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She wanted to record every bit of her experience. Memory would make this fade and time would make her doubt that what was happening had ever happened. She made notes of the scaled skin over his forehead and down the sides of his face, the most alien thing about him. He was reptilian, staring down at her with a predatory gaze which consumed her.
Elizabeth had always told other people’s stories. She liked it that way. There was control when you told the story. You decided what happened and what didn’t happen.
But now a story was happening to her. Crouched in a cage beside an alien throne, she was surprised she hadn’t seen it coming. She should have sensed the story before it wrapped its tendrils around her. Maybe she could have gotten out of the way. Maybe it would have grabbed some other girl and turned her into a reluctant heroine. Instead, the story had grabbed her.
One could imply that all involved lived happily ever after — and one would be quite right to do so, she wrote.
But one cannot do that at this point in time, as one happens to be crouched inside a cage, under the desk of a very aggressive king who is furious at having been ignored by Dominax, who, having taken a mate and bred babies, no longer finds as much time for diplomatic forays, and who forgot to greet Konan, the Beast King when he arrived in port.
Chapter 2
“Stop that tapping!”
Konan nudged the cage with his foot. The human he’d captured kept scratching away on pieces of parchment, or on the cage itself. It was a sound which gnawed at his attention, forever distracting him from the important business of planning wars.
“Sorry,” she squeaked.
She was a mousy thing with fine dark hair, and a pair of dark plastic frames encircling her eyes. Pretty, if you liked weak animals. Konan did not. He leaned forward and clasped his hands together, glowering down at the cowering human who scrambled to the back of her very small cage under his stare.
“Tell me again how you came to be at the port of Golden City, trying to stowaway on my ship. Tell me how you came to be so many light years away from your POO.”
“Sire?” She let out a nervous titter, because she was human, and that set of sounds was a weakness innate to almost all of them.
“Planet of origin. Don’t giggle, girl.”
“I was abducted by accident,” she said, repeating the same story she’d told him several times already. “Dominax took a human girl aboard his ship when he abducted her from New York. I was passing by at the time and got beamed into the cargo hold. I’ve been on Homeworld for months looking for a way off this world.”
“How could you have gone undetected? Look at you. You’re a strange beast.”
“The king was very taken with his human, sire. And I just sort of, hid. I guess I’m the sort of person people don’t really notice. Maybe the Homelanders just thought I was a new kind of alien. There are a lot of them here in the Golden City.”
“Just sort of hid,” Konan snorted. “Vague. I believe you are a spy. You sought to board my ship so you could send word of our movements to your superiors. You make notes of everything. I have found them scattered all over the place.”
“That’s because I like to tell stories. I’m a professional narrator.”
The king snorted. “Lies, you mean. That’s what stories are.”
“Kind of. Sort of.”
Konan let out an almighty growl, threw the cage open, and dragged the human out by her pretty neck.
“I know you are a spy,” he snarled, drawing her so close to his face she could see every alien ridge of his blue epidermis, and he could see the terrified whites of her eyes. “I will make you confess, you little wench.”
“I’m not a spy! I’m just unlucky!”
“Oh, you are unlucky,” he agreed, his long, clawed fingers wrapped completely all the way around her throat. “You will tell me everything. You will spill the secrets of your human spymasters. You will give me all you know, and some you do not know besides. I will break you, little human female. I will use this flesh of yours and I will turn it against you until you are a prisoner in your body. You will beg for mercy, and none will come.”
“Please," she whimpered, her voice hoarse as it escaped his grip. “I’m telling the truth.”
“I will know the truth when I hear it,” Konan growled. “I have already given the order to depart this overheated planet. There are none who will save you now. You are alone, one speck of hopeless human life in my custody. I promise you this one thing: this is your end.”
