COWBOY ROMANCE: Justin (Western Contemporary Alpha Male Bride Romance) (The Steele Brothers Book 1) (93 page)

He let out an anxious huff as he knelt by her side. “Sarah.” He hissed, shaking her.

But her body just stupidly followed his movements. He pressed his hand against her chest. A faint heartbeat greeted his palm. She would be fine.

I wonder…

He rushed back into his lab and came back with a sterilized tool kit. One short moment later, he had lifted her off of the bed. He set up his small scanner, training it on what he needed to see the most.

There it was: the liver.

He furrowed his brow. The human doctors had been right about that. The thing decrepit thing hardly still classified as living tissue. He stuck his probe into her, his mind running in circles, but his hands as steady as a machine’s. He needed a sample of her flesh. He would never be able to forgive himself if he didn’t at least try to save her.

He had managed to remove the sample of liver tissue and take it to his microscope in less than twenty minutes. He gave her an extra sedative to keep her under while he analyzed it. Once his machine spit out the results, everything from red and white blood cell count, pathogen and toxin scan, as well as protein markers, he ran it again.

His heart fluttered in his chest because he couldn’t believe it. His reservations about her Kaharan blood had been nothing more than his own flimsily crafted excuse to continue to see her. His reservations about her lineage were mere speculation at best. But now he stared at a readout on a machine that revealed her Kaharan bloodline.

Her blood cells held Kaharan protein and so did parts of her liver, so her body had begun to attack itself. Her liver fought back, initiating its own, unorganized regeneration. The growth spiraled out of control. The pullups on its surface were just as much Kaharan as they were human.

Coel knew exactly what he had to do. The problem sat right in front of him. The solution: obvious. He would have to kill every human bit of her to let her alien blood do its work. He would have to destroy her to save her.

Talking to her about it was out of the question. She didn’t have time for him to explain to her the intricacies of her bloodline, didn’t have time to convince her heart and her emotions that her survival depended on this.

So he fetched his full surgical kit.

He gave her another dose of sedative, just to keep her under a little more. He couldn’t deny the excitement coursing through his veins as he prepared the materials: Kaharan plasmid harvested from him, the proteins chemically isolated and then amplified. He would inject the mixture right into her liver.

Coel used the scan to monitor his movements, watching the serum coat her liver. It targeted her fragile, human cells, destroying them while regenerating on its own. Blood flow slowed to a halt, her heart rate dropping even more. But the sight of rapidly forming Kaharan cells invading their human counterparts consumed Coel so much that he hardly noticed. Her extremities faded to a bluish color.

Coel pushed the scanner away. He needed to keep her heart beating so that he could keep blood filtering through her liver. So, he shot her with adrenalin. He witnessed no immediate change in her appearance. Her skin remained its olive color, her lips their blushed pink. She laid as still and human as she could be. After two hours of induced, rapid dialysis, Coel began to think he had failed.

***

Sarah’s eyes flashed open. She glanced down at the bed she laid in, at the satin sheets and the blank walls. A sigh slipped out of her lips and with it, the word, “Coel.” She understood now. He must have taken her back to his place.

She gazed around at this temporary arrangement, wondering how he could have possibly managed to set up a camp like this when she could barely manage the tent she had haphazardly erected for herself.

When she tried to get up, she noticed something strange. Her whole body ached. Her skin felt tight and stretched. Her heart thudded in her chest and yet energy poured out of her. In one subtle movement, she had climbed out of her bed.

She towered over his room, forced to duck her head to keep herself from hitting the ceiling. Had she grown taller? Everything looked brighter, sharper, as if she looked through the lens of glasses for the first time. She stumbled through the small cabin with jerky, awkward movement until she found what she searched for: a mirror.

“What the hell?” She whispered as she got a good look at herself.

She pressed her dark green hands into her dark green face. “Oh my God.”

None of it made any sense to her.

Chapter Five

“Sarah?”

She turned to find Coel standing in the center of the room with a bowl in his hand. He looked almost apologetic.

But he wasn’t the man she had spent the better part of a fortnight with. He was the man she had dreamed about with the skin and the eyes and…

He had turned her into him.

Her skin crawled. “What did you do to me?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t understand. “I
saved
you.”

The warring urges to slap him and to get as far away from him as possible possessed her. “No, I don’t fucking understand. What is this? What are you?”

“I’m a Kaharan,” He said, his voice even with caution.

“What is that?”

“I’m here to find others like us.”

Sarah shook her head. “Oh no, no, no, no. I am not like you. You did this to me. You changed me.”

“I only enhanced what was already there.”

Sarah glanced back at the mirror, her eyes stinging with tears.
What was already there?
No. She refused to believe it. “I don’t believe you.”

“Your human was killing you.”

“You had no right!”

“You were going to die!” He yelled.

Sarah flinched. “And I’m not now? Now that you destroyed me?”

“I figured you would be stronger this way. I wanted to see if your Kaharan DNA was enough even if you only had half of it. I didn’t know if it was going to work.”

“Right. So that’s what I am: a little experiment for you.”

“No. No, you’re more than that.”

“How long?” She asked, approaching him with arms crossed.

He shook his head in confusion. “How long what?”

“How long did you know this about me? Was this whole seduction just so that you could kill me?”

“I did not kill you. Please do not reduce my actions.”

“You made me hideous. Change me back!” She yelled, shoving him.

Coel took a step back to steady himself. “I can’t!”

Sarah ripped the bowl out of his hand and chucked it at the wall behind him, the shards raining down behind him.

He grasped her shoulders with both of his hands.

She shrugged out of his grip, surprised at her strength, her speed. “Why not?”

“Because this is who you are. You can try to deny it because you’re afraid, but there is no turning back. Your only options were death or this. So get a hold of yourself.”

Anger turned Sarah’s vision red. She shoved him, watching as he flew across the room. The entire raider shook. “You don’t get to tell me that!” With that, she turned and made her way to the door.

“Sarah no! You can’t be seen!” Coel lunged after her, grabbing her arm.

“Oh fuck you!” she screeched as she yanked herself out of his grip, opened the door and ran out into the evening anyway. She ran through the small clearing and into the dense coverage of wood. Dry air filtered through her body as she sprinted, going faster than she ever thought possible.

But she could feel Coel right on her heels, could hear his breath. It sickened her. She started to harness her strength, deliberately manipulating her environment. One tree came crashing down, then another, then another. It was all calculated at first, but then she lost control.

As she continued to run, kicking up mud and ignoring Coel’s pleas, things started to fall around her of their own accord. Branches and leaves rained down on the both of them, the ground trembling below their feet. She travelled up and around the mountain, tears covering her face and dry sobs filling the air. She paused on the ledge of a large platform to catch her breath.

“Sarah.”

He sounded desperate and out of breath. His voice stirred a sympathy in her that she wanted nothing more than to crush as soon as possible. She raised her arm, her lips pursed as she brought the biggest tree down between them. As the dust settled, she could hardly see him on the other side of the fallen trunk.

She sat down, catching her breath, but her relief was short lived.

The ground began to rumble beneath her, the dangerous purr foreshadowing until, just like that, the dirt split from beneath her. She plummeted down into the dark hole, instinctively reaching up to grab the edge of the trunk, but her hands slipped off almost immediately, snapping a nail off.

Coel’s surprised scream echoed through the darkness before a deep thump cut him off.

She slid through the natural tunnel, her skin scratching against the hard, rock surface as the gravity threw her against the walls before spitting her out of the mouth of the tunnel. A shot of sharp pain rushed from her back up her spin as she hit the ground.

She heaved dry coughs, clouds of dust forming around her lips. No sooner had she managed to sit up did a second rumble catch her attention. Rocks and debris came rushing through the short tunnel, plugging their only way out.

Chapter Six

Coel’s eyes flashed open. It took him a short moment to adjust to the darkness. He flexed his jaw, sucking on the cut in his lip. His aching hands found the ground as he managed to push himself up. The stale, moist air told him they only had a limited supply. He wandered away from the plugged tunnel and into the large space before him.

Stone markers dotted the area with carvings in them. He approached one of them, running his fingers over the groves in the rock. “Unbelievable,” He whispered at the sight of Kaharan writing. After sweeping the area with his gaze one more time, it became obvious. He had fallen right into a tomb.

He continued on, weaving in and out of the markers, until he saw something glinting in the starved sunlight that streamed through the tunnel.  He rushed towards it: a medallion lodged into a marker. The Noble Settler had worn this pendant, but Kahara so despised him that it kicked him out of her planet and exiled him on earth.

This was his colony.

But they were all dead.

“Coel!”

Sarah’s broken voice reached him easily.

“I’m all right!” He screamed back, but he went deeper into the tomb.

“Coel come back! Help us get out of here.”

But Coel couldn’t answer to her, at least not yet. He was too mesmerized by what he had fallen into. The farther back he went, the more densely packed the stones became. Before he knew it, they weren’t just stones. Dusty jewelry and shoes, Kaharan novels and gadgets covered the ground. 

He picked up a stack of thick paper that had been bound together with string and attempted to read it. But he couldn’t get enough light back there, so he made his way back to the mouth of the tunnel, where Sarah stood, yelling into the debris in the misguided assumption that someone would happen to walk past them and be able to help them out.

He scanned the material, his eyes shooting wide when he realized what he had come across –a Kaharan history account. The first few pages were boring, nothing more than recounts of dates and book-keeping, a record of their settlement. But as he went on, things got darker.

Soon enough, he scanned words that spoke of an illness. Their colony had grown larger and larger, encompassing the locals and fully assimilating into human culture. Then a “famine struck”. Life expectancies plummeted. The men and women barely lived into their thirties and with every one, death brought the same symptoms: weakness, vomiting, chills, heart failure.

Coel glanced over at Sarah, predicting how her end would have come about. He shook his head. “No. It can’t be.”

Her cancer would have caused heart failure. The vomiting, the weakness, the flu-like symptoms would have been her body’s last attempt to rid of her Kaharan blood.

Coel’s lost settlers, his life’s mission, had been annihilated.

Sarah was all he had left.

***

A film of sweat covered Sarah’s whole body and yet she shivered in the chill. The air had grown stale and every breath felt less nourishing than the last. She wanted to kick herself. How stupid could she be? She had single-handedly caused an avalanche and now they were stuck underground with no way to get out.

Just the same, Coel wouldn’t help her.

He just sat off to the distance, staring into the ground.

She told herself she never wanted to see him again, told herself that she would force him to change her and then get out as fast as possible, but the longer she stood in her own body, the more right it felt. She could finally stretch out her muscles and, according to Coel, she was no longer going to die.

It was the stupidest most impossible thing but he had saved her life and now, looking at him, she couldn’t help but feel a king of gratitude.

So, she approached him.

“This whole place is a tomb.” His voice sounded stripped and raw.

“What do you mean?”

“The Kaharans. There are none of them left.”

Sarah furrowed her brow. “I thought that was a given.”

He looked up at her, his eyes red. “You are the only one left.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I’m not. I can’t be, because you exist.”

“No. I am full Kaharan. I’m from Kahara and... There is no one left there. No women. It’s why I’m here.”

“What happened?”

“A meteor crashed down on us. My men and I only survived because we were underground in my lab when it happened. We will go extinct without a way to…” His eyes grew large. “… To procreate.”

“No. No, I can’t be the only one.”

Coel stood up, placing his hand on her shoulders. “But you are.”

Sarah ripped herself away from him. “I’m not!” her voice echoed. She stalked right up to the tunnel. “We have to get out of here right now.”

“Sarah, please at least listen to me. I cannot force you. It wouldn’t be right, but—”

Sarah raised her hand. “Please do not talk to me about this anymore.” Her mind sprinted in circles.

She could call someone… or something.

“I have an idea.” She breathed.

Then she closed her eyes and let her own energy inform her judgements. She could feel something else, another being, close by. So, she reached for it with her mind. No sooner had she felt contact did a roar sound off in the vicinity.

“A bear?” Coel asked, stepping up next to her.

Sarah slumped over as the steps grew louder and closer, shaking the earth with every thump. The rocks shifted from right to left. The bear lifted a large stone, allowing sunlight to pool through the cave. “Oh thank God.” Sarah did not wait a second. She climbed over the rest of the debris towards the opening.

The bear met her with its angry eyes, the tall body towering over her. Its fur rustled in the wind, its teeth bared. She sucked in a deep breath and released it. She calmed it with her mind, reaching out to it once more and allowing her influence to pour over him. With a huff, it turned and moved away.