Page 7 of The Naga Princess's Soldier Mate

“What does that mongrel want?” one of the remaining females snarled, daring to be bolder when Reid didn’t seem to make any further moves. We were all familiar with posturing and loudly talking to intimidate, so they might have felt like they were getting back on somewhat familiar ground. In any case, they were all looking at me as if I had the answers, and I wasn’t sure if I should reveal that I knew what he’d said.

It was Khawla’s mate, and she flicked her long, dark blue hair over her shoulder and shimmied a little closer, disdain on her face. “Well? You’re touching him, so I assume you understand him. That’s how it works, right? Mates understand each other. Figures you’d get matched with a filthy mongrel like this.” To underscore her words, she flicked out her clawed fingers and indicated Reid.

Reid proved to have understood everything Kusha had said, courtesy of the technology that he and the Elder Shamans had implanted in their brains. It could just as easily mean nothing, but the others wouldn’t understand that—and they were right. Kusha’s disgust over such a match made fury simmer in my bellyand it made me reckless. When Reid shifted his eyes from Kusha to me in a quick glance, I knew he was trying to see in my eyes whether what she’d said was true. Then, he jabbed a finger at the female and growled, “Sure, call me mongrel, call me names—I don’t care. But you do not talk to Sazzie with that tone. Try again, and I’ll wipe that smirk right off your damn face. Got it?”

The way his fists curled, the way his chest seemed to swell with power, the geometrical markings beneath his skin shifting and warping—I knew he spoke the truth. He was ready to give Kusha the fight of her life if she didn’t change her tune. Ah, stars, why did that make me feel so good inside? Why did that make me feel like I was worthy and like I was safe?

I moved a little closer to Reid—not quite at his side, but slightly behind him and still out of reach of Evarah’s claws. “There are not going to be any challenges,” I said carefully, my tone as calm and neutral as I could make it. If I could, I wanted to keep Reid in the dark about my ability to understand him. If he knew, I had a feeling he would be relentless in pursuing the mate bond, and I couldn’t shackle him to a female like me: a killer, a brawler without a single soft edge, tainted by the past. I was not his pretty ‘angel,’ and I was not tender or beautiful. The thought that he’d be disappointed when he discovered those truths was killing me.

“I am standing down. I do not wish for the throne. You will leave right this instant.” When that made Kusha and Astrexa hiss with displeasure, I gestured at Reid. “Do you want to test him?” On cue, he leaned forward and snapped a hand toward Kusha, and, in reflex, she startled back.

“Hide behind your mate, coward!” Astrexa snarled as she pushed past the female she’d been fighting when I arrived. The action made Scraikee hiss and snap her teeth, but she must have been the loser of the fight, for she did not attack Astrexa over the slight. “Nothing has changed, has it? Are you hiding an injured Ayala in the bushes somewhere? Is your brother going to come to your aid? Zathar is banished; he can’t help you now.” She tapped a claw against her pouty bottom lip when I did not rise to any of her bait. The others did not silence her, so she grew bolder. “You might have fooled some of us over the past few years, but I’ve always seen the true you! You did not deserve the title of princess, and you do not deserve to be Queen!”

With a final, furious snarl, she leaped forward, hands outstretched. It was clear she meant to come around Reid and straight for me. As fast as she was, she should have made it. Reid was faster. He collided with her with a furious shout, curse words spilling from his lips, though I could no longer understand them. They tangled as they fought, Astrexa coiling around him and clawing at his back. Khawla and his males lowered their spears, hissing, but they did not know what to do. Then Evarah rose in furious humiliation at my side, and I was too late to see that threat, my eyes locked with the supposedly sick, fragile human male who was somehow standing his ground—and more than that, he was gaining, winning.

Chapter 5

Reid

My Sazzie was in trouble—big trouble. All my senses were heightened, my heart pumping steadily in my chest, and the nanobots were finally doing as they should. I could hear every sound, every breath, moan, and scream. I tasted the copper of blood on my tongue, and though I felt the bite of my injuries, they meant absolutely nothing to me. These Naga females were not nearly as big as the Naga hunters I regularly sparred with back at Haven. My opponent would not have stood a chance if I had fought her before this strange illness, but today? I was grinding her to dust beneath my fists.

Tossing her aside when she passed out from a simple chokehold, I spun and located my angel. She was pinned face-down beneath the female I’d first attacked when I arrived—a show of force to make it clear I meant business. They might not understand me, but I could hear every word they said. Sazzie did not want to fight with any of them, and they would not leave her in peace. “Princess,” “Queen”—those words had been thrown around, but they made little sense. Wasn’t my Sazzie a Shaman? Or maybe an apprentice? I’d even fantasized that she didn’t speak because she’d taken a vow of silence, but clearly, that was not true. She’d spoken to these females, so it was just me she didn’t want to talk to. It was a silly fantasy anyway because it was her voice that had drawn me back to the land of the living in the first place.

“Let her go, right now!” I warned. When the three Naga males present started to move forward, as if they intended to stop me, I growled. The one in the lead was oddly colored—his scales a huebetween blue and purple, with a dullness that made them seem matte. He froze, but the other two kept going. Nobody stood between my angel and me, especially when she was in danger.

With speed I shouldn’t have, I darted forward and felled the first warrior with a precise blow to his neck. He never saw me coming. The other raised his spear, but I dodged; his movements seemed so slow it was preposterous. I grabbed the shaft of his weapon with my fists and snapped the heavy pole in two. With the broken, blunted end, I slammed him in the center of his chest, and he crashed to the forest floor like a ton of bricks.

Their leader was backing away, a grin on his face, a glint in his eyes, and his hands open at his sides in a typical Naga sign of surrender. With my senses as wide open as they were, I could hear the excited thud of his heartbeat and read every minute movement in his expression. He was pleased, which meant he was no threat right now. Dismissing him from my mind, I flung myself on top of the dark, serpentine shape that was pinning my angel to the forest floor. She had clawed Sazzie all along her spine and back, creating deep, possibly deadly furrows in her delicate, azure scales.

This attacking female weighed nothing as I picked her up and flung her away. She crashed through the underbrush, then into a tree, and did not get up again, though I could still hear her heart pumping inside her chest. “Sazzie, my sweet angel, are you okay?” I asked as I went down on my knees next to her prone form and gently touched her shoulder. Her wounds looked bad—she’d been caught by surprise, stabbed in the back by that traitorous female. When she rolled her head toward me and gave me the slightest nod, her blue eyes were filled with tears she was fighting to hold back.

Twisting my head, I gave the downed viper a death glare, but she was still out cold. Turning to the others still hovering in the clearing, I bared my teeth. “Try that again, and I’ll kill all of you. Female or not, I’ll have no fucking mercy.” They might not understand my words, but I was certain my threat came across loud and clear. In the past, I might have felt guilty about threatening a woman, but on Serant, the rules were very different.

Sazzie made a soft, shuddering noise, and then I saw her move her arms as if she intended to push herself up. I was having none of that; she was injured and needed medical help as soon as possible. I dipped my arms gently beneath her hips and shoulders, rolling her into my grip with surprising ease. I had once tried to help carry Zeidon, the badly injured Water Weaver male who had been out cold—and as heavy as a freight truck. Sazzie, in comparison, was light as a feather when I stood up with her cradled bridal style in my arms.

Her long, elegant tail draped over my left arm and down to the ground; it would drag across the forest floor when I started walking. “Why don’t you curl that around my shoulders, angel?” I remarked, offering her a light-hearted grin I didn’t feel. My worry for her overruled everything, but I did not want to frighten her. Proving that she understood me perfectly—though she’d tried to hide it earlier—she lifted her slender tail and slid it in a loop around my waist, then up around my shoulders. I tried very hard to pretend that the sensation of her scales as they slid over my bare skin did not turn me on; I was certain I failed.

I started walking, then jogging back to the Shaman camp, hoping the physical exercise would make my rampant cock go down before my pretty angel noticed. She was staring up at my facewith an expression I wanted to think indicated awe. There was pain too, evident in the furrows at the corners of her eyes and the pinch between the delicate nubbed ridges of her brows. All her silky azure hair hung in a cascading wave over my arm, and as I jogged, it swayed and brushed against my hip with tantalizing strokes. All my nerves were on fire for her, and after the heat of battle, that fire was steadily morphing into lust. I couldnotget enough of her scent, was dying to taste the delicate lushness of her bottom lip.

“Hang on, angel,” I told her. “We’ll be back at the camp soon. Good old Erish will take good care of you. I’ve got you.” Focusing on the care she needed helped to keep me going. If I faltered a step, I knew I’d claim her mouth. That would be wrong; she was badly injured. I could not let my desire overrule her needs. When she raised her hand and gently trailed her fingers over my shoulder and up the side of my neck, my resolve almost broke. Damn it, that felt so good. I felt it a thousand times over, far more intensely than I’d ever felt anything before.

“Why did you do that? I thought you were sick…” she murmured softly. Her eyes were searching mine, trying to find the answers. Maybe she was trying to find out how I was doing. I had to admit, a few hours ago, I never would have thought myself able to get into a fight and win, let alone travel through the woods at something that far surpassed my previous running speeds.

I felt alive, powerful, stronger. I knew it was my nanobots. Erish had forced them to replicate inside my body so they could drive out the invaders. I had never had this many nanobots in my system as I did now. I could feel them beneath my skin, see them in the shapes that pressed against the flesh on my chest. Theywere doing this, enhancing me beyond anything the scientists who had created them had ever managed.

We were almost at the camp when I caught a flash of red from the corner of my eye. Red scales. I froze in place, then swung us around and ducked to press my back against the cover of a nearby tree. My precious cargo I pressed closer against my chest, urging her to put her arms around my neck. “I know your back hurts, sweetheart. I need you to hold on. Can you do that? Can you be strong for me, angel?” She bit her bottom lip, and my damn cock surged again in my pants. Clearly, my body didn’t know the difference between fight and fuck.

“What did you see?” she asked, her voice pitched in a low whisper. She’d given up pretending she couldn’t understand me—good—and she proved to be as smart as I thought she was; she sensed the danger too. Leaning to the side, I angled my head and peered around the tree, searching the lush purple and gray foliage for another hint of the red I’d seen. There it was, not even well hidden, and once I’d picked out one shape, my vision sharpened, and I counted a dozen more.

“Ah, fuck. Bitter Storm warriors. How did they get here? Isn’t the Shaman camp supposed to be secret? Seems to me a few too many know its location.” My words made her eyes grow huge in her face, and if she were human, I was certain her skin would have gone pale. I thought maybe some of the scales beneath her eyes did go silvery, and she definitely shivered. Holding her, I could feel how the scales along her spine raised with her unease, and that made her hiss out a pained breath as the motion aggravated her injuries.

“This is all my fault,” Sazzie murmured. “Please, we have to hurry and warn Elder Chen. Bitter Storm is not supposed to know about this place!” Her fear and panic were very real, and it was very obvious that she blamed herself for this development—the watery glint in her eyes and the rapid pulse at her throat betrayed her feelings. Why would she think that? What did Bitter Storm want with my angel? I felt a surge of energy go through my body, strength concentrating in my core muscles as I prepared for a confrontation. If those warriors wanted my woman, they were in for one hell of a fight. Nobody was taking Sazzie anywhere—nobody but me.

“I count a dozen, including a scrawny fellow missing his front teeth. How odd.” I also saw that they were more interested in the plumes of smoke from the Shaman camp and the single campfire from the Thunder Rock females. They had not noticed us, and I wasn’t going to let them. The Naga had a strong sense of smell, though, and Sazzie’s wounds were severe and still dripping blood. We were leaving an obvious trail, and if the wind turned and blew their way, they’d know we were there in a heartbeat.

Backing away, I made my footsteps quiet against the moss. Without shoes, it was far easier to sneak around than when wearing my combat boots. To be sure they did not track us, I looped back once, then circled around several large boulders so there was cover between us and the enemy force. When I crossed with my angel into the perimeter of the camp, I felt the tingle of the sensors and knew we’d have a greeting committee soon.

They came rushing around one of the smaller shuttles parked at the edge of the large clearing. Chen was in the lead, but several of the younger camp residents surrounded him. They weren’t taking any chances, and several of the males held weapons—guns, if I wasn’t mistaken. “Ah, Reid!” Chen said with obvious relief. “Bring her here, quickly now.” I was only too happy to follow the older Shaman back into the camp, but an odd wash of trepidation came over me when I caught sight of the large medical ship.

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