The Alien King's Pet: An Alien Abduction Romance (Royal Aliens)

by Loki Renard

  He’d wanted a human pet because he was bored, because the universe’s distractions had become stale for him. He was not bored now. He was annoyed and concerned, and he was having to tolerate repeated audiences with officials who demanded his attention.

  He should have listened when Archon warned him. But no, he had to disregard his fellow monarch’s words because he was too caught up in the exoticness of it all, and claiming a human as his pet.

  “Crime has risen substantially in the city! Petty thefts now occur daily.” The Lord of the City Guard said. “We have been receiving multiple complaints about a juvenile crime gang, or perhaps aliens wearing the suits of juveniles. Pink clad, they run about the city stealing that which they are not entitled to, and which they have no intention of paying for. It is unprecedented in our history.”

  “Perhaps the City Guard has become complacent,” Dominax suggested. “Perhaps being an interstellar hub cannot be all hugs and trust falls.”

  His reply was uncommonly sarcastic. He almost heard her voice while he was speaking, as if the human had commandeered some part of him and was making her presence felt even in her absence.

  “Perhaps the alien element is causing problems, as we predicted they would when you decided to open Golden City to the universe at large. It was so much easier when the city was open to Homelanders only. Now we have to have ramps and street access. It is unsightly, and they are being used to facilitate flightless crime.”

  “Change is inevitable, Knax,” Dominax said. “If you are not willing to police the city as it needs to be policed, and catch criminals instead of complaining about them, there are many who would take your place, and your rank, and your title, for that matter.”

  The Lord of the City Guard turned a bit ashen upon hearing that, though Dominax did not know what he had expected to hear. Had he truly believed that if he only complained enough, the king would reverse his position on having the city open to the universe and return to the days when only Homelanders were allowed to live on the planet?”

  Probably.

  “My apologies, sire,” Knax stammered, bowing deeply, his wings folded in contrition. It was not common for the king to threaten to remove a lord from service, but it was possible.

  “SIRE!”

  A fresh voice rang out, interrupting the king and his audience. There was only one reason anybody might be permitted to do that. Dominax was actually glad to be interrupted.

  “GOT A PRISONER FOR YOU, SIRE!”

  “You can stop shouting and come in,” Dominax said, gesturing the intruders forward.

  “We found him! He was at home!” one of two very proud guards called out. They had a tall Homelander between them, a distinguished member of Dominax’s own guard — and a traitor.

  Alf had disappeared on the same day and at the same time Katie did. At first it had seemed like something of a coincidence, or perhaps some evidence of foul play.

  “Clear the court!” Dominax cried out. He did not want witnesses to the exchange about to happen.

  The courtiers fled, not wishing to be caught in the king’s ire. Dominax had never been this furious, or this dangerous. When he and Alf were alone, he focused all that anger on the soldier.

  “You,” Dominax growled. “You took something from me, something you had no right to take.”

  The guard he had once trusted to keep his pet safe now kneeled in chains, though he did not have the good sense to look ashamed.

  “I didn’t take her, sire. I helped her leave. She wasn’t a prisoner. And you were hurting her. I did what was right.”

  “You are not here to do what is right. You are here to do what I tell you to do. Need I remind you that I am your king?”

  “No, sire. You need not remind me.”

  Dominax let out a snarl. He wanted to kill this soldier for his treachery, but Alf was not any mere soldier. He had served under Dominax's father. He was a literal war hero. Killing him would cause a scandal and potentially turn the entire court against him.

  Being king did not mean having unlimited power without consequence. It meant being at the top of a grasping, desperate, greedy pile of maniacs who each wanted his seat.

  Losing a pet like a careless child did not look good. It looked like weakness. Having had his pet stolen out from under his nose by his own guard looked even worse. When the old guard rebelled, that was the beginning of the end.

  He needed Katie back. He craved her with every part of his being. Alf didn't understand how badly he had hurt his king by taking the female. But he would understand.

  “You will find her, and you will return her.”

  “I will do no such thing. If you want her, you should earn her. You should woo her. You should…”

  Dominax’s growl cut Alf’s speech off mid-way through. “I do not need lectures from you, old man. I am king, and I take what I will.”

  “You are a spoiled child.”

  Dominax’s brows flew toward his hair, and his eyes became even darker. “You realize that speaking to me this way is disrespect punishable by death?”

  “I realize that I am an old man. I have performed my duties and given my service. But I will no longer serve a crown acting like a spoiled child. You amuse yourself with distractions and you take the spoils of your position without thought for the consequences. That girl you took from the other planet, she is innocent. Or was, before she spent hours being ravaged by you. I heard you beating her, and I had to help her escape. I doubt she is anywhere near where I left her. I doubt she is on this planet. But I don’t know. She went off on her own.”

  “So you think taking my disobedient pet and setting her free without any kind of help is kindness, while my discipline of her was cruelty? Do I need to begin to tell you how ridiculous that is?”

  “I gave her choice.”

  “The last bloody thing she needs is choice. The last thing you should ever have done was taken pity on her. Do you not realize what is happening? I have every lord and dispenser of justice calling for blood because of a pink-clad, one-human-crime-spree taking place in the city. It’s her. I know it’s her. Taking her was one thing, setting her loose, that was a far greater cruelty than my discipline. You can return home, Alf. And you can stay there. Your retirement has come early.”

  “Don’t be so hard on the old man.”

  Dominax looked up as a new voice landed nearby.

  “Not now, Darma,” Dominax snapped at his younger brother, who had chosen to enter the otherwise sealed room by coming down the chimney.

  “It’s about the human.”

  “Have you found her? Are you going to bring her to me?”

  “Well….”

  “If you don’t have the human, I don’t want to hear from you,” Dominax snapped, irritated. “How many times have I told you not to fly down the fucking chimneys. They’ll be lit one day and you’ll be burned to cinders.”

  “They haven’t been lit since the ocean turned to lava. Anyway, Dominax…”

  Dominax wasn’t listening. He could not believe that the human had been on the run from him for all of thirty days. He had been certain that she would be found. The city was large, but she was a helpless female on a planet she did not know. He had imagined she would be begging for help and recapture within a matter of hours.

  But she hadn’t.

  Dominax was furious. He was certain someone had her. She couldn’t possibly be out there on her own. Someone had to be in possession of his pet.

  “Make yourself useful and issue an edict. Anyone found in possession of a human will forfeit their lives,” he growled. “And any information leading to the capture of the human will earn a personal favor from the king.”

  “Dominax, did it occur to you that there’s a reason Alf helped her escape? And another reason why she hasn’t been found?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “You’re suffering from an outbreak of disloyalty. Or, put another way, at least one Homelander has chosen to help the human rather
than obey you. Alf was a good guard.”

  “Again. What are you getting at?”

  “Having this human has turned you into a monster.”

  Dominax shot a dark look at his younger brother. “Go away, Darma.”

  “I’m not going to go away. You don’t have anybody to tell you what you need to hear. You’ve been getting more and more out of control. You banned my mate, you’ve alienated your guard, and you managed to make a human who was dependent on you for everything, someone you could have spoiled to the point of worshipping you, want to escape. You need to work on yourself.”

  “Or I need to weed out the weak and the ill-disciplined until nobody is left but the obedient.”

  “You never choose the obedient. You choose the exceptional. If Alf betrayed you, he did it for a reason. And if the human you picked ran away, she did it for a reason too.”

  “Is this your way of trying to get your mate allowed in the palace again, Darma?”

  “No. Although. Yes. He should be allowed here. I miss him.”

  “You should have thought about that before you disobeyed me.”

  “Great, Dominax. You sit there on your fancy throne and you tell yourself everybody is obeying you, while one by one they defect from you, because every decision you make lately is for your happiness, and not theirs. Did you even consider what kind of a life you were giving the human? Did you think to find out if she was happy living here? Or did you just assume you could tell her that she was happy, and she’d just go ahead and be happy?”

  “This is a very long-winded way of calling me a tyrant because you can’t see your lover,” Dominax drawled.

  Darma was forced to bite his lip to avoid exclaiming something he would regret.

  12 And It Was Called Yellow

  “Fucking Dominax. Stupid winged king asshole,” Katie muttered under her breath. “Goddamn bastard with his flappy wings and…”

  She was not in a good mood. Having escaped Dominax’s custody, she was realizing just how far from home she was, and just how lonely she was. Of course, being a fugitive on a far off planet was going to suck, but there was more to it; a longing she'd never had when she was a virgin too scared of anything that looked like a relationship to ever risk getting into one.

  She missed Dominax.

  God, she hated that she missed him, but she did. She’d probably just gotten used to him. Like the rat that had haunted her apartment before the building manager put out traps. She’d get over him once she was back home, on Earth, where she belonged.

  That’s what she told herself, anyway. She didn’t know if it was true. She didn’t recognize herself anymore. Every feeling she felt was foreign and inconvenient. She’d never needed anyone. That's how she had evaded the soldiers for so long. She could survive on her own just fine.

  So why the fuckety fuck was her brain playing imaginary montages of all the soft and tender times she shared with Dominax? And why did the memory of that very last punishment fuck he’d given her before she escaped pop up in the middle of the night and make her want to touch herself?

  It was time to strike back. Take revenge. Make a statement. Dominax had his soldiers out looking for her, but they weren't able to cover every inch of the city, and she didn’t have too much trouble dodging them. It was always easier to hide than to seek.

  Right now, she was looking at a statue of the king displayed in one of the lava gardens. It was naked and anatomically complete, but not correct. His real life cock was much, much larger.

  Her very presence irritated her. On some level, she knew she was basically sitting near the statue so she could see the king's face again, because she… ugh…gross… no. She was not going to finish that thought.

  Katie decided then and there, in a fit of avoiding the contents of her own brain, that the statue was going to bear the brunt of her ire. Pulling it down was out of the question. With her luck she'd end up with a ton of rock crushing her. But… she could decorate it. Okay, deface it. She could show Dominax her complete scorn for him. She could make his crimes against her public. She could show the entire city what their king was really like through the medium of art. Or maybe she’d just piss them off, but that was good too.

  In the middle of the night, she crept in the flickering lava shadows toward the statue of the winged king. The buzz and hubbub of the day had gone all muted, the absence of fire in the sky serving to highlight the searing volcanic fissures around which the city had been built, as if they were barely an inconvenience.

  Dominax’s stone face was even more handsome in the darkness, red light making him look almost lifelike. As she approached the statue, she could have sworn she saw it breathe.

  She hesitated, almost tempted to apologize for some bizarre reason.

  “You brought this on yourself," she told the stone. “Or, the guy you’re supposed to be did.”

  In her past raids on various stores, which had started as ways to survive, but lately had become more entertaining in nature than a desperate waif’s attempt to feed herself, meant that she had a supply of materials which weren’t useful for survival. Like paint. And these big sticker things that the Homelanders used for covering burn stains until things could be replaced.

  She had a backpack full of stuff to decorate the statue with. No, not decorate. Deface. She had to get that straight. This wasn’t trimming a Christmas tree. This was an act of human rebellion against an alien oppressor.

  Rummaging through her bag, she found a can of what looked like paint. Yellow paint. Yellow was a coward's color, so that suited him. Somehow. For some reason. She couldn’t rationalize it, but nothing about this was rational. Rational people didn’t tell space dudes it was fine to abduct them.

  Shit. Was that a near brush with accepting her role in the entire situation? No. She had to stay well away from that train of thought which might lead her to a station of having fucked up herself just a little bit. Responsibility was better when projected onto statues.

  “Your fault," she told the solid rock beast. “Everything is your fault.”

  “Reaallly?”

  For a brief second, everything she knew about reality was shunted out of her head and she was left with nothing but a primitive fear of statues that could talk and perhaps even take their vengeance.

  She screamed at the top of her lungs and threw the entire paint can at…Darma? Again? What the fuck was with this guy? He stepped out from behind the statue just in time to be gooped in a good pint of paint.

  “What the FUCK!”

  “Yeah. That’s a good question,” he said, shaking his wing which was now covered with yellow paint, dripping and spraying with the twitching of his feathers. "What the fuck are you doing? You know people notice when you break shit, steal shit, and deface shit, don't you?”

  He was starting to use her own parlance. It was funny watching an alien man talk like he was straight out of NYC. It was also funny seeing him covered in paint. Much better than taking her feelings out on a statue with no sentience whatsoever. She should have been throwing things at Darma all along.

  “People? Or the king?”

  “Yes. Dominax knows you're fucking his favorite city up,” Darma cursed, once again showing a remarkable grasp of human cursing. “I cannot keep saving you.”

  “Why are you helping me at all?”

  “Listen, anyone fucking with Dominax is alright by me, but I think…”

  “What?”

  “I think you’re trying to get his attention. I think you’re in love with him. And I think you should turn yourself in before you get arrested, because you’re really not going to like what happens if you get caught.”

  She ignored all the parts about the consequences of being caught, and focused on the words which seared into her soul the moment she heard them.

  “Uhm. In love!? With the guy who brought me to a lava planet and whipped me…”

  “Yeah. He made you love it.”

  “Fuck off, Darma.”

  “Do you kno
w why Dominax is king?”

  “Because he’s the biggest asshole out of all you assholes?”

  “Because he sees what others need and he finds a way to give it to them. Our kingdom is perpetually on fire, but it’s peaceful because of him.”

  She screwed her face up, not wanting to think about Dominax. The truth was, there was a void inside her where the king had been – and not just sexually. She missed being… ugh, she could barely even bring herself to think the words.

  Taken care of.

  There they were. Those three little words hanging around out of context and yet still somehow fucking with her head.

  She kept getting flashes of being curled up in the king’s arms, safe and catered to, even though she had never really submitted to his will. That would have pissed a lot of guys off, she guessed. But Dominax wasn’t some guy. He was the winged king of this whole entire place and he’d chosen her.

  Part of her wanted to go crawling back, but the NYC pride part of her would never let her do that. Not ever.

  “Fuck this shit. I’m going home.”

  “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said this whole time.”

  “Not the palace,” she clarified. “The place I’m staying.”

  “You’re just drawing out the inevitable,” he called out as she ran off into the darkness, leaving her rebellious art behind.

  13 Sick

  “Thirteen… fourteen… fifteen…”

  She was still shy of the number of money credits needed to get a ticket off planet, no matter how many times she counted her stolen savings. The cost of living in the Golden City was way too fucking high. She’d thought New York was bad, but that was nothing on this place.

  As far as she could tell, it wasn’t actually possible to get a ticket back to Earth itself. The travel agent she’d talked to said the best they could do was a human colony. That sounded like a promising start.