Dazzled by the Alien Daredevil
The Kurians Book Five
Ashlyn Hawkes
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Other Books By Ashlyn Hawkes
About the Author
Special Author Note
1
Strol
The day is hot, the air heavy and oppressive, but I don’t mind as I stare at Sarah, my twin. “Are you sure?”
Sarah lifts her chin. “Why are you still here?” she asks. “I thought you wanted to actually go out and do something for once.”
“What do you mean for once?” I retort. “We’re always doing something.”
Her lips curl into a smirk. “You mean that you’re always doing something to get under Father’s skin.”
I roll my eyes and put my hands on my hips. “Father needs to lighten up. He’s too uptight. He acts as if we’re children still.”
“He doesn’t trust you,” Sarah says.
I wince. “I don’t care what he thinks. I do what I want.”
“And that’s why he doesn’t trust you. He thinks your irresponsible.” Her blue eyes are barely neon, but they’re sparkling, and her grin is wide.
“You’re terrible, you know that, don’t you?” I grumble.
“Then what are you waiting for?” she demands. “You said you were bored, so I said I could suggest a dare, and you were all for it up until I said what the dare is. It’s a simple little thing, taking down a nealander.”
Nealanders are a strange animal native to Kurian. They’re a bit ugly since they have minimal fur, their bodies all wrinkled. They eat rocks, more specifically the moss that grows on rocks here, and then spit out the rocks. They’re about as smart as those rocks.
While each one is roughly triple my size, they aren’t that hard to kill. The issue lies in how skittish they are. They tend to stampede, and the location of the pack is rather close to a small settlement. If I cause a stampede, Father might actually kill me this time.
I survey the field below us. Sarah and I stand on the ledge of a mesa. If I head around and come at them from the southwest… If they do stampede then, they should hopefully go northeast, and if that's the case, the settlement should be safe.
Should is the key word.
“You’re too afraid of Father. I get it. He is the almighty overlord. I mean, he hasn’t at all been a bit of a softie lately, considering how many Kurians have found love on Earth, and he isn’t even forcing them to return to Kuria like he originally said.”
I grit my teeth. “Oh, yes, love. That’s all Father cares about.”
Sarah blinks a few times and crosses her arms. She really does favor Mom. I look so much more like Father.
Overlord Nestrol. Nadia. Our parents. They’re legends here on Kuria. Father has been the leader of the Novans for so long that he doesn’t know how to do anything but order people around. I guess, to some extent at least, that’s a good thing because if it weren’t for everything Father’s ordered, the Novans would all be dead already.
For hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years, the Novans lived in peace on Nore. There was the occasional killing of an overlord, which lead to there being a new overlord, but other than that, peace. We never had a civil war or anything like that.
But then, we did face a war. Nore was one of three planets in close proximity, and one planet stole aliens from the other. Once the Novans learned about this, they swept in to free the slaves. Again, there was peace, although this time, the peace was broken from outsiders. Invaders.
The Grots.
I don't know why the Grots came, but they came, and they tried to vanquish the Novans as they had so many others. Whenever I think about them, I grow so furious, and I can't see straight. When I learned my history, I didn't bother to ask or learn what precisely motivated the Grots. In my mind, they were greedy and evil, power-hungry to the point of believing themselves to be gods.
But even gods can fall.
And they did.
We brought about that fall, or I should say the Novans did, but only after the Grots made the Novans pay a terrible price.
The Grots slaughter every Novan woman and girl. Even the youngest boys were also killed.
My father organized the Novan males, the survivors, and they did what they had to. They fled, but they did not give up. For two years, they survived in their spaceships, and they developed new weapons, more powerful ones. Once they were ready, they sought out the Grots.
The fiends had their eyes set on another planet—Earth. The Earthlings fought alongside the Novans, and the Grots were killed, every last one of them.
But for the Novans to not die out and the Grots to win despite their own extinction, my father convinced the leaders of Earth to send females to Kuria, the new home planet of the Novans. The children resulting from Novan-Earthling couplings are Kurians.
My twin and I are among the first Kurians to have been born. As much as our father tried to have more children, he never did. I think that has always bothered him. He wanted to do his part to help ensure the Novans didn’t die out, but he is extremely happy to have two children.
Well, he had been when we were younger. Now, I seem to be more of a burden than a son to him. He’s a bitter old man, if you ask me, too hardened by his long rule. He doesn’t understand that sometimes, you have to live a little in order to truly experience life.
All he does is have meetings and love Mom, and I suppose he’s happy, but I can’t stand the thought of all of those meetings.
“You’re stalling,” Sarah says, almost singing the words. “I never knew you were
