It smells female. I’ve never seen a female before, but the learning implants embedded in my brain fill in the blanks for me. Female. Adult. Appealing.

And full of fresh blood.

She waves a thin, wobbling length of metal in the air like a weapon, staring into the darkness. Once she’s confident she’s not going to be pounced on, she moves, shuffling to the side, and puts her back to the wall. Too late, I realize she’s tapping on the light fixture to activate it.

Pain floods my eyes. My skin lights up as if it’s on fire, and I let out a roar of agony. “Turn the lights off!”

“Shit! Sorry!” the female’s voice squeaks out, and she quickly hits the panel to kill the lights. She speaks in a foreign tongue, but the translator makes her words understandable. After a moment, she speaks in the mesakkah Homeworld tongue, though her words are halting and less comfortable. “I didn’t realize someone was here.”

Her words are apologetic and do a lot to ease my anger. I crouch lightly on the floor, wiping at my watering eyes. “Leave it off,” I say gruffly. “It hurts my eyes.”

There’s a pause. “Oh. Okay. Sure. Is . . . that why they left you behind?”

“Left me?” I get to my feet, and my skin burns wherever the light hit it. There’s a setting in the lab for dim lighting that won’t burn me, but I don’t know what it is, and it’s clear this stranger doesn’t, either.

“Yeah, I think they all hightailed it out of here to avoid the monster.” Her voice drops to a whisper, and she glances around the darkness, her weapon in hand. “Have you seen it?”

My eyes are finally no longer tearing up, and I can get a better look at her. “What monster?”

“The one everyone evacuated to escape? Don’t tell me you were unaware? This station is deserted, buddy. They left me behind because I’m a poodle, and I guess they left you to be eaten because of the light allergy. Bad news for you, though.” Her voice drops to a dramatic whisper. “If we run across the monster, I’m going to trip you so he eats you first.”

I snort at her bold statement. A monster. They’ve fled the monster. I thought that the scientists were regrouping in a safer part of the station to try to figure out how to contain me. I’d grown tired of their poking and prodding and broke my restraints when they’d tried to give me yet another one of their “experimental” treatments that left my insides burning and painful and made me hurt for days on end.

They’d tried to suppress me with shock-sticks and, when I wouldn’t return to my cage, turned up the electrical current. It didn’t work, though. They buzzed me with annoyance but didn’t slow me down. The enhanced healing that they altered me with took care of that. They tried gassing me next, but I can hold my breath for an hour, thanks to their modifications, so that didn’t work, either.

After that, they’d fled, and I went to find some blood to drink. They’d mentioned something about iron deficiencies when discussing me under their breath, and I’d grown hungry every time someone leaned in close and I could smell the blood pulsing under their skin.

Once they’d abandoned me, I helped myself to the lab’s stockpile of blood bags.

They’ve left the station entirely? That’s new. Cowardly and unsurprising, but new.

And they’ve also left this fragile, clever creature behind. “You’re sure they left?”

“Positive. I’m not normally alone for this long. I checked the escape pods, and they’re all gone. We’ve been left with whatever it is that’s terrorizing this place. I’m surprised you haven’t run into him.”

I take a step forward in the darkness, then another toward her. Blood pulses under her skin, and I can smell the faint notes of it. I put my hand over the light panel, and she quickly moves to the side, her pulse skittering and the blood scent growing stronger.

With my claws, I rip the light panel out of the wall so she can’t use it.

“Bad news,” I growl, echoing her words.

“Oh?” Her voice is a little uncertain, and she shivers even as she tilts her head back as if to look at me.

I lean in close, mouth watering again at her delicious scent. “Little one, I am the monster they fled.”

Chapter Four

Dana

Ipress myself harder against the wall.

He’s . . . the monster? He’s the reason everyone fled the station? Panic flares in my chest, and I tamp down the urge to run. Be cool, I remind myself. If you’re having a normal conversation, he’s not as monster-y as you think. He’s just saying that to freak you out. “You’re messing with me, right?”

“I do not understand.” His words are measured, calm. I can’t see his face in the darkness. All I can hear are his movements . . . and I can feel the heat coming off his body. He sounds like he’s breathing heavy, but he’s also an alien. How do I know how heavy or how light he breathes normally? But the fact that his deep voice is even is a good sign, I think. “What is this ‘messing’?”

“You’re teasing me,” I clarify, wishing I could turn the lights on. He just clawed the panel out of the wall, though, so that’s a vote against him being cool and calm. I shiver, chills prickling on my skin. “You’re not the real reason they left, are you?”

“I broke out,” the stranger says simply. “Their poisons and their shock-sticks could not hold me. So they left to save themselves because I said I would kill them if I caught them and drink their blood.”

He says it all so casually, as if two dozen well-armed aliens and a handful of scientists abandon ship every day. I glance up, because I can’t see him in the darkness, but I can feel him looming. He’s taller than me, and the nearness of him is starting to unnerve me.

“So that is why I am here,” he continues in that too-calm voice. “Why are you here?”

“Because I’m a poodle.”

“A pooh-dull?” He echoes the word, mangling it. “I still do not understand.”

It suddenly occurs to me that being seen as a poodle is going to work for my benefit. “I’m a pet,” I explain. “Aliens—the big blue guys—stole me from my home planet a few years ago. The guy that owns me makes me sleep in a cage and treats me like I have no functioning brain cells.”

He huffs.

The sound of his response is vaguely amused, so I keep going. Haven’t I been learning how to deal with those bigger and stronger than me all this time? I can handle one more. If he’s not on their side, he’s on mine. If they think he’s a monster, he can be my monster. “So you’re really the big bad that’s got them all running scared?”

“Big bad . . . what?”

I ignore that and feign confidence I don’t feel. I push off the wall as if it’s every day I’m trapped on an abandoned space station—in the dark—with a stranger. “It seems we’re the last two left here. What’s your name?”

“I have no name. What is yours?”

“I’m Dana. How come you don’t have a name?”

“I have a batch number. Do you have one?”

“I’m not a clone.” I step forward and immediately stub my toe on something metal. A loud clang echoes in the room, and I wince. “Ow.”

“There is a mess,” Captain Obvious the clone tells me. “You are not wearing shoes.”

“They don’t give me shoes. Poodle, remember? I get to keep my cute little toesies on the cold floorsies because my master is a huge dicksies and thinks it’s cutesy.”

“. . . what?”

“Never mind. I hate being a pet and I’m venting and talking nonsense.”

He grunts.

I take another step forward, only for an oversize, warm hand to clasp my arm. “Don’t. You’ll step on glass.”

“Oh.” I remain where I am, because that was kind of him. His skin against mine feels good, like a heating pad, and I’m reminded how I’m always cold because the air on the station is frigid and optimal for mesakkah aliens, not humans. This guy is warm, though. He hovers over me in the darkness, and I suspect if I reached my hand up above my head, I’d find his face.