Page 26 of Resisting the Alien Rider

“I’ll be very gentle, I promise,” she said, her tone so tender and sweet that it made every muscle in me go tight with longing. And it was not even the perverse, physical longing I’d experienced a few moments agowhen I’d felt as if I might die if I did not immediately lick the back of her bare, wet leg.

No, this was something deeper. Something transporting, nearly nostalgic. As if I, too, were a child like Killian, aching to move towards that gentleness.

Killian appeared to feel the same way, because he did not flinch or hide or bite. He merely wrapped himself tighter in Magnolia’s towel and sat obediently upon a nearby log. Magnolia worked smaller amounts of the same products she’d just used on herself into Killian’s tangled-but-clean strands.

She was right about the colour, I mused internally. I’d never seen Killian’s hair gleam this way before. The precise shade of moonlight draping itself over dew.

True to her word, Magnolia must have been gentle, because I heard not a single hiss of complaint from my convict-ward as she worked. She approached her task with the patient dedication of a surgeon and the relentless endurance of a soldier, her fingers never tiring as they coaxed the neglected strands into smoothness.

Her combination of competence and caretaking left me spellbound. I leaned against the tree and watched her, my own scalp tingling.

Once or twice, when Magnolia got too close to his right ear, I noticed Killian shift his head slightly away.

The third time it happened, Magnolia noticed, too.

“Is something wrong with your ear?” she asked. She ran a smoothing hand over Killian’s clean and now-detangled hair.

“No,” Killian said, shifting on the log. “Are we done?”

“As soon as I make sure your ear is alright,” she replied. “I noticed you tugging on it yesterday.”

I’d noticed the same thing tonight.

“Let’s grab your things and get back to camp,” Magnolia said, quickly packing up her comb and bottles. She reached for her wet clothing, then appeared to think better of it, leaving the garments to drip dry on the tree branch. “I have some medical supplies. I want to make sure you don’t have an ear infection.

“Infection? What infection?”

It was not until Magnolia and Killian’s heads both snapped towards my position that I realized it was I who had spoken.

“Garrek?” Magnolia said, squinting in the darkness as I abandoned my hiding place and approached them. “Where the heck did you come from?”

“The Empire of Zabria,” I snapped, knowing full well what she meant and ignoring it. “What do you mean, infection?”

I was speaking loudly. Too loudly. And Magnolia knew it. She observed me, her head tilted slightly to one side, her lips pressed tightly together.

“An ear infection,” she said after a moment that left me feeling slightly unravelled inside. “Do you know what an infection is?”

“Of course I do,” I growled. I was not so uneducated and isolated a creature that I did not know what an infection was. Infection could take down a full-grownbracku in its prime in less than a single night. I’d seen it happen.

“Back to the camp,” I told Killian in a harder, more commanding echo of Magnolia’s earlier suggestion. “And put your boots on,” I added sharply, barely biting back my exasperation as I watched Killian begin to walk away without them. Without bothering to turn around or even stop walking, he sent his tail sweeping across the ground to find and collect them. He proceeded to drag them along behind him through the dirt like some unwanted rock tied to the end of a rope.

He did not retrieve his trousers. Swallowing a sigh, I scooped them up.

“My brother is just like that,” Magnolia said as we followed Killian through the trees. “It was always a fight to get him dressed when he was younger. And he loved to run around barefoot.”

I noticed that she seemed to have hung back a little so that she could walk beside me instead of ahead.

I tried not to notice how much I liked it.

“Is that the brother you said bites people?” I remembered her mentioning that back on Fallon’s ranch.

She laughed. “Ha! No. That’s Leo.”

“How many brothers do you have?”

“Three. Plus two sisters. Five siblings total, all of them younger than me.”

I’d never had a sibling. I’d only had my father, and then my cousin Oaken after he’d come to live with us for the very brief period of time before my father’s death and our convictions. I wondered what it wouldbe like to grow up with so many other children around you.

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