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“Wait. You’re not speaking in English now?”No way.
“I’m speaking in Luvia’s Had’zhak dialect. The chip translates what it can directly and explains what it can’t in words you can understand. For instance, when you hear me sayhour, I’m actually sayinghour.”
Emilia blinked.
“See?” His tentative smile returned, which only made his elongated lower canines –tusks?– shine brighter in the room’s artificial light. “All you heard washour, right?”
“Yeah… That still doesn’t make it okay to put stuff inside me without my permission.”
That’s the spirit, Emi, go on the offensive!As scary as being abducted by aliens was, simply standing against the wall, cowering, wasn’t going to solve anything. Besides, thus far she had not been hurt. Taken against her will and equipped with a translator chip, but not hurt. And all she had heard from the humanoid alien so far had sounded rather… human. Emilia knew how to deal with humans. Why let fear rule her, then?
Thanks to the self-defense classes she had taken a couple years back, she knew just how to act. She had been thought the best strategy was to run, but since that wasn’t an option in space, that left her with option number two: acting less like a victim and more like the person in control.
If that didn’t scare the alien off, she could pretend she was on his side to lure him into a false sense of security until he let his guard down and… bam! He would be wriggling in pain on the floor in no time, cradling his smashed family jewels, and she could get away to… another part of the ship?
Emilia really hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though. For starters, she didn’t know what the alien was packing. His pants outlined a regular-looking bulge, but who knew?
Going for the throat with the heel of her palm was another option. But she could now see he had dark-orange tattoos –tiger stripes?– on his skin there as well as down his collarbones and around his biceps and forearms. She suspected his red leather-like sleeveless vest was hiding even more stripes. Who could say he would feel anything when her palm collided with those things on his skin?
No, if it came to an actual fight, her best chance lay with getting her hands on the weapon attached to his belt. If using it proved not as easy as it looked in sci-fi movies, she could always slam the futuristic-looking pistol’s butt into his head. That would actually give him a taste of his own medicine, since her head hurt from before she had introduced it to the wall. All thanks to whatever he had used to knock her out at the back of the pub.
Speaking of…
“What’s also not okay is you abducting me. Though I’m sure you have an excuse for that as well?”
“Well…”
“Something about the first stage of a plan?” Emilia pressed on. “Where you needed a Terran and made a fool of yourself?”
He passed a hand over his face, making her notice he had a cleft in his chin that was now beard-free. “You heard that, didn’t you…” The wild swishing of his lion tail grew even wilder before he stopped it by curling the long evidence of his anxiety around his knee. “Not that I wasn’t going to tell you anyway, but… perhaps in better terms?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, feeling more confident the more insecure he got. Maybe if she pressed him just right… “There is no such thing as ‘better terms’ when abduction is involved. The only way you can make things right is by returning me home. I’ll keep my mouth shut about what I saw, and no one will ever know about your crim–”
“No.”
Emilia got startled by the very firm statement. “No?”
“No.” Gone was his insecurity. He was the confident one now. Even Cubbie ceased his attempts to escape at his owner’s tone and looked up at him. “I can’t. Not until I close this case I’m working on, for which your help is indispensable.”
Emilia kept her stern look on but inside she was allshit, shit, shit. “Myhelp? Or just any woman’s from my planet?”
He bit his upper lip for a second there before saying firmly, “It can’t be helped now. Like I mentioned at the bar, this is a time-sensitive matter.”
“Jeez, don’t I feel special!” She had no idea why that bothered her, but it did. “So, I’m here because I had the bad luck of being the first woman in your way at the pub?”Wait a second… “What about Mandy?”
Emilia might be imagining it, but his eyes got even more rounded at the mention of that name.
“What about Mandy?” he asked in a not-so-confident tone.
“Mandy. The woman you could have taken to see your spaceship two minutes into meeting her, wasting no time and encountering no resistance whatsoever. Heck, she would have volunteered to do whatever you asked of her, provided she got access to your bank account in the process! Or whatever means of payment you use in… in… space. But nooo, you had to choose an unwilling woman instead, do some light juju on her and,” Emilia waved her hands at the room, “go full-blown alien abduction on her!”
Cubbie whimpered at her biting tone.
Her abductor resumed petting the pet gently, but there was no gentleness in his tone when he spoke next. “If I wanted a female to pleasure me in exchange for funds, I would have taken the Terran you speak of. But I want a partner, someone I can trust while I’m trying to save thousands of lives. I felt you were the one, Lia, but... perhaps I was wrong.”
Emilia gaped. Was this alien using reverse psychology on her? Like she would fall for that trick. “Perhaps you were wrong indeed. You should return me right away, while you still have time for another, more well-thought-through abduction.”
His reaction? A slight smile. “Nice try, Lia, but right or wrong, you’re the one I’ve chosen. I’m sorry for abducting you – I wasn’t planning on resorting to such methods – but it is what it is. We’re stuck with each other now.”
