Page 77 of The Alien Warlord's Fated Mate

My heart, my heart.

Firm hands pulled him away, then Jyrak was there, shoving an antivenom injection into Mia’s thigh. Others bore a simple stretcher and a flat board toward her.

Zoran tried to shove them away. “No! She is my mate. I must carry her!”

Jyrak caught his sleeve and yanked. “She may have suffered other injuries, my lord. We must allow the medics to tend to her until they have assessed the damage.”

One part of his mind understood her logic.

Another part, the primitive instinct that had led him across the galaxy to his beloved, struggled viciously to reach her.

Strong arms wrapped around his chest from behind and hauled him backward. “You must allow them to work, Zoran. Control the fear. Let them help her.”

His mother knelt in front of him, blocking Mia from view, and placed her hand on his shoulder. “Listen to Lord Drexus, my son. Mia’s luck will hold. The medics believe the antivenom was injected in time. Now we must wait.”

His soul cried out for her, and as his people carried her away, he begged the Fates to save Mia from the terrible monster they had sent to prey upon her.

They gathered in the lobby of the healing center, what Mia’s human friends called ahospital.

Zoran could not bear the smell of the place, not when his beloved mate’s life yet hung in the balance. Thevyirkolen’s claws had pierced her spinal cord. There existed some possibility that the nerve damage would render her unable to control her lower body.

Xeruvian medical advancements had rendered all but the most severe nerve damage fully treatable. The question now became whether such techniques could be used to save Mia.

Assuming her body recovered from thevyirkolen’s venom. She had received only the slightest dose; yet were humans more susceptible to such toxins. And as she was smaller and more fragile, the venom had worked much faster on her than on a Xeruvian. She lay now in a coma while the medics frantically strove to save her.

To lessen the distraction he presented, Zoran retreated to the outer gardens surrounding the building and contacted Aklan Phyrz asking the other warlord to bring Mia’s parents to Zephyria. He had only just disconnected the call when Kaelen Drexus joined him.

Without preamble, Kaelen said, “Thevyirkolencarried the marking of the Var’Kol tattooed onto its inner lip.”

Zoran stiffened. “The Var’Kol are dead. We wiped them from existence. Did not our fathers and grandfathers relay such stories to us? How then could they have marked avyirkolen, when the last Var’Kol died so long ago?”

“We decimated their population. Such is true. But they finished the task, murdering their own women and children to keep them from falling victim to our warriors. Who can say that a few did not survive the knives of their kin?”

Was such possible? Had pockets of Var’Kol survived beyond the end of the last war?

A terrible memory filled Zoran’s mind, of the day the earthquakes came. He and his father had been touring the southernmost area of theirjutji, plotting out areas for potential expansion of farmland. The ground had rumbled ominously, then a great rift had cleaved it in two, opening up a maw more terrifying and deadly than anyvyirkolenyet born. His father had stumbled once. Looked up and given Zoran a strained smile. The land beneath his feet crumbled away into the rift. Zoran dove for his father, snatched at his father’s hand.

And missed. His father had slipped away. The last Zoran saw of the male who had been his rock, his taskmaster, his mentor, was his body falling into the black void, lost beyond retrieval.

Then the burning fever had come, a plague that had killed many Xeruvian females or rendered them sterile, a nearly fatal blow to his people’s survival.

Mia had insisted on reopening the investigation into its origins.

Had someone targeted her? Was there a Var’Kol spy living among them, covering up an alternative truth about those disasters?

But to what purpose? The Var’Kol were gone. Even if a few had survived, as Kaelen postulated, surely their numbers were not so great. After all this time, surely their enemy had faded into history.

There were other implications to Kaelen’s words, other possibilities Zoran and the other warlords must consider.

“If this becomes known,” Zoran said slowly, “if the old suspicions rise again, anyone with Var’Kol blood will become a target.”

“Do you think one of your people betrayed you?”

“A very few might have.”

“Do you believe I had a hand in this?”

Zoran considered the other warlord, the bad blood lying between them, the opposition and arguments, the trouble that seemed to cling to every conversation and deed. And considered, as well, the fact that Kaelen had risked his own life to save the life of another warrior’s mate, one of the human females whose presence he had so vehemently opposed, the beloved of a warlord with whom he had carried on the bitterest rivalry.

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