15. Chapter 15

I had hoped Dzur-Khan would find me in the pond like he had yesterday afternoon. Instead, it was three of Willis's cohorts who came trampling into the clearing.

"Boys," I greeted, annoyed at their presence, knowing my peaceful respite was over.

"Well, look what the good doctor was hiding under that uniform," the man with yellow teeth snickered.

"Willis send you?" I asked, leaning back to distract them with a better look at my tits.

"He told us to take care of you , sweetheart," the same man replied.

"Oh yeah, and what exactly does that entail?" I asked, wiggling my tits, distracting them some more so they didn't see me pick up an egg-sized rock and palm it.

The man in the middle rocked his hips lewdly, making the kind of sounds men, for some reason, thought turned women on. It was the kind of sound that just churned my gut with anger.

My aim was always good—no matter what I used - gun, knife, rock. I never missed anything. Hitting the idiot in the middle was as satisfying as hearing him hit the ground. The other two were quickly taken care of. A quick survey told me that nobody else was here besides Dzur-Khan, hiding in the bushes. I called him out while reaching for my clothes and giving him a small show of my ass.

Any mood for a quickie with him had left me. If these three men had been willing to kill me for Willis, I suddenly wasn't so sure that it had been Willis' hands who had killed Dawn or if he had sent someone else to do the deed. Willis still deserved to die, but I had to make sure I got my sister's killer as well, whoever he might be.

Dzur-Khan came out from behind a gnarly bush. His muscly physique took the breath right out of me. Fuck, he was built like an ancient god.

He came around the shore, surveilling the three men on the ground, one of which was still howling through his broken nose. His knee was shattered, and he probably would never walk right again, but I failed to bring up any kind of sympathy for him. He and his friends would have raped and killed me. There was no doubt about it in my mind.

"What do you want to do with them?" Dzur-Khan asked.

"Leave," I replied, buttoning up my uniform top. "Predator?" I asked, hoping something mean and wild would find and eat them during the night unless Willis and his men would come looking for them and find them first.

Dzur-Khan assessed me from head to toe. "You are a warrior?"

I nodded. I guess I was. Or I had been.

"These males would have killed you." It wasn't a question. His question came next. "Why?"

How to explain with my limited Vandruk?

"Their boss—khadahr—Willis." I halted, looking to make sure he understood. "Doesn't like me," I ended lamely.

He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow at me without saying a word. "Okay, fine, maybe it's a bit more than that, but how am I supposed to explain it?" I said, frustrated, raising my arms in the air.

That he seemed to understand.

"Later?" he demanded.

"Later," I agreed when we had learned enough words between us.

I still had to warn him, though. "Willis plans bad things," I tried.

"I know," Dzur-Khan surprised me. I had known there was more to him than good looks. There had to be if he was a leader of his clan. Still, his awareness caught me off guard. A man with brawn and brain , I mused, be still my heart, and shut up my pussy , I admonished, because both wanted to jump his bones.

We walked to the camp, and now and then, I pointed at something, asking him for the Vandruk word and telling him the English meaning. It was a companionable walk, and I wondered if there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I had just avoided getting raped and killed, had maimed three men, one permanently, maybe even sealed their fate to a horrendous death, but try as I might, I didn't feel the slightest tinge of guilt. Instead, I was having the time of my life with Dzur-Khan.

You're a psycho , my sister's voice sounded in my head. She had once asked me how I was doing when she visited me in a hospital I had been airlifted to. I had been shot five times during a rescue mission of an American ambassador and his staff. On that same mission, I also killed several insurgents.

I knew Dawn hadn't been asking me how I felt physically; the morphine the docs gave me worked miracles. She had wanted to know how I was coping, having killed six people.

Honesty had always been one of my downfalls, and it had been then, too, when I answered, "Good. I saved eleven Americans."

"You killed six people," she replied aghast, "don't tell me you don't feel guilty about that."

The look in my eyes must have told her where words failed me, and she said those famous words, "You're a psycho."

Perhaps I was; I allowed. There was a very good chance she was right. Or maybe she was the psycho for calling me that when I had been hailed as a hero and received several medals as well as a promotion. Apparently, she was one of the few who thought what I had done as atrocious.

I didn't want to dwell on it too much. She and I had never seen eye to eye on anything. She used to call Uncle Cody a psycho, too, and he had been awarded the Navy Cross before he was honorably discharged with a full pension and everything because of an injury .

She had even gone as far as accusing me, "You're like mom and dad, a killer with no conscience."

That had been a bridge too far, and I kicked her out of my hospital room. That was the last time I saw her alive, three years ago. Shortly after I was released I went to New York to rethink my life choices and met Stan. Ironically, he was the first person ever who was more intrigued by the fact that my parents were serial killers than turned off; maybe that, too, should have told me something about my life choices.

The ice blood running through my veins did come in handy when chasing down my sister's killer though. Also, I figured it made me perfect for this alien planet—a place I would have never expected myself to be. I would have never volunteered to come here, not as a mate to an alien, nor as a scientist, and especially not as a soldier, because if the Navy had sent me here, they would have expected me to take part in taking this world down, and that my conscience wouldn't have allowed me to do.

I watched Avatar and rooted strongly for the aliens. I would have fought against my own people and never looked back. If that made me a traitor, then so be it.

Dzur-Khan and I didn't have a long walk, but for some reason, our silence reminded me of the companionable quiet Uncle Cody and I used to enjoy. You would think that after my refusal to shoot a deer, he would have grown tired of the company of a nine-year-old, but he endured it until I was forced to move out .

"You missed," he had said in a voice dripping with the helpless attempt to hide his disappointment and assure his niece that it was okay that she had missed her first shot.

"I didn't," I corrected him, "my bullet hit right where I wanted it to."

"At the deer's feet?" he had asked incredulously.

Solemnly, I nodded.

Even then. I would have never been able to hurt or kill an animal. People? Yes, if they were bad. Animals? No. Because there was no such thing as a bad animal.

It had amused Uncle Cody to no end that I was also an avid meat eater.

"Where do you think the meat comes from?" he asked me one day.

I shrugged, pretending ignorance. "From the grocery store."

Yeah, Uncle Cody and I had a great time during the few years I lived with him. Dawn, of course, had hated it and moved back in with Aunt Helen once she was better. Neither Uncle Cody nor Aunt Helen ever spoke of our parents, of their sister, who had helped my father rob several banks in the most brutal way possible, killing anybody who had the misfortune to be at the bank at the time. They weren't smart enough to figure out that they always left a witness, the security cameras, which kept filming their atrocities long after they were done. It was technology that eventually bore silent witness when they were inevitably caught.

I was glad when we reached the camp, and I didn't have to think about my messed up family or my childhood any longer. Otherwise, I probably would have started thinking of all the kids I beat up who called me and Dawn Monster S pawn . Dawn's only reaction had been to cry. Mine was to get into physical altercations with the name-callers. When a group of four boys beat me up so badly that I ended up in the nurse's office in school, Uncle Cody began teaching me self-defense. Before long, I could beat him and his friends. That's when he enrolled me first into jiu-jitsu, then taekwondo, boxing, and any martial arts offered in our small town.

Turned out I had a natural knack for kicking men's asses.