Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
I am keeping my eyes out day and night for any signs of tentacled alien faces. I even do little patrols, though I have to pretend they are not patrols, because that also upsets my mates.
Seeker and the others try to go back to normal, but I can tell that they’re never really going to trust the world the same way again. That makes me angrier than I can say.
My mates live inside their ship, which is landed in the shadow of the flying city. They insist I live there too, though they are not so controlling I can’t go out and about in the day when I want to.
We are all taking things slowly, I think. Trust has been damaged on all sides. Not mine, so much, because I don’t remember.
“We’ll stay here as long as she needs us to,” Sharp is saying while I lurk just out of sight. “We’ve always wanted to stop the human trade.”
“Have we? Or have we just ended up repeatedly caught up in it?” Kronos says. “I remember Boss having a vendetta or two of his own. I remember having a purpose that drove me. Now we’re babysitting human females day and night.”
“You can leave if you want,” Sharp says.
“I can’t,” Kronos growls. “I love her.”
This feels like a good time to swing out of the shadows.
“Why are you so much more angry at me than the other two are?”
It’s a brave question to ask Kronos, but it’s been on my mind since we met again. Kronos seems absolutely infuriated.
“I expect better from you than they do. A human can be seen as an intelligent little creature full of seduction and mischief, or she can be seen as a mindless animal to be fucked. I have always hoped you’d live up to the first ideal, but you insist on running headlong into the same traps over and over.”
“You don’t have to put up with me. There are other women in the world…”
I am snatched up off my feet, and find my nose less than an inch from his flashing sharp teeth.
“Listen to me,” he says. “You are mine, and I am yours, and when your silly little brain begins to function again, you’ll understand why. For now, I’m going to act as guardian to this particularly mindless version of you.”
“Then you should stop being mean for no reason. I don’t think I would ever have tried to hurt you.”
“No,” he admits. “You don’t try to hurt me. You just don’t think about the pain your absence inflicts. We love you. I love you. When you run from us, you tear something in us away as well.”
I want so badly to be able to reciprocate the emotion, but all I can feel right now is a sort of animal attraction. My body responds to him as if it knows him, but my mind produces nothing but blankness.
I’ve got to work on getting my memories back. I’ve got to get up to the flying cities somehow. I have a feeling they’ll know how to undo what’s been done. I can make this right somehow. I’m sure I can.
Boss is the happiest of my mates. I can sense a kind of calmness in him, and it makes me seek him out when the tension with the other two seems as though it might soon be at boiling point.
I find him walking in the woods, chewing on leaves and bits of grass which he plucks from trees and the ground quite happily and meditatively.
“Pet,” he greets me in his low, smooth voice.
“You like it here, huh?” I smile at him.
“I do,” he admits. “It is close to the planet where I was born. More trees, less grassland, but there is enough to satisfy the memories of my youth and assuage some of my nostalgia.”
“I think that’s… yeah,” I say. “That’s how I feel too. Like this is a place I was at some point, or came from, but forgot?”
“This is the land from which humans came. You are connected, deeply,” he says. “There is nothing that will ever break that bond, no matter how much you forget about yourself, or how much those flying cities try to pretend that they are better than what lies below.”
He’s so fucking wise, and so fucking kind.
And so fucking hot.
I don’t know if it’s a shift in the wind, or if I just give off mad amounts of pheromones when I have so much as a sexy thought, but he catches it. His big eyes turn toward me, and the corner of his mouth curls up in a sexy grin.
He is so much broader than I am. Almost three times as wide, I’d say, and that thick reddish hide with the big dark cascade of mane is enough to make me fucking quiver at the memory.