My Alien Warrior Read online

  “And who takes care of you?”

  It wasn’t a new question by any means. Everyone who got close to her in some way asked that question eventually, and Kayla’s answer was always the same. “I can take care of myself.”

  “You shouldn’t have to, though. That’s what partnerships are for.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not fair if it’s one sided. If someone is taking care of me, and I can’t give them the same back. That’s not right.”

  It had to be equal, or nothing at all, which was the main reason why Kayla had been living with nothing for so long.

  Khaos seemed to consider that. “I don’t think it’s one sided,” he said after a moment. “Not if the other person wants to take care of you. There’s nothing wrong with one person being the caretaker if you’re both into that. It’s not like you’re selfish, Kayla. I think you’re one of the least selfish people I’ve ever met, actually.”

  “You haven’t met that many people,” Kayla felt compelled to point out.

  “I don’t just mean humans. I mean out of everyone. There are some people out there who can’t even imagine what it’s like to do stuff for other people, and that’s definitely not you. You sort of remind me of the women who ran the orphanage I grew up in.”

  Kayla didn’t quite know what to say to that, so instead she said nothing, choosing to sigh softly and focus on the warmth and solidness of his body on top of hers.

  “I still want you,” Khaos said softly. “No matter what you think about yourself.”

  “Why?” It was a fair question, she thought. He didn’t know anything about her really, aside from the fact that she worked too much and spent too little time caring about herself and apparently fell apart under his hands. He could probably have anyone he wanted back on his home planet, and she didn’t know why he would want a human woman anyway, if he didn’t plan to stay here.

  Although if no one could figure out what was killing his people, then he wouldn’t have much of a choice either way about where he stayed.

  She glanced up at him, and he seemed to be putting some thought into his answer. “Because you interest me,” he said. “Most of the women I’ve been with were convenient and interested in me, but it was pretty one sided.”

  “So you just slept with them because they were there and because they wanted you?” Kayla asked, arching an eyebrow. “That’s kind of awful.”

  He shrugged. “That’s just how it worked. They knew what it was, so it wasn’t like I was leading them on or making them think they were going to get something that they didn’t end up getting. Everyone was in agreement.”

  “I guess that makes it better.”

  Khaos cupped her face in his hand and gave her a soft smile. “I wouldn’t do that to you, you know. I know that’s not what you’re looking for, and it’s. I dunno why I feel like this, but I’d want more with you. If we were going to do something.”

  “Because I interest you?” It didn’t seem like enough of a reason for him to suddenly change his ways and start wanting to do relationships.

  “That and because I want. I want to be there for you. You’re helping me even though you don’t have to, and I just. I keep feeling like I want to help you, too. Like I want. To be yours.”

  His clumsy confession had her eyes widening, and she couldn’t help the little gasp that spilled out of her. No one had ever said anything like that to her before after her telling them that they would always be second to her career and her patients. Usually they would say that they had changed their minds or that they didn’t think it was going to work out, but here was Khaos saying he wanted her and all that came with her.

  “I...I don’t really know what to say,” she murmured.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. “My feelings don’t have to influence yours if you don’t want them to.”

  “I’m not sure what I want,” Kayla admitted. It would be so, so nice to have someone to come home to. Someone who she wouldn’t have to make excuses to about why she was home so late and why she couldn’t have pried herself away from the office earlier. She’d dated men who said they didn’t mind her schedule, but it always came down to missed dinners and postponed dates, and that tended to wear on people after a while. It made relationships hard, and Kayla didn’t know if she could set herself up for that again, no matter what Khaos was saying to her.

  Because if he turned out to not be able to handle it just like all the others, then she would feel like she’d truly hit rock bottom and had no hope of finding a partner who would just understand.

  But his eyes were earnest, and he looked like he really wanted to try, no matter what their differences were and what obstacles were between them.

  It didn’t make much sense, considering the fact that they barely knew each other, but she felt that warmth in her chest, and she wanted it, too.

  Before she could say anything about it, he was kissing her, and she was melting into it.

  So that was how it started, and Kayla was finding that so far, it was exactly what she wanted. Khaos would come to the clinic with lunch for her, reminding her that eating was important, and then he’d hang around until they were closed, limiting Kayla to just two hours to work on finding out what was killing his people before he was telling her to pack up and go home.

  When she pointed out that making her leave wasn’t helping them figure out what to do to help his people any faster, he pointed out that she wasn’t the only one working on the problem. With any luck, one of the government scientists who were also looking into it would find out what was going on any day now, and then Kayla could rest.

  Khaos made sure she ate when they got back to her place and took over feeding Charlie and letting him out to run around in the yard while Kayla took a bath and then at the end of most nights they were curled up together in her bed.

  It felt comfortable and good, and while Kayla was so nervous that at any moment something could go wrong and ruin everything, she was cautiously allowing herself to believe that this was something that could work for her.

  Chapter 8: The Truth

  The last thing Khaos had been expecting to find on Earth was a woman he wanted to be with. He’d heard stories of travelers from other planets falling for the charms of human women and abandoning all they believed in and cared for on their home planets to stay on Earth, but he’d always scoffed that those were just tales to keep them from interacting too closely with human women.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  He knew that Kayla hadn’t done anything to entrap him, like the stories would lead him to believe. It was more just that he was unbelievably attracted to her, and he didn’t really know why.

  One of the men who had come with him to Earth asked about where he’d been going so much, and, almost desperate for someone to talk to about the whole thing, Khaos had spilled what was happening.

  He told him all about Kayla and how she was helping him and how much he liked her and wanted to help her, and then also mentioned how strange it was for it to have happened out of the blue like it had.

  “You know,” the other Kaspersi had said. “There’s a legend about mates being a thing.”

  “Like how they were in the old days?” Khaos asked, lifting an eyebrow skeptically.

  “Yep. Apparently, it’s not really a legend, but a real thing that used to happen. Males from all different clans would fall for human women. Sometimes they stayed together. Sometimes they would just get them pregnant and then leave. Humans are strange, and people say that part of it is because most of them have some alien blood in there.”

  “I thought once you had a mate, you couldn’t separate from them,” Khaos said, head tilted. “That’s what I always heard in the stories.”

  “I think that bit might’ve just been romantic nonsense. No real reason why you can’t abandon your true love, right? Especially when you’re both from different planets and aren’t even the same species. So I mean, if this human lady is your mate, then you don’t have
to feel bad about leaving her. It’s not like she’s going to waste away pining for you.”

  It wasn’t a very romantic way to think about it, but Khaos supposed it was for the best if two people couldn’t be together. He knew that he and Kayla wouldn’t have an easy time of it if they decided to try and stay together, if they were even together currently, but there was a heat and a driving inside of him that made him want to try.

  It was hard not to want to try when he found himself thinking about her all the time when they weren’t together. When she was working and not with him, he was wondering what she was doing, if she was eating her lunch or working through it, if the nurses were asking her about him, and if so, what she was saying. He recognized that being clingy and weird about it wouldn’t help anything, especially since neither of them had explicitly stated that they were an item or whatever the term for it was.

  At the very least, he knew he didn’t have to worry about her with other men, considering how infrequently she had anything to do with them before he came along.

  When he wanted to see her, she was happy to see him, and when she needed some space, he backed off, and for the following weeks, it all worked out pretty well.

  Khaos had never put much stock in the novelty of having someone to curl up with at night and hold, preferring to crash after a long day of fighting in the arena and not having to deal with another person before he could sleep, but it was much more satisfying than he’d ever thought it would be.

  As much as he wanted them to find the cure for the Sickness, he wanted to keep spending time with Kayla all the same. And as soon as this mission was done, he’d be called home and would have to leave her.

  Apparently neither of them were thinking about that, though, since they didn’t talk about it when they were together and avoided mentioning anything about having to separate at some point.

  It worked for them, too. Better than either of them seemed to have expected it to. The first couple of weeks grew into a month and then that month turned into two. By some miracle, Kayla’s workload slowed down enough that they had time to spend together, and she took him to see things and eat things that he’d never experienced before.

  He told her all about losing his parents and the people he lived with back on Blessini and then got interrogated about his intentions by the nurses who worked with Kayla.

  They clearly gave their blessing in whatever form that took because Kayla seemed happier than she had before they’d started whatever this thing was. Her smile was beautiful, and Khaos went out of his way to find reasons to make her grin and laugh, always pleased when he succeeded and her face would light up in a way that seemed to be just for him.

  Of course, things like that couldn’t just stay simple. Khaos’ life had been simple for quite some time once he’d found his stride in the arena, but since becoming champion and all that went along with that, he’d found that things were never simple.

  Being with Kayla was easy enough for the most part, or at least it was until the day that the scientists found out what was killing the Kaspersi.

  Khaos had spent the night with Kayla, so he wasn’t there when the call came in to the apartment building where the rest of the Kaspersi were staying. In fact, it took them most of the day to track him down so they could deliver the news.

  He left Kayla’s clinic in a hurry, kissing her cheek and squeezing her hand before he left, going with his escort to the government lab where the experiments had been conducted.

  It was so much more clinical than Kayla’s office, all shiny metal and white sterile surfaces, and the men who faced them in a line were clad in white lab coats, gloves, and goggles, looking more alien than Khaos had ever looked in his life in his opinion.

  They were all murmuring to each other as Khaos and the others filed in, but they ended their conversation as soon as the door closed behind them.

  A screen slid out of the ceiling, and one of the scientists pressed a button, filling the screen with the image of a close up of cells surrounded by decaying matter. It wasn’t something he really wanted to look at, no matter how much he was used to seeing blood because of his time in the arena, and it just reminded him that this was the flesh of one of his people. It was the same as his parents and the hundreds of others of his kind that had died and suffered along the way. And now they were close to finding out what the problem was.

  “What you are looking at is a close up of a sample you gave us,” said one of the men. “As you can see, there has been plenty of decay here, essentially killing the owner of this sample. What we’ve been able to determine is that this isn’t actually a ‘sickness’ in the strict sense of the term. There are no viruses or bacterial infections present that are causing this, which is why your medics haven’t found anything.”

  The tone of the scientist clearly said that he wasn’t surprised that their medics hadn’t known what to look for, and Khaos bristled for just a moment before he focused on the matter at hand. If it wasn’t a sickness, then what was it?

  The lone woman in the group stepped forward and pulled out a pointer, pointing to the screen around the area of decay, bringing their attention to the greenish-black hue of the flesh there.

  “As you can see, even though there’s no evidence of a virus or bacteria here, there is still clearly something eating away at the flesh. It mimics the effects of a poison, as near as we can tell. A slow acting one, yes, but a poison nonetheless. In the older days of kings and queens and treachery, people would slowly poison monarchs they didn’t like, making it look like they were slowly wasting away from an illness that no one could cure. It’s a similar sort of thing here.”

  “Wait,” Khaos said, fingers gripping the armrests of the chair he had sat down in. “A poison? Like from venom?”

  A ripple of realization went around the gathered Kaspersi in the room at his words. There were very few creatures on their planet with the ability to produce toxin within their bodies. Some of the flowers and fruits were poisonous to eat, but they’d already ruled those out as having anything to do with the Sickness. So it had to be something else.

  It had to be something that they hadn’t thought of yet.

  It had to be the Vekosh.

  They were venomous, and every Kaspersi over a certain age could conjure an image of the Vekosh with their hunched, scaled bodies and reptilian eyes, oozing venom from their sharp teeth.

  When the fighting had been the worst, plenty of people had seen that sight, but very few of them had been killed that way. It was sloppy and inefficient, and for the most part, the Vekosh seemed to prefer gutting their kills on their serrated swords to messing about with poisoning them.

  “How would they be able to do this?” someone asked from behind Khaos. “They aren’t allowed over the borders.”

  “Is there a water supply they could get to?” one of the scientists wanted to know. “This is one of the most complex and resilient toxins we’ve ever studied. If there was some way to get it in your food or water, that would be enough to get it in your people.”

  The implications of that were horrifying, and they all fell silent, thinking about it. If there was some way that they were poisoning the people without them knowing, then the Vekosh had a huge advantage. More than that, they were clearly coming up with some kind of plan to wipe the rest of them out.

  “How is it that some of us are immune to this?” someone asked.

  The scientists deliberated amongst themselves for a moment, clearly unsure of how to answer the question.

  “It’s possible that some of your kind have built up a resistance to it. You say there’s no connection between those who get infected with the illness, but there has to be something. Since we now know that it’s not an actual sickness, you should look at broader connections other than just their age or health before they get sick.”

  It was a lot of new information, and Khaos didn’t at all feel like he was intelligent enough to process it. This wasn’t what he did. He was a fighter before anythi
ng else, and he didn’t like a threat that he couldn’t fight off.

  He felt caged in just then, and he wanted nothing more than to escape this lab and go find something to hit. The Vekosh were responsible for the deaths of his parents, and he hated knowing that.

  He had been very, very young when the bulk of the fighting had subsided, the Kaspersi beating back the Vekosh through sheer numbers and forcing them into hiding and isolation. Their threat had never been a big part of his life, though he’d always known that as a warrior, he would be called to fight them if they ever tried anything again.

  And now there was this.

  Honestly, he didn’t know what was going to happen now. The people in charge wouldn’t let something like this stand. Not when there had been so much fighting between the two clans for so long.

  No one was really sure how the two clans had come to hate each other so much. Khaos had never been one to pay attention in his history lessons, but he knew that there was very little the Kaspersi had known about the Vekosh before all the fighting had begun. As far as most people were concerned, the Vekosh had appeared out of the shadows, bringing with them death and destruction and chaos, upsetting the Kaspersi way of life.

  The fighting had started long before Khaos was born. Before his parents were born, even, and it had lasted for decades, the Kaspersi constantly pushing back the rebels until they could reclaim all of their land as their own.

  The Sickness had appeared while the fighting was still very much an issue, killing warriors and civilians alike. It quickly became apparent that the Kaspersi were the only ones suffering from the Sickness, as the Vekosh numbers were only declining due to them being run through or shot by Kaspersi warriors.

  By the time the remaining rebels had slunk back to their caverns and shadows, the Kaspersi had something much more deadly to deal with.

  It seemed almost absurd that none of them had thought to think that this could be the work of the Vekosh before, and Khaos knew that a great number of his people were going to be kicking themselves for not figuring things out sooner.