Birth of a King Read online

  Setting the baby down carefully on the ground, she scooped the branch up and whirled to meet the three giants charging after her. To her stunned surprise the three skidded to a halt the moment she raised the branch to strike. “You stay away from us! Go away!” she yelled at them, waving the stick around threateningly.

  The aliens exchanged a speaking look that was so human-like it totally blew her mind.

  Then she felt a tug at her leg and glanced down to discover the baby had grabbed her.

  Keeping an eye on the men, she bent quickly to scoop the baby up and settled him on her hip.

  “She thinks she’s protecting him,” Kadin said slowly, struggling to focus on the issue at hand rather than his reaction to the female—which was not nearly as simple or easy as it should have been. And that circumstance stunned him. It was not as if he had never met an attractive female. There had been enough to appease his body’s demands, at the very least—Well, until recently. His circumstances had changed, but not so drastically as would account for his powerful reaction to her.

  “I was thinking just that,” Gaelan agreed.

  The baby fixed him with a look when he spoke and narrowed his eyes. Opening his mouth, he uttered a low growl/bellow from deep in his chest.

  Absolute astonishment hit Gaelan at the gesture even before he felt the force of it—little more than a puff, naturally enough—he was a baby—but staggering that one so little would have the instincts to use it.

  Admiration followed and, as a reward for his bravery and cleverness, Gaelan faked far more reaction than he actually felt. Grasping his chest, he collapsed to the ground dramatically.

  The female’s mouth dropped open in stunned surprise.

  Kadin and Hauk turned to gape down at him in disbelief.

  “What the fuck?” they asked almost in unison.

  Struggling with the urge to laugh, Gaelan made a pretense of difficulty getting up. “He hit me with the voice. You did not notice? It was so clever I felt like I should at least allow him some gratification for his effort.”

  Kadin and Hauk exchanged a long look.

  “He is protecting her,” Hauk acknowledged.

  “He will not take it well if we wrench him away from her and that is not likely to leave a good impression or make things easy for us on the long trip home.”

  Kadin agreed with Gaelan’s assessment, but they had no choice in the matter. They had come a very long way to rescue him. His people needed him. “We can spare a few moments for him to grasp the situation and accept but no more. The warriors from that fort are bound to be right behind us.”

  “Let us return to the hut,” Gaelan said in his own tongue, gesturing to the woman.

  Kadin shook his head at him, both amused and annoyed. “You did not learn their language?”

  Gaelan reddened with annoyance. “I did not have a chance,” he responded tightly. “I was not born to an Earthly woman as you were.”

  “The infant is not dressed for this cold. Let us return to your home … and talk.”

  Emma was so stunned that she could understand what he said that it took a few moments for the meaning to actually sink in.

  She wasn’t especially happy once it did. She didn’t trust him further than she could throw him, but the truth was they didn’t have to talk her into anything. The one who’d spoken could overpower her, she was sure, with very little effort. With three of them ….

  Bowing to the inevitable, she clutched the baby more snuggly against her and nodded.

  They clearly didn’t trust her either. They surrounded her and ushered her back the way they’d come.

  Which wasn’t far.

  If she hadn’t been so upset, she thought she might have been embarrassed by her poor performance.

  She was, though, and things got way worse in a huge hurry.

  They weren’t even halfway across the backyard when it was abruptly flooded with blinding light, the sound of what seemed like a hundred rifles being cocked, and echoing bellows of ‘halt, don’t move!’.

  Almost as if they’d choreographed it beforehand, the three aliens, instead of halting as ordered, burst into a flurry of action that was nearly as blinding in speed as the floodlights.

  The winged alien who’d chased her from the backyard grabbed her and the baby and launched the three of them skyward. The other two, the one who’d come through her front door and the yellow skinned one that had no wings, planted their backs against one another and issued earsplitting bellows.

  Emma didn’t see anything, but she heard a lot—explosions, screams, shouts, the rush of air.

  She felt the rush of air, too, like racing along a road in a car with no windshield.

  Shock had separated mind from body and she wasn’t truly functioning above primal. Her mind filled with ‘impressions’ and sensations, but she couldn’t even actually assimilate them at that point. Frigid air blasted her and she instinctively clutched the baby tightly, so much so that he began to squirm and whine.

  She was only marginally aware of it, the sounds of complaint, but she felt like she had to grip him tightly to protect him and, instead of relaxing her hold, shushed him soothingly. “It’ll be over soon,” she murmured.

  And yet no one was more surprised than she was when ‘it’ ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. She felt the sensation of descent and then a jolt. Her feet never touched ground, however. Before she could decide what would happen next, she felt the alien carrying her forward.

  A sliver of light appeared out of nowhere, almost literally as if the woods had opened a window into another dimension. The dull thud of boots upon metal pierced the blanket of night. They were ascending … something. A ramp?

  They stepped through the narrow opening and were engulfed in blinding light.

  She was lowered to her feet. Fortunately, she was near a wall. She felt it as she swayed in an effort to gain her balance.

  The baby, apparently confused, or awed, ceased his quiet fussiness, went completely silent.

  “Are you injured?”

  Emma’s brain struggled to interpret the sounds the alien made into familiar words. Stunned when she realized that, despite the heavy, unfamiliar accent, it was words she knew, it took a moment more to grasp the question.

  “Are you hurt?” he demanded in a sharper voice.

  Emma launched an internal evaluation but broke from it almost as quickly as the other impressions she’d gathered abruptly came together.

  They’d been surrounded by soldiers who’d tried to shoot them! Had shot at them.

  Terror filled her when she discovered the baby was covered in blood and that he’d gone quiet, too quiet.

  Apparently, the alien man noticed at almost the same moment. He wrenched the baby from her arms before she could do more than gasp and searched him a little frantically.

  “It is not his blood.”

  Emma blinked at him, gaping, struggling to make sense of what he’d said. “Not …?”

  “You are bleeding.”

  Emma followed his gaze and stared at her arm blankly.

  Almost as if it had taken that for her brain to process the injury, pain moved to the forefront of her mind, and dizziness.

  The alien man shifted the baby to one arm and scooped her against his side, walking her awkwardly across the room they’d entered and then through a door and along a narrow corridor. By the time they were halfway across the small room, he was carrying most of her weight. Emma discovered her legs were rubbery. Her knees refused to work properly and darkness kept trying to close in around her like a heavy curtain.

  Dimly, she heard the baby crying and tried to reach for him.

  “He is not harmed. And you would drop him if I gave in to your demand.”

  He shifted the baby toward her chest, however, and managed to scoop her and baby up together.

  They entered a room off the corridor and lights flickered on, illuminating a place that was strongly reminiscent of emergency rooms she’d visited.


  And, apparently, that was the general purpose of it.

  He set her on a bed/table with surprising gentleness.

  Prying the baby away from her, he settled it on the table within the circle of her uninjured arm and lifted the wounded one to examine it.

  “The projectile has passed through,” he said after a moment. “Tissue damage, but nothing else that I can see. It bled much but it seems to have mostly stopped on its own. So … no major veins and no bone fragments.”

  He spoke low, more as if he was talking to himself than her, although he continued to speak in English.

  It wasn’t broken English as so many foreigners were prone to. The words simply weren’t pronounced entirely the same and his very deep voice and unfamiliar accent together made it impossible to instantly grasp what he was saying. Her brain had to ‘interpret’ the words before she could understand what he was saying.

  He moved away from her, crossing the room to a storage cabinet and searching it with the air of someone who expected to find what he was looking for but wasn’t so familiar with the room that he knew where to find it.

  The shock, she supposed, had begun to wear off.

  She was certainly feeling a good bit more—or maybe just aware of it?

  She studied him warily, trying to jumpstart brain function—which was still dangerously sluggish at least in terms of survival ability.

  She supposed he was more human in appearance than simply ‘alien’. Physically—as in two arms, hands, legs and feet. Proportionally human, not just the shapes.

  Of course, there were other things totally not human—the bat-like wings that clearly worked very well. The horns sprouting from his head. The skin color that most closely reminded her of a very bad sunburn except it wasn’t ‘fried’ looking.

  This wasn’t the one that had come to her door.

  She thought he’d looked similar, but somehow different, too, and the skin had been more of a reddish brown.

  All three had very long, very black hair.

  He caught her studying him when he turned around.

  Her instinct was to look away, but she found she couldn’t.

  His face snagged her attention as it hadn’t before, made her heart execute a little dance in her chest.

  She was so captivated that she didn’t even realize he’d walked right up to her while she gaped at him like a smitten teenager.

  “I am known as Hauk—Nightwing.”

  She digested that slowly while he took hold of her wrist and lifted her arm.

  “This will burn.”

  She didn’t have time to brace herself before he poured what felt like molten acid over her wound. She sucked her breath in on the edge of a scream.

  It startled the baby. He jumped and began to cry.

  And to glare at Hauk, making that odd, vibrating sound he had before in the woods.

  “Hush, little one. I mean no harm,” he responded, clearly unfazed.

  Hauk Nightwing.

  She didn’t understand what he said that time. She thought at first that she just hadn’t caught the words and then realized he hadn’t spoken in English that time.

  “You know our language?” she said when she’d managed to catch her breath.

  He looked amused. “I speak Satren. I am a Satren of Nardyl.”

  That threw her for a loop. If he was speaking his language, how had she understood him?

  “You’ve been to Earth before,” she said flatly as the answer leapt into her mind, accusingly, abruptly convinced his people had been making raids on Earth for centuries.

  To think that she’d always thought the people that claimed to have had encounters with aliens were nothing but kooks!

  He looked more like the human concept of Satan than alien—And he called himself satren. That seemed to clench it.

  His eyes narrowed, but she didn’t know if that was his focus on what he was doing—placing some sort of ointment on her wound and then covering it with a gauze-like bandage—or from anger. “Not I,” he responded coolly. “But I have … encountered your species. We have a common enemy.”

  He studied her when he’d finished, his gaze intent enough to elevate her awareness of him to a level approaching what she’d felt before. She almost felt like it must be her imagination when he reached for her. Before she could decide if she should feel threatened or not, he hooked a hand the size of her head behind her head and pulled her toward him.

  She had no clue of what his intent was until his mouth closed over hers.

  She jumped as a jolt like lightning went through her, sucking in a sharp breath of surprise as it seared nerve endings with hyper awareness.

  And yet, it was much like taking a deep breath of anesthesia in some respects. Her head swam even as she absorbed his scent and taste and touch with a fervent welcome she knew, on some level, she should not have felt. And she felt as if she was falling, floating down into a warm, dark, peaceful place where awareness of pain or concern were both overshadowed by a rising tide of desire.

  She was dimly aware of the baby’s fussing, but even that failed to rouse any urge to fight the warmth stealing over her.

  She wanted more.

  She loved the feel of his mouth, the stroke of his tongue along hers, and knew his hands would give her even more pleasure.

  Disappointment flooded her with an overwhelming sense of loss when he broke the kiss as abruptly as he’d started and shifted away from her.

  “What the hell?”

  Chapter Four

  Annoyance flickered through Hauk even as he withdrew from the female and turned at the sound of an approach from the corridor outside the med bay. Though not entirely resentment over the demand—a great deal more was from being interrupted—it deepened at the obvious censure of the question.

  Kadin was not his superior in any sense of the word and had no right to question him whatever he chose to do.

  Gaelan, who entered behind the mixed breed, glanced from one to the other and then strode toward the bed and lifted the squalling infant, who, to everyone’s relief and surprise, began to quiet almost instantly.

  “She was wounded,” Gaelan observed quietly, clearly focused on the infant. “She will be better now.”

  Kadin glanced at him at the comment and then returned his attention to Hauk. “What did you give her?”

  Hauk studied him for a long moment. “A kiss,” he responded coolly, making no real attempt to prevent a complacent smile from curling his lips, despite the fact that he was certain Kadin would take it as provocation.

  Kadin had not expected the bastard to admit it outright. He was taken aback enough by the bald admission that he was momentarily speechless.

  Which was just as well since he had a moment to reflect on the fact that he had neither reason nor right to feel possessive about the woman.

  “It has put her to sleep very nicely,” Gaelan observed with no attempt to hide his amusement.

  Annoyance flickered through Hauk although he had never considered himself particularly thin-skinned. “It was intended to help her relax and make that possible,” he responded coolly, struggling to keep his anger from lacing the words. “I do not know what meds might be safe to give her.”

  “No more than you know how the mating kiss might affect her … or you,” Kadin said pointedly.

  “On the contrary,” Hauk retorted, “I have a very good notion. Her species is not completely unfamiliar to mine.”

  Kadin’s lips tightened. He did not believe the comment had been intended to insult him, but he felt insulted regardless. He might be mixed, but one of his fathers was Satren. “Mayhap not, but you have no personal knowledge of them.”

  “Suggesting?” Hauk prompted.

  Kadin shook his head. “It is done. I hope that you will not find it a sacrifice you had not intended to make. We cannot take her even if she wished to go and we will not come this way again.”

  “The infant thinks she is his mother. We cannot leave her,” Gaelan broke i
n to say.

  Kadin and Hauk both whipped a sharp look at him. “We cannot take her,” Kadin snapped. “We are going into war—if we can even make the trip back.”

  Gaelan glared at him. “We should take this discussion elsewhere,” he said pointedly, indicating that the baby had fallen asleep.

  Hauk and Kadin both stared at him in surprise but nodded and turned to go. Gaelan settled the sleeping baby beside the female and lifted the side rail for safety.

  Kadin was pacing the bridge impatiently when Gaelan reached it.

  “How can the child believe she is his mother? And how the hell would you know it anyway?”

  Gaelan sent him a strange look. “You know we can communicate with our minds …?”

  Kadin’s irritation showed in his expression, but his response was fairly mild. “But … he is an infant. I have not sired a child myself so I know little about infants, but it seems to me his mind cannot have developed enough to allow … that sort of communication.”

  Gaelan shrugged. “His mind has. I cannot say whether it should have or not. I also will not say that it is like communicating with an adult or adolescent, but he has managed to state his wants and his likes.” He considered it. “His mother was an Earthly woman so I suppose his infant’s mind has confused the two women. I did not know her so I could not say if there is any similarity beyond being of the same species, but there must be some similarity.”

  Kadin stared at him thoughtfully for a long moment.

  Hauk spoke before he could say more. “Gaelan is right. We cannot leave her. She is attached to the child as he is her. She was wounded because she used her body to shield him. It would not be right to leave her to the tender mercies of those who attacked us. I am not certain she would fare a great deal better than the man that Gaelan interrogated.”

  “Will you quit harping on that?” Gaelan snapped. “I have said it was not intentional! He resisted. I was trying to discover what he knew that he was trying to keep from me.”

  Kadin straightened. “Did you discover it?”

  Gaelan looked disgusted. “No. I pressed him and his brain ….”

  “Well that was unfortunate,” Kadin growled testily. “It might have been anything, but we do not know so we must be on guard.”