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Adrenaline pumps through my body, making it impossible for me to come down from the epic high of my last set. With the encore finished, the show is officially over, but my work isn’t finished yet.
As I step off the last step backstage, Margot is waiting for me. For once, she’s decided to dress down and is wearing a pair of tight leather pants and a white T-shirt with the words STAFF across her chest. Her sleek black bob makes her look severe, but the smile she gives me is genuine as she blows me a kiss.
“Great job!” she chirps as she loops her arm through mine.
Sweat rolls down my forehead and back as my vision starts to blur. That plasma packet did jack shit, and all I want to do is fall into a bathtub somewhere far, far away from the venue.
“You were a little flat on the last number, though,” Margot continues, leading me down the long expanse of concrete hallway. Along both walls, people I don’t recognize congratulate me, but I can barely make out their faces. My head spins as though I got stuck in a laundry machine’s dryer cycle.
“So, we’ve got about a hundred people waiting for the meet and greet and pictures. Then there’s an interview with AMP Magazine after that…” Margot rattles off her list like she does after every show, but unlike every other show, I feel faint, like my head’s suddenly turned into a balloon and is now drifting up toward the ceiling.
“Margot,” I murmur, gripping her arm tighter.
Either she doesn’t hear me or she doesn’t care, because she continues down her list of to-dos as strangers brush my shoulders, my arms, whatever they can touch as I’m dragged toward my next destination.
“I need to lie down for a second. Or just sit.”
We make it to the end of the hallway when Margot finally looks at me and takes my cheeks into her palms. “Hey. Hey, Kallista.” She snaps her fingers in my face, and her bright red fingernails glint in my vision. Everything blurs together and my head throbs. “You need water. We’ll get to your dressing room for a quickie.”
A quickie? I don’t need a quickie. I need to hibernate like a bear in winter.
“Jonas,” Margot yells to someone behind her, and in the next second, another pair of hands are on my arm. Why is everyone always touching me without my permission?
Margot fiddles with the ends of my hair, trying to force them back into place as I’m taken down another sleek white hallway. The lights above hurt, and my head thrums with a dull headache just behind my eyes. When we finally arrive to my dressing room door, Jonas—or whoever the fuck this guy is—lets go of my arm and reaches for the door handle.
“It’ll be fine,” Margot says. “We’ll get you some water, and you’ll be good as new.”
“I appreciate your optimism,” I rasp, then step through the doorway.
Margot sits me down in the leather chair and grabs my water bottle from the counter, then thrusts it into my hand. A faint rustling sound from somewhere behind me catches my attention, but I’m too busy trying not to pass out to care. Is it Jonas? No, Jonas didn’t come into the room with us, and thank god for that, because I don’t like it when there are strange people in my dressing room with me. Unflattering photos have a way of winding up in the tabloids the day after a show when people are allowed in and out of my quarters.
I’m chugging down the bottle of water and spinning around in my chair when I hear the rustle-rustle again.
Popping the bottle top out of my mouth, I ask Margot, “Did you hear that?”
Margot knits her dark brows together and leans against the vanity. “What? No. I didn’t hear anything.”
And then, before I can spin around again, an enormous male Angoro crashes through one of the dressers, landing on the floor by my feet. Margot and I exchange looks of horror as the alien scrapes himself up off the floor, his sixteen beady black eyes searching the room wildly … until they all fall on me.
Angoro males are dangerous. They’re big, for one thing, bigger than any Terran or Lunan could ever hope to be. And they have sixteen arms, a hard shell that encapsulates their body from head to toe, and long, serrated teeth that can pierce a Gorcian’s hide.
For half a second, he’s still. He blinks those beady eyes of his as though he’s finally realized what’s going on. Fear paralyzes me, pinning me to my seat.
Then Margot lets out an ear-piercing scream, I drop my water bottle to the ground—and all seven-hundred pounds of this alien are on top of me.
2XAVIAN
The Slitheron’s meaty fist connects with my jaw before I can dodge it, and white-hot pain rings throughout my skull, clouding my vision.
This isn’t how this job was supposed to go, I think as I grab the ruddy red tail of my mark and give it a hard yank. The Slitheron howls in agony and thrashes about on the ground, making it difficult to get a good grip on him. Finally, he exhausts himself and goes still for half a second, long enough for me to bear hug him from behind.
I hoist the alien high above my head, allowing the creature to dangle helplessly in the air for several seconds before I grind out, “I’m done playing nice. Either give us the credits now or end up at the mercy of my Gorcian friend.”
Slitherons love sneaking away into dark, disgusting alleyways like the one we’re in. There’s barely enough room for me to turn around, wedged between the brothel we dragged this asshole out of and a bank. The line to the credits terminal wraps around the building twice, filled with hungry men of various alien species eager to ease their weekday tension. My mouth goes dry thinking about how I had to pry the Slitheron—a species that resembles Terran snakes, if those snakes had bird beaks and raptor claws—off a woman just trying to do her job.
I’m charging my client extra for the trauma I’m going to live with thanks to that disgusting image permanently seared in my mind.
The Slitheron lets out a garbled cry as he tries to writhe away with little success. My mark’s not going to pay. They almost never do. Scumbags like this guy are why I get to sleep comfortably in my sixty-thousand count Ashmeena silk sheets every night.
