Hunted By Bruk (Alien Mate Hunt #6)

Kerris

The portal spit me out onto bone.

I caught myself before I fell, one hand scraping against something that had once been alive and was now just calcium and silence.

The surface was rough under my palm, porous in a way that spoke of age.

Centuries, maybe. Millennia. Whatever had died here had been dead longer than humanity had been building anything worth remembering.

The orientation materials had warned about disorientation. They hadn't mentioned the heat.

Dry and relentless, baking up from the white ground and down from a sky the color of old paper. My skin prickled. Sweat broke out across my back, my chest, between my breasts. Within thirty seconds, my shirt clung to me in ways that made my nipples visible through the fabric.

My nipples, which were already hard.

The tonic. It had started in the medical bay when they'd made me drink that thick, sweet liquid, and it hadn't stopped. Wouldn't stop for thirty days, they'd said. Or until...

I knew what the "until" meant. I'd signed twenty-three waivers.

I straightened and looked at what I'd bought with my signature.

Bone. In every direction, bone. White and gray and ivory, curving up into formations my brain immediately started cataloging.

Rib structures forty feet tall. Fifty. Taller.

Vertebrae the size of cargo containers arranged in patterns that could have been arranged by natural death or might have been deliberate placement.

In the distance, a skull formation rose against the horizon, big enough to be a building.

Big enough to be a city block. The orbital cavities faced outward like empty eyes watching the territory.

The Ossuary. Sector 7. Thirty days.

Between my legs, something clenched.

Not a thought. Not a decision. Just my body responding to stimulus I couldn't identify, muscles deep in my core contracting around nothing.

I instinctively pressed my thighs together, and the pressure made it worse.

Made me aware of how swollen I already was down there, how the lips of my pussy felt puffy against the seam of my pants.

The intake coordinator had called it the Preparation Compound. Clinical name for chemical slavery.

I took a breath. Then another, forcing myself to think past the heat pooling low in my belly.

The rib formation to my left offered height. Vantage. Whoever or whatever lived here would have the advantage of knowing the landscape. I needed to see what I was working with before it saw me.

I walked to the base of the nearest rib and tested it with my weight. Fifteen years of structural work had taught me to read load-bearing capacity at a glance. This bone could hold a hab-block. It could hold me. The surface was rough enough for grip, the angle manageable.

I started climbing.

The tonic made it difficult. Every movement created friction.

My pants dragged across flesh that was becoming oversensitive, the seam pressing against my clit in ways that sent little shocks through my nervous system.

My nipples rubbed against my bra with every reach upward, and I was suddenly, acutely aware that they were harder than they should be. Swollen. Aching.

I gritted my teeth and kept moving. Hand, foot, hand, foot. Focus on the structure. Focus on the angles.

Jonah's voice slid through my concentration, unwanted.

"You won't regret this, Ker. I promise."

I shoved the memory away and hauled myself onto a horizontal surface forty feet up.

The view was worse than I'd expected.

Bone stretched to every horizon. Ribs, vertebrae, scattered skulls, all of it white and gray under that colorless sky. No vegetation. No water that I could see. Just the remains of creatures so massive I couldn't imagine what they'd looked like alive.

Movement.

I went still. On a ridge maybe half a mile away, something massive shifted against the pale landscape.

My engineer's brain started calculating automatically: eight feet tall, maybe more.

Broad. Built like the bones around us, meant for weight-bearing, for permanence.

The coloring read wrong for bone, more ivory than white, with undertones of gray.

Living tissue, then. Armor, maybe, or thick hide.

It wasn't moving toward me. It just stood there. Watching.

For a moment I thought I was going to be sick. Nausea rolled through me, sharp and disorienting, and I gripped the bone surface hard enough to scrape my palms.

Then I realized it wasn't nausea at all.

My pussy clenched so hard I gasped. A violent contraction, visible through my lower belly if I'd been looking, my internal muscles seizing around emptiness.

Wetness flooded between my legs, enough that I felt it immediately, hot and slick and spreading.

My nipples tightened to painful points, the fabric of my shirt suddenly unbearable against them.

My body was responding to the sight of that thing on the ridge like it was something I wanted.

I didn't want it. I wanted to survive thirty days and never speak to my family again.

The figure didn't move. Neither did I.

My thighs were pressed together, trying to create pressure, trying to ease the ache that was building between them.

It didn't help. My clit was throbbing now, swollen and insistent, and every pulse sent another wave of wet heat through my core.

I felt myself opening, the lips of my pussy spreading slightly even through my pants, my body preparing itself for something I refused to accept.

Ten minutes. I counted them, forcing myself to breathe slowly, to wait out the wave, to prove that I could control this.

The figure turned and disappeared over the ridge.

I stayed where I was, shaking, my hands white-knuckled on the bone. The wetness between my legs had soaked through my underwear. I could feel it against my inner thighs, cooling slightly in the dry air, a humiliating reminder of how thoroughly my body had betrayed me.

My hunter. Had to be. The one who'd paid for the privilege of chasing me through this graveyard.

At least Jonah never made my body turn against me. All he took was money and years and the last shred of faith I had in family. This thing wanted more. This thing wanted everything.

I climbed down from my perch on shaky legs. My calves burned from the uneven surface. My lower back had started to cramp. Exhaustion settled into my muscles, my body diverting resources to the arousal it thought would attract a mate instead of to basic locomotion.

Halfway down, another wave hit me.

I clung to the rib structure with both hands, pressing my forehead against the bone while my body convulsed.

The wave passed after maybe two minutes.

Two minutes of clinging to ancient calcium, shaking, trying not to fall, trying not to scream.

When I could move again, I finished the descent with careful, deliberate movements.

Testing each handhold. Calculating each step.

Being an engineer because being a woman was too humiliating right now.

I spent the next two hours mapping what I could see from ground level, using my knife to scratch notes into the bone surface. Rough marks that served dual purpose: navigation and proof. Proof I'd been here. Proof I'd thought my way through this instead of just suffering.

Three horizontal lines at the base of the rib I'd climbed. My mark. My signature. Proof of passage.

The skull on the horizon was maybe five miles away, positioned at the center of a natural bowl formation. Water would collect there if it rained. The terrain between here and there was a maze of bone structures, some natural, some that looked almost architectural. Almost deliberate.

I walked toward the skull, picking my way through the bone field. The ground was uneven, scattered with fragments that ranged from pebble-sized to boulder-sized. Every step required attention. Every step also created friction against my swollen, sensitive flesh.

I stopped every hundred yards or so. Not from physical exhaustion, though that was building too.

From the need. From the way walking made my pants drag against my clit, made my thighs rub together, made my body think it was being stimulated when it wasn't. Not really. Not in any way that would really help.

The tonic didn't care about my survival. It only cared about reproduction.

Jonah had never cared about my survival either. Just about what I could provide.

Funny how the monster hunting me through a bone maze was already proving more honest than my own brother.

The wind shifted while I walked. I paused, tilting my head. The dust moved differently now, swirling in patterns I didn't recognize. The air tasted strange. Drier, if that was possible. Something was changing in the atmosphere, though I couldn't identify what.

I filed the observation away and kept moving.

By late afternoon, I'd covered three miles at best. It should have been an hour's walk on flat terrain. Took me four times that long because of the uneven ground, the constant detours around impassable bone formations, and the waves of arousal that kept forcing me to stop and wait them out.

My body was a disaster. My pants were soaked through at the crotch, the fabric dark with moisture that had nothing to do with sweat. My nipples were chafed raw by my bra. Between my legs, everything was swollen, tender, aching with an emptiness that had become its own kind of pain.

I needed water. I needed rest. I needed to stop thinking about the thing on the ridge and what it would feel like to have something that big between my thighs.

That last thought made me stumble. I caught myself on a protruding vertebra, breathing hard, furious at my own brain for betraying me as thoroughly as my body had.

I didn't want it. I didn't.

But my pussy clenched anyway, and I had to press my hand against myself through my pants just to ease the pressure enough to keep walking.