Page 16 of Alien God

I realized I’d started thinking of the human as she and her instead of him. I’d encountered enough races across the cosmos to know that gender and biology could vary vastly. But she shared enough characteristics with species I knew well that made me think she was a female. And even without that experience, the analysis that consisted of holding her up against other women I’d met, I still would have figured it out. If I’d only encountered other stone sky gods and had never seen a female in my life, I would have known she was one. It was primal. Instinctive. A wordless recognition that flared in my belly and my brain, as vivid and inescapable as the blinding burst of the sun on this very tree just a moment before.

“Wake up, woman,” I hissed, holding her head firmly so that when her snow and honey eyes finally did open all the way she had nowhere to look but at me. “Wake up and tell me exactly what you think you’re doing in my world.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Torrance

“Hello?”

I heard the word, and it took me a moment to realize I was the one who’d said it. It had come out as some kind of automatic response to my returning consciousness. Like I’d been lost in a dark room and had heard the sound of somebody moving nearby.

“Hello?” I said again, confusion muddling my mind. The last thing I remembered was...

The tree and the snow and the explosions and the engines and...

They’re gone.

Where everything had been hazy a moment before, it all became clear, crashing in on me and shattering in sharp fragments. The fighting, the avalanche. The alien figure who’d clawed his way out of a stony sky, defying everything I thought I knew about space and air and atoms.

My eyes wrenched open as adrenaline rattled my limbs. I shook violently, teeth chattering as my eyes focused on... On...?

Him.

Cold air clawed down my throat on my gasping inhale. A face, mere inches from my own, filled my vision, broad and alien and vicious. A gaze like electric blue fire seared me. Stunned, I looked down and away. I shuddered violently when I realized just how close this creature was. He was holding me up, one massive fist scrunched around the front of my parka, the other at the side of my hood, holding my head in place.

I stared mutely at the fist holding my parka, blinking over and over, trying to figure out if he really did have glowing stars webbed all over his hand and bare arm, or if that was just some trick of my oxygen-starved brain. That arm connected to a bulging, muscled shoulder, leading into a bare, mostly human-looking male torso. Except that it wasn’t human. Because the skin was a deep, stony bronze colour, shot through with glowing blue veins of starlight, glittering points of light clustered like constellations everywhere I looked.

And the size marked him as non-human, too. No human man I’d ever seen had shoulders that broad, muscles that tightly packed on a towering frame. The only reason his face had appeared level with mine when I’d opened my eyes was because he’d been forcing my head back with his hand while simultaneously bending down to me.

That hand tightened, as if responding to my thoughts. He wrenched my head back again, my neck craning, until our gazes met once more.

A small, wordless moan tore from my throat. Even though I’d made the sound, I couldn’t quite name the source of it. Fear, maybe. Pain.

Or shock at the obliterating, savage beauty of his eyes.

They weren’t just bright and blue, like I’d thought at first. They were mostly a deep and inescapable black. The blue light I’d noticed came from the iris or the pupil or... Whatever the fuck it was. His irises weren’t round like a human’s, but more like swirling columns running up and down each eye. Blazing blue fury in a black abyss, twisting like tornados made of azure flame. The blue of his gaze was so bright it sent a dusting of light over the rugged slashes of his cheekbones and turned his thick white eyelashes into the colour of a sky I’d once known. A sky somewhere very far from here...

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