I jump and quickly hold my fists out in front of me, cautious to only show him the backs of my hands. It has the desired effect because his own fingers halt as they circle my wrists and I hear him suck in a very subtle, yet reverent breath.
“Your markings…” he says softly, his thumb rubbing over the bright red pattern that curls across my dark brown skin. “Tevbarannos didn’t mention markings. You’re not the female he’s looking for.”
“Nob, I’m not,” I say, confirming his words. The kind pirate male had looked so sullen when Igmora had given him a glimpse of me from the door. He hadn’t been allowed to touch, like the others. “He said so himself.”
“Good,” the male grumbles to himself. He makes the word sound like a curse, distracted as he is by the colors clashing over my arms. “That’s good.”
The red skin-toned markings extend over the backs of my palms, circling both arms. On the right side, they slide past my shoulder and unfold over my neck before curling around my right ear. On the left, the markings extend up my arm and spread over my shoulder blade to form one enormous swirl on my back. Though he cannot see them, my breasts are also red and so is my stomach, abdomen and groin. There are also red swirls on both my feet and ankles and my left leg, but strangely none at all on the right one.
Abruptly, he clears his throat and when he speaks again, his interest seemingly evaporates. He’s dispassionate surliness once more. “I haven’t seen your markings before. Are you from Quadrant One?”
My heart summersaults. My stomach dives. My lungs float. He doesn’t know who I am. He isn’t here to buy me at all. I gasp and rip my wrists out of his overwhelming and rough fingers. “Stars!” I stumble back, running into the moving chair and causing it to scurry away from me again.
Because if he isn’t going to be my master, then all of my talk of having one master has flown out of that broken window. Because no one will want me if I’ve been tainted by another male and maintaining my purity is the most important commandment I’ve been given. A female must be untouched, except by her master. If she is, then she will end up on her back with not just one master, but hundreds of them. If I’m tainted, Igmora might just give me to Tyto freely then for him to torture with his pronged tail and his cutting claws before voiding me into space, like trash, as it’s rumored he’s done to other pleasurers before.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I shout again when he says nothing.
His shoulders jolt, as if stunned. He glances around like he’s confused, then reaches up and touches the base of his left horn in what appears to be an absent gesture. “I thought this was the way out.”
“Nob…nob nob nob…” I’m suddenly furious. So furious that I do the unthinkable. I rush to the small side table, grab the statue and turn… Before I know what’s come over me, I chuck the statue at his head and, in a split instance of pure horror, I realize my aim was true. The gold connects.
The little alien prince’s penis clunks against the center of this mighty male’s forehead before bouncing off and onto the carpet. The huge male canters back a step, like I just blasted him with a cannon instead of a dinky little thing, barely a trinket in his oversized paws.
“Off!” He scoffs, moving the hand on his horn to the space between his eyes, so large and lovely. “What was that for?”
Honestly, it’s a good question. I should be angry that he came in and touched me or that he saw me and that no one is supposed to see me except for the bidders. I should even be angry that he came in and stole precious moments from me that I should have been using to escape. But I’m mostly, irrationally, overwhelmingly angry because in those precious seconds when I thought he was here to purchase me, I felt something I haven’t felt in a very long time. Maybe, even…ever.
I felt hope.
And now, just as quickly, he’s stolen away this shriveled, desiccated dream that he never knew he gave me at all.
“You are not supposed to be here!” I point at him and a droplet of blood slashes from the end of my finger and onto his tunic, making my hand feel like a blade.
“Your ohring hand,” he growls, touching his horn again — nob, grabbing onto it like he’s worried it’ll fly away. Then he reaches up with his other hand and grabs both horns at once. He looks rather…ridiculous like this, but I don’t have the adequate time to appreciate it as I scramble once again for the window. “I told you, you were injured.”
“You didn’t tell me I was injured, I was injured and right now you’re in my way,” I snap. I’ve never snapped at anybody before and my momentary thrill at how good it feels is quickly doused by shame.
I open my mouth to apologize until he grunts, “Your way?”
“Yeffa,” I huff, annoyed all over again. “You’re Lemoran. You’re supposed to be one of the clever ones, but right now you sound about as dense as an Egama.” Wait. Essmira, did you just insult the male?
“I…you…an Egama!” He shouts and suddenly he’s right up against me. I know I should be panicked, but my need to escape is too large and unwieldy to fear being alone in a room with a male who has no intention of purchasing me and, evidently, too great to stop me from insulting him.
“I’m clearly trying to escape, now would you hand me that fuzzy chair over there so I can reach the window?” I reach for the shattered frame again, not caring about the jagged edges, but he snatches my wrist from the air.
“You cut your hands the first time and now you’re trying again and you have the gall to call me an Egama?”
I try to yank my arm away from him, but the point is futile. He could have broken every bone in my body with likely very little effort on his part, but I couldn’t really care less at the moment. I shove his chest with my other hand, smearing my own bright red blood across his no longer pristine tunic. How many zaps of electricity would this have won me from Tyto’s eager claws? Many. Hundreds, spaced out over solars.
I nearly scream, “Don’t you see I’m trying to escape?”
His lips mouth the word escape as his eyes dart from my hands to the window back to my hands back to the window before finally dropping to my face. He gasps — gasps — and suddenly staggers away from me, dropping my arm like it’s a rotten log teeming with flesh-burrowing insects.
“Ohr!” He hisses. He grabs onto his left horn again, only this time, when my gaze follows, his hand twitches and his face does this horrible twisting thing, like he’s in a world of pain.
I jolt, startled by such a sight and the training beaten into me from birth kicks in. “Are you alright?” I reach for him, intending to soothe, only to be arrested by the soft clearing of a throat on the other side of the room.
I glance up and all the blood drains out of my body. My soul abandons my bones and floats up and out through that jagged patch of window. Bye bye. The dark hole where I’m going, I won’t need it anyway. Standing in the open doorway is Igmora.
She steps forward and I know her black eyes well enough by now to sense that she’s neither surprised nor horrified though she appears to be both. On the contrary, the false breathiness to her voice is well rehearsed and the outrage she levels towards me is something completely contrived. No one else can see it though. And my concern isn’t for Igmora anyway, but for Tyto, an Egama giant, and the Oosa delegation crowding the space behind her.
Tyto’s tail slashes behind him furiously, but I can see the bright excitement in his yellow gaze when our eyes lock. He licks his lips and my stomach clenches. I know what’s in store for me now. Pleasure houses would be a gift at this stage.
Tyto’s slitted yellow gaze drops to my hands and he sees the blood and he looks up and over my head and he sees the window and he knows. And in his eyes I conjure my own afterlife because I’m sure it will be preferable to his punishment. And he knows it. He smiles to show all of his fanged teeth. He brushes his clawed hand back through his black, waist-length hair. He knows he’ll get to exact punishment. And he knows how I fear him and revels in it.
Immediately,
I move to the center of the room and drop to my knees, palms upturned on the tops of my thighs. I bow my head and steady my breath and wait…
The Oosa are the first to start trilling wildly, but closely on their tails, the Egama bellows out a battle cry. Tyto says nothing while Igmora whistles her outrage in a voice that’s as fake as it is falsetto. She charges into the room and points at the male who’d ruined all my plans and chased all my dreams out of that window into the starlight.
“Raingar, you have no right to be in here. And look what you’ve done. You’ve damaged her hands. I assure you,” she says to the Egama and the Oosa behind her, “that this is a superficial wound easily healed. It will not in any way affect her purchase price. We will continue the bidding at nine tuns of kintarr for the female…
“Centare, centare, of course she was not taken by the Lemoran chieftan here. He told me expressly he had no desire to peddle in flesh.” Peddle in flesh. Is that what we’re doing? Is that what I am? Not a being? Just flesh? A soulless thing?
“He is not a part of the bidding. The bidding remains to you, Ooran. Will you outbid the Egama’s nine tuns or will you yield to him?”
“Whatever he bids, I will outbid!” The sturdy voice of the Egama rattles into the room filling it like a gas. One with a low temperature of combustion. Energy sizzles through the space, crackling and popping dangerously. My bloody hands are wetting the fabric of my dark purple dress. Igmora says that indigo brings out unearthly hues in my brown skin and makes my curly raven hair shine like water.
The Oosa trill as they counter, but the Egama is paying them no attention. Instead, he points somewhere to my right, towards the gaping window and the Lemoran who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“But first…” The Egama ducks low in order to enter the room and I pity the Lemoran male, fear for him even, as the Egama takes a step towards him and threatens menacingly , “I cannot let this slight go unpunished.”
Every cell in my body tenses. Every nerve dies. I feel like running out of the room screaming my head off as if I were on fire.
And then two fingers tap down on my shoulder stiffly. I jolt and look up, but the Lemoran — what did she call him? Rain…something — isn’t looking at me. His jaw is clenched and when he brushes his hand over his horn once again, a little bit of black flakes off onto me. I wonder what color is underneath…
Distracted, I’m boneless when he lifts me underneath the arms so high that my feet clear the floor up until he sets me back down again on the far side of the room between the wall colored in crude murals of princes and princesses fornicating and the frightening green chair that may or may not be a sentient being.
He positions himself directly in front of me, blocking my view of the Egama and Igmora but not of Tyto whose reptilian face remains stoic and stony and terrifying as he watches me. And I’m so distracted by the slight and unexpected twitch of Tyto’s upper lip that I don’t fully register the war brewing mere paces away until the Egama releases a battlecry that I’m certain can be heard from three stars away.
The giant drops his shoulders and charges across the floor straight towards me.
I don’t scream. A female does not scream. A female hardly ever makes a sound. I just cover my head and brace for impact…but the impact is not with me. The impact is with the Lemoran male charging across the furry carpet to meet the Egama. The scowling, irritable and frankly goofy male that just told me he was looking for the exit charges for the Egama, looking every inch, deadly.
The two beings collide in the center of the room and the impact literally makes the entire room shake. The painted walls reach up to a high ceiling where chandeliers made of crystal crack and break. Falling stone hits the carpet in beautiful explosions of pink and yellow powders. A huge statue of a princess standing upright against the wall behind Igmora topples over. Igmora screams wildly and pretends to faint.
Tyto blocks the entrance, preventing the Oosa from entering. I’m grateful for it. Without his intervention, this fight might have become a dozen times more deadly. Meanwhile, the Egama is relying on brute strength. He hits the Lemoran in the stomach and the Lemoran flies into the wall beside the broken window. I clap both hands over my mouth to cage my terrified cry.
The Lemoran growls as he hits the floor, landing in a crouch before barreling forward with his chin tucked. The Egama reaches to grab him but the Lemoran grabs the Egama first. Wrenching down on his arms, bringing the Egama even closer to him, the Lemoran scores his opponent’s chest with one upward strike of his horns.
The Egama’s olive blood sprays over the Lemoran, turning his once pristine-turned-red tunic forest green now. The Lemoran fires another punch, hitting the Egama in the jaw, which the Egama returns with even more power. Luckily, the Lemoran does, indeed, appear to be made of rock because if he hadn’t been, his face would have shattered on impact, I’m sure of it.
The two are more evenly matched than I thought they would be…until the Egama manages to wrestle the Lemoran down to the awful carpet. I start to panic, my breath coming in shallow bursts. I know that a female should stay out of the affairs of males, but I can’t watch one being kill another one in front of my eyes because of me — not without at least trying to do something.
I try to stand, but my legs don’t work, so I shout where I’m seated, “Please stop!”
They can’t hear me, but across the room Igmora can. She’s smiling ear-to-ear. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her look so pleased about anything.
“Please.” I’m begging her now.
The Egama has the Lemoran in a headlock — an unfortunate place for the Egama because the Lemoran jerks his head back, spearing the Egama across the forehead and nearly taking out his left eye. The Egama is forced to release him and both males scramble to their feet, nursing their wounds, but still determined to square off against one another — at least, until Igmora finally steps between them and holds up both hands. Her expression has shifted again. She looks petrified. Her long eyelashes are fluttering. Her hand is even shaking in what should be an involuntary reaction.
“Please…please stop this senseless violence. This is enough. We will need to conclude these negotiations immediately. I say that my prized daughter — ” daughter? Daughter! Ha! “ — will go to the Egama for the sum of nine tuns of kintar…”
“WAIT!” The force of the roar is so loud more chandeliers take flight and explode around his feet in a symphony of color. The Lemoran is, remarkably, on his feet and the goofy expression he once wore is gone. His teeth are clenched and he’s seething.
He chokes, “Wait.” His heavy breathing and the Egama’s heavy breathing are the only sounds in the room for the next moment. The next ten moments. The next eternity.
The Egama puffs out his chest, pounding on it with one fist to finally break the excruciating silence that weighs more than stormy waters right before the inundation. “There is no reason to wait. I’ve won her. I will claim my…”
“Pagh!” The Lemoran shifts when the Egama takes a half step towards me, the movement so subtle it would have been easy to miss. To me, it’s clear. He’s moving to intercept the Egama. A small, daring hope swells in my chest, in place of that shriveled, desiccated thing, because if I didn’t know any better, I might think that the Lemoran is still trying to protect me.
The Lemoran holds up one hand towards the Egama. With his other, he points at Igmora. “You are clever,” is all he says to her.
Her expression softens, becoming more true. That truth is a lie in itself though. There is nothing to her beneath the exterior. Her heart is locked away in a box buried beneath layers of greed so deep, she no longer remembers that she ever had one. All that’s left is a cobweb-covered shovel and a useless key that now pertains to nothing.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she says, knowing exactly what he means. She always knows what others mean. Always.
“I don’t negotiate,” the Lemoran tells her, and his voice sounds strained.
>
She tilts her head forward and, as the Egama starts to speak, she makes a sound, a little tsst, and then she waves him away. With no great ceremony, she dismisses him. “What does this mean?” The Egama shouts, taking a step towards her.
Her gaze moves to his and she says nothing. She doesn’t need to say anything.
The Egama roars, “You tell me that she is mine and now you take it back? Centare! I want to negotiate!”
She gives him a look that’s as cool as death and whispers, “This Lemoran does not negotiate. So negotiations are over.”
“Augh!” The Egama rages, smashing everything in his path on his way to the door before smashing that, too.
Meanwhile, the Lemoran says, “Go get the other clan chiefs. I need to speak with them.”
Igmora nods at the Lemoran and I feel understanding flit away from my thoughts, like dust in a storm. Igmora doesn’t take orders. Despite what she tells me, Igmora does not bend to the wills of any male. Not even Tyto. But now, she looks to Tyto and a tense, yet wordless communication passes between them very briefly before he turns, dismisses the Oosa and makes his way down the hall away from us.
The Lemoran looks over his shoulder at me. Well, he turns so that I can see his profile, but he only looks at me quickly before diverting his gaze back to the floor. “Are you okay?”
Nob. Absolutely not. Essmira is not freaking oh… “Yeffa, of course. You fought…admirably?”
He scowls again, face twisting up before he stomps towards Igmora and points at the door. “Hall,” he orders her. Nobody ever orders Igmora, but he does and she obeys and she smiles as she does. He follows her and they keep the door open. Still, through the stone wall, it’s difficult to hear what they say, especially when so little is said between them.
Maybe nothing at all.
Sometime later, new voices pop up. They sound…authoritative. They also sound…worried. I hear gasps — likely at the sight of the Lemoran, if I had to guess — and shouts — likely at Igmora, if I had to hope — before soft murmuring picks up and then Igmora’s voice generously coos, “Excellent doing business with you.”
Taken to Lemora Page 4