Page 13 of Resisting the Alien Rider

I did not want to think of what Killian would be like the day we would have to leave her.

I grunted a greeting at him and grabbed up the other trough, the one from the bracku herd. A quick headcount told me all the bracku were accounted for. One of the benefits of giving up my tent meant that I’d be more easily woken should a predator approach. The bracku, in unfamiliar territory, had spent the night huddled very close together, the youngest, smallest, and easiest to pick off in the middle. Genka were large, and they could take down an adult Zabrian male with relative ease, but they’d struggle with a full-sized bracku. They were not pack animals that could hunt large prey with their brethren. Solitary, they usually went for the easiest prey.

Didn’t mean a predator wouldn’t be able to start a stampede, though. And the closer we got to the mountains, the more we’d be exposed to other, new predators that I was less familiar with.

All in all, a colossal pain in my backside.

I headed for the creek and filled the bracku’s trough, hauling it back on my shoulders, following Killian’s waterlogged footprints. I sighed when I realized, based on the size and shape of them, that he hadn’t bothered to put his boots on yet.

“Where are your boots?” I asked him, glancing down at his filthy bare feet as I returned with the water trough.

I’d learned some time ago that issuing orders at Killian very often resulted in him deciding to do the exact opposite thing. If I’d told him to put on his boots, not only would he likely not have done it, but I might have found myself dodging one (or both) being thrown violently at my head.

“I don’t know,” he replied.

“You don’t…What?How can you not know?”

I squatted and set down the trough among the bracku. Then I straightened and stood with my back to Killian for a moment, breathing deeply until my annoyance was only a low simmer in my blood and my eyes were not blazing white.

I turned around.

“Don’t you think,” I said slowly, “that finding them and putting them on might be a good idea?”

“No.”

Empire help me.

The way this child could reject all reason and rational thought, even when designed to help him, was an exercise in torture I could never have conceived of.

I scrubbed my hands down my face and rubbed at my jaw.

“Do I need to remind you that there are ardu serpents?”

One bite from an ardu would kill a grown man my size, let alone a child. Not to mention the other less lethal but still vastly unpleasant things there were to step on out here. Thorns and beetle nests and dung, to name a few.

Killian merely stared at me in white-eyed,mutinous silence, his bare toes wiggling defiantly in the dirt.

My tail squeezed the metal of its hook as frustration lanced through me. Some men likely would have thrown up their hands at this point and said, “Fine, don’t wear the boots then.” I’d said similar enough things myself, usually when it came to more mundane issues like making sure he cleaned his face. Sometimes letting him go to bed with dirt on his cheek was better than the fight.

But not when it came to things that could actually, truly hurt him.

I was going to keep this thick-skulled child alive even if it killed me.

I whipped open Killian’s tent flap and went in. There wasn’t much in here. Killian’s bedroll was in a mad, messy heap. Beside it was a small pile of what looked to be pebbles Killian must have collected at some point during our travels.

The boots I found, not under or beside, butinsidethe turmoil of the bedroll’s hides. I thought it likely he’d gone to sleep in them and had kicked them off in his sleep. I pulled them out. The weight of them in my hands was very familiar.

They were my old boots from when I was Killian’s age. When he’d arrived here, I’d mended and resoled them for him.

“Here,” I grunted, thrusting the boots at him as I emerged. “I’m going to go back to the creek to refill the bracku trough one more time and have a quick wash.When I get back, I want to see these boots on your feet.”

Maddeningly, he did not take them. He merely brought his pale eyebrows heavily down over his bright and asked, “Or what?”

Or what?I remembered asking such a thing of my father, once, before I learned how foolish it would be. And I remembered the cutting blows to my back that followed.

If I ever tried to forget, the stiff stretch of scars there reminded me.

No matter how he angered me, no matter what he did, I refused to hit him. I’d wrestle him to the ground and tie his boots tightly to his feet if I had to, to make sure he was safe, but I wouldn’t hurt him.

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