Won by an Alien Read online

  WON by an ALIEN

  by Amanda Milo

  Dedicated to everyone who bought and borrowed and reviewed and blogged and told their friends to read my books.

  Somewhere in a faraway (Storage-unit) land, I still have the rejection letters from when I tried traditionally publishing my stories. I couldn’t get anyone to take a chance on them. The odds of publishing an indie book and having someone read it, let alone hit bestseller are the same as being trapped under an evil stepmother until a fairy godmother turns my ferrets into fine servants and makes the prince throw down a wedding proposal right there on the ballroom dance floor. You just made my books go Cinderella-Story. (Please let the clock never strike Midnight, and yes, I want ferrets instead of mice. Or otters. I’d totally take a team of otters. I’m not a picky story-princess, sheesh!) I’m still in shock. But I freaking love you.

  And all my love to R, who doesn’t call me a damn liar when I say, “I’m almost done, I’ll be right there!”

  But don’t think I don’t I see the skeptical looks you send me.

  ??

  Special thanks to Dr. Yui Phitchaya Monsintorn and Professor Ronika W.: your time and input were invaluable and any medical/anatomy detail errors are mine.

  (a.k.a. Everybody, please suspend disbelief and chalk up any mistakes to the beings in question being Alien, okay? :D)

  Copyright © 2017 Amanda Milo ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information and retrieval system without express written permission from the Author/Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CHAPTER 1

  TARA

  The surge of alien bodies against the barrier is so violent, I feel the ground under my feet actually quake.

  Not so ironically, my knees start to do the same thing. Nearly tripping in my hurry to back up, I collide into another woman. She snarls—but when I twist sharply, intending to toss an apology to her, she’s not looking at me at all. She’s facing the… the sight in front of us. My eyes dart back over them, but it’s not a whole lot more believable this time.

  Where am I?

  “Please be pranking me. Please, let someone with a big camera step out and say this is all a stupid, stupid, terrifying joke.”

  “It’s not a joke,” the woman next to me mutters. I’m too scared to admit she’s right. Too scared, but with every passing second, I’m forced more and more towards the possibility that this—this situation—is a reality.

  How…?

  I just dropped off my girls at daycare. I’d been about to head to work! Now I’m here, in a pen, facing a sea of aliens.

  Aliens.

  Aliens. I double over, gasping. Are my girls safe right now? Did the—I swallow, having a difficult time even thinking the word, no matter what my eyes are telling me—did the aliens leave the daycare safe and untouched when they sucked me up into an alien spacecraft? Did anyone see me get taken? Not that I even saw it happen—vaguely, I think I recall bright light—but it doesn’t matter what I remember. They’ve got to find my car, surely. They’ll know I couldn’t have just disappeared out of thin air. Of course, if no evidence of a freaking spacecraft exists though, they’ll draw the logical conclusion.

  And what would that be, exactly?

  They’ll think I’ve been abducted, true; but they’ll never guess this. Aliens. Nobody will know where to look for me—how to look for me. How do I get back to my girls?

  This last thought makes me heave.

  “Yo, you’ve got to keep it together, Pongo.” I feel a flick against the side of my neck. My heavily, heavily freckled neck.

  I cough. “You didn’t just 101 Dalmatians me,” I manage to say as I turn to the woman who may, or may not, be trying to insult me.

  “That I did,” she replies. “I’d come up with something wicked-clever here about dogs and biting but I got nothing. Guess abduction days aren’t my days, you know?” And although she’s wearing a smile, she’s not committed to it. Her face looks grim, her eyes are rounded and wide, and the terror reflected in them is probably a pretty good match for mine.

  “So... this isn’t good,” I say conversationally, having to swallow bile down before I can force the words out. I shove up my sleeves and try to calm my mind.

  “No shit. What gave it away?” Her eyes are drawn down to my skin again. “Geez, were you beaten with the freckle stick?”

  I can understand why she’s curious. There’s ‘freckled’ and then there’s ‘leopard spot appaloosa’ and about there is where my skin coverage falls. I’m ready to lob a comeback—I’ve had a lifetime to store them up, after all—when, I don’t know why, but I look over her shoulder.

  And see him.

  An alien has his hands on the top ‘rung’ of the mish-mash of stuff that forms a barricade between all of us humans, who are standing here huddled together like startled water buffalo facing down a threat—and the aliens clamoring in predatory fashion on the other side.

  His eyebrows look charmingly strange—quirky—not made of hairs, exactly, but something else, sort of chunky and spear-shaped and he otherwise appears almost human. It’s reassuring somehow. That, and the fact that he’s not shoving around others near him like a psycho, or screaming things at us we can’t understand. Not like the rest of the aliens here doing exactly that.

  He’s staring at me, and as he does, as the woman beside me runs a hand over my freckles, examining them, he runs a hand over his arm—not looking down at it, but seeming to mirror the move thoughtfully.

  I have no idea what that means.

  I try to break his stare but he gives me a small smile, and it’s so unexpected, small but so kind, that I feel my jaw drop a little.

  Then, tentatively, I close my mouth and feel my lips curl up in a tiny return show of… what? Reciprocated kindness? Politeness? I guess it’s nice to know not all aliens are evil and insane.

  Though you certainly can’t tell when you look at the rest of them.

  Shouldn’t alien lifeforms want to make friendly contact? Or… I don’t know—study us?—in some clinical, hands-off, impersonal way?

  That would be better. That would be preferable to—to this.

  If you told me the whole Playboy mansion was the prize for the alien that could exhibit the worst behavior, then this would make sense—especially if all the bunnies came with the deal, because that’s how they are ogling us.

  Not reassuring. Not reassuring in the least, let me tell you.

  At my tiny returned smile, this alien almost seems to bounce on his feet, bobbing lower behind the barrier for a beat but I can still see his face and… seriously, there is something cute going on with his eyebrows, but he’s too far away for me to make the details out. My glasses are smudged, and carefully, I take them off and try to find a spot on my blouse that isn’t covered in sand—that’s what we’re standing on right now; silty, soft sand that kicks up and coats us in a layer of dust.

  That’s when something clamps over my arm and yanks me sideways, sending my glasses tumbling to the dirt.

  I scream, “Ow, stop, stop! My glasses!” and try to yank back my arm but I’m being dragged along and I have no real leverage to stop this—
and the alien that has ahold of me doesn’t feel sorry for me in the least as he takes another one of his hands (of which, he has several) and wraps it in my hair, yanking it so hard my neck pulls and I let out an involuntary shout.

  There’s an answering holler from the women I was just separated from, and there’s an uproar from the aliens on the other side of the barrier, and then there is this angry, strange cackling warble that I don’t even know how I notice, how I pick it out from the rest.

  But I do, and, tears pooling at of the corners of my eyes, I fight the hard grip on my hair to turn enough to see that alien again, the one that smiled at me.

  He isn’t smiling now.

  He makes an angry motion with his arm, cutting the air in what I’d like to believe is a ‘Stop hurting her!’ gesture that the alien gripping me only laughs at before rattles something back to the unsmiling alien with the quirky eyebrows. Quirky bird-chitter-coughs a reply, confirming where or rather, who, made the cackling noise. He is making it: loud and harsh sounding. And the crowd goes wild behind him. The exchange comes even faster now, the thing holding me starting to sound like a dang auctioneer…

  My hands freeze from where I’ve been uselessly trying to pry the cruel fingers out of my hair.

  Auctioneer… oh shoot. Oh shoot, oh shoot! My blurry eyes wildly fly around the pen. The pen. Are we in an auction pen?

  Other aliens start calling out what sound frightfully like bids. They are bidding on me. What do they want with me?

  A flash of this morning, when Megan was struggling to help dress herself, strobe-lights right into my frontal lobe. It’s followed by Simone making a face at the pureed squash I set down in front of her for breakfast. Megan! Simone! I can’t go to an alien! I have to get home to my kids!

  I can see the other women have figured out what’s going on too as they stare at me in horror and I start to struggle against the mean grip even harder in my panic. When the auctioneer gives me a shake that makes me feel like he’s going to peel my scalp right off my dang head, I scream again—and Quirky Eyebrows yells out something that makes the crowd go dead quiet.

  Well… this is scary…

  WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!

  The auctioneer does that auctioneer thing, where he tries to goad someone else into jumping in, but despite what sounds like grumbling; there’s no takers. Almost reluctantly, the auctioneer grouses what I assume to be confirmation that Quirky is the one that will be taking me out of here.

  I’m hit with a profound sense of relief.

  Which is insane: he’s an alien. Feeling relieved would practically be reason enough for a straitjacket except that he appears to be the nicest alien of all of them. Shoot, if they’d just asked me, ‘Now what alien do you want to leave with today, darlin’?’, out of the bunch, I’d have tried my luck with this one anyway.

  I just need him to get me home.

  I can’t be here: this isn’t where I’m supposed to be. Mothers being separated from children should not be a thing; and neither mother nor child should get abducted by aliens. And they certainly don’t get auctioned off to an alien. It’s crazy. It’s not possible. Maybe exhaustion has finally caught up with me and I’m having a wacked out nap and this is all just an insane drea—

  Quirky leaps the fence.

  He bounces right over it! Due to the fact that it is nearly as tall as he is, and because he’d been leaning against a part of the pen wall that was solid, I hadn’t been able to see his bottom half before this.

  I am so, soooo seeing it now.

  He’s— he’s—

  And I thought he looked human?

  My eyes struggle to make sense of his long, thick, lightly furred tail. To make sense of the powerfully sleek-muscled legs that are not at all hidden by his form-fitting pants. And his feet—his feet are longer than my arms—and when he jumps? His back arches over just like…

  Standing before me, I can see that having a pair of different eyebrows is nothing when you consider the fact that the rest of him can be classified as Mutant Kangaroo.

  CHAPTER 2

  TAC’MOT

  My insides are churning with memories. I doubt that this is the very same pen that I myself was auctioned off in, but it’s close enough that it does make me nervous and brings back sour, fear-filled memories all the same. Unlike Lem, I hadn’t willingly consigned myself to being sold off. I’d been taken, and although my buyer had eventually become my friend—as was common, I was in his employ until I paid my way free. Or until seven solars passed; whichever came first.

  Virtually the moment he shelled out credits to buy me, I had legally become his possession. All four of my stomachs sink as I stare at just what I have purchased with my seven solar severance stipend… plus Lem’s.

  He is going to frag me into pieces so small, I’ll never regenerate. But seeing—and smelling—the fear of the princess in front of me makes me shove the not-so-minor concerns aside. Lem would tell me I was projecting right now, but I’m not. This female—all the females—look frightened and confused and yes, I do remember feeling that as a youth. I am reliving all of it right now, but I know what my eyes are seeing: I’m not simply ascribing my own memories to their present. These Gryfala are feeling all the same things I once did. I know that they are here against their wills.

  The underside of my tail taps against my heels with my slow hops over the sand. I’m trying not to make any quick movements towards them. And instead of rebuking me, instead of reacting with the air of sovereignty they are famous for, the females back away warily as I approach, forming a tighter cluster, and I give them an apologetic look as I bend down to retrieve the strange adornment the princess lost when she was dragged away from the others.

  Dragged.

  They dragged a princess! I had been handled roughly too, when I’d been auctioned, but what was one Wanbaroo? Nothing with true value, they made that plain enough. A female though, any female—let alone a princess? I warble in anger and outrage, the sound breaking loose in a sort of rough chuckle—though no one can possibly mistake the sound for a humorous one—proven as some of the females gasp. They’re either startled by the sound, or shocked at the thought of the repercussions of ‘one of my kind’ becoming upset or… I am not for certain. They are as much a curiosity to me as I am to them, I think.

  It’s all so wrong, but as much as I’m feeling bad for having to leave all of them to whatever fate they are about to meet, I also feel an intense need to rush back to the princess that I… that I…

  Won. I won a princess. At an auction.

  ...I just bankrupted not only myself but a friend.

  I dig my claws into my ribs and scratch rapidly, and snort a little when I see everyone’s eyes trained on me, following my movements. Unlike the reception I’m so used to receiving from most races though, I don’t see disgust here so much as extreme wariness. All of these females are watching me as if they don’t want any part of the damage I can do. Almost as if they respect the abilities that genetics gifted me with.

  I will not lie; this is a rather pleasant change.

  I tip my head to them and as I quickly hop towards my princess (never did I ever even think I’d have reason to claim a statement such as this), I glance down at the object I’m carrying for her. Some sort of strange face adornment indeed. With a shrug, I fold its little leg pieces so that it rests in the cup of my hand.

  She has stopped screaming, and is simply staring up at me now, clearly frightened. I try to give her a reassuring smile, but I think she is much too afraid to recognize I mean her no harm.

  Feeling a protectiveness rise up in me, I bare my teeth at the handlers—and wince when I see that I make her shrink away too. I address them without the sharpness I’d originally intended. “No need to be rough with her. She’s just scared.”

  I remember that fear.

  All too well, too. Warily eyeing the warning blots multiplying across my skin, the auctioneer waves all his hands indifferently as the princess continues to back awa
y. “Your credits have processed: get her out of here. We’ve called for more guards, but the crowd’s going wild.” He rubs two of his hands together before clapping them and addressing the workers behind me. “Grab the next one. We’re going to start the bidding right where his winning bid left off!”

  The crowd groans.

  The auctioneer smiles evilly. “Think you’ll ever get another chance to possess your very own Gryfala?” His laugh is rough and derisive. “By all means! Pass up this opportunity! Or you grab a friend: pool your bids together. Split her up between you later—”

  He finishes something crude, and I feel sick as I look around the pen. I wish I could buy them all. “I’m sorry,” I say to them as I cover the considerable distance between me and my new princess in a single bound, and try to take her much smaller hand.

  She doesn’t accept me though. She rapidly trips away instead. It’s not that I am surprised; I didn’t really expect her to rush to me with open arms. She doesn’t know me, and I’m probably the first Wanbaroo she’s ever seen up close. I definitely spotted her shock when I jumped the fence. I think my hopping now is scaring her.

  “If you can’t control her, I’ll do it myself,” the auctioneer snaps. “Get her out of here, I have more merchandise to move today.”

  I straighten automatically, my body stiffening and preparing to kick him with everything I’ve got.

  Then I see one of his hands go for his blasted whip.

  My claws dig into my palms—and that’s when I remember the face adornments. The ones that belong to my princess. The princess who won’t benefit from me getting myself killed if I attack this waste vac scum.

  Releasing the breath out forcefully from behind my teeth, I relax from the defensive pose, letting my heels drop all the way to the ground and letting my back curve over. Like this, now I’m only a head or two taller than she, and I’ll bet that helps calm her. A little, anyway.