“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.
“We only call pet animals that get lost strays,” I say.
“Yes,” he says.
Justyes.The fucking nerve. The fluffy yellow creature looked at me like I was something to consume. These three are looking at me like I’m a wet kitten who just rolled in out of a storm.
Speaking of the third, he is the most astonishing beast I have ever laid eyes on and I am quite literally surrounded by a sentient menagerie.
He is a Minotaur.
Hate to describe it that way, because it feels so terribly human-centric, but he’s a big red bull-like creature with a face that is far more bovine than human—though he can speak.
“Cute,” he says, in a voice that sounds like a bull lowing for his mate. “Does it want something to eat?”
“I’m not an ‘it,’” I say, immediately offended. “I’m a ‘she.’”
“Does she want something to eat?” He repeats the question in an unbothered tone.
“I don’t know if they have anything for humans to eat here. What do they like? Fats? Carbs? Simple starches?”
“We could look it up,” the blond beauty says, pulling out a small tablet.
I am grateful that they seem to care about me on some level, even if it is only on the level of a bunch of frat boys suddenly confronted with a responsibility they didn’t really anticipate having.
“They can’t have cyanide or arsenic,” he reads off the screen. “I feel like arsenic is in a lot of this food.”
“The Deltari have to have arsenic, or their teeth fall out,” the tall one says. None of them have introduced themselves or asked my name. I think that is rude, until I realize it makes perfect sense. I never introduced myself to my friend’s pets either. I did always ask their name, though.
