by Aubrey Moyes
“Always on the run.”
She froze. Jackson stood under the tree outside the clinic and watched her intently. “I just thought it would be easier,” she muttered. “For everyone.”
“You though it would be easier if you just ran away again? Is it that easy for you to leave me?”
She turned away from him. “Look, I appreciate everything that you’ve done for me. I really do. You saved my life. But things are different now.”
“How?”
She cocked her head. “What do you mean, how? Before I was a human with some psychic abilities. Now I’m a witch. Everyone knows that witches and shifters don’t mix. I know you hate me now.”
“Hate you?” in the blink of an eye, he’d crossed the small clearing and grabbed her wrist. “Why the hell would you say that?”
She pulled out of his grasp. “Are you kidding me? You could barely look at me inside. It’s clear that you can’t stand the sight of me. Why are you fighting me on this?”
He laughed hoarsely and pulled her into his grasp. “I definitely don’t hate you, Natalie. I failed you. I promised that I would keep you safe, and if it weren’t for your witch gene, you’d be a bear shifter. And you’d belong to Paul’s pack. I figured you’d hate me.”
She collapsed against him. It was nice to feel his warmth again. “You didn’t fail me. Every time I was in danger, you found me. I don’t hate you,” she muttered. “I love you. You did save me.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I love you too, Natalie. I have from the moment I felt you enter my building.”
“Even though I’m a witch now?”
“You’ve always been a witch. Just because you’re more powerful now doesn’t change how I feel about you. And it doesn’t change anything about you. I don’t care if you’re a witch, vampire, or otter shifter. I love you. I love everything about you,” he whispered into her ear.
And in that moment, she was happier than she’d ever been in her entire life. Jackson loved her. “What do we do now?”
“You’re going to marry me.” He pulled back and searched her face. “You’re my mate.”
She punched him lightly in the arm. “Aren’t you supposed to ask, first?”
He shook his head. “And give you a chance to say no? Absolutely not. You’re mine.”
“I am yours,” she said with a smile. “But what about your pack?”
“They’ll love you. And no one is going to be upset with a witch by our side. But I have to warn you. I think something big is about to happen. And I’m not sure I want you in the middle of it.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I’m not leaving your side. If you’re going to be in the middle of it, I’m going to be in the middle of it. That’s what marriage is. That’s what love is.”
He wrapped his arms around her, and Natalie suddenly didn’t care about her being a witch or him being a shifter. She didn’t care about their past, and she didn’t care about the future. At that moment, he was a man that she loved. She was the woman that he loved. And life couldn’t be more perfect.
THE END
Desired by Alien Lord
Chapter 1
Kelly awoke with a start in the night unable to move her limbs. This wasn’t a sensation that she was unused to, as she had had bouts of sleep paralysis since she was a child. Many of the nights that she lied in her bed trapped under her sheets, she saw large, masculine figures crowded around her, looking down at her, helpless under invisible weights. As always, she stopped and told herself not to panic. Yes, the feeling of being at the mercy of someone or something else was a horrifying one, but this was something that she was used to. She woke up frozen in the night because there was something wrong with the way her brain worked, not because she was in a trance or about to be abducted. This was a night just like any other over the course of her life, and nothing that she should be worried about. Until it was.
Unlike the many other nights that had come and gone with her stuck awake, staring at the ceiling and the shadowy figures that encircled her vision, after what she guessed was about five or ten minutes stuck under her comforter, a bright white light started emanating from the center of the circle that the shadowy figures had always formed. Initially, she panicked, her heart racing and her frozen palms growing clammy as it grew brighter and brighter. The light began to envelop the forms, which had become so familiar to her over the years, and their predictable outlines grew blurred. Suddenly, she didn’t think that her nightly visitors were so familiar. She quickly moved to force that thought out of her head, however. She figured she would be awake soon enough. It would all be over, just as it always was.
The light continued to grow until she could no longer see what she had come to believe were hallucinations hovering over her. Everything around her became white – blinding white that served to completely disorient her. With no frame of reference or no bearing, she had no idea where she was or what position she was really in. All she knew was that she felt suspended, and that she was moving somewhere inexplicably fast.
Though the light had taken a bit of time to fade in, it disappeared all too quickly, jarring Kelly’s awareness to her new surroundings. She blinked a few times, and her mouth fell open in disbelief. All around her, she saw polished metal with smooth edges and gliding corners. Everything seemed seamless and streamlined, like it had been the culmination of astounding intellectual achievement. Clearly she had never been in such a place before, nor had she imagined that people could have made such a thing a reality, but there she was – unless she was still dreaming. She hadn’t seen any people yet, after all, and she was being moved down the hallway, around winding corner after winding corner. This was probably still just a dream, like she had always been used to, or so she told herself.
Eventually, she came to a glass door, which disappeared as she approached it. Inside, there was a pitted theater style room, which she was placed in the center of. The lights that were pointed toward the stage at the center prevented her from seeing whether or not anyone was in the presumed seats behind them. She could only hope that this dream wasn’t about to be turned into a nightmare. Soon, she would wake up and be able to move her limbs again. She’d walk into her kitchen and make herself a nightcap to calm her nerves and send her back to sleep. It would be okay. She’d go to work in the morning and just shrug it all off. Routine. That’s of course when she realized that she could actually move her head. The whole time she had been moved to her new location, she had assumed that her propped vision was the result of her waking dream, but in all actuality, she had been holding her head up the whole time on her own. That’s also when she started to panic a bit, and decided to take a look downwards to see what her state of affairs looked like.
What she found was that she was lying unclothed under a thin, but sensationless blanket on a floating polished metal disc. Her wrists and ankles were secured to the disc, but she could rotate enough to sit up and hold herself up with her hands. Nor were her restraints so uncomfortable that they were particularly noticeable either. Her mind was screaming that she was still in a waking dream, but she knew deep down that she was definitely awake. After all, she could move. That light wasn’t her just falling back asleep. It was a transport of some sort – that was the only thing that made sense given that her surroundings screamed otherworldly. Kelly wasn’t necessarily the most put-together of people – she was frequently late to work and would sometimes spend her night munching on a large container of vanilla yogurt versus actually making a balanced dinner, and to top it all off, she would regularly forget where she left her keys. However, it doesn’t exactly take a genius to notice things that are right in front of your face, and she had to quickly accept that facts were facts.
I guess it turns out that sleep paralysis isn’t to blame for all of the accounts of alien abductions, she thought. I mean, they’re pretty similar, but this is definitely distinct. I hope this isn’t one of those anal probe abductions. I’ve never been too into that. She had always been pr
eoccupied with watching UFO based sci-fi growing up and had devoured all accounts of alien abduction as she could find. She had seen them run the gambit from profound to downright torturous, but she still couldn’t get enough of them. She even saw similarities through time, but a part of her always did want to believe. A smaller part of her deeper down wouldn’t even really mind the anal probing that much, if it was done right. She didn’t want to admit to that though, and never would publicly.
Eventually, the lights on her dimmed slightly, and she was able to make out silhouettes behind them. They looked pretty familiar and humanlike, which was a great comfort to her since she didn’t really know how many more visual surprises she could take in the near future given how shocked she was. She realized that her years of morbid fascination had rendered her incapable of really feeling anything about the situation other than a vague, animalistic fight or flight response that was woven with a mildly sexual frustration – visceral response, certainly, but dulled.
Finally, she got a visualization of what the figures always surrounding her looked like, and she was thrilled. There literally couldn’t have been a better abduction scenario – the man who walked into the amphitheater seemed larger than life and was build like a classical god. Clearly defined muscles rippled all over his form and he brazenly bore half of his chest beneath a similarly classical toga.
Chapter 2
Maybe I am dreaming, Kelly thought. However, he turned to the raised seating and started lecturing in a language that she couldn’t come close to understanding. It seemed like a mixture of every language family she had heard – a little bit of Spanish, a little bit of English, a little bit of Chinese, a little bit of Arabic – and was an incomprehensible mess. Or, maybe I’m not, she finished.
The vision of classical beauty that was standing before her droned on at his audience for a while and was met with courteous applause at what Kelly could only assume was the end of his piece. To her surprise, he then turned to her and began to speak to her directly.
“Though I won’t apologize for our actions exactly, I will apologize for any possible shock to your system that we’ve caused. We’ve been planning this for years, you know,” he began, pausing while he awaited her response. It took her a few seconds to collect herself, but she managed to deliver, not questioning that he could speak English – after all, she was in a ship that managed to make it across the universe. It would make sense that they could learn a new language or two from a less advanced civilization.
“Planning this for years?” she asked. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”
“Considering you’ll be living among our society from now on, I might as well tell you. Our faction picked you out of a large sample size of possible candidates for future integration. Our species as a whole has always been largely invested in the futures of others, and have taken appropriate action when necessary in order to preserve the ones that are favored more and can be helped. Over the eons, we’ve managed to make the process a bit easier by integrating the experience into one of the chosen specimens so that it’s a bit more… familiar by the time it actually comes around.” He paused, giving her time to digest the information that he had just given her.
“So, you mean that you all… gave me the sleep paralysis problem when I was a kid?” she asked.
“Precisely. The feeling of restriction is similar to what transport feels like, and we would have been watching over you to make sure that everything was positioned correctly to grab you up safely. If we showed you what that was like early on, then you would be more used to it when it came around for real and would be less likely to get scared or die on us.”
Kelly was intrigued at the care taken to maintain her person. “So, you want to keep me safe and happy? For what?”
“Successful integration into our society.”
“Why will I need to be doing that?” Kelly asked, suddenly somewhat panicked.
“Because we have foreseen a date of a catastrophic cosmic event for your planet. On the following date from your transport, your planet was to undergo a collision from a large asteroid that you had not been able to detect. We saved a large number from your species, but you in particular were chosen by a much smaller community.” The way he recounted the information was almost infuriatingly cool, and the news of her planet’s destruction was overwhelming and confusing.
“You saved me from the fucking apocalypse? Why? What’s so special about me and others like me?” she was beginning to panic as the reality of the situation set in.
“You most closely resembled our ideals from the members of your species who originally gave us form. It suggests the highest possibility of successful interspecies breeding that will give us extended longevity in the stars, as we rely on the sustained, deep seated genealogical belief in our ascribed forms in order to keep them, and having form is incredibly useful in this universe.”
Kelly’s head was swimming now, but the beautiful face and perfectly toned muscles in front of her continued speaking.
“Not only does your physical form fit in with those who first created us, but you are particularly fertile and receptive. Of course, we don’t just see you as breeding stock – we do want to integrate you into our society, and others like you. We also don’t want you to see us as your gods, as you once did.”
“Don’t tell me your name is Zeus or something,” Kelly interrupted, unable to believe what she was hearing, but still somehow finding a way to listen and accept what she knew was the truth.
“Actually, it is,” he responded, smiling to reveal perfect straight white teeth, “And you and I have been bonded. It’s the most viable pairing. We’ll be doing a lot of getting to know each other over the next few weeks, and I’m sure we’ll come to love each other’s company.”
Life in interstellar transit was easier to adjust to than Kelly would have thought it would have been. It might have been made easier knowing that there was no home planet for her to return to, though she really had no way of knowing whether or not that was true. Clearly the alien masters that had abducted her had knowledge far beyond what she knew of, and they could have easily told her a farce to keep her from fighting back or becoming too depressed. She didn’t think that was the case, though. After that initial bewildering show of her person to the other Tu’Fallians (she had now learned the name of their species, which was also the name of their planet), she had been treated more than hospitably by her possible rescuers; she had her own lodgings, was never intruded upon, and areas of the ship didn’t seem off limits to her, though there were places that she definitely knew that she didn’t belong in.
One of the things that made her quite sure that Zeus had been telling the truth when he told her that her planet had met an unforeseen (to humanity, anyways) disaster was that she wasn’t alone on the ship. I mean, clearly there were the Tu’Fallians, who came in all shapes and sizes depending on which intelligent life in the universe they had influenced first and had subsequently given them form, but she wasn’t alone. There were other humans on the ship, and enough of them that she couldn’t remember everybody’s name or face. In fact, she was quite sure that she hadn’t even seen all of the humans aboard their vessel since she had been there.
Another thing that assured her of her conviction that she had not been lied to was that every other human that she spoke with had similar experiences to her their entire lives. They too, were plagued by sleep paralysis. They too, had a preoccupation with extraterrestrials and life among the stars. They were all adventurous types who didn’t shy away from something new. All in all, it seemed to her that the claim that they had seen disaster coming for their planet and decided to help was true. After all, when the Tu’Fallians reached out to human consciousness, human consciousness was what was able to give them form and enable them to reproduce and persist in their existence. It would make sense that instead of allowing them to perish, the aliens would continue the relationship built on good will by helping out humans this time around.
Of course, there was the other bit that Zeus mentioned. He had gone into more detail on one of their courtship excursions around the huge starship. He had almost seemed awkward approaching the subject, even though the both of them knew that there was really no changing the actions that were to come or events that would follow by their consequence. During that particular walk of theirs, he had made it a point to take her though the huge atrium that they had aboard. It was hard for her to remain focused on the task of getting to know her new husband (though she didn’t even know if marriage was an institution on Tu’Fal, or if these things were just intrinsic in the type of relationships that Tu’Fallians had) as he took her through this area of the ship. Her eyes were drawn all over the place to plants she had never seen or would have been able to imagine. There were blue fruits, leaves of bright violet that were as large as the average person’s bathroom, and tiny cacti-type plants that were so small that they looked as though they could be nothing more than clay miniatures.
“Your people had a seed bank in Svalbard,” Zeus told her, noticing the fact that her eyes had grown into dinner plates, “We have a living garden of Eden, with specimens collected from each planet that we have visited. This is simply what we took with us to create the oxygen needed for the ship and what we picked up while saving all of you, but I will take you to the main garden on Tu’Fal when we arrive.”
Kelly had looked up at him after he said this, shocked at his consideration.
“What, do you think that I would just keep you locked in our home?” Zeus asked, amused at her disbelief. “That’s not how we do things. Just because your species isn’t as technologically advanced as we are doesn’t mean that your emotions, your soul, is not. Your life is just as advanced as ours is, and it deserves all the pleasures that come with it.”