Page 3 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

Five hours. I hadn't lain down long enough to lose five. I could've sworn it had been one at most. But the second hand was ticking. Weird.

I pushed myself up with a groan. The team should have come by now. Then a low hum rose behind me. My shoulders dropped. Finally—the team.

"Hey! Over here! I'm up here!"

I waved my arms, licking dry lips. They had to be close. I couldn't wait to see someone with water. My canteen was down at the base of the building, still on my abandoned backpack, and there was no way I was climbing back through that temple until I was sure the jaguar had moved on.

The humming grew louder. I turned in a circle, trying to spot the team. I couldn't place the sound — no equipment I knew of hummed like that. A GPS locator was silent. And I was the one carrying the mapping tech.

Louder still. Hands on my hips, I frowned. It was vibrating in my back teeth now.

The one thing I didn't do was look up.

I should have. I really should have. But it wouldn't have mattered.

When I finally sensed someone behind me and spun around, the ship was already there — hovering above the temple, massive and silent except for that hum. And on the roof with me: a huge, upright lizard with a tail, wearing something that looked like an orange leather snowsuit, pointing a short stick at my chest.

A lizard person. Of course it was a lizard person. Somewhere down there, every podcast guy in a tinfoil hat was owed an apology, and I was clearly not going to live long enough to deliver it.

I opened my mouth to scream.

Then nothing.

2

TAYLOR

Iwoke up moaning. And not in a good way.

Ouch. The side of my face hurt, my shoulder throbbed, and both palms burned where the stone had skinned them. One knee felt swollen beneath my field pants, and a bruise was already hardening along my hip.

But this wasn't my tent, or the dirt floor of the jungle. I sat up with a squeal so fast I gave myself whiplash. I would have scooted back too but my head hit something behind me. I wanted to look, I really did, but I was not going to take my eyes off the most dangerous thing in the room at that moment. Which was a bright pink thing with large eyes, tentacles and some sort of legs. Also it was looking right at me making some sort of odd wailing sound.

Holy. Shit.

I swallowed and moved my eyes for a fraction of a second to look to the side and snapped my eyes back on the tentacle thing. It was bright pink and wet-looking, like a popsicle someone had licked and put back. Then I moved my eyes to the right and snapped them back.

I was surrounded by aliens. Honest to god alien life. The squid tentacle thing was not in a water tank. The gigantic grasshopper thing next to it moved its little claw hands, and a frightened sound escaped me before I could stop it. My pulse hammered against the sore side of my face. There was no door, no familiar voice, no one on Earth who knew where I was. The dread was too big for my body, so my brain did the only thing it could: it shrank the whole nightmare down to a word small enough to hold. Fine. This was fine. I knew it was a lie even as I grabbed it, but it was the only shield on offer, and I dared anyone else to react better.

Then what sounded like an actual language came from my immediate left. I slowly turned my head and stilled. This was the most humanoid-looking alien yet. Except the alien was blue: a deep, striking blue, with sharp, elegant facial angles and knobby crests tracing the sides of the forehead.

Those knobs were all I could focus on before my vision started swimming. For one panicked second I decided this had to be an elaborate prank — prosthetics, drugs, the world's cruelest hidden-camera setup. Then the blue alien blinked sideways, and the prank explanation died. I was going to faint.

Him or her? Neither? The mouth kept moving and noises kept coming out. I managed to calm down enough to hear it: several different languages. Probably the same short phrase repeated each time, like the alien was trying to find a common language with someone. That someone being me.

My heart was still battering my ribs when I forced air past my teeth. "Uh. Hi?"

An idiot. I had a degree in archaeology and that was all I could manage, but at least terror had not stolen speech completely.

More noises came back. I didn't understand any of it. But the alien seemed relatively safe, so I turned my head in the other direction and wished I hadn't.

A wall. But not a normal wall. It was a partially transparent barrier sealing all five of us inside a cell, with a diagram of lights running across it like some space-age sci-fi lock. The hallway on the other side was dim, but I could still see dark gray walls that looked like steel or something similar. Across the corridor, shallow mesh racks lined up with the cells, each holding scraps of clothing and whatever the prisoners had been carrying when they were taken. Prisoner property. My god. Where the hell was I?

A faint vibration trembled under the floor. And the humming—the same sound from the temple right before the lizard thing walked toward me on two legs.

The lizard!

I whipped my head around fast in all directions but didn't see that lizard guy. I braced against the dark gray wall behind me and tried to slow my breathing. It refused. I kept my knees bent and my hands ready, trusting none of the strangers around me. At least the lizard thing wasn't in here with us. It must have kidnapped me.