Rygnar: My Alien Monster

Chapter One

The Ambush

Lina

We were three wagons short of the Colorado line when the horizon went wrong.

From the driver’s bench, I watched two riders appear where there shouldn’t be riders at all—out of a fold of tawny foothills, sun at their backs, hats pulled low, as if they’d grown straight out of the chaparral.

Their horses walked like they owned the road.

The lead man’s coat flapped open to show a gun belt he wasn’t bothering to hide.

“Traders?” Ben called from the second wagon.

“Maybe,” I lied, and felt the little courier tag beneath my collarbone pulse its steady thump. The tag always felt hotter when I was afraid—as if my own heartbeat had moved outside my body.

The riders reined up in the track and raised a hand. Polite, like they knew the choreography. The surrounding country was all knee-high grass and scattered boulders, the Front Range mountains lifting blue and cold beyond. Nothing moved except a hawk hanging on a single point of sky.

I flicked the safety strap off the pulse pistol under the seat. “Morning,” I said, because that’s what you say when the world pretends at civility.

“Morning.” The lead rider’s smile was lazy and wrong. “Road ahead is washed out. Bad footing for wagons. My crew can guide you around a side trail—small fee, just to keep your stock safe.”

Ben climbed down. I wanted to shout at him to stay put, but the script had him already in motion. “Appreciate the warning,” he said. “We’ve got schedules.”

“That so?” The rider’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Schedules and cargo. Which we can help with. Step down now, ma’am,” he added to me, as friendly as poison.

I didn’t move. He was close enough that I could see the nicks on his gun’s grip, the tally marks someone had carved there. The second rider shifted to show the shotgun across his lap.

Behind us, Hale whispered, “Lina?” and I could hear the prayer hiding in my name.

The hawk folded its wings and dropped like a stone.

“Side trail’s north,” the second rider said. “We’ll lead.”

I breathed out through my teeth, buying seconds. “What’s the fee?”

“Everything,” the lead man said pleasantly, and brought the gun up.

I didn’t think. The pulse pistol leapt into my hand—but the shotgun’s muzzle flared first. Ben spun, a red comet’s tail where his shoulder used to be.

The world telescoped—shouting, hooves, the wagons lurching as reins went wild.

I fired at the shotgun man and missed by a bad inch. He kicked sideways and came down swinging; my shot burned a divot in the road and took a sliver out of his stirrup.

“Down!” I yelled to Hale, but he was already falling.

The lead man fired into the air, and that was the signal.

Men spilled out of the grass and rocks like ants from a kicked nest—half a dozen, then more, masks tied at their necks, blades and clubs, and two more guns.

They didn’t rush the cargo.

They rushed me.

I kicked out of the bench, hit gravel, rolled, and came up under the wagon’s belly with my pistol stuttering. One man dropped. Another howled and kept coming anyway. A hand seized my boot and dragged. I twisted and kicked him in the jaw so hard my toes went numb.

Something struck the wagon’s axle. The old wood screamed. Hale’s breath made wet sounds. The lead man laughed like this was a dance he’d rehearsed.

“We know what you carry. Pretty little tags and pretty little maps. You’re worth more than flour and salt.”

My hand went instinctively to my collar. Courier tags weren’t just ID—they held routes and access codes; the kind of information raiders killed for.

I fired until the pistol whined empty.

The lead man stepped close and stomped the pistol out of my hand. “There,” he said. “No more mistakes.”

He grabbed my coat and yanked me into the wrecked sunlight. The road had become a ring of men and dust. The riders’ horses stamped and snorted. The nearest boulder flashed with mica like a million small eyes.

“Let’s make sure you don’t run.”

He shoved me into a rutted ditch. Someone caught my arms from behind. My shins hit stone; sparks shot up my bones. He crouched in front of me, all smell of tobacco and sweat, the grin now a strip of teeth.

“You gonna be smart about this?”

I spat blood at his boots. It felt like the only thing that was mine.

He sighed, almost disappointed. “Didn’t think so.”

He reached for my throat, fingers going for the courier tag cable to rip it free. I thrashed. The man behind me folded me in like a trap, forearm across my windpipe. Sound narrowed to a mosquito whine. Somewhere, a wagon horse screamed and screamed.

Then the air changed.

The hair along my nape prickled. It was like a cold wind moved through the ditch without touching the grass.

The lead man’s grin stuttered. He looked past my shoulder. The men around the ring turned their heads and went very still.

“Who the—” the one behind me started, and his voice cut off with a wet hiccup.

The weight on my throat vanished. I fell forward into the ditch water, coughed, and crawled on my palms. Boots slid in gravel behind me.

A shape moved—wrong in the way a mountain moves when you try to see it while you’re falling.

Tall. Broad across the shoulders. A dark coat that wasn’t cloth at all but some kind of matte armor that drank the light.

The lead man went for his gun.

The shape didn’t shout. It didn’t warn.

He stepped in, caught the man’s wrist, and the gun went off into the sky. His other hand struck the rider’s face once—precise, almost gentle.

The rider folded like a cut rope.

“Two!” someone yelled. “On the flank!”

I saw it through a frame of grass: the stranger—no, the thing—turning. Something like a blade flashed from his forearm. He moved too fast to be human; the world seemed a step behind him, trying to catch up.

Two men rushed with clubs. He slid between them, took one by the throat, and clipped the second at the base of the skull.

No wasted motion. No joy in it.

Only economy.

“Monster,” someone breathed, and my mouth remembered that word even as my eyes fought it.

I got my knees under me and reached for my knife.

A boot kicked it away.

Another man dropped into the ditch after me, grabbing my hair—then screamed and shot backward as the stranger hit him mid-lunge, a black blur and a crack of knuckles.

The ditch water ran pink around my hands.

“Can you stand?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. Low, roughened, with a strange shape to the vowels—like someone speaking through a mask they’d worn too long.

I ripped my gaze up.

He was close enough now to see the lines of him: armor fitted over a body built for fighting and then punished for it, an odd jointing at the shoulders where plates met, and a helm that hid his eyes behind a dark, slanted lens.

His jaw, bare beneath the helm’s lower edge, was a map of small, silvered scars.

“Can you stand?” he asked again, softer.

I nodded because my mouth didn’t trust me yet.

He reached—slowly, palm up—and I flinched before I could stop it.

He froze.

Then he turned his hand so I could see it wasn’t a weapon.

The skin there wasn’t like ours. Darker, patterned—scaled in a way that caught the light like polished stone. Not slick. Not reptile.

Something else.

Something alive.

Behind him, a gun cocked.

He pivoted faster than a blink, body angling to shield me.

The shotgun’s roar punched the ditch.

His shoulder jerked; his armor took most of the blast, but blood spilled dark down the seam.

He didn’t make a sound.

He just moved—low and lethal—and the shotgun man went down clutching his throat, surprised to find it empty of air.

Silence fell like ash.

My ears rang. The only sound left was a horse’s quaking breath and my own ugly rasp.

The stranger turned back to me, blood seeping along his upper arm. He reached again—careful, telegraphing every inch.

When I let him, his hand wrapped my forearm with a pressure that would have been tender if not for the steadiness of it. He pulled me up out of the ditch like I weighed less than the shadows.

“More will come,” he said. “We must move.”

“Ben—” I staggered. Ben lay where the shotgun had put him, eyes open to a sky that was suddenly too bright. I took a breath that hurt. “We can’t—”

He looked, and there was something in the angle of his head—a slight bow that might have been respect.

“I am sorry,” he said simply. “We cannot stay.”

“What are you?” It slipped out raw, ridiculous.

His helm tilted. “Rygnar,” he said, as if that answered everything. Then, gentler: “I will not harm you.”

The raider leader groaned and rolled.

Rygnar’s gaze flicked toward the sound. He released my arm and scooped up a fallen cloak. He shook it once and tossed it over the man’s face—not to hide him, but to keep dust out of his mouth.

Monster, my frightened brain insisted, even as the rest of me watched a man do a small kindness for an enemy.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

“I can run,” I said, surprising myself.

“Good.”

He stooped to snatch up my dropped knife and set it in my palm, handle-first.

“Keep this,” he said quietly. “If you need to use it on me, aim for the throat. Here.” He tapped a seam where armor met skin.

I stared at him. “Why would you tell me that?”

His mouth did something like a smile, brief and tired. “Because you are afraid. And because I do not want to be what he called me.”

Another horse screamed, farther away.

Rygnar’s head snapped up. “Now.”

We ran.

The road fell away behind us, and the foothills took us in—rough and rising. He chose a line that wasn’t a trail so much as a suggestion: up a dry wash, through stands of cedar, over a rib of rock that scraped my palms raw.

Twice he steadied me with a hand at my elbow, and twice he took it away before the touch became anything else.

We climbed until the wind tasted like snow.

The land opened suddenly at a lip of stone. The Front Range surged up in a jagged wall of blue ice and pine, the sky above it a hard white.

Rygnar scanned the lower slopes, quick and methodical. Satisfied, he gestured toward a dark seam in the cliff face barely wider than a wagon plank.

“Shelter,” he said. “For tonight.”

I hesitated at the seam, chest heaving, heart doing the rabbit-against-snare thing it does when death brushes by and then doesn’t take you.

My hand brushed the courier tag through my shirt. It pulsed back.

“Wait,” I said. “I have to—”

I fumbled under the collar, found the tiny pressure switch, and killed the signal.

The tag went cold, and I almost cried from the hush that fell inside me.

Rygnar watched, that still way of his like a held breath.

“Good,” he said. “Clever.”

“Not clever enough,” I said, and stepped into the seam of stone.

He followed.

The world narrowed to stone and the whisper of our boots.

For a long time, there was only our breathing and the faint drip of water—the old bones of the mountain taking us in like we were small and unimportant.

Like we were safe.

I didn’t believe in safe.

But I kept walking.