Chapter One
Lynx's mind was spinning. He didn't know what to think or how to react. He could hear the walls cracking and tearing as the massive creatures pulled themselves into the room, following each other so closely that they filled the doorway and crawled over one another grotesquely as if they couldn't wait to get to him. Lynx could only relate them to the spiders that Zuri had shown them pictures of while she was describing Earth and some of the types of life that lived there, but these were far beyond the small, scurrying bugs that she had shown them. Even the largest of those were miniscule compared to the gleaming creatures and their sharp, spiked legs that dug into the walls and ceiling as they crawled into the room.
As they moved toward him, Lynx stepped closer to the bed where Rain, the human, lay frozen in her calm, sleeping state. He had to protect her. He knew that this beautiful, delicate-looking woman, this lovely human that at once baffled and intrigued him, was meant to be his mate. It didn't matter to him that she was from a species that was not meant to have even visited Uoria before they started to arrive at the Denynso compound to research and learn, and even then were supposed to have been limited just to their area of the planet. It didn't even bother him that she had been lying here, frozen in her sleep, for longer than he had been alive. It was confounding and beyond his realm of comprehension, but at that moment the only thing that mattered to the warrior was making sure that the woman that lay in front of him was safe from these fearsome creatures crawling toward him.
There were seven of them now, leaving deep gouges in their wake as they moved across the walls and ceiling. He had seen gouges like that in the lower portion of the house when he had first arrived, but he had thought nothing of them. He had been far more concerned with the fact that in their desire to explore the planet of Uoria and discover what types of beings might share it with them, the group of Denynso men had found that there had been a long-running feud between two species that ended in one of them, the Covra, locking the beings they knew as the Light Ones, and that Lynx now knew were humans, in time, and that they were then roaming through that locked kingdom discovering everything that had stopped in the span of a breath, decades before.
Now what he worried about was Rain and how he would protect her. She couldn't move. As far as he knew, she had no awareness of what was going on around her. It was his responsibility to ensure that she was safe and that these creatures didn't harm her. He could continue to process the fact that she was human later. Right now he had to think quickly and get rid of these monsters.
Lynx stepped back toward the window that overlooked the street and could hear muffled screaming coming from the rest of the settlement. The creatures seemed to have found the rest of the Denynso men. Like the others, Lynx rarely carried weapons. They preferred to fight with their bare hands. And like the others, occasionally he carried a dagger that he had crafted himself. This dagger, however, he had left tucked in the bag he had been carrying as they walked from the compound, and he had dropped that bag to the floor near the door to the room.
He heard another scream from one of the buildings across the street and the frantic sound mobilized him. Lynx took a long stride across the room and dove toward his bag. He could feel something sharp grazing his back as he grabbed onto the bag and pulled it up against his chest. A fearsome hissing sound above him told him that he had angered the creatures, and he felt the sharp, piercing feeling in his back intensify.
Lynx reached into his bag and pulled out his dagger. In one fast movement he rolled over onto his back and slashed at one of the creatures. The tip of his dagger bit through the leg that was digging into his back and vibrantly green blood splattered down on him as the leg splintered off of the rest of the creature's body and skittered across the floor. The injured creature let out a horrific screeching sound and pulled back away from him, but even as Lynx saw the gleaming black thing withdrawing away from him, he watched as the open wound in the leg healed itself over and the limb started growing back.
Out of the corner of his eye Lynx saw one of the larger creatures climbing over the smaller one above his head, moving toward Rain where she lay on the bed. Lynx tightened his grip on the dagger and scurried backwards across the floor toward the edge of the bed. The large creature came toward him and he slashed at it with his dagger. Since he had watched the other creature heal itself so quickly, he didn't know how the larger one would react to his threats, but it was all he could do.
The creature took another step toward Rain and the fury built inside Lynx with an intensity that he had never experienced. He pulled himself up higher and changed his grip on his dagger so that it was pointing directly at the bulbous black eye at the front of the rounded body. He could see the reflection of his blade in the surface of the eye and as he leaned toward the creature, it stepped back. Lynx took another step forward and lay a protective hand on Rain's leg.
As soon as his hand touched her, Lynx felt his entire body tingle and saw a flash of bright, vibrant light. The room around him disappeared in the light and then reappeared, but it looked different. Sunlight, the type of dark, rich light that came with a late afternoon, made the room appear to glow. Out of the corner of his eye Lynx saw movement and he turned. Against the wall stood a vanity table with a large, curved mirror and at the table sat Rain.