Alien Prince: (Bride of Qetesh) An Alien SciFi Romance (6 page)

We reached my dwelling just as the last rays of light dimmed and the flowers closed their buds. I had built myself a fine little cabin out of Panyan wood, and it gleamed in the low light of evening. It was a friendly little home, if small; there was the fire pit at the front, as was standard in a Qeteshi dwelling; then there was the bed, a fine, large thing with soft feather mattresses, pillows, and blankets, all of which I had inherited, all of which I had taken with me from the village. The bed itself I had constructed by hand, along with all of the furniture in the cabin. A trunk sat at the foot of the bed, a table and one chair at the side of the room, and a staircase leading to the loft. I had my cooking utensils on the walls, my weaving on the loom. Once I could get the fire going, it would be cozy enough, indeed.

But when I brought my lady to my home, I thought how bare it looked. How sparse. Not at all fit for a lady such as she. But it would have to do.

I laid her down on the bed and covered her with blankets before taking my kills to hang on the wall. Then I set about stoking the fire with slow-burning oils that would keep us warm through the night. Finally, I fetched a bowl of fresh water and a clean cloth, setting the bowl on the table next to the bed as I gently tugged the blanket away from the sleeping girl.

I examined her closely, trying to ascertain the extent of her injuries. I was concerned that she had not yet awakened, but all I could conceivably do for her was make her comfortable and clean her wounds. I dipped the cloth into the water and began to wipe the blood from her face, until there was no trace of the injury save for the cut itself, a long slash that ran parallel to her hairline.

Next, I dabbed gently at her lower lip where there was another cut, and then one on her jawline. Then lower, on her left shoulder, her arm, her hip. Setting the cloth aside, I trailed my fingertips gently over the slope of her cheek. She stirred me to wanting; I covered her up again. I leaned in to listen to the steady rhythm of her breathing. She did not appear to be in any distress, but I knew little of such matters, particularly for a human girl, as she was. It was likely that lesser injuries could claim her life.

I resolved to go back to the village to fetch the healer if she did not wake up before daybreak. At least then I could say that I did all I could for her. Climbing off the bed, I went to the front door and tossed the bloodied water out into the cold night air. Then, I set about skinning the talatuna to prepare it for roasting.

The day was as any other night, except I lived by the music of her breathing. The night was the same, except I saw only the curve of her breasts, the hue of her lips, in my mind. My life was unchanged, save for how she occupied my every sense.

So it should have been no surprise that I dropped the talatuna into the fire when I heard her stir and groan. I shot around and darted to the bedside to peer down at my lady as she shifted underneath the cover of the blankets.

“My lady,” I whispered, standing still, praying to those absent gods that this would be the moment she would wake. “You are safe now.”

She turned her head from side to side, her expression one of distress as she wrestled her way back to consciousness. There was a crease between her eyebrows as she sucked in big gulps of air. And finally, finally with a fluttering of lashes, she opened her eyes.

Teldara Kinesse…

Tierney Mafaren...

Ciara Zehr...

Sara Yve...

These names were a mantra, and they came to me even before I was fully conscious, their faces flashing across the screen behind my eyelids. The preceding days were scraps on the cutting room floor of my memory: the Quarter Moon crest; the accoutrements of my enslavement; the cages; the other frightened faces. And I am a fighter. I fought my way off that ship, and I fought my way back to consciousness.

With a groan, I shifted beneath the heavy cover of furs, that smelled musty with smoke, and I cracked my eyes open against the glow of orange light filling the space. Where am I? I wondered. And how did I get here?

As my eyes adjusted to the light around me, I ran my hands over the furs and tried to push myself up to sitting. But a pair of hands caught me gently by the shoulders and kept me down. I heard a voice — a man’s low, gruff timbre — in a language that was not my own. Blinking, I turned my head in the direction from which the voice had come, and that was the first time I saw his face. He had stubble along the line of his solid jaw, and his eyes were a piercing and disarming shade of blue. So blue, in fact, that I noticed them even before the great horns that emerged from his forehead and swept back over the crown of his head. He wore his white hair long so it brushed his shoulders, a few braids and beaded accents hanging to frame his face. His ears came to a delicate point, adorned from lobe to tip with metal rings in neat rows. He had skin the color of cafe au lait — just the way I like it, just a splash of milk — with the tribal markings of his people in thick inked lines of black and red all over his body. He was terrifying and exquisite. And he was speaking.

“What?” I stammered, first in English. But he was shaking his head; he did not understand me, so I gathered my wits. I’d routed a course to Qetesh; he was clearly Qeteshi. And I could speak his language, so I did: “Forgive me,” I said, my style formal, “I do not know where I am, precisely. And my head is heavy. Please, slow down.”

He nodded his head, and sat on the edge of the bed beside me. “My name is Calder Fev’rosk,” he said, his voice low and sonorous, “and I pulled you out of a badly damaged escape pod a few leagues from here.”

“Here,” I repeated. “Where is ‘here’?”

“Ah, my home,” he said, gesturing absently around the space. “A dwelling about thirty leagues outside of the Qeteshi village of Larandi.” The second settlement. I was familiar with it, if only through what I’d read. The Echelon had sent a contingent of Europax women to this settlement within the last several years. It was a small, peaceful place inhabited largely by godly creatures who still worshiped the old pantheon. Of all the spots to end up, I’d gotten lucky.

I nodded my head, and Calder perked up. “You know of it?”

“My family works for the Echelon,” I explained. “I know something of your people and the attempts to reinvigorate the population.”

“You were in the hands of the Quarter Moon Slavers,” he went on, his tone cautious somehow.

“Yes,” I confirmed.

“How did you come to be their property?”

“I am not their property!” I spat, and my head swam. I closed my eyes a moment, and he pressed the back of his fingers to my forehead.

“Of course you are not,” he said. “But you were in their possession when you escaped.”

“Yes. I was… I had stolen away on a transport vessel bound for Earth. We were sold out by the co-captain: the captain, three other girls, and myself. We were taken aboard the slave ship, and we were en route to…I honestly haven’t a clue. The Keldeeri were going to send me to the auction block, because they determined that I could…” I swallowed hard. “Breed. They knew I could breed, so…”

Calder gently patted my hand. “I understand the ways of the Quarter Moon.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes. We had been in negotiations with them, at one point. When our women first began dying off, we reached out to them to ascertain whether or not they might have any Qeteshi women in their slave ranks. They had none, or at least none they would admit to — and why would they? If they had one of the remaining Qeteshi women in the universe, she would undoubtedly fetch quite a price. In any event, they offered to sell us a few dozen women of other species, but we did not want to deal with them for that. Not when the Echelon was willing to do the same thing for us without the considerable expense.”

I nodded my head, and Calder proffered a faint smile. “Your Qeteshi is very good,” he went on, “if you understood all that I just said.”

“I understand it better than I speak it,” I smiled, “and I speak it better than I read it, so…”

Calder rose to his feet, fetching a jug full of fresh water, which I watched him pour into a hand-carved mug. He sat back down again, cradling the mug in his palms. “Do you feel well enough to sit up?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, and pushed myself up to sitting. As soon as I did, my head began to swim and I nearly fell over. But Calder caught me, sloshing a little of the water onto the furs as he did so.

“Easy,” he gently intoned, “easy.”

Once I’d steadied myself, I noted my distinct lack of clothing, and tugged the furs up to my chin so as to preserve my modesty. Of course, that was hardly necessary at this point. He’d clearly seen all of me that there was to see. Even under such circumstances, civility prevails and I kept my body hidden from his sight, even as I reached out to take the cup of water that he offered. I drank it down greedily so that it spilled over my chin, and when I was finished again, he wiped my face with the corner of the furs. “Thank you,” I breathed.

“My lady,” he said, and something warm blossomed in my chest, “you have not yet given me your name. I know not what I should call you.”

“Forgive me,” I said, smiling as I shook my head gently, so as not to jostle my brain again. “My name is Lorelei Vauss. You can call me Lore.”

“Lore,” he repeated, and I liked the sound of my name on his tongue. I should not have trusted him like this, so completely, so immediately. And I checked myself, reminded myself that I needed him to help me get back to the
Atria
and get those other women off of the slave ship. I needed his help, but I didn’t know anything about him. Chances were good that I had not fallen into worse hands than I had been in with the Quarter Moon Slavers, but he was three times my size, and so much stronger than me that I may as well not had any muscles in my body at all.

I was completely at his mercy. I didn’t know which way the village was, I didn’t know how to navigate the terrain of Qetesh, I didn’t know anything at all. In fact, all I really did know was that it was unsafe to venture out of doors after the sun went down. Even the plants were sucked back into the ground because of how the temperatures plummeted to freezing. I knew that, and I knew that there had been two dozen or so Europax women who now called Larandi home with their new Qeteshi husbands. And I knew his name. Calder. But that was the sum total of what I knew.

“You should rest,” he said, interrupting my reverie. “Rest, and I shall prepare us something to eat.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But I have to get to the village.”

Calder furrowed his brow, taking the empty mug from my hands and setting it aside as he came around the bed and headed toward the dwelling’s entrance. There, he stoked the fire that kept the cold Winternight air at bay. “The Winternight is upon us,” he said plainly. “We will be going nowhere tonight.” He considered me levelly from where he stood near the fire, rigid, awkward almost, like he was unsure of what to do with himself. I shifted on the down mattress and drank in the sight of him: carved from stone, it seemed like, the muscles of his abdomen rippled beneath his flesh. He wore only a pair of light linen drawstring pants, and a leather necklace with a simple pendant hanging at his sternum. I wish I’d been afforded so much covering.

“Tomorrow, then,” I asserted, not sounding as insistent as I felt.

“We shall see how you’re faring, my lady Lore,” he said, turning then to his work table where a few dead animals I did not recognize were in a neat stack.

“You don’t understand,” I began to protest, “I have an urgent matter—”

“None so urgent as the matter of your health,” he said, and I found that I wanted to listen to him. He had a commanding voice, and an even more commanding presence that wanted my obeying. But I am what I am, which is foolhardy and pigheaded, so I went on.

“There are four other women,” I said, sitting up a little straighter, “and they need my help. I swore to them that I would help them. I’ve managed to land on this planet all in one piece, so what I need to do now is find a way off the planet and back to the
Atria
, where I can notify the proper authorities as to the abduction of the women that remain aboard the slave ship from which I escaped.” I sucked in a deep breath of air after letting myself go on like that, and he blinked.

“Are you quite finished?” he asked, and I quirked a brow at the sudden turn of his attitude.

“Furthermore,” I said, “I would like some clothes, if you please. Unless you were hoping that I was here to be your mate.”

Calder barked a laugh. “My lady, I was offered a mate, and I will tell you precisely what I told her: it will be a warm midnight on the coast of Qetesh before I mate with anything the Echelon sends my way.”

I scoffed. “And what’s so wrong with me, exactly? Hm? That you wouldn’t be…honored to have me as your mate?”

“Would you like me to begin with your looks or your personality?” he countered, crossing his arms across the broad expanse of his chest.

“I beg your pardon—”

“Because nothing is wrong with the way you look. You are quite beautiful, my lady Lorelei, and you have a fine, round bottom and enough fat on your body that—”

“Did you just call me fat?”

“—I think you might actually survive on this planet, unlike the Europax twigs the Echelon sent us. So, no, there is nothing wrong with the way you look.” He paused then, considering me, and unless my eyes deceived me, I fancied that I saw a bit of a bulge in the crotch of his black linen pants.

“So there is something else, then, that you find distasteful.” I said, mirroring his stance as best I could, crossing my arms in front of me, over the blankets.

“It is your manner that offends, my lady,” he said, an edge to his tone. “Your manner, where I have saved your life, brought you into my home, and you have immediately begun to throw your weight around when you know nothing of this planet, or its traditions, or indeed anything at all about me and what I might have gone through to secure your well-being. Not so much as a good day to you, sir. Nothing. I’ve had more thanks from the talatuna I’ve skinned to eat for my supper.”