Caveman Alien’s Curse by Calista Skye

Author:Calista Skye [Skye, Calista]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

- Betruchael -

Nichelle makes many interesting sounds on the way back. I let her down on the beach at a safe distance from the water.

She checks her dress for dryness and wrinkles her nose. “What’s that smell?”

I walk over to the part of the monster I burned the other day. It stinks as it rots, so I take my pants off, wade into the sea, and toss the disgusting glob of burned jelly out into the waves so it will drift to shore some other place.

Putting my pants back on, I check the gold. The new piece is plenty for me to Change, to fly over the sea to the other landmass and do what must be done to force hoard gold from the alien females there. Things are suddenly looking very good. And probably I can turn Kyandros’s problems to my own advantage.

Nichelle is building a new fire outside the hut. “Do you think there’s fish in that ocean?”

“Small monsters that can be caught, gutted, and eaten,” I tell her, having heard of fish before.

“Um. Something like that. We don’t call them monsters, really.”

I stand and watch her build the fire. “Are there signs that the previous residents of this beach caught and ate such things?”

“I actually found their trash heap,” Nichelle says as she rubs sticks, trying to light the fire. “There are definitely fish scales and fish bones there. But I haven’t seen any bait or fishing line or hooks.”

Reaching out, I casually stroke her smooth, long hair, marveling that any lesser being would let a dragon get this close and not cower or hiss. “These are instruments for fish-catching?”

“You need thin line and small steel hooks. And bait, but that’s not the problem.”

“Where have you looked?”

She blows on the smoking kindling. “All around the hut and the fields they made and the kiln they had for making pots.”

“Is a beach a good place for catching those edible monsters?”

The fire catches, and she blows on her singed fingers. “I don’t know. Probably not. The water may be too shallow.”

“Come with me,” I tell her and lift her, carrying her to the end of the beach. Here the water comes straight up to bare rock, and there’s a narrow spit of bedrock that continues further out into the ocean. “This would be a better place to keep those contraptions of fish-capture.” I walk over to the nearest tree.

“There’s line!” Nichelle exclaims, pointing at a place on the tree where a twig has been cut off halfway down its length, leaving a hook-like offshoot with something hanging from it.

I walk so close that she can reach the length of braided string and the small, black hook attached to it.

“This isn’t steel,” she says, turning the hook over in her hand. “It’s silver. They used their jewelry to make it. Look, this was an earring once. They bent it and hammered it into a fishhook.”

“Resourceful ladies,” I offer, once more struck by how overwhelmingly difficult this world must be to the lesser kinds.

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