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“Stop!” I thumped the alien’s hard back. “Please, I mean it this time. There’s a child here. We can’t leave Max.”
“A child?” He slid to a halt. “Where’s this child?” Was this all part of his act to get me to trust him? Or was he the kind of guy who cared about a child?
“I don’t know. Locked in a small room.”
“Me bring you here!”Max said.“Me close!”
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?” he growled, his voice so deep I felt it vibrate through his shoulder and into my stomach.
Oh, shit. Maybe I really had lost it and made up an imaginary friend to get through all of this.
“Me no fake!”Indignation filled my mind.“Me real.”
“He’s that way.” I twisted on the alien’s shoulder to point left.
There wasn’t anything there but another door. He sat me down and gestured me out of line of sight. Then he ran his phone over the controls, and the door clicked open.
The doctor’s strident voice came from inside the room, louder than the alarm. “Who are you?”
All the anger and frustration of the past week welled in my chest. As soon as she appeared in the doorway, I launched forward. My body moved in harmony, each piece lining up to deliver a thumping punch to her gut.
She wheezed and crumpled forward, one hand clutched to her stomach as the other worked her phone.
Her eyes cut through me, no longer cold and assessing. “You little frek—”
It cut off mid-word as my rescuer shot her.
My eyes widened, and my heart skipped. I’d hated her, but… “Is she dead?”
“Stunned.”
Of course he only stunned her. If he was working with them, he wasn’t going to actually hurt them.
I darted around him and into the room. It wasn’t the lab I’d expected. Instead, soft golden sunlight fell through a wide window on soft chairs and rugs in a range of purples. These were living quarters.
“Over here!”Max cried in my head even as a loud yowl filled the air.
I rushed over to the corner where a cage held the largest cat I’d ever seen. As big as a medium-sized dog, it was covered in glossy black hair and had big purple eyes and two purple horns sticking out of the top of its head.
“Me no it! Me your friend!”
Shock pushed the most obvious words from me. “You’re not a child!”
A long arm reached past me to wave the phone over the cage’s lock. “It’s a kreecat, and if you can hear him, it means he’s telepathically bonded to you for life.” The alien’s voice sounded wearily resigned for some reason.
Max being a cat might explain why the alien had played along. If he worked with these people, he knew there weren’t any children here. He must have wanted to figure out what the hell I’d been talking about.
Max surged out of the cage, purring in a rumble as he stropped against my calves so hard I almost fell over. Only the alien’s strong hand on my shoulder kept me upright.
“We need to go. Shall I carry you again?”
Oh, hell no! I shook my head. “I can run.”
“Me run, too!”The kreecat dashed out the door, and I took off after him, his joy at being free filling my mind.
We made it outside, and the warmth of sunlight touched my face for the first time since waking up in this new place. The wind carried the smell of something like pine, and we pushed into blue-needled trees after only a few feet.
