Alien Champion: A SciFi Alien Romance (Fated Mates of the Sea Sand Warlords Book 15)

PROLOGUE PART ONE | Fiona

(Please see the preceding author’s note for an explanation of the prologue format)

“What are you drawing, Fiona?”

I glanced up from my vakta and found Tilly looking over at my work curiously from her spot beside me.

“Oh, God, I’m boring.” I turned my vakta towards her, showcasing my plain Jane jack-o’-lantern design with its triangle eyes and grinning mouth. The thing was, I was actually pretty good at drawing. For a long time when I was a teen, I thought I’d be a tattoo artist. But the carving part was such a pain in the ass that when it came to pumpkins, the simpler the design, the better.

“Nah, it’s classic. I like it,” Tilly said, nodding firmly. The firelight at the end of Gahn Errok’s hall flickered across her cheekbones and pile of kinky curls on the top of her head as she turned her attention back to her own vakta. “I still don’t even know what to do for mine.”

A group of us were carving vakta plants tonight. The blue Deep Sky succulents were a little bit like Sea Sand valok plants, but much larger, rounder, and, well, more pumpkin-y. They were too bitter to cook with, but apparently the braxilk loved to eat them, and Stephanie noticed the similarity to pumpkins when feeding her braxilk, Henrietta.

The Deep Sky people were fascinated by the idea of slicing them up for human Halloween, and so a bunch of the big blue things had been harvested from the mountains and brought here to carve. It hadn’t taken long for Lerokan and Errok’s boasting about how their carvings would turn out for it to become a contest among the alien men with us human ladies as the judges. The Deep Sky kids, and most of their parents, had all gone to bed by now, and their carved vakta plants glowed all along the ledge of the hall that led directly out into the darkened night sky. The only ones left now to carve were Kohka, Oxriel, Errok, Zakkar, Lerokan, Dalk, Tilly, Nasrin, Priya, Steph, and me. Valeria and Grim were keeping tabs on things at our shuttle near the Vrika’s mountain, and Abby had long since taken Keir to bed. He was too small to carve anyway, and he just kept trying to shove the bitter guts of the vakta plant into his mouth despite how truly awful the stuff tasted.

I dipped my braxilk feather back into the dark blue ink and finished off my simple design before turning to the hulking figure on my other side. Dalk was hunched over his vakta, his copper-warm sight stars pulled into tight points of focus as he dragged the ink-soaked tip of his braxilk feather along the rounded surface.

“Need any help?” I asked, trying to peek round to see his design.

“No,” he grunted, never taking his eyes off of his work. “I do not require assistance with my pumm-kin.”

I snorted, shaking my head. For some reason, everyone thought the word pumpkin was much more exciting and exotic than vakta, and all the aliens now refused to use any word but that when talking about the succulents we were now carving.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Just offering.” Every alien guy had a human expert to guide him along in his vakta carving. Priya was seated beside Lerokan, and Stephanie was supervising Errok. Oxriel, Tilly, Nasrin, and Zakkar had formed a sort of group of four, and Abby of course had been with Kohka before she’d ushered their sleepy kiddo off to bed.

Which meant that I was paired with Dalk. Not that the guy seemed to want a human pumpkin-carving partner. He barely spoke two words together at the best of times, and focusing on his pumpkin didn’t seem to be doing his usually snarly mood any favours.

“Alright, well, can I borrow something to carve my pumpkin? Mine’s ready,” I asked him, eyeing the varying sizes of blades strapped to his bronze back.

That made him look up. His sight stars slid to me before going back to his work.

“No. You’re more likely to slice one of your own tiny fingers off than you are to successfully carve your pumm-kin.”

“Hey! I take offense to that!” I said, but I laughed even as the words came out. God, this guy could be such a freaking grump. It was incredible. “I’ve been carving pumpkins for years. I am a certified master.”

Not exactly true, considering I usually fobbed off the carving part of the whole deal to my Nan when I was younger, and then to boyfriends when I was older.

Dalk grunted, sounding unconvinced.

“How does one become declared as a master of such a thing? I’ve never seen you with a blade in your hand and I am not inclined to believe you.”

I gasped with mock horror.

“Excuse me? Fine! I’ll just have to go beg somebody else for a knife!”

I put down my vakta and made a move to get up when Dalk suddenly muttered, “Wait.”

I looked at him, brows raised so high I felt the blunt edge of my short bangs tickle them.

“Oh, do you finally believe me? I have serious pumpkin-carving skills,” I said smugly, even though I was completely blowing smoke out my ass by that point.

“No,” Dalk growled. “I simply do not trust any other man’s blades but my own. A dull blade can be more dangerous than a sharp one.”

He put his vakta down and reached around his back with expert, practiced precision, easily grasping the smallest knife from its place and handing it to me handle first.

“Thanks,” I said, taking it from him. “Shit. OK, this is bigger than I thought it would be.” It was easy to get size and scale mixed up between humans and Sea Sand guys. Dalk was tall even as far as alien men went, and he was broad and bulky and just big all over. The knife had seemed a lot smaller on his back than it was in my hand.

“It is not bigger than I thought it would be,” he said in a gruff, I told you so sort of way. “Your hand is exactly as small around its handle as I knew it would be.”

“Oh, yeah? What, you spend a lot of time looking at my hands or something?”

He held my gaze silently for a moment before his sight stars slid back to his vakta without answering. Something went a little funny and twisty low in my belly, but I ignored it, focusing on the task at hand. Dalk had finally gotten off his high horse, or, erm, high irkdu, and let me have a knife. The last thing I needed now was to prove him right by fucking things up.

Luckily, I didn’t run into any problems with his knife. I got my vakta opened up and scooped-out, and with such a simple design, I had it carved in no time. Once finished, I let my gaze wander around the hall. Zakkar and Oxriel were both at the carving stage, and I smirked at the intense look of concentration on Oxriel’s normally smiley face. Gahn Taliok’s representative Ox was so focused that the three tips of his tongues were poking out, his brows knitted together over his eyes. Gahn Errok’s right-hand-man Zakkar was a little more relaxed, and he often stopped working to chat with Tilly. Nasrin was still on the design/painting stage of her vakta, and Kohka was working away on his without speaking to anyone else.

Priya and Stephanie had, like me, taken the lazy girl way out and had done simple triangle designs, so they were done. Both were now absorbed in supervising their mates’ work. Errok and Lerokan were both still painting their designs on the vakta plants with feathers and ink, and I couldn’t help but get the vibe that each brother was trying to outdo the other. Those two were the whole reason there was even a contest in the first place, after all. Each brother, when he thought the other wasn’t looking, would peek over at his competition with a stiff frown on his face. It was actually pretty hilarious, considering how alike they looked. Like fearsome mirror images of each other, their indigo brows taut with tension over moonlight-coloured sight stars.

“I am ready to carve my pumm-kin,” Errok proclaimed suddenly, as if giving some royal decree that we all needed to heed. With that, he snatched a blade from his back with a confident sweep of his arm, brought it to the vakta’s surface...

And promptly sliced right through the entire thing.

I clapped a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud at the look of pure fucking venom that darkened his features. Steph was struggling, too. She bit down hard on her lips, but I could see the laughter in her eyes as Errok fumed.

“I require a new pumm-kin!” Errok snapped, his tail thwapping behind him on the stone. “Mine is defective.”

“Perhaps it is not the pumm-kin that is defective, brother,” Lerokan offered cheerfully. “Besides, there was nothing in the contest rules about second chance pumm-kins. You must work with what you have.”

“I will not put up with this,” Errok seethed. “I am Gahn and I demand another pumm-kin to replace this weak, pathetic one. Whoever chose this one for me must have been trying to sabotage me in the contest.”

“You chose it yourself,” Stephanie reminded him helpfully, not bothering to fight her grin now. “Remember? You made a big fuss about the Gahn getting first pick.”

“I would not have picked this pathetic pumm-kin,” Errok insisted. “Someone must have swapped my real one out. In fact, that one you have looks very familiar, brother.” The tone of his voice on that last word wasn’t brotherly at all, and I kind of hoped Lerokan would run for his life at that moment. But Lerokan just grinned, fangs flashing, while Priya rolled her eyes.

“I had no need to steal your pumm-kin when mine was already the finest of the lot,” Lerokan said. As if to demonstrate the superiority of his vakta choice, he grasped a blade from his back, brought it down....

And sliced through the whole thing, just like Errok did.

I cackled, and none of the other human girls could hold their laughter back now either. Errok glared with smug satisfaction at Lerokan’s ruined vakta, while Lerokan stared blankly ahead as if questioning every choice he’d ever made in life. Finally, in a toneless voice, the younger brother said, “It appears I, too, will require a new pumm-kin.”

Still chuckling, I turned back to Dalk.

“How about you? Is yours defective as well?”

Dalk didn’t answer for so long that I thought he’d decided to ignore me. Just when I was about to give up, though, he murmured, “I do not believe so.”

I nodded, impressed, realizing that he’d already scooped out the insides and was slicing through his vakta with careful, precise strokes. He’d obviously learned from the other two dolts over there and had been a lot more careful with his super-sharp knife and bulging alien muscles. That kind of surprised me, to be honest. Dalk had always struck me as a big, beefy, grumpy sort of guy who would be more concerned about how hard he could hit something versus how carefully he could carve it.

I still couldn’t see what his design was, so I settled on watching him as he carved. Muscles flexed under bronze and black skin, forearms and biceps and trapezius muscles flickering with every movement of his blade against the vakta’s blue side.

“Why are you watching me?”

I was so absorbed in watching Dalk’s hands and arms that it took me a second to realize he was the one who’d spoken.

“How do you know I’m watching you?” I said, crossing my arms and frowning at the top of his dark head. “You haven’t looked up from that thing once in the past five minutes.”

“I do not know what a minute is,” he grumbled, still not looking up, “but it doesn’t matter. I can feel your eyes on me.”

“Well, it’s your first time, and we’ve already established I’m the expert. I need to supervise you,” I stammered, feeling a hot flush creep up my cheeks. There was absolutely no reason to be embarrassed or shaken up by what he’d just said. Who cared if I’d been watching him? He was a goddamn alien carving a blue pumpkin, that sure as shit was something worth watching in my books!

He made an unsatisfied hmmph sort of sound in the back of his throat. After a moment of beyond-awkward silence, I sighed and said, “Will you let me see your carving yet?”

“No,” he said decisively, without a moment’s hesitation. “It is not finished.”

“Fine,” I groaned. “Well, whatever you’re working on, I hope you know it can’t compete with my awesomeness over here. Like, just look at this!” I said jokingly, gesturing at my simple design.

Dalk’s eyes flicked up to me, my pumpkin, then down to his again.

“Several of you new women did faces. Why?”

“Oh.” I blinked. In all the excitement about explaining the carving process, we hadn’t really talked about the origins of the custom. “It’s actually a tradition where I come from. Ireland. It was believed that Samhain represented a time when the barrier between our world and the spirit world was thinnest, and ghosts and ghouls could come through. Carving faces into turnips and other vegetables was supposed to keep bad spirits away. There was also a story about a bloke named Jack who tricked the devil and was cursed to wander the world with nothing but a carved-out turnip and a single coal to light his way, so it’s also related to that. The carved pumpkins are called jack-o’-lanterns.”

Dalk was quiet again for a long moment before uttering, “That is stupid.”

“Um, and that is rude,” I fired back, scowling at him.

“It is not rude. It is the truth. It is stupid to rely on a hollow vegetable to protect you against something malevolent,” Dalk said. “Especially someone as small and defenceless as you.”

Wonder if he’ll still think I’m defenceless with my boot-print stamped on his fucking backside...

“Whatever. My jack-o’-lantern turned out pretty spooky. I think it would hold up alright against a ghostie,” I huffed.

“You do not mean that.”

Dalk wasn’t looking at his vakta now but at me, his shimmering sight stars burning a fucking hole through my head.

“Well, then what do you suggest I do when I need to scare away some beastie, oh wise one?” I asked, arching a brow at him.

“You drop the pumm-kin and you run to someone who can protect you. You find a man like-”

He stopped, and I leaned forward.

“Find a man like you?”

“Well... I am a warrior,” he said. There was a new huskiness in his voice that I didn’t recognize. As if fighting it, he growled out the next part harshly. “And unlike you, I’m not foolish enough to think a vegetable with a face is a shield. And, also unlike you, my fingers actually wrap all the way around the handle of a blade.”

A deep wrinkle formed between his brows as he glared at his vakta. He huffed out a sigh, then put down his knife.

“Is it done?” I asked, trying to change the subject from the one that had gotten kind of weird a moment ago.

“Yes.”

“Can I see?”

“I assume you will not stop pestering me until you do.” The grim weariness in the words made me laugh, melting away some of the earlier awkwardness.

“Nope! It’ll be all pestering over here,” I assured him. He cast his sight stars up to the hall’s glittering ceiling as if begging some unseen force to end the misery of this new woman daring to disturb his peace by, gasp, talking to him. So fucking dramatic.

His sight stars finally descended and he spun his vakta around to me. Carved into its front was a large, painstakingly perfect flower. Just like the flowers of his homeland – the ones that dotted the hills of Fallo’s territory in the Sea Sands.

I gawked and I didn’t speak for a long moment, because it was absolutely gorgeous and not at all what I’d expected.

“A flower,” I finally said slowly, taking in the curves of the petals and the delicate line of the stem. “I didn’t take you for the sort of man who cared much for flowers.”

“I don’t... I didn’t.”

I cocked my head at him.

“Then why? If you don’t even like them...”

His sight stars pulsed, flicking down to my bare arms before he turned away without another word, carrying his vakta over to get judged alongside the others. Shaking my head in confusion, I looked down at my arms too, stretching them out in front of me to try to see what he saw.

I sucked in a breath. Because it was so fucking obvious. Anyone who looked at my arms would see the same exact thing.

Flowers. Flowers upon flowers upon flowers, permanently inked into my skin.

The contest decision was unanimous. Dalk’s beautiful flower won out over Kohka’s wave design, Errok’s braxilk, Lerokan’s bow and arrow, Oxriel’s irkdu, and Zakkar’s.... well, no one could quite figure out what Zakkar’s was.

Dalk didn’t seem to care at all that he’d won. His face didn’t budge from its usual look of pissed-off-ness when his name was called.

But I did notice... at least, I thought I did...

I thought that when the winner was announced, when it was his name that was called, that he looked at me. Just for the tiniest fraction of a second. A mere whisper of a glance. As if to make sure I was looking, too. As if checking to make sure that I’d heard.

When our gazes met, I grinned widely and gave him a thumbs up. His sight stars gave a single pulse before he turned and stalked out of the hall.

“Well, happy Halloween to you, too,” I muttered, watching as he disappeared further into the shadows of the mountain. When he was gone, my gaze found its way back to his vakta once more. A small candle had been placed inside it, and Dalk’s flower glowed so brightly that when I closed my eyes in bed later that night, it was all that I could see.