tark stared off into the distance after Shep’s bike.

  I slipped my fingers into Tark’s and squeezed. “Are you okay?” I asked. I knew the answer; I could feel his emotions in my head. He was a little sad, but mostly feeling determined.

  He glanced down at me, and his expression cleared, warmth filling his gaze. “I’m good. I will heal. We have an expression, left over from our civilization on Corin: she is all. I knew it but never fully understood it. And now I do. You are all, Enna. And as long as you are with me, I will always be okay.”

  “Me too,” I said, nerves fluttering in my chest like a flock of sparrows. “So the plan is…?”

  “The plan is we get on my bike, and we ride. We land wherever it feels right.”

  “We land wherever it feels right,” I echoed, excitement spiraling in my blood. “Let’s do it.”

  As we soared over the blue grass and green dirt in his bike riding toward our future, I decided maybe I was exactly where I was meant to be. Alien planet with an alien mate, and all.

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  Thank you so much for taking a chance on a new author and checking out my series! I had so much fun writing this story, and I have lots of plans for my Drixonians.

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  Check out the first full-length novel in the Drixonian Warrior series:

  The Alien’s Ransom

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  Frankie: I thought alien abductions only happened in movies. But here I am on a strange planet with green soil and a gang of muscled, wicked-horned aliens on hover bikes. All I want to do is go back to Earth, but the alpha male in charge has decided I belong to him. Now I'm on the back of his bike speeding to an unknown destination and super freaked out about liking his biceps and serious scowl. Good thing I have some banked personal days, because this might take awhile...

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  Daz: The job is supposed to be easy. All I have to do is deliver a spaceship of living cargo to the vile Uldani and they'll release my brother. If I fail, they'll take it out on him. Except the cargo is something I've never seen before--human females. The one called Frankie is beautiful and soft, and I've already spilled blood for her. Now how am I going to save my brother? Because this human female is mine.

  Available on Kindle Unlimited

  (Tark and Anna make an appearance! You don’t want to miss what they’re up to! *grin*)

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  Read on for an excerpt of The Alien’s Ransom (Drixonian Warriors Book One)

  The Alien’s Ransom

  From Chapter One

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  There were a lot of things public school didn’t prepare me for. How to balance a checkbook. How to change the oil in my car. The proper way to load a dishwasher.

  But public school definitely, most freaking definitely, did not prepare me on how to deal with extraterrestrial motorcycle clubs.

  Yeah, you heard me. E.T. motherfuckers on wheel-less bikes that hovered above the ground. Well, okay, so they didn’t look like E.T. They looked more like… giant horned bodybuilders covered in shiny scales in various tones of blue.

  We heard them first, a ground-shaking rumble like a volcanic eruption before they appeared over the horizon like a locust horde. One rode out in front, like the president, with the others flanking him. Well, I assumed they were males. They were fairly humanoid, with noses and mouths and two eyes. Wicked black horns corkscrewed out of the side of their heads, ending in sharp points. The bikes looked a lot like regular motorcycles on top, but instead of wheels, flat circular disks the same circumference as the bike’s body spanned the bottom. And they just…hovered. And soared.

  I sat on the ground with six other women, wearing whatever we’d worn to sleep before we’d been snatched out of our beds. On Earth. We were certainly not on Earth now. This planet was covered in a coating of green dirt, kind of like matcha powder, and the vegetation was blue—from the grass to the distant forest-like area where the hover bikes had emerged.

  A warm breeze blew over my skin, which was nice because I wasn’t wearing much. The craziest thing was not only could I see a sun, but also a whole other freaking planet. It wasn’t like I could leap over there or anything; it was probably still light years away. But it was visible and rising over the horizon with a b
lue-green swirled atmosphere. It reminded me so much of Earth that my heart ached.

  I kept hoping I’d wake up in my apartment to the beeping of my dying smoke alarm because I hadn’t bothered to change the batteries yet. But nope. As much as I wanted it to be, this was not a dream. After we landed on the planet, we’d been ushered out of the spaceship—an actual spaceship!—by another type of alien…species. They were easily eight-feet tall and wide as freaking Grizzlies, so even if they weren’t covered in plated armor and helmets, I wasn’t going to fuck with them. I eyed the gun-like things on their hips and shuddered.

  The Dolphin-Hole aliens had taken their stupid ship and left, just zoomed off into the distance leaving us on this strange planet with Armored Bears and the incoming bikers. We seemed to be in a rather deserted area. I would compare it to the places outside Vegas where the mob buried bodies.

  The biggest biker who rode in front—I assumed he was the leader—came to a stop and five others followed. The bikes settled, kicking up dirt as they dropped to the ground. The dust swirled around the alien’s tree trunk legs as they approached. They wore black pants that looked a bit like shiny leather and black boots. Most of them wore no shirts so their muscles upon muscles were on full display, and their scales were mottled, almost like blue camouflage. A few had ratty-looking vests with patches on them—I didn’t want to know what they had to do to earn those patches. I assumed it wasn’t community service.

  Each one had a black armband on their left biceps. There was some sort of symbol on it that I couldn’t make out. Oh and they had tails. Yes, actual tails, about six feet long. They were thick at the base, about the size of their thighs, and then narrowed to a spiked point. Most of them had some sort of jewelry on the end of their tails. Well, less jewelry and more like weapons. Collars of blades and chains of spikes. Their pants were held up by their tales, with a clasp of some sort at the top of the base, like a backwards belt.

  This entire thing reeked of a handoff, because the Armored Bears, while tense and alert, did not seem surprised at the bikers’ appearance. I kept my eyes on the leader. His armband was a little different—the edges were trimmed in a gold thread, and he was seriously fucking scary looking. His prominent brow was ridged in a series of nubs over his black eyes, and as he flexed his arms, a seam split open from the scales on the outside of his forearms. A row of black blades emerged, about six inches long and four inches wide, shaped like a shark’s teeth. I imagined they could slice through anything, including me. As quickly as they rose, they settled back into his skin, and I wondered if that was some sort of display of dominance. I accepted silently with a shudder. He was dominant. Done. No need for more demonstrations.

  His septum was pierced with a thick ring, and his black hair streaked with silver hung straight to his shoulders. It blew in the breeze like some intergalactic shampoo commercial. Dove for X-Men on Bikes. Christ, I was delirious. My friend Paris always told me I laughed at inappropriate times, and that was true, because my brain seemed to handle stress with humor.

  Something about the leader’s posture and that of the rest of his crew made me uneasy. They weren’t human, but they had similar features, so it was easy to see that to them something was wrong. They glanced at each other, murmuring harsh words in a guttural language. The leader’s nostrils flared as he took us in with his fists clenched at his sides. His hand appeared to have five fingers, each topped with a pointed black nail.

  Most of the women looked away and a few whimpered, but I kept watching him. His gaze landed on me, and a flicker of darker blue flashed over his scales. His tail thumped the ground, and I felt it, like an electrical current speeding through the dirt. Those eyes looked into my very soul, and a fissure of heat licked at my spine.

  I looked away first, because what the hell was that? Did magic exist here? Did he cast a spell on me? When I looked back up, he was conversing in low tones with the head Armored Bear who stood in front of us holding a wicked looking spear. About a dozen more Armored Bears stood guard over us, as if a bunch of weapon-less women in sleepwear were any threat.

  I had on a pair of short shorts and a large T-shirt. I was better off than the girl in the back who wore nothing but a sheer teddy. Poor thing. But really, who slept in stuff like that? About four of the Armored Bears were checking her out with hungry eyes. Well, from what I could see through the slits in their helmets, I assumed they were hungry eyes. Kind of hard to tell because they had no eyelids, just these big yellow eyeballs. Every once in a while, an opaque film would descend over them before disappearing again. It was freaking me out.

  I stared down at my feet. I’d meant to repaint my toes before bed but had fallen asleep before doing so. They were a chipped bright pink, and sitting here on a foreign planet, I couldn’t believe that I was actually thinking about my stupid fucking toenails. Who gave a fuck when these aliens were going to rape us or eat us? I shivered and glanced around, like I’d find evidence of a gnawed-off human arm laying nearby.

  My way of dealing with stress all my life had been to just… not deal. After my mother died when I was two, my father raised me. He was a fantastic dad, but a little overbearing. He made the decisions for me, and I went with the flow. That had been a fine plan for the most part because my life had been a pretty calm current. Floating on top in an inner tube, I’d been content to let the wind blow me around since I’d never strayed far from shore. When the seas got a little rough, I’d laugh it off and move on. But this? This wasn’t a small storm at sea. This wasn’t even a hurricane. This was Armageddon. My inner tube had popped a long time ago and I was drowning.

  Miranda sat beside me, and although she shot me cautious looks, we hadn’t spoken since I’d woken up. I needed some time to deal with the fact that this wasn’t a dream. I’d bitten my lip to hell, and still I was here and not in my bed. I wasn’t waking up in my apartment, grabbing a granola bar to go, and getting ready for my waitressing job. I wasn’t fielding my best friend’s phone calls about when I was going to pick up my bridesmaid dress. (Never if I could help it. Peach wasn’t my color.) Nope, I was here, on a planet with a gleaming orange sun that seemed so close, I couldn’t understand why we weren’t all burnt to hell, and a sister planet that loomed like a threat.

  “Hey,” I whispered to Miranda, unsure if we were allowed to talk, although some girls were sniffling. Shrieking Blondie sat with her head bowed, hair covering her face, slender shoulders shaking. I wanted to go to her, but the guards glared every time we did so much as scratch an itch.

  Miranda turned to me. “Hey, back.”

  “Sorry for my freak-out back there.” I gestured to the area where the spaceship had landed.

  She smiled. “Hey, it’s okay. You didn’t hear me when I woke, up. I did the same thing, but I got it under control before they shot me full of that paralyzing shit again.”

  “Yeah, what the hell was that?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged.

  “Any idea where we are?”

  “None. Another solar system? Some black hole time warp?” She pointed to where the hover bikes rested on the ground, the sun rays gleaming off the polished metal. “I mean, what are those things?”

  “I vote for black hole time warp. That’s easier than believing this place has existed all this time, and all we’ve accomplished through our space research was dissing poor Pluto.”

  Miranda snickered, and me, being me, the daughter of a loud Italian chef, opened my mouth and hooted.

  Big mistake. Huge. The guard next to me took one of his massive club hands and swung it at me on a hiss. I didn’t have time to duck or dodge because it was coming at me like a chunk of concrete. I managed to avoid a full contact blow, but he still cracked me across the cheek. Blinding pain scorched across my face and down my neck as my head felt like it spun three hundred and sixty degrees. I fell to the side, lungs burning as I inhaled dirt and whatever air was on this godforsaken planet as I tried to stay conscious. Cries surrounded me, and I felt soft hands i
n my hair followed by the sound of Miranda’s soft voice.

  I wasn’t in Jersey anymore, Toto. How I wasn’t dead by that blow, I wasn’t sure. My entire body ached. Did he know humans were fragile creatures made of flesh and bone and blood? I stared at the dirt below as a dark liquid mingled with it. My blood.

  Something thumped the ground, hard enough to make my teeth rattle, followed by a dull roar. Earthquake? Tsunami? Was there even water on this planet?

  Miranda gasped, and my vision cleared in time to see the X-men leader sprinting toward me. I wondered if he planned to finish off the job, and I wasn’t sure I cared at this point. Use me as an example, fucker; I dare you.

  Except he didn’t stop at me. He was heading toward the guard who’d cracked me. His scales seemed alive as ripples of varying blue shades shimmered over his body. His forearm spikes unfurled from his arms, and in my head I heard the Wolverine metal clash sound effect. He leaped in the air, and I swore the entire event happened in slow-motion as his mouth opened followed by a thunderous growl. He brought his arm across his body as he descended—forearm spikes out— and when he dropped in front of the guard, he whipped his arm back across his body to his side. He landed with a massive thud, dust surrounding him.

  I didn’t understand what had just happened. At least, I didn’t understand until the guard’s arm fell off. The same arm that had clubbed me over the head fell off his freaking body and landed in the dirt in front of me with a thud, the fingers still twitching. With a wheezing high pitched squeak, he held his now armless shoulder as thick, clotted liquid squirted from his body.

  What followed was chaos.

  Read the rest of The Alien’s Ransom on Kindle Unlimited!