Caveman Alien's Riddle - Calista Skye Page 0,90

sufficient amounts,” Heidi points out. “Never an easy thing to find.”

I raise my hand. “There may be a source. I’ll find out.”

Delyah nods, wise enough to not ask any more about that. “We can hold out indefinitely in here. If the escape ship was sure to work, I’d recommend that all the girls who want to leave Xren should go now. But if there’s a chance the Plood have sabotaged it, then we should find out if and how. We have time for that. Let’s not screw that up, this close to the end.”

We leave the control room in thoughtful silence.

Caronerax is waiting on the garden level and comes over to embrace me. “There you are. Finally.”

I squeeze him. “Hey, it was only ten minutes.”

“It was indeed. Ten infinite minutes away from you.”

I stroke his scaled chest, fully healed. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. You don’t believe in that?”

“I don’t believe in absence at all. I am all about presence.”

“I know.” I look up at his extraordinary face. “My love. I have to ask you something.”

“My astonishment knows no bounds.”

I slap his scales lightly. “Stop that. Husbands aren’t supposed to roll their eyes at their wives.”

“I think opinions differ on that.”

“Probably. Anyway. Your cache. It contains gold, yes?”

“If you say so.”

“And gold is effective ammunition against the dragons.”

He taps his chest. “Demonstrably.”

I steel myself. “Could you lend us some gold? In case we have to fight the dragons.”

He thinks about it. “Pieces of gold as ammunition? My dragon heart winces at the mere thought. Yes, I’ll lend it.”

I frown. “You will? From your cache? Just like that? I was expecting that you’d demand an immediate divorce.”

“The cache hasn’t been on my mind for days,” he says. “It’s very mysterious. I think it’s because my wife is now my main hoard. So as long as I have you, I can lend gold. Or even give it. May I keep some of it?”

I go up on tiptoe to kiss his lips. “Keep as much as you want. I don’t think we need much.”

“Then start with this.” He reaches under his pants and takes off the gold chain, handing it to me. “I don’t need it to Change anymore. Each link could be split in four, I would think. That should be ammunition enough for at least a skirmish. Just make sure to hit with every shot. Don’t want to give dragon enemies gifts of gold. Make sure it gets inside them and poisons them.”

The chain is heavy in my hand. “This has to be a couple of pounds. Thank you. We may not need much more.”

“Tell me if more is required. The cache is buried under the campfire in your old village.”

My jaw drops. “You just told me the location of part of your hoard!”

He taps his lips. “I did, didn’t I? Well, now I have to kill you.”

“I don’t believe you will.”

He grins. “The available evidence points to you being right about that. Don’t tell anyone, though. That was only for your ears.”

“Your secret is safe with me, prince. Now, I wonder if we-”

Phoebe appears at the alien elevator, then comes walking fast, urgency in her movements. “Guys, you want to look at something up in the control room?”

Caronerax and I follow her up.

Delyah points to the giant display screen that is the wall. “Do we know who that is?”

The sun is setting, and the shadows are long. That’s why it’s so easy to see the hundreds or dragons and cavemen standing together in a long line about a half-mile away from Bune. There must be hundreds of them, if not thousands.

But that’s not the worst part.

Above this new and mixed army, alarming enough on its own, is the thing that Delyah was talking about.

There’s a dragon, very big and powerful, flying along the line with slow, calm beats of its wings.

As we watch, it turns in the air and is suddenly coming right at us, as if it knows we’re watching.

The dragon grows big as it approaches, beautiful and still terrible.

I gasp. “Is he going to…”

Delyah and Phoebe and I reflexively duck as the dragon gets close enough to touch.

Then the room is bathed in searingly bright light as the chilling creature breathes a stream of plasma-hot white fire at the old spaceship.

When we get up again, Caronerax is still standing there, watching the other dragon circle away. Part of the display is now dead and black, its outside sensors burned to a crisp. But we can still see that this new menace is blue with bright yellow stripes. He looks a lot like Caronerax.

“We know who that is,” my husband says tightly. “That’s my brother, Prince Yranox. The heir presumptive to the dragon kingdom. Probably the mightiest of dragons.”

“It looks like he has an army,” Delyah points out, her voice trembling. “Including cavemen. Is that possible?”

Caronerax reaches out and grabs my hand. “With Yranox, anything is possible. He is unusually persuasive and shrewd. Strong and powerful. Evil and twisted. Nothing I’m seeing here seems impossible.”

My heart sinks in my chest and a coldness spreads through me as I exchange worried glances with Delyah and Phoebe. This is not looking good at all.

“If you fought him,” I ask in a voice that’s at least as unsteady as Delyah’s, “could you win?”

My husband squeezes my hand. “It would be close.”

The other dragon does a lazy spinning loop in the sky, the tips of his wings leaving an intricate set of contrails that shine orange in the light from the setting sun. He is plainly an absolutely formidable enemy.

I squeeze Caronerax right back. I can’t bear even the vague idea of losing him. “Then I won’t let you.”

© Calista Skye 2020

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Dear Reader,

thank you for reading Caveman Alien’s Riddle!

Caronerax is a different dragon from Kyandros and Aragadon. I wanted to see how an even more powerful creature like him would deal with being injured. As it turned out, he didn’t take it all that well, but at least the penny dropped for him by the end.

Jennifer was incredibly patient with him, I think. She has more going on upstairs than she ever thought, she just needed a way to find her talents. Hey, whittling a wooden hairpin with what is essentially a small pocket knife is not a joke. Try it and see :)

I feel bad for the spidermonkey that was killed while he was bringing Jennfer’s message back. But it was a pretty heroic death if it took two whole spears to kill him, and I think he would be okay with having done his very best.

Those little guys will be important in the next part of this series. We know they are fierce, and at some point they’re going to get their fill of all the dragon stuff and just snap. That will be pretty chilling. The dragons should never have messed with them.

Heidi wasn’t dead at all, just semi-unconscious with her eyes open. Something similar happened to me when I was a kid. I slid on the ice, banged my head on the ground and contracted a pretty bad concussion. I’m told my eyes were open, but it was impossible to communicate with me in any meaningful way. My mother was extremely worried for a while. I recovered quickly, as did Heidi.

Did you like Marshie? I had a lot of fun writing about her. I think she will find a good guy monster and they will live happily ever after on that pretty rad island she’s either made or found, I’m not sure which and she’s not telling me.

I know the title of this book doesn’t quite work. The riddle has little to do with the cavemen. But that’s the title format of this series, and at this point I’m stuck with it. I suppose I can say that all the dragons are riddles to the cavemen, so the most mysterious of them must be the greatest riddle? Or something like that.

Things are really coming to a head now. Even the Plood have returned, and everything seems to be going straight to hell for the girls. They even lost their village, for crying out loud.

This book ended on kind of a cliffhanger, and I apologize for that. But I need two books to complete the pretty pivotal subplot of Caronerax and his brother.

And also to see if the girls can ever go back to Earth. That will finally be resolved in the next book, which is Beatrice’s story and expected in January of 2021.

I hope to see you then!

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Thanks again!

Calista

PS: Did you try my new series of science fiction romance, called Alien Abductors? If not, the first part is right here.