Cyberella: Preyfinders Universe (3 page)

Perhaps the pretty girl was worth more than that at auction. He needed money badly.

“Come.” He jerked on her plait then indicated his lime-spotted qualarfa stallion. They’d have to ride together to Besk. Her ship would be there. So were the auction yards.

Once he’d saddled the qualarfa, she turned her back to him and jiggled her tied hands. “Free me.”

“Not yet. When we are off the Kalfa lands. I don’t want them to think I am too lax or I might lose my head early.” He hoisted her up onto the beast, to the front of the saddle area.

“That’s ridiculous,” she muttered, glaring down at him.

“Is it?” He mounted behind her and took up the reins. His thighs nudged in behind hers and her ass was inches from him. This ride would be interesting. “What is a true pity is that a good Sicar warrior keeps his word. Certainly, I do. I will free you when I say, but not before.”

She harrumphed as if disappointed. “I think my fingers must be going blue.”

He checked, feeling them for coolness also. Women had such fine fingers. “They aren’t blue or cold. Wriggle them.”

She did so, and the sight of her lashed-together wrists and her fingers down there, wriggling and barely inches from his groin made his cock stir.

“Good. You are so lucky,” he murmured, then he clicked his tongue to stir the stallion into a smart canter.

“Lucky? You call all this lucky?” She jerked her chin toward the citadel.

“Yes. Lucky. I could have caught you back there in the coldroom with little effort and given you to Kalfa. I could have said a secret word to make our agreement void so that I could keep you myself after all, to sell or to be my slave. I didn’t.”

“What?”

He grinned at the dismay and incredulity in her voice, then he leaned in until his lips were an inch from her ear. “Not all of us are honorable to Outsiders. I need money. Lucky, you’re so very lucky.”

Torgeir wrapped his arm about her waist, pleased at the feel of her softness then he began to hum a battle song he’d learned from a dying warrior on the planet Gerrelt...or was that the moon of Lun? So many strange, new places and more out there to discover.

He had an armful of delightful, if spirited, female and he was free for the first time in his life to do as he chose. The woman was a reminder of his decision to tread a more civilized path where slavery was but a memory. He needed nothing more than the stars and a ship to ride among them.

And some money. Ships were damn expensive.

If he wasn’t so nice, he could have sold her.

Her luscious ass jiggled against him again and his cock swelled. Every breath brought him her feminine scent, for it lingered in her hair and at her nape. Torgeir cleared his throat. Really, if he was still taking slaves, he would have kept her. He would’ve dragged her off the mount, made her sit on her knees on his rug, facedown, flipped up her little skirt, and taken her, here, now.

The old ways had their benefits.

“What’s your name?” he asked her yet again.

The horse creature cantered smoothly under her thighs. Now and then the motion jarred her backward and against this warrior’s groin. The hard bulge of his cock was obvious.

“Ella,” she said, grudgingly. What information was safe to tell him? To distract him she asked a question of her own. “This creature, is it a horse of some sort?”

“I don’t know horses. It’s a qualarfa stallion. A male. From my travels, many planets have similar four-legged animals. Tell me more. We have a long ride. Where are you from?”

She set her lips in a line. Her hands were tied and she was at his mercy but she wasn’t inclined to cough up information just to amuse him when she wasn’t certain of his intentions. His little threats about selling her were ominous. She shut her eyes.

Be calm.

“Not talking?”

“I will talk when you free me.”

He snorted and wrenched her in closer. “Silly female. You think that would make me change my decision if I was going to sell you?”

Anger flared. “No, but I figured it might frustrate you, and that’s a plus.”

“Annoying a man who has you captive is stupid.”

True. She fumed, hating to be shown her error. “I’ll talk when you free me.”

“I don’t like ultimatums or women who annoy me. Who are your employers? If you’re this annoying to them, I can imagine they’ve beaten you a few times.”

“What? No! The Spiriton Trader Corp doesn’t beat employees.” The pressure at her ass seemed even more obvious and she added dryly. “Could you not hold me so close?”

“Is there a
please
with that?”

Ella sighed. “Please.”

“It’s not possible. You will fall off, if I let you go. Be good.”

“Untie me and I can hang on myself.”
Duh.

“Did you not understand the part about my head being removed if I release you early?
I
would beat you. You feel good against my cock anyway. I’d stop this horse, tie you to that prickly Nagar tree over there, beat you, then fuck you until you pleaded for more.”

The almost leafless tree was a stark black presence at the base of a red cliff to the left of the trail. Rocks kicked up under the stallion’s hooves as it took a few, slower steps. While she was still gaping at his words, he went on.

“But first I’d beat your ass red, blue, purple.”

“You can’t...” She hauled her squeaky protest short.

“Has anyone ever made your ass purple?”

“Is that...was that meant to be funny?”

“I was just annoying you, Ella.”

She bit her lip, to make herself not reply to that.

“Let’s agree that I won’t beat you, if you promise not to try and get my head cut off.”

A second later, what he’d said sank in. Had that been a joke? A smile sneaked in. He was absurd and rude, but somehow his stupid sense of humor had relieved her anxiety. The idea of him fucking her had been planted too though. She swallowed and pushed away that image.

The man was a big, male presence that she couldn’t ignore. Scary and sexy and yeah, even more scary, yet she was becoming convinced he would free her.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered.

“Accepted. I know you must come from Earth – where the Bak-lals were finally defeated. Kalfa wouldn’t try and sell you as an Earth woman if you weren’t one. The women of your world had some magical powers that helped us win. You must not have this sort of power, or it’s weak and useless, else you would’ve freed yourself. So, why does someone wish to pay for you? The price was large. You know this?”

“Yes, I know that and yes, I am from Earth.”

She’d been given three fifty thou of the universal currency when they’d finished with her at the hospital and told her she could become a citizen of the universe. She’d spent some, trying to see where she fit in, retraining. Learning. The unit was the basic currency of their money. Eighty thousand units to buy her. You could buy a small house most places, with that.

Money slipped through your fingers while you gazed at the wonders of this universe. She’d found that out while living on a single planet and the journey there from Earth had been gratis on a warship of the Concer Command. Now, much of her money was gone. A lot of it to Kalfa and this man behind her. She had no clue what had happened to her fellow traders. If they fired her and left her on this planet, she’d never earn enough to go elsewhere.

Despair leached in and she felt nauseous.

Ella shook her head. “I don’t know why anyone wants me.”
As a slave.
She couldn’t bear to say that. “Do you know if my shipmates survived?”

“They did. Kalfa freed them. It was only you he kept, and the Carmagga women. It makes me think he knew you would be there.”

“Two birds with one stone,” she said to herself.

“A saying of your kind?”

“Yes. Means, umm –”

“Doesn’t matter. Someone may have betrayed you. Be careful when you return to your ship.”

She stared ahead, past the qualarfa’s green-spotted ears. That was disquieting but also she wondered why he cared.

“Thank you. I will.”

A few hours later they stopped in the shade of a copse of more of the straggly, shiny-leaved trees that favored the ferocious climate here. He turned her away from him. When she heard him draw his knife, her heart picked up speed, but he put his hand to the ropes binding her, and he cut her loose.

“Thank you,” she said again, finding it strange how often she was thanking him.

“You’re welcome, little female.”

Oh now. Him calling her that and the last pressure of his hand about her arm, just above her wrist, it sent a warm thrill shimmying through her.

Heat wasn’t what you needed on Sicar, desert planet. She brought her hands to her front and began to massage them, head down, thinking about how crazy it was to be affected sexually by a warrior from Sicar. It was like...like ambling through a bull ring and admiring the sky. Or something. Torgeir confused her.

“Allow me.” Before she could react he was before her and had taken one of her hands in his, and now, was massaging her wrists.

Her eyebrows sprang upward. “Hey, I’m fine. I got this.”

“No. It’s my obligation since I caused the injury.”

Put like that, in that sensual male voice that threatened to turn her mind to jelly, if not her knees, she could only stand there and suffer being massaged.

“May I ask how many of your people have been allowed loose in the ’verse with large sums of money and no supervision?”

“I don’t know. Let loose? No supervision? I’m an adult. I can take care of myself.”

He eyed her steadily. Gold and gray eyes, she noticed. They’d altered or perhaps it was the lighting?

“Of course. You’ve only been captured, almost sold as a slave, and handed over most of your money to me.”

“It also happened to my companions. They were lucky not to be from Earth, is all. Does that mean you’re giving my money back?”

“No.” He smiled and let go of her hands. “I need it for my ship and crew fund. I’ve not heard of others from your planet coming out here, to space – apart from those who bondmated with Preyfinders. Or that one who mated with Dassenze, the Ascend, godlike one. What is special about you?”

Oh crap. She’d fallen into that one. “I don’t know.”

It was a truth, of sorts. She didn’t know what she’d been or done. Only that the Bak-lal had caught her and had done something to her. She may have been the only one they’d managed to reverse engineer. She guessed that someone up high had commanded she be compensated. Perhaps they felt sorry for her.

“No?” He dared to reach toward her and place his hand under her chin.

She dodged away from his grasp. “No. I really don’t.”

That was the bad thing. Yet she was terrified to find out why and what had happened, also. The unknown was a leering monster that wanted to pull her into darkness and smother her. Her dreams never survived awakening but she had them. They made her wake sweating, with a fading sense of
something
out there, creeping over the ceiling, in the shadows where she couldn’t see them.

A rustling and a blob of rust-red scampering across the cracked ground behind Torgeir made her gasp and jump back. “What’s that?”

He turned and laughed. “Mimi! Come here, girl.” He patted his knee. “How’d you find me?”

This was a pet of some sort? It wobbled, slid, and stepped over to the warrior then nuzzled around his feet making snuffling noises. The thing was like a small, very round bear with tiny ears like twin lumps and black eyes that gleamed as it studied her from its position beside Torgeir’s boot.

It snuffled some more, then squeaked softly. Its ears twitched.

A second later it leapt, well, it bounced, into her arms.

“Don’t catch it!”

His shout was too late. She’d caught it with both arms and the thing merely shifted about with a funny shimmy of its behind area then sucked on her forearm here and there.

She giggled. “It tickles.”

Torgeir stared and shook his head. “She likes you. I’ve never seen that happen.”

“Is your name Mimi?” she asked it. Mimi ignored her, licked her arm this time with a raspy tongue then dropped to the ground. The thump when she hit the earth was ridiculously loud and the ground seemed to vibrate.

When she waddled away, she left a crater, inches deep.

“What the fuck?”

“That is why you don’t catch Mimi, unless she likes you.”

“What is she?”

“She’s memo-morphic metal. A MeMoMe for short. I got lazy the day she friended me. I was only thirteen. Called her Mimi.”

“Wow. Memo-morphic metal? Fancy species title.”

“Yes.” He angled his head. “They kill by dropping on prey. Hide on cliffs, cave ceilings. They can alter their weight. Nobody knows how they do it but they do. No one has figured out how they can be alive even. They’re a Sicar anomaly. I have no idea why your arms weren’t torn off.”

Crap.
Ella blinked and watched the little thing disappear among the rocks. “I know what she is!” She whispered her revelation, “It’s a bloody drop bear. Oh. My. God.”

“It. She. Is deadly. Remember. Don’t catch her.”

“I won’t.”

After that, they ate and drank quickly then she mounted the qualarfa. This time she tried riding behind him, with her arms about his waist. Staying on was nearly impossible, due to the saddle design and the gait of the creature. She soon gave up and sat before him, with his arms around her. Now that she knew he was honest, to a degree, the position made her feel safe, weirdly safe.

They stopped at a vehicle and stable depot a few miles outside Besk and exchanged the beast for a ride in a taxi of sorts. The gleaming yellow halftrack vehicle ground over the last few miles to the city. When the road changed from tamped-down rock to a gray facsimile of concrete, the taxi somehow transformed into a wheeled vehicle.

There were houses, streetlights, shops, people. More cars and trucks humming past. As she’d come to terms with months ago, these were not always alien futuristic tech in appearance so much as rusty and ramshackle with multiple dents.

Ella grinned. She could finally relax. She
was
free.

“Now you smile?” Torgeir asked, turning in the seat to watch her.