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A buzzing noise came from behind him, and a purple triangle appeared over his shoulder, attached to—
“Oh. My. God. Is that a tail?” I leaned out to peer around him, and his tail darted around his side to press the vibrating end against my shoulder.
My eyes snapped back to his face. He’d lost his scowl, his lips parting to show a hint of fangs. And those lips were firm and not too thin—they looked perfect.
I licked mine.I wonder if he’d kiss me. You know, for science?
A huff of laughter burst from me. Why was I hiding anything I thought? It wasn’t as if he could understand me.
“You, my man, are one gorgeous hunk of male flesh. Why couldn’t I have been bought by an alien like you instead of those lizards?” I gave him a flirtatious wink and tapped a finger to his chest. Yep. Still very firm and yum. “I wouldn’t mind belonging toyou.”
His eyes heated, and his tail buzzed harder, sliding around my back as if it wanted to pull me to him. Which made no sense, because he couldn’t speak English, right?
He pulled out a phone and tapped at the screen. Then he turned it to face me. Instead of the incomprehensible symbols I’d been surrounded with for days, the text was in plain English.
“I have an updated translator chip.
“I can understand everything you say.”
CHAPTER TWO
Raxnor
“Kirel reported in! He’s found another Hyoo-mon female!” Tark’s voice vibrated through the shuttle, loud and exuberant.
I suppressed a growl and stood. My chair folded back up into the light-blue wall of the main cabin, leaving the small space free of obstacles.
Three strides carried me into the cockpit. We were between two of this sector’s solar systems, and the empty blackness of space filled the viewscreen, dotted only by stars. I sat in the copilot’s chair and glanced at the display Tark worked on. “Where’s the female?”
He grinned at me, his blue face beaming in a bright smile that flashed his fangs. He pulled a hunk of straight black hair out of his eyes and tucked it behind the base of one of his upper horns. It fell forward again as soon as he let it go, of course, so he tucked it around one of the lower ones instead. I never understood why he let his hair get that long, except that my friend was a top engineer who tended to get lost in his work.
“He says she’s on Tularia!”
“Tularia! That’s odd. The lizard-alien home world isn’t very friendly to outsiders.”
“The Grug shipped one of the Hyoo-mon Kri-Oh pods there over a week ago. There wasn’t even an auction. She’d already been sold to a top Tula senator.” He looked at me, some of his usual cheer falling away to show the warrior underneath. “As a pet.”
This time, I did growl. I was still getting used to the idea that these Hyoo-mon females could be a Zaarn’s fated mate, but you only had to look at one of them to know they weren’t animals—they were sentient beings with intelligence in their eyes. The Tula senator who bought her would know that.
But they obviously didn’t care if they’d gone to the trouble to make a private purchase.
“We’re the closest to Tularia, aren’t we,” I said, glancing over the navigational display.We were headed to a rather dodgy space station with a thriving black market. We hoped to find zurilium, the metal that could keep the Grug from telepathically invading our minds. The gray aliens who controlled trade in the seven sectors made sure it wasn’t available on the open market.
“Yep! TheDaredevilis still over here.” He pointed to a tiny blue dot, a couple of day’s flight away. Another blue dot flew alongside it, the Hyoo-monARK 1.
A week ago, we’d rescued the entire ship full of frozen Hyoo-mon females and had no idea what to do with all of them yet. But there were still more out there to find and save, so we were making them our priority. The ones still asleep—or frozen or whatever it was the Hyoo-mon technology had done to them—wouldn’t register the passage of time. For the ones already awakened, however, every minute counted.
“We’re officially on this mission now.” Tark grinned at me. “It’s a good thing you’re an expert at infiltration. Senator Bila owns a private compound right in the middle of the jungle.”
“Of course she does,” I said dryly. A city would have been much easier, even a Tula city. Because there was a disguise that would hide I was Zaarn. Pretending to be a Sun Goddess monk would clothe me in a cloak with a hood, and my horns looked a lot like the sun crown the monks wore under them. But even if monks visited the cities, you didn’t tend to find them traipsing around the jungle.
“That just makes it more fun!” Tark said. “Kirel sent me a program to hack Tularia’s satellites. We’ve already got information.”
“Thank the Goddess for Kirel,” I muttered. He was theDaredevil’s expert hacker.
I leaned forward, eyes scanning a satellite image of the Senator’s compound. I didn’t look for anything specific yet. Instead, I tried to soak in all the details so my subconscious could start to work on the problem.
A tall wall surrounded a large Tula house in the middle of nowhere. Everything was the stucco favored in the planet’s desert regions. The light-tan color stuck out amongst the greenery, but using the traditional building style made the Senator look good in the eyes of her constituents. There was nothing around for miles but the jungle of the subtropical region. It was also far from the tourist destinations, on private land. We’d have no valid reason to be in the area. “It’s not going to be easy.”
