We'll figure out how to deal with our enemies. As long as we're together, I'll take anything this planet throws at us.
54
KASPAR
There is something so satisfying about gazing at my mate and knowing we are on the same wavelength with everything. Alice isn't mad at me over my omission about the footprint. She wasn't happy, but she'd listened carefully and understood my point of view. We're partners.
It's something I need to remind myself of when I want to keep the truth from Alice in the future. In a way, her lack of anger at me made me feel worse about keeping the secret, because I'd been the one that had fretted and worried over things for the last two months. If I'd shared with her, it wouldn't have been my burden alone. Together, we'd have been able to figure out a plan of attack.
Like we're doing right now.
Alice paces back and forth in our bedroom. After our quick mating, we retreated there to clean up, and right now I'm sprawled on the bed, naked, watching my female as she thinks.
"So the footprint you saw was by the first stream," Alice says to me. She tugs on her lip, her other hand on her hip, and moves back and forth, back and forth. Her breasts look mighty fine like this, and since I'm a male, of course I stare at them while she walks. "You said it was how many toes?"
"Four."
She glances at my foot. "And you have three."
I wiggle them in silent confirmation.
Alice paces some more. "And the newer footprint you saw?"
"Smaller than mine. Boots, so I couldn't tell the number of toes, but definitely a different person than the owner of the first foot." I'm less panicked about the situation now that I'm back with Alice. She's here and she hasn't been touched, so a lot of the stress I've felt for the last day or so melts away. I don't even feel the urge to check my data pad to check the reading on my lungs. Just looking at her helps me relax.
The view of her breasts helps, I admit.
"Neither one was mesakkah?" she asks, turning to face me.
"No."
"Are mesakkah the only blue aliens in space?"
I frown, because that's an odd thing to ask. "Why?"
Alice tugs on her lip again, thinking. "I saw someone, too. A big blue form. It was from a distance, and he wasn't the same blue as you so I thought you were muddy. I called out to him but he didn't answer, just ran away." She pauses. "I don't remember if he had horns like yours, either."
So much for relaxing. All the post-coital easiness is gone in a flash. "You saw someone? Here?"
"Yeah." She looks upset. "Like I said, I thought it was you and so I called out. He knows I'm here now, whoever it was."
I groan, rubbing my face. "Kef me."
"I didn't know—"
"I'm not mad at you, Sunshine. Just frustrated at the situation." And on alert. Someone else knows my pretty, vulnerable mate is here and I don't like that one bit. "Is that why the rope was pulled up?" When she nods, I feel a surge of pride. "Good girl."
"Blech. I'm not a dog." She makes a face at me and then frowns when I jump up from the bed and walk past her. "Where are you going?"
"To pull the rope up again," I tell her. Alice's survival instincts are better than mine. I left the damned rope ladder down in my hurry to touch her. I jump down from our bedroom and cross the small ship over to the open door and haul the rope up. There's no one on the other end of it, which is good. I scan down below anyhow, wondering if there's anything Alice might have glimpsed that would have made her think she was seeing someone that didn't answer. A weird shadow of a stone or something, or another predator like Sterre?
But there's nothing, and there's certainly nothing blue.
I don't like this. I don't like that I wasn't here to protect her. I head back toward our bedroom and gaze up at Alice. "The rope stays up at all times," I say. "And tomorrow morning, I'm going to go scouting. See if I can find out who's here with us."
"It sounds like several people," she tells me, climbing down the ladder to join me. "Someone with big feet and four toes, someone with small feet, and someone mesakkah. You think it's your brothers searching for you?"
"No. They wouldn't have run away when you called out."
"Hmm. True. What about that Straik guy?"
"He's a runner, but I somehow doubt it was him, unless you saw an entourage. I doubt he'd go anywhere on this muddy planet."
Alice chuckles. "Okay, so we can rule him out. What does that leave?"