Chapter Three
Marcus finished his last set of bicep curls and set the weights down on the rack. He glanced at his watch.
Elle was late.
Elle was never late.
Screw this. He was going to find her.
He tried her room first. After banging his fist on the door for a full minute, he frowned. Where the hell was she? A door down the hall opened and a teenage girl teetering on the verge of womanhood leaned against the jamb.
“She isn’t there, big guy. Didn’t come home last night.” The girl grinned. “Figured she got lucky.”
“Thanks.” Marcus ground his teeth together and stalked off down the hall. Had Elle spent the night in some jackass’s bunk? He wanted to slam a fist into the wall. He rounded a corner and nearly plowed into someone headed the other way.
“Hey, Marcus.”
“Noah.” Marcus tried to keep his scowl to a minimum. “Have you seen Elle?”
Noah nodded. “Yep. She spent the night working on that damn map translation. Left her sleeping facedown on the keyboard.”
Marcus’ rigid muscles relaxed. “Thanks.”
Minutes later, he opened the door to the comp lab and there she was.
Fast asleep.
He let himself watch her for a moment. She was everything he’d never known he liked in a woman. Before the invasion, he’d had sex. Quick, hard and over. He’d never really paid much attention to the woman’s personality, or even what she looked like, although he’d tended toward tall, fit women who could handle a man his size. Since the invasion, he’d been too damn busy to worry about women.
Except this one.
Her head was turned to the side, her cheek pressed to the metal desk. Her dark lashes were long against the pale cream of her cheek.
She was a woman meant for silk, and fine dining and sunshine. Not stuck in this shithole.
He reached out, wanting to touch her, but let his hand drop to his side. “Elle?”
Her eyes blinked open, the blue of them unfocused. She blinked again and sat bolt upright. “What time is it?”
“Nine o’clock in the morning.”
She pushed her hair back off her face. She had the faint outline of the edge of the keyboard on her cheek. “It can’t be.” She looked at her watch and groaned. “I’m so sorry, Marcus. I missed our session.”
“You’ve been in here all night?”
“I wanted to see if we’d missed anything on the translation. I don’t sleep that well anyway, so I figured I’d work.”
He crouched down beside her. “All night is above and beyond, Elle. You need to stay rested. The squad needs you. We get called out, we need you in top form.”
Her eyes widened. “God, you’re right. I never thought of that. I could have endangered—”
He pressed a finger to her lips. “That’s not the point. I don’t want to see you run yourself into the ground. No more all-nighters, okay?”
She nodded.
“So, did you find anything?”
She huffed out a breath and twisted her long, dark hair into a knot at the base of her neck. “No. There are just too many letters we don’t know.” Frustration, raw and sharp in her voice. “I need a Rosetta Stone.”
“A what?”
“A Rosetta Stone. It was a stone discovered in Egypt in 1799 by a French solider. It had engravings of Ancient Greek on it, and parallel words in another Egyptian script called Demotic, as well as hieroglyphs. It allowed scholars to finally decipher Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The original stone is probably destroyed now.” A flash of sorrow in her eyes. “I know London was decimated in the first wave and it was in the British Museum. But the point is, if I could find something like it, that had our language and the raptor language on it, I could use it to decipher more raptor text.”
Marcus’ jaw tightened. “Or we need a translator.”
She snorted. “I’m the best we’ve got—” her shoulders slumped “—and apparently that’s not good enough.”
“We have a raptor prisoner in the cells.”
Her eyes widened. “But he doesn’t speak English.”
“No, but the Interrogation team got enough out of him to find out about the map to the comms hub. We might be able to get some more info out of him.”
She jumped to her feet. “Then let’s go.”
Whoa…what? “You aren’t coming.” He wanted her nowhere near the raptor, even if the alien was chained up.
She lifted her chin. “And how well do you know the raptor language?”
Shit. He recognized a couple of words, at best. The damned dinosaur-like aliens spoke mostly in grunts and roars and wrote in a scrawl that looked like scratches to him. “It isn’t safe.”
She waved a dismissive hand at him. “He’s chained up and locked in a cell. And with you there, I can’t get much safer.” She snatched up a tablet. “I have everything here. I can show the raptor some of the words I want translated.”
“Elle…” Jesus. Marcus didn’t want her near the alien, but he also didn’t want her to see what had to be done to get the creature to talk. The sad fact was that survival wasn’t pretty. “He isn’t going to just have a chit chat and offer you what you want. Interrogation…it isn’t nice or neat.”
Her voice lowered. “I know, Marcus. It’s them or us. Tough choices have to be made.”
Marcus scraped a hand through his hair. “Shit.”
She gripped his arm. “I’ve been your comms officer for six months. I know this is war and it isn’t nice. Now, I’m going down to Interrogation whether you’re with me or not.”
“Fine.” He checked the urge to kick something.
They were silent as they navigated the tunnels and took the spiral ramp down to the lower levels. Blue Mountain Base had started life as a little-used military facility. But after the raptor invasion, it had become a home. Because of its excellent defenses, hidden location, and the fact it had the essentials like a power source, running water and a comp system, it had turned out to be the perfect haven they’d so desperately needed.
It also had a section of reinforced cells in the lower levels.
They reached a heavy metal door guarded by a solider in fatigues.
“Steele,” the man said with a nod.
“James. We’re here to talk to the prisoner.”
James nodded. “Captain Bladon’s in there. Talk to her first.”
“Will do.” Marcus pushed Elle through the door with a hand on the small of her back.
“Staff Sergeant Steele. What have we done to deserve the presence of Hell Squad’s leader here in our humble environs?”
Marcus nodded at the tall, redheaded woman blocking their way. Laura Bladon, once a member of the Coalition’s Navy Intelligence Unit, was young but she ran the prison area with an iron fist. Behind her, the tunnel was lined with thick, reinforced glass windows that looked into the cells.
“Elle is working to decode the map for the comms hub your raptor prisoner gave us intel on.”
“But we can’t decipher it all,” Elle added. “There are too many raptor words we can’t translate.”
Bladon’s eyes narrowed. “You think he’s going to help you? It took my team an entire month to get anything out of him.”
“We have to try.”
Bladon caught Marcus’ gaze. “You sure you want a civvy in there?”
Elle straightened. “I’m Squad Six’s comms officer. I’m not a civvy.”
Bladon raised a russet brow. “All right. Come on, then.”
As they followed the captain down the hall, Marcus cursed the choices he kept being forced to make.
***
Elle dragged in a breath and stepped up to the glass.
Her gaze settled on the raptor chained to a metal chair and her pulse tripped.
He was big. But they were all big. Over six-and-a-half feet, the alien had a humanoid body that was all packed muscle, and covered in thick, gray-mottled, scaly skin. Prominent brow ridges and a heavy, elongated jaw dominated his frightening face and large, hairless head.
Sensing them, he looked up and stared at them. His eyes glowed deep red. Elle could almost see the hatred and a vicious desire to kill within them. She shivered. Then he opened his mouth in something resembling a snarl, baring razor-sharp teeth.
Everything inside her shook. For a second, she was back in that dark closet in her parents’ house, listening to her mother’s screams.
“Elle?”
Marcus’ gravelly rasp drew her back to the present. She wasn’t that girl anymore and now she was fighting back. “Open the door.”
She heard Marcus mutter under his breath but he pushed the door open.
“I’ll be waiting out here if you need anything,” Bladon said.
As the door closed behind them, the raptor’s hellish gaze zeroed in on them. Elle was grateful for Marcus’ solid presence beside her.
Marcus crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the raptor. “You scare her…in any way…and I’ll make you hurt.”
Swallowing, Elle stepped forward, holding the tablet out. “I need to understand these words.”
The raptor bared his teeth again and let out a hissing noise.
Up close, she saw blood staining his skin, and ugly wounds that the chains at his wrists and ankles had left. Her stomach turned over. She really didn’t want to know what they’d done to get him to talk.
“This word.” She pointed at the strange alien scrawl. “I think it means wind. Or air.” She fanned the air with her hand.
The raptor lifted his chin, looked over her shoulder at the wall, and stayed silent.
“This word.” She pointed to another. “What does it mean?”
The raptor lunged against his chains, rocking the chair, and let out a loud growl. Elle jumped backward.
Suddenly Marcus was there, between her and the alien, slamming the creature and his chair back against the wall. “Do it again. I want to hurt you, you bastard.”
Marcus’ low words had the right effect, and the raptor dropped his gaze.
Elle steadied herself. She stepped forward once more. “Let’s try again.”
They kept at it for over an hour. The raptor did know a few English words, but not many. And despite Marcus getting physical with him, he didn’t share much.
As they left the cell, Elle’s shoulders sagged. “One word. That’s all we got.”
“It’s more than we had.” Marcus flexed his hands.
She stared at the blood staining his knuckles. She hated that he’d had to do that.
He noticed her looking and thrust his hands in his pockets.
“Fly. It doesn’t really help much,” she said.
Captain Bladon met them. “If you leave the words with me, I’ll have my team continue working with him.”
Elle stared at her tablet. “Working with him” was such an innocuous way to say it. She had a choice to make. To leave her notes, and give permission for that…being to be tortured. Butterflies flitted in her belly. Not pretty, gentle ones, but ones with razor-edged wings.
The raptor, for all his invading and killing, was still a living, breathing being. She thought again of her mother’s screams, of all the blood soaking into the carpet. Of Marcus and the others going out every day to fight. Elle slowly nodded. “I’ll send them through to your comp.”
As Elle and Marcus headed back up to the main part of the tunnels, she felt exhaustion dragging on her. “I’ll take another look at the map document. See if I can—”
“You need to get some sleep.”
She knew he sometimes did back-to-back missions without much rest. He must think she was weak. “All right.”
He reached out and tucked a strand of her hair back behind her ear. “Grab a few hours of sleep and then meet me in the gym.”
“What?”
“We still have a training session to do.”
Her chest tightened. Time with Marcus. Alone. “Okay.” She headed down the tunnel to her room, excitement lightening her steps.
“And Elle?”
She glanced over her shoulder. With his broad shoulders and muscled bulk, he seemed to fill the entire tunnel.
“Don’t look at that translation again. Get some sleep. I mean it.”