An enormous, talon-tipped hand grips my upper arm and yanks me up against the bars. The creature’s strength is undeniable. If it decides not to let me go, I’m not going anywhere…
My bare toes, still caked with dried mud, are scrabbling at the cold stone floor as the syringe is aimed at my neck.
Hang on a second. Myneck?
“You are not sticking that thing in my neck!” I say with as much authority as I can muster. “Forget it. Not. Going. To. Happen.”
The thing grunts, I feel a sharp prick in the sensitive spot beneath my right ear, and then, for the second time in what I assume is the same evening, everything goes dark.
* * *
This time,when I awaken, the needling pain in my skull has faded to a dull ache, and I can suck in air more easily. It still smells musty and weird, but I don’t choke every time I try to fill my lungs.
The side of my neck is throbbing, and I’m curled up in a little ball in the corner of the cage. The weird lizard-gorilla creatures are still there, talking amongst themselves in hushed, grunting tones.
“…wake up soon…”
“… that she arrived here just in time for the auction…”
“…hope the translator chip will recognize her native tongue, and function…”
“…so small and fragile, sure they won’t break her?”
“…be starting soon, hope she wakes in time…”
I’m exhausted, scared out of my wits, and confused as fuck, so it takes me a moment to realize that I can actually understand what they’re saying. How? Some weird alien technology? Does it have anything to do with what they injected into me?
My fingertip finds the spot on my neck where the needle went in and I prod it, wincing. There’s a tiny lump just below the surface of the skin. A chip? Have these fuckers actuallymicrochippedme?
Or am I still dreaming, and really imagining all this?
Swallowing past my dry throat, I take another musty breath and call out, “Hey! You!”
Instantly they hush and, as one, just like last time, they all turn their heads to peer at me.
“You awake,” one of them grunts, taking a step closer to my cage.
“No thanks to you.”Easy, Emma, don’t antagonize them.
“No… thanks?” Another of the aliens tilts his head, contemplating my statement. So they seem to understand what I’m saying. Sort of.
“It means… oh, never mind.” I sigh. “Which one of you is the leader?”
“Leader?” The word the creature uses is a guttural exclamation but I still understand him perfectly. So strange.
“Yes. Who’s in charge? Captain? Chief? Boss? You know, the head honcho.”
They all look at one another in turn. Then one whispers something. He has a blue scar over his eyebrow. “Me,” he says, in a tone of disbelief.
I get the impression there is no hierarchy here, and they’re just pretending for my sake. I don’t care. I’m going to get home, one way or another. That’s my only objective. “Okay, you’ll do,” I say to Blue Scar in as sweet a tone as I can muster. “I think there’s been some kind of a mistake. I’m not meant to be here. I don’t want any harm to come to you—ideally, I don’t want any more harm to come tomyself, either—so how about you just let me out of this cage and show me how to get home?”
He comes closer and his gaze meets mine. His eyes are round and dark, deep pools with swirls of silver. Hypnotic. I blink and look away. “No,” he says at length. “You stay here. You go to auction. You good for Ulfarri, or other bidders.”
Wait—what?I’m not sure I heard him correctly. “Auction?” I say slowly.
“Yes. Girl slaves. You go into heat soon, good for Alphas to mate. Alphas pay well for good mate.”
I take a moment to absorb this absurdity.So let me get this straight. In the course of one Friday evening, I’ve been denied entry to a kink club, turned away at the door, then fallen through a mud-slick wormhole into another dimension? Galaxy? Something alien, anyway. Then I was locked in a cage, injected with god-knows-what against my will (although we’ve already established it’s some kind of microchip and translation software), and now they’re going to auction me off as a sex slave to something called an Alpha?
