Abducted: Alien Mate Index Book 1: (Alien Warrior BBW Science Fiction Paranormal Romance) (The Alien Mate Index) (3 page)

“The…the AMI?” I asked, feeling my heart rate start to go back to normal now that he wasn’t glaring golden daggers at me.

“The AMI—The Alien Mating Index,” piped up the worm creature I had dubbed Bambi. “We are an agency that specializes in finding and procuring only the most elite females. Only those that were seeded with hidden talents by the Ancient Ones are found and taken. Our database has millions of candidates on Earth alone and is growing daily as new abilities are being discovered and new and luscious females come of age to be harvested. Males come from all over the galaxy to see what we have to offer and—”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” I said, holding up my hand. “Stop the sales pitch. Did you just say you’re running some kind of an alien dating agency here? Because I don’t remember signing up to be matched with any kind of alien, okay? So there must be some mistake—if you’d kindly just take me back to Earth—”

“Impossible,” twittered Bambi in his high, squeaky voice. “You have been chosen as the prime candidate by his Eminence, Lord Sarden. He has commanded that you be transported and has paid your contract price in full—we never remit such a payment unless just cause is found.”

“Lord Sarden?” I said, staring up at the not-Devil guy again. “Lord of what? Lord of
who?”

He shrugged, his impossibly broad shoulders rolling with the motion.

“Don’t pay any attention—that’s just how the Commercians talk. Obsequious little bastards, always looking to turn a credit.”

“But Master,” interrupted the proper butler voice. “You
would
be Lord if you would claim your rightful place. If you would only—”

“That’s enough, A.L.,” Sarden snapped.

“Forgive me, Master.” The golden insect on his shoulder—which looked a little like a dragonfly—fluttered its glittering wings in agitation.

“Forgiven. Just keep your mouth shut.” Sarden looked back at me. “Basically what they’re saying is that I paid for you and you’re
not
going back.”

“What?” I demanded, sitting up straighter. Forgetting I was naked, I put my hands on my hips. “You
paid
for me? You can’t do that! I’m not for
sale!”

“You most certainly are—this whole planet is. Now that the lock put on your world by the Ancient Ones is being dissolved, your entire world’s female population is fair game.”

“Lock? Ancient Ones?” I shook my head—I was getting more and more lost.

“The ones who seeded your planet millennia ago,” Bambi said helpfully. “They traveled across the universe, planting the seeds of life on only the worlds they considered the most deserving. Their DNA lives on in many sectors but only on a few, rare, specially selected worlds has it been preserved in its purest form.”

“And the ‘lock’ they put around your planet is what I believe you Earthlings refer to as an ‘ozone layer,’” said the proper butler voice, which seemed to be coming from the golden dragonfly. “Now that much of it has been removed and your planet has begun to heat, outside investors are free to harvest Earth’s females. Females such as yourself, who are most valuable because they have not bred with any of the other peoples of the known universe. This is why we dub you ‘Pure Ones’—because you have only the pure blood of the Ancient Ones running through your veins.”

Forget about the Ancient Ones and all the crap he was spouting about ‘Pure Ones’, my mind snagged on something else the butler voice had said.

“The
ozone
layer?” I stared at the not-Devil guy, aka Sarden, in mounting disbelief. “Are you saying that me being abducted is a result of the hole in the ozone layer? I got snatched because of
Global Warming?”

He shrugged again. “If that is what you call it.”

I wanted to laugh but I clamped down on it, knowing what came out of me would be more like a scream.

All the environmentalists and climate change people had tried to warn us. They said that the ice caps would melt…that the seas would rise…that all the polar bears and penguins and puffins would die…They never freaking said we’d be abducted by alien bride hunters, though!

I bet more people would have sat up and paid attention if someone would have mentioned
that
little tidbit of information. I know
I
would have run my AC less in the summer and carpooled to work to keep from being snatched by aliens. I was betting a lot of other girls would too. But who was telling them? Nobody, that’s who. So now they were fair game for this crazy AMI organization.

Thanks for nothing, Al Gore.

“The moment the hole in your ozone layer was wide enough, the Commercians moved in, as they always do with newly harvestable planets,” the butler voice which Sarden had called “A.L.” informed me.

I was beginning to think the voice coming from the dragonfly sounded like a cross between C-3P0 and Jarvis, the mechanical servant in the Iron Man movies. It sounded damn strange, coming from an insect. But before I could answer, it continued.

“The Commercians injected your atmosphere with trillions of tiny viruses—some for universal translation so that brides from your planet might understand their future mates, some for immunization that our alien pathogens would not infect or kill you, some for surveillance so that every female may be watched in any reflective surface, and some for transportation—which process you have just undergone. Then they opened their base for business.”

“Hold on—go back,” I said. “Did you say
any
reflective surface?”

The dragonfly fluttered its jewel-like wings.

“Indeed. Surveillance and transport viruses work together. They are silicone based life forms which are able to live in glass, metal…even water.”

“So you’re watching every woman on Earth every time she checks her lipstick or does her hair?” I was horrified at the idea. Freaking peeping-Tom-pervert aliens!

“As you see.” Bambi made a gesture with one of his many clawed hands (come to think of it, he looked more like a centipede than a worm) and a large screen made of golden light suddenly appeared behind him. My heart caught in my throat when I saw who it was displaying.

Leah was standing there with her phone pressed to her ear, talking rapidly and looking worried. The angle we were looking at her from seemed strange and her image was elongated and distorted but I could still see her long waterfall of silky brown hair and her big, brown eyes as she spoke.

“Fix distortion—switch viewing area,” Bambi commanded in his squeaky, innocent-sounding voice.

At once, the angle changed and we appeared to be looking at Leah from the side—as though we were staring in through the small window of the break room at her work, I realized.

“What…how were we looking at her before?” I asked, aloud, my mouth as dry as cotton. “You said, any reflective surface, right?”

“The scanner picks the first reflective surface it can find,” Bambi explained. “This was our initial viewpoint.” He pointed one clawed hand at the curved, silver side of the toaster which was sitting on the counter in front of Leah.

“Oh my God,” I muttered. “And I thought it was weird that you dragged me through the bathroom mirror. Now you’re telling me it’s not even safe to make
toast?”

“Any reflective surface can be used for viewing and transport,” Bambi assured me. With another wave of his clawed hand, another image came into view.

I bit my lip—this time it was Charlotte but she was upside down.

“Switch viewing area,” Bambi said again.

The view changed to a more normal look and I saw that Charlotte had a half-empty Greek yogurt container in front of her and was toying with a silver spoon as she spoke on the phone. A spoon—so that was why she had appeared upside down! Not only was it not safe to make toast, yogurt was out too!

Breakfast was never going to be the same again.

Charlotte looked as worried as Leah had. As always, her thick, wavy blonde hair was confined in a tight, no-nonsense ponytail and her sharp green eyes were intense as she spoke into her phone—no doubt she and Leah were discussing what had happened to me and what they should do about it.

I felt my gut twist.

“Those are my best friends—please, you have to leave them alone!”

“We will leave them in peace,” Bambi promised.

“Oh, thank you,” I whispered, but my relief was short lived.

“At least until a customer comes who wishes to buy them,” Bambi finished. “After all, both are Pure Ones and either or both might have hidden gifts from the Ancient Ones—it is difficult to tell without further testing.”

“You leave them alone!” I snapped at him. “And better yet, send me back to them. They’re worried sick about me already—can’t you see that?”

“Regrettably, your former life and friendships must now be left behind,” Bambi informed me. He made a gesture and the screen made of light that showed Charlotte’s face disappeared as if it had never been there in the first place. “Currently you are no less than three hundred miles above the surface of your planet on our base.”

“Your base? Is that where I am?” I looked around again at the plain metal walls and floor. There was a row of what looked like holographic lights blinking in one corner. Was that some kind of control panel? It looked about the right size and height for the worm-like Commercians to use, though Bambi hadn’t needed it to show me the light screen and my friends.

“Their base is a ship orbiting quite close to your planet,” A.L. informed me. “It’s quite easy to conceal amidst all the space junk you have floating in your outer orbit. Your people certainly seem bent on being harvested—it appears that you dissolved the lock the Ancient Once put around your planet yourselves.”

“Yeah, right, whatever,” I muttered, feeling like a scolded child. “I guess we did. But we had no idea there were aliens looking to abduct us as mail order brides!”

“How could you not?” Bambi asked in his piping voice. Now that I’d been watching him for a while, I realized he looked different from the other Commercians—his wormy hide was a slightly lighter shade of blue. “For the past fifty to seventy Earth years or so we have been testing our transfer equipment by abducting one or two Earthlings every year and then returning them,” he informed me.

I looked at him in horror. “So all those stories about being taken by aliens are true? Not just crazy people saying crazy things?”

“I am afraid so. We had to test and perfect our equipment, after all.” Bambi shrugged—or what I assumed was his version of a shrug. His wormy body rippled with the gesture.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “But in all those stories—or most of them—the abducted people get…get
probed.”
I looked at Sarden quickly. “You’re not going to…I won’t let you! I’ll fight every step of the way if you try to stick something up my…”

I trailed off, finally registering the look of amusement on his sharp features.

“No, no—please go on.” He made a sweeping gesture at me with one big hand. “Where exactly did you think I wanted to, ah,
probe
you?”

“Never mind,” I said grumpily, seeing he was laughing at me. Clearly some of the crazy abduction talk was just that—crazy.

“The captured Earthlings were probably referring to our sensitivity tests,” Bambi informed me, making me feel nervous all over again. “We are required to run certain examinations to be certain that our subjects are healthy and that the transportation process did not injure or mutate them in any way.”

“
Mutate
them?” I looked down at myself, wondering if I had grown a third nipple or an eleventh toe or something awful like that.

“Don’t worry,” Sarden rumbled, giving me that annoying, sardonic smile I was beginning to really dislike. “You’re fine.”

“Technically we cannot say that for sure until she is tested,” Bambi pointed out.

“No—no tests!” I insisted, trying to keep my chin up and my voice strong. But the awful reality was, if they wanted to test me—to
probe
me—they could. There were too many of them and I was just one naked, unarmed Earth girl.

God, what I wouldn’t give for the little canister of mace I carried around in my purse right now! Or maybe Charlotte’s taser—she was attacked once, back in college and now she doesn’t play around. She will straight up taze a guy if he comes at her in any kind of threatening way. I wished she was here with me now to taze the big, red son of a bitch alien who was smirking down at me.

Speaking of the red son of a bitch, he seemed to read my mind.

“No need to fear, little Pure One—no one will be probing any part of your lush body. Though I confess it’s a tempting idea,” he murmured. “You’re safe enough while you’re with me. Of course after I trade you, I can’t say.” He shook his head. “You’re even more beautiful than your image on the viewer. It’s a damn shame to trade you to Tazaxx.”

The way he was eyeing me made me realize I was exposed—my arm had slipped and one of my nipples was peeking out at him. I readjusted quickly, but I was damn tired of feeling at a disadvantage just because I was naked.

“Listen, you’re going to have to stop talking like that because you can’t buy or trade what’s not for sale,” I said, glaring up at him. “Now give me some clothes and let me go home because you’re not trading me to
anyone.
Read my lips—
you don’t own me and I am not going with you!”

It’s hard to make a point sitting down while the other guy is looming over you. I started to struggle to my feet—not easy with one arm locked in a death grip over my ta-tas and the other shielding my lady-bits.

“Here.” Sarden reached down a hand to help me up. My impassioned little speech didn’t seem to have fazed him at all. Not surprising since he apparently thought he held all the cards. Well, to be honest, he pretty much did, I had to admit to myself. But still, I’m no quitter! I wasn’t going to let him just steal me away and march me off to some Godforsaken planet where—

My thoughts cut off abruptly when his big hand made contact with my skin for the first time. I felt a shock of something like electricity go through me—a jolt that seemed to sizzle through every nerve in my body. It raised chill bumps over every inch of my skin and made my nipples into two painfully tight points.