But I didn’t miss the way his nostrils flared again, taking in my clean scent. Didn’t miss the flash of heat in those golden eyes before he carefully banked it down.
Tonight would be no different.
The vines around my perch rustled again as I settled in, the humid air thick with jungle sounds. A distant trill echoed across the canopy, something low and animalistic.
I didn’t flinch.
I’d lived in this weird too long already to fear it. I’d faced creepy abandoned bunkers in Arizona, stalked Mothmanthrough a West Virginia mine, and eaten mystery jerky from a conspiracy theorist named Big Earl.
This? Alien vines and a smoking-hot bodyguard?
This was just another Tuesday.
6 /LOR
I wokewith her scent on my tongue, so vivid I could taste her still. The Unity dream clung to me like a fever, hot and insistent against my skin. My body thrummed with the echo of her pleasure, the memory of her cries reverberating through my bones. Miri. The name beat inside my chest, a second heartbeat I couldn’t silence. The primal part of me—the part that was more beast than Reaper—paced beneath my skin, hungry and claiming. Mine. She was mine. And I was dangerously close to forgetting why that couldn’t happen yet.
The vines had curled around us both during the night, weaving a living cocoon that joined us even as we slept separately. They knew what we were to each other before we’d even spoken. The jungle had sensed the bond forming between us—had felt it ripple through the ecosystem like a stone dropped in still water.
I sat up slowly, careful not to disturb the delicate network of connections that had formed. A thick vine—the one Miri had dubbed “Phil”—was draped lazily across my chest, pulsing with information it wanted to share. I placed my palm against it, extending my consciousness into the living network.
The impression came immediately: Miri was not in the perch.
Not panicked—not yet—I expanded my awareness, letting my senses flow outward through the jungle’s neural pathways. East. The mineral pool. I caught impressions of warm water, steam rising, her body submerged to the neck.
She’d gone to wash away the evidence of our shared dream.
I could feel the jungle’s fascination with her—the way the vines gently guided her path, how the dangerous flora receded at her approach, the way even the carnivorous species regarded her with curious respect rather than hunger.
“She isn’t prey,” I murmured, more to myself than to Phil, who was still trying to feed me information.
The vine gave an undulating pulse that translated clearly through our connection:
The Other watches her too.
I went rigid, my claws extending instinctively. The fugitive. Of course he would be drawn to her—new, different, a disruption in the jungle’s carefully balanced ecosystem. A potential weakness in my defenses.
“Show me,” I commanded, pressing deeper into the connection.
The response came as a series of fragmented impressions—movement to the north, a faint energy signature that didn’t belong, the acrid scent of fear and desperation. But the signal was weak, indistinct. The jungle’s attention was divided now, focused primarily on Miri rather than tracking the Cydarian.
I stood, my muscles bunching with suppressed urgency. Since her arrival, the jungle had been…distracted. Its vast consciousness, once a precision tool I’d wielded in my hunt, hadbecome unfocused, splitting its attention between protecting the newcomer and maintaining surveillance on the fugitive.
I couldn’t blame it. I’d been equally distracted.
The dream played again behind my eyes—her body beneath mine, her taste flooding my mouth, the way she’d surrendered so completely, as if we’d been lovers for lifetimes instead of strangers thrown together by cosmic chance.
A low growl rumbled in my chest at the memory. My tail lashed behind me, betraying the hunger that clawed at my insides. I paced the perimeter of our shelter, checking the defensive lattice I’d woven the night before.
No breaches. No signs of the fugitive’s presence within range of our camp. But he was out there, watching, waiting. I could feel it in the subtle shifts of the ecosystem, in the way certain sectors had gone quiet, in the defensive posture of the apex predators that ruled the upper canopy.
Phil slid across the platform to twine around my ankle, offering another impression:
She belongs here now. The jungle has claimed her too.
I shook my head, trying to clear it. “She doesn’t belong to the jungle. She doesn’t belong to me. Not yet. Not until she chooses.”
But even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t entirely true. The jungle had already marked her as important—had already woven her into its consciousness, just as it had done with me over the long months of my isolation here. And I...I had been marked by her in ways that went beyond physical. The Unity dream had sealed something between us, something primal and unbreakable.
