Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
I keep thinking Thor is soft because he’s more overtly civilized than Drako. The veneer of nice guy just sits on him so well. But every now and then, I get a glimpse into a heart that is just as dark and feral as Drako’s, if not more.
I nod quietly and avert my eyes. I don’t know how long I can safely look into that particular abyss.
I hadn’t even thought about falling in love. It’s not really something you think about, is it. It’s just something that happens to you. It’s illogical chemistry that sweeps through your synapses and fucks your whole life up. That’s the only way I can explain my sisters’ choice in husbands, anyway.
I never really thought it would happen to me. It still hasn’t, I suppose. Unless it has?
I don’t know what love is. But I know that when Thor talks about Drako being hung, it feels like a pit of endless despair opens up inside my belly, one that would absolutely never be filled.
So that’s interesting.
I pray for Drako to be unpleasant again, to make my knowledge of what awaits him less awful to bear. But he insists on being handsome and sexy, and exposing his tattooed biceps covered in thick yet intricate tattoos depicting works of the gods. Loki steals Thor’s hammer over and over with every rippling motion of Drako’s arm.
I am still curious about the Vikar. I wasn’t nearly as interested in them when they had me captive and were going to make me watch the bodies of my crew burn, but there’s something about fresh air and the knowledge that almost all of them are now also dead that puts me in a more forgiving mood. Or maybe all the stress is turning me insane. Could be that. Hard to say.
Thor is going to let Drako call the shots. He is not going to bother arguing because he hopes our ships will scan the planet, find three human life signs, and sweep us all up before Drako can do anything about it.
We start walking again, heading away from comfortable temperate terrain and toward the rockier, icier heights. I follow because I have no choice. I don’t know if I really agree. It’s not even worth thinking about because nobody is going to listen to me anyway.
I stay a little nearer Thor than Drako, because interacting with Drako makes me feel like I have to contend with self-examination I don’t want to do.
“We don’t have cold weather gear,” I say as we leave the tree line behind and start heading into a rocky area that seems to have quite a few caves at various elevations.
“Arghghglblrag!”
It’s not the response I expected to get from Drako, and that’s because it doesn’t come from him at all. We all swing around to see something that I, for one, do not get a very good look at because I am too busy already running the other way. We are talking tall, shaggy, toothy.
The sound of a creature charging us echoes off the rocky surrounding walls. It is making the sorts of sounds a semi-verbal humanoid might make if it had never heard anybody say anything.
I have a vague sense of something two-legged rushing toward us faster than any man could ever run. The three of us race away from it, following sheer, stupid instinct. You can train people to react to dangerous situations all you want, but when you’re really caught off guard, the animal brain takes over.
“I’ll hold him off!” Drako says, turning around as if he has a death wish.
“No!” I scream. It doesn’t matter. Thor has grabbed me by the back of the shirt and he is dragging me with him, hauling me into his arms and maintaining pace. We are heading toward the edge of the mountain, which has decided to stop being a mountain, we discover as we scramble over large rocks that reveal a sudden edge. There isn’t time to stop. The ground beneath our feet crumbles as we run and before we know it, we are falling.
The predator leaps, overshoots us, and goes arcing out into thin air. The drop below has to be well over a mile. There is no surviving that kind of fall.
Thor grabs the side of the cliff just in time to stop us from falling. I don’t know if I am screaming or not. I grip onto Thor with all the primate instinct my brain can gather. In this moment, I have not evolved a bit from an ancient monkey clinging to its mother in a tall tree.
Drako’s head appears over the edge. He is lying flat on unstable ground, reaching out an arm to Thor.
“Give her,” he says, referring to me.
The uncanny feeling of not having ground beneath my feet and knowing that there is nothing but eternity below me will never leave me. I felt more secure on the spaceship when we were surrounded by nothing at all than I do here, with the ground much closer, relatively speaking.