Just beyond the edge of the small clearing, I stare up through the branches of a spica tree at the woman who’s inexplicably occupying my hunting net. There isn’t much meat on her bones, but based on the way she’s thrashing in the net, she has no idea how weak she truly is. Or that guma fibers can’t be torn, nor can they be cut with anything less effective than a sharply honed blade. Still, she keeps thrashing, exhausting herself with futile efforts to get free. She even tries to bite through the net with a set of blunt, squarish teeth.
Stifling a chuckle at that, I step into the clearing, my spear clutched in one fist, still watching her fight her predicament. I have to respect that. I’d do the same thing, until there was no breath left in my body.
She goes still when she hears my footsteps. Then the human twists in the net, and suddenly I can see her face, peeking out from her long mane of dark hair. Her features are delicate and…beautiful.
She blinks as I stare up at her, but other than her eyelids and the shallow expansion of her chest with every tense breath, she remains completely immobile. She’s terrified. I can smell fear wafting from her in thick, delicious waves. She may not be food, but she certainly believes herself to be prey, and I can’t blame her for that. Humans have no defensive features whatsoever. They are a soft and fragile species that relies on their tech to protect them. To make their lives easy.
Yet this woman appears to have no tech. No weapons.
She’s trouble. I should walk away, net be damned. Someone will be coming for her, and she cannot be found with me.
“Um…hi,” she says at last. Her voice is very soft and pleasantly pitched. She’s speaking English, the language of the guards in black uniforms.
A wave of bitterness grinds my teeth together at that realization. I blink at her, and she huffs in frustration.
“My name is…um…Syrie. I know you can understand me,” she says. “I know you got a language dump when you were a kid.”
Yes. They make damn sure we can understand the guards, so that occasional orders can be obeyed without hesitation. I detest her language. And her violent, intrusive, entitled culture.
Humans are not to be trusted. I learned that lesson the hard way, many years ago. So I turn to leave her there, already mentally mourning the loss of my net. She’s safe up there, and her people will find her. But I cannot be here when that happens.
“Wait!” she cries, and against my better judgment, I turn back to her. I can still escape into the woods if I hear an engine, and I have to admit, I'm curious about what she will say. About how she got here. “Is this your net?” she asks, trying to twist herself upright in the confines of the guma fibers. “I seem to have accidentally gotten snagged in it. Unless—” Her dark brows dip low, drawing tight toward the bridge of her upturned little nose. This little human is oddly…cute. “Did you intend to catch me?”
I snort.
“Ha! You do understand me.” She smiles as if that bit of knowledge is somehow her personal accomplishment. “Did you— Did you mean to catch me?”
I don’t dignify that with an answer. How would I possibly have known she was going to be out here, alone and evidently barefoot. Completely vulnerable, without one of those little glass bubbles to enclose her like a transparent cocoon.
But she can't answer questions I don't ask.
“Who are you?” I say the words in her language. “How did you get here?”
“I— I don’t really know. I just woke up on a shuttle, and this man pushed me out of a hatch in the floor. In a cage. But then it opened when it hit the ground, releasing me into…” She shrugs. “Into the wild, I guess.”
A cage? I wonder if it’s salvageable. I wonder what it’s made of. Surely it’s to the east, the direction both she and the ezaki arrived from.
“This is the Fetoji enclosure, right? You’re Fetoji?”
Of course I am Fetoji. What else would I be?
She huffs when I don’t answer, then she gives her head a little shake, which rubs the side of her skull against the guma fibers. She looks a little ridiculous, all bunched up in my trap. “So, is this your net?” She reaches up and runs one hand over the inside. “It’s awesome. Great…craftsmanship. I give this kidnapping a solid five stars. I would totally recommend it to a friend.”
Though I understand her language, I have no idea what she’s talking about. She hasn’t been kidnapped. At least, not by me.
“But do you think you could let me down, now? I’m assuming, based on the fact that you’re holding one of its horns, that that monster is dead? So could you just…?” She reaches up and grabs the net with both hands, then she hauls herself upright, as much as possible. Then she makes a sawing motion toward the fibers. “Can you, like, cut me down? Or something? I promise if you get me out of here, I’ll return the favor.”
I snort again. This woman is barefoot, scared, and alone. She’s tiny, and though this enclosure may be artificially produced and maintained—a false version of my species’ homeworld—the predators inhabiting it are real, and she is defenseless against them. There is literally no way she can help me with anything. Except to empty my net.
“You’ll be greatly rewarded,” she continues, expanding upon her meaningless promise. “I mean, I don’t really know what you need out here…” She glances around the woods, evidently perplexed as to why they exist. “But whatever it is, you’ll have it in spades.”
Her offer is ridiculous. But I do need my net back, and just because I let her down doesn't mean I have to take her with me. So I head toward a tree to my right and use my spearpoint to chop through the long guma fiber suspending her from the tree.
She crashes toward the ground, and too late I realize that the fall will hurt her. So I lunge into place beneath the net. My spear and the ezaki horn thunk into the dirt on either side of me as I drop them. And as her slight weight falls into my waiting arms, drawing a soft, tantalizing grunt from her, her scent washes over me.
It’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled before. It swirls through my soul, and rushes through my veins. All at once, it makes my hands clench around her flesh, my mane puff up, and my cock swell.
Do all human women smell like this? I’ve never been close enough to one to catch her scent.
“Oh!” the woman breathes, when she finds herself safely caught. “That wasn’t what I was expecting. But thank you.” She tries to slide out of my grip, but I hold onto her. In that moment, I can’t let her go. Literally, I can’t make my hands open and release her.
Until I realize that the now-slack guma net has fallen to drape over my head and down my back, to brush against my tail and the backs of my thighs. It’s big enough to hold at least six women her size. Maybe twice that. Because it was intended to hold an ezaki.
I set her down on top of the half of the net that isn’t draped over me, then I reach back and flip the guma fibers over my head, folding the net over on the ground at her feet. When I stand, I find her staring at me in astonishment. Her gaze trails over me, and I feel my chest puffing up at her appraisal. My hair follicles stiffen, fluffing up my mane as well, so she can see how long it is. How magnificent, and shiny, and thick.
Maybe I should step into the sun, so she can see the light shine on each golden strand.
No. I shake my head, trying to dislodge that thought. There are several women of my own species within a three-hour run from here who would gladly bend over and present themselves to me, without requiring any promises. They understand my position on the issue of mating.
This human woman is not an option. Not if I want to live. Now that my net is back in my possession, I should just turn around and leave her here.
But then her attention finds my erect cock, and I go still, pride surging through me as her mouth drops open.
“Oh my. You’re not wearing a scrap of clothing, are you? Though from the looks of things, you’d need much more than a scrap. You need a whole bolt. That’s what cloth is measured in, right?” She aims a vague, one-handed gestu
re at my cock. “You’d need a whole bolt of cloth to cover up that situation.”
I can’t fathom what kind of “situation” would make me want to cover my cock, but her reaction is satisfying. She is impressed. She is intrigued. She is…aroused. I can tell from the sudden shift in her already delicious scent.
This is unexpected. Humans usually look at me in some combination of fascination and disgust. Yet this woman… This Syrie…
No. She is no different. She is dangerous. A certainty that is rendered no less true by the fact that she is also utterly helpless out here. In my world.
Only it isn’t my world. Not really.
My hands reach for her before I realize what’s happening, and it takes all of my self-control to pull them back. To make myself kneel, instead, and fold the net back again, to free my spear and my horn from the tangle of guma fibers. But she’s still standing on the other half of my net.
I lift her by her upper arms, and her little squeal of surprise pings off of every nerve ending in my body. It makes my cock ache and my mouth water. I want more of these sounds from her, but I want to hear them coming from beneath me. I want to be touching more than just her arms, when I draw these sweet little noises from her.
I want to take her. To claim her, right here on the forest floor. I want to bend her over and slide inside her, coaxing more of those soft grunts from her. I want to sink into her and—
No. That isn’t possible.
I walk her backward and set her on the ground, then I quickly fold up the net, ignoring several tangles. The truth is that it would be in worse shape if I’d had to spear the ezaki through it, because my spear would have cut holes in the fibers.
“What is that made of?” Syrie asks as I work. “It’s like some kind of thin cord, but it’s stretchy, like rubber. And it—” She prattles on, and I tune her out. Her questions and exclamations don’t matter. She is nothing to me. Nothing but a very real and imminent danger.
Yet my cock stays achingly hard.
When the net is folded as small as I can get it, I tuck it into my pack, then I slide the horn in next to it and swing the leather pack onto my back. I seize my spear in my left hand. Then I turn to walk away from her toward the ezaki’s corpse, which is probably being scavenged right now by every creature who heard or scented its demise.
“Wait!” Her small, warm hand lands on my arm, and I shrug off her touch, even though I miss the warmth immediately. “You can’t just leave me alone out here! I’ll never make it!”
I keep walking. “Your people will come for you,” I tell her. Though surely she already knows that.
“No, they won’t.” She follows me through the woods, her steps annoyingly loud, despite her lack of typical human footwear. “Not any time soon, anyway. Because they don’t know I’m here. They don’t even know I’m gone. I— Well, I don’t know if you have any frame of reference for what I did, or if you’d understand why I did it, but I kind of…disappeared. On purpose. No one’s expecting me back for nearly a month, and my guar—” She bites that word off before I can figure out what it was supposed to be. “Very few people know I’m missing, and the ones who do know have no reason to look for me here. I don’t even know why I’m here, or, really, how I got here.”
I grunt at her as she finally catches up with me, falling into step at my side. “None of that matters. All you have to do is flag down the next glass bubble that rolls through here. They’ll have you out of the enclosure in no time.”
“Glass bubble?” She looks confused. “Oh, the tour pods. But there won’t be any more tours for a while, because the maintenance period just started. They do it every year, to give the software teams a chance to update their systems without risking any glitches while there are customers around to—” She gives her head a little shake, and her dark mane ripples with the motion, catching the sunlight. “Never mind.”
Syrie trips over another spica root, and when she gasps and grabs my arm for balance, the warmth of her touch settles into the base of my cock, making the already stiff length ache. “Sorry.” She snatches her hand back as if my flesh burned her. “But my point is that no one’s going to be down here for a while,” she continues as she struggles to keep pace. “For a month, at least.”
Oh. She’s talking about the peaceful period. Every now and then, the glass bubbles stop rolling through the enclosure. I never knew why, before. I’ve always simply accepted it as a gift from the universe. One it damn well owes those of us kept down here, on display.
“So I… I need your help. Please.” She’s pleading with me now. “I can't be alone down here. I promise, I’ll make it worth your while.”
Her eyes are huge and brown, with little round, black pupils.
If I get caught anywhere near her, I’m as good as dead. But if I leave her out here, she’s as good as dead.
Suddenly Syrie gasps. She goes silent and stops walking, and I look back to see her staring at something. “Holy shit,” she whispers. “You really killed it.”
I follow her gaze to the remains of the ezaki, which is—miraculously—still scavenger-free.
“No need to sound so surprised.”
“I’m not— I mean, I knew you’d probably killed it, because you had its horn. But seeing it is… Wow.”
I set my things down and begin unfolding my net.
“What are you doing?” she asks. “Here, let me help.” She rushes forward and grabs one end of the net, to help me unfold the heavy bulk of it. Even though her muscles strain against the weight.
When she finally understands my goal, she helps me drape the net over my massive kill. “This will protect it?” she guesses. “See, I can help you!” she adds, without waiting for my answer to her question.
“Yet somehow, I’ve managed to make it out here all this time, without needing a tiny human woman to lift one corner of my guma net.”
“Okay. That’s fair.” She nods quickly. “But—”
But the truth is that how she can help me doesn’t matter. If I don’t help her, she’s going to die in this enclosure. She’s right about that much.
One month. No one off-world will be looking for her and no one will be down here to find her for an entire month. So as long as she’s out of my hair by the end of this “maintenance period…”
No. I’ve already learned that lesson. It’s too dangerous.
I start to shake my head, and she grabs at my arm. Again. “Please. Please. Don’t leave me here to die. I promise I’ll compensate you for your kindness.”
But she won’t. She can’t possibly. She has no useful—
Oh. She keeps admiring my cock. Perhaps she intends to repay my kindness by presenting me with her cunt. That isn’t something a Fetoji woman would likely offer as an exchange, but maybe it’s a common arrangement among humans?
I’ve never mated with a woman who wasn’t of my own species, yet this woman makes my veins burn with the need to touch her. Just thinking about the look she gave me earlier—or the scent pouring from her pores—makes me hard all over again.
A growl rumbles up from my throat. I lurch forward and grab her arm, then I squat and pull her toward me with a firm grip on the back of one of her narrow thighs. I lift her as I stand, and she squeals when the weight of her torso bends her over my shoulder.
“Wait! Put me down! What are you doing?”
“I can go much faster this way,” I tell her as I move out of the clearing, in the direction of my home.
“But I—”
“There are predators out here, and they don’t need any help finding us,” I snap softly.
“But—
I shush her with an inarticulate hiss and a light smack on her backside.
The woman gasps as my hand makes contact with her firm flesh, but she goes quiet. Satisfied with her cooperation, though a Fetoji woman would be hissing and snapping at me, I purr, and she sucks in a breath when the rumble from my throat echoes through my torso.
“Well,” she whispers. “
That feels…good.”
I grunt in acknowledgment.
She feels pretty damn good, too.
3
Syrie
He’s purring. Like, actually purring. This large man, who’s just killed a massive monster with nothing but a primitive-looking spear, has just thrown me over his shoulder and is purring like a giant house cat. The sound rumbles through me, the same way you can feel the rumble of an engine on a plane or in a ship. Only it’s much more intimate than that. He seems very pleased with himself. Or maybe he’s pleased with me.
Either way, the sound—
No, it’s not the sound itself. It’s the feel of it. That rumble. It’s oddly soothing. Yet also stimulating, in a way that’s not entirely platonic, but isn’t fully erotic, either. It makes my body feel alive, everywhere I’m touching him. Which is pretty much the entire front half of me.
Yet as comforting as this odd purr is, it confuses me. I've been here before, and not one of the Fetoji I met purred at me.
I can't afford to forget how dangerous this man is. How dangerous he—and his species—can be, anyway. He may be humanoid, even with his lion-like alien features, but he just took down the biggest animal I’ve ever seen. All on his own.
If he wanted to hurt me, I’d have no way to stop him. And this time, there won’t be an extraction team coming to my rescue. Not any time soon, anyway. Which means that I need to make this man my friend.
"What's your name?" I whisper.
"Lohr.”
Knowing his name makes me feel suddenly guilty for lying to him about my own. Though it's not a lie exactly; Syrie is my middle name. I don't know for sure that he would recognize my first and last name, if he heard them, but if he did…
He can't know who I really am. No one in the enclosure can.
"You know you really can put me down," I say. "I'll be quiet, I promise."
"Again, I can move much faster this way.”
I plant my palms on his back, intending to push myself up and demand to be put down, but I find my focus derailed by the sight of his tail, moving slowly back and forth as he walks. And by the soft fuzz covering his torso. It has a smooth, velvety feel, and I can’t stop touching it. So I settle my cheek against his back and watch as the trees go by. Only the occasional branch slaps at me; for the most part he manages to dodge them. To keep me from being whipped by this transplant of nature.
The Lion and the Mouse Page 3
