“Are you ready, half-brother?” he shouts through the door.
I’m standing up, completely naked. My cock is pointing skyward. The knocking wakes Annabelle, and she immediately looks over at me.
I’m not embarrassed. In fact, I want her to see how large I am, and how hard she made me.
“Good morning, little human,” I say.
She puts her hands over her eyes. “Good morning. Are you going to get dressed?”
“Do you have any questions for me?”
“Why is it those colors?”
“My penis is a tool for bonding on the higher dimensions, and it leaks light from those dimensions. The colors are pulsing due to my arousal.”
“Okay,” she says, hands still tight over her eyes. “You want to get dressed now?”
Kula pounds on the door again. “Raiska!”
“We are late for our breakfast appointment.”
“Go get dressed, Raiska.”
When we reach the lobby, Kula is pacing back and forth.
“You’re late!” Kula says. “Ellie is already mad at me because of you, brother, don’t make it worse.”
“I have a human female with me,” I say. “You know how long they take.”
Annabelle does the rolling eye thing at me. “You realize I can hear you, right?”
“You like when I am obnoxious, human, and you also cannot deny that it took you well over twenty minutes to get ready.”
“Twenty minutes is fast for a human woman, brother. Consider yourself lucky.”
“I can hear you too, Kula,” she says.
“I am arguing in your favor,” Kula says. “Do not repeat this to my Muru, but it takes her at least an hour to get ready in the morning, and that is with me rushing her.”
“See,” Annabelle says, “I’m not so bad.”
Nine
Annabelle
“Perhaps I am just better at rushing my human,” Raiska says, grabbing hold of my waist and pulling me against his body.
I try to shove him, but I can’t move someone his size. “You’re taking credit for rushing me?”
“Careful, brother,” Kula says. “Human women are stubborn, she will get ready even slower next time to prove you wrong.”
When we arrive at the restaurant, Ellie is waiting. She smiles and waves, and Kula runs up and hugs her. He puts his hand on her belly and beams with pride. “How is the little one?”
“Good. Kicking pretty hard. The baby is ready to come out.”
Kula offers us seats, and I go to sit down. Before Raiska can sit down though, Kula pulls his chair away. “Come to the kitchen with me, brother.”
Raiska eyes me nervously. I smile and wave toward the kitchen. “Go ahead. I’ll be fine. You and Kula will be right next to me anyway.”
When the two alien men are gone, Ellie looks at me and smiles nervously. “I’m sorry for kicking you out.”
“No. I understand.”
“I feel like a hypocrite, because I was in a sort of similar situation before. If I weren’t about to have a baby it would be different.”
I reach out and put a hand on the back of hers. “Ellie. I understand, really.”
“So...four aliens are coming after you?”
I nod.
“Hundreds of Ulkar were coming for me. Did you ever see an Ulkar?”
“Does Raiska count?”
She laughs. “I guess Raiska and Kula technically count, but those two look nothing like Ulkar. Ulkar are like...tentacle dicks.”
“Hundreds of tentacle dicks were coming after you?”
“Each Ulkar can have up to dozens of tentacle dicks, so I’d say it was more like thousands of them.”
My eyes bulge. “The ones coming after me are like...three little aliens that are the size of children. I think they are psychically connected—er, connected on the higher dimensions—because one of them screamed when Raiska cut the other one’s head off.”
“How many are there?”
“Well, there were four, but Raiska killed one or two of them.”
“At least they’re small…”
“Their dicks weren’t.”
Ellie bites her lip. “So there are those little guys, and who else?”
“A gold-skinned one named Philos. He ate like ten cheesesteaks—”
“Cheesesteaks? What? Aren’t you from Pittsburgh?”
“They were Pittsburgh style cheesesteaks, I personally like them better than Philly ones, but I get the feeling he used the food to power himself up or something. He could grow pieces of himself much larger. He made his hand the size of a truck. I’m guessing he had to eat a lot to do that though. Cheesesteak guy killed the third one though at least, so it’s just those two. Well, technically the goblin things are more than one, but I think I’m counting them as one.”
“I’m glad to let Kula help you.”
“I, um, heard what Raiska did to you and Kula. I’m really sorry.”
She shakes her head. “It’s water under the bridge. Being bonded is an amazing thing, but what Kula and I managed to accomplish without a bond is more special to me. I’m his Muru, bond or not.”
“What is Muru? I’ve heard him say it, but I don’t quite get it.”
“It’s an Aparan word. I don’t know if the Valittu use it.”
“Raiska just calls me ‘little human’ all the time.”
She smiles. “That’s cute.”
My face goes a bit red, partially from residual frustration toward Raiska, but mostly from embarrassment toward her being right.
“So, um,” Ellie says, “maybe I’ve been around Kula too long and have lost my tact, but what are you planning to do? Do you like Raiska? Are you going to let him breed you?”
I laugh nervously. “You have been around Kula too long if you say ‘breed’ like that. I don’t know, Ellie, I actually do like him. I’d sleep with him in other circumstances, but the bond thing scares me, and the fact that I have to get pregnant after knowing him for a few days is honestly kind of fucked up. It feels like an insane thing to do, but then I remember the alternatives: Cheese steak guy and a pack of alien goblins raping me.”
Ellie forces a sympathetic smile. “When I met Kula, I had even less time to make a decision. The Ulkar had surrounded us in a cabin on Earth, and Kula had some kind of stasis thing that stopped time around us. It only was able to hold them off for a few hours, and I had to decide quickly. Bond with Kula, or let the Ulkar take me.”
“Do you ever wonder what you would have done if it hadn’t been such a forced decision like that?”
She shakes her head. “Not really. I mean, it was scary at first. Right after he bonded me, he abducted me to some spaceship. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about that. Things worked out though, and I’m so happy with my life right now. I couldn’t really have asked for anything more than this. It’s a very strange story to tell people about how Kula and I first met, but it’s romantic in its own way.”
I nod as she speaks, but I wonder how I would ever tell my story to anyone.
“Imagine if I end up bonding to Raiska, and we end up back on Earth. Maybe he can disguise himself as human so he can live there with me. Then someone asks us how we met, and I have to say ‘We met on the Breeding Games.’ They’ll think we were porn stars on some kind of game show or something.”
“You’d definitely have to make something up. Or you could stay here.”
I look around as if ‘here’ meant just the restaurant. I know she means Lakria and Thrace, but I somehow hadn’t even considered that until she mentioned it. “You think that would be best?”
She shrugs. “Like I said, I’m happy with my life here. This place is wonderful. I miss my friends and family, but Kula says that the Council is likely to make contact with Earth soon, and I’ll be able to go back to visit once that happens.”
Ten
Raiska
“How tight is it?”
Kula strokes his chin. “I’ve only bred one human, brother,
so I can’t speak for all human females.”
I take in a deep breath, thinking of a way to phrase my question without offending him. I obviously don’t want to know details about his Muru’s vagina, but I need to know general details about female human anatomy.
“Do you think I will fit, Kula?”
Kula grins and looks down at my kilt. “I doubt you’re bigger than me.”
“Shall we compare?” I reach toward my kilt, but he grabs my wrist.
“Not in my kitchen, brother.”
We’re not really in the kitchen. We’re in some pantry where he keeps his ridiculous ingredients. We’re away from his staff so we can speak privately.
“Judging from your line of questioning,” Kula says, “you have not done it yet. I’ll remind you that I had bonded Ellie within hours of first laying eyes on her.”
“Your situation was different. I made significant progress last night, but as a Valittu, I respected her body language and resisted my carnal urges.”
“Significant progress?” Kula says. The obnoxious smirk fills his face again.
“We only kissed.”
He nods, but the smirk doesn’t go away. “She’s resisting you. Does she not understand the danger she’s in?”
“I’m asking a lot of her, brother. She barely knows me.”
“Show her who you are then.”
“I am a warrior! I’ve had little time to find anything else I could be. The only way I could truly show her what I am is if the others came for her, and I was forced to put my life on the line for her. I know it sounds selfish, but I almost want it to happen. I want her to see exactly how far I would go for her.”
Kula nods. The smug grin is gone from his face. He looks at me with a respectful understanding in his eyes. He puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry for giving you a hard time, Raiska. You speak from the heart, and I understand your dilemma.”
“I will have her, Kula. Ever since I’ve laid eyes on her, I’ve known it. She may not understand just how badly I need her, but I’ll wait until she does. I don’t want to have her until she realizes my full feelings for her. I’m bad with words, but I was good with my tongue and hands last night, and I think she’s starting to understand what I can offer her beyond physical protection.”
“You’ll be tempted by the scent, but if you are as skilled with your tongue as you say, this will take you very far, brother…”
Eleven
Annabelle
“I am ready to hobby.”
I cock my head at him. “What?”
“To hobby.”
“It’s not a verb.”
“I am ready to have a hobby.”
“Okay...what’s your hobby?”
We are leaving the restaurant. Ellie is staying with Kula for a while as he gets ready for lunch prep. We walk down the grassy street relatively aimlessly. We’re both full, and I’m too nervous to even suggest going back to the hotel, where that bed would be there looming and reminding me of what I’m too afraid to do.
“I want to climb.”
“Climb?”
“Yes,” he says. “I saw it on the feeds last night. There is a large building we can go to, and it has simulated mountain peaks. We can climb them as if they were real mountains.”
“A rock-climbing wall?”
“You have these on Earth?”
I nod. “Not that I’ve ever done one.”
He grins wide. “Now you will. We will do it together.”
We take a self-driving taxi. I thought this city had no cars, but I hadn’t realized the lights flying around in the air were the cars. It starts off just putzing around the roads, but at some point it just randomly starts flying.
“Why would it drive around on the ground at all if it can just fly?”
“I am not Lakrian, don’t ask me.”
The car flies us to the other end of the city, to a building that looks like a big, high-ceilinged cube.
When we step inside, I am surprised—even though I shouldn’t be by now—that it is much cooler and high-tech than a rock-climbing place on Earth.
There are no harnesses or goofy little colored hand grips. There are dozens of different things that look like actual pieces of mountain. Real rock with grass and tiny little trees with resilient roots clinging on for dear life.
Various alien species are climbing with no safety equipment. I watch as a very broad-shouldered alien man with scaly grey skin works his way up a peak. He’s at least 100 feet above me. I have to crane my neck to see him. He tries to leap to a new edge of the mountain, but his foot slips. He grips tight with his hand, but he only has grip with that one hand, and it’s not an especially good place to hold onto.
His muscles bulge as he tries to pull himself up. His feet kick forward and find some leverage, but they slip, and then his hand slips too. He starts falling.
I gasp and cover my mouth with my hands. I want to close my eyes to avoid seeing someone splatter onto the ground, but I’m too terrified to react, and I just watch as he plummets.
When he’s a few dozen feet above the ground, something shimmers and pulses in the air, and each inch down he falls, the shimmering disturbance in the air thickens. He slows down drastically with each additional foot of free-fall, until he’s finally about a foot off the ground, and covered in a glowing purple light.
He shouts out some kind of swear word that I can’t hear clearly, and the purple lights cut off. He drops the extra foot to the ground. His friend tries to say something to him, but he shakes his head and kicks the wall.
“What if that purple stuff doesn’t stop us from falling?” I ask.
“I don’t plan to fall, little human.”
“Have fun, Raiska, because I don’t plan on climbing.”
“My understanding of the rules of a date are that we must do the activities together, Annabelle. The purple stuff will catch you if you fall. Now which mountain would you like to climb?”
None of them? I used to tell people that “hiking” was one of my hobbies because “watching TV” or “binge reading books all day” made me sound too lazy. Hiking, which more or less just amounts to walking around for a few hours, was something that I didn’t do for fun. I most certainly was not climbing mountains.
Raiska is already looking around at all the various cliffs and scratching his chin. A mischievous smirk is filling his face. I realize that this man has seriously never had a hobby or done anything for fun, and this is probably really exciting for him.
Do I really want to be a wet blanket and ruin that for him? Just because I’m worried that I will fall a few hundred feet to my death and splatter on the ground?
“I’ll climb that smaller one over there,” I say, pointing.
“I was thinking of this one,” he says, pointing at one that looks like K2, or one of those insane mountains that kills a few dozen people who are dumb enough to climb it every year.
I frown. “We have to do things together, remember?”
He smiles and takes my hand, and soon we’re at the bottom of the “tiny” mountain, which is still very scary looking, and still more than high enough to kill someone who fell.
I don’t know what kind of technology they used to get these mountains inside. It almost looks like they just chopped big chunks off of full-sized mountains and put them in this building. None of them have actual peaks, the cliff face just goes up flush with the ceiling. I think it’s unlikely they cut pieces out of a mountain with lasers and giant floating construction ships. More likely than not they “synthesized” all of the rocks, trees, clumps of dirt, and all the other little things that make up the mountains.
A yellow-skinned alien who works at the climbing gym approaches us. “Before you climb, let me go over the safety rules.”
Raiska sighs impatiently, but I’m hoping the safety rules are so strict that neither of us are allowed to climb without some kind of harness or additional safety equipment.
“When you fall,” he says, “don�
�t close your eyes, or you will get dizzy when the substrate catches you.”
He nods and starts walking away.
“Wait! What about all the rules?”
He shrugs. “Those were the rules.”
Raiska takes my hand and tugs me toward the mountain. “Now we climb, little human.”
This peak may not have the fake little handholds that climbing walls on Earth have, but it does have a lot of very convenient pieces jutting off and sinking in, and they are arranged in such a way that it seems built for beginners. Because of this, I’m actually able to climb a few feet up. I stop though and climb back down. “That’s a good start, isn’t it?”
“You climb first,” he says, “I will be just below you. I will catch you when you fall.”
“Why does everyone keep saying when I fall. Shouldn’t it be if I fall?”
He nudges me forward, and I start climbing again.
I have to admit, once I get moving, it’s fun. Even though the handholds and footholds are more or less spelled out, it’s constantly challenging to figure out the best way to move onto the next set of holds. It’s a lot more strategic, and a lot more like a puzzle, than I thought it was going to be. I’d imagined it being all about brute strength and endurance, but all the problem solving makes the physical part more fun to me.
So it’s fun...up until the point where I look down to tell Raiska that I’m having a great time. When I look down, I notice that I have climbed up much higher than I originally thought. I was climbing smoothly and without issue, but as soon as I look down at the ground, I panic. I cling tight to a boulder with my right hand, and I press my knees against the cliff face.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“We’re very high.”
“It’s called climbing, human. You were doing well at it.”
“I was.”
“Climb higher.”
“Are you sure you’ll catch me if I fall?”
He nods, as if there would possibly be any doubt. I haven’t been watching him climb, as I’ve been too busy focused on my own hands and feet. Even if he’s an excellent and highly skilled climber, catching me is going to mean grabbing me with one single hand, and supporting my falling body weight in one arm while holding a tenuous grip to the cliff face.
The Breeding Prize: A Scifi Alien Romance (The Breeding Games Book 2) Page 7