Total pages in book: 40
Estimated words: 36875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 184(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 123(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 36875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 184(@200wpm)___ 148(@250wpm)___ 123(@300wpm)
“What were we hunting?” She asks a question in the wake of mine that remains hanging in the air. “That’s what I don’t understand. We went out and you didn’t have weapons.”
“Oh. That’s easy. Mushrooms.”
She lets out a little laugh. “My language implant must be malfunctioning. You don’t hunt mushrooms. You gather them.”
“I hunt everything.”
Her face falls and she goes slightly pale again. I do not need to keep reminding her that I am an apex predator. She knows that all too well. I feel bad for her, for the decisions that led her here, and for a temperament that does not mesh well with the cold, hard realities of existing in this universe we share. I have always understood that there are those who kill, and those who are killed, and I have always known which one of those I want to be.
“Lyssa,” I say her name gently.
“Yes?” She dares to glance up at me.
“It is going to be okay,” I tell her. “No harm is going to come to you.”
“But I might watch great harm come to others of my kind.”
“Not if you close your eyes.”
A groan emerges. She was close to laughing. I wonder if she is clinging to her shock and horror as a shield. Humans always go on about their humanity and how it must be preserved. It is the strangest thing, how what should be an intrinsic quality, unable to be avoided in any way, has become something that they hold fast to in fear they will lose it. Humans, in the end of all things, are predators too. They are soft and they are fleshy and they like to fight with ideas, sharpening ideologies into barbed points and ramming them into one another’s psyches, but they are still predators. They have canines and eyes that face forward. These are the universal qualities of a creature that hunts.
“Why are you looking at me that way?” She asks the question softly.
“I am wondering what you will become while you are with me,” I tell her. “And I wonder what led you here. Would you tell me the story, what actually happened, not merely what I surmised?”
She shrugs and plays with the corner of a blanket. “I was going to be married. My mom had even bought us a house to live in together. But my fiancé walked out on me. And then I thought…”
She trails off. I attempt to finish the thought.
“Then you thought you might hunt bad men and make sure they were punished?”
“Yes. Maybe. Yes. I am tired of being seen as something to be used or traded. I am capable. Not as capable as you; my fingers can’t dig into the flesh of another being and remove their skeletal structure, but I can hunt bounties.”
She looks determined now. That flash of hurt from her past steels her and makes her strong.
“What happened to the man you were going to marry?”
“I don’t fucking know,” she says in a tone that strongly implies he could be sucked into a black hole and she wouldn’t care.
I sit down in front of her and take hold of her hands. They are delicate and much smaller than mine. I hold them in my hands and wait for her to look at me.
“I may kill men,” I tell her. “I may do it in ways you find brutal and distasteful. I may take them as trophies and take pride in their deaths. I may be what some have accused me of being. A monster…”
“A psycho,” she whispers under her breath.
“Yes. That too. I may be all those things. But I have chosen you, Lyssa. And unlike others with softer tastes and less of an appetite for violence, I can promise you I will never take another. I have chosen you for me. Forever.”
* * *
Lyssa
His words are so fucking romantic, and I could so easily swoon for him. Manik is in some ways the sort of man every woman wishes she could have. But there’s a bit of skull sticking out of the back of his pack. I can see the teeth sort of… ugh. Instead of swooning, I shudder.
He follows my gaze. “Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry. Let me get cleaned up and stash my things. You stay here.”
I have never left this front room, this haven of technology and propriety. I know the rear of the cave must go quite deep, and I know it has pumpkins in it. And corpses. Pumpkins and dead bodies. It is like Halloween, but it’s real, and it’s a horror I am now wrapped up in.
I distract myself with the conversation we just had. Stan. That’s the name of my ex, and I haven’t really thought about him since I got here. Manik’s presence has a way of mentally erasing all thoughts of other men, the same way his violence removes them physically. I could truly fall in love with this monster. I think I might already be starting to. But… what the hell am I loving? What am I doing? I didn’t start this journey of independent womanhood and becoming a kick-ass bounty hunter just to end up the prisoner of a brutal alien.