Page 3 of The Naga Princess's Soldier Mate

My eyes shifted from my lap to the male stretched out inside the Naga medical nest. The bed wasn’t sized right for him, as it was made for a being with a long tail and coils to curl up in the round bowl. This male hadlegs, two of them, and large feet with five toes on each foot. They were so foreign, so weird and alien, yet I couldn’t keep myself from staring. He was fascinating in his differences, beautiful even.

Reid. That’s what Corin and his small human mate had called this male—Reid. The name was as foreign as the black sigils on his skin. Sigils that were always visible and formed images rather than savage, violent slashes and lines. His left arm was covered in the snarling faces of beasts I did not know, though I recognized them as predators instinctively: the fangs inside a beastly mouth, the shape of something akin to a Rakwormcurled around a thick wrist, and the wild mane and sharp eyes artfully drawn in black, belonging to a very regal-looking beast.

His chest was bare, and little circles had been stuck to it by Elder Erish—relics from Serant’s past that could monitor all kinds of things about his life: the steady thud of his heart, the rhythm of his breathing as his chest rose and fell. On a viewscreen, lines and images I barely understood indicated the progress of the battle waging inside his magnificent body. He looked peaceful, but war raged within him.

I did not understand any of that either; just that two foreign entities fought to control him, and only one could be the victor. I had never heard of such a thing, but Elder Erish was very sure of his diagnosis, so he had to be right. Reid seemed to be improving day by day; that alone was proof.

The deep brown of his eyes was engraved on my heart, so warm, so… I had no words for that kind of color or the look I’d seen in his eyes. I knew nobody had ever looked at me the way he had in that one moment, four days ago, when he’d nearly died. I craved seeing it again, certain I’d imagined it. That alone was the reason I was sitting here, vigilantly keeping watch, when I could be doing so many other things. I had made a promise to Corin, one of my brother’s closest friends, but even without that promise, I’d be here.

No male had ever caught my attention, nor had any male made me crave to be close or to gaze into his eyes. In that, I had been just like my sister Naga: as cold and indifferent to the males who wooed us. Not even a desire for offspring had influenced my choices, as it had with so many others. But this Reid—this human—made me want to talk to him. He made me curiousabout the things that had drawn my brother and his friends to the human mates they’d found.

I knew I was different, and Avrish, the lone female Shaman at the camp, had tried to approach me several times to speak. I couldn’t bear to face it—not yet. But I could face this: Reid. More than anything, I wanted to know if the pull I felt between us was real or imagined. Did he feel it too?

When he started to stir, it was slowly at first, but my attention was so tuned to his large, muscled body that I noticed it right away—the change in his breathing, the slight movements of his head, and the way his fists clenched against the furs. His brown eyes flicked open quickly, leaping from sleep to full awareness. Everything about his gaze was sharp, alert, and it locked onto mine with unerring accuracy.

The desire to reach out and touch him was overwhelming. I tried to curb the impulse, but I never stood a chance. The tip of my tail curled over the edge of the nest and settled against his leg—a tiny brush of scales against warm, heated flesh. So innocent, so tiny a touch that he might not even have noticed.

“Hello, angel,” he drawled, his voice low, husky, and carrying a vulnerable rawness. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?” I could understand what he said word for word. His tone held nothing but admiration, despite my visage resembling nothing of the pretty, scarless girl I’d used to be, let alone the smooth perfection of the human females I’d seen. Heat flashed through my chest, curled in my belly, and settled like a blanket around my shoulders.

“Ah, I forget,” he murmured, his husky, damaged voice creaking as he lowered his tone. “You can’t understand me. You don’t have a translator, do you?” But I could. I understood him perfectly, and there was only one reason for that—an impossible reason.

Chapter 2

Reid

“Ah, come on, Erish!” I said. “Just a small trip outside. These walls are driving me crazy.” I’d been awake for three days, and I was starting to think I’d dreamed my angel while struck down by the fever that had gripped me. I swore she was real, but despite asking Erish, the Shaman healer, who she was, I had learned nothing. This was my next attempt to find her. Sure, I was going a little crazy stuck inside a med bay, but it was killing me not to know if she was real or not.

“You are not strong enough yet,” the Shaman elder said, but he was laughing, his blind white eyes somehow managing to twinkle. For a male who supposedly couldn’t see a thing, he got around very easily. When I quietly raised a hand so I could lever myself out of the nest, his tail was there. “No, you don’t, boy. You are staying put until I say otherwise.” When he got stern like that, I felt both inexplicably scolded and cared for at the same time. It was a very odd combination.

I curled my lip and crossed my arms, sulking over being thwarted, but the truth was that he was right. My body was a mess, and everything hurt; even my fucking hair ached. The memories of how this had happened were still tangled up inside my brain with memories from the past. I didn’t like how unbalanced that made me feel—when I couldn’t even trust my own mind. It made me feel even more insecure about the existence of my angel, but there was no way I’d imagined those pretty blue eyes.

Erish sighed as he smoothed the furs back over my leg with gentle hands, his expression kind and a little melancholic as he settled himself on the edge of the medical cot—or “nest,” as he called it. “I know you want to find her,” he said, “but what if she does not want to be found?”

My heart soared in my chest at those words, and the pain that burned in my nerves every minute of the day was briefly pushed to the back of my mind. So she was real. This was as close to an admission from Erish as I was likely to get, but it was enough. In my mind, I pulled up the image of her. It was engraved in my brain; I’d never forget it: her long, dark blue hair lying in soft waves around her face and shoulders, the paler blue of the fine scales that covered her delicate features, and the intelligent gleam in her beautiful azure eyes. I never knew I was that partial to blue, but I really,reallywas.

“Tell her that I’d never harm her, Erish,” I said, exhaustion pulling at me as the elation ran its course. “Not my angel. I’d protect her till the day I die, and beyond.” I laughed hoarsely. “I’ve done death a couple of times now, so I really mean that.” Three times, by my count, I had died and somehow escaped its greedy jaws: first on Scrak-4, ending my normal military career for the UAR; then on Exrata, which ended my career as a soldier in the Shadow Unit; and then here, on Serant, as UAR-designed nanobots waged war with nanobots designed by the ancient Naga of the past.

Either I was a cat, or death really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I was starting to grow an admirable set of whiskers at this point, but I wasn’t ready to go with cat, just yet.

“That’s not something one says to a Naga female,” Erish murmured thoughtfully. “You would be better off staying away from this one. She has a particularly fierce and cruel reputation.” The words made me laugh, which made me cough, and I tasted copper in my mouth. Her? Fierce and cruel? There was no way. My angel was the kindest, gentlest of them all. She was nothing like the Naga females described by my friends back at Haven. Maybe Erish didn’t realize he’d slipped up even more, but I sure had. He was talking about her now. Pretty soon, I’d pry her name from his lips.

“I mean it,” I told him, tapping my chest in vain to ease the cough still tickling the back of my throat. Raised bumps sat beneath my skin in odd, geometric patterns there, and I still hadn’t gotten used to it. They hadn’t been there when I’d passed out in the caverns beneath Haven. They weren’t part of what made me a Shadow Unit soldier, but they were there now, a permanent reminder of the damage these conflicting nanobots were causing inside my body. “Tell her she’s safe with me. I will protect her.”

Erish did not comment on how unlikely that offer was. I was in absolutely no shape to keep anyone safe, let alone a beautiful, powerful Naga female like the one I remembered. That’s what she was: a Naga, with scales and fangs, a delicate horn jutting from her chin, and a long, sinuous tail. She was still an angel in my mind, and I doubted anything could shake that faith.

“Very well,” Erish said with a nod. “If you promise to take the sleeping medications to rest, I will pass along your message.” His smile was wry, his sightless eyes locked on a point above my head rather than my face. He wasn’t supposed to see it when I nodded, but testing him was exactly what I did. “Good,” heagreed, and his hands flew to the control unit beside my bed. Before I could process the new information I’d learned about my healer and about my angel, drugs flooded my body through my IV. It was lights out in seconds.

My vision narrowed, darkness creeping in from around the edges. Just before it closed all the way, I swore I saw her: blue scales, a lock of silky blue hair, and a sharp, intelligent gaze as her azure eyes met mine. I dreamed not of memories this time but of my beautiful angel—and all the very non-angelic things I wanted to do to her.

***

Sazzie

“You can’t keep them waiting forever,” Elder Chen said, his arms crossed over his dark blue scales, and the even darker blue robes framing his lean body. He followed me into the medical skyship, his scales making a soft, whispering sound against the metal flooring, where mine made none. As the head of the triumvirate that ran the training grounds, he was probably the most important male on the planet. Turning my back on him was rude, and it was exactly the kind of thing my mother would have done—a power play to let him know he was not the only important person around, and as a male, he was far inferior to a Queen.

But I was not a queen, and the last thing I wanted was to be like my mother, which was precisely why I was ignoring the Thunder Rock escort that waited on the outskirts of the Training Grounds—far enough away not to be sacrilegious, but close enough to be there the moment their Queen decided to leave. I’d killed theirQueen, so they were waiting in vain. There was no reason for them to linger, and I was certain that a Shaman had gone out to meet them and tell them the news of the Thunder Rock Queen’s death.

“Watch me,” I snarled in frustration. I was not going back to Thunder Rock; there was nothing waiting for me there but more violence, more death, more pain. Zathar’s advice from long ago had been right; it had been the only way to survive. If not for his push, I would have died at the hands of Astrexa or one of my other female peers before long. I was done with that kind of life, and even if it meant living in exile with the Shamans, it would be better than continuing to live a sham. I couldn’t recall when I’d been happy—certainly not since my father died when I was eight summers old, maybe not even since Zathar left with the injured Ayala. I had never dared to ask my brother if the poor creature had survived.

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