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Chapter Two
VARUS
She is mine.
My Javorian bond instinct flared to life once I saw her among the soldiers. I didn’t have time to question why. I only knew I had to get the human female out of combat.
I took her and flew over the flames and the fighting. My blood sang with the victory of a fresh enemy kill. Too bad I couldn’t throw all my Quarek captors into the fire. The woman’s safety came first. My vengeance would have to wait.
I couldn’t remember the last time my wings took to the air. Finally, after months of being a prisoner, I was free. My wings remembered the weightless freedom of having nothing underneath to pin them down. I stretched them wide, wider than I knew they were able to go when I had to sit huddled in that cage. Then I let the air currents take me out of reach of ranged weapons. Shouts of combat quieted the higher I flew.
"Stop."
But the shrieks from the human female got louder.
"Put me down." She spoke the modern Javorian tongue. She had the strangest accent. I never heard her speak before but I saw her many times in visions.
I blamed my Quarek captors and the months of torture. By starving me of blood, they must have damaged my ability to judge between Javorian and humans. Why else would the bond instinct shake me awake to this foreign woman from a planet galaxies away?
She squirmed in my grasp. Her little brown hands clawed the air, likely in search of my skin to rip from my face. Black hair fell in hers, hiding everything except for the curve of her chin and the slender line of her neck. She kept kicking as though she might have a second chance at taking out my legs.
I still felt the brunt of her prior attack. Those damn boots she wore hurt. What was she hiding in them, slabs of metal?
The wound she inflicted on my neck continued to sting. I don’t know what was in that little syringe, but I could feel the blue liquid surging through my veins like a thousand little insects burrowing. I wanted to claw them out.
The feral beast within me snarled in irritation.She did this.
Ever since I'd been deprived of blood, it never left me in peace.
"Hey, you. Do you hear me?" The woman shouted through my thoughts, her high voice sailing over the inner beast’s roar. "Let me go."
I ignored her. At least, I tried.
"I said, put me down." She jabbed me in the ribs with her pointy elbow.
"Oof." Air forced out from my lungs. For a person half my size, she packed a good punch. I grunted, feeling my hand lose grip on her coat. She screeched as she began to slip. I fastened my other arm around her waist.
Yet still, she couldn’t be satisfied. "Put me—"
"Enough." The echoes of my shout carried through the sky. Words flooded my head. They had meaning again. I hadn’t spoken this many of them since my capture. "Do you want me to drop you in the trees?"
Her warm body stiffened beneath the layers of her military uniform.
"That’s what I thought." Maybe the way I spoke was harsh, but I did get her to stop flailing.
She hung, limp, in my arms until I found a patch of dry ground to touch down. I landed in a wet field. Mud-caked reeds leaned into foul-smelling standing water. Green scum sat on its oily surface.
I set the human on her ball-busting steel feet. At once, she fell to her knees and gagged.
