Saved By The Warrior Hero Read online

  “I think you might be right,” I said through my fingers as I clapped my hand over my mouth. “Let’s go.”

  In the medical bay, we found Coplan immediately. He was treating the same young warrior that I’d seen on my first day in the ward—Ero, if I remembered right. He must have had a concussion after all.

  “Where is Healer Adskow?” Nion’s voice was sharp and commanding. “We need him at once.”

  “I am not sure,” Coplan admitted. When his eyes fell on me, they flashed a strange sort of yellow-purple. “What is the matter? Perhaps I can help.”

  “Is something wrong with Alyse?” Ero asked. The way he stared at me made me feel like I’d just sprouted a second head.

  Nion glared at him. “That is not of your concern.” He turned to Coplan. “Can we speak about this in private? It is urgent.”

  Coplan nodded and led us to one of the exam rooms. Nion only explained the situation to him once the door was shut tight.

  “If the gilly-fruit was sweet to taste, then you could be pregnant,” Coplan said immediately. Apparently, they’d done this little song and dance with human females before. “Nion, if you have lain with Alyse—”

  “He did. He has. Um. Several times, actually.” As a doctor myself, I knew better than to hide something like that from a fellow healer. “And the fruit was sweet, but…too sweet. It made me puke. Is that…normal? Because I definitely don’t feel normal right now.”

  Actually, I felt like someone had grabbed hold of my stomach and was wringing it out like a wet dishrag—but every time I opened my mouth to speak, it only made my nausea worse.

  “We need to scan you for pregnancy either way.” Coplan reached for an implement that looked like a supermarket price gun, but hesitated before he pointed at me. “I need your consent, though, Alyse. I do not wish for you to bite me again.”

  “It’s probably too early to tell again,” I told him. “I only started ovulating when we were on Newthelia last week. I explained this to you before, Coplan. The human body takes a while to produce the hormones that would normally indicate conception, and an ultrasound wouldn’t show—”

  “Let me, Alyse,” Coplan urged me. “We are still learning the specifics of gestation for interspecies cubs, but my research indicates that Lunarian-human children likely grow slightly faster than what is normal for you. Please. Humor me? Just this once.”

  I sighed, then nodded. “Okay. But if you’re wrong—”

  Before I could finish my sentence, Coplan had already triggered the scan. My body was enveloped in an eerie green light. As soon as it flickered off again, Coplan frowned—then shot Nion a furious look.

  “How long have you two been mating?” Coplan snapped at him. “Did you have your way with her as soon as you pulled her off that cursed ship, Nion, or did you wait until she’d already bitten me first?”

  Nion and I shared a look. He seemed as perplexed as I was.

  “Alyse and I…no. I wouldn’t not have taken advantage like that.” It was hard to tell who he was saying that bit to—Coplan or me. “Only once we were on Newthelia did anything transpire between Alyse and I.”

  “And you only began ovulating a week ago?” Now, Coplan’s glare was trained on me.

  “I think I would know that,” I snapped back at him. “Let me see the results of the scan, Coplan, or at least explain what you’re being so pissy about.”

  Slowly, Coplan turned the screen of the scanner toward me. I had to squint to see what he was even looking at, but when he pressed a button to zoom in, it gradually became clearer than any scan I’d ever seen on the OB wards back on Earth.

  The screen showed the shape of my uterus. Inside it was a bean-sized blob on one side—and on the other, a little speck.

  One, I could recognize for what it was. An embryo. A tiny one, yes, but definitely a fertilized egg. It looked about six weeks old—which, when I counted back in my head, seemed like it couldn’t possibly be correct. Had it really been six weeks since I’d woken up on Var-arak’s ship? I wasn’t completely sure—but it definitely didn’t feel like I’d been aboard the Avant Lupinia for more than a month.

  As for the speck, it only looked like a particularly large stray bit of dust. The rest of the scan was so clear, I was sure that was all it was. But when I moved my fingers across the screen to wipe it away, it didn’t budge.

  “That…shouldn’t be there,” I whispered. My voice sounded distant from my lips, though. Like someone else had said the words from across the room. “Neither of those things should be.”

  “Not things, Alyse. Cubs. Unless I am wrong—and I rarely am—you are having…twins,” Coplan said. Despite his certainty of his own deduction abilities, he didn’t sound like he believed it either. His fingertips hovered over the screen in my hands. “One Lunarian.” He pointed to the tiny speck. Then, his claw shifted to tap at the larger embryo. “One Rutharian.”

  And just like that, my entire world shattered apart.

  20

  Nion

  I watched Alyse’s lower lip tremble and immediately wrapped my arms around her. By now, I knew it was a telltale sign tears were about to come.

  I did not blame her for falling apart at the news. In that moment, I could not keep my head together either. My eyes must have shifted every color imaginable, until they were a swirled rainbow of feelings so mixed I could not even begin to pick them apart. Joy—Alyse was carrying my cub. Anger—her rapist, the Rutharian king that I had killed on her behalf, had somehow impregnated her too. Fear—how could I not feel fear? Fear of becoming a father. Fear for my cub, which had been conceived in such happiness, sharing a womb with a half-Rutharian princeling that had been forced upon Alyse during the worst days of her life. And most of all, I feared for Alyse. If the Rutharians discovered that such a thing had happened, they would want her dead—and both cubs along with her.

  But once my head stopped spinning, the emotion I finally landed on was confusion.

  Confusion, in this moment, seemed like the most rational thing I had felt all day.

  “How is this possible?” I asked Coplan. “Two cubs from two fathers, conceived so many weeks apart…that does not seem real.”

  “It sh-shouldn’t be,” Alyse whimpered in my arms. Her body trembled as her tears came. I regretted every one of them that fell because of my part in this. I could only hope—perhaps hope beyond hope—that having my cub in her womb was not the reason for her tears. “This d-doesn’t happen to humans. It goes against everything I…everything I know.”

  Coplan raked his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “I wish I had an answer—but I do not. We know little enough about human-Lunarian breeding and cubs. Of the Rutharians…we know practically nothing at all. Perhaps Rutharian seed encourages a second ovulation…something to do with hormonal shifts, perhaps…”

  “Enough of this perhaps nonsense,” I barked at him. “Are you a healer, or aren’t you? How do you not know this?”

  For a moment, Coplan glared at me. But he must have seen my fear in my irises, for his glare softened almost immediately.

  “I do not think that anyone knows the answers to these things yet, Nion. I am so sorry, Alyse.” His apology sounded genuine. His eyes shifted to a sad, dull gray. “For all I know, this situation is entirely novel. A human-Rutharian cub very well may be the first of its kind, and as for the Lunarian cub sharing a womb with it…” He shook his head. “I can say with almost certainty that, in its own way, it will be the first of its kind as well.”

  “Can you fix it?” Alyse asked. Her voice was so small, if she hadn’t spoken in a moment of such silence, it could have been lost in the sound of a rustle of paper or a movement of cloth.

  “Terminate the pregnancy, you mean? Of course, such a thing would be possible, but Lunarian healers would not be skilled with such a thing. Our dwindling population generally greets offspring with such joy…” Coplan glanced at me anxiously. “And if we tried, I do not know that Nion’s cub would survive.”
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  “No,” Alyse said immediately. “I want Nion’s child—his cub.” She looked up at me with shining, tear-filled eyes. “I wanted this. I asked you for this. I just didn’t think… I didn’t—”

  The rest of Alyse’s words were lost to more sobbing. I did not begrudge her it. Given the circumstances, I believed that any sane female would cry. I only wished I had some way to make it better. To stop her tears and comfort her as I had all the other times before.

  But this was not like the other times. She did not need to be healed from the traumas of her past right now—she needed to be loved so she might have the strength to bear this new burden.

  Love, at least, I could give her. But beneath that love, unyieldingly, my trepidation remained.

  “You will be in danger if you continue to carry the Rutharian cub, zahvinya,” I warned her. “He or she will be the heir to the Rutharian throne—which puts you both in danger. Others vie for the Rutharian crown even as we speak. If they were to discover this pregnancy, they would want you dead.” I paused, knowing that if I wished the Rutharian cub to be gone from Alyse’s womb, I would likely lose my own as well. My first—and only just barely brought into existence, too. “They will wish to kill all three of you.”

  “I want your baby, Nion.” Alyse clung to me like she was adrift at sea and I was all that was keeping her afloat. “I don’t want to lose it.”

  “And I will protect you no matter what. Protect you all—if you are sure.” I held her tight, but even as I said the words, I knew this would be a struggle to the end. Alyse, I would have happily given my life for a thousand times over by now. My cub in her womb, however speck-like and new, I would do anything to keep safe.

  But how in the nine holy moons was I meant to protect a Rutharian child? Could I truly raise it as my own? Love it, when its very existence placed Alyse and my cub in such danger? Would I even be able to look at it, knowing that every time Alyse gazed at its face she would see Var-arak all over again?

  I did not know. But I would have to try.

  For the moment, it was all I could do.

  Behind us, the slam of the door broke the silence. When I snapped my head to the sound, I saw the door fall back into a closed position once more.

  Blood. I had closed that door behind us myself. When my eyes met Coplan’s, his gaze was worried.

  I could not blame him. As I rushed out the door to see who had been eavesdropping on us, I was worried too.

  I skidded to a halt in open space of the medical bay proper—but though I looked around wildly for a fleeing spy, I found only Ero retching in a bedpan on the cot that Coplan had left him on.

  “Ero—”

  Ero made an even louder vomit noise. When he looked up at me, he forced a smile—but even that was weak.

  “Yes, Nion?”

  I frowned. “Was anyone else just here? Did you see someone enter the room that Alyse, Coplan and I were in?”

  Ero looked confused for a moment, then shook his head. “I didn’t, no. I am sorry, Nion. Was I supposed to be keeping watch?”

  I growled in frustration as I strode back into the private exam room. If someone had been listening at the door, there was no telling how long they had been there—or what they had heard. But regardless…I doubted it would bring about anything good.

  “I need to go brief Haelian and Kloran on this. Immediately.” I cupped Alyse’s tearful face in my hands and gazed down at her until her eyes met mine. “Will you be okay, zahvinya?”

  “As okay as I can be,” she promised with a little sniffle. Annoying, that even in all this strife and grief, she could still be so damnably cute. “Go. It’s fine. You’re right—Kloran and Haelian need to know.”

  As I kissed her goodbye, I hoped that she did not feel the grimace that had set itself into my lips. I was not scowling because of her—I was scowling because of the situation Var-arak had left us in.

  The Rutharians were brutes. Evil and cruel. They had killed my own brother, and so many others as well. They disgusted me to my core.

  But if it had not been for whatever magic of Rutharian seed that had sent Alyse into a second heat, my cub would not have been conceived at all. My own cub’s life was bound up with that of the Rutharian cub now. They shared one womb. If they survived, they would be irrevocably entangled for as long as they both lived.

  But for as long as the Rutharian cub lived, Alyse and my own cub were in danger.

  A danger that would only grow if word began to circulate on the predicament Alyse and I now found ourselves in. The slamming of that door made me feel as though a target had just been placed on Alyse’s back.

  The question was, what weapons would that target draw? The Rutharians would want Alyse dead for this…but what of my own people? How would the Lunarians react to discover that a cub of their own species shared a womb with a cub wrought from the seed of our sworn enemies?

  When I had explained all that had transpired to them, Haelian and Kloran were at least in agreement with me on one matter:

  No one else could learn of this until we had made preparations and gotten Alyse somewhere safe.

  “Not even Leonix,” Haelian warned me.

  “Or Healer Adskow,” Kloran added. “No one at all. We cannot be too safe right now. Especially with the raid on the Rutharian outpost tomorrow—we do not need any more worries than the ones we juggle already.”

  “It may be too late for that already,” I told them, grim. “The door to the exam room slammed shut as we were speaking on the matter. I fear we were overheard. Though I found no spy in the medical bay when I searched it, I cannot be sure.”

  “More traitors aboard the ship,” Kloran growled. “Moons, how I miss the time when we could trust our own.”

  “With Lady Idria running our intelligence forces?” Haelian looked as though he wished to spit. “I do not know that such a time ever existed in the first place, my friend. It is only just now that such treachery among our own kind is finally coming to light.”

  “I will find the traitors yet,” I swore to them. “Any warrior who puts Alyse’s life in danger, real or merely imagined, will soon find himself missing his own throat.”

  “Protect your mate and keep your ear to the ground, Nion.” Haelian rested a hand on my shoulder. “But do not lose focus on our mission, either. We have another human female to rescue tomorrow. We cannot afford any more distractions right now than those we already face.”

  As I returned to the medical bay to collect Alyse, I could not help but think that avoiding distractions right now was more easily ordered than carried out.

  “Where is Alyse?” I asked Coplan. Besides him, the ward was all but empty now. Even Ero seemed to have recovered and returned to his bunk.

  “I walked her to her room after you left,” Coplan tucked a chart away and shrugged off his lab coat. “I assumed that was what you wanted. If I made some mistake…”

  “No.” I held up a hand. “Of course you did. She belongs in her room, where she can be comfortable and safe. I should have taken her there myself.”

  “What did Kloran and Haelian say?”

  I glanced around the room, then drew in closer to Coplan and lowered my voice.

  “No one else can know about this,” I told him sternly. “Not even Adskow. Can you keep this between us? Just for a little while.”

  “It is no problem. I can even seal the records on it, if need be.” Coplan placed his hands on my arms and gave me an apologetic smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I am sorry about how this all has come about, Nion. I know that you did not welcome my flirtations with Alyse before this point, but I hope you understand I bear neither of you any ill will. I want her safe, just as you do. Please forgive me if I have overstepped my bounds.”

  It was a touching gesture, apologizing like that. Of course, I had fumed at the thought of any other male even looking at Alyse before I had made her mine. But now, the tides had turned.

  It was good to know that despite this change in dyn
amics, he was still my comrade as he had been all those years ago. He had not won Alyse for himself, but he was still on our side.

  “We appreciate your discretion,” I told him. “And your friendship too, Coplan.”

  “Then take this from a friend—a friend who is fond of both you and Alyse.” Coplan’s lips were pressed into a razor-thin line. “She is not doing well, Nion. Physically, she is strong and healthy, but mentally, she is suffering. I know how difficult this must be for you both, but you must be kind to her. One of the cubs is yours still. If she had a choice, she told me, she would wish them both to be. But regardless of that—none of this is her fault.”

  I lowered my head in shame. I had not been cruel to her, I did not think, but admittedly the bulk of my worries since Coplan had discovered Alyse’s pregnancy had been about how I would handle it. I had not been thinking of her nearly enough. I could never have blamed Alyse for what she had been through—but in my worries, I had been far too selfish.

  The cubs were both Alyse’s. Who had sired them did not matter compared to that. After my own father had abandoned my family, I had my own opinions on fatherhood.

  It was not blood that made a father. Action, presence, love—these were the traits that determined such things.

  Rutharian or Lunarian, I would raise both cubs as my own.

  “Thank you, my friend,” I said in parting. “Your words have helped me more than you could know.”

  Alyse’s suite was dark when I entered it. In the bedroom, I could see her tiny form curled up beneath the blankets. She faced the wall and did not stir as I entered.

  “Alyse?” I called out. I did not wish to wake her if she had managed to drift off to sleep, but I yearned to tell her what I had decided. It should have been the first thing I said to her when we discovered her pregnancies, but what I had not done then, I could do with confidence now.

  She must have been fast asleep, though. She did not move, even as I slipped into bed next to her.