I open my fanny pack and bring out the rough knife I made in the weeks after Elle went over the cliff. The kind we humans are forbidden to have since us remaining weaponless was part of the New Terrhan accord. “…if I distract them.”
Zinnia immediately starts shaking her head. “No…no Kira. I’m not going. Not without you! Give me the knife. Let me distract them. I’m a cripple. My life is worth so much less than yours!”
I want to argue with her. Explain how her life is worth just as much if not more than mine. At least she’s capable of love. Not some bitter mess, who’d shivered—actually shivered—when that alien licked his tongue up her neck. Who still quivered, just thinking about it. And sometimes…sometimes even thought of touching herself.
Shame washes over me as I tell Zinnia. “I love you. If you love me, don’t make my death a waste. Hide. Hide and don’t let them get you.”
I don’t wait to hear her answer. There’s no time. Instead I cut west around the tree line, in the opposite direction of the hiding holes. Into a blur I could not possibly navigate without Zinnia’s help. I can only hope she does as instructed—saves herself and forgets about me.
I run and run and sooner than I’m expecting, I hear footsteps behind me. Thunderous as boots, though I remember the Xalthurian who grabbed me having bare feet.
They’re just that heavy I realize as I cut right into the forest, and then take another left, running through toward the dark, blurry distance, hoping the moonlight-blocking trees will slow him down.
They don’t.
Soon he’s right behind me, calling out to me in that low click-and-throat-scratch language, his tone a deliberate sing-song. The words are completely foreign, yet, somehow I understand exactly what he’s telling my back.
“I’m coming to get you. To breed you. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”
But fuck that…
I abruptly stop running and turn to face him, gripping my knife behind my back.
He stops, too. So close, I can see him clearly, even though the moonlight can only shine down in patches through the thick canvas of the woodland.
I recognize him in an instant, even though he does not look exactly the same. His pure white hair hangs down in a braid as opposed to tied up in a top knot. No golden breastplate uniform tonight either. In fact, his upper body is completely naked, moonlight glinting off the overlapping platelets the Xals call skin. Only a thin loincloth covers his bottom half.
And it is severely tented.
Fear rises, threatening to choke me. Yes, I know this Xalthurian. He’s the one I spat on. The one the diplomat had called Tel D’Rek with his eyes lowered, like the midnight blue alien was some kind of big deal.
Well, I don’t care who Tel D’Rek is. If I’m going down, it won’t be without a fight. I swallow my fear and face him fully.
He stills, his head tilting to the side with something like a smirk on his blue lips. His red eyes lock on my mouth, then he takes a step forward, clicking and throat scratching, as he speaks to me in a low, menacing tone.
It takes every ounce of pride not to turn tail and run again. He’s close … so close … and getting closer.
I hold my breath, partly to shut up my squealing heart, and partly to brace myself for what I’m going to do next. I’ve never hurt anyone before. Have never even wrung the neck of a Xalthurian chicken.
But when he takes another step toward me, I do it. Raise the knife and plunge it into his chest, stabbing him.
However, instead of staggering back, he merely flinches, his blue chest flexing, like he’s only been scratched. Then with a consternated look he reaches down and pulls my knife out of his chest. Like a toothpick, with just a trickle of what looks like black blood in the silvery moonlight.
My mind bellows with disbelief.
And then his hands are on me.
It’s a fight from the start. One I know I can’t possibly win. It would be easier to stop resisting, to become pliable and just hope to pass out.
But I can’t. My sister stepped into air, and I can’t let myself stop fighting.
I fight him with everything I have. Every single thing.
And it doesn’t matter one bit.
He captures my wrists in one hand and pins me under his heavy body with almost ludicrous ease. Even his cock seems to be holding me down. I can feel it long, thick and threatening against the triangle between my legs. Only a pair of underwear and the thin red bark pants my mother sewed by hand stand between my pussy and his cock.
I can feel his bare skin through my clothes. I’d thought it would be scaly, like the small red snakes, we have to watch out for when pulling water from New Terrhan’s sole river. But it’s more like leather. Tough and completely ungiving as he holds me down.
No…no…I won’t let him fuck me.
I squirm. As much as I can with what feels like at least four-hundred pounds of alien on top of me. It’s not much. But I try. I keep fighting, keep bucking my hips in a futile attempt to get him off, keep glaring defiantly into the black diamonds set inside red eyes.
He stares back. His red gaze narrowed with cold curiosity. Like I’m an experiment not quite going as expected. He probably wants me to cry, to scream and beg.
But I don’t. I won’t.
I keep on struggling and snarling, until…the fighting suddenly turns weird.
For some reason squirming and bucking my hips isn’t producing the reaction I want. In either of us. He doesn’t seem to be getting angrier and peculiar sensations start blossoming inside my body.
With my breasts smashed against his chest, my hips start bucking in a rhythm, trying to…I don’t know. I don’t’ know what I’m doing. But small whispers of pleasure spark between my legs, hinting at something bigger. Something I’ve never felt before. And those previously unknown sparks make me ache for more.
A moan escapes my mouth and the alien goes stiff on top of me. As if I’ve stabbed him again. There’s a beat of complete silence. The only thing I can hear is pigeons cooing in the trees.
Then suddenly he’s moving on top of me, his long, thick alien cock grinding against me in circles as I continue to buck.
The feeling this action produces between my legs—it’s indescribable. My pussy isn’t just aching now, it’s desperately seeking, throbbing as it bucks into the alien’s cock with a mind of its own.
Oh moons, oh moons…I know I should stop. Know that this has turned from fighting into…something else. Something I don’t understand.
But I can’t stop. Don’t stop. And neither does he. He drops his head into my shoulder, his voice clicking and scratching words I don’t understand into my ear, as his alien cock grinds into me, faster and faster, until…
We yell out at the same time, both sounding the exact same kind of shocked despite our opposite languages. My body quakes, as an explosion of pleasure unfolds inside of me, and his body stills, right before something hot and liquid spills above my crotch, saturating the front of my pants.
I stare at him, my heart beating wildly in my chest.
He stares back at me, looking just as surprised.
For a moment, I want to smile at him. Want to laugh, because moons, I’ve never felt anything like that in my entire life.
But then my body stops buzzing and the pleasure ebbs, allowing reality to sink in like a shadow.
What just happened? What did we do? What did I do?
“Let me up,” I tell him. When he doesn’t lift, I start frantically struggling underneath him, crazed with sick shame. How could I have done that? Willingly? With a Xalthurian? “Let me up, you pigeon shit alien. Let me up now!”
He doesn’t let me up. Instead his face goes from pleased to grim and then I feel something circular press into my neck.
What the …?
My eyes fall closed before I can even finish the thought. The whole world turning to black.
4
Kira
I surge awake, completely naked, and lying on
some kind of soft mat. In a place the exact opposite of the red woods.
Everything on my planet can be traced back to nature or some kind of human process. We live in houses made of red clay, and every stick of furniture we have is made by hand, often with wood sourced from the forest. We pound red bark to make our clothes either with a thread and needle or with a loom that was, you guessed it, also made by our own hands.
Metal is precious. Mined carefully from an iron deposit we found a couple of years after crash landing, then put through an age old melting process before getting poured into red clay molds for everything from eating ware to drainage pipes and plows. Point to anything on New Terrhan and I’d be able to tell you exactly how it was made and a lot of times, who made it.
Oh, those chicken houses? Yeah…I watched my dad and a bunch of other villagers cut down two whole trees to make them, while my mom and her friends took small branches from the tree and weaved them into a fence around the main coop.
But the place I wake up in…I don’t even think there are words in New Terrhan to describe this room. It’s like somebody decided to design a bathroom after binging the entire run of my dad’s favorite entertainment, Dragon Shifters in Space.
Everything was made of some material that looked like gray iron fused with gold. That metal we mined so carefully before using every single scrap? It’s been tossed around here, embedded in the floors the walls—even the doors were made up of diagonal panes of Xalthurian gold.
And did I mention that I woke up in a bathroom that appears to lay inside an actual residence? What the hell?
I’d only ever seen inside bathrooms in entertainments prior to this. There wasn’t enough iron in the one deposit we found on New Terrhan for luxuries like indoor pipes, and we didn’t have the tools to break the colony ship down into parts.
Zinnia and I had once gone on a trip to see the old showers in our crashed ship, but it had felt like visiting what the old planet entertainments would have called a museum. I seriously don’t remember a time when I didn’t bathe, pee, and defecate outside.
But apparently, that isn’t the case here. Not only does this bathroom have a Xalthurian gold-encrusted toilet, but also a bath that looked more like what I’d heard referred to as a swimming pool in the old planet entertainments.
Where in the moons am I? I mean, this couldn’t have possibly been the breeding ship, could it? Elle had said it was only one room with nothing in it but randy aliens. Also, if I am not on New Terrhan what must my parents be thinking? They must be out of their minds with worry, having lost one daughter already. And…and wait a minute. Wait a damn old planet minute!
How am I seeing all of this? I blink, then try again, and yep, even though this room is crazy large—like a good five or six red clay houses could fit inside it large—I can see every aspect of it, down to the tiny insignias in each corner of the farthest wall.
My eyesight. It isn’t just better, but as far as I can see between disbelieving blinks, perfect bordering on bionic.
But how?
As if in answer to my question, a voice says, “Oh good, she’s awake.”
I look up to see what must be two Xalthurian females coming toward me. They are both much shorter than the alien that felled me in the red woods, and their jewel tones come off as prettier somehow. Shinier and even brighter. They have lustrous hair tied back in simple braids. And they are both extremely slender, wearing jumpsuits that mold to their stick-thin bodies.
Speaking of clothing…I look around for some kind of blanket to cover up my nakedness, only to discover there isn’t one. Maybe because the room is perfectly warm without one. This place feels like how tropical destinations looked in the old planet entertainments.
Still, I would have traded the pleasant heat for a little bit of not sitting around naked while two fully dressed Xalthurian females approach me.
I stand up anyway, bracing myself for a fight, even though I’m naked and weaponless.
But the women just stop right in front of me, their diamond eyes lit up with curiosity as they click and scratch.
“My look at her mammary glands. They are so very large! See the way they hang off her chest?”
“And her body…have you ever seen one so stumpy and large? Her stomach pooches out and look at her wide hips!”
“No wonder the hu’man females are said to be so good at becoming pregnant and giving birth.”
I cover my breasts as the women titter, shocked by their blatant observations, and even more so by the fact that… “I can understand you? How can I understand you?”
The ridges on the nose of the bright yellow one quiver. “Why is she covering her large mammary glands? Is it possible that she understands us?”
“Oh, yes, I meant to tell you. Before you arrived for your shift, the Kel ordered the medic to give her a translator, so that she might better understand his orders,” the lovely amethyst one answers. “Also, her genetic deficiencies were fixed so that they will not be passed on to our Tel.”
Genetic deficiencies? Is that their way of saying my vision was fixed on a genetic level, so that I wouldn’t pass bad eyesight on to the baby of the blue alien who kidnapped me? Another, even more upsetting question occurs to me before I can finish pondering that notion…
“Wait a minute, you could have given us humans translators all this time, but you didn’t?”
They stare at me blankly for a moment. Then the amethyst one says, “I wonder what her strange throat words mean. She seems rather upset.”
Rather upset would be the understatement of the millennia. These bitches did not give me a translator and not bother to get one for themselves. And then strip me naked and do moons knows what else.
I look down at my body to check for further modifications and let out a shocked squeak.
The fine black hairs that used to hang out in a thatch over my pussy are gone. The hair on my legs, my pits, and oh moons, even my forearms has also disappeared. I’m bare. Completely bare. I can’t find a speck of hair anywhere on my body—oh no, please tell me they didn’t…
Fear surging through me, I pat the upper part of my face and the top of my head, then let out a sigh of relief. Thank the moons, my brows are still there, along with my afro. Though it’s no longer in a puff, and it feels even softer than it used to, as if someone hit it with several bottles of conditioner while I slept.
“I think perhaps she is upset about the removal of her fur,” the citrine one says to her co-worker.
“Why would she be upset about Kel D’Rek not liking it and ordering it removed?” the amethyst one asks haughtily. “She should be grateful to be rid of that unsightly fur.”
Kel D’Rek. Not Tel, but close enough that I knew they had to be speaking of the alien who’d jumped me in the woods. “Why is Kel D’Rek allowed to tell you what to do with my body?” I demand. “And why am I even here and not back at my settlement? Surely my three hours are done.”
Their blank stares remind me that—dammit—they still can’t understand me.
“Come we must prepare her for our Kel or S’Lei will have our braids,” the amethyst one says, pulling me toward a little glass room on the back wall. It looks like one of the colony ship showers, but much, much larger.
I soon find out that the swimming pool in the middle of this inside bathroom might be just that. The Xalthurians clean themselves by means of solar radiation. I know this because I can hear the two Xalthurians gossiping while the glass room hits me with waves of heat. “I heard the New Terrhans use water to bathe themselves. How disgusting! Could you ever imagine growing up without access to gamma rays?”
There are more comparisons where that came from as they groom me after the heat shower.
“I heard the humans make their own fabrics out of bark,” Amethyst says to Citrine as they dress me in a silky soft robe. By this point, I’ve decided to start calling them by their gemstone names since they’ve yet to tell me their names…or address me directly.
“I h
ear they purposefully cut their nails for farm work, instead of shaving them into talons,” Citrine says, as she does the best she could to make points on my short, ragged nails.
“Do you think all of her kind have hair like this?” Amethyst ask while they’re trying to figure out how to get a ribbon laced with gemstones around my huge afro. “It reminds me of the bushes in the palace gardens. How does she even groom it—oh I think she’s upset again. Better hold her down.”
Unfortunately, along with being non-stop gossip machines, Amethyst and Citrine are twice as strong as me. No matter how angry I get at their rudeness, I can’t fight them off.
I don’t discover that we’re not on a ship until I’m brought into a room they call a sleeping suite. And, oh my moons, it’s even more decadent than the inside toilet and bath room. Most of the floor are covered in gem-colored pillows and gold mats. Like the one I’d woken up on, but even softer. I find that out when Amethyst and Citrine position me like a marionette doll on my hands and knees.
“Our Kel will be told you are ready for him and then will come to you soon after. You are to stay in this position to receive him,” Amethyst says, addressing me directly for the first time.
Then Citrine adds, “I have heard that humans are quite weak. If your arms grow tired, drop to your forearms but you must present for mounting when he comes into the room.”
Fuck that noise all the way to the moons and back.
I might have told them exactly what they could do with their mounting instructions, but I’m too busy staring at what looks like a vast palace garden, with a plethora of swaying white frond palm trees and a gorgeous array of colorful flowers and black bushes that…okay, well might sort of look similar to my afro.
But as pretty as the garden is, I’m completely focused on what I can now clearly see on its outer edges. A city, gleaming and bright.
5
D’Rek
Kel D'Rek; His To Claim Page 4