Ash’s pulse hammered hard as she inched toward the living room. A familiar pounding of panic thudded in her ears. “Is it a bear?” she asked. “I thought I heard something earlier, outside.”
“It’s too big for a bear,” Dana replied. A noise, like the screech of tires on asphalt, but animalistic, surprised yelps out of them, and a muttered, “Holy fuck,” from Dana, who gripped a fireplace poker.
Ash struggled to pull in breaths. This wasnotsupposed to happen at the retreat. “Get away from the glass,” she hissed, but everyone was too afraid to move.
Suddenly, a wide, gruesome face filled the window. Gray and hairless, it opened a mouth filled with rows of sharp teeth. Four large black eyes, arranged in a row above a lipless mouth, glinted at them in the dim light of the few cabin.
Ash screamed. This wasnota bear. It was three times the size of the biggest bear Ash had ever seen at the zoo. Her mind flew into chaos. Whatever it was, the thing outside was not of this Earth.
There was a mad dash to get away, but the creature let out another horrible howl and crashed through the window in an explosion of glass.
The creature filled the room, smashing furniture and making more of those awful noises. Claws extended from arms that were far too long. What looked like extra bones and oddly shaped muscles bulged from its grotesque body.
It moved incredibly fast for something of its size and slashed out at everything in its path.
Ash would never truly piece together what happened next. She knew panic. She heard screams and smelled the strong stench of sulfur. Suddenly thatthingwas right above her.Oh God, she could almost touch its flat, black eyes. It had slits for nostrils, which flared wide at the scent of blood.
It lowered its head and pain seared her lower leg. No, “pain” was too easy a word—this was a burning agony unlike anything she’d ever experienced. She opened her mouth and let out a ragged, anguished cry, kicking with her other foot out of sheer reflex. It hit something soft—possibly one of its eyes because the creature howled and flung her across the room.
Ash felt weightless. The room slid by in a blur beneath her, before her body slammed into the wall.
And that was it. Her world went dark.
CHAPTER TWO
Zade
Zade Baru-Nok, high physician of the Raplan-B, had been given two tasks by his Saar-king. First, to save the life and, hopefully, the leg of the human woman who had been transported to him, and second, to discern what had attacked her, slaughtering the rest of her party.
There was no saving the leg.
He didn’t have to run a test to know that. It was all but dissolved, including the bone.
Her life, on the other hand, was less of a lost cause. She had a sixty-eight percent chance of survival. If the swelling in her brain went down at the rate he expected, her chances rose to eighty. He had already repaired the fracture to her skull. Whatever had thrown the female possessed great strength.
He crossed the room to add that detail to his report. No equipment cluttered his primary treatment room, where only his highest priority patients were kept. The space was large and dull gray and mostly empty except for therejutable holding the female. the table itself, with its thick gel mat, imbedded with thousands of tiny sensors, monitored every body system. The walls, on the other hand, were covered in screens for readoutsand imaging of patients present. The lower half was a grid consisting of ports, scanners, and instruments that could extend from the walls when needed and retract flush to the wall when not in use.
A thick glass wall separated this space from his personal lab and work chamber, which contained far more equipment. It had been adapted for him over many cycles. A full-body sanitizer in a washroom had been upgraded to accommodate all of his needs, including various types of showers, a body moisturizing system, as the membrane films could be very drying to the skin after a while, and a full closet of clothing.
He had arejuengineered and built specifically for him. It induced sleep at the touch of a sensor and could be set for a timer or synched to therejuon the other side of the glass. This way he could awaken when his patient did so. He found it efficient to program in restorative sleep on his schedule and not waste time trying to fall asleep naturally. Zade could find no fault in an efficient system.
This female was incredibly fortunate to have survived, when the other four females she had been with had not. There had been little left of them.
As for the second part of his assignment, he was not as confident. The samples were degraded, making it difficult to identify the creature. The components of the venom had reacted with the human tissues and were proving difficult to separate out enough to analyze. There were fifty-five species from the known universe that could be the one loose in the state of Colorado, on the planet Earth. None of them would be easy to find. Worse, twenty-two of them were on strict protection lists, meaning that it would be violating intergalactic law to kill them.
That was not his problem.
His problem was the female lying on therejuwith a melting leg. He noticed little about her other than the thingshe had to fix. She had a pleasing form, though. Her bones were strong and her muscles well developed. Her breasts were large enough to be a handful—why did he think ofthat? Zade shook himself from the thought.
He slid his hands into a machine that covered them in a thin, but impermeable membrane and set about removing the female’s calf. Her knee could be saved, and it would not be difficult to graft a new leg and foot to the existing bone. He just needed permission from her people to do so. That request had been issued almost instantly after he laid eyes on her.
He tapped a device on his ear. He had to alter his usual methods to include a voice transcription of his diagnosis and treatment because everything he did with this patient was being translated to English and sent back to Earth. It would be amusing, if it were not slightly irritating. Zade listed the medications and treatments he’d administered, knowing the human doctors would have no idea what they were listening to. He waved off an assistant who entered holding up a clear tablet. They could wait. The patient’s leg could not, and he could not begin the removal of her diseased tissue until he documented everything to the letter.
The assistant stood there, clutching her tablet until he finished, then stepped forward, with a hard swallow.
He looked at her, brow raised. “Proceed.”
“Permission has been granted to begin leg restoration of patient 33-H,” she said.
