“Together? I’m betting on the Prillons.”
“Rezz will send them to medical.”
“How many do you think he can take?”
I skirted the edges, clinging to the back wall, trying to stay in the shadows. No one paid any attention to me, their complete focus on the contest about to begin in the ring. The tension in the air was growing as anticipation made the men edgy and primed for competition, for violence.
My shoulder bumped into a large brace that curved up over my head. The giant piece of metal was at least three feet wide and curved up to connect to a series of overhead beams that supported a clear-domed roof at least thirty feet above my head. Each beam had a two or three inch ledge that I could use to climb, and once I was up there, they were wide enough that I could lay down on my stomach, watch everything and not be seen. Perfect.
If I could just make it up there.
With a grin, I adjusted the pack on my back and lifted my foot to the lower ledge. Years of gymnastics and messing around on the rock climbing wall at the local YMCA were paying off, big time, as I climbed up and hoisted myself onto the top of the beam. Crouched low, I climbed about a third of the way up, finally found a space, settled in on my belly and peered over the edge, looking down. Shit. It was the closest thing to a gladiator fight I could imagine. The arena was a full circle. Small, perhaps the size of a one-ring circus. In the center, the ground was dirt and two men stood facing a giant.
No, not men. The two fighting the giant faced my direction and they were not like any men I’d ever seen. They were aliens and the disappointment I’d been feeling just moments ago died. These two were obviously from the same planet, one a dark mocha, the other with pale golden skin and copper hair. Their faces weren’t quite human either, their noses, eyes and chins too sharply pointed. Neither was less than six-six, but their eyes gave them away. Gold and copper. And when they smiled, they flashed a hint of fang, not enough to be vampirish, but enough to make me lean forward trying to get a closer look.
Fascinating.
Not human. Soooo not human. But damn. None of them wore a shirt and I’d never seen a more spectacular display of masculine beauty. Well, except for in my dream earlier, but that hardly counted. These were real, flesh and blood and standing right in front of me.
And the model perfect chests on the two challengers were small compared to the bulging muscles and massive frame of the giant they faced. He was monster sized, his profile oddly elongated, as if his face had grown out of proportion to the gigantic rest of him. He was even bigger than the other two, towering over his opponents whose heads barely reached the top of his shoulders. The men in the crowd were chanting, and the giant raised his hands in the air like a victor, rotating his torso to acknowledge the cheers. His knuckles were bloody and he had more blood running from a small cut near his eye, but he was smiling.
“Rezzer! Rezzer! Rezzer!”
Other than the fact that he was massive, he looked the most human of the bunch. My theories of lizards and blue skin were for nothing. No one, not one spectator, looked completely different from an Earth man. Some had different skin coloring, sharper features, but not enough to be alarming. Just odd. And huge. Big huge. Like…huge huge.
What I quickly noticed was that every single person in the crowd was a man. Scanning the crowd, I didn’t see one woman, alien or not. I was the only female here. Strange. Where were the women?
The sound of a fist connecting with flesh and bone filled the air, followed by cheers and shouts. My curiosity quickly forgotten, I redirected my focus to the fighters as my pulse pounded in my ears and I fought to control my breathing inside the helmet. Below me, chests heaved and I could practically taste the testosterone in the air. It was like being inside the male mind, surrounded by heat and power and…rage.
The intensity of my reaction startled me as anger rose to choke me. I swallowed hard, fighting the burning sting that gathered behind my eyelids as the giant below me bellowed out a challenge that made the entire crowd roar. An answering yell exploded inside my chest, but I clenched my jaw and held it inside, locked away with the rest of the emotions I couldn’t deal with right now.
I didn’t want to be here, belly down, on this stupid beam twenty feet in the air on an alien planet. I didn’t want to have one more nightmare about my beautiful, broken little boy and his innocent, trusting eyes. He was mine, and he believed me when I told him everything was going to be all right.
Everything had to be all right. I’d do whatever I had to do. For my son, I would lie, cheat, steal, fly halfway across the galaxy locked in a crate. For Wyatt, I would do anything, risk anything. Even my life. I was no killer. I wasn’t a fighter or a soldier, but for Wyatt? I was a mother, and that meant nothing was out of bounds. Absolutely…nothing.