Evolved to be the perfect hunters, these g’hir were fucking fast. The males stood between six and a half and seven feet tall and were ungodly strong too. She’d learned that quick enough when Ar’ar had kidnapped her not fifty feet from her Uncle Lester’s cabin in Brittle Bridge, North Carolina.
But they possessed a keen sense of smell too—the kind the best bloodhound ever born would envy.
Over the past three days of her “alone time” she’d managed to traverse the whole settlement, even the back stairs she’d just used. Crisscrossing this way and that, she touched everything she could, even leaving here and there bits of hair from her hairbrush that she’d secreted into her pockets. She wasn’t sure just how well their sense of smell worked but she was going to do every goddamned thing she could think of to confuse it.
She’d managed to secure one of their weapons too, a small blaster lifted from the clanhall’s stores when Ar’ar wasn’t looking. She hadn’t had a chance to try this one out but she’d wheedled her “mate” into letting her fire his blaster out at the practice range so she had a basic understanding of how it worked. The indicator showed the weapon fully charged, but just how many shots that meant or how powerful those shots were, she didn’t know.
She hadn’t secured a gun belt though so she slipped the weapon into the thigh pocket of her pants. Summer adjusted the fastening on her boot and stood, shouldering her pack.
Insects hummed and nocturnal birds whooped from the forest ahead but from the settlement there was no sign that she’d been missed yet. A few quick steps and she was under the cover of the trees, already bound for the stream at the southwest edge of the Betari settlement.
With the g’hir’s inborn skills as hunters she, a human woman alone on a distant world where no one would help her, probably wouldn’t have stood a chance.
But she wasn’t the same person she was four years ago and nothing—not a race of alien warriors or the light years of space between here and Earth—was going to keep her from getting home.
And one thing she had that these alien fuckers didn’t was a great-granddaddy who had once slipped a Georgia chain gang.
D’other men said it was right impossible, PawPaw would wheeze. His hair was mostly gone by then, wisps of white over a shrunken skull, his face leathery. PawPaw had even fewer teeth than hair but his eyes, pale blue like Summer’s own, were alight with pride and glee. That it were crazy to try and I tell ya I was crazy—crazy like a fox!
Praying some of them fox-crazy genes had made it down four generations and right to her, Summer walked into the creek, just like PawPaw had done in the 1920s to throw off the dogs.
She headed upstream like he had too but it was hard going, much harder than she expected. The water dragged at her feet and even with the moonlight it was a struggle to see her way. The water soaked her boots, icy enough to make her grit her teeth—probably runoff from the nearby Zun Mountains. She slogged along until the shore on either side looked good and rocky then made her way to the eastern side to slide her pack off.
Then, bending and scooping, she covered herself from head down with mud.
PawPaw had been evading dogs, not g’hir, when he’d done this but what could fool a bluetick hound’s sniffer might just fool an alien’s too.
She coated her hair well, intent on dulling its bright platinum to the muck’s dun color, better to camouflage herself from the g’hir’s sharp eyes. The mud was just as miserably cold as the water, slimy too, but there was one thing to be grateful for: it was mid-spring on the g’hir homeworld; she wouldn’t freeze to death out here. It had been winter in North Carolina; the Smoky Mountains were buried in white, every store in town alight with decorations for the upcoming holidays when Ar’ar had come to Earth and ripped her right out of her life—
Her nostrils flared, remembering. She’d fought that glowing-eyed demon with strength borne of terror until a shot from his blaster had knocked her out. When she’d awakened on his ship they were already light years from home. He’d cuffed her wrists together—some stupid alien courtship custom of theirs—and when he’d finally taken the restraints off he’d tried to mate with her.
But despite the heat of his amazing body, the warm male scent of him and that mating sound he made as he caressed her—a rumbling-purr that tightened her * and vibrated right through her clit till she was gasping with need, scarcely able to keep from grinding against him to seek release—Summer wouldn’t submit to him and, to her genuine surprise, he didn’t rape her.