Then the next thing I hear is my mother screaming and wailing, “Elle, no, nooooo! My girl, nooo!!!!”
My father’s hands fall away from my arm, just as the soldiers step back…to reveal nothing on the cliff’s edge. Nothing but an empty space where Elle was standing.
She’s gone … Elle took another step back and now she’s gone. I can’t even be sure if she did it on purpose or if she didn’t know … didn’t know she had nothing left to step back to, except air. Either way, the result is the same.
A moment ago she was there, begging the Xalthurian Reapers not to take her baby, and now, she’s just…not.
The pain.
It’s like the time I broke my wrist. How I felt the snap, but somehow didn’t get it. Didn’t feel the pain until I raised my arm and saw the way my hand was hanging at a funny angle. Only then did I understand. Only then did I rush over to my older sister, crying out, “Libeth! Libeth! It’s broken! It’s broken!”
It’s broken.
Libeth … Elizabeth … Elle … my sister. She’s gone. She’s gone. And so is her baby. Because of the Xalthurians. Because of the Reapers who kept on advancing on a mother who didn’t want to lose her baby.
The world becomes a scream.
And I can no longer be held back.
I fly forward and shove the Xalthurian in the gold uniform—the Tel who made her such a magnanimous offer. Up close I see that he’s got to be at least seven-five. So tall, it feels like he could step on me. I don’t care. I want to fight him. I have to fight him. For Elle, who never had a chance.
When he turns around to see who’s shoved him, I swing on him, morphing into a hitting and slapping fury, until he pushes me back, the tips of his dark blue fingers pressing into my chest.
It’s just his fingers, just the tip of his fingers, but I go flying backwards and land butt first in the red clay dirt.
I don’t stay down for long. Not because I quickly leap back up. I wish. But jumping to your feet is kind of hard to do when you’re wheezing from having all the breath finger shoved out of you.
No, it’s the overlarge Xalthurian who quickly helps me back up…with a huge hand wrapped around my neck.
My inner rage scream cuts off abruptly and the sound of the real world comes back in. Suddenly, I can hear the crowd murmuring and my parents yelling in the background. Begging the Xalthurian with his hand around my neck for mercy on my behalf.
“Please, please…” my mother says. “Don’t make me lose two daughters today!”
The dark blue Xalthurian ignores her, his gaze lasering in on me. His eyes are red where mine are white, with a pair of black diamonds where a human’s pupils would be. He glares at me, the ridges on his nose bristling, but other than that…nothing. After a few moments of being almost but not quite choked, I realize he’s waiting, probably expecting me to beg for my life like my mother did.
But I don’t beg. I stare the huge alien in his red diamond shaped eyes. And I refuse to flinch. “She was my sister,” I tell him. “She wasn’t just a womb.”
Then, I spit at him.
Because if I’m going to die today. Hell, if I’ll go out begging this Xal for anything.
When my spitball lands square in the alien’s face, the human crowd goes deathly silent. And so do the Xalthurians.
But only for a moment. Then an enormous golden yellow Xal with a long black braid, click roars and comes charging forward with the rest of the reapers right behind him.
They advance on me, the way they advanced on my sister.
Still, I’m not scared. The pain and hollowness of loss dominates my spirit. There is no room for fear. I refuse to look away from the blue alien, who still has his clawed hand wrapped around my extremely fragile neck. As it turns out, my father was pretty damned right about how easy it would be for one of the Xals to snap it. Only a matter of flicking his wrist, I suspect for a Xalthurian as large as this blue one.
But then, instead of flicking his wrist, the Xal brings his free hand up, holding it in the air. This one action stops the yellow Xalthurian and the rest of the advancing force cold, as if they’re machines who’ve been powered down with the motion of a hand.
Then, to my total surprise, instead of snapping the fragile column that connects my head to the rest of my body, he tilts my head to the right, baring the left side of my neck, like a vampire in one of the old entertainments we still watch on our wrecked colony ship.
I only know what he’s doing because of what happened during last year’s Breeding Ceremony, when one of the loin cloth Xalthurians burst into our house, looking for eligible 21-year-olds to drag onto their circular ship. In accord with the agreement between our two species, each New Terrhan girl must be given a birth year stamp in the weird Xalthurian number system of dots and lines. It can only be seen under UV lights by human eyes.
But the Xals don’t have human eyes. The loin cloth Xal easily checked my age before moving on to assessing Elle and dragging her out of the house. And now I can feel the golden uniformed Xal’s red eyes on the side of my neck. I’m nineteen now, not eighteen like I was when they took Elle. Still not twenty-one.
However, that fact brings no relief. Looking at the huge blue alien, I have to wonder if my too young age even matters. This Xal stopped those Silver Uniforms with just a raise of one hand. He could probably do anything he wanted to me. Right now. Right here. Including breeding me before I reached the contracted age.
His minions wouldn’t stop him. And though I love my fellow New Terrhans, I had a bad feeling they wouldn’t either.
We’ve been living on severe rations for months now. Would any of the nearly starved humans really risk the huge shipment of meat, seedstock, and supplies the Xalthurians always brought with them as a “gift” for allowing them to enact the Breeding Ceremony on one girl who dared to spit in an alien overlord’s face?
His eyes still locked on mine, the Xal’s other hand goes up again, this time with a beckoning motion.
A green alien comes forward. His eyes carefully lowered.
The Xal in the golden uniform says something to him, throat clicking and scratching.
The green Xal’s diamond-shaped eyes raise to meet mine, his expression almost carefully neutral. “Tel D’Rek wishes for me to translate what he’s saying to you. Word for word.”
“Just kill me already, no speech needed,” I answer hotly.
But Tel D’Rek starts speaking anyway, the jade Diplomat translating during his pauses. “I will be back … I will make it a special point to come back for you, little hu’man … in two solars.”
My eyes shift from the Diplomat to the alien who’d been addressed as Tel D’Rek. He stares back at me, his eyes burning. Then he leans his head forward and before I can even think to jerk back, I feel his tongue on my neck, licking up my birth code in one intense swipe.
My entire body shivers with a sensation unlike anything I’ve ever felt. Not disgust though. Dear moons, it’s definitely not disgust. A strange heat appears between my legs, burning as red as his eyes. Overshadowing the anguish seething through my bones.
But before I can even process what’s happening to me…to my body…he sets me down. Then with a deliberate turn, he walks back to the ship, the rest of the uniformed Xalthurians falling in behind him. Leaving me to stand there with my heart thundering in my chest and wondering if he was serious about coming back after I turned twenty-one. Oh moons…
Even as my parents fall all over me, hugging me and crying, I continue to wonder at this.
And fail to convince myself the answer to that question is anything but yes.
Click here to find out why this crazy hot alien romance became an Amazon Top 100 Bestseller…
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About the Author
Theodora Taylor writes hot books with heart. When not reading, writing, or reviewing, she enjoys spending time with her amazing family, going on date nights with her wonderful husband, and attending parties thrown by others. She now lives in Los Angles, California, and she LOVES to hear from readers. So….
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Her Dragon King (Her Dragon King Duet Book 2): 50 Loving States, North Dakota Pt. 2 Page 25
