Chapter 19

Lise

Well, I’d done it. I’d gone and had sex with Adrik, Warlord of Thrail Tyvor.

As I walked up the path towards the ridge where the river flowed, I was still trying to grasp this fact. The huge male who had blown my mind last night was an even, steady presence at my side. It was almost a dream. I couldn’t believe this powerful, gorgeous male was even looking at me, let alone calling me his. I wasn’t a slouch in the looks department. I’d been called “cute,” “pretty,” but Adrik looked at me as if I were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And I was sure he’d seen quite a few females—human and otherwise—during his lifetime.

He was older than me for sure, although not by too much. Mitran ages were measured differently than human ones, which used the standard galactic time measurements, but I put him in his late thirties, maybe even forty. I was twenty-nine. So yeah, he’d lived a bit more life than me. Seen a lot of things. And he wanted me.

And god help me, I wanted him in a way that was making me rethink all my life choices. Primary among them was how the hell I was going to leave this planet and go back to my regular life in my little apartment on Earth, writing stories for the Earth Life News and Galactic Report.

I glanced up over my other shoulder and saw the ever-present flycam—hovering, moving along and recording our trek up the hillside. I looked away from it with a glance towards the sky, wondering what the fuck I was going to put in my column next week. So, readers, this journalist managed to bang a warlord.Read on for all the juicy details! Um, no.

I’d have to decide what to reveal, if anything, and if I didn’t, I’d have to find a convincing way to write around it. I wouldn’t lie, but it also wasn’t very professional. To go around having sex with the warlord of the Thrail I was sent to report on, sucked all objectivity out of anything I wrote about. And on the other hand, this was way more than just sex. My heart was involved. More than just my heart, it was a soul-deep feeling like I needed this man in my life. It might not matter at all what I put in my column. If I decided to stay here, I’d be leaving Hans and the entire Earth Life News and Galactic Report behind and embarking on a whole new adventure.

That was, of course, if all of us women weren’t sent away. That was a real concern.

Six Mitran guards waited where the path took a fork and began to ascend up the rocky slope towards the top of the ridge. It wasn’t terribly steep here, but there were a lot of switchbacks, which had us meandering in a snakelike trail up the slope.

“If you need help, I’m happy to carry you,” Adrik said with a wink as we began.

This trail was narrower and not as well-trodden as the one leading from the buildings to this point. “I’ll let you know, Warlord,” I said cheekily.

There was no point in stating that I exercised at the gym three times a week before I came here. I was in decent shape. The little extra weight I carried was due to my unwillingness to give up cheese and ice cream. And wine. I could handle this hill without help. Now, of course, I was determined to do so.

Our escort was heavily armed. Even Adrik carried not only swords from his belt but also a spear tipped in a mean curved blade. He snapped his fingers and one of the guards trotted over to us. “Did you bring the extra spear?”

“Yes, Pal-Adrik,” the guard replied. He was carrying two spears, one smaller than the other. He handed the smaller one to me.

“This is just in case you need it,” Adrik said. “Most of us wouldn’t admit this, but the spears are helpful in keeping your footing in some of the slippery areas of this trail.”

I smiled at him. “So, you’re saying there’s no shame in using it as a hiking pole?”

“None at all,” he said. “Tools are helpful, especially in challenging places.”

The guard called out to Adrik. “Our scouts saw nothing up there. No sign of Dessican activity at all.”

“Good.” Adrik nodded ahead. “Proceed. I don’t want to be up here any longer than we have to be.”

We worked our way up the sloping terrain. The river had gouged a depression that had effectively sliced the mountain in half, leaving the hill on the one side with all the landing pads, and the higher rocky mountain on the other side. The valley stretched through the middle. The water ran faster. Here, we moved through unique-looking trees that seemed to bend to the increasingly colder and windier conditions at the top of the ridge.

At last, we arrived. The six Mitran warriors spread out, eyes keen as they scanned the horizon, where the rocky, inhospitable land reached out in peaks and some snowy forests. I could see smoke rising in the distance, and the tops of some buildings. “Are those the Dessicans?” I pointed to what looked like a settlement far off.

“Yes.” Adrik nodded. His eyes narrowed on the same place I was looking. “They grow bolder with every passing season.”

I winced. “It can’t be easy to live out here. It looks very cold and not much is growing.”

“They lost the war centuries ago.” His voice was flat. “We don’t even have a number of how many Mitrans they massacred. This is the longest time we have had peace on this planet.”

I glanced worriedly at the fast-moving river. “Then I hope what we find does not implicate the Dessicans and spark another war. I hope it’s something natural.”

Adrik turned hard eyes to mine. “If we find something up here, it will be linked to the Dessicans. I am certain of it.”

We walked along the river. I watched carefully, looking for anything that appeared out of place and hoping I would find something. At the same time, I hoped I wouldn’t. And then suddenly, I stopped and stared at the running water. The river was narrower here and the water had an interesting gleam to it. I couldn’t quite explain it, except that it sparkled a little bit more than the rest of it.

“What do you see?” Adrik asked me.

I waved a hand in the general direction of the river. “It looks different here. Don’t you see it? It’s a little bit, I don’t know. Shiny.”

Adrik squinted at the water, frowning. “It doesn’t look any different to me.”

“You really should think about getting your eyes checked,” I said, and I didn’t mean anything snarky by it. “It’s a simple procedure to get your vision corrected.”

“Perhaps human eyes perceive a different spectrum than Mitrans,” he said. “I can see the riverbed just fine and it does not look any more shiny than anywhere else.”

I went to the edge of the water and knelt down where it looked the most different to me. Something was different. Something wasn’t right here. Even the way the water flowed looked strange, as if there was an extra thickness to it. I dipped my hand into the running water and felt around, and gasped as my fingers touched on something unusual. “Adrik, look at this.”

He crouched beside me. Jutting out a little bit from the sediment and sand edge of the river was a small tube. It was clear and looked like a drinking straw back on Earth. “You can see this, can’t you?”

“Yes,” he said ominously. He looked at me, eyes narrow and angry. “I think we know where to take our water samples.”

I filled four small jars with the water that ran in this part of the river, sealed the caps on and gave them to Adrik, who packed them away in the bag he carried on his back. His mood had changed. He was grim, tense.

“What do you think the medic will find?” I asked to fill the edgy silence.

“Nothing good. Something flowed from that tube. I could feel pressure on my fingers.”

“Then we’d best head back and get a look as soon as we can.” I was grateful for the spear. It made me feel a little more in control, now that the Dessican threat was so very real. “Who knows what this stuff is.”

“Whatever it is, it did not register on any of the tests Gexor ran. He checked for all the normal toxins and pathogens.”

“Perhaps this one time you’ve been outsmarted,” I said.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

We gathered up the warriors and headed back down the winding trail towards the Thrail. We were two-thirds through when Dikon came running up to us.

His chest heaved. His eyes were wide and panicked and he drove the butt of his spear into the ground. “Something has happened to the human females,” he said in a panicked voice. “They’re dying. All of them.”

“What?” Adrik stepped forward. “Dying. Are you sure?”

“Please, you must come fast.”

Three of the six warriors let out cries. They obviously had mates in the Thrail.

We ran, leaping over roots and rocks, and when I couldn’t keep up, Adrik picked me up and carried me.