The cloaking technology wasn’t good enough to get through the shield without causing damage to the ship. Krayter knew from experience that flying through could completely fry all of the electronics, leaving them hobbled and vulnerable, with no means of escape.

Jacinta and her people sat strapped in seats in the cargo hold, ready to be dropped out at the agreed upon spot. It was up to Ruwen and his people to bring down the shield and keep the ship functioning while the recovery mission was underway.

Krayter sat up in the cockpit with Ru, Lis, and Kayleb, but he couldn’t force himself to stay here while the rest of the crew went out to save his mate. What kind of man would he be if he let others endanger themselves to save the person he loved?

“You’re going with them?” Kayleb asked when Krayter stood as they approached the outer perimeter.

“Wouldn’t you?” Penny was out there somewhere and he had to find her and bring her back to safety.

Kayleb nodded solemnly, a look of unspeakable sadness flitting across his face and disappearing in an instant. “Good luck.” He handed his blaster over. “You’ll need this more than I do.”

Krayter took the weapon and stuck it in his pocket. He hoped he didn’t need to use it, but if he did, he prayed he shot true.

Jacinta put up no argument when he appeared with her. She must have been happy that Nicole hadn’t managed to sneak aboard. She’d been sent away to wait back at the compound and no one had listened to the protestations that she was better with a blaster than half of her mother’s people.

“You follow Cary’s orders,” she said, nodding to a woman with a dark scarf covering her hair. “My team’s following the tracker we placed on Resa’s shoes. The most likely scenario is that Kurt’s holding the girls together in the Cellar. It’s his little hidey hole in the main house. On the off chance that isn’t the case, Cary is taking the secondary team to the Dugout. It’s where he keeps prisoners. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Krayter. “I want them back just as much as you do.”

She studied him for several seconds, but Ru’s voice came over the intercom and announced the drop off before she could say anything else. He set them down on the north end of the settlement, outside of the force field in an area unlikely to be equipped with laser drones.

As quickly as he set them down, Ru flew away, the ship barely more than a ruffle of leaves in the night. Krayter had never seen cloaking technology like that up close and he was determined to get a better look, once this hellish night was through.

He had questions for Jacinta, but they were long past that time. Now they needed action. They waited as close to the field as they dared, counting the time until Ruwen was meant to blow a hole in the force field on the other side of the Settlement. Once the guards in this quadrant were drawn away, they’d have little trouble getting through.

Exactly seven minutes later, the air in front of them fizzled and sparked just as one of Jacinta’s men’s watches beeped the time. Cary pulled a grenade out of her bag and rolled it towards the edge of the field while another guard took a laser scalpel to a small tree, pushing it in the direction of the Settlement.

With a pop, the lasers of the grenade exploded, cutting a deep hole in the ground and blasting a chunk of force field away. It wouldn’t last for long, as the kind of grid used here was self-healing, but they only needed a minute to get through. The second guard pushed the tree a final time and it fell, crushing against the field and widening the almost invisible hole.

If any guard saw it, they’d assume the disruption came from the tree, not their team.

They filed in, blasters drawn. Krayter’s claws peeked from the edges of his sheathes, but he didn’t let them out, not when he had a long range weapon that would do the job more efficiently.

“Remember, no deaths. We don’t want retaliation.” Jacinta had commanded them to place all their blasters on stun, but Krayter doubted it would be enough to stop Kurt from fighting back.

Krayter didn’t care, not as long as he got Penny back.

They marched in formation through the dense woods, moving as quickly and quietly as their small group would allow. A man called Rygan deployed sentry drones to lead their path and sense the enemy before they saw them. This portion of the force field wasn’t far from the central part of the Settlement, but ‘not far’ was still measured in miles.

At some unknown signal, Jacinta and her people split off from Cary, Krayter, and two other soldiers. Cary took them to the right while Jacinta went left. The night was alive around them, bugs of some kind chirping and others flashing bright for a moment before dimming again. If it weren’t for the imminent threat, it would be magical. They didn’t make nights like this on Jaaxis.

Krayter gripped the handle of his blaster and forced his mind back to the task at hand. His hands threatened to tremble as excitement rode him high. He’d thought the pirates he faced on his way to Earth were bad. They were nothing compared to this. The fear he’d known then seemed like a mild annoyance compared to the disaster scenarios that kept playing through his mind.

Penny would be okay. She had to be.

***

Penny wasn’t okay. She’d been dumped in a dank hole somewhere far away from the Residence. Her feet and hands were bound and though she wasn’t blindfolded, the darkness in the room was black as pitch, an almost physical presence she could feel pressing in all around her.

She pulled at the rope on her wrists, but they were wrenched tightly behind her back and she didn’t have the leverage to find any give. When she kicked her feet, nothing happened; they were anchored to the wall behind her. A scream bubbled in the back of her throat, but she held it back, swallowing everything but a frustrated sob as she tried to make any movement.

She’d thought that Nicole and Resa were experts at binding. Her father put them to shame. She collapsed back, crushing her thumbs under the small of her back and straining against the pull in her shoulder. There was nothing relaxing about the pose and her fingers were starting to tingle from the lack of circulation. If she was kept here for long, the bindings alone might permanently injure her.

Tears pricked at her eyes and began to fall. Tied up, she couldn’t wipe them away. You’ve really done it this time, she thought, castigating herself. Who knows what Father’s doing to Resa? And if Krayter comes, he’ll kill him too.

She dreaded her mate’s arrival even as she prayed for it. Even tied up as she was, she believed that her father wouldn’t hurt her, not on purpose. Krayter had no such guarantee. If he came alone, he’d be dead.

Would she feel it?

The mate bond between them pulsed in her chest, right alongside her heart. If Krayter—she swallowed hard and took a deep breath before she could even think the word. If Krayter died, would that pulse disappear? Would it be torn out of her, the roots violently dragged out from where they’d begun to grow into her very blood vessels? She didn’t know if she could survive that. Not for long anyway.

No. Penny couldn’t let herself think like that. She had to be strategic, had to be smart. Krayter wouldn’t come alone. He had his brother, and his cousin and Lis. Her mother would lead a mission to retrieve Resa. A dozen people would be headed to Highland Settlement in the morning, just as soon as it was discovered they were gone.

And Nicole? Her sister was in more danger than she could imagine. What would happen if she discovered that Penny and Resa were gone? Would she sound the alarm? Or chase after them into the woods where her father would, no doubt, have a man stationed looking for her?

A sob tore out of her throat as she imagined one of her father’s more vicious men finding Nicole. Accidents happened, even under the best of circumstances, and a cruel man might be happy to orchestrate an ‘accident’ if it meant he could have his fun with a young woman who was almost fully grown.

Penny jerked her arms again, the ropes tearing her wrists raw and sending white jags of fiery pain shooting up her arms as she cut through skin and left herself bloody, still with barely two centimeters of give in the ropes.

Her ears popped and Penny’s head jerked up as she sensed a strange change in the air pressure outside. The wall behind her wavered for a moment, like a gust of wind was battering it, and then for a second, all was silent. Penny strained to hear, but the darkness around her seemed to smother her ears as well as her eyes.

She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that might trick her senses into dealing with the dark. At first it didn’t seem to work, but then the thumping of blaster shots broke through and pinged the outside reaches of her hearing.

Krayter? It couldn’t be morning already, she had no way of tracking, but she’d only been tied up for a few hours at the most.

But if he was here, she needed to be ready to go. Penny strained again, biting her lip to keep from crying out in pain as blood flowed from the cuts around her wrists. If she could get her hands free, she might just get out of this.

***

It was chaos.

Krayter’s instincts pulled him in one direction, while Cary commanded her people away from the main residence and through the trees adjacent to the road. This wasn’t right. He could feel a string pulling at his back, a pressure telling him to turn around and find his mate right where he could feel her, not at the end of whatever path they were following.

Jacinta was wrong about the Dugout, where ever it was. She hadn’t been to Highland Settlement in eight years, and despite her beliefs, things had changed.

Krayter sped up, coming even with Cary and her second in command. They both looked at him on just this side of a glare. “Penny isn’t this way,” he said. In the distance, a fight was underway as blasters fired against the almost invisible ship attacking their defenses.

“How do you know that?” Cary demanded.

“I…” He didn’t have the right words to describe the denya bond. “It’s an alien thing. I just know.” If that made him sound psychic, so be it.

Cary glanced at her second and pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. “Nice try, spaceman. We’ve got a mission. You can come with us or not, but stay out of the way.”

She and the second sped up, breaking their jog into a run while Krayter stood in place and their third passed him by. He watched them go, knowing he had a better chance of fighting if he went with them. Four fighters would be better than one.

But Penny wasn’t there.

He turned around and sprinted in the other direction, holstering his blaster as he did so. A night like this, darkness closing in and the enemy all around, brought out the feral beast that his people had evolved from. Here, that monster, all claws and fangs, rose to the surface, determined to find and protect his mate, no matter the cost.

Blaster shots slowed Krayter down as he got closer to the Residence. But Krayter’s instincts kept him sharp, allowing him to fade into the slimmest of shadows and find hiding spots no human would ever think of. He scrambled up a tree, using his claws for grips and jumped from thick branch to thick branch, his movements nothing more than a thick wind.

The trees had been leveled in the final space before the house, giving way to a giant yard covered in floodlights and guards patrolling in a disciplined rotation. Though he saw one or two jerk from the sounds of heavy blaster fire, none of them ran to or from the blasts.

Rather than pull him to the house, the bond kept him heading east, away from the lights and the guards. Krayter crouched on a branch, waiting for a guard to turn away before he took sprinting steps and leaped, clutching a tree trunk and sliding down, snapping off thin branches under his weight. He waited at the base of the tree, straining to hear the running feet of soldiers, but nothing came, the sound of his fall disguised by the distant battle and the windy night.

Next to the main residence was a small building, probably used for storage. Krayter’s heart beat wildly and he knew that Penny was there, even if there was no sign of her from the outside.

No guard waited outside of the large retractable door, nor was there anyone posted by the side door that Krayter could barely make out. Unlike the Residence, there were no flood lights surrounding the building. The only light came from one bulb above the garage.

Just as Krayter was ready to step out into the open, a guard turned the corner. Krayter darted back into the shadows and didn’t dare to breathe. Okay. There was one guard. But the man calmly walked down the road and away from the building, merely checking to make sure the doors were closed and the windows weren’t broken.

On another night, one not under the constant barrage of blaster fire, there might have been more men here, but they’d been diverted, just as planned. Krayter moved low and quickly from the trees to the storage building. One look from a guard, and he’d be flattened. They killed aliens on sight here, he remembered. So he needed to be unseen.

He tried the handle on the door, but it was locked. As for the garage, there was a palm sensor that might have opened it, but Krayter didn’t know how to hack that. He didn’t see anything that indicated an alarm, and with the fight already underway, it was possible they’d ignore one from this building.

That wasn’t likely if Penny was inside.

Without hesitation, Krayter rammed his shoulder into the door, butting up against it with all his might. But it held firm, reinforced by metal and a solid lock. He tried again, backing up several paces and getting a running start before throwing himself at it.

All he got for that was a bruised arm. He expected more spots just as dark as his clan markings in the morning. If he made it that far. No, when.

Trying another tack, Krayter kicked at the door, trying to hit a weak spot and break the jamb. He thought he heard something crack, but he couldn’t be certain. He kicked again, and this time a thwop echoed past him. Success! But the door wasn’t opened, and a guard could come by at any second. Krayter kept kicking, ignoring the pain in his knee as he put all the force he could muster into one foot.

Finally, it gave, collapsing inward, a strip of wood inside the door clattering to the floor as it swung open. Krayter stepped inside and closed the door behind him as best he could. It couldn’t lock anymore, but most of the damage to the frame was on the inside. A quick glance outside wouldn’t show that there was any trouble here.

He hoped.

Inside, the room was lit by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was an old motor car and several racks of gardening equipment, but no Penny. Despite what his eyes told him, Krayter could sense her. She was here, even if she wasn’t right here. He looked around for a door or a closet, looking for any hint of where she might be hiding. He wanted to call out for her, and he even opened his mouth to do it, but stopped at the last minute. If there was a guard behind a door somewhere, he didn’t want to alert him.

But other than the garage and the broken door behind him, Krayter saw nothing. He could scream in frustration, but the same caution that kept him from calling out kept him from yelling.

The wood creaked under his feet and Krayter froze. He knelt down onto one knee and pressed his fingers against the worn boards. Most of the floor here was made of stone, but a small patch by the door had been laid with wood instead. Why? What kind of garage needed a wood floor?

He knocked gently against the rough floor and listened to the echo as it came back hollow. A pained groan floated up and Krayter snapped to attention. Now that he was focused on the wood, he found a catch for the hidden door after only another minute. The wood strained and creaked as he forced it open, but once it flipped up, he found a hidden staircase that led down into darkness.

He took the stairs carefully, even as he wanted to sprint. Penny was so close that he could hear her, but she still wasn’t close enough. He only knew he made it to the bottom of the stairs when he stumbled. There was no light, the darkness a thick presence around them. But in a way, that darkness was a gift.

No guard.

“Krayter?” Penny gasped somewhere to the left of him.

He spun around and squinted. She was barely more than an outline in the black. “I’m here,” he said. “You’re going to be okay. Hold tight.” He couldn’t see well enough to free her, or to make sure she wasn’t horribly wounded.

He scrambled back up the stairs and found a hand torch, returning as quickly as he could. He swung the light towards her and his mate recoiled away as soon as it touched her eyes. He flipped the light down, giving her time to adjust, but relief made his hands shake.

She was alive.

“I knew you’d come,” she said.

“Always.”