Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81280 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
He’s all fluffy smiles now, and the sounds of the bar are fading back into my consciousness. I didn’t even notice the way they seemed to fade when he held me in his thrall.
“Show me the receipt for her, and I’ll walk away right now,” the newcomer says.
“What are you? Store security? I don’t have to show you shit.”
A blade appears under the creature’s chin. It is held by a scaled hand. A chunk of yellow fur falls away with the mere pressure of its existence there. It’s sharp, probably more than razor sharp.
“Let her go, or I will cut your head off and sell your hide to the tannery to be made into toys for infants of various species,” the newcomer says. His voice has just a hint of menace in it, but for the most part it is chillingly conversational. He makes these threats as if they would just be part of his day.
I feel the grip on my arm loosen and fall away.
“Now leave,” the voice says. “Before I decide to do it anyway.”
The creature has a jumpy sort of gait, I discover, a sideways rocking horse gallop that takes him out of the bar with his head bobbling around on his shoulders, still somehow intact.
“You shouldn’t talk to strangers,” the stranger says to me with no trace of irony whatsoever.
“Thank you,” I reply.
I look up at him for the first time, and see a tall, severe-looking alien man with penetrating eyes and dark hair tied back behind his head. He has scales along the lines of his nose and his hair and his features are much closer to human than whatever I just encountered.
“If you’re looking to sell yourself, there’s an auction tomorrow night,” he says. “But if you are captured before then, that will be the end of it. Humans have no rights here.”
“Why would I sell myself?”
“Have you not come to the stars to breed?”
“No!” I laugh at the notion. “Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’m here to survive.”
“Oh,” he says, deadpan. “You’re doing a very good job.”
I laugh because I know he’s teasing me.
“Do you have a place to stay? Do you have any money?”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“I saw you come off the ship,” he says. “You were a stowaway. You’ve got what you have on you, and nothing else. Good luck with that. Zeta Station is a harsh, transitory place. Nobody really lives here, and nothing good has ever happened here. Females of most species wouldn’t come here for all the gold in the Illidian Belt.”
I don’t know how much gold is in the Illidian Belt, but I’m guessing it is a lot.
“I guess I’ll hitch another ride,” I say. “You know what would be useful right now?”
“What’s that?” He speaks with the calm indulgence of a man dealing with an irrational little creature. Now I know how my puppy used to feel at the vet.
“Some sort of book, or file. You know, like a Hitchhikers Guide?”
“Ah,” he says. “There used to be one of those, but they stopped updating it in 2001.”
I do not know that he is any more safe than the twenty-four carat gold asshole who just tried to abduct me and do god knows what with me, but I am not getting the same signals of desperate lust and other hungers from this man as I did from the one who first approached.
“Maybe I’ll write my own,” I say. “So far I’ve managed to hitch a very comfortable ride on a Sligtonian slave freighter, and I’ve survived an encounter with… what was that thing?”
“A Laborbur,” he says. “Vicious creatures. They’re going extinct because half the time when they mate, the male consumes the female.”
“We have that in insects, but it’s usually the other way around,” I muse. “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
“You survived the encounter because I intervened,” he says, matter of fact.
“I might have protected myself eventually,” I say, knowing there’s no way I ever would have.
“You can come and sit with my friends and me,” he says. “While you work out your next gambit.”
One of his friends is an almost-human man so fucking beautiful and blond and muscular and stunning it feels like the universe has put a perpetual kind of spotlight on him, and I cannot begin to pull my eyes from him. He smiles as my savior introduces me.
“Stray human,” he says.
“Stray?” I ask.
“That’s what we call it when a human female does not have an owner.”
“And what do you call it when a human male does not have an owner?”
“Lunch,” he says succinctly.
I make a snorting sound. That’s not really funny. Poor human men being eaten by aliens. I know that women can’t be that far from the menu either. A woman on Earth is unfortunately often accustomed to being preyed upon. Men like to try to fuck us when we’re not all that interested in fucking them. But most of the time we’re not also a candidate for the barbecue. I feel the hair on the back of my neck rising as all those implications filter through my brain.