They wiped their respective faces of blood.
Archon had no intention of searching for her by scanner. He had every intention of giving her a very good head start and then capturing her all over again.
“Would you like me to initialize the search, sire?”
“No.”
Naxus looked at him askance.
“The humans have a custom. Catch and release. It is what they do when they fish. They catch a fish, then they let it go, so they can catch it again another time. Humans understand the thrill of the hunt, Naxus, I am surprised you don’t.”
“I like a completed hunt, and a peaceful colony. Are you really this bored?”
“There’s another saying they have. Enough rope to hang oneself with. It means giving someone the latitude to get themselves into trouble. That is what I intend to do with Iris…”
“This is just one big game to you, isn’t it,” Naxus accused him. “The people don’t matter. The colonies don’t matter. Only the game matters.”
“And it is what I have done with you. Naxus, we exchanged punches, but I will not tolerate endless disrespect. If a king chooses to make sport, that is a choice which is his right to make. My right to make.”
A disgruntled general was the least of Archon’s concerns. He found himself looking forward to descending back down to the colony. He had enjoyed the experience of being taken for a human, being one of their warriors. The life of roaming the woods, hunting his own food and sharing meals with other transient males who wandered about the world looking for trouble, and more often than not, finding it, was very rewarding in ways the life of a king was not.
He had been quite aware of Iris sneaking out of the tavern room, and known all too well she would go back to her old ways. It did not surprise him that she was causing trouble. If anything, he relished it.
Naxus was right. This was a game. A game Archon was very much enjoying. But Naxus was also right when he said that all good things had to come to an end eventually.
So, Archon returned to the planet, a few hours away from the location he had last seen Iris. He could have been closer to her than before, or further away. He didn’t know, and that only served to make the game more intense.
With every step he took, he thought about her.
She was beautiful. He was hungry for her, in a way he had never been hungry for anybody else. He had rutted before, of course. When he first ascended to the throne, the female flesh was almost endless. So copious, in fact, that he had become utterly bored by it. Whenever he got the biological urge to mate, he would find the nearest willing female, who could be relied upon to usually be not much more than an arm’s length away, and fuck her until he was relieved of the burden biology put on a virile male.
This, however, this was an entirely different experience. He’d not had sex with the same female twice in years. He was surprised to find that he wanted to claim Iris again, but he did. He wanted to hunt that sweet human pussy down and bounce it on his cock until her toes curled and she screamed in that pretty way which made him spill deep inside her.
But it was going to be more difficult to find her again. She would be frightened, skittish. She would have gone to ground. He would have to use every single one of his tracking skills to…
A piece of paper fluttered at him in a come-hither sort of way. At first it merely caught his eye because of the motion, but as soon as he looked at it, he saw a very familiar visage
“IRIS, BORN OF FIRE, UNITER OF THE TRIBES. COME HEAR HER SPEAK! HEAR THE WORD OF THE FIREBORN DAUGHTER!”
Perhaps it would not be that hard after all.
The flyer made Archon very grumpy indeed. For one, he expected to enjoy a good hunt. He had been deprived of that. For two, he had expected that their last tryst would have made her afraid of him, or at the very least, mildly respectful. It appeared that it had not.
Archon’s ego was bruised by the mere sight of the picture. The artist had managed to represent the essence of her all too well. The lift of her brow, the rebellious tilt of her chin, and the narrowing of her eyes as if she were glaring at him through the parchment.
Now she was truly in trouble.
Chapter 14
“So, I say to you, it is time that we threw off the shackles of oppression, and revolted against the alien who believes himself king, though he has never earned any royal title on this planet, or among our people. He is not a king. He is a warlord. A tyrant. A brute. And I, for one, am done living in fear of him!”