by Elise Jae
Alien Captive
Elise Jae
Contents
Chapter 1
RISK
CHRISTINA
Chapter 2
CHRISTINA
RISK
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
RISK
ARC
Chapter 5
SHOCK
Chapter 6
RISK
Chapter 7
ARC
Chapter 8
CHRISTINA
Chapter 9
CHRISTINA
Chapter 10
CHRISTINA
Chapter 11
RISK
Chapter 12
ARC
Chapter 13
CHRISTINA
RISK
Chapter 14
ARC
Epilogue
Thanks!
Also by Elise Jae
About the Author
One
ARC
The sky is just starting to turn that particular color of yellow. I think I’d heard it called goldenrod once.
Dawn is minutes away, and soon, I’ll have to go back. Have to face the inevitable. Because today is the day one, or both of them, makes me say, outright, that I’m leaving.
Risk might have an eerie sort of foresight, but it doesn’t take a supernatural gift to know what’s coming.
Maybe I’ve made it worse by avoiding them.
Pausing to watch that quiet dawn break, I can’t help but remind myself it’s one of the things I’m best at: ignoring a problem until there’s no choice but to burn it all down.
A piercing sound splits the morning sky, and I look up as fire and smoke paint a dark gash across that golden air. The ship leading that trail isn’t going to make it.
I’ve never seen anything so mangled… so crumpled.
It looks like it’s had its nose punched in.
Lifting my scope I see I’m wrong. Its nose was pulled inward.
Implosion, not impact.
But it will get the latter soon enough.
It’s not one of the Agency’s ships—thank the Saints. It’s not military… and it’s definitely not a pleasure craft. A cargo hauler, surely.
It’s rapid descent hasn’t put out the fire. If anything, it’s fueled those flames.
An explosion tears out the back of the ship and thicker, darker plumes of smoke billow from it as it hurtles toward me.
All I can do is watch.
Wait for it to skim overtop of me and follow it to wherever it crashes. See if anyone survives.
The ship starts to break apart… no, that’s not right. I pull up my scope.
A piece detached.
An escape pod.
But only one.
And a ship of that size would require a minimum of ten crew members.
The pod’s parachute opened, the wind caught. It had launched too close to the ground, and it hit like a bomb, spraying snow and rock into the air .
But the ship, still streaking through the atmosphere, catches my eye, and I stand frozen as I watch it catch a wing on a jagged spire and spiral the final thousand feet of its demise..
When it hits, the ground shaking beneath me, I turn back to the pod.
It’s not a hard calculation to make.
It’s closer, and if the occupant survived. They might not be equipped to make it through an early morning in the ice.
Kicking my bike into gear, I turn toward the pod first. The crash can wait—I’d be amazed if there’s more than smoldering bodies inside.
The wind cuts a little chiller as I speed over the rise and down into the valley where the pod hit.
It’s half buried, beneath the snow it sent flying into the air, and the rocky ground beneath it looks like a black scar against the ice.
Whoever is in there hasn’t popped it open, and I barely take the time to kill my engine before I’m off it, climbing up and onto the pod.
I bang against the housing. “Anyone in there?”
No answer.
There is, however, an external emergency release.
It takes a minute and a half to clear the snow. To pull the locking mechanisms out and find the handle.
Yanking on it, I put all my weight into levering the thing open. It doesn’t budge.
And then it does.
But it only opens a fraction of an inch before the handle breaks and I’m sent flying backward into the snow.
“Saints.” My muttered word disappears into the frozen morning air as I pull myself back upright and reach for that sliver of an opening.
Some part of the hinging mechanism was damaged. I wasn’t getting any help from the engineer, or the Saints themselves.
The metal is freezing, but I barely feel it as I tear the cover open.
The interior is like a geode. The casing designed to wrap around its occupant barely lets the morning in past the gel cushion padding and I have to lean fully in to even tell there’s actually someone in it.
And there is….
I don’t know what I was expecting, but a woman was not it.
Light hair has fallen over her face like a veil, and her soft lips are parted… just enough that the strand laying overtop flutter with each breath.
Thank the Saints.
I brush her hair away, and look down at the face of an angel who’s just been dropped straight into hell.
Whoever she is, she was shoved into the pod. They didn’t even buckle her down.
And the gash on her forehead is bleeding.
Fuck.
I pull her out.
Can’t wait for a monster to catch her scent and descend.
She’s out cold, and I’m not sure if it would be better or worse if I tried to wake her at this point.
If I had an outer layer to put on her, I would have wrapped her up, but there’s nothing to take off other than the protective layer of second-skin-like suit.
And there’s nothing in the pod with her.
Dragging her up onto the bike with me, I try to take more care than whoever it was that shoved her into that pod. But she’s limp, dead weight and limbs flailing when I pick her up too fast, move her too sharply.
I forget how fragile humans are. None of the ones I’ve encountered have been this… helpless.
But once I have her secure—have her snug against me—her loose limbs bundled up tight, I don’t want to let her go.
Kicking the bike to life, I head back toward the outpost, the smoldering wreck sending billowing darkness into the sky.
Someone might need help, but with her in my arms… I can’t risk it.
Tapping the comm bud in my ear, I wait as the call connects to the outpost.
It takes less than five seconds.
“What’s up?” Shock asks, his voice is thick and groggy. I can imagine him rubbing sleep from his eyes.
“Did you happen to notice the ship that just crashed in our backyard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Get out of bed and go to the Saints damned window.”
“Holy—” Shock’s curse is cut off. “Do you need an assist?”
“I don’t, but if there are any other survivors, they might.”
“Other survivors, I’m looking at the sensor array and you’re nowhere near the crash.”
“A woman dropped out in an escape pod. I’ve got her, but she’s bleeding and I can’t risk keeping her out here.”
There’s a beat of silence, and when he speaks again, there’s a t
remor of terror in the words. “It’s an Agency ship?”
“I don’t think so. It doesn’t look like any ship I’ve—”
The explosion is deafening. I skid the bike to a halt and turn back.
What remains—amid the fire and smoke—has carved out a crater, a clear indicator that the woman in my lap is the only one who made it out alive.
“Call Drift, have the others take care of it. You, Shock and I have something more important to deal with right now.”
“You need us both to help you with a lone survivor.”
“When you see her… you’ll understand.” Because the woman in my arms is perfection.
Disconnecting, I shift her closer to me. Hoping the heat my body puts off will be enough to get her home safely.
Our outpost is the furthest East, it’s the largest, and it’s the only one of those surrounding the caldera that isn’t heated by geothermal pools.
She might be better off at one of the others.
But I won't let anyone else touch her.
The garage door is still shutting behind me, my bike still grumbling with the last strains of its power as I lift her from it and turn toward the open door where Risk and Shock are waiting.
“We have the diagnostic machine ready.” Risk says, holding the door wide.
Neither of them try to take her from me.
They both know better.
Following me through the dark compound, Shock asks questions I have no answers to.
The lower levels are a maze, but I walk them on autopilot. How many times have I had to make my way down here by feel, half torn open or with blood in my eyes?
I thank the Saints she’s relatively unharmed. Pray to each and every one of them that there’s nothing worse lurking beneath her soft, slack features.
“Did you try waking her up?”
I look back at Shock, not annoyed, just… tired. “I haven’t exactly tried to keep her asleep.”
Risk’s jaw ticks as he silently goes to the readout panel and calibrates the machine.
When I lay her down, a halo of blue light forms over her, and I fight the feeling of mites under my skin.
She looks dead.
Even thinking it twists my stomach.
Burbling from the screen distracts me, but not enough to look away from her.
Risk face rarely betrays him, but I see him scowl out of the corner of my periphery as he grabs the skin patch for her forehead. “It’s no wonder they shoved her in and she didn’t strap herself in before they pushed her out. She’s been drugged. But otherwise, there’s nothing to worry about. She’ll probably have bruises from the landing and be groggy as hell when she wakes.”
“If she was drugged,” I say, not sure if this is better or worse. “it’s definitely not the Agency.”
Shock is shaking his head. He moves beside the table, squatting down so he’s eye to closed eye with her. “Who else would have a human woman on a ship?”
“We’ll have to wait until she wakes up to find out.”
“If she wakes up.” Shock looks at me, a warning in his gaze. One I’m not willing to accept.
“She will.” Risk says it with the same surety he approaches everything with. “The Saints wouldn’t have dropped her on our doorstep, only to snatch her away again.”
It takes me a few minutes to place her. To figure out why she's familiar.
And it's because the place I've seen here is the last that I'd expect.
She's Jessica's sister.
My brother's bondmate—the one who hates me, and rightfully so. But I don't want that to taint how the others interact with her. So I keep that to myself. I need them to see her—to meet her—without that shadow.
RISK
The woman on the bed is… soft.
We live in a world of hard, sharp, jagged things, and my first instinct is to get her out of here. To send her far away where she won’t be hurt any more than she already has.
But there’s a tug that’s stronger. A feeling in my gut that tells me that is the worst thing I could do for us.
Not just Arc, but all three of us.
Maybe it’s selfish, but the desire to keep her wars with the desire to protect her from this life we lead, and I don’t know which will win.
Arc won’t let us touch her. He hasn’t stated it outright, but we both know him, so neither Shock nor I try.
It’s why I’ve chosen to take a place apart from them, holding up the wall by the door. Because I want to move to the other side of the bed. I want to sit on the other side of her, to try to help keep her warm simply by proximity.
But Arc has that covered.
I’ve never met another man so large and yet so gentle. He cradles her head like an infant as he lifts her from the diagnostic bed. “I don’t want her waking up in here, especially if something happens and one of us can’t be there.”
He means, if we have to head out into the snow to deal with one of the monsters… a monster that would have killed her in an instant if it had found her before Arc.
She was lucky.
I can’t help but wonder if we were luckier.
“And she’ll need a mountain of blankets if we don’t want her to freeze.”
It’s the first time in forever that I’ve worried about the fact our home has no heating. The first time it’s ever mattered.
“We’ll put her in your room,” I say looking at Arc, at the way he’s looking at her. “It’s closest to the main part of the house. And you can sleep with me tonight.”
Somehow, I don’t think he’s going to spend the night out in the caldera, running away from whatever it is that has him avoiding us.
He nods, and I turn, knowing he’ll follow.
Arc’s room is also the cleanest of the three occupied bedrooms in the house. When he lays her down, pulling off shoes that were not meant for snow, I watch, keeping my distance from both of them, as Shock hurries through the house, collecting every blanket we own—I’m not sure it’s enough.
Together, he and Arc bundle her up.
“Are you okay?” I ask, when Arc doesn’t immediately stand, eyes still locked on her face.
“She’s special. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. I just know she is.”
I don’t agree. Not yet. But I don’t argue either.
We lapse into silence, and she moves… just a little bit. Snuggling her cheek against the blanket with a soft breath of a sigh.
“We should call for Cindy.” Shock has already started for the living room.
“No.” I catch him by the arm, shaking my head. “Arc’s right. Something’s… different about this. We need to keep her here and out of sight until we have a little more information.”
“A feeling?” As with every time he’s asked that in the past. Shock’s face tightens, his spine straightens, and there’s a fight in his stance.
He’s not squaring up against me. He’s squaring up for me. Ready to take on anyone who might let superstition get in the way of logic… even when he doesn’t need to.
I nod, they’ve always accepted these feelings before. I know they will now.
We’ve been losing Arc for a while. I won’t do anything to drive him further away. And he might not be able to leave her side because of the pull she has on him. But I feel it too. I know Shock does as well.
A tone echoes in the distance. And I know it’s the inevitable. “I’ll go. Yell for me if she wakes up.”
Answering the call fills one wall of our living room with Drift’s face.
The head of the Shadow Zone Brotherhood scowls at me, larger than life.
And I see the movement of his bondmate behind him.
I’d much rather be talking to her. Of the two of them. She’s the more rational.
I wave away his recriminations before he has a chance to get them out.
“We were going to call it in.” I look out the plate glass windows to the plume of billowing smoke and sit, a coil of dread tightening in my stomach. “
But a complication arose that we had to take care of first.”
“Is everyone alright?”
If she hadn’t gotten out—no, if someone hadn’t gotten her out….
“The three of us are. There was a survivor.” I don’t know why, but for the first time in my life I feel compelled to lie to him—or at least omit a very pertinent fact. “They are alive, minimal damage from the crash. Our med scanner confirmed they’re stable. A lone escape pod jettisoned and Arc was in position to get to them.”
“Out on his never ending patrols?” Drift’s brow raises, and I know he wants to scold me again. Know he wants to get me to agree to reel him back in.
As if I could.
“It was a routine perimeter check of our sector.” I glance toward the back, hoping she doesn’t wake up before I can end this. “He witnessed the explosion of the ship. It was clear there would be no other survivors. We’ll go survey the rest of the damage shortly.”
“Okay. I’ve managed to convince the governing board to keep the news outlets at bay. The last thing any of us wants is a random reporter being killed by one of the monsters. Keep me updated on your patient and let me know when he’s able to be moved. I’m sure he’ll be better served in one of the hospitals. As for the crash. I’ll head out that way myself once we’re done here. We need to figure out how this is going to affect the caldera, and who we need to get out here to deal with it.”
He nods, a curt dip of his head and disconnects. The crash won’t be our problem anymore.
Sitting on our couch, I look back toward that dark hallway, to where my best friends and a sleeping mystery woman exist in a sort of silence that fills me with both hope and dread.
Had I told Drift about her, he would have descended on us, his bondmate and possibly other members of the Shadow Zone Brotherhood in tow.
