They weren’t as tall as the males, but they didn’t miss it by a hell of a lot. They weren’t as muscular, but they didn’t miss that by much either. Like the males, they wore nothing over their upper bodies, which was why she deduced fairly quickly that it was females of the same species. Many of them had breasts as big as her head--hard to miss.
They, too, appeared to have long, dark hair, but unlike the males, it appeared that they shaved all but the hair in the back and instead of wearing it lose, the hair was braided and coiled tightly against the crown of their heads.
She didn’t have to wonder if they were fierce. They were fighting among themselves--and it wasn’t a cat fight. They were slugging it out like prize fighters. Like Consuelo, she tensed, staring at the melee in frozen dread.
The awful moment of truth that she’d hardly acknowledged came when one of the women happened to glance in their direction. The moment she did, she went rigid, like a pointer that had spotted a covey of quail. One by one, the other women stopped and stared. Even those who’d been moments before trying to pound the life out of each other stopped.
Fear washed over Bri, leaching the strength from her limbs. She clutched the baby a little more tightly, grabbing the blanket and covering his head.
It was too late.
The women knew she and Consuelo had their babies.
Rage contorted their features as they moved almost as one toward the edge of their yard.
“Oh my god!” Bri whispered in a suffocated voice, looking wildly around for help, protection, a weapon of any description, an avenue of escape.
Chapter Four
One of the women screamed something that sounded like a challenge or a battle cry. Bri wasn’t certain which, but she doubted there was much of a distinction anyway.
Kole, she saw when she glanced around, was staring at her grimly, condemningly, she thought.
Consuelo, looking as pale as she felt, was gazing wide eyed at the savage horde.
Bri retreated closer to Consuelo, who was smaller even than she was and probably no more capable of fighting anything like these creatures than she was. It was the best she could come up with by way of ‘safety in numbers’, though. “They’re wearing the chokers. They can’t cross the line,” she muttered more to herself than to Consuelo, trying to convince herself they couldn’t. She wasn’t as certain as she wanted to be, though, and after she and Consuelo exchanged a look, they both whirled and fled toward the door of their habitats.
The door was locked. Bri beat on it with her fist when she discovered she couldn’t open it, demanding to be let in, cursing the aliens with every curse word she’d ever heard and resorted to name calling when she couldn’t think of any more swear words. When she finally wore herself out enough that the mindless panic began to recede and her hand was numb and bruised from beating on the panel, she turned to cast a terrified look over her shoulder.
There was no sign of the savage alien women.
The collars, she decided, must have held.
The fear had seized her that the aliens might not use them to control the women, that they might be bent on entertaining themselves watching the alien women rip the two puny Earth women to shreds.
Too weak with relief to stand, Bri wilted to the ground and promptly burst into tears of profound relief. Her reaction startled the baby or frightened him. Bri wasn’t certain which, but after uttering several noises that sounded like coughs, he set up a wail to match hers.
Surprised, Bri choked back her own tears, wiped her eyes, and looked down at the squalling infant. Sympathy and remorse filled her. She’d scared him. He hadn’t let out a peep until she’d lost control. Sniffing, she began to rock him, patting his back, stroking him. He subsided after a few minutes, looking up at her with an expression that was almost accusing.
Feeling more shame for scaring him than for running like a rabbit, Bri chuckled a little huskily at his expression.
It was the first time, she realized abruptly, since she’d had him that Cory had cried. Was it reaction to fear he’d sensed in her, she wondered? Or was he just mimicking her?
Rage seemed to be an emotion the yellow tribe was familiar with, but she doubted they were more than passingly familiar with fear. Maybe the babies were taught not to cry? Or was it just that he’d been too weak before?
She frowned. It seemed important. Crying was the only way a baby could communicate fear or hunger or hurt, but he hadn’t before.
A vague memory surfaced after a few moments. She remembered something she’d heard on TV about infants in an orphanage that didn’t cry because nobody came.
She felt nauseous at the thought.
She’d been right, she decided. Cory had needed her. He’d needed loving care as much as he’d needed food. He hadn’t been so weak and listless because the aliens hadn’t tried to feed him. He’d been dying by inches because no one cared.
She
cared, she realized, feeling warmth fill her chest, feeling it tighten with emotion. She loved him, as strange as it seemed even to her that she could come to love a child not even her own, a child, moreover, that wasn’t even of her kind. The determination to protect him filled her, as well, but how could she do that? She couldn’t defend herself against those creatures, or the aliens that had captured her.
She was as helpless as he was.
She shook that thought off. She’d never thought of herself as being helpless. She’d thought of herself as being self-sufficient. She’d been taking care of herself forever, it seemed. Her mother’s health had always been bad, and it had deteriorated more and more as she’d grown up until by the time she’d graduated from high school, she’d been supporting her mother instead of the other way around.
She’d taken the skills she’d learned keeping house as a youngster and turned it into a lucrative business--homemaking for the working woman.
She’d tried not to think about her business falling apart since she’d been taken, tried not to think about the time and money she’d invested in the trip to expand into new markets. It didn’t really matter if MacIntyre Prepared Home Cooking survived if she didn’t. She had a half dozen employees, but they could find other jobs.
If she lived, if she managed to go home, she could start over.
As daunting as that prospect was, it beat the alternative.
And there was no point at all in thinking about it when she couldn’t do anything to change the situation.
The worst thing was that she was not prepared to protect herself. She hadn’t even had ‘in home’ training squabbling with siblings to give her a clue in self-defense. She’d always had ‘authority’ to run to for protection. Then she’d had money to provide protection, and common sense--like staying away from dangerous situations.
None of that was going to do her any good now.
She would’ve liked to think she could fall back on her intelligence, but she was certainly no ‘brain’ and she was up against some serious heavy weights from what she could tell of the slaver aliens.
The yellow race--maybe, maybe not. She still hadn’t quite decided whether they were on an intellectual par with humans or not, but Kole seemed to be picking up both English and Spanish faster than either her or Consuelo were picking up each other’s language.
That didn’t say much for either her or Consuelo.
Maybe he was exceptionally bright for his race, and maybe not. He didn’t strike her as being the nerd of the pack. If anything she was more inclined to think he might be a leader. He had a way about him.
In fact, now that she thought about it, he’d stalked over to the side closest to the women and bellowed something at them just as she’d whirled to run for her life.
Dismissing that for the moment, she focused on the physical threat the women represented.
Physically, as pathetic as she was, Consuelo was hopeless. The woman probably didn’t weigh ninety pounds soaking wet, and she was barely five feet tall, if that. Short of biting one of those amazons in the groin, Consuelo might as well throw in the towel. Any one of those women could probably snap her in two like a dry twig.
Her own situation was only marginally better--not enough to give her any confidence that she could hold her own.
If she could bench press a couple of hundred pounds, maybe.
Brains, that was all she had.
She was screwed.
* * * *
Kole’s fury and frustration nearly got the best of him when he saw the females who referred to themselves as Earth women had two of the Hirachi infants. He’d thought all of them had died. He’d been too stunned, at first, to accept that the babies really were alive and to grasp that it could only be some of their own--perhaps even his, though his instincts told him that neither was of his blood line--the babies were too young, he thought, to have been born
before
they left Ach, and, in any case, the Sheloni had never been known to take infants.
They would die without their mothers--without either parent--slowly from the look of them.
Were the women too stupid to realize they were only prolonging the inevitable, torturing the innocent by making their death a lingering one? Or was it simply that it didn’t matter to them because the babies were not of their own kind?
He was tempted to reach across the barrier and throttle the pink one when she refused to give over the baby, enraged as much by her defiance as he was by the way she looked at him--as if he meant the baby harm! As if
he
was in the wrong!
The woman’s defiance had nearly overwhelmed his good sense. Coldness washed through him when he realized how closely he’d come to yielding to the impulse to reach across and grab her.
And he wasn’t completely convinced that impulse was pure anger toward her.
Truthfully, he’d been itching to get hold of her from the moment she’d finally come close enough for him to see her really well … and throttling her had been the furthest thing from his mind.
His reaction to her revolted him and thoroughly confused him. The instinct to spawn was supposed to be an urge to propagate his species and line. He wouldn’t have considered accepting an invitation from a Hirachi woman that was inferior in any way, physically or intellectually. He wanted to produce strong, intelligent, young.
Almost worse, she’d very clearly turned her nose up at
him
, not issued an invitation. There was nothing wrong with him! He’d proven he was the best of the best or he wouldn’t have been chosen to lead.
Damn her!
Was that it what it was? A challenge to his ego?
Maybe, he thought, that was part of the reason--an urge to prove himself--but that didn’t explain why he got hard all over every time she strolled past him. That was lust, and he, frankly, didn’t think the spawning faze had anything to do with it. Spawning was the last thing on his mind, in fact. He just wanted to fuck her blind and bow legged, and to hell with the consequences.
He spent half his time trying to reason with his lust, reminding himself that children were forever and once spawned, one was stuck with them, however they turned out--even if weakened in mind, body, and spirit by mating with a female that was obviously all those things.
Except she had spirit--or she was stupid--or brave because she thought he couldn’t get to her. He couldn’t decide which, but the doubts didn’t turn his mind from the images that had been tormenting the hell out of him of shoving those pale thighs apart and burying himself so deeply inside of her he lost his mind in the ecstasy of having her hot, tight flesh wrapped around his cock.
When she’d looked at the women threatening to tear her limb from limb if she didn’t hand over the baby she’d stolen, he’d felt like all his doubts about her were confirmed. Then again, they had been threatening to dismember her and use the bloody stumps to pulverize her--and it had been all of them, not just one. It would have been more stupid if she’d been willing to take on the mob.
He’d told himself he’d ordered the women to stop because they were threatening to ruin his plan of surprise attack--and they certainly had risked it with their undisciplined fury--it infuriated him that they’d degenerated into an undisciplined mob that scarcely deserved the honor of being considered trained warriors.
But he knew if any of them had attacked, he would’ve protected her from them, and the realization that he was willing to side with her over his own people wasn’t a pleasant thing to discover about himself.
The imprisonment, the sheer boredom, the frustrations were beginning to weaken his mind as well as his body.
* * * *
Bri did not want to go out again. She realized the moment the thought entered her mind, though, that she had unwittingly given the slaver aliens something else to use to control her--Cory. She’d been afraid to go the first time until they’d shown her the extent of pain they could cause her with the push of a button. As debilitating as that had been, as reluctant as she was to experience it even once more, she realized that balking would not only result in another lesson, she might well drop the baby and hurt him if they zapped her with that nerve paralyzing jolt again. Worse, if they hit her hard enough to knock her out, Cory would be completely helpless until she regained consciousness.
She didn’t regret adopting Cory. If she had it all to do again, she would have done the same, but she very much feared that the slavers were well aware of the added leverage the baby gave them.
A quick survey of her surroundings assured her there was nothing in the room she could use as a weapon. Frustration filled her but not surprise.
She hadn’t consciously looked for anything like that before, but she realized that, unconsciously, she had, because even as the thought occurred to her, her mind produced a mental inventory of the contents of the habitat and instantly registered a negative.
It wasn’t just that she was too civilized to consider it, or that she was too afraid, or too unaccustomed to trying to protect herself. Nothing but a gas mask would have protected her from the slaver aliens because they used the gas to render her helpless, and nothing short of a bazooka, she was sure, would take down one of their robots.