Chapter One

Safire watched as her phone rang. She knew it was Deja, her best friend and wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to her yet. Gripping the cover, she pulled it tighter to her body and watched as the phone vibrated on her leg. She answered on the last ring.

“Hello.”

“Safire, where are you?”

“Home. Where are you?”

“I’m home too.”

Her home was with the man she met several months ago. Safire didn’t want to say she was jealous because it felt petty, but well, she was jealous. She wanted what Deja had, not who she had, just what she had. A man that loved her and couldn’t take his eyes off her.

“I haven’t seen you in a while, and you’re avoiding my calls, and I was getting a little worried.”

She was behaving like a bad friend, and she didn’t have an excuse. Everything that could happen seemed to happen at once, and she didn’t want to ruin her friend’s happiness by cueing her into her sadness.

“Sorry Deja, I just needed some time.”

“Well, you’ve had time. Six months and now your thirty. What are you going to do on your birthday?”

Her eyes slid to the open bottle of Jack. She hated Jack, but she figured it would knock her out.

“I’m going to have a party of two. He’s not here yet, but he’s coming.”

“Fire.”

Nope, her friend wasn’t even going to entertain that lie.

“I want to be alone Deja. You only turn thirty once, and I guess I want to think about my life and what’s next.”

“Fire we’re besties, and I don’t want to lose you. I can take the night off; we can go out, have fun, hit some bars. What do you say?”

“I’m tired of hitting bars, Deja. I want to stay home, drink and watch a movie. I’ll call you tomorrow, promise.”

“Okay don’t allow yourself to get sad. Life will pick up I know it will.”

A smile tugged at her lips as she clicked the phone off. Deja was optimistic always had been.

Let’s kill someone.

She laughed out loud, leave it to the crazy female that lived inside of her to cheer her up. The voice had a killer alien body and was sitting in a chair in the corner of her mind sharpening a huge knife.

This was her birthday; she was supposed to be relaxing instead she got up and hurried over to her easel and drew a quick sketch of what she was seeing her in mind. She made a good living selling her artwork. She did portraits and other things she found boring, and then she caught these images in her mind, she drew and painted them. They sold, one of her customers told her if he didn’t know better he would swear they were real worlds. She grinned and collected a hefty fee.

Stepping back she was amazed; this was a version of her. Her hair was all over her head like it was windblown, her eyes were wider more dramatic. Her teeth were long and her fingernails matched. She was savage, but she was sexy. For a minute, she longed to be the woman in the sketch and not the one she saw in the mirror.

The knock at the door drew her out of her thoughts.

“Who is it?” She grabbed the robe that was lying on the couch since she was dressed in her pajamas for her night in.

“Hi, it's Ron your new neighbor.”

The new neighbor that made her senses tingle and the voice inside her head want to kill him and hide the body. There was something about Ron she didn’t like. She looked out the peephole to make sure he was alone before she cracked the door.

“Hi, how can I help you? Need a cup of sugar?”

“No, but thanks for the offer. I wasn’t doing anything tonight, and I was wondering if you wanted to get a drink?”

Ron was a tall, slender man with black hair and bright blue eyes. Many would call him handsome. She, on the other hand, was attracted to men with muscles. She always figured she needed a strong man because she was a big woman. Now she had seen lots of bigger women with smaller men, but Ron wasn’t into big women. She had watched him, and he liked the neighbor who lived across from her who was one twenty wet so why was he asking her out? He also had a creep factor that made her wary of him.

“Thanks, maybe another night, I plan to spend tonight alone.”

“Sorry to hear that.” He gave her a smile that looked more like a grimace. He was forcing himself to be pleasant. The more he talked, the more her blood pressure rose.

The desire to put him in his place was nipping at her heels, but instead, she gave him a pleasant smile. She needed to be careful around him. He was vicious even if she didn’t know why.

“Maybe another day.”

She smiled, “Maybe.” Taking a step back, she closed the door and watched out of the peephole until he finally turned around and walked away.

She made her way back to the couch and stopped, turning she took her latest drawing and went into her room. Deep inside her closet was a large safe, she opened it and placed the picture in there with all the other ones that depicted scenes not of Earth. She locked it and buried it behind clothes and shoes. Then she made sure all her nice flowers and waterfalls were on display.

She entered the bathroom to turn on the shower. Her encounter with Ron changed her mind. There was no way she was staying home for her birthday.

*~*~*~*

Declyn prowled the grounds of their compound, he needed to let his inner beast out before Jessie or Mia saw him. They were part of the family now, but he was still playing it safe around them. They had been through too much lately. His bones popped and cracked until his body grew standing at least twelve feet. He growled and heard the answering calls from his battalion.

They were Kur’iks who were created to fight a war that wasn’t their own. They were chasing a Thalian ship when both ships were knocked out of their galaxy and eventually found this one and then this planet. He was the Alpha of his battalion that included roughly two thousand males and two hundred females.

They had been confined to Earth for roughly four hundred years. For many of those years, they lived in fear that their people would come for them and haul them back to the only existence they knew before landing here. After a while, that fear disappeared and fear of the Earth government that was growing powerful and more intelligent every day began to haunt them.

The humans would eventually come to realize they had aliens from the stars on their planet and once again they would become hunted or caught up in a senseless war. Now more important things worried him. They were compatible with a select number of females on this planet. He had no idea how to identify those females, but he had two thousand males who were depending on him to find them mates. No pressure.

Then there was her, the female that haunted his dreams. She was thick with skin almost the color of Deja’s, Enzo’s female. He looked down at his skin it was slightly gray, but Deja didn’t seem to mind and even Jessie their waitress didn’t seem to care when she took Cole as her mate. Before that she never mentioned it, maybe she thought they weren’t getting enough sun, or it was a vitamin deficiency. Who knew what human females thought.

He watched as Enzo and Ven walked towards him their inner beast on display, between them was Deja. She was the first human female to live in their compound. She was magnificent with her canines descended and her nails sharp and painted pink. He laughed she would never do what anyone thought she should do.

She was human, but something had happened to her. Somehow she had changed when she mated with Enzo. Was her ability to change the thing that made her able to breach the barrier they put up? It seemed more plausible now that both Jessie and Mia not only breached the barrier but also became part of Cole’s family. A daughter, he couldn’t imagine Cole’s joy.

Cait the first Kur’ik to mingle enough with the humans to successfully achieve several degrees in human medicine had a theory, but she refused to share it until she had more samples. Right, no pressure.

“Are we going hunting?”

Enzo was his beta, he helped to hold their battalion together as well as assisting Declyn with anything he needed. Right now he needed to hunt to get the images of Deja’s beautiful friend out of his mind. She hadn’t come back, even though he was waiting for her. He wanted to slip past the barrier and hunt her down, but it wouldn’t mean anything unless she proved she could pass the barrier a second time on her own. Which meant he had to wait something his inner beast was familiar with but hated.

“We hunt.”

“Not without us.” Caden and Xander joined the group followed by Cole, Chase, and Jasper.

Declyn looked around no one else was there, so they broke into a run heading for the wild area of their land. If you looked for their land on a map, it wouldn’t be there as far as the humans were concerned it didn’t exist. That was due to the barrier their ship placed around the territory they claimed long ago before modern technology. The animals didn’t exist either which was something they were thankful for. They couldn’t leave the field they were enclosed in, which gave him peace. If they ever escaped the city wouldn’t survive a day.

He looked down at the faint tracks on the ground and smiled. He had been tracking the Ephant for a while; one had gone rogue and needed to be put down. They weren’t easy to kill and would give him exactly what he needed to take his mind off her. It would also make a plentiful meal for some of his people.

He dropped to all fours and sniffed the ground to get a better idea of when it was last here. The Ephant were a community they didn’t wander alone, but this one did. He sniffed again. This one was a killer.

He growled when Enzo dropped down beside him warning him off his prey.

“Alpha.” Enzo was reminding him of his responsibilities even in the middle of the hunt. That made him the perfect beta as well as a pain in the ass.

“Jasper came to me with some disturbing news.”

He was one of their younger members. Not young like Ven who was only around twenty by Earth standards but still he was young.

“What did he have to say that was so important that you have interfered with my hunt?”

“He thinks we are being hunted.”

“I assure you the Ephant has our scent and it is already plotting our deaths.”

“He thinks there is a group of human hunters that have caught wind of our presence on Earth and are actively looking for us in several cities. He has been monitoring activity on the internet and has been sneaking out to hang around meetings that have been advertised.”

“What proof does he have?’

Enzo linked minds with him just long enough to allow him to hear what was said at a meeting. They caught one of them, a young female and dissected her. The leader boosted to the people who were there. She wasn’t from their group; she was from another group in another city. There were pictures as proof.

He roared in fury just as the Ephant attacked. It took him down using his lack of focus against him. Its claws raked him over his stomach opening him up wide. He jumped to his feet, death blazing in his eyes but the Ephant melted into the background. He let him go. He needed to find a way to keep his people safe.