ROMANCE: The Lion Wish (BBW Paranormal Lion Romance) (Paranormal Mystery Alpha Male Romance Short Stories) (8 page)

After that first night, our life together has been wonderful. Samuel stays in my dorm room most nights, and every morning we make love with the same intensity and desire as we did the first time. We’ve started experimenting with a few different positions. Him on top, from behind—which I like the most because it feels like he can push deeper inside of me—but our favorite position is still me on top, riding him. But it’s, of course, not all about the sex. Most days after our classes are done, we talk for hours, sometimes walking around town, sometimes just in my room, whispering quietly to one another, telling each other about our deepest hopes and dreams. Okay, mostly it’s me talking about my deepest hopes and dreams. Which is great, I love having such an attentive boyfriend, but I was starting to wonder about him.

How come he never talked about his family? How come he never told me about any of his friends or his life in Quebec before coming to study at ASU. He didn’t seem to have any interests other than me, and other than Mr. Devlin’s class, it didn’t seem like he had any other classes. And what was really odd about that was he didn’t have a laptop or the required text. He would just go to class with me, sit next to me and glare at Mr. Devlin like he did on the very first day he appeared. It was weird, and finally, I just kind of broke down one night in a crying fit—which was also a little weird, but I couldn’t help but feel like he was lying to me by not saying anything about himself—and I confronted him about his silence.

After he had calmed me down, he sat quietly for a few minutes as if he was mulling something over. Finally, he stood up from the bed and faced me, his eyes soft and rimmed with tears.

“Sara, I have to show you something,” He said as he started to undress. I started to get mad at him all over again, because how could he think of sex at a time like this? (Or how could I think of sex at a time like this? Because seeing him stripped down was definitely getting me worked up.)

But just as I started to yell at him, he raised his hand.

“Be quiet it for a moment and watch.” His voice was like thunder and made me swallow my protests. In fact, it made me lose my breath for a moment as if his command somehow stripped me of my voice.

And as I sat there on my bed, I watched as my boyfriend, a man who I honestly loved (But had yet to tell him.), began to change in front of my eyes. His tan brown skin suddenly became hard and thorny. His blonde hair turned green and leafy, and then he began to grow until he was close to 7 feet tall.

My boyfriend was a walking, talking pile of crystal like rocks.

                                                                                  #

Needless to say, I freaked out a little. Okay, I freaked out a lot. But just as I was getting ready to scream out in horror, Samuel’s voice filled my head.

I need you to stay calm.

And suddenly, my joints felt loose and completely relaxed. I felt full of a joy that I’d never experienced before, and I knew he was doing something to my brain. He was keeping me calm so that I could comprehend what he had to show me. And what he showed me was so far beyond my imagination that I thought my mind would shatter.

Samuel showed me a world much like Earth, but it was so green and lush. Even the cities were composed of nothing but vast jungles, and Jarred’s people were one with everything on their planet. Everything was used, but everything was respected, because it was all a part of one vast organism. There was nothing but serenity and peace, at least until the monsters came. That’s really the only way I can describe them. They were huge creatures almost wolf-like in appearance. Their mouths were full of sharp teeth, and their fingers were razor sharp claws. But it was their eyes that frightened me the most. They were a fierce, empty silver that seemed like they would swallow you whole if you looked into them too long; like they would devour your soul.

The monsters invaded Jarred’s planet, his people fought back relentlessly, they almost beat the monsters back. Almost. But then the monsters—the UnMakers—unleashed a weapon that devoured Samuel’s entire planet. Only a few thousand of them survived by escaping in these flying spheres of light. And now, Samuel’s remaining people traveled the universe hunting the UnMakers, making sure that they didn’t obliterate other planets.

By the time the vision cleared from my mind, I was in tears. What I had just seen was so beyond my comprehension that I felt like I was going insane.

Samuel had become his human form and held me tight against his chest as I cried. When I finally calmed down, I asked:

“One of them are here, aren’t they?”

“Yes. One of them is.”

I straightened and looked into deep into his bottomless eyes.

“It’s Mr. Devlin, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And he has one of the weapons, and he intends on using it.”

The reason why Samuel hadn’t confronted Mr. Devlin was because if he got too close to him, he knew that he would sense him and either attack him or detonate the weapon and if that happened, Earth and all of  humanity was lost. So that night, we devised a plan. I would go to Mr. Devlin’s office during his lunch hour—Samuel was almost 100% certain this was where he was keeping the weapon—and I would locate it, steal it, and bring it back to Jarred so he could disarm and destroy it.

“It is a great wish, Sara,” He said as he calmly rubbed my shoulders while staring directly into my eyes. “And I would never put you in harm’s way unless I felt it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”

“I know,” I said, my eyes brimming with tears of either fear or intense sadness. “We have to stop him. We have to.”

                                                                                  #

I had never been so scared in my entire life. I think the only time I had felt this kind of out of control dread was when I watched the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with my dad when I was 13. I had read about the movie in one of the horror magazines I was into back then, and I was obsessed with seeing it. My parents were fairly liberal when it came to what I read and watched, but my dad was super hesitant when it came to that movie, and he kept rebuffing me and rebuffing me for weeks until he finally agreed to rent it while my mom was visiting my aunt in California. After it was over, I finally understood the reason why my father didn’t want me to watch it. I barely slept for weeks after that, because every time I closed my eyes, there was Leather face swinging his saw, dancing his mad dance on a sweltering Texas morning.

But this wasn’t a movie, this was for real, and Mr. Devlin was a real life monster.

On knocked on Mr. Devlin’s office door just in case he was inside. When he didn’t answer, I turned the knob, praying that it wasn’t locked. But it turned easily, and I slipped inside. I scanned the room quickly with my eyes, the office was very spartan and only contained a very old computer, a desk and a small side table with a black leather valise resting on it. The weapon, if it was here, had to be inside of it. I walked over to the bag and snapped it open. Inside was a shimmering orb. I hesitantly picked it up. It fit comfortably in my hands, but it was so cold and seemed to have a tiny hurricane or tornado raging inside of it, and seemed to pulse with my quickening heartbeat.

“Tell me, meat. What exactly are you doing with that?”

I turned and there stood the hulking shape of Mr. Devlin. His entire body filled the room and he flickered between his human form and his true one.

“You will give that to me now.”

My mind went blank, my body went stiff, and I levitated over to him. He took the orb from my hands and stared at me with his dead eyes.

“It’s quite extraordinary, isn’t it?” His voice filled my mind, and it felt like it was breaking apart, shipping away one little piece at a time. “Would you like to see how it works?”

The orb rose in the air and began to spin like a top, a lifeless silver began to pour from it, cause every hair on my body to stand up.

Suddenly the door to Mr.Devlin’s office crashed open, and there was Jarred in his true form.

“Ah, I thought I smelled one of your kind.”

Samuel charged Mr. Devlin, but then he opened his mouth, and the loudest noise I’ve ever heard exploded from him in a ball of silver fire. Samuel’s body was enveloped in it and the wall behind him exploded in a shower of fire and brick. But yet, Jarred kept moving forward, edging closer to the UnMaker. Abruptly the sound came to a stop and Devlin grabbed me by the throat.

“Stop where you are, or I’ll destroy the meat.”

“No!” Samuel shouted. “No, let her go, and you can destroy me. Just let her live.”

The UnMaker laughed and flung me against the wall with a hard crash and I crumpled in a heap, nearly unconscious.

“What a fair bargain. Your kind has always had too much of a weakness for life. If only you knew the true pleasures of the darkness.”

Samuel levitated into the massive hands of the UnMaker, and it wrapped its claws around his throat and opened his mouth, preparing to unleash another unearthly scream of black fire. But just as his breath began to smolder, a long ragged branch exploded out of the back of the UnMaker’s head, it’s arms falling to its sides.

“And your kind, have never understood the true power of life.”

The UnMaker’s body hit the floor with a dull thud, and then I felt Jarred’s strong arms encircle me and carry me away. My mind finally had enough, and I passed out.

                                                                                  #

We lived for a week in the desert outside of Phoenix. We were there for so long because defusing the UnMaker’s weapon was a complicated process, and he didn’t want it anywhere near other human beings in case he made a mistake. He made a small cave in the Earth, bending the soil and rock to his will. I could hear him in my mind talking to the soil, telling it that we needed its help and it abided.

Finally, Jarred dismantled the weapon, and we went back to campus. I hadn’t brought my cell phone and there were a million voicemails from mom and dad. They were panicking and wanted to make sure I was okay. I called them back and found out they were on their way to Tempe to make sure I was okay. The explosion had been all over the news while were gone and they said one of the professors had been killed in the blast. The authorities described the explosion as a freak fire caused by faulty wiring, and ASU had been shut down the entire week we were gone.

I tried to get my folks to turn around and go back home, explaining the reason why hadn’t gotten back to them sooner was the explosion had screwed up cell phone reception. But they weren’t having any of that, and they told me they’d see me in a couple of hours.

After I hung up, I looked at Samuel and sadly smiled at him.

“So what now?” I asked. “Now that the Destroyer’s gone, are you going to have to leave?”

He smiled at me and stroked my cheek, wiping away a stray tear.

“I have been in contact with my people, and I have told them that I will be staying here on Earth to act as its protector in case the UnMaker’s come back. And if you’ll have me, I’d like to stay here with you.”

I burst out crying and pulled him to me, kissing him hard, wanting it to never end.

We sat and held each other for a long time on my bed, and I thought to myself how lucky I was to have Samuel. But, how was I going to explain to my parents that my boyfriend was a giant living rock formation from across the universe?

THE END

Prologue

Have you ever felt that there’s something not quite right with you? That there’s some missing piece that you can never quite put your finger on. This how I have felt my entire life, as if I’ve been walking through the world in a haze and that the world around me is a false one, nothing but an illusion. Over the years, I’ve tried to fool myself into believing that this is how everyone feels. That each morning when they wake up that they don’t belong, that they have no place in the universe, or at least on Earth.

I won’t say that I don’t feel human. If anything, I would say that I feel almost too human, that I feel everything too deeply and become hurt too easily. But this in itself is what makes me feel alien; what makes me feel like I don’t belong. My Grandpa felt the same way. He was an artist at heart despite the fact that he made his living as a welder. He could paint or draw anything he saw and reproduce it with a photo like an accuracy. My mother always said that this was the reason why he had lost himself in his delusions; that this was why his aliens and flying saucers seemed so real to him because he wanted them to be real so desperately that he basically willed them into reality.

Well, at least, his reality.

For years, we all thought that Grandpa was completely out of his mind. Sure, we all want to think that there’s life on other planets and there are more advanced forms of life other than ourselves out there. But you have to admit, most of us believe aliens are nothing more than the creations of science fiction writers imaginations and that we’re completely alone in the universe. To be honest, I always hoped this wasn’t true. When I looked up at the night sky, I couldn’t help but think it was a huge waste of space if there wasn’t someone or something other than us out in there in all that blackness.

But the way Grandpa made it sound, the aliens he encountered were all nothing but horrors. Creatures that snatched us up in the middle of the night, fly you into space and then essentially do nothing but torture you until they grow bored and send you back to your bed to relive those horrors until you lost your mind. It all seemed so terrible, too terrible to be real, so I convinced myself that it wasn’t.

But just a couple of minute ago, I discovered that Grandpa’s visions were all very real. That is such a thing as a little green men and that we are not alone in the universe.

And that these little green men maybe even more terrible than I can possibly imagine.

May God help me and protect me.