Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 159487 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 797(@200wpm)___ 638(@250wpm)___ 532(@300wpm)
After a moment, a green light came on and he heard a familiar voice.
“Ravik? Is that you? What do you have over your shoulder?”
Ravik put the struggling female down. Keeping a firm grip on her, he turned her so she was facing the hidden camera. Then he dug deep inside himself, trying to find the words.
“Wo-man,” he said at last. “Hu-man. Mate.”
“You spoke!” Severin’s voice sounded surprised. “You haven’t spoken for three solar months, at least!”
“Woman,” Ravik repeated, more sure of himself this time. “Mine,” he added, for good measure.
“Well, we’ll just see what she says about that,” Severin remarked.
At that point, the human woman began making mouth noises again—this time she seemed to be speaking to the camera.
“Grabbed me…need help…from Earth,” were a few of the words that Ravik actually caught. He frowned, trying to put them together. They almost made sense. In fact, his head felt less fuzzy than it had in weeks. There was something about the human woman—something about her scent that seemed to clear his mind. He listened intently, hoping to find out more about her but she was speaking so rapidly now, Ravik couldn’t follow.
“Infected?” he heard Severin ask.
The woman shifted from foot to foot and tugged at the arm of her short, silky robe, which barely came down to mid-thigh. She had gorgeous thick thighs and a juicy behind, Ravik noticed—he had always loved a woman with a big ass.
The thought surprised him because in the past few months, he hadn’t thought about women at all. As the gray fog crept over his brain and the white film covered his eyes, he thought less and less about anything. But now, standing so close to the human woman and breathing in her sweet, unique scent, he could feel the fog lifting and his interest in women and life in general coming back.
What was happening to him?
He had no answers and before he could make sense of the situation, he heard Severin say,
“All right, Ravik, I’m opening the door. Bring her in to the decontamination suite.”
Then the steel door slid open and he was pushing the little female inside. Maybe Severin would know what was happening to him—he hoped so because he had no hope of figuring it out himself.
4
SEVERIN
Severin waited at the door of the decontamination suite, which was the very first room in the underground bunker where he and Ravik had been staying for these past five months. The idea being that if someone was found to be infected, they could be cast back out into Dead Zone immediately.
There were some who might say he should have cast Ravik out.
Severin knew it was true. As a Blood Kindred, he was cold and logical—he knew that he should have locked the door against the big Beast Kindred the minute he got scratched by one of the Infected.
But Ravik was his best friend as well as his long-time partner. They’d been to too many worlds together on too many missions to count and both of them had saved each other’s lives many times over. Besides, Severin was a Xeno-virologist and if anyone could beat the Hunger Virus, he could—or so he told himself.
So he kept Ravik with him. Even when the big Beast Kindred wanted to go out and die, he talked him out of it.
“I’m going to turn and when I do, I’ll kill you,” Ravik had said dully, eyeing the ugly scratch on his broad chest where an Infected had gotten him during a supply run. “Let me go out now, Sev. It’s better that way—at least one of us will live.”
“Beast Kindred are strong healers and the virus takes months to incubate—that’s how it was able to spread so fast,” Severin had argued. “Everyone on this benighted planet was infected before they even knew they had it. Give me time to work on an antidote—I’m sure I can crack this thing!”
He’d spoken with more confidence than he felt—the Hunger Virus moved and mutated with startling speed. It was constantly making more variations of itself to fight the various antidotes he developed in the lab. But Sev refused to give up. Every day he worked from early morning to far into the night, trying new combinations. He was close to a cure—he could feel it. But there seemed to be something missing—some ingredient he didn’t have, though the bunker had a fully stocked lab, since it had been a science retreat before it had become their refuge of last resort.
At any rate, he’d been able to slow down the progression of the virus, but not stop it completely. Which was why, little by little, day by day, he had to watch his best friend slowly lose himself to the Hunger.
Every day he asked himself if this was the day that Ravik would attack—the day he ought to send the big Beast Kindred out of the bunker for supplies or spare parts and not let him come back in. Severin was muscular—though at six-foot-six, he was considered short for a Kindred male—but Ravik was seven-foot-one and outweighed him by a hundred pounds of pure muscle. If the Hunger virus took over his brain completely and he went berserk and attacked, Sev probably wouldn’t stand a chance against him.