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THE SIREN GAVE EMILY an immediate headache and she could barely make out what Oz was saying. Braznon’s bowels? Sounded messy. She would have asked what he meant by that, but he’d morphed from her polite host to an alien warrior between one blink and the next.
Was there a fire? A tornado? Were they under attack?
She kept her questions to herself and sprung to her feet, ready to do what Oz told her to. She wasn’t sure she fully trusted the man, but he was the one with the electric wings and fangs who was supposed to keep her safe. For right now that was enough.
“Away from the windows,” Oz barked, and Emily jumped back. He didn’t take his own advice, but he crouched down and peeked out, not making himself much of a target. “Punting braz,” he spat. And yeah, those were definitely alien curses. Why didn’t her translator handle them? That was a question for later.
He stumbled back from the window and looked at her from head to toe. There’d been heat in his gaze before, but now there was no lust. Just assessment. He nodded once. “Shoes on. Good. We need to go.”
“What’s going on?” Emily would do what she needed to do to survive, but she couldn’t do it silently.
“Sweep coming through,” Oz said, moving quickly and picking up things that didn’t seem too important. He shoved them into a bag and pulled it on. “Come on, we can make it to the—punt. Solan’s got the shuttle.”
Yes, he did.
“Did that give us away?” Maybe it wasn’t the time to ask.
But Oz just shrugged. “Can’t worry about that now.” He grabbed something else off the counter and shoved it into his pockets. “There’s a vehicle downstairs we can use. No flight, and they might see us leave, but we can’t stay here.”
Emily was regretting volunteering to stay. It hadn’t occurred to her that something like this might happen. Maybe it should have. They were fugitives from the research facility and apparently these aliens didn’t like humans all that much. Back home she’d never even gotten a parking ticket and now she was on the run from alien soldiers. What had her life become? “What are we waiting for?” The need to move flowed in her veins. She didn’t want the Apsyns getting their hands on her. She wasn’t going back to that terrible place where they treated her like a lab rat. She didn’t want to die as someone’s science experiment.
Oz took a final look around the room and they headed towards the door. The night seemed peaceful. The alarm had stopped ringing, and though Emily could hear the sounds of vehicles, she could pretend it wasn’t evil aliens racing through the night to come and get her. But pretending for too long would get her killed. And she wasn’t going to die today.
She didn’t know where downstairs was. The apartment opened right to the street and there was no obvious entrance to a lower level. She hadn’t even realized they had roof access until they had to carry Lena up there, but it seemed the building held secrets of its own. Oz moved swiftly to a recessed door that Emily would have never noticed. He opened it with a wave of his hand and a narrow staircase led down into darkness.
“A light?” she asked. She couldn’t see a thing, but could imagine all kinds of monsters lurking in the basement on this alien planet.
“They might see it,” Oz whispered. “Here.” Energy crackled and she looked back to see those magnificent wings of his stretching out over head, dimly illuminating a path out.
Emily wanted to reach out and touch them so bad that her hands hurt. But she’d seen the destruction wings like those could cause and she wasn’t going to let curiosity hurt her even more. The metal staircase banged and clanged as they moved downstairs to the garage. There were a few vehicles, but Oz passed them all by until he came to what basically looked like a motorcycle. The wheels looked different, solid in a way rubber wasn’t, and it gleamed with an inner glow. But there was room enough for two people sitting astride. Emily was ready to climb on behind Oz when he motioned for her to get on first.
“Do you expect me to drive this thing?” she asked. She’d never been on a motorcycle back home.
“I can handle the controls, but I need to be behind you to use my wings.” He gave her an encouraging smile.
Emily closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and said a little prayer. When she opened them, a giant armored truck hadn’t magically appeared, so she climbed on the alien motorcycle and decided to trust that Oz would do what he could to keep her safe.
He waved his hands in front of the controls and it all appeared in front of her like a hologram. “Hold on to this bar,” he told her, breath rushing by her ear.
Shivers raced through her body, goosebumps breaking out on her arms. Thankfully they were covered by her jacket. She didn’t want Oz to know the effect he had on her. She couldn’t let herself get hung up on an alien. She had to keep her focus on getting home.
But she still leaned into the heat of his body.
For safety.
And warmth.
Yeah, right.
She tried to understand what he was doing with the controls, but it was all in symbols she didn’t recognize. “Shouldn’t there be handlebars or something? How do you steer?” She knew that much about bikes, and the bar she was holding on was fixed in place.
His breath brushed against her again. “The steering controls are along the side of the bike. Our bodies tell it where to go.”
That sounded complicated, but Emily wasn’t going to argue. He seemed to know what he was doing.
She hoped.
Something crashed overhead and she could hear pounding footsteps. “They’re here,” she breathed out.
Oz started the bike and they were off.
***
PUNTING patrols. How had they found them so quickly? Solan was a better pilot than that; he knew how to get them the braz off the planet without alerting security.
He could curse Solan out later. Right now he had his arms wrapped around Emily and needed to get through the city without anyone noticing. At the last moment he handed her a helmet and made her put it on. His wings could protect him from most injuries, but it was difficult to protect someone else, and she’d be less likely to be identified as a human if she were wearing the helmet. Sure, she didn’t have wings, but it wasn’t like every Zulir had theirs out all the time.
Oz wanted his own wrapped around the bike to deflect anything the patrol shot at them, but he retracted them. The bright, swirling electric colors would be a beacon, and they needed stealth for as long as they could manage.
There was only one way out of the garage on a vehicle, and the patrol was sure to have someone near the door. Oz held on tight to Emily and pushed the bike forward. If they were fast enough, they’d lose the patrol quickly.
And he loved to ride.
They burst through the garage entrance and he barely had time to see the first patrolman signal for him to stop. Oz ignored it and tore down the street, leaning his body and guiding the bike down the narrow lane. The vehicle became an extension of himself and Emily. He’d been worried for a moment that she would resist the controls, but she leaned into him and let him lead. But it was more than that. She didn’t surrender to him, she moved with him, like she knew what he was doing even before he decided.
It couldn’t be that she knew where he was going. He hadn’t decided on a path, and she didn’t know the city. But one turn after another she was flowing with him, letting the bike become a part of her, and they danced together as they drove.
It would have been perfect, maybe even romantic, if not for the sound of vehicles in hot pursuit, sirens blaring. Soon it would be more than sirens. Blasters, bullets, lightning from their wings. It all depended on why the patrol was after them. Did they suspect he was a Synnr? Did they know Emily was human? Or was this just a random patrol that had gotten lucky?
No time to stop and ask, and Oz couldn’t really care anyway. If they got a hold of them, it would be over for Emily and maybe for him. He wasn’t going to let that happen.
A sharp turn had him and Emily almost scraping the ground as they sped down an alley almost too small to accommodate them. He thought they were lucky, that they’d managed to shake the patrol, but when he popped back out onto another street one of the patrol cars was there.
Punt.
More driving. More evading. More flowing perfectly with the human in his arms.
And then the patrol got serious.
The first blaster shot went wide, taking out the window of a nearby building. It was a warning. They wouldn’t rely on blasters for long. The weapons could hurt if they got hit, but they weren’t usually fatal. That was saved for the projectiles and the lightning.
The second blaster shot would have hit them if Emily hadn’t jerked the bike to the side. The patrol was determined to stop them.
Oz let his wings out.
Energy crackled in his veins as he could feel the lightning within him flow. There was a sudden freedom to it, one he couldn’t quite explain. The wings didn’t weigh anything, and yet he could feel them simmering in the air, ready to strike out, ready to shield, ready to fly.
He absorbed the next blaster shots and turned the bike towards one of the roads that would take them out of the city. The land around Vanen was unforgiving, but there were places to shelter if needed, and if they could lose the patrol they’d be able to hide. He didn’t want to get stuck in the city where the patrol would have almost unlimited resources.
They just needed a bit of space. A bit of speed. They could do this.
He had to keep Emily safe.
More blasts shot after them and Oz spread his wings wide, but Emily froze up in his arms, her body stiff as a board. She quickly relaxed back and he didn’t have time to check to see what had happened. Had she been hit? Was it something else?
They had to get out of this.
Now.
He turned his whole self to it, and Emily followed. They got the space he needed, and when an exit onto the local highway came up Oz passed it by, letting the patrol vehicles speed along before slamming his bike to a stop, rearing backward, and climbing the ramp.
No one in the patrol was on a bike like his, so they didn’t have the same maneuverability, and that bought him almost a minute. Just enough time to put distance between them and speed down the road to safety.
Well, relative safety.
They ditched the bike as quickly as possible and he stole a different vehicle, this one with two seats and doors. He took the time to pull out the vehicle tracking system.
Emily walked stiffly to the door and got in when Oz was done. “Are you alright?” he asked. He pulled them back onto the road and wished he could let the autonav take over, but it was tied into the vehicle tracking system and wouldn’t work without it.
Emily nodded. “Don’t worry about me, just get us out of here.”
“I can multitask,” Oz assured her. But she was talking, she was breathing steadily. She didn’t look gravely injured, so he had to trust that it could wait.
The patrol didn’t find them again. The highway took them out of the city and Oz turned to dingier roads for cover. He debated ditching the car again, but unless they went into one of the small villages and stole another one, they wouldn’t have a way to get back, and he didn’t want to draw more attention to them. Not yet. Not unless they had another choice.
So that just left one more question.
“You look like you’re thinking too hard,” Emily said.
Oz shot her a grin, some of the tension leaking out of him. “I have enough untraceable credits to rent a room in one of the travel inns along the road. They don’t ask questions seeing as their clientele...”
“Rent by the hour?” she asked.
Oz furrowed his brows, “I’m not sure what that means.”
“Prostitution? Or other seedy business?”
Was that common on Earth? He’d heard stories about the planet, but they’d been about exploration and technology, about the great feats of humans. Nothing... seedy. He’d wondered if humans who came from Earth would be different than the ones he’d met, if they’d have impossibly high standards or be horrified by the darker parts of Zulir society. But it appeared humans had problems of their own.
“Something like that,” he said, “though I’m fairly certain we have to rent for the whole night. Our other choice is to sleep in the vehicle.”
Emily looked around and sighed. “I feel like the safer choice is to avoid people, isn’t it? I’m sure we can make do. And it’s not that cold outside. We can always sleep under the stars. People think camping is fun for some reason. Maybe I’ve been missing out.”
This woman. This wonderful woman.
Oz pulled the car over and turned toward her. “You’re—”
Whatever he was going to say was lost when she leaned over and sealed her lips against his.
