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 totallynothuman—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
