Chapter 5

CHAPTER

FIVE

MAGGIE

The world wavers around me, white walls and the smell of sick and the surreal feeling that I have no idea where I am.

A comforting blue glow enters my wobbling field of vision, an impossibly deep voice rumbling something I can't understand in a concerned, comforting tone.

I'm cold.

I'm hot.

I'm talking, rambling, incoherent, and the tiny part of my brain that's still somewhat rational knows this is bad, so bad.

I miss my grandma, and I am incomprehensibly sad.

A bee stings the flesh of my neck, and I gasp at the sudden pain.

Then there's nothing.

Sweat pours off me and my mouth, incredibly, feels and tastes even worse than it did the last time I was fully conscious.

Truly, a feat in and of itself.

It's like freshman year in college all over again, when I learned the hard way that trash can punch was, in fact, a trash choice.

I guess getting abducted has some of the same cons as frat parties.

"Who would've guessed it?" I mutter, wincing as my head splits at the sound of my voice.

"Navina ka'renya." The blue alien-man dabs something cool against my neck.

"For sure," I tell him agreeably, though I don't have a clue what I'm agreeing to. It's clear we can't understand each other at all.

His glowing eyes search mine, and I stare back at him, truly at a loss for anything resembling a coherent thought. Light blue hair, so pale it's nearly white, brushes the tops of his shoulders, and I startle slightly as I realize there are curling horns protruding from the tangled mass of it.

One hundred and ten percent alien.

But he's beautiful.

I blink, truly taking him in for the first time without adrenaline and fear dictating my reaction, without the pain of whatever the stupid blow-dart was full of.

Blue light spills from his skin in strange, jagged lines. His biceps are spiked, and I gasp in surprise as his tail—a freaking tail!—forms a question mark over his head, like a barn cat who's looking for pets.

The urge to scratch between his horns grips me, surreal and unconscious, and I'm reaching for him without even thinking about it. He's sitting on the floor, the fact that he's still nearly eye-level with where I lie on the strange platform not nearly as disconcerting as it should be. My hand makes contact with the soft mass of silvery blue hair on his head between his horns, and he closes his eyes, a deep rumbling sound coming from him that startles me.

Until I realize it's a purr.

He's purring!

Or, at least, doing some alien approximation of the sound.

My fingernails scrape gently against his scalp, the deep rumbling intensifying, and I close my own eyes, the sound so soothing it nearly vanquishes the absolute terror threatening to overtake all my rational sense.

I'm in some kind of alien holding cell.

I am naked as a fuzzy peach on pie-making day.

I am with an alien male, who is also firmly in the naked peach category.

And he's purring, and despite the horrible fact I've been abducted, the noise he's emitting is making me feel better. I frown, opening my eyes.

I'm pretty sure I read an article once on how cat purrs help heal people. I am also pretty sure I wrote it off as clickbait.

I make a mental apology to the writer of said article.

The alien's eyes open in the next instant, trapping me with their otherworldly glow.

I'm so entranced by him that I nearly miss the moment he stabs himself in the neck with some sort of metal object.

"What the fuck?" I yell, scrambling back so far from him that I manage to fall ass over tea kettle off the platform.

My back smacks against the ground and I groan, then stiffen as I remember I just threw up over here.

My nose wrinkles, my lip curling in automatic disgust, and I wait for the tell-tale scent of sick to hit my nose.

It doesn't.

There's no vomit on the floor, and I blink in surprise, glancing back at my alien, who's busy ramming a third syringe into his neck. The glow of his skin thrums, and he tilts his head back, eyeing me through slits.

"Na nkessa ta galaga," he utters, the words gravelly and harsh and completely unintelligible.

He raises one eyebrow at something behind me and I turn, making note of three things all at once.

There's a fine crack in the wall.

The wall is open. Not a wall then, a door.

I swallow hard.

Outside it, one of the strange furry aliens stands with some sort of gun in his hands. My hand goes to my throat reflexively, and I make my own unintelligible sound before scooting as fast as I can towards the glowing alien.

Something curls around my waist, dragging me the rest of the way towards him until I'm situated behind his massive bulk. I glance down, bemused and truly out of sorts, when I see it's his tail wrapped around me.

Prehensile.

Cool, cool, very normal.

I peek around the alien's back, squinting slightly as he continues to brighten.

The alien with the gun is barking something at him, and my alien answers in a different language, that purr intensifying in his chest as my breasts brush against his back. He's warm to the touch, warmer than me. It's distracting.

The alien at the door… wall? …shrieks something at him, and a dart goes whizzing by my head almost faster than I can see it.

I cower behind my blue alien, angry and terrified and absolutely not wanting to get sick again from whatever is in those darts.

The blue alien's hand is curled into a fist near where my face was moments ago. Slowly, he unfurls his fingers, and the dart the ugly alien shot at us falls to the floor with a clank.

"Shit sandwiches," I swear, fear blinking its eyes open. "We can't stay here, we need to get out of this damned cage. I've watched Law & Order . I don't need to be on alien Special Victims Unit, okay? I don't need a probing. No, thank you, just say no to alien probes."

"Kalaka na tani'aata," the blue alien shouts, pushing me to a standing a position. His tail curls tighter around me, effectively binding me to him.

I screech as he surges forward, nearly stumbling were it not for the stupidly strong tail holding me upright.

Upright, and flush against his ass.

"This is like the worst three-legged race ever," I manage, nearly incoherent with confusion and terror.

He's racing towards the opening in the wall, his legs as long as half my freakin' body. I stumble along behind him, a squeak of surprise and pain wrenching out of me as his tail lifts me bodily off the floor. I clamber to his back, doing my best to ride him piggyback as he high-tails it for my ugly alien abductor.

It's a wide back, and when I try to hook my ankles around his waist, he grunts.

He grunts because I kicked him in the stomach.

"Oh shit, I didn't mean to hurt you, okay, no worries, my giant blue buddy, I'm just gonna scooch on up here…" A weird noise slips out of me as I try to scoot further up his back.

Weird, because I'm not wearing pants.

Or underwear.

And now I'm scooting up his back, completely bare, and discovering that he has a nice little ridge there that's, ah, stimulating parts that have no business being stimulated at the moment.

"Like, hello clitoris, we are in danger here, miss ma'am! Now is not the time to enjoy this!" Wonderful. Now I'm talking to my clit like she's some wayward debutante.

God bless adrenaline and losing what's left of my ding-dang marbles.

"Not enough marbles in the universe to replace what's gone," I say sadly.

The alien grunts, muttering something under his breath.

The door/wall slams against my leg, and I yelp in pain.

"Leaneanasha sayonireatza," the blue alien growls.

The furry captor alien backs up, wild-eyed, screeching something I don't understand at all.

A whimper leaves my mouth, and I reach for the alien's horns, no longer able to grip as well with the leg the door slammed into. "That's gonna leave a nasty bruise."

The alien glances back at me, his blue eyes dilated so far they're very nearly black, and wrenches at the door.

I stare at the wall.

His muscles bulge. The blue light he's emitting intensifies.

The wall cracks, the tiny splintering break growing thousands of fissures.

It shatters, falling to the floor in a million pieces—and turns into goo. Steaming goo.

"What the fuck?" I ask again, though at this point I think it would be worse if I got an actual answer to that question.

I hang onto his horns even more tightly, not wanting to fall onto whatever the hell the wall was made of.

My alien ride takes three steps forward to our hairy captor, grabs his head in both hands, and squeezes.

I look away, but it's not soon enough.

And I can't avoid the resulting squelch, either.

Or the way the head hits the goo, and begins to dissolve. A rancid smell fills the air, a cross between nail polish remover and the formaldehyde-frog odor that's embedded in my memory thanks to ninth grade biology.

I bury my face in his skin, trying not to gag while holding on for dear life to the ridged curves of his horns.

He's moving again, and when I peek out from his shoulder blade, we're passing a set of empty cells. My eyes water and I blink when a familiar shape catches my attention.

"Wait," I yell, yanking at his horns.

He utters something under his breath, coming to a stop.

"That's my goose, Ken," I tell him, pointing at the cell wall, nearly sobbing. "Why would they take Ken?"

I don't know if I'm crying about stupid Ken sadly wandering around his cell, his cute little tail feathers waggling, or about the fact that I'm so far over my head in shit here that it's a fucking wonder I'm not choking on it.

"Ke-en," the alien says quietly, then sighs. "Lenaniish anly Ken?"

"Yes," I say emphatically, "I need Ken."

He kicks at the wall, once, twice, and instead of breaking, the damned thing slides open.

I breathe out a sigh of relief, because seeing Ken the goose melt into a steaming pile of alien goop would definitely scar me for life.

The very real possibility that my life might not last long enough to merit worrying about scars slams into me, and I frown.

Ken honks, the sound designed to keep away predators of all shapes and sizes, including glowing blue seven-foot-tall aliens, I guess.

Way to go, Ken.

The goose stretches his wings wide, flapping them in warning before he lunges at my alien, honking for dear life. I scoot up more, watching over the alien's broad, muscled shoulder.

Geese choose violence all over the universe, I suppose.

My alien simply scoops him up and tucks him under one arm, muttering something in a soothing voice to the big white bird.

Ken rewards him by promptly pecking at his glowing blue nipple.

Well, that's something you don't see every day.