Page 8 of Claimed By the Alien Mercenary

I blinked at him in confusion, certain I’d heard wrong. That had to be a mistake, I’d uploaded my last report last week and gotten the usual response: verified message received. It had looked fine… and I was pretty sure I’d overheard Litarun and D’aron talking about word from Aderia, about Koratalin, my half-sister. How could we be out of contact for three weeks? Surely I hadn’t lost track of that much time after D’aron took us hostage. Though I could not deny that I was running on so little sleep that my brain felt sluggish and slow. I might have lost a bit of time here or there, but not that much, right? Not two whole weeks?

“You’re frowning awful hard, little one. Why is that?” Jaxin asked, with a tone that, to my ears, sounded friendly, warm, a bit concerned. I didn’t think he was that good at faking emotion in conversation when he felt nothing of the sort, because he felt nothing at all. I sought to find the truth with my gift but met silence, and an ache in my brain that warned me not to try that again for a while. Burnout was so close, and so dangerous, that it could permanently stunt my gift.

A traitorous voice at the back of my mind, driven by sleep deprivation, wondered if that would be so bad… No gift might finally mean a normal relationship—and actual intimacy—with a male. My eyes went to Jaxin’s strange, alien face. His gray skin had a fascinating texture I wanted to study more closely, as if it weren’t skin but minuscule triangular scales overlapping one another. Before I could curb the impulse, I reached up and dragged my fingertips over his skin. It was slightly rough, but pleasantly slick at the same time.

“All right, that stopped you from frowning. I guess you can do it again.” I froze, eyes widening in shock. He was doing that not-smile again, the one that felt like it was a secret, and I wasn’t supposed to see his amusement. He was Rummicaron; he couldn’t feel amusement. At least he didn’t seem to mind that I’d touched him, uninvited. Then the enormity of what had just happened crashed into me: I’d touched him, and I hadn’t gotten blasted with his feelings.

“I believe I have complete empathic burnout,” I told him, to explain the frown, and perhaps the strange impulse to touch him. If I could touch him, was this my one chance to be intimate with a male before my gift recovered? I opened my mouth, ready to proposition him then and there, but snapped my teeth back together in a rush. No, that was the lack of sleep talking. I couldn’t just ask a stranger to have sex with me—especially not on the heels of Jeltom getting shot, the research facility getting demolished, and my safety still hanging in the balance.

“You’re probably talking to the one person least equipped to deal with that,” Jaxin huffed, still smiling. I was certain of it. How could he smile? And why did I like his smile so damn much that it made my belly feel all twisty inside? I couldn’t recall ever feeling that way before.

I opened my mouth to tell him he was wrong. His quiet, emotionless Rummicaron mind was like a balm to my frazzled senses. For the first time in days, I wasn’t on overload, and things could begin to heal; that was the theory, at least. My eyes were locked on the corner of his mouth, waiting for it to tilt into that minute smirk again. I did not expect him to snarl, to be confronted with a massive maw of jagged teeth in the blink of an eye. I might have screamed, because it was terrifying, suddenly staring down the gullet of a beast.

The teeth had so much of my terrified attention that I didn’t register the sound of his roar until later, when my ears were ringing. He broke into a run, abruptly throwing me back over his shoulder, and my aching shoulder flared with renewed pain. Everything was happening so fast that my brain struggled to keep up, but I saw it—Jaxin charging at top speed through the underbrush. A Radin giant.

It was huge, as tall as the trees, with thick legs and a leafy sort of skirt tied around his massive waist. He also had a black, segmented tail with a very scary-looking barb at the tip. The massive chest was streaked with red dirt, and that same dirt had been rubbed into his hair. He was a wild creature, nowhere near civilized, and hard to subdue by the Kertinal. His language was crude as he shouted at us, long, thick legs eating up the distance as he gave chase.

“They smell blood,” Jaxin said. “Are you still bleeding from somewhere?” I began to shake my head immediately, but froze, because he could not see that. No, my lip; he’d taken care of that with the pad from his healing kit. Then my blood chilled in my veins. The nick on my chin, I’d forgotten I had it. My fingers went to the slight cut and felt the tiny dried crust. It was so little; was that really it?

“I’m sorry,” I said in a small voice, my eyes locked on the giant pursuing us with shocking agility through the trees. “I forgot.”