Page 55 of Resisting the Alien Rider

I looked down.

And I stopped breathing.

Magnolia had chased me out here in nothing but her sleep clothes. She had no jacket.

She had no boots.

Her left foot was bleeding. Two little puncture wounds.

Behind her, a water ardu slipped away through the rocks and disappeared.

“No.” The word sputtered out of me. An involuntary, grief-stricken rebellion against what had just happened.

Against what was yet to happen.

“Seriously, what was that?” Magnolia grumbled, completely unaware.

I was not unaware.

I knew that she was dead even as she blinked her beautiful eyes up at me in innocent confusion.

I could already feel it destroying me.

I should have never left the tent.

I should have never spent the night there in the first place.

I’d give her to Oaken. I’d give absolutely anything. If only I could go back.

Undo it all. Make it so she neverloved me.

Make it so that she was never standing here, in this place, at this time, without her little boots.

“Garrek? What is it? You don’t look so-” She stopped speaking and then swallowed hard. Her gaze grew hazed and distant. “Oh. I don’t feel…”

I caught her when her knees gave out. She twisted in my arms and vomited. When she was finished, I pulled her away from the mess.

She sank down to the rocks, and I sank with her, wrapping my body around hers.

“Stay with me, Magnolia. Please.”

I begged her.

Even though I knew it would not change a thing.

21

OAKEN

It was amazing how much a man could be slowed down when he managed to go and mangle one of his feet. Truly astonishing. Infuriating, too. Because it meant I hadn’t been able to meet my bride when I was supposed to.

Magnolia. I smiled as I ran over the syllables in my mind. Even her name was pretty.

But my stupid foot was too stupidly broken to go and meet her and, though I’d tried, there had been nothing for it.

I’d had to turn around.

I needed to go home. Let my bone heal. Walking more than a few paces was out of the question, and even riding for too long didn’t work. I’d learned that the hard way, when after half a day in Fiora’s saddle, my foot swelled up so much I’d had to spend three days in a row flat on my back with my foot propped up on a rock above the level of my heart. The swelling had subsided eventually, but it had been an unsettlingexperience. At one point I’d queasily wondered if I would have to take out my hatchet and cut the blasted thing off just so that it didn’t kill me.

---