Well—gassed them and sent the metal monsters to collect them.
Chapter Eight
It was nightmarish. Like the times before that she could still only vaguely recall, she found herself on a gurney similar to the examination tables in an obstetrician’s office and surrounded by the grays—the skinny, elongated monsters with the huge heads, and the huge black, soulless eyes. They were staring at her. She had the sense that they were talking among themselves but she couldn’t see a mouth or actually hear any sound. It was just … an impression.
Or maybe she thought that because it seemed likely, far more realistic than simply standing around her staring at her?
Because it wasn’t really a nightmare.
She knew that now and the logic of the real world applied.
Absent were the mammoth, muscular aliens, sweating with their efforts to fight the alien control and the effort to breed her.
Which was what had brought her here, she was suddenly certain.
They were checking to see if it had ‘taken’.
Well, she thought uneasily, it wasn’t as if she’d had a lot of exposure. If it didn’t ‘take’ when they’d put a bare minimum of three different males on the project, she was doubtful her one ‘voluntary’ exposure with Jarek had done the trick.
Because he hadn’t shown any interest in repeating the experience.
She hoped that wasn’t going to get both of them killed.
Or they would be merciful and do it while she was so out of it she couldn’t feel a lot of fear.
She felt the pain, though, when the bastards probed her with their robotic instruments.
She struggled to keep from crying out, but the pain intensified until she did and then, thankfully, darkness swallowed her up.
She was still in pain when she rose up toward consciousness and she turned on her side instinctively and drew herself into a tight, fetal position, groaning with the pain. It penetrated her consciousness, though, when someone settled behind her and she jumped, whirling to face the new threat.
It was an alien.
One of the yellow-skinned giants, but it wasn’t Jarek.
“No scream,” he said in a deep, soothing voice. “Fayn no hurt. OK?”
She didn’t know that she believed him, but she was in no condition to fight and she didn’t have the energy to scream even if it might have done any good.
He took her silence as acquiescence and pulled her closer to his length and settled a hand heavily on her abdomen.
A huge hand that covered her entire belly.
But the heat and weight of it eased the throbbing pain and the heat of his body curled around her warmed her. She drifted for a time on the fog of diminishing pain and then she lost all awareness of the world.
She was uncomfortable when she woke, freezing on one side, burning on the other and weighted down by something uncomfortably heavy. She struggled until she managed to lift the weight from her belly and was relieved when the other weight loosened at the same time. Still drunk with fatigue, she shifted around, glanced at the face attached to her ‘blanket’ and then burrowed closer to warm her front.
He settled around her again and she drifted away with the flickering thought that this was the one who’d protected her before in the midst of the food war. He’d caught her and shielded her and said something about not hurting her.
It was a familiar scraping noise that woke her the second time.
Fayn was clearly already awake. His eyes were completely alert when she looked up at him.
Actually, a little wary.
She searched her mind for why that might be and recalled the comment about not screaming.
And then she remembered one of the younger women had been put with him.
That must have been fun for both of them!
“Have hungry?”
Lori felt a flicker of amusement, but really his English was nothing short of amazing under the circumstances.
How had they learned any English?
“Listen,” he responded, touching his temple as he got off the sleeping platform and retrieved the bread and water.
Lori frowned, thoroughly confused.
She didn’t recall speaking out loud.
She caught a look that flickered across his features that suggested … something.
She turned that suspicion over in her mind as she took the bread he offered and began to eat it slowly.
It was fresh and that realization prompted a flood of memories.
She scrambled off the bed and checked the platform, all the way around, even though she knew before she did so that it was a waste of time.
She’d lost her damned day count!
Fayn was looking at her curiously when she climbed back onto the platform and settled. “Was dis look?”
She had to revise the ‘he speaks English amazingly’. Between the strange sentence structure and his heavy accent she didn’t think she would’ve figured out what he’d asked if she hadn’t just been searching for her lost marks.
She glanced around the cell in the dim light, but that was pointless. No doubt all of them were pretty much identical.
She shook her head. “Something I was doing. Probably a waste of time anyway,” she said tightly.
He looked like he was waiting for her to explain further.
She considered it and decided that it didn’t matter one way or the other whether she kept her thoughts to herself or not. “I just noticed that the water in the facilities wreaked of sulfur. And then the odor seemed to get weaker and then, after about a week, very strong.”
He studied her hard, blinking several times and then looked down at the bread he still held. “Dis no old,” he muttered. “Long time here, but not bad.”
Excitement flooded Lori that he seemed to grasp her point immediately.
But also because it bolstered her beliefs in her mind.
She would have liked to have discussed it further but the alarm sounded and she never dawdled when she was ordered out. She moved as quickly as she could.
Which, unfortunately, wasn’t that quickly.
Her belly cramped the moment she slipped off of the platform and took a step.
Fayn scooped her up and strode to the opening with her and set her on her feet a matter of seconds before the damned door slammed closed.
Lori more than half expected to see detached pieces of him hit the deck and blood spread outward. Dizzy with relief when there was no sign that he’d been hurt trying to help her, she clutched her belly and made her way over to the facilities with slow care.
If she hadn’t been so focused on her pain, she might have noticed the furious woman waiting for her. Unfortunately, she had been and she was caught completely off guard when she was confronted.
“Debi was right! You are a whore!” the young woman snarled furiously.
Lori rocked back on her heels, too stunned to react for many moments. Finally, she looked around to see who the girl was berating and discovered she was completely alone. “What?” she demanded as thaw set in and survivor’s anger began to percolate through her.
The woman made the mistake, in her own anger, of invading Lori’s space. She stuck her face so close they were almost nose to nose and screamed ‘whore’ and grabbed Lori’s hair.
Lori slapped her so hard her feet flew out from under her.
Of course, she probably didn’t weight a hundred pounds soaking wet.
Horror washed over Lori the moment she did it, shock that she had, fear that she’d actually hurt the idiot when she slammed into the floor.
When the girl/woman gaped at her like she was a lunatic, though, the anger surged again. “You’re a fucking idiot!” she snarled. “You come at me like that again and I won’t stop at slapping you down.”
She didn’t wait to see the reactions of the other women, to discover if there was condemnation all around or if she had allies among them. She stalked into the facilities to use them.
It unnerved her that
she found blood after she’d relieved herself.
It wasn’t a lot, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be more.
The frightening thing was she had no clue if it was her cycle and nothing to be overly concerned about or if it was something else, something more threatening than the discovery that she hadn’t conceived when her life hinged on it as far as she knew.
Her belly didn’t seem to be hurting any worse than it had been, though, so she tried her best to convince herself that she was alright, took the blast bath and headed outside again.
The incident with the girl had taken a backseat by that time to her anxiety about her condition, but she found a place to sit alone because she wasn’t certain of her reception.
May came and sat beside her. “You pissed at everybody because of the stupid girl?”
Lori reddened. “No. I just wasn’t sure anybody wanted to hang around me. I’m really not a violent person,” she said uncomfortably.
May snickered. “That looked pretty effective. I wouldn’t think you’d have to do a lot of work to defend yourself.”
Jill joined them. “She attacked. We all saw and heard. Don’t worry about it.”
She did worry, though.
She’d grown up in a fairly large family, which meant a lot of self-defense lessons growing up, but her parents were sticklers on that. Self-defense was a god given right. Attacking people wasn’t. “I just … reacted. She got in my space,” Lori said.
“Wasn’t there long, though,” May said, laughing.
Lori wasn’t inclined to laugh about it. “I don’t even understand what she was accusing me of,” she said unhappily.
“That warrior that helped you out of the cell. They switched us all around,” May responded, clearly as unhappy about that as the female that had attacked her.
“I’d say everybody is … unsettled about it. I mean, just about the time you start to get used to the situation they snatch you up and throw you in with someone else.”
Jill nodded. “No way to work on allies.”
Lori glanced at her sharply. “You think that’s why they did it?”
Jill shrugged. “What’s your theory?”
“I don’t know. I thought their objective was to breed us and they checked and it hadn’t worked so they decided to change it up.”
“Soooo … you aren’t preg?” May guessed. “’Cause I was thinking you might be and that might account for the new aggressiveness.”
Lori stared at her with a mixture of resentment and dismay. “I don’t know. I’m spotting, but they hurt me when they were probing so I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Rough bastards,” Jill growled. “And no excuse for it, damn it! They just don’t give a fuck if they hurt or how much. I’d love to get hold of just one of them with a … curling iron.”
Lori and May exchanged a long look.
“Yeah, this shit is enough to bring out the violence in anybody,” May agreed.
Survival instincts kicking, Lori thought and then dismissed it. “Soo … stupid has some idea that I manipulated my way into the cell with her man? Is that it? Are we going to just start bickering over the guys?”
May shrugged. “We are what we are and it is what it is. I think so.”
“They’re going to win by default,” Jill agreed glumly.
“No, we’ll defeat ourselves,” Lori agreed. “But I don’t see any way around it. As May said, we’re programmed to squabble over mates, to fight to get the one we see as the best candidate. And the grays have set us up to mate and breed.”
“Well, they’ve no interest in anything but the breeding part.”
“Granted, but our nature means we’re trying to pair up.”
And the truth was it was already eating at her to wonder who was with Jarek.
Not that there was anything at all between them except a few couplings, but she’d become attached, she realized, from the breeding. Her brain said ‘fucking’ but her instincts were trying to bond her to him.
She was going to have to hold herself back if she came up on Jarek’s new fuck friend.
Chapter Nine
Fayn had barely cleared the door to the courtyard when a vice clamped around his throat, lifted him to his toes, and slammed him back against the door that had just closed behind him. His reaction was an immediate counter to the grip, slamming his balled fists upward into Jarek’s wrists to loosen his grip and then down on the tops of his arms.
It wasn’t one hundred percent effective, but he managed to loosen the chokehold enough to gasp in a deep gulp of air.
The moment he fought back the darkness to see, he grabbed Jarek around the throat.
Before any real issue arose, a half dozen warriors crowded around the two of them and pried them loose from one another.
Fayn rubbed his throat and glared at the war chief, who’d been his friend most of his life, abruptly feeling the bizarre sense that he was staring at a complete stranger. “What the fuck?”
“Did you touch her?” Jarek snarled.
Fayn’s lips tightened with anger at the challenge when he had as much right to accept any favors Lo-ri chose to bestow upon him as Jarek did. There was a modicum of shock, as well, that Jarek had so far forgotten himself and the ways of their people as to attack a male presumed to be chosen. And beyond that anger that Jarek’s behavior suggested he had lain with her if a sense of possessiveness had arisen from their liaison. That gave rise to more than a twinge of jealousy, for he was next door to obsessed with her himself. “You will need to ask her,” he growled back.
That response only infuriated Jarek more even though in a dim corner of his mind he acknowledged that it was not Fayn’s place to answer such a question any more than it was his to ask.
She was not his.
He struggled with his fury for several moments more and finally slung the restraining hands off and stalked across the courtyard to put as much distance between himself and Fayn as he could before he did or said something completely unforgivable.
Fayn was released when Jarek had walked away.
“He has lost his mind,” Malik muttered.
Fayn whipped a questioning look at the man who’d spoken.
Malik shrugged. “He challenged three others in similar fashion before he realized that she had been placed with you.”
Fayn’s eyes widened with shock and dismay, but then he frowned uneasily. “The spawning?”
Malik frowned, clearly considering it. “He should not be. It is not the time.”
“I should not be,” Fayn retorted, “but I feel it coming on.”
Malik gaped at him. “Gods! We are in trouble if your suspicion is correct. It is hard enough to keep my head as is.”
And they needed their war chief if they were to have the best chance of success when the time came.
Naturally enough, that thought put him in mind of what he’d learned from Lo-ri. He had intended to approach Jarek immediately when he had the opportunity, but the ‘disagreement’ had put it out of his mind and now he was not certain that Jarek was in any frame of mind to listen.
He decided it was not of an urgent enough nature to risk an all out battle with Jarek—which would almost certainly result in them being separated and possibly permanently. Instead, he headed into the facilities to make use of them and then found a place opposite Jarek to work off some of his excess energy and work his muscles to keep himself in fighting form.
Ordinarily, he would have worked with Jarek to hone his fighting skills, but he was fairly certain that mock battle would turn into real battle in Jarek’s current mood.
Not that his own was a great deal better.
He was, in point of fact, deeply disturbed to find that Jarek seemed to be as focused on Lo-ri as he was.
Granted, he had noticed that Jarek had interest before, but he had not considered it of any great consequence. Jarek was war chief. He was accustomed to a great deal of admiration from the females of the tribe.
He had
not been without a lover for long at all since he had attained adulthood—even before he became war chief. As a result, he was prone to see them as disposable.
It was not that he had no respect for them. He was always respectful.
Fayn thought it was simply that he never allowed his heart to be engaged.
It was the one way they were complete opposites—despite the many similarities that had made for a strong, enduring friendship.
Fayn’s heart was wide open.
He loved all of the women who chose him as a lover.
Perhaps not deeply, but certainly with enthusiasm, and he was always hurt and disappointed when they moved on to another lover.
He supposed, in his own way, he was as unconventional as Jarek.
Jarek had no trouble letting go when the time came because he was never truly engaged—as had become the rule, not the exception, in their world since the conquest.
He always had trouble because, each time, he was certain he had found his one true life companion—as had been customary in the old times before his people were preyed upon and enslaved.
He was older than Jarek, but not by many years, not enough that he actually remembered the old days and the old ways.
Which, however, did not explain his interest in the alien woman.
She could not be his true life companion when she was not even one of the people.
There would be no family for the two of them to parent.
He did not understand why he felt so drawn to her that he wanted to fight anyone who looked at her—as if he could own her if he disposed of all competition.
He knew with his head that a being of free will could never be owned.
His heart kept teasing him with the possibility, though, urging him to fight.
But perhaps it was merely the result of the spawning that he could feel his body building up to? He had never managed to spawn. Mayhap that state always meant that he had no discernment? No particular goal other than seeding any female he could get his hands on?
And their own females had been removed from them.
She was just a handy vessel, he told himself.
It was not likely that he would grow fond enough to find misery instead of the comfort he sought.
Alien Enslaved IV: Spoils of War Page 7
