by Leith Briar
I let out an amused sigh. While not ideal, at least she was not with another man. “The scouts did not see her, though? You made sure of that?”
“Of course,” he says.
“Good.”
The pair of us return to our horns, I suspect both as glad as each other that the conversation is now over.
“Gregor,” I shout to my commander who sits at one of the lower tables with the rest of my men. “Bring a table over, will you? I think I may stay awhile.”
He laughs and shakes his head, but he does it anyway. It takes only two of them to drag the huge table over, and before long the Balachs are placing Uisge-Beatha down by the jug-load. We spend the rest of the evening drinking and telling stories of war, as we always do.
“I had thought you would be eager to get acquainted with your new… guest?” Lugh says after a while. He has a smug look on his face before he chomps down a bite of his apple.
A loaded question, but that is always the way with Lugh. It is not unlike him to take advantage of a situation and use it to wind people up. He has always been like this… it is as though he gets some twisted pleasure from making people uncomfortable.
Anyone else would have tired of his tricks long ago, but sometimes his tricks are the most interesting thing to happen around here, so I let him have his fun.
“There is little eagerness in me, I assure you of that.”
“Hmm. How interesting.”
I laugh at him. “It is?”
“Why, yes,” he says, his face looking offended. “The things I would do if I had a woman’s touch waiting for me in my chamber. I would not be downstairs drinking my sorrow with the likes of you old goblins.”
I grin at him. No one else would get away with the things he says. “Tell me, what is it you would do? Do you even remember?”
He flicks his eyebrows at me and takes a drink from his horn. “Oh, I remember it like it was yesterday. I was skilled in the bedchamber.”
“Pah!” I brush him away. “You talk shit. The only hole you would leave hurting would be her poor ear after you bored her with your tall-tales.”
The rest of the men laugh, but he shrugs them off and takes another bite of his apple.
Truth be told, I am glad of the distraction. It stops me thinking of the more pressing matters at hand, and that is a good thing. I am not supposed to put too much thought into the little creature waiting for me upstairs.
To do so would be dangerous for all of us.
But the hour grows late, and I know I cannot put it off forever. I down the rest of my drink and bid my men farewell.
I have business to attend to.
Chapter 4
Sophia
The man who brought me here, Scarface, hasn’t returned.
My best guess is that he’s returned to the party downstairs, and then he will come back — probably reeking drunk and wanting sex.
Maybe he’ll fall on top of me in his stupor and crush me to death.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.
I fought him as much as I could, but my attempts were pitiful. Even if I wasn’t weak from hunger, I’m two feet smaller than him. Every part of me is sore and honestly, what is the point?
I never thought I’d admit defeat so easily. I mean, hypothetically, we’ve all thought of ourselves getting into precarious positions. I always thought I’d fight. I’d be the strong one, the one who kicks-ass and doesn’t just sit around waiting to be saved.
Except all those hypothetical situations I ever dreamed up were down the back of alleyways or in deserted parks. I had a bag full of belongings in my hand, with a mobile phone inside it.
I was also on planet Earth — so there’s that.
This passive sense of hopelessness was my attitude when I was in the wagon, and it has returned to being my attitude now. The only time it faltered was when I clocked sight of the size of this bed, and I realised he was leading me straight into it. That was when I let myself panic. I let the flight or fight urge kick in.
I chose both.
I landed a punch on his solid body and I scrambled away as fast as I could.
And I still ended up in the bed.
My hands are belted together at the wrists with a thick piece of leather and then attached to the headboard above my head.
Being stretched out like a plank of wood is only exaggerating just how empty my stomach is, and it’s growling with every breath I take.
Every so often I raise my head up and look around the room. There’s a fire on the back wall, big enough to keep the chill at bay and bright enough to light all but the darkest four corners of the room.
Not that there is very much in here to light.
The bed takes up most of the space. It’s bigger than a kingsize — longer too — and covered in fur throws. Something beneath me is warming it, as if from the inside. I can kick my leg over to what should be the cold side and it’s just as warm as the space I’m laying on.
Other than the bed, there’s a small table with a chair, and there’s a large wooden chest in the corner next to the fire. Just along from it, a boarded-up window, and under that is a desk. No books or writing implements.
Nothing.
From the looks of his room, I’m guessing he is perhaps a lowly soldier. Maybe even a slightly less-than-lowly soldier. Whoever he is, he’s not one for luxuries.
Which leads me to thinking... what the fuck is this place?
Clearly, they are more advanced than the humans of planet Earth. At least, they would have to be to have mastered long-distance space travel. There is nowhere in our solar system that has three moons and is habitable. Nowhere else has oxygen.
But if they’re so advanced, where is the electricity? Where are the flying driverless cars and the buildings so tall you can’t see the top from the ground?
That’s how I imagined a civilised, technologically advanced alien planet to look. Instead, I feel like I’ve come back to the dark ages.
My thoughts turn to the rest of the women who were taken too, and I wonder if they are fairing better than I am. I wonder where they went, and if Megan is okay, and that woman beside me who squeezed my hand. I wonder if her tears have finally dried up now.
I feel my eyes burn just as I’m telling myself I better not cry. Blinking a few times and trying to bury that hopeless feeling inside me, I hear a sound coming from the other side of the door.
Footsteps.
Heavy ones.
The door crashes open and I squeeze my eyes closed again. I won’t shake. I won’t cry. I won’t let myself feel terror like I did the night when I was younger.
I don’t remember the night I was taken, and I can only assume either I didn’t wake, or I woke and passed out from the fear of it. But if I had been awake the night they came for me, perhaps I would have escaped. Perhaps I would have fought.
And now it’s too late for any of that. That’s what terror and panic do to you. They make you weak and useless.
I open my eyes and stare up at a spot on the stone ceiling. I follow the long dark wooden beam along to where it meets the wall and then back again. I already have his scarred face clear as day in my mind — I do not need to see it again. But neither will I close my eyes and let him think I fear him.
Fear is power.
And power is the only thing he could ever have over me.
I hear his boots thud against the floor as he crosses the room. He clears his throat. Still, I look at the beam.
“Ceud mile failte.” His voice is deep and gravelly, the words harsh on his tongue. He says them like he’s cursing something. Or someone.
“I don’t understand your stupid fucking alien language.” There is no hint of malice in my voice when I say the words, in fact I kept them specifically bland. Tone is everything. I don’t know what he just said, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. He won’t know what I just said, but he’ll have not a clue what I meant by them either.
But instead of a what? sound, I g
et a laugh.
And it’s a laugh I most definitely recognise.
Deep and booming.
I pop my head up.
It’s not the man who brought me here, the one with the huge scar running across his face. It’s the man who was sitting in the chair, the one who was eying me up like a piece of meat.
Still, he has that smirk, that look on his face like he’s playing a game and winning it.
I want to ask him what he wants. I think on it for a moment, wondering if I could show him with just nods of my head and facial expressions.
What. Do. You. Want.
I don’t do that though, because I’d probably look fucking deranged.
Although I do feel slightly deranged.
He says more words in his gibberish tongue and I let my head fall back on the bed. Maybe he’ll give up when he realises how pointless it is.
My stomach growls again and I cringe a little at the thought of him judging me, despite knowing it’s stupid. Who knows the last time I ate anything, what does he expect?
His footsteps come nearer and I watch him when he comes into vision. I hadn’t realised the size of him when he was sitting down on that chair, but now I could swear he is bigger than Scarface. Scarface looked scary, but this guy looks deadly. He still hasn’t removed all the fur that is wrapped around him. The room is warm, so the suspicious part of me wonders if he’s hiding something.
He stands over the bed and looks down at me. I see now his eyes are grey, so grey they’re almost silver looking, and lined with dark lashes. Eyeliner makes the whole effect even darker. And he has a scar too, this one cuts right over his eye and leaves a line through his eyebrow. His gaze stops at my stomach and I look down just as he extends an arm out from his furs.
My whole body tenses.
This is it.
He lays his palm flat over my stomach, but to my surprise, it doesn’t roam any further. I swallow down the lump in my throat while he looks into the fire. My empty stomach rolls and lets out another growl. He looks back at my face and shakes his head at me, before clicking his tongue three times in a tutting sound.
“Tha sibh acras,” he mutters. His face is hard. He looks angry.
I watch him warily from my spot on the bed until he finally removes his hand from my stomach. It’s only when he turns and heads towards the door that I finally let out a breath. I’m left alone, but I’m still on edge.
What if he comes back? What if Scarface comes back?
I might have punched Scarface earlier but from the look on this new guys face, I’ve pissed him off too. Whichever one comes back, it’s likely not going to be sunshine and honey for me.
Silver returns (I call him that now) and he’s carrying something. It’s like a terracotta pot, big enough that he needs two hands to hold it. Don’t tell me we piss in pots on this planet? I can take the lack of driverless cars and electricity, but pots are where I draw my personal line on the list of shit that I can’t deal with.
He sets it down at the side of the bed and comes up to free my hands. Instantly I bring them down and rub my wrists, trying to ease the ache from the tight leather straps.
“Brot,” he says, nodding towards the pot. I lean over when he removes the lid and instantly steam rises. The smell of something that reminds me of beef fills the air.
It looks like soup, and it smells exactly like the one my grandma used to make in the cold months. She called it winter broth.
Wait.
“Broth?” I ask him.
“Brot,” he says, taking a spoon out and mixing it, causing the steam to rise even more.
Another whiff of it and I can barely stop myself from picking the whole thing up and drinking it down without chewing.
I shift on the bed, hoping he takes the hint and hands over that spoon pronto. He watches me in the corner of his eye and then takes a small scoop of it and carries it over to my face.
“Fosgailte.”
I don’t need him to make aeroplane noises to understand the meaning of what he wants me to do. I feel like a child with him towering over me. I should be offended, I should tell him to fuck right off.
But actually, all I want is for that soup-slash-brot to be inside my empty stomach.
So I open wide for him.
I barely get a taste of it before I swallow it down. I’m ready for another one, but he takes his time with it, scraping the bottom of the spoon against the side of the pot.
I’m desperate here.
“I can do it myself?” My tone is polite as I nod towards the spoon.
He smiles and shakes his head. “Nah.”
I swallow down the next mouthful when he finally lets me have it.
“Do you understand English?”
I don’t know what makes me think he would, but somehow his words don’t sound all that alien to me, considering he’s… well, an alien.
“Chan eil sasainn snog,” he says, his face smirking at me.
I don’t know what the fuck that means, but I’m taking that whole sentence as a no.
At least now I know his word for no, though, and I’ve a feeling I might need to put it to use.
Chapter 5
Colm
She eats as if she has never had a hot dinner in her life before.
I could not have allowed her to do it herself, though. She would have wolfed it down far too quickly and probably hurled it all back up. Our food is not too far from the things they enjoy on Earth, but it is not the same either. It may taste the same, look the same, smell the same, but it would be foolish to assume that made it the same.
The food we eat, the whisky we drink — our Uisge-Beatha — the livestock we raise, even our bodies. It is all similar, yet not the same.
When the Plaigh came for us all those years ago, we were too stupid and ignorant to know it until it was too late. They took everything else before they came for us. Our plants, our animals, our weapons. They changed it, made it better and more enhanced.
And then finally they came for us.
The Plaigh were so advanced that at first we thought they were the old gods returned to Earth. We thought they could make fire appear with the push of a button, control sound as if it was a physical thing, and make things happen on their own. Electricity, radio-waves, machines — we knew nothing of it. We did not understand then what we have come to know now.
We came to learn that the Plaigh were advanced, but ultimately they were scientists. We lived in a world that valued brawn over brains, while the Plaigh were the exact opposite.
We were a match made in hell.
And so with their technology and our bodies, they set about creating their own personal army of savages. Everything we knew, including ourselves, was made bigger, stronger, faster. They gave us knowledge and in return we gave them protection from their enemies whenever called upon.
It has been seven-hundred years since we were taken.
Seven years since they last visited us and made their demands known.
The girl sat in front of me is the sacrificial lamb of sorts, and that is why she was chosen specifically. Our new race was never supposed to know the love of a woman — in fact, it was all but guaranteed in our conditioning.
They ran tests on us. I still remember some of them, because to my eyes back then it was like magick happening in front of me. Moving images appeared in front of my face, so lifelike I wondered how I could not smell them. Scenes of violence, death, aggression, and darker things. Scenes of women being fucked in every orifice while they screamed, scenes of whole villages being burnt to the ground, the sound of death cries. The only thing we were told was that those of us who could keep the wee fella under our kilts primed, would get to live.
Some men could not manage it. Some men, well, they hurled up all over themselves and fainted. Those men became the Balachs — the half-men.
And everyone else became what we are now. Bhiast. Injected with a cocktail of hormones — some of them not even human. Everything designed to mak
e us more aggressive, more violent, more bloodthirsty. We have the strength of ten men, are almost impossible to kill, and thanks to our Uisge-Beatha, our bodies continuously heal themselves.
We do not get sick.
We do not die.
But we do not really live, either.
Our will is not our own.
I look down at the wee thing beneath me. Her eyes never leave the spoon in my hand, watching it constantly with a worried look, as if I might take it away at any second.
With her attention elsewhere, I take in the sight of her again.
Her hair is dark like a raven, and she has big green eyes the same shade as the moss on my home planet. Her lips are peculiar, the top one just slightly bigger than the bottom, but still full and lovely. Her arms look small and weak but her legs are sturdy, and they are bare almost to her cunt. The skin looks soft enough, almost creamy, and she has these tiny brown freckles dotted over them. Fairy kisses, I am sure we used to call them when I was a balach. I had forgotten about those.
I force myself to look away before I can become enamoured with her. Losing control and killing the wee thing on the first night would do no good to anyone.
Instead, I focus only on feeding her until the pot is scraped dry and she does not look quite so worried.
“Thank you,” she says when I set the spoon down.
At least she has manners.
I have not let on that I can understand everything she says, because if I did she would only pelt me with questions. And I am not ready to answer them yet.
I could lie to her, yes. There is nothing physically stopping me. But if this works, and she becomes both my wife and my mate, then knowing I lied to her would not sit right with me.
That is not how it is supposed to be between a man and wife.
Aside from that, conversing with her would greatly increase the chances of becoming attached to her, and that is something else I am not yet ready for. The second I let her get under my skin is the same second the fate of my entire race falls into her lap, and that is far too much power for a little thing like her.
