Page 5 of Bride of the Enemy Alien

“Syin,” I whisper.

“I feel it.”

A sound comes from inside the wreck. The Zmaj warriors lower their lochabers. For one breath, the basin is all sun, smoke, and held violence. Then something moves in the split hull.

A hand appears.

Large. Long-fingered. Clawed at the tips, but not like a Zmaj. The skin is dark bronze under the soot, crossed with pale lines that look too deliberate to be scars and too cruel to be decoration. The hand grips the edge of the torn hull and metal bends.

The alien who comes out of the wreck isn’t Zmaj. That’s the first thing I know.

He has wings, but not like theirs. No broad desert membranes, no familiar sweep of bone and scale. His are darker, heavier, folded tight against his back, the edges torn and scarred as if someone once tried to cut the sky out of him.

His horns are wrong too. Shorter than Zmaj horns, black as burned glass, sweeping back close to his skull instead of rising from his brow. No tail. No familiar scale pattern.

He’s tall, though. Taller than any human by a head and broad through the shoulders in a way that makes the broken ship look too small to have held him. Dark, almost ebony plates of natural armor trace his throat, chest, and forearms, something between scales and shell fitted to his body like a violent world made him for storms and war.

Over that, he wears actual armor, though it takes me a breath to separate one from the other. Charred black composite plates are strapped across his ribs and shoulders in overlapping bands, fastened by dull copper buckles and torn harness straps that disappear beneath his damaged wings. One side has been crushed inward by the crash. Another hangs open, exposing the living armor beneath and the blood sliding between them.

His hair, if it is hair, is black and braided tight against his skull in rows bound with tiny rings of dull copper. Blood runs down one side of his face from a cut near his temple. Beneath the soot and blood, faint green lines flicker under the dark plates at his throat, there and gone so fast the heat might have put ghosts in my eyes.

One of his eyes is swollen and almost shut. The other is open. Black, ringed in molten gold, with a thin green spark buried so deep I almost miss it. It lands on me first.

The look is so direct it feels like a hand closing around my throat. Then he looks past me to the ridge, the smoke trails, the warriors, the sky. Measuring.

I hate him.

Instantly.

It’s a clean hate. Practical. The kind that arrives with reasons lined up in formation. He looks at us and our City like he’s deciding how it dies.

“Do not move,” Syin says, stepping forward.

The alien smiles. It’s a terrible expression. A flash of teeth to prove he has them and is probably willing to use them in a pinch.

“I have already fallen from orbit and survived,” he says. His voice is rough, low, scraped raw by smoke. “If I wished to move, your warning would not prevent it.”

Three Zmaj growl. I should probably be frightened. I am frightened. My stomach is a hard knot and goosepimples rise across my flesh, but I’m also annoyed.

“Good,” I say. “He’s arrogant. That should make everything easier.”

The alien’s black-and-gold eye returns to me and something flickers in it. Pain, maybe. Or interest. No. Pain. I prefer pain.

“Name yourself,” Syin says, flexing his claws.

The alien shifts his weight. For half a second, his knees threaten to give. He grabs onto the edge of his ship for balance. One torn wing jerks in a failed balancing reflex. He straightens, pressing his other hand against his side. Blood leaks between his fingers, dark and thick.

From inside the ship, something clicks.

Not the tired tick of hot metal cooling. Too even. Too deliberate. Once. Pause. Again.

All the breath leaves my lungs. The alien closes his eye as if he knows exactly what that sound means.

“You need to leave this basin,” he says.

“Name yourself,” Syin says, raising his blade.

The alien opens his good eye.