Breeding Ground Part 33

It was Peac.o.c.k. Holy s.h.i.+t! It was Peac.o.c.k. And John and Vlad and...Fija! There were a few other women warriors, too, people she didn't recognize.

Alex's heart began to race. A smile enveloped her face. "Peac.o.c.k!"

"Al!" She saw him cup his hands around his mouth. "You okay?"

"Yeah!" she yelled back. "But I don't see a way off this cliff."

Fija walked a bit closer towards the river. Even from this distance Alex could see her entire body still-and tense. "You needs must jump into the water!" she bellowed. "Do it! And quickly!"

Alex's forehead wrinkled.

"Jump!" Fija implored her again. "For the love of the G.o.ds...jump now!"

A foreign sound, one akin to both gurgling and clicking, reached Alex's ears. The tiny hairs at the nape of her neck stood on end.

Something was behind her.

Afraid to look, but realizing she had no choice, Alex slowly c.o.c.ked her head and glanced over her shoulder. Oh. My. G.o.d.

"This isn't possible," she whispered, her green eyes wide. She was being hunted-pack hunted. And what was hunting her was too incredulous to believe.

"Jump!" she heard Fija scream. "We ran into these creatures two days hence. They cannot swim!"

Raptors. She was being hunted by Velociraptors.

Holy son of-

The rest happened as if in slow motion. Alex saw one of the creatures prepare to lunge off its mighty thighs. Whipping around and praying she hit water rather than a jutting rock, she threw herself off the side of the cliff and dove for whatever lay below.

Seconds later, she hit water. So did her hunter.

"Come on, Al!"

"Swim faster!"

"Mooooooove!" She heard Vlad bellow.

Swimming against the current, Alex tried with every bit of strength she could muster to get away from the creature and its wildly snapping jaws. The proficient killer might not be able to swim, but it was determined to take her down with it. It flailed closer and closer and...

Her heart racing, adrenaline kicking in, Alex turned in the water to face her nemesis. On a hiss, deadly pikes shot out from where her fingertips were. Fangs exploded from her gums. Not sure what was happening to her, but realizing Malik's bite had made her what she now was, she went with the instinctual pattern that took over.

On a deafening roar, she attacked the creature in the water. The Methuselah's crew and the female warriors stood on the bank of the river. Their jaws were all but unhinged, unable to believe what it was they were seeing-

Alex had turned into a creature deadlier than any they had ever encountered.

Circling her prey, she established her dominance. They struggled for a suspended moment, but then, as if the creature knew and understood its place in the chain of life and death, it offered little resistance when she killed it with a single, lethal slice to the jugular. Blood gushed out from around the dying carca.s.s, staining the pristine silver waters a haunting crimson.

Alex turned her head to look at her crew, her heart beating like crazy when they stared at her as though they'd never seen her before. Taking the cue, she glanced down at her reflection in the mirror-silver waters not stained by raptor blood. She paled.

Malik had made her...one of his kind. She didn't fully s.h.i.+ft like a true Xandi, but neither did she recognize the face staring back at her. Her eyes were gold slits, her teeth serrated fangs. She looked as frightening and formidable as any predator.

"Oh my G.o.d!" Alex cried, reaching out a hand for help. "What is happening to me?"

By the time her crew reached her in the river, the anger had dissolved and with it her alter-ego. The deadly pikes disappeared as though they'd never been and the fangs retreated back into her gum line. On a blink, her eyes returned to their natural state, light green and round in lieu of gold slits.

"It's okay, Al," Peac.o.c.k murmured, grabbing onto her. "Let's get to the sh.o.r.e. You'll be just fine."

"What's going on?" she demanded, her voice semi-hysterical. "Were those...things...what I think they were? And what about me? What did I just turn into? What the f.u.c.k is going on!"

Vlad sighed. "Yes, they were raptors. We have much to tell you."

Alex barely heard him. The shock of what she had turned into during the fight in the river had all but frozen her powers of rational thought. She'd never felt more primitive or base in her entire life. The need to kill had been maniacal, an instinctual thing that couldn't be tamed or described.

When Malik had said they would always live within the other, he had meant it in more ways than one.

Chapter Twenty-One.

"100,000,007 B.C.?" Alex could only gawk at her men. "Are you serious?"

"Afraid so," Peac.o.c.k sighed.

"You saw the Velociraptors yourself, Alex," Vlad reasonably pointed out. "And that's not all we have encountered while looking for you."

"The T-Rex," John listed, "two packs of Velociraptors, two Coelophysis-"

"-and a partridge in a pear tree," Peac.o.c.k muttered.

"That's the Cretaceous Period...I think." Alex frowned. "But people-or our monkey ancestors-didn't spring up until at least five million B.C."

"Well apparently scientists were wrong." Vlad raised his hands. "I do not know! All I do know is this-there are dinosaurs here and there are humans here. The Takuri might be the forebears to humans, creatures that are destined to become extinct, but humans they are."

"Maybe the Xandi and the Takuri are fated to kill each other off. Maybe their fossils are so deeply buried within the earth that scientists from our day never found them." John shrugged. "I don't have any answers. Science is art, a working hypothesis. Nothing is set in stone. You know that, Alex."

Silence.

"It makes sense," Alex whispered.

"What do you mean?"

"The Xandi might not live on in fossil finds, but they live on in human folklore." She went on to explain about how they shape-s.h.i.+fted, describing their two forms. "They easily could have been the basis from which humans derived tales about gargoyles and vampires."

Her crew continued on with the conversation amongst themselves. Being scientists, they sounded like kids who'd discovered Santa's hiding place. All Alex could do as the Takuri-crafted boat whisked through the black waters was feel the heaviness of the burden that had been placed upon her.

If John's hypothesis was correct, the Xandi and the Takuri would kill each other off. The thought of Malik's people dying out was as troubling to her as the thought of Fija's people meeting with the same fate. Once upon a time, she had fooled herself into believing that she couldn't have cared less. But now? So d.a.m.n much had happened. Too d.a.m.n much.

She didn't know what she could do to help or if she even should. By entwining herself even further into the fabric of the twenty thousand years-long war that had raged on between the Xandi and the Takuri, Alex could very well be revamping history.