Tchaikovsky: Stargazer Alien Barbarian Brides #3
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Tchaikovsky
Stargazer Alien Barbarian Brides #3
Tasha Black
13th Story Press
Copyright © 2019 by 13th Story Press
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
13th Story Press
PO Box 506
Swarthmore, PA 19081
13thStoryPress@gmail.com
Contents
Tasha Black Starter Library
About Tchaikovsky
Tchaikovsky
1. Angel
2. Peter
3. Angel
4. Peter
5. Angel
6. Peter
7. Angel
8. Peter
9. Angel
10. Peter
11. Peter
12. Angel
13. Peter
14. Angel
15. Peter
16. Angel
17. Peter
18. Angel
19. Peter
20. Peter
21. Angel
22. Peter
23. Peter
24. Angel
25. Angel
26. Peter
27. Peter
Bond (Sample)
1. Posey
2. Posey
3. Posey
4. Posey
Tasha Black Starter Library
About the Author
One Percent Club
Tasha Black Starter Library
Packed with steamy shifters, mischievous magic, billionaire superheroes, and plenty of HEAT, the Tasha Black Starter Library is the perfect way to dive into Tasha's unique brand of Romance with Bite!
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About Tchaikovsky
Can a homesick space pirate and a broken alien heal each other’s hearts?
Angel signed up with the Space Cadets to join her twin brother after he left to explore new frontiers. Instead, her stasis pod was lost in space. Now, hundreds of years later, Angel has been rescued, but all her hopes and dreams are dead. Becoming a space pirate seems as good a way to fill her time as any other. She certainly isn’t going to put her heart on the line again. But when she meets a sexy yet complicated alien security officer on her very first mission, her priorities start to get confused.
Peter has always been the strongest of his brothers. But being captured and forced to serve on the pleasure ships against his will until his brothers broke him out has changed him. The enormous alien is confident on the outside, but broken inside. He never expects to share a physical connection with another being. But impossibly, the human scavenger aboard his vessel awakens both his lust and his most violent protective instincts. Angel is destined to be his blood mate, if Peter dares to bring her into his bed and his heart.
When the unlikely mates discover a pod onboard with a baby who just might be the clone of the famous classical composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, the two must finally face the music.
Can these broken travelers make each other whole again? Or will their escape from the abandoned cruiser be their swan song?
Tchaikovsky
1
Angel
Angel strode out of the chamber she had just looted. Her origami drone, BFF21, hovered near her shoulder.
Angel tried to keep her eyes on the ground, but somehow the trees in the biodome drew her gaze. They loomed over her, dark as night, their canopy so far above that she could barely see it.
She shivered.
“Your body temperature is ninety-eight point six degrees Fahrenheit,” BFF21 announced in a gruff yet feminine voice. “Your trembling indicates that you may be coming down with the common cold.”
“It’s not that,” Angel said. “It’s just those trees, they give me the creeps.”
“The purpose of the biodome is to provide oxygen and comfort to the occupants of the ship,” BFF21 said. “It’s meant to be peaceful.”
“Well, it looks like the set of a horror movie,” Angel said, picking up her pace to reach the next doorway so she could escape the view of the woods.
Angel had grown up in a colonial-era townhouse on a cobblestone street in Old City Philadelphia. Trees were for field trips and fairy tales. You weren’t supposed to live under them like a troll under a bridge. Literally anything could be hiding in there, waiting for a person to let her guard down.
She scurried into the next room and slid the tagger out of her holster.
Though this was her first mission as an intergalactic treasure hunter, she was getting the hang of it quickly. The pirating trade suited her restlessness.
“But what would my brother have to say about it?” she wondered out loud as she scanned the room for anything worth scavenging.
It was a sleeping chamber, a bit fancier than most. The gold-toned fixtures were only painted composite. But she saw real metal in the frame of the bed. Someone important must have slept here.
She bent to tag it.
“Good find,” BFF21 chirped.
“Thanks,” Angel said.
There was something anticlimactic about tagging an item of value and then walking away.
Carrier drones would come back when the captain retrieved her. They would take everything she had tagged back to the Stargazer, or maybe onto a freighter if her haul was big enough and worth the steep rental cost for a freight ship.
The only other thing in the room maybe worth saving was the hanging on the wall. It appeared to be some sort of projected image on a liquid looking screen. The image was of a woman either floating just over the surface of a stream or drowning just under it - it was hard to tell which.
“Is that art?” she wondered out loud.
“It appears to be everyday art,” BFF21 said cheerfully.
“Is it worth anything?” Angel asked.
“The value of any artistic work is in the eye of the beholder,” BFF21 said.
“I’ll take that as a no,” Angel said, spinning around to get out of the room.
BFF21 swooped down to hover near her shoulder.
Angel took two steps and then BFF21 beeped.
“Proximity alert,” BFF21 said.
“What do you mean?” Angel asked.
“It means there’s another life form nearby,” BFF21 said.
She knew what the proximity alert meant. She’d just been taken by surprise to hear it. The ship was supposed to be deserted.
“What kind of life form?” Angel asked.
BFF21 hummed for a moment.
“An unidentified life form,” she replied at last.
“I thought this ship was abandoned,” Angel said, spinning to face her robotic companion, even though the little drone didn’t have eyes.
“With the electromagnetic interference it was impossible to get a reliable scan from the Stargazer,” BFF21 said. “It is still rendering many of my scans ineffective.”
“And Mama sent us anyway?” Angel asked.
The captain of the Stargazer was called Mama by the entire crew, though no one had ever said why. She was a tiny woman with a silver eyepatch - tough, mysterious, beautiful in her way, and far too young to be any of their mothers.
“The probability of any creature remaining alive on this ship is highly unlikely,” BFF21 said.
“And yet, here we are,” Angel said.
“Here we are,” BFF21 agreed.
Angel willed herself to remain calm.
“Are you getting an
y reading on what it is?” Angel asked.
“Oh, there’s no need for alarm,” BFF21 said. “It is almost certainly not Gryvens.”
It had not occurred to Angel that it would be Gryvens.
Her stomach began to twist in knots.
“Why not?” Angel asked.
“There would be more corpses,” BFF21 said brightly.
Great.
Angel slid her hand into the side pocket of her suit and wrapped her fingers around the smooth, reassuring handle of her baton.
She pulled it out, flicking her wrist to extend the telescoping metal cylinder to its full length.
“You’re not supposed to have a weapon,” BFF21 pointed out.
“Sneaking around an abandoned luxury cruiser with a giant forest in the middle of it is no place for an unarmed privateer,” Angel said.
“Mama wouldn’t like it,” BFF21 said.
Angel decided now might not be the best time to mention that the end of the baton was electrified.
“Mama’s not here,” Angel said.
“Where did you get it?” BFF21 asked.
“It was a gift,” Angel said.
“How thoughtful,” BFF21 sniffed.
“You ready?” Angel asked.
“Are you suggesting that we deliberately try to find this thing?” BFF21 asked.
“Better than letting it sneak up on us,” Angel said. “We don’t have to make contact, but I want to know what we’re dealing with.”
She didn’t wait for the little drone to answer, instead she headed back into the corridor, trying once again to keep her eyes away from the trees that filled the center of the ship.
2
Peter
Peter awoke with a start, half-expecting to feel the cold metal of a pleasure collar around his neck.
But he was free.
He stretched his muscles and shook off the nightmare, only to remember he was on a stranded cruiser.
With the baby.
“Tchai,” he hissed, leaping up and landing in a crouch, ready to fight.
But little Tchai was sleeping soundly, bundled in his makeshift creche beside Peter’s own bedding. His little brow was furrowed as if he too were unsettled.
“Everything is fine, little one,” Peter crooned softly.
The little face smoothed, rosy lips pouting.
Peter sat back on his bedding, heart pounding, and cursed his dream memories for destroying the precious little rest allowed him by the growing baby.
Small humans were surprisingly restless. Peter attributed it to their being caged in just one form.
He sighed, watching Tchai’s tiny chest rise and fall.
All is well. You are safe.
Something about caring for the baby was healing his broken soul.
If only they weren’t so lonely. Children needed a community, full of good smells and happy noises, not this eerie space-bound tomb.
Out of the profound silence, there came a sound.
It came from out in the corridor, soft and subtle. It was worse than a loud sound.
It was the sound of something trying not to make a sound.
This time Peter’s skin shivered with electricity and his heart pounded in response.
The Other was calling to him, and he chose to allow it to transform him.
Without conscious thought, his mind went to a story book from the ship’s library about an angry boy escaping his home for a wild place.
Instantly he felt himself swell taller, wider. Fur sprung from his body. Horns protruded from his forehead. His bare toes grew claws.
As his horns scraped the ceiling, a scent drifted toward him.
He froze in place, hypnotized by it.
In this Other form his thoughts were strange. It was hard to know what attracted him. It wasn’t meat, or the salt water of a traveling sea.
But something called to him, siren-like.
Peter stood stock still, torn.
That scent couldn’t have come from the evil thing that dwelled on the ship and pursued the baby. That thing was cold, devoid of scent, and vicious. It was effortlessly silent.
No, this was something softer, warmer…
And if it had made it this far, it had somehow circumvented the DNA lock, something the monster had never done.
Thoughts of the monster sent a wave of involuntary panic through his veins. Peter needed to find the owner of the delicious scent, before that monster did.
But he couldn’t abandon the child.
The sounds in the corridor grew closer.
He turned back to Tchai. The baby was sleeping comfortably.
However compelling it smelled, this thing might not be friendly. And if it were a danger, it might be better for him to face off with it far away from the child.
But the door to the suite where he and the baby hid was opening now, it was too late.
And the intriguing scent was washing over him like a dream, making it harder to focus his other senses.
With the last of his determination, he lunged out of the room he shared with the baby and into the antechamber to face the unknown intruder.
3
Angel
Angel placed her hand on the DNA lock and tried not to flinch at the pinprick.
She hated the sight of blood. The fact that this ship forced her to give a sample any time she wanted to enter a restricted area seemed grossly unfair.
“If you think that finger prick hurts, just wait until you bump into an acid-spitting alien,” BFF21 said.
“You’re only saying that because you want me to put my helmet back on,” Angel said.
“I do want you to put your helmet back on,” BFF21 agreed. “But acid-spitting aliens would prefer you to keep it off. It will make it easier to peel strips of your face off when they eat you.”
Angel shuddered again and pulled her helmet out of her pack.
She slid it over her head, instantly hating how removed it made her feel from her surroundings. There was an interior holographic display, but it made her feel like she was in a video game instead of real life.
“You would have loved this, Anthony,” she whispered ruefully to her brother, wishing he were there in real life to agree.
They continued to a door.
“Back there somewhere,” BFF21 said.
“Any clue what it is?” Angel asked. “We’re closer now.”
BFF21 hummed and whirred.
“No,” she replied at length.
Angel placed her hand on the DNA lock to the door.
Another pinprick and it swung open, bumping against the wall.
“Something’s coming our way, fast,” BFF21 cried.
Angel held the baton in front of her, defensively.
Something huge skidded around the corner and rushed at them.
It was one thing to have an electrified baton. It was another to have to use it.
Angel held her weapon, trying to get a sense of the creature beyond the flash of fur and fangs and… feathers?
It eyed her wildly.
It reminded her of something. A monster from a child’s picture book.
She tried to strike it, nearly wrenching out her shoulder with the effort.
It dodged, lightning fast, knocking BFF21 to the ground. It moved way too fast for something so huge and ungainly.
She went for it again, brandishing the baton over her shoulder like she was about to serve up a tennis ball.
Suddenly she was pinned to the ground by her baton arm. The energy coursing through the weapon fizzed out and it hung uselessly in her pinned hand.
The view through the helmet was murky. She couldn’t even properly see what was holding her down.
This isn’t how I’m going down, she thought to herself.
She ripped the helmet off with her free hand.
There was an intake of breath from the thing that held her.
She blinked into the huge yellow eyes of the creature, momentarily transfixed.
It brok
e eye contact with her and lifted its snout to the air, snuffling softly, as though something else had caught its attention.
Before she had time to register what was happening, the thing leaped off her.
She watched as he darted over to the door and sealed it, just as something huge slammed into it from the other side.
Angel scrambled to her feet and backed away until she felt the cold wall of the antechamber behind her back.
There was a loud bang on the door, and then another, but it held steady.
A few seconds passed without another sound from the hall, and the strange creature in the room with her sighed.
No, it wasn’t a sigh. At least it wasn’t only a sigh.
The fur and feathers melted away before Angel’s eyes until she was looking at the very fit and naked backside of a man.
He turned to face her.
Angel nearly gasped out loud. He was beautiful, almost inhumanly so. His eyes were dark and soulful, his body chiseled, like a sculpture of a superhero.
Her mind began to reel at what had happened. She couldn’t have just watched this beautiful man change forms.
Something dangerous might be just outside the door, and she didn’t know if it was more or less dangerous than the man before her.
Her only ally was a two-ounce origami robot that lay dazed on the floor beside her.