It was purely accidental that she slammed the heel of her palm into the woman’s nose on the way to clawing her eyes out, but that probably did more to save her than anything else. She could see the pain explode in the female’s eyes as blood gushed from her nose. Even as she raked her nails across the female’s eyes, the warrior let go of her abruptly and grabbed her nose and eyes.
Lauren hit the floor painfully, but she was in too much shock, and too gripped by flight mode, to really feel anything or have much awareness of her surroundings beyond the attacker. There was a pair of tree trunk legs splayed directly in her path. She shot between them, glanced around for ‘her’ posse and headed for the safety of her group as fast as she could.
They ‘melted’ away from her.
It took her a few minutes to figure out they had no intention of offering shelter and standing between her and the monsters that were after her.
She paused then to search for another safe harbor.
That was when she discovered the two warriors—male and female—were locked in a battle of titans.
And that another of the yellow skinned giants—another male—had followed her while the first two were preoccupied. He grabbed her arms just as that discovery clicked in her mind. As quickly as it leapt to mind to use her legs instead, he maneuvered her into a position where that attack was impossible. Crossing her arms over her chest as he twirled her around, he had bound her back to chest against him before she could do more than think about launching an attack.
“Shhh. No harm liddle ting,” he murmured near her ear. “Kep save.”
Lori glanced at him sharply at that.
Unfortunately, his head was so close to hers at the moment, she smeared her face across his in the process.
That lustful gleam she’d seen in the eyes of the other one was in his gaze by the time she managed to jerk head back far enough for her eyes to focus.
Her heart tried to beat its way out of her chest.
Her brain was in too much chaos to be of any assistance.
And then … rescue.
The battle cry she heard that time was definitely male.
It made her hair stand on end.
The warrior holding her stiffened, whipped a look toward the sound, and abruptly put her away from him, catching the first warrior as he slammed into him.
An ear splitting alarm went off. The lights began to blink off and on.
Metal monsters appeared out of the walls and surged toward the combatants.
Everything that had vocal chords screamed and ran in every direction, trying to flee when they were all boxed in by solid walls.
Cage doors opened.
And then Lori heard a sound she’d never heard before in her life but instantly recognized, the beat of giant wings behind and above her. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Her head whipped around to see what was after her completely of its own accord.
It was the winged, horned demon from her nightmare, she discovered, bearing down on her, his harsh features filled with intent.
Galvanized by that thought, Lori scrambled to her feet and ran for all she was worth toward the door she thought she’d emerged from.
She’d nearly made it when she saw the other women piling inside a cage two down from her goal. Switching directions, she clawed her way into the group and skidded inside on the blood and guts left of the woman who’d been caught in the door.
A wave of nausea washed over her the moment she realized what she’d slipped on. She managed to surmount the urge to vomit. Unfortunately, there were several who didn’t. In a matter of moments the entire fucking place wreaked of it and everyone that hadn’t puked fought the urge to add to the stench.
Lori managed to struggle up on her bunk. Covering her mouth and nose with the shapeless ‘hospital type’ paper/plastic gown she’d been given in place of the real clothes she’d been wearing, she managed to block out enough of the disgusting odor and her other discomforts to fall into a semi-coma when the adrenaline her body had been pumping through her abandoned her as abruptly as it had surged into her bloodstream in the first place.
* * * *
Aidan struggled with his anger as he watched her scramble to safety.
His only intent had been to protect her from harm from the two knuckleheads fighting over her, but the look of pure horror she’d bent upon him when she’d seen him had pierced him to the quick, stopped him in his tracks as if he’d hit a stone wall.
There was no recognition in her gaze.
None.
What had the bastards done to her?
* * * *
Jarek’s body knew ‘her’ and reacted in remembrance of the pleasure he had taken from her long before his brain managed to engage and resume function.
Reminding him of the shame his pleasure had brought him.
It gave him no comfort that he had been forced to protect her by violating her right to choose. Guilt still warred with the desire he had felt for her from the moment he had first seen her, been ordered to breed her. The desire he still felt that had haunted him in the time since, when he had wondered if they had destroyed her despite their offer to keep her alive if he would breed her.
The bastards could not be trusted.
He knew that.
And yet there was no choice, had been nothing he could do to protect her from himself—only from the Sheloni.
Because he certainly did trust that they would dispose of her without compunction if he defied them.
There was no leavening the guilt by sharing fault, either.
Because he was no longer a child to believe guilt was divided if one was not alone in transgressing.
In any case, it made things far worse that she had been bred with others—his second, Fayn, and the leader of the Satren war party that had been captured, Aidan.
Because his mind was tainted by the desire to claim her as his own, almost as if he were in spawning—the only time they were irrational enough to believe they could claim another thinking being and own them.
In his mind, he knew he had not actually bred her—whatever the Sheloni thought to the contrary. He was not in season to spawn and could not.
But mayhap it was the insistence of the Sheloni that they must breed these tiny females?
No doubt the Satren bastard had succeeded.
Aidan claimed that they were capable whenever the female was.
He was not certain that he believed that, but in all truth, he had not caught the Satren in a lie and could not say that was typical of his nature.
And yet, he realized abruptly, he had detected … something that had twisted his mind into a morass of confusion and lust.
What?
He was not certain of anything except that he wanted the woman with a desperation that made him vulnerable.
If it was the same with the others, and he thought that was very likely, then they were in deep trouble.
They had no chance at all if they could not keep their wits about them.
Instead of a slim to none chance of breaking free.
* * * *
Contrary to popular belief, or maybe wishful thinking, survival instincts weren’t altruistic. They were, in point of fact, the epitome of selfishness. This was actually completely reasonable even though most people, when they could view it objectively, considered it shameful, but then that was mostly because very few people had ever had a true survival level event in their lives. The few who had had survived because they were completely focused on and dedicated to their personal survival.
Except in those cases where they’d had offspring to worry about and even then, sadly, instincts for their own survival won out probably fifty percent of the time, perhaps more.
Finding someone to blame for anything and everything that went wrong was part of the survival instinct. This was also not one of mankind’s more stellar traits, but it, too, was logical after a fashion because in some cases, of the dog-eat-dog variety, the ‘guilty’ got someone else ki
lled.
Lori understood what made people tick better than most, because she’d made it a goal to observe and understand. It was one of her main ‘talents’ that made her good at what she did.
She wasn’t really surprised, therefore, to find herself the target of animosity for circumstances completely beyond her control, but she was pissed off about it.
She heard the whispers as she rose toward awareness from the blessed fog of nothingness, but it took a few moments to recognize the words, to process them, and to conclude that she wasn’t safe.
“I don’t know if I’m going to die of thirst or hunger first,” someone whined.
“It’s her fault. She flaunted herself at him. There’s no other explanation. It’s not like she’s hot or anything.”
“Yeah! And she damned near got her ass kicked for it—which she richly deserved if you ask me!”
“I would’ve liked to see that.”
“Shit! Not me! I thought we might get dragged into it.”
It only took a few moments to locate the conspirators in the corner of their cell and conclude she was the subject under discussion—even though their account bore little resemblance to what had actually happened.
She struggled with the urge to leap to her own defense, but discovered a social constraint for creating a scene was impossible to surmount.
She told herself it didn’t matter what they thought.
But she knew better.
They were building a defense for themselves to justify anything they thought they might need to do to protect themselves.
She could stop them, at least temporarily, by challenging them, but even knowing that she found it hard to throw off the chains of ‘acceptable’ behavior by doing so.
Instead, she withdrew into her cowardly, self-preservation, cocoon, turning what they’d said over and over in her mind in an attempt to understand how they’d reached such a conclusion.
She had met his gaze, she realized—which most animals, including humans, often took as a challenge. It didn’t matter than it hadn’t been intentional. She’d just been terrified and confused and searching for a way of escape.
The horror of the woman crushed by the door had driven her until she’d discovered the area she found herself in was filled with … beings that weren’t human, many of which, although most seemed to be humanoid, were so far from human they looked like monsters.
She didn’t really know why she’d looked directly at the yellow skinned warrior—unless it was because he was directly in front of her in her line of vision and dressed very much like pictures she’d seen of Native Americans.
It was that stare, she was suddenly certain, that had set off the female warrior’s possessive rage.
It had to be because there just wasn’t anything else.
She hadn’t even noticed the female until she’d bellowed with rage so she certainly hadn’t ‘challenged’ her by word or look.
But the male—well there was no getting around the fact that he’d looked her over and gotten aroused.
Unless that thing in his loincloth wasn’t what she thought it was.
But there was logic to the situation if she considered the male had gotten aroused, the female had noticed, and the female decided to crush her competition.
So, in a way, the ‘accusation’ wasn’t exactly wild imagination.
The most critical part of it was a damned lie, though!
That made her angry enough she sat up and turned in the direction of the whispering conspirators. “I get that you’re scared. I get that you’re looking for some-damned-body to blame for your predicament, but that somebody damned well isn’t me!” Nobody challenged her statement. She considered leaving it at that. In retrospect that probably would’ve been wiser than what she did do. “It isn’t that you believe for one second that I flirted. You think I might have an edge you don’t have and you’re pissed off one of those badass warriors didn’t make a move on you!”
Actually, she pretty much knew as soon as the words were out of her mouth that she should have kept that to herself. Now they were going to think there was a competition to see who could charm the pants off of the big bad warriors—because she doubted there were any other allies that would even be half as effective.
Of course, they were obviously captives, as well, but among the captives, they must be close to top of the pyramid if not at the top and she’d glimpsed some pretty fucking scary aliens.
They were aliens.
She could try to rationalize that away all day long and into the next six months, but it wasn’t people in costume.
She hadn’t hit her head and lost her marbles.
And it wasn’t somebody trying to play an elaborate hoax.
She hadn’t really been aware of registering a hell of a lot in the little time she’d spent outside the cage, but her senses had been busy recording all the same. Flashes of images kept popping into her mind and disappearing almost as fast, almost too quickly for her to grasp them, but, little by little she was able to piece them together.
They’d been crated—all of them—for transport.
She didn’t have to search hard to find an explanation for that.
Clearly this wasn’t a ‘catch and release’ situation like those she’d read about where people were taken and studied and returned.
Oddly enough, that thought triggered the sense that a memory was floating just beyond her grasp. She struggled for a while to make it materialize, but it only seemed to drift further from her grasp the harder she tried to recall it.
And maybe it was nothing?
She shook it after a little while, turning instead, reluctantly, to ‘the incident’.
She’d frozen when she’d spotted that warrior and she realized she couldn’t lie to herself about it being nothing more than a reaction to spotting a giant, yellow skinned alien. He hadn’t been the only one so he hadn’t snagged her attention because he was. He had been staring at her, she realized.
And she’d felt a sense of familiarity wash over her, she realized now—accepted that it had.
The problem was that she couldn’t figure out why she’d felt that vague sense of recognition.
He sure as hell didn’t remind her of anybody she knew.
She frowned at that thought and examined it.
Ok, so he did remind her, very slightly, of Billy Eagle.
She wasn’t sure of why he did, and the fact was that the same could be said about all of the one’s she’d glimpsed.
She thought it was the black hair.
The skin tones were similar—although there was a far more pronounced tinge of yellow to the alien’s skin.
Both were exceptionally tall and muscular.
Both were warriors, actually.
That wasn’t it, though. She couldn’t track down what ‘it’ was, but she felt that she was on the wrong track and that the sense of ‘knowing’ wasn’t just that there was something about the alien that reminded her of Billy Eagle.
It also couldn’t be that she actually did know him, or had at least met him, before because she hadn’t seen or met up with any aliens before she’d woken on the damned …. Well, where ever the hell she was.
It had a warehouse-like feel to it, but she couldn’t imagine that there was much chance that she was being held in a warehouse—certainly not one on Earth.
At the same time, she couldn’t wrap her mind around any possibility that she was sitting in a crate in the hold of an enormous space ship.
And yet … the other yellow-skinned alien that had grabbed her had spoken English, she abruptly recalled. She’d been too stunned at the time to really register it, and his accent had been so thick it was hard to understand anything he said.
But she had.
Delayed reaction, and maybe she was out of her mind, but it had certainly seemed like he’d said something about not being a threat or not harming.
So, unless she was losing her mind, they must have had some contact with humans fo
r him to know even a few words of English.
But not with her.
It was at that point that she abruptly recalled the nightmares that had been plaguing her—not that she could recall much about them, but she did recall that she’d woken with the impression that the nightmares had to do with aliens.
Chapter Four
The hunger came in waves, stayed to torment her for a little while and then faded away.
The thirst was relentless.
She passed from dry mouth to parched mouth and throat. Her lips began to burn as if they were chapped from wind or sun and she could barely gather enough moisture in her mouth to swallow.
It wasn’t until the lights flashed on again, though, that it exploded into her mind what she’d seen the last time they’d been turned out of their prison to join the general population of captives.
There was food and, more importantly, water, down at the other end of the space. That was what had preoccupied everyone else almost exclusively so that they barely seemed aware of the fact that they were captives and surrounded by alien beings. That was what all the turmoil at the other end was about—the captives fighting over water and food.
There was food and water at the other end of the room if she had the guts to go after it.
And she was going to die if she didn’t get some.
Unfortunately, the same realization seemed to hit the others at roughly the same time.
“There’s food and water at the other end of the room,” one of the women croaked through dry throat.
Stupid bitch!
Now she was going to have to fight every-fucking-body to get something, not just the damned aliens!
Apparently, everyone was in pretty much the same shape as Lori was and of like mind. They’d piled so tightly against the door to get out by the time it opened that the three in the front simply fell through and got trampled by the others trying to get out behind them.
They were too desperate to really take note of the injuries, however, bounding up as soon as they could and charging in the direction they were certain they would find food and water.
“Fucking bastards just had to put the shit way the hell down there,” somebody growled.
Alien Enslaved IV: Spoils of War Page 3
