Alien Brute's Captive - Aya Morningstar Page 0,15
it’s not quite a polar bear--it’s the same size, and the teeth are just as sharp, and it looks like it could kill me just as easily as a polar bear, but its proportions and the way it moves are all different. More alien.
It just eyes me, as if it was curious.
“Krakon!” I scream
14
Krakon
I jolt awake. Something is wrong.
Then I hear her screaming my name.
A night’s sleep has mostly healed my leg. It hurts a bit still, but I run at full sprint toward Catherine. Toward the big ice bear.
Fuck. Idiot. Why did I put her camp so far away from mine?
I’ve got the axe in my hand, though I’m probably just going to have to use the wrist tool.
If she just stays still and stares it down, it will likely back off. Ice bears are afraid of Cygnians, and it will probably register a human as a Cygnian. As long as she doesn’t…
She starts to run.
Shit.
It takes off after her, its hunting instinct triggered by her fleeing motion.
I’m maybe a hundred feet away now, and Catherine is running toward me. The distance will close fast, but not before the ice bear gets her.
My autocannon isn’t calibrated to hit bears, and I don’t have time to mess with it. If I just point and let it auto-fire, it might assume Catherine is the bigger threat.
And Catherine is right in front of the bear. If I aim manually, I might still hit her. In auto-fire mode, the cannon shoots one bullet in a straight line. In manual fire mode, due to the difficulty of aiming with your wrist, it shoots a wide buckshot. Terrible for this situation.
The axe then.
I run fast. My injured leg throbs with pain. I ignore it.
When she’s about twenty feet away from me, I see the bear jump.
I don’t think. I just throw the axe.
It hits the bear in its head. The bear falls and knocks Catherine down, but it’s dead, and it doesn’t dig its claws or teeth into her. She just falls into the snow, and the bear’s big heavy dead body falls on her ankle.
I’m on her in a flash. “Your leg!”
“It’s stuck,” she says, eyes wide with shock. “It doesn’t hurt. It’s just stuck.”
I lift the dead bear up off her so she can free her leg.
I check her ankle. I press gently on it. “Does that hurt?”
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says. “I’m fine. Just scared.”
She looks at me with those big puppy dog eyes, and I know what she’s going to say before she even opens her mouth.
“Krakon...can we just have one camp now?”
15
Catherine
We merge our camps. One fire. One place to sleep.
We don’t sleep together, of course. He stays about six feet away from me at all times. The limit of our scents is about that far—social distancing. He acts like my scent really is a virus.
I should think more like that, though, shouldn’t I?
Sure, he protected me and saved me. After he kidnapped me and crashed his ship. He’s protecting me from the giant fucking mess he got us into. It’s like if Thad had been super high and crashed the car, and then rescued me from the burning car. Would I consider that sexy and heroic of him, or would--
God, who am I kidding? I would consider that heroic. Because I always go for the wrong man. I’m drawn to all the wrong things. I can’t see cause and effect properly. If I see a sexy thing, that’s all I see. I only see the tip of the iceberg. For Krakon, “sexy pirate” is the tip of the iceberg. Everything under the water is harder to see, but it’s the most important part. I need to focus on that, and ignore the shiny ice poking up above the water.
Krakon is not the right guy for me. It doesn’t matter how good he looks, how nice he smells, or how fiercely he protects me. He’s only protecting me from a situation he created, and he’s only doing that because he wants to sell me.
“Do ice bears taste good?” I ask.
It’s roasting over the fire. He’s chopped it up into pieces. He salted some of the raw meat. The pelt is hanging up to dry.
He shrugs. “Never eaten it. I doubt it tastes very good, but we will soon reach a point where we don’t care how good things taste. Food is just fuel.”
We’re sitting about eight feet apart. If I ever try to get closer, just to make it easier