by Zara Zenia
The Alien Mate’s Abduction
A Sci-Fi Alien Abduction Romance
Zara Zenia
Juno Wells
Illustrated by
Natasha Snow
Contents
Mailing List
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Epilogue
About Zara Zenia
Also by Zara Zenia
Roxy Sinclaire
Also by Roxy Sinclaire
About Juno Wells
Benzen Preview
The Blue Alien’s Mate Preview
Copyright © 2017 by Zara Zenia, Juno Wells
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Natasha Snow Designs
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the authors’ imagination.
Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.
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Chapter 1
Lainey
I was curled up in the fetal position on a metal gurney empty of any comforting measures, sitting in air so cold it burned while I drifted in and out of consciousness, trying not to think about how I got there or what was going on. When we first began the fertility study, they took us to a hotel that had rooms bigger than my apartment.
Mine had a jacuzzi tub and a bathroom the size of my living room. There had even been a little vanity that held sample bottles of designer perfumes. The suite even came with a free massage.
My biggest regret was that I stayed in. I didn't even use the jacuzzi. Instead, I looked through the room service menu and ordered a sushi platter. After that, I passed out and woke up naked in this freezer.
I only signed up for the study because they were offering fifteen thousand dollars to participants. At such a high rate, I should've known it was going to be something terrible. Cancer research is the same way. There's always a waiver stating that the people conducting the study are not legally liable for the death of the participant. People died a lot in my studies. It was just something that happened. We warned everyone. The study participants I dealt with knew what they were getting themselves into, but they took the risk.
This study was different. Nobody told us it was going to be like this. I felt like a piece of meat ready to go on sale in the supermarket.
I heard something hissing pass me by. It drifted off in the distance, propelled by what sounded like a thousand ball bearings scraping and crackling against the tile. What was it?
I shouldn’t be here, freezing to death in this room. I squeezed my eyes shut and started replaying the events of the night before when I ordered the sushi platter. I could see the strips of raw salmon and bright green avocado surrounded by a casing of seaweed and rice. I took my time, mixing the wasabi and the soy sauce, staring at a piece of sashimi. When I was done, I stabbed the sticky chunk of raw salmon with my chop stick and plopped it into the black and green wasabi mixture so I could let it soak up the flavor.
I loved it as soon as I tasted it. The fish, the rice—everything was so much more flavorful than it usually was. It was addictive.
I decided to take my food to the bed so I could watch a movie, but when I picked up the platter to set it down on the bedside table, I almost dropped it from the weight of my body threatening to fall in on itself.
I finally got back up on the bed and drenched another roll in the thick black liquid before I took a bite. When it hit my mouth, I forgot the movie playing in the background and it felt like I was spinning until I hit the floor and lost everything.
Nothing could've prepared me for what I woke up to.
When I first started the study, everything seemed to be legit. The researchers did an amazing job of allaying our fears during orientation—especially that woman, Victoria, with the starlet red lips and the perfect blond beehive.
The day of the orientation, they had us sit down in a large conference room with pastries and beverages sitting in the center of the table. We were called in one by one and asked about everything from our sex life to our cycles. The man who called me back was bald with cold blue eyes that met mine when I spoke. The way his eyes held mine, made me feel vulnerable and naked.
I still didn't understand what exactly was going on. They told us different things, that they were going to test our fertility level because they wanted to learn about how best to improve fertility in women, but it had all been a bunch of crap. I’d known even then that they'd never let on what was really going on. Lying is necessary for accurate results when conducting studies with live participants. It helps limit the placebo effect. Still, this was my body they were planning to play with and I wanted to know what they were going to do to me first.
The mood throughout the room seemed to mirror what I was thinking, but everyone perked up when Victoria came in. Unlike the rest, she moved confidently and with authority.
“All right.” She moved to the head of the table and met all of our eyes. “I know you're all wondering about what is going on here, so I'd like to clear things up.” She showed us, through a series of graphic slides and videos, how a device would be implanted inside our bodies.
She didn't say what the device was or what it would do to us, but at that point it didn't matter, because she clearly knew what she was talking about. She left us with a warm smile and the words, “You're all gonna be just fine.” I believed her. I didn't have any reason not to, she was so sure of herself.
Looking back, I should've walked out when she said that. They couldn't keep me on this cold metal gurney against my will. I refused to put up with it any longer. I commanded my feet to move but nothing happened. My hands, my neck—every single part of me was paralyzed. I couldn't even speak.
I forgot the cold and my naked body. I was completely incapacitated. Anyone that wanted to could walk in here and do anything they wanted to me, and I wouldn't be able to stop them.
Suddenly something raced across the floor toward my bed. It moved slowly and deliberately along the edge of my bed. I shut my eyes and tried to black out everything I could, but that sound was still there, a sentry slithering across the room.
It felt dangerous. Somebody wanted me to stay on the gurney. What if this was more than just a study? They couldn't paralyze me without my permission. There were waivers to be signed, ethical and legal concerns to address.
I couldn't die like this. I had unfinished business. I still needed to talk to Markathus. That couldn'
t be left undone.
Three weeks ago we had gotten together for dinner. It was supposed to be our night, a special night that would mark one of the most magical moments in both of our lives. I cleaned up, dimmed the lights in the dining room, and set the table with fine china and a pair of vanilla scented, tall white candles.
I wore my black hair in wavy curls, hanging loose over a thin, red dress drenched in department store perfume. When I answered the door, he was wearing a plain t-shirt and jeans with his short black hair slicked back like a prohibition era gangster, a single breathtaking curl falling down over his forehead.
“Come on in.” I turned around to walk back inside, but I didn't hear the sound of his footsteps behind me, so I turned back. “Come on.” I was covered in sweat from the oven's heat filling the house, and couldn't help but wipe my forehead. The house was stuffy and quiet. Too quiet. This didn’t feel like a meeting of two souls bound by love.
Why was he standing there like that, leaning against the doorway with his eyes averted as if he couldn't meet mine?
“Lainey...”
“Come inside.”
“I can't.”
“What are you talking about? I made us dinner.”
“No, Lainey. I have to go. I can't see you anymore. I just thought that I should tell you in person.” He turned around and walk back to his car. He seemed so cold.
“Just tell me why?” I chased after him, struggling to hold my tears in.
He sped off before I could get an answer out of him. Knowing him, he would've arranged it so I couldn't find or call him. He was gone, but I refused to accept that. I fell flat on my knees in the middle of the of the street, in my red cocktail dress with mascara streaming down my face.
That was how he left me, like a lost child with no place to go. I had loved that men, and yet he had betrayed me. Now here I was stuck in the freezer, and still wondering why he’d gone. Hadn’t he cared? He’d promised me that we would always be together. That was a lie. I don't know why he did it, but something told me, deep within, that he knew from the start that we'd never be together.
But why lead me on? What could possibly make a man that seemed so devoted and loyal leave the life we that planned together? I'd never met a man like him before. There was never a moment when I sensed that he had any doubts about us. I was the center of his universe, the only thing that mattered. Or so it seemed. Every time I walked into the room, he held a spotlight on me, and a million questions. His curiosity was insatiable.
So why did he leave? I know he loved me. That was the one thing in the entire world that I knew for certain.
But now I had other things I needed to focus on. The ultimate insult to injury. This terrible, dark place with something stalking the floor while I slowly froze to death. It seemed like hours had gone by while that clacking sound moved across the room watching the other gurneys. The sound started to become hypnotic and the cold was starting to make me tired. I let myself fall asleep, haunted by images of strange faces, and that woman who told us that everything would be all right.
All of a sudden, something snapped and I lost it.
The door slammed open and I got a glimpse of the room, all long rows of gurneys just like mine, and somebody was walking fast down the center aisle. All I could see was his silhouette. It didn't give me much to go on.
As he moved closer, his baby blue scrubs and white jacket came into view but it was too dark to make out his face. He was only three rows away from me.
Was he coming for me?
I felt like I needed to fight for my life as he closed the distance between us and stared down at me before pushing his hand underneath my back and pulling my petrified body up against his.
“Let's go.” Markathus's voice was barely audible.
There was something not right about this place. Woman after woman stared up at us quietly while their pale frames huddled closer against the metal. Just before we passed through the doorway, I managed to get a look back at the creature slithering across the floor. It was a snake fashioned out of hundreds of tiny, metallic spheres, and bound together by an unseen force.
Chapter 2
Markathus
My species has been traveling from galaxy to galaxy for thousands of years. We've encountered countless civilizations, transformed dead planets and created life. Until we started losing our ability to reproduce, we had been considered gods.
The entire Fiori Imperium was thrown into a state of panic. If we couldn’t find a way to reproduce, we would go extinct in less than a century. We had built countless failed fertilization clones, artificial wombs and implants. Nothing worked. Every failure was like a tiny death bringing us closer to extinction. Depressed, we looked elsewhere for answers until we eventually found humans, a virtually unknown race that were so young that they'd barely even learned to harness electricity.
When we first started leaving our planet, humans were still swinging through the trees and eating bugs off each other’s backs.
The astounding rate at which their civilization progressed still didn't make up for the fact that their cognitive abilities were greatly hindered. They weren't dumb. In many ways they were smarter than most, but humans were more occupied with delusions, entertainment and emotion than they were with critical thinking and research.
There was no order on Earth. At any given time, the humans on one landmass were a second away from eradicating the other, and all they could talk about was how civilized they were. Had it not been for the fact that they were carbon-based, and their cellular makeup seemed to be able to match our own, we would consider them a comical circus unworthy of Fiori attention
Humans would be able to conceive our children. The entire Fiori Imperium was focused on that small blue planet. We studied their air, their history and their environment. We even studied their cultures, so that when the time came we could begin mating with the females there.
At first, we were optimistic. We believed we could easily implant a baby inside them and kill them when the time came with little resistance. So I was sent down to Earth to pose as human and find a woman to implant.
I had never been so revolted in my life. The air was thick with water and green house gases so pungent I could barely breathe. The humans had a disgusting habit of burning things: plants, fossil fuels and other chemicals. The result was an unholy mixture of smells and sensations that drove me insane.
I arrived at a city called San Francisco and took the opportunity to further my research into the species by posing as a doctor—a vocation seen by many human females to be attractive due to its high level social status and difficulty.
I began to learn about what seemed to be the unique practice of human medicine. The humans helped the inferior and ailing members of their species rather than killing them the way the Fiori did. They believed in the happiness of the individual rather than the good of the species. That meant that they didn't care if somebody was slow or dumb, if their bodies had become infected or if they were in pain. The humans didn't leave them behind. They passionately served the sick, took on their pain and did everything in their power to make sure that their patients health was restored.
Among all of the alien practices I had ever encountered, medicine was the strangest. The Fiori believe that weakness is immoral, something to be stamped out in order to better the evolution of our species. When a child was born with a deformity it was killed and its parts were recycled. The same occurred with somebody who became ill. If their bodies couldn't handle the universe than there was no point in them remaining alive. They would simply slow the rest of us down.
The same was done with the elderly, mentally inferior and those born with abnormalities. Before the calamity, we spent centuries manipulating our evolution, carefully planning out our mating patterns in order to foster a stronger species. The result was a species capable of fighting anything we came up against.
That's why living with an inferior species was so terrible. The Fiori were better than they wer
e, so I focused my efforts on my mission and studied human anatomy while I searched for the perfect specimen.
When I met Lainey, she had dedicated her life to studying a human disease. She was visiting a cancer patient in the hospital, and it was clear, just from the look on her face that she really cared about the patient's well being.
I wanted to understand this woman, so I decided that I would study her and implant her with a fetus. Like other humans, Lainey respected the views of the individual rather than the species as a whole. This was due to their instinct called compassion.
In my mind, Lainey became the embodiment of that instinct. She worked tirelessly, living on practically nothing just to heal a disease that occurred naturally in the species. I didn't understand at first. But then I started noticing the way she looked at those suffering, and how she couldn't help but do something to end their pain.
The Fiori felt pain just like humans. We hated it, but we never tried to relieve it for another individual. It didn't make sense for us to waste time doing that when we had to worry about our own survival. Feeding the weak made it easier for them to reproduce and hindered the evolution of the species.
When humans feel compassion, they not only have the desire to help other humans, they feel a kinship with them, something I'd never felt before. It was the most amazing feeling in the world, and when I saw the way that Lainey tried to help the people in her studies, I started to feel something similar for her.
Human instincts are strong, much more powerful than our own. They can't help but react to the way they feel, so I followed her, and told her that I cared about her. I became attached to her and eventually started to understand what it meant to care about another individual.
