Hunted By Alyth (Alien Mate Hunt #4)

Naia

The intake coordinator's office sits fourteen feet above current high tide. By next month, it'll be underwater.

“Miss Cross.” The coordinator doesn't look up from her tablet. Salt crust edges every window in this repurposed cruise terminal, and the whole building sways when the bigger waves hit. “Twenty-one signatures required.”

Twenty-one ways to agree that an alien can hunt me. Twenty-one variations on the same terrible bargain.

I pick up the stylus. My hand's steady. Eight years pulling drowning tourists from riptides taught me to lock down the shakes until after. Always after.

The evacuation notice for Sam burns in my pocket. Level Five Emergency Relocation, it says. Immediate transport to Calgary Highlands required. Thirty-seven thousand credits, due in full before processing.

Thirty-seven thousand, or my sixteen-year-old brother stays in Tide Zone 4 until the September surge takes everything south of Orlando permanently. The math is simple. Thirty days being hunted by an aquatic alien, or Sam dies in the same water I used to navigate for a living.

The irony was so thick I could taste the salt in it.

“Initial here to acknowledge Aylth's planet experiences regular tidal surges up to forty feet.” The coordinator taps the first box. Her nails are bitten down to nothing. “Participants must be capable swimmers.”

I almost laugh. N.C.

“Initial here to confirm you understand the hunter species possesses multiple prehensile appendages adapted for aquatic environments.”

Tentacles. Just say tentacles. But the clinical language makes it easier to pretend this is a normal transaction. Like renewing a diving certification instead of signing up to be bred by something that lives in the ocean.

N.C.

The next twelve boxes blur together. Risks of drowning.

Risk of pregnancy. Risk of permanent physiological changes.

Risk risk risk, as if any of us would be here if we had better options.

Through the window, I watch a cargo ship navigate the drowned streets, floating over what used to be Bayfront Park.

The water's brown today, full of whatever the morning storm churned up.

“Initial here to acknowledge consumption of the preparation tonic will create immediate and permanent changes to your body chemistry.”

My stylus hesitates. “What kind of changes?”

“Increased tactile sensitivity. Enhanced lung capacity. Improved underwater vision. Modified pheromone production that travels through water.” She rattles it off like reading a grocery list. “The changes make you trackable by scent even while submerged.”

So the ocean itself becomes my enemy. The one place I've always felt capable, and they're going to turn it against me.

N.C.

Box fifteen describes the neural implant.

Translation and comprehension of hunter communication, including what they call “subsonic vocalizations.” Box sixteen covers the portal technology.

Box seventeen explains the thirty-day timeline and what constitutes a successful completion without accepting a mate bond.

“What's the success rate?” I ask while initialing box eighteen.

The coordinator finally looks up. Her eyes are bloodshot, exhausted. “For returning through the portal?”

“Yeah.”

“On aquatic worlds? About four percent.”

Four. Out of a hundred. The stylus grows slick in my grip.

“The water changes everything,” she continues, maybe feeling guilty for the honesty. “Humans can't outlast something that never has to leave the ocean. Most accept the mate bond by day ten.”

“But the credits clear immediately?”

“The moment you step through the portal. Your designated recipient receives full payment within six hours.”

Six hours and Sam will be on a transport north. Six hours and he'll be safe from the Atlantic's steady consumption of our coast. That's all that matters.

N.C. N.C. N.C.

The last box is different. Longer.

“Read this one aloud,” the coordinator says.

I clear my throat. The words scraped my throat, each one a fresh betrayal of the water I once loved.

“I acknowledge that by entering the Mate Hunt, I become property of the assigned hunter for thirty days.

I understand that Earth law no longer applies to my person once I cross the portal.

I accept that refusing the mate bond after consensual mating may be interpreted as theft of resources by Galactic Alliance standards, and that hunters have the right to.

.. to pursue their claim through any means necessary within their species' cultural norms.”

“Initial and sign.”

The stylus moves without my conscious thought. N.C. Then, at the bottom, my full signature. Naia Marie Cross. Former rescue swimmer. Current alien bait.

The coordinator swipes through her tablet, processing everything. “Medical bay, Dock Seven. Follow the yellow lines.”

I stand to leave, then pause. “The four percent who make it back. What are they like? After?”

She looks at me for a long moment. Outside, a wave broke against the seawall, and a tremor ran through the building's foundation.

“Different,” she says. “They're all different.”

Dock Seven used to be a cruise ship terminal.

The medical bay occupies what was probably a duty-free shop, all the luxury goods replaced by examination tables and industrial medical equipment.

Three other women wait in curtained cubicles.

Nobody makes eye contact. We're all calculating our own desperate math.

A tech in scrubs that have seen better days gestures me to a table. “Behind the left ear for the implant. Preparation tonic after. Any questions?”

“Why behind the ear?”

“Best integration with auditory processing centers. Also,” he loads the injection gun, “tentacled species communicate through vibrations in water. The implant translates those to something your brain interprets as sound.”

The injection burns cold, then hot, then something beyond temperature. My skull aches, and suddenly I'm hearing the building differently. The wave impacts have rhythm, almost like words. The air conditioning hums consonants I don't have letters for.

“Test phrase,” the tech says, but I also hear something underneath. A ripple of meaning that translates to verification requested.

“I understand,” I say, and feel my throat trying to add a subsonic pulse that human vocal cords can't produce.

“Good integration.” He hands me a sealed vial. The liquid inside shifts between green and blue, too thick for water, too thin for oil. “Preparation tonic. Drink it all at once.”

“Here?”

“Wherever you're comfortable. Effects begin within minutes. You have two hours before portal activation.”

I take the vial to a corner, away from the others. The seal breaks with a soft hiss, releasing a smell like ozone and deep ocean. Something chemical and wrong. Something that makes my body want to run even as my mind knows there's nowhere to go.

Sam's evacuation notice crinkles in my pocket. His school photo is clipped to it, taken before Miami went under. Before Mom drowned trying to salvage things from our old apartment. Before the world admitted it had already ended and we were just managing the decline.

I drink the tonic in one swallow.

It tastes like drowning from the inside out.

Like seawater that's been distilled down to its worst components and mixed with something alien.

The effect is immediate. My skin prickles, suddenly aware of every thread in my clothing, every air current in the room.

My mouth floods with saliva that tastes wrong, chemical.

But it's between my legs that the change is most aggressive. A clenching heat that makes me grip the table. Wetness, immediate and embarrassing, soaking through my underwear. My body preparing itself for something it shouldn't want.

“Normal reaction,” the tech says without looking over. “It gets worse before it stabilizes.”

Worse. The heat spreads up through my core, making my breasts ache. My nipples harden into painful points against my sports bra. Every heartbeat sends a pulse of need through me that has nothing to do with desire and everything to do with biological imperative.

I breathe through it the way I used to breathe through the panic of being tumbled by a wave. Count to four in, hold for four, out for four. But each breath brings more awareness of my body, more sensitivity, more wet heat between my thighs.

“Portal room's at the end of Dock Seven,” the tech says. “You'll want to go soon. Walking gets harder the longer you wait.”

He's right. Standing takes concentration. My legs shake, not from fear but from the constant clench and release of internal muscles I shouldn't be this aware of. The forty yards to the portal room feels like swimming against a riptide.

The portal itself doesn't look like much. A metal arch filled with something that bends light wrong. Through it, I can see a world of black rock and violent water. Storm clouds race across an orange sky. Waves crash against coral formations that pulse with bioluminescence.

“Two minutes,” an automated voice announces.

I pull out Sam's photo one last time. He's smiling, caught mid-laugh at something off-camera. He wants to be an engineer, wants to build the seawalls that might save what's left of the coast. He's got ten times the brains I do, just none of the credits to use them.

“One minute.”

The tonic has progressed to full-body awareness.

I can feel my pulse in places I shouldn't.

My tongue tastes copper and salt. The wetness between my legs has become a constant, humiliating tide that has nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with biological preparation for something my mind doesn't want to consider.

“Thirty seconds.”

I think about all the times I dove into dangerous water to pull strangers to safety. This is just another rescue. Except this time, I'm saving Sam by letting something pull me under.

“Portal active.”

I step through.

Crossing the portal felt like being disassembled and reassembled in the wrong order. Then I'm standing on black volcanic sand under a bruised orange sky, and the first drops of an approaching storm hit my skin like warnings.

The portal snaps closed behind me. No sound, just absence where return used to be possible.

I'm alone on an island maybe a hundred meters across. Black coral spires rise from the sand like skeletal fingers. The ocean surrounds everything, violent and gray-green, nothing like the Atlantic I knew. These waves move wrong, too much weight behind them, as if the water itself is denser here.

Thunder rolls across the sky. Lightning illuminates the water for a moment, and I see something massive moving beneath the surface. A shadow that displaces too much water to be anything I have a name for.

The rain starts in earnest, and I realize the drops taste different. Salt and something else. Something that makes my modified body respond, skin prickling with renewed sensitivity. The wetness between my legs increases, mixing with rain running down my thighs.

I need shelter. Need to think. Need to figure out how to survive thirty days on a world where the water itself is hostile territory.

But the shadow beneath the waves surfaces just enough for me to see the tentacles, each one as thick as my waist, and I understand that the hunt has already begun.

He's been waiting for me.