Venomous: Erotic Science Fiction Romance (Alien Warrior Book 1) (2 page)

“I need one hole once, Sorkbhal. We can use it as meat when we’re done.”

Panic crawled over my scalp and I couldn’t breathe.

They spoke of raping me then eating my corpse as if it was nothing.

A long, thoughtful silence.

“No, Morpo. I have another use for it.” Sorkbhal flung me away. He snorted. “It stinks.”

“It soils itself.” The guard sounded disgusted. “Humans are animals.”

“Good enough for the other animals to mount.”

Arm raised to protect my head, I curled into a ball and hugged my knees.

My mind pried apart at the edges.

Blocking as much emotion as I could, I glued it back together with willpower alone.

If I gave into insanity all hope of somehow getting out of this would be lost.

Giving up ... I wasn’t quite
there
yet.

I needed my mind to stay calm and focused. I didn’t have a clue how to escape, but keeping my self sane seemed the best place to start.

“Give it to me,” Morpo pressed. “There will be meat. The slaves will tear it to pieces after they plough its holes.”

Sorkbhal made a deep, snoring rumble in his snout. “Depends on who wins the fight. If it’s one of the Zozon it will be kept alive. Many will find relief. If it’s one of the Yoni they’ll share.”

Air whistled through my clenched teeth.

I didn’t dwell on the hell those ominous statements alluded to.

The hinges of my jaw throbbed, and my chest constricted.

Hold it together.

They’ll get bored with you and put you back in the hole.

“Any of the others will kill it,” Morpo muttered. “Except the Verak. It will start a harem and guard her jealously.”

“So? This way the gladiators will stop trying to escape for a moontide. We give them females to cover, and the anger is replaced with a need to please us for more.”

“The Rä is the strongest. A mate would make it harder to control. The
seeding
is powerful.”

Sorkbhal sniffed. “That cockless savage wouldn’t know where to stick it.”

Stomach-churning laughter.

“Shall I drop it in the pit?” asked the guard.

“Arena. Let them fight,” Sorkbhal said. “The winner gets it.”

“A waste.”

“I do not care. It came free as part of the Strophig shipment. The Zutki trader couldn’t even shift it as pleasure stock. Remove it. Its stench sickens me.”

Pulled by the hair, I lurched up.

I staggered as Morpo prodded me into walking.

Movement was surreal for a second as I reigned a sense of orientation, shaking off a head rush.

It was such
an effort
to lift one foot in front of the other.

I hadn’t eaten since traded and ran on empty.

Morpo marched me from the room into the dimmer corridor.

A siren bleated then echoed long after the original blare faded.

Sounds of labour were replaced with trampling feet.

The narrow tunnel amplified a murmur of gruff voices lifted in confusion, and the angry shouts of the slavers.

The L’Odo’s conversation looped in my mind and I tripped over my own feet. “Wait.”

“Silence.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Morpo cuffed me upside the head. My ears rang and white dots skittered across my vision.

“Do not speak,” he spat as he shook me. “You are not worthy.”

Hating the ease with which he abused me, I wished for the millionth time I were strong enough to beat the living shit out of him, but being a chubby, five-foot nothing who couldn’t run a mile without wheezing, I doubted I’d suddenly develop mad mixed martial arts skills a la Gina Carano.

I possessed an average intelligence, and I was not considered a take-charge kind of person.

In college I’d been the quiet loner who never tried hard enough, and not quiet because I was shy, quiet because life in general bored me, and the people drawn to me were more often than not self-serving assholes who made me want to poke my eyes out.

I matured into an unexceptional twenty five year old who worked as a dental receptionist.

I had acquaintances, people I hung out with, but no real friends.

I’d never needed them or found anyone I clicked with.

My only true companion?

A fat tabby I rescued from an animal shelter and was insipid enough to christen ‘Ginger’.

I wasn’t beautiful or witty.

There was nothing remarkable about me, and no one awaited my return.

Back on Earth, I was
nobody.

My disappearance would elicit no more than a lax investigation by the police.

I’d be forgotten.

My home would gather dust, my job would be given away, and my cat would leave me for the old lady next door who fed him fish guts.

As an only child there were no siblings to grieve me.

My parents, also only children, died a decade before in a head on collision, my Dad had been drunk, my Mum high.

That pretty much summed up my childhood, my parents splurging their government handouts on booze and drugs while I sat hungry, needing a warmer coat for winter.

I supposed it was fitting I’d be the human suffering like this.

Because of me other women wouldn’t suffer this fate.

Failing to sell me at auction after auction, the Zutki trader who abducted me aborted plans to harvest more warm bodies from Earth, and cursed the value of its location as worthless.

“Who wants to know where to find a planet filled with ones such as
you?
” he’d sneered stuffing me back into stasis, but not before branding Earth’s coordinates onto my forearm with a laser.

I’d made such a bad trial specimen even the L’Odo considered my species too weak to be their slaves.

In a way, my unremarkable ass saved planet Earth.

And my collage professors lectured I’d never amount to anything if I didn’t apply myself
.

As Morpo dragged me towards the growing uproar, I remembered how he argued the slaves would tear me apart as they raped me.

Despite his continuous blows, I struggled against his spiked, armoured side, scratching my skin, wishing nothing more than to be thrown back into the lightless hole in the ground.

We approached a platform that jutted into a larger space.

The immense cavern below augmented the ululation of alien screeches.

My knees banged together. I would have pissed myself if my bladder weren’t already empty. “Okay, I admit, we got off to a bad start, with the peeing and all. I don’t think it warrants doing
this
to me.”

Morpo adjusted his grip to my upper arm. He lugged my floppy body behind him. “This is all you are good for.”

“Can’t I starve to death in my cell?” I’d thought things couldn’t get worse, but I’d been wrong. So bloody wrong. “Did you hear me?”

Ignoring me, he yelled at a brawny male with a whip coiled at his waist. “Phugort. Ready the shackles.”

Snuffling, Phugort peered at me, pity clouding his dull eyes.

Morpo cut away my dirt-smeared blouse.

When he finished ripping off my threadbare jeans, I was left in a pair of panties that passed decent days before.

I recoiled in embarrassment.

I cannot explain how relieved I’d been each time my clothes were thrown into my cell with me.

They’d become my only connection to my past life,
mine
, a reminder I once had a home. I was once safe, warm, fed, and master of my own existence, even if it had been unremarkable.

My back hunched and my limbs jerked inward in a futile attempt to cover myself.

That last comfort had just been stripped away, as if they hadn’t already stolen so much.

Morpo looked me over with a grunt, handling me with the rough, impersonal touch of a farmer at market.

His skull crest lifted, spread then he spat phlegm from his snout.

“Under
me
you would have died quickly,” he said then stormed into the tunnel without looking back.

I crawled after him yammering to be taken back to the cell.

The devil you know and all that.

Phugort grabbed me around the throat then hauled me up.

Unseen manacles clamped around my wrists and ankles.

Gripped by a force field, I jerked up and back.

I flailed and whimpered, fettered, spread-eagled within a gleaming circle.

Sparks of energy crackled as it jumped from the beams of light circling my wrists and ankles to the inner surface of the metal.

Phugort bounded off the platform. “Die well.”

My eyes bugged. “
Don’t.”
The panicked plea turned into a breathless shriek.

The machine holding me prisoner jettisoned into the air then dropped in a vertical decent.

Wrenched to a stop, the air left my lungs.

The energy cuffs bit into my skin with a painful sizzle, and I cried out.

Blood dripped down my wrists onto my shoulders.

Panting in harsh puffs, my eyes darted.

In front of me was a sheer wall of rock.

My head snapped side to side and there was nothing but craggy stone.

A dissonance of sound resonated around me.

It sounded....

It sounded like....

Unable to contextualise the ghoulish symphony without
seeing
my gaze dropped.

Hundreds of impossible to describe eyes gazed up at me, straining orbs opened wide and set into alien faces savage with sexual hunger.

The optimistic ran up the walls, twisted, launching their bodies airborne.

They reached for me with freakish hands and paws as if they could grab me where I hung thirty feet above.

The mass of bodies surged.

Pushing, shoving, screeching they became agitated, enraged, and a swarm of bodies tried to scale the walls or leap straight up to reach me.

A thunderous voice filled the room ordering for calm.

The slavers cracked their whips and swung their batons, ripping flesh from bone and knocking people senseless.

The restless throng settled.

My stomach churned at the savagery towards the miners, but it also revolted at the sight of the males themselves.

Are those tentacles?

“Slaves,” Sorkbhal’s disembodied voice boomed. “See it above you? It is female. She goes to the strongest.
Fight for her
,” he finished on a roar as the transmission ended in a tooth-grinding squeal.

The scene became a bloodbath as the males turned on each other.

Smaller, humanoid beings squatted near the fortifications, removing themselves from the struggle and their chance at winning me for a prize.

The monsters enduring resembled human men crossed with mutated predators lost in berserker rage.

A handful of fights with three to five males brawling merged into a penultimate scuffle of aliens biting and slashing in a ferocious mass.

My sob echoed above the skirmish.

I blinked and my tears fell like rain.

Blood sprayed the walls and misted the air.

The stink of sweat and gore mixed with the cloying heat, rising to choke me.

There was a sudden lull.

Tearing my eyes from the dead and clumps of viscera, I realised only two remained standing.

Eerily, they looked at me at the same time as if reminding themselves what they fought for.

The larger male was golden, his features feline and his eyes a vibrant green.

Furred skin the colour of rose gold shone in the dim.

A wild mane of silken hair rippled from the crown of his head to his waist, and twin flesh-coloured horns curled through his hair like a laurel wreath, the points at the back of his head tipped with black.

His expression turned bestial, possessing a domineering slant that made my skin crawl.

He opened his mouth and roared, sounding like an enraged lion.

Muscles slick with sweat rippled and gleamed as he lifted a clawed hand to swipe in my direction.

My gaze darted to the stranger alien.

Seizing, my heart gave up the struggle to regulate itself and blood drained from my face leaving me pale.

There were no words to describe
him
.

Head turned into my shoulder, I squeezed my eyes shut, praying the more human-looking creature won.

I could
not
deal with the one that looked like
that
.

Restless, the horde chanted from the sidelines.

The brash sound bounced off the walls until it seemed a gathering of thousands brayed for blood.

Tension in the room mounted as the two males circled.

The chanting silenced.

Lunging, they clashed in mid air.

A hissing, snarling battle ensued.

Claws and venom spitting fangs were their weapons of choice.

They broke apart.

Feinted.

Came together with primitive fury.

I yanked on my restraints.

Free falling to death was the better alternative than being given to the winner.

Vicious snarling ended with a wet crunch.

Choppy breaths razed from my lungs.

My jaw wrenched open in a silent scream of denial as my mind accepted whom the dying snarl belonged to.

Quivering, I beheld the arena champion.

Head thrown back, arms flung out from heaving sides, the victor stared up at me with intense, narrowed eyes.

He stood triumphant over a broken corpse.

“Give it to ...
him
,” commanded Sorkbhal’s ghostly voice. “I am entertained.”

I shrieked as I plummeted, my stomach crawling into my throat.

The circle of metal slowed a foot from collision, setting down with a clang on the rocky ground.

It crushed the squidgy body of a dead slave, popped its skull in a mushy splat of oozing puss.

The alien trampled over the dead challenger.

Jarring to a stop at my wail, he reared back, stopped charging me as if about to lop off my head.

Now as he advanced it was with a look of passionate focus.

The vast rise and fall of his powerful chest halted as he inhaled deeply then held it.

Fisted hands, all four of them, clenched and unclenched as the aggression leached from his frame to be replaced with another kind of tension.