Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II)

by Elizabeth Stephens

  Silence. No one tries to pull me back in. No one comes out to sacrifice themselves at my side. Thud. The quiet is punctuated by the boot. It has to be a boot because it’s too heavy, too forceful, to be anything else. I’ve never seen one of the Sasor in real life, but I’ve heard stories of their size. People likening them to houses and hilltops and boulders.

  I press my forehead to the gritty, bowled surface of the ceramic cask in front of me as I wait for the world to settle. I take in one last deep, quiet breath as finally, the storage room door is forced open with a contained crack. There’s a precipitous hush at my spine until the leaden gait of a Sasori barbarian ruins it. I clench. I focus. My head spins. I nearly pass out. Fear or hunger? He’s right on me now.

  The little hope I had, more delicate than a flower, slimmer than a knife’s blade, recently whetted, is filched away from me when the enormous ceramic cask is lifted from the packed earthen ground and gently set aside. I don’t move, frozen where I’m sitting cross-legged between two other casks, the curtain at my back, cold packed earth under my bottom. Goosebumps break out over my arms as I look up into his face.

  He blinks — from the side — and when he does, his already dark irises darken further, becoming the shadowed side of a fray leaf, glittering emerald, but sticky and thorned. I shudder and quickly look away, sweeping my gaze over the rest of him. He wears leather plating over his right shoulder and arm, and has similar leather pieces covering his legs, but beneath that, he is all corded muscle heaped onto an enormous frame. His skin is a lighter bronze than mine is, but his hair…his hair is shocking. It’s gold. It drapes almost to his waist on the right side, while the left is cropped close to his scalp. Against the honey of his skin, it looks…it looks like he’s a male fashioned by the sun in its own image. Pretty, even if nothing else about him is. He’s far too brutal-looking for that.

  He’s got a scar that twists from his cheekbone, disrupting his hairline to follow the serrated line of his ear. He doesn’t have an earlobe. His jaw is hard. His eyes are mean.

  Without warning, he bends down and slides a massive hand through my hair. A shocking surge of laughter rises in my chest that the heat of his gaze makes it possible to overcome. He’s a breath away from me now, completely bent over so that I can’t see anything behind him. We’re face-to-face, nearly nose-to-nose. I inhale. He smells like fresh cut grass and sweat. He smells like blood above all else.

  His hands comb across my scalp in a way that’s nearly intimate, until the gesture changes from one light caress to the next, becoming feral as he fists my hair and yanks me to my feet. My limbs uncurl like they’re boneless and when he sets me down I can hardly stay upright. Fear and hunger war with the adrenaline, which wins out. I plant my feet and inhale blood, wood, metal and leather and I don’t exhale. Can’t exhale. Not when I take in the size of the alien in front of me.

  His shoulders span mine three times over and his chest is as deep as my shoulders are broad. He’s three heads higher than I am, maybe more. All I know is that I have to crane my neck way back to hold his gaze. And I do hold his gaze. I hold his gaze like my life depends on it, watching as the color shifts again, darkening until it’s so black I can see through it to the depths of the universe.

  What a funny way to go. Shipped from settlement to settlement, never staying in one long enough to find friends or family or roots. About to be killed by an alien barbarian with the universe in his eyes because a woman was nice to me once and told me funny stories about the universe. I exhale, ready, and smile.

  But when his face-sized palm charges towards me again, it isn’t to reach out and snap my neck or sever my spine. The brute is reaching straight for…straight for my breast! Instincts kick in and I give the back of his hand a decisive swat.

  Shock.

  I jump three feet out of my skin. I just swatted him. The cannibal barbarian. I meet his gaze and hold and watch as the most terrifying thing of all happens. His lips…they curl up, parting to reveal a flash of perfectly white, square teeth. This cannibal barbarian is smiling at me.

  I jerk back, stumbling into the ceramic cask. I reach out to catch it, but he’s already there, one hand on the side, the other holding the lid in place. He rights the cannister slowly without releasing me from his gaze. It tracks my hand when I touch my chest, where I’m trying to steady the erratic raging of my own heart, which is trying to get away, despite the fact that the rest of me is rooted in place.

  Cask settled, he reaches for my palm and, catching it, tosses it aside with such force I stumble again. What’s he doing? He’s looking at my…buttons. They’re giant mismatched buttons that look like the buttons on doll clothes — some that I think actually did come from the dolls’ clothes of the highborn mistresses — and he’s inspecting them with an expression that suggests they just insulted his dead mother. And then he lifts a single finger and I watch in fascination and horror as a sharp, serrated point grows from the tip of his nail. A finger long at its longest, he brings that freshly formed claw down in one swift motion and slices through the loose thread anchoring my top button.

  Given that I’m down to three buttons, that small act of destruction has cataclysmic consequences. My shirt falls open to the naval, exposing my bony ribcage and small breasts. I tell my body to grab it and hold it closed! But my body does something else.

  I slap him.

  I rocket four feet into the air instead of the meager three I shot up the first time. When I land, I forget about the shirt. My arms are frozen away from my body, waiting for him to slice me open as quickly and easily as he did that piece of thread. Waiting for him to eat me or at least, subdue me — the preferred Sasor torture. Maybe while he prepares the human stew, I can get away.

  I wait. And I’m left waiting.

  Because he touches his cheek, blinks many times in that strange alien way, then his lips peel back and he laughs. He laughs so full and from the belly it makes razorblades appear in mine. I can’t remember ever hearing anybody laugh like that. And he’s a barbarian cannibal alien.

  I jump again, shocked, when his laughter dies and he fixes me with green eyes that are both condescending and indulgent. He shakes his head, grabs my arm and starts dragging me towards the door.

  He says something to me. It sounds playful, but he could just as easily be telling me that it’s time to be disemboweled now.

  “Okay,” I answer, knowing that whatever he means, I don’t exactly have a choice in it.

  He grunts out another laughter-like snort, but just as we reach the door, I hear a slight cough behind me. I freeze. He freezes. He looks over his shoulder and his eyes meet mine and when he shakes his head so slow like that, the long tresses of his wavy hair tickle my bare arm.

  “Tokan, ya reesa, teka annak,” he says, and though I don’t know the words, all I can think in response is, shit.

  Neyehuu

  “Tokan, ya reesa, teka annak,” I tell her. Close, but not enough. I call her ya reesa, a title of honor when intended, and when sneered, a title of disrespect. Perhaps I use a little of both here when I call her brave. Little brave one. She is to defy me as she’s done. I just didn’t realize how brave until this moment.

  How clever too.

  She nearly succeeded in distracting me, and if not for the foolishness of the humans behind the curtain, she would have.

  I look upon the gaunt, sallow faces of the humans in hiding. They are each as poorly clothed as she is, and so thin as to be considered starved by Sasor standards. Slaves. Reesa is certainly one, even if her coloring would be considered rare among the united tribes.

  Like raw bronze, she is both red and gold and the same time. She shines, even in this dim, dusky cellar, illuminated only by the outside light filtering in through uneven slats in the walls. Similar though our colors may be, that is where our likeness ends. She is a puny, runty little thing with bones like reeds and strange eyes that are dark and blink up and down instead of side-to-side. Human, a species I have encountered before, t
hough never as the leader of my tribe. It’s considered a great success to come across a human tribe and decimate them. Their females are compatible with our species and their males weak. I don’t know if I’ve seen one before though that was this pretty, funny eyes and all. She is watching me with those eyes now, as if waiting for something.

  Typically, I would have rutted her by now and there is no question — I will rut this little reesa. Her matted hair, a color I have not often seen before except on other humans, the stench of her unwashed and threadbare clothing, and the smudges of dirt and ash on her skin are nowhere near enough to deter me — however, curiosity compels me to push back my need.

  “You want them to live, ya reesa?” I know she does not understand my words, so I show her what I mean. I lift a hand again for her breast but she angles away from me, shielding herself with that filthy rag I mean to tear from her body.

  She says a word in a language she knows I do not speak. She shakes her head for added meaning.

  “Tszk,” I say, though why I tell her the word she needs to deny me, I have no idea.

  Irritated with myself, I flit away her hand when she tries to block mine, and mold my palm to her chest. I lift, admiring the weight of her small tit in my palm. It’s larger than it should be given that I can see the bones of her chest through her skin, and the bones of her ribs. Her hip bones are likely to be just as prominent, and it doesn’t matter. I want to see them too.

  Her jaw sets, the black dots in the center of her light eyes contract. She pries my fingers away from her tunic and shakes her head just once, firmly. She says her strange alien word again.

  “Yena,” I answer. This is a better word. One she will get accustomed to saying to me, once she realizes who I am.

  She does not break. I do not move. We stare one another down, not a word said between us. I think it surprises her as much as me that I am the one to cede first. Irritated, I am ready to return to my men and my dolsk. I glance meaningfully at her people, huddling against one another, trying not to meet my gaze at all costs. Funny, that they cower when she does not.

  Reaching among the mass of their bodies, I grab the first human I see. A female. I assume she is older for the shriveled way her skin clings to her frame. She has thick grey hair tied away from her face. Her lower lip quivers and she says something to the reesa that makes her wince.

  Reesa looks from the woman to me. An expression of pain crosses her face. She takes a half step towards me that surprises me again. She holds her wrists out between us, revealing their slightly paler insides. She is covered in black markings, sketches drawn all over her skin that will not fade. We don’t have this tradition in my dolsk, none of the united tribes do. But on this little reesa, I find them beautiful. Though dozens of small patterns and markings are scattered over her arms and shoulders, for now she’s focused on thin, black rings just below her palms. The lines are straight, but incomplete. A small gap of clear skin tantalizes me, making me want to rub my thickest finger over it.

  She speaks to me then in sentences. When I don’t answer, she repeats what she has said, shaking her wrists slightly for emphasis. I don’t understand her. Holding the older human by the upper arm, I again feel the front of reesa’s chest, making it clear what I want. What is at stake should she refuse.

  Her mouth turns down. She breaks my gaze and looks to the female. She is weighing her options. Deciding her price. And when, with the slight lowering of her chin, she agrees to pay it, but I don’t feel the satisfaction I thought I might. Her shoulders cave, making this already slight female seem almost insignificant. Swirling shadows, where before she was pure light.

  I catch her wrist as she turns from me, my gaze roaming over the markings there and wondering about their significance. So many mysteries, beginning with why this little reesa denies me.

  “Tszk,” I tell her finally.

  She blinks at me, her expression hollow. Lost. A deep chasm opens up at the sight of it, and I feel, for the span of a heartbeat, her mirrored emotions even though I have never felt them myself before. She is utterly transparent and through her, I can see and feel and experience everything. Beneath my true form skin, my manerak stirs slowly, as if waking up from a deep sleep.

  I squeeze her breast roughly and say, “Tszk.” I let her go immediately, dropping the other human female’s arm as well. I push the older female slightly back andthe curtain shut between us so that I can no longer see the human slaves, the alien barbarians.

  Understanding flits across her face. She smiles at me. Her teeth are white and straight in her small mouth, except for two on the bottom row which overlap a little. She doesn’t have any fangs to speak of. Just reeds for bones and smiles in her eyes. Why does she smile at me when I have taken her kingdom? Mysteries. Interest. She has mine. All of it, for this fleeting moment. I know it will fade — she is a slave and slaves come and go — but for now I’m content to smile back and watch her full lips peel part so I can see all her teeth. Her eyes glitter. She is radiant light once more.

  Dangerous. My manerak is fully awake now, needling the underside of my skin. But I ignore it, just like I ignore any thoughts of danger in her presence. She’s just a puny little human to be taken, rutted and forgotten. There’s no danger here.

  “Strena,” I tell her. Come.

  Her head tilts to the side, unwashed hair falling around her shoulders in matted locks. Her thin fingers still clutch her tunic together, but they no longer tremble. She glances to the heavy mud cloth hiding her humans from view. I shake my head. “Tszk.” I snatch up her wrist, which is thinner than the hilt of my sword and far easier to break, and lay her palm against my chest, where the leather does not bind it. There are rough calluses on her fingertips, but her palms are soft and dry, despite the humidity of this dank, disgusting place.

  She shakes her head. I nod. Her eyes grow large in her face, making her look like she will soon transform. Based on what I saw of the warriors, these humans have no such ability. When she doesn’t take on her manerak skin, I take it that she is the same as the others. Utterly transparent. Totally defenseless. And mine for the taking.

  I pull her roughly out of the smallest room, through the next room and finally into the main area of this shack. There, Dandena and Mor are busy brawling over a golden crown they found hidden in an ale cask. They tower over me in their manerak skins until, seeing me, they shed them and return to their true forms.

  The human in my grip tugs pitifully on my arm, trying to free herself. I wonder if she has never seen manerak before and imagine it must be a frightening sight for her if she hasn’t. I wrench her forward and her heat crashes into me. She’s so warm. I’d think her feverish if she showed any other signs of it.

  Mor licks his lips and takes a step towards us, his gaze locked on her in a way that makes my skin prickle. My gaze focuses on him, becoming sharp, lethal. Manerak. “What do you have there?” He says with a cocky sway of his hips. The crown forgotten, he takes a step forward.

  “Found her hiding,” I answer with a grin.

  “Was she alone?”

  “Yena,” I lie.

  “Then there is only one to be had.”

  “Yena.”

  He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, smearing blood of dead humans across his face. “I’d like to have her.”

  I laugh. “Come on then.”

  Mor’s thick eyebrows fade back into his skin the moment the challenge is accepted. The corners of his mouth stretch back towards his hairline and I feel my pulse hammer, manerak unreasonably thrilled as it expands and elongates in response.

  The little reesa jolts beside me when my shoulders begin to swell and my thighs thicken and lengthen. Already hunched over her, soon I tower. The uncomfortable wooden roof is no match for my manerak’s size. It sizzles beneath my skin, aching with a tension that feels different than it usually does though I’m damned to put my finger on it. All I know is that my manerak is eager. I feel my brow bone flatten, my eyes expand, my pupils
slit. My fangs come down to shield my teeth and I only release reesa when I feel claws claim my all ten of my fingertips. From between my forked tongues, I issue a hiss.

  Mor tosses his crown aside and charges and though he is one of my best fighters, he is still no match for me. I am First of my tribe. I wonder if his heightened bloodlust is the reason that he issues this challenge — one we both know he’s going to lose — or if it has something to do with the slave beside me. Can he also see her radiance? The thought grates. My manerak seethes.

  She jerks wildly now, frightened and that only ratchets up my pulse. My forked tongues loll out of my mouth, tasting the air she creates. Something sour and sticky, like the tart rathra leaves used by our woodsmiths, and beneath it something sweet that makes the first wave of bitterness possible to overcome. Blossoms. The nectar of the carnivorous egra flowers. Beautiful. Dangerous. I release her fully and with a gentle push against her thin chest, guide her behind me so that I can have both hands free when I meet Mor in a clash of thunder and violence.

  There are no weapons in a challenge, so he swipes for me with his claws. He is a smaller male both in his true form and in his manerak, but his strength lies in his speed. He spins away from me as I block and comes in below my arm, attempting to switch around me and bring himself closer to reesa.

  My manerak call reverberates deep in my chest, causing my whole body to tremble with its might. I bring my foot down on his thigh, stopping his path. I swing my fist around to meet his cheek, drawing blood. He rises with a hiss, claw raking my ribs as he spins out of my grasp.

  My manerak skin stretches, becoming broader with the tangy scent of his blood — and mine. The other warriors back to the very edges of the room, dragging casks of ale that they want to preserve with them. I attack first this time, moving straight through a flimsy piece of wood these humans once used for a table. As it disintegrates to dust beneath me, I hardly feel it at all.