Alien Mine (The Pruxnae: Earthside #1)

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirtee n

They gathered in the living room around Dyuvad. He held his hands out to them. Rachel latched on hard, then tucked Kelly and Tiny between her and Fate, on Dyuvad’s left side holding the other man’s shoulder.

Sick anticipation swirled through Rachel’s gut. Whatever Dyuvad had planned, she hadn’t a clue. His expression had closed off half an hour ago, right after he told her to get her family, and he’d barely spoken a terse word since.

It couldn’t be that bad, could it?

He sucked in a sharp breath, let it out nice and slow, and fingered a small, button-like device snapped onto the waistband of his shorts. “You must all trust me now.”

“We do, Mr. Dyuvad,” Kelly said, though her young voice quavered and shook like a sapling braving the wind.

Dyuvad smiled down at her and his hand tightened in Rachel’s. “Take a deep breath, sweet, and exhale.”

They all did, one after the other, Fate and the girls and Rachel, and Dyuvad last. He glanced at her and his midnight blue eyes grew and grew, filling her vision, crowding out everything else, the fear of discovering what he really was, the recent chaos of their lives, everything.

“It’s time,” he said softly, and in a flash, the world shifted around her, the same way it had the day he’d rescued her from Miguel Ramirez’ men. This time, she was aware of Dyuvad’s hand in hers and of the kaleidoscope surrounding them where her living room had been. Between one breath and the next, her heart flipped over, and when it finally settled into her chest where it was supposed to be, her living room was gone, replaced by a stark, empty cavern.

“Lights.” Dyuvad’s voice echoed, slapping against metal before returning to them. “Breathe through it, Rachel. Fate’s passed out and the girls need your care.”

She staggered into him, too stunned to react to the change in location. A soft hiss drew her attention to Fate and Kelly slumped on the spongy gray floor and to Tiny clutching Dyuvad’s leg, her eyes as big as saucers in her pale face. Rachel reached out to her youngest daughter, missed Tiny’s fist by a mile. “Sorry,” she mumbled, but the word came out all wrong, slurred and distorted as if she’d dived into the lake and tried to speak under water.

Dyuvad shifted his hand out of her grasp and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Kneel while your body adjusts to the jump, beauty. It won’t take long.”

Rachel collapsed gratefully onto the floor next to her eldest daughter, checked Kelly’s pulse with a shaky hand, and sighed. Her breath came out ragged and harsh. She cleared her throat and tried again, and was as surprised at what she said as she was in the change of scenery. “Where are we?”

Dyuvad pried Tiny off his leg, swung the toddler into his arms, then knelt beside Rachel. “My ship.”

Tiny burrowed her face into his neck and mumbled, “Abyw, Dooda?”

“No, baby. We’re still in orbit near Earth.”

“Orbit?” Rachel choked out. “What do you mean, orbit ?”

“It’s better if I show you,” he said softly, “but not until the others awaken.”

It took a while for Fate and Kelly to come ‘round, and even longer for them to harken on to where they were. At last, Dyuvad judged them ready and led them out of the cavern into a wide corridor through enough twists and turns to jumble the journey into a mess inside Rachel’s memory.

But the room he led them to stuck there and good, and so did the view. She stood stock still in the middle of an arched doorway, one hand on the frame, and gaped. The room was smallish, about the size of her living room and kitchen combined, and held a variety of consoles and chairs.

What took her breath were the windows arrayed along the opposite curved wall, and the planet framed within them, a blue ball coated with swirling white clouds. “Earth,” Rachel murmured. “That’s Earth.”

Kelly raced right up to the window and pressed her face and hands against it. “I never seen nothing so pretty in my life, Mr. Dyuvad. How’d you get Earth inside the picture frame?”

“That ain’t no picture,” Fate said. He swiveled a narrow-eyed gaze at Dyuvad. “Is it?”

“No,” Dyuvad confirmed. “We’re on a spacecraft orbiting Earth in the shadow of the moon, where Earth authorities are least likely to look for it.”

Rachel sank onto the floor right where she was, blocking the exit out of the room. “A spacecraft?”

“My spacecraft. I was sent here by…” He glanced at the windows, then shook his head. “I came here to protect Tiny from an unknown threat.”

Fate snorted. “Miguel Ramirez.”

Dyuvad nodded once. “As I discovered.”

“But why her?” Rachel asked. “Who cares what happens to one little girl on a…?” Her eyes widened as the truth hit her, a truth about the universe she’d never suspected, though plenty of others had. “You’re an alien.”

“No,” he said sharply. “I’m as human as you are. But I wasn’t born on Earth.”

“Where you from?” Fate asked.

Dyuvad glanced down at Tiny, still cuddled against his chest. “A planet called Abyw.”

Rachel’s gaze drifted to Tiny and the numbness she’d felt since coming onto Dyuvad’s spaceship slowly morphed into a feeling she couldn’t quite name. “Did you tell Tiny about this Abyw? ”

Dyuvad shook his head. “That’s another story.”

Rachel pointed a shaking finger at him. “Start at the beginning and don’t leave nothing out.”

“A long time ago, humans lived in Origin Space. It’s a frontier now, a place where only outlaws and those not integrated with the Net live.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward Earth hovering in the window. “This planet is one of many located within Origin Space.”

Fate settled into a chair behind a console situated near Rachel. “What’s the Net?”

Dyuvad’s mouth firmed into a thin line for a moment. “Something like the Internet, but more. Bigger. It’s run by…”

He glanced at Tiny, then toward Rachel, and she finally identified the unnamed emotion: A mother’s instinct to protect her children. Tiny was wrapped up in this somehow, and Rachel by golly needed to know every detail.

“Go on,” she said.

“Telepaths.”

The word erupted from Dyuvad like a volcano spewing lava, and was followed by Fate’s low whistle.

“Tiny,” Rachel whispered.

Dyuvad nodded. “I don’t know what the Net ‘paths want with her, only that she’s important enough for them to send somebody halfway across the galaxy to protect her.”

A long silence filled the air between them, broken only by Kelly’s soft pats against the window as she shifted her hand and covered one landform on Earth after another. Finally, Rachel said, “You were telling us about Origin Space.”

“We don’t know much about that time in human history,” Dyuvad continued, “only that at some point, humans fled during a short-lived Great Migration and spread out into the galaxy where they settled onto many different worlds.”

“How long ago was that?” Fate asked.

“Millennia. Long enough for human civilization to evolve into many different cultures, and for humans themselves to begin to evolve.” Dyuvad gently patted Tiny’s back and tucked her closer to him. “No one knows when the ‘paths arose or when they first formed the Net, but a few hundred years ago, they began letting other people into it using technology. It’s become the best way for humans and aliens to communicate across large distances and provides updatable information on the bulk of human knowledge.”

Something occurred to Rachel then, and she nearly laughed in spite of the grave situation she and her tiny family had found themselves in. “You weren’t kidding when you said you could help Kelly learn about space, huh?”

Dyuvad’s lips twitched into a half smile. “I have some knowledge of it.”

Fate barked out a laugh. “That’s gotta be the understatement of the year.”

“Why now, though?” Rachel asked. “Why not when Miguel threatened us before or when Juan killed that man down in Gainesville?”

Dyuvad shrugged. “We learned long ago not to question the Net ‘paths. It doesn’t do any good. They never answer unless doing so furthers their goals.”

Now that she’d asked the question, though, Rachel couldn’t let it go, and she couldn’t keep the other questions from building up inside her. Why Dyuvad and not somebody else? Why a lone man and not a squad of soldiers? Dyuvad was a big guy, tall and muscled, not somebody to be messed with between his strength and that fancy gun of his. But he was just one man. What if something had gone wrong? Shoot, not had gone wrong. What if something did go wrong?

She opened her mouth to voice that question, took one look at the dark circles under Dyuvad’s eyes, and closed her mouth. There’d be plenty of time for questions later, after Dyuvad had finished his tale and shown them around his space home and they had, the good Lord willing, returned to her house and had a hearty supper. Later, she’d pester him into answers, but right now, her curiosity and excitement grew apace. She never in a million years would’ve thought she’d make it to outer space, and while she was here, she was by golly going to take advantage of the opportunity.

It took an hour for everyone’s curiosity to wind down and for the girls to protest hunger. Dyuvad handed out dried fruits from his ship’s stores to appease them, and to demonstrate that the Terrans could, if they had to, live on food grown on other planets.

Just in case.

Once it became apparent that Rachel wasn’t going to freak out on him, as Kelly would say, his anxiety lessened and he relaxed as he led her and hers through his ship and answered the dozens of questions they flung at him. What was life like in outer space? Did the ship have gravity? How did it work? How many planets did humans live on? Were aliens friendly or were they bent on dominating the known universe?

The last question came from Kelly and was, he suspected, born out of a fear bred by Earth’s movie industry. He hadn’t the heart to tell her that there were several species of hostile aliens, but he did fill her in on the ones humans were largely friendly with, and even accessed the Net to show her pictures of a few of the humanoid ones.

If he’d let her, she would’ve happily spent hours in front of the viewscreen, exploring a universe she’d never known existed.

Eventually, the questions petered out. Rachel insisted on going home, and Dyuvad obligingly jumped them all back into her now-darkened living room, thankful he hadn’t passed out as Fate and Kelly did. The wooziness was there, but it was largely controllable. It was a change he deliberately put out of his mind for later study, filling his thoughts instead with all the things he could freely tell Rachel, now that she knew part of who he was.

Not all, but enough for the rest to make sense once he explained it.

He bided his time through a quick supper and Fate’s goodbyes, through the girls’ bath time and story time and bedtime. At last, Rachel headed for the shower, and Dyuvad couldn’t wait another minute more. He followed her into the small bathroom, shut the door firmly behind himself, and shucked his clothes.

She was standing still under a spray of steaming water, hunched under it with her back to him. He paused for a moment and admired the curve of her shoulders, the indentation of her waist, the drops of water clinging to her smooth skin. His heart leapt and flipped in his chest and he knew, just knew, that whatever the future brought, he would spend it with her.

Even if it meant never returning to Abyw.

He yanked the shower curtain back and grinned when she whirled around and squawked and smacked a wet hand against his bare chest.

“Miss me?” he asked.

She huffed and put her back to him again. “I just saw you not five minutes ago.”

“Yes, but we were surrounded by people then.” And he’d desperately needed to be alone with her, any way he could get her. He picked up the soap, lathered his hands good, then wrapped his arms around her and pulled her gently into the shelter of his body. “You took being on a spaceship well.”

He felt her laugh more than heard it. “It wasn’t like I could run screaming out of the room or something.”

“You could’ve asked me to take you home.”

“Would you have?”

“Any time you wanted.” She had to know he’d do anything for her, anything at all, if only she’d ask. “We can go back if you want to.”

“Kelly would like that,” she said softly, and relaxed into him, tilting her breasts into his touch. “I have so many questions, so many things I want to know about you and the worlds out there.”

“In good time, beauty.”

Though there were plenty of things she needed to know now, things he needed to tell her for his own peace of mind, and because he was his father’s son. And his mother’s.

He cupped his soapy hands over her breasts and kneaded gently, ignoring the desire pooling in his gut and hardening him against her firm ass. “On my world—”

“Abyw?”

The single word, uttered in her mountain sharp drawl, filled him with a possessive pleasure unlike any he’d ever known. “Yes, beauty. Abyw is an ice world. Beautiful, yes, but a hard world to survive on. We have…problems breeding daughters, and so, there’s always a shortage of marriageable women.”

She twisted in his embrace and looked up at him, her somber expression broken by the mischief twinkling in her green eyes. “That’s not a problem, Dyuvad. That’s a tragedy. Reckon there must be a lot of virgin men out there, huh.”

He sputtered out a laugh, outraged in spite of the humor lacing her voice. “We have spaceships.”

“Uh-huh.” She turned back around and traced her fingers lightly over the backs of his hands. When she continued, her voice held a studied nonchalance. “You weren’t a virgin when you landed here.”

“No,” he said gently. “But I was fresh from selecting a woman as my wife.”

She stiffened, and he rushed on, allowing his words to drown out her quick protest. “Someone else stole her before I could, and for this, I will always be grateful. If not for that, I would never have been sent to Earth. I would never have had the opportunity to protect Tiny, and I never would’ve met you.”

She was silent for a long while, still stiff under his hands and the water streaming down around them both. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible above the roar of the shower, and held a cautious note unlike her normal, straight-forward tone. “Stole?”

“As is the custom of my people, the Pruxn?.” He slid his hands to her stomach and resumed washing, then waited for her to relax again before continuing his explanation. “If I had been successful in finding a woman, I would’ve carried her to Abyw. My mother would’ve taught her to fight, and when the time was right, my bride would’ve fought for me at the Choosing. My mother would love you. ”

She stilled, like a yinga bracing for an attack. “She would?”

“She would,” he confirmed, and slid one hand lower into the soft curls protecting her mons. “She would teach you to fight, and on the day of the Choosing, she would present you there with a pride befitting a Q’Mhel.”

“I—” Rachel’s head fell back into his shoulder and her hands dropped to her side, and the possessive pride he’d felt earlier flooded into him, expanding until it filled him and shoved everything aside.

“You will fight for me, beauty,” he said, and slid his fingers along her clit, ensuring her compliance in the pleasure he willingly gave, and gave until her passion broke on soft sighs and the water grew too cold to bear.