CHAPTER ONE

Cara

I FLINCHED AWAY from blinding light, my arm sluggish as I tried to shield my face with my hand. Why did it feel like my insides had been scooped out and replaced with cotton wool? Oh, yeah. Cryo.

If they were waking me up, we were there. Our new planet! A thread of excitement wove through the sluggishness of cryohangover.

I blinked repeatedly, trying to get my eyes to focus.

“What the hell!” My heart skipped. That wasn’t a medic! The thing looming in front of me had to be alien! Like alien-alien, not like on the really old Star Trek ’s where they just glued different things to the actors’ foreheads.

Leathery gray hide covered a hairless head with four solid-black eyes and a little blob of a nose. It opened a large mouth, and a sound like crashing rocks filled the air.

As soon as it fell quiet, I said, “Do you speak English?” I winced. It was such a stupid question, but what the hell else could I ask? Maybe they had some kind of universal translator.

Those eyes stared, unblinking. Then it moved backward, letting more of the room come into view. Instead of waking on a bed in the medbay of ARK 1 , the spaceship I’d left Earth in, I stood upright in my cryopod. This also wasn’t one of the ship’s cavernous cargo holds filled with cryopods. Nope. We were in too small of a room, and instead of white plastic, the ceiling, walls, and floor were made out of unpainted metal.

The alien got even more alien as the rest of it came into view. It had shoulders and two arms that ended in three-fingered hands, but below that, it widened out into a shape like a mini-mountain. The base flared in all directions until it was three to four times as wide as me. It looked like a huge slug without the tail. It glided over the flat floor, but how? Were there a million little legs under there? Did it slide like a snail?

Another rumble of rock on rock from it jerked my gaze upward.

The light wasn’t actually that bright, now that my eyes had adjusted, but it still glinted off the silver barrel of a gun the alien gripped in its meaty fingers.

“Fuck!” My body instinctively tried to backpedal, but I only pushed myself deeper into the gel bed of the cryopod. I started babbling, using my perkiest voice, “Hi! I’m Cara Peterson. I’m from Earth. You’ve probably never heard of Earth. It used to be a really nice planet, but it’s kind of not anymore. That’s why I left.” Oh, god, you’ve lost it now, Cara! I’d been trained to make an armed opponent empathize with me as a person. Who knew if it worked on aliens?

The alien certainly ignored me. Its other hand reached out and engulfed my shoulder, yanking me forward and around.

Damn, damn, damn! I tried every move I knew, but I couldn’t break the grip on my shoulder. The thing was freaking strong.

I swiveled my head, trying to keep the gun in sight. The barrel swung up, then disappeared behind me. Panic made my heart race. “I’m a trained peacekeeper! I help people!”

There was an uncomfortable thunk at the base of my skull as a sharp pain pinched. Then the alien let me go.

I sagged in relief, my muscles so weird and wobbly from cryo that I fell forward, face planting into the gel bed of my cryopod. Yep! That’ll really convince them you’re someone to take seriously. A bark of hysterical laughter pushed through my throat.

The grinding rocks came again as a hand lifted me and turned me around. More and more noise poured over me, coming from the alien holding me and another one I couldn’t see.

The sound stopped, those four inky-black eyes boring into me.

“Sorry, dude.” I licked dry lips. “I don’t know what you want.”

None of this was how it was supposed to go! The experts on Earth had programmed ARK 1 to fly until it found a habitable planet. The ship would wake a select team of personnel. As a peacekeeper, I was one of them. Kind of a police officer, solider, and bodyguard all rolled into one, my first duty would be to protect the scientists sent down to evaluate the planet. The women were all brilliant, but common sense wasn’t their forte. Thank god, I had it in bucketfuls.

It had sounded exciting and grand and way better than a dismal corporate security job on a dying Earth. And the thing I’d been too embarrassed to tell anyone else was I’d also imagined it would be like my favorite sci-fi TV shows and movies, the classic ones I used to binge watch with Gramps.

You wanted there to be aliens, Cara! Here they are.

When my ship had left Earth in 2123, humans had still thought we were alone in the universe. I’d always hoped we weren’t.

I’d also hoped for something different than this. Maybe watching Captain Kirk horndog his way through new alien species had skewed my view of what “first contact” actually meant.

The alien spoke again, its large mouth opening enough to show it didn’t have a tongue. A second one glided into view. The two of them looked exactly alike. Were they twins or clones? Or were there differences I couldn’t see with human eyes? I shrugged. I had bigger things to worry about.

While they talked, I craned my head over my shoulder, searching for clues. Crates in various sizes and colors filled the rest of the room, but in the back stood two upright white rectangles—cryopods. Excitement skittered through me. Hell, yeah! I’m not alone! There are more women here.

Then reality hit. Being “here” wasn’t exactly candy and roses. It was my job to protect those women. Thank god they were still asleep.

The gray aliens fell silent, and I turned back around. A twinge of pain flashed from the base of my skull. What the hell had they shot me with, and why?

The one in front of me grabbed my shoulder again and marched me forward. My feet caught against the flat floor, my leg muscles still not working right. How damned embarrassing! I was supposed to be a fighter, a protector, and I could barely walk.

The alien shoved me forward, its grip impossibly strong. The damned thing really was a mountain, ready to roll right over me like a landslide. I’ll call you Mount Slug .

We rounded a stack of crates, and the end of the room came into view. A large metal door hinged upward, and a wide ramp descended to the ground outside. This was the cargo hold of a ship, just not my ship.

I staggered forward, too fascinated by the view outside to care that the alien had to almost drag me.

This was everything I’d dreamed about.

Sunlight poured from a pale-orange sky, bathing a busy street filled with aliens of all different types. The chaos and activity of the scene created a whirl of textures and colors. My eyes pinballed from one place to the next. There were so many things to look at I couldn’t focus.

At the bottom of the ramp, I stepped out onto soft, dusty beige dirt. The thin slippers that went with my white cryo onesie hadn’t offered much protection from the hard metal floors of the ship. The ground felt a lot better, and my toes instinctively dug in to steady me.

Wind tossed my straight black hair into my eyes, and I tucked it behind my ear. Humidity gave the air a thick quality as it coated my face, and a wild mixture of scents competed for attention—grilling meat, clashing perfumes, and the rich smell of greenery.

Ships stretched off in a line to the right and left, all of them small, like shuttles made to land on a planet. We stood on a pedestrian avenue, and only a few feet ahead, an open-air market started. Stalls sprang up everywhere, the setup kind of hodgepodge. Each sold something new to discover. I wanted to explore so damned badly I jolted forward. The gray alien’s grip jerked me to a halt.

The babble of numerous voices came from everywhere. None of them sounded like the same language, but people obviously understood one another.

Mount Slug dragged me across the road and up another ramp. This one led to a raised metal dais about four-feet high. When we got to the top, it spun in place, taking me with it so I faced all of the aliens walking past.

This is more like it! Maybe I could find allies or clues, anything that would help be figure out what the hell was going on.

There were more of the gray pyramid-shaped aliens here and there. Their large bodies really did act like mountains, forcing others to go around them.

A new type of alien came close, an upright-walking lizard. Golden eyes topped a snout filled with fangs. Bright yellow covered the chest, darkening to green everywhere else. It looked like a dinosaur made human-sized with normal-length arms. A bit taller than my 5-foot-six, it had at least twice the body mass, all muscle. A fat tail hung down the back of its legs to just above the ground. It didn’t wear clothes, but a couple of harnesses crossed its chest with things clipped to them. I dubbed it a dino.

Next came a bird alien a few inches taller than me. I was medium build, but this new alien was skinny, way thinner than any human. It had huge dark eyes and a beak instead of a nose and mouth. Pale-yellow feathers covered its body, short everywhere on the front, including its arms. I craned my neck as it passed. It had wings as long as it was tall tucked close to its back, and those feathers were a foot long. That kind could be called birdie.

A tall bipedal form with a huge head walked past, covered in a hooded red cloak that hid its body completely.

Then the crowd in front of me parted, and a new kind of alien strode through the gap.

I sucked in a shocked breath.

He looked the most human of anyone I’d seen, and yet he clearly wasn’t human. His face was a rich blue, shining with a beautiful iridescence in the sunlight. His inky-black hair looked like a true black, throwing off purple and blue highlights. Dark-purple horns crowned his head, one set pointing straight up while a second sat curved down around the sides. Black pants covered his long legs, and something like a long-sleeved T-shirt clung to the muscles of his wide chest and well-defined arms. The triangular tip of a narrow tail poked up above his shoulder, held close to his body.

He carried himself like a fighter, moving through the crowd with the kind of controlled strength you got from doing a martial art for years. The gun on each hip added to the feel. If anyone here could help me, it was him.

He was a dangerous blue demon made flesh—a space demon.

And sexy, like one of the aliens in smutty books who made you orgasm so hard you saw stars.

Yes, please. He looked better even than Klingons, who’d always been my fave sci-fi crush monsters. I almost choked on a laugh. Here I was, lost in space, and all I could think about was this?

The cryohangover was making me loopy. So loopy it was hard to do anything but stare at the new alien.

Space demons, here I come!

Grab it now to see exactly what that gorgeous blue demon does when he sees spots Cara!

CLAIMED BY THE ALIEN ROGUE