AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I turn the communicator off and return to my blanket nest bed.
“LYSSA!”
Manik uses my name at high volume as he comes through the front door, his big, scaled hands full of bounty hunter supplies. He’s been out there stripping corpses. I wonder if the satchel on his back is full of their bones. Has he already made them nothing but decor?
He looks down at me, seeming slightly pleased to see me where I should be, but unhappy at what has no doubt happened outside. I am sure he was smart enough to avoid the ship. But he still looks mad. I feel myself cringing internally, worried that I am about to bear the brunt of his alien fury.
“Your ship has attacked the…”
“Yes. The ship the bounty hunters landed in. I’ve told her not to attack you again. I don’t know if she’ll listen to me or not.” There’s a tremor in my voice. I’m scared. This bed puts me at his feet, and I am always at his mercy. Today I have finally seen what great mercy that truly is. He could kill me and add me to the wall of bones without thinking twice about it if the mood took him.
He looks at me, and his expression softens slightly. “You are afraid of me.”
“Yes,” I admit. It is not much of an admission. “You’re terrifying.”
“I do not intend to hurt you. I want to keep you safe. And I want to keep you mine. Do you still want to be mine after what you have seen today?”
“I…”
Manik
How can she answer that question? She is obviously too scared to give anything like an honest answer. This is why relationships are so hard. You rip one man’s spine out in front of a woman and it changes things.
“Don’t answer that,” I tell her. It doesn’t matter anyway. Whether she wants to be mine or not, she is mine. I saved her life, and that means that the rest of her life belongs to me. She owes me her very existence, and I will defend her against her petty bounty hunting rescuers for as long as it takes.
“What were we hunting?” She asks a question in the wake of mine that remains hanging in the air. “That’s what I don’t understand. We went out and you didn’t have weapons.”
“Oh. That’s easy. Mushrooms.”
She lets out a little laugh. “My language implant must be malfunctioning. You don’t hunt mushrooms. You gather them.”
“I hunt everything.”
Her face falls and she goes slightly pale again. I do not need to keep reminding her that I am an apex predator. She knows that all too well. I feel bad for her, for the decisions that led her here, and for a temperament that does not mesh well with the cold, hard realities of existing in this universe we share. I have always understood that there are those who kill, and those who are killed, and I have always known which one of those I want to be.
“Lyssa,” I say her name gently.
“Yes?” She dares to glance up at me.
“It is going to be okay,” I tell her. “No harm is going to come to you.”
“But I might watch great harm come to others of my kind.”
“Not if you close your eyes.”
A groan emerges. She was close to laughing. I wonder if she is clinging to her shock and horror as a shield. Humans always go on about their humanity and how it must be preserved. It is the strangest thing, how what should be an intrinsic quality, unable to be avoided in any way, has become something that they hold fast to in fear they will lose it. Humans, in the end of all things, are predators too. They are soft and they are fleshy and they like to fight with ideas, sharpening ideologies into barbed points and ramming them into one another’s psyches, but they are still predators. They have canines and eyes that face forward. These are the universal qualities of a creature that hunts.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” She asks the question softly.
“I am wondering what you will become while you are with me,” I tell her. “And I wonder what led you here. Would you tell me the story, what actually happened, not merely what I surmised?”
She shrugs and plays with the corner of a blanket. “I was going to be married. My mom had even bought us a house to live in together. But my fiancé walked out on me. And then I thought…”
She trails off. I attempt to finish the thought.
“Then you thought you might hunt bad men and make sure they were punished?”
“Yes. Maybe. Yes. I am tired of being seen as something to be used or traded. I am capable. Not as capable as you; my fingers can’t dig into the flesh of another being and remove their skeletal structure, but I can hunt bounties.”
