Page 4 of Warrior Enchanted

With a mouth as dry as cotton, my throat aching, and my stomach all up in knots, I answered her question. “I’m Meena Kocchar,” I said, my hands clutching at the coat I wore, my only shield against the outside world; the knife a burning weight in the right side pocket. This Aggy looked so neat and put together in a beautiful crocheted sweater over a simple pair of leggings. Purple boots encased her feet, which matched that handcrafted yarn masterpiece exactly. The only wrinkle in her appearance was a stain on her shoulder, where she was holding the strange baby.

“Welcome aboard the Vagabond Meena. Let me take you to the med bay. Don’t worry, we’ll get you taken care of in no time.” Aggy gestured at the metal doors at her back just as they swished open to the appearance of even more people. I flinched back, bumping into the leathery wing Sunder had cupped behind my back. A sense of feeling trapped clawed at me, like I was doomed if I stepped aboard this ship.

This feeling only grew when I realized just what had come out of that door. A giant creature covered in green scales, its head shaped like a bull with a wide set of horns, and a gleaming gold ring dangling from its nose. Emerald eyes pierced me with laser focus, and despite disliking the wing at my back, I pressed myself more firmly into it. That creature looked even more monstrous than Sunder. Then he snorted smoke from his nostrils and I wanted to scream.

“Easy there,” an unfamiliar voice said. “It’s okay. Ziame doesn’t hurt a fly.” It was another woman, her skin a glossy mocha, her hair in beautiful braids. She was easily six feet tall, but she looked tiny when she stepped in front of the giant green-scaled bull. “I’m Abigail and you’re safe here.” Behind her back, the monstrous giant snorted. I could easily imagine that he was laughing at her calling him harmless. He was clearly not harmless.

This Abigail and the green monster weren’t the only ones who’d stepped outside, but the other two… They looked almost mundane compared to Sunder and the green dude. Then my eyes snagged on the softly rounded belly of the woman, the third human woman so far. She was pregnant, and from the anthracite arm curled around her shoulders, the last man had to be the father. All of these women had hooked up with an alien male. Was that my fate?

A daze fell over me. Maybe it was the shock that finally settled in. I didn’t protest when Aggy put my hand into hand the pregnant lady was holding out, and then I shuffled after her, into the ship. I was relieved when no one else seemed to follow, not even Sunder, who had hovered over me since the moment he’d found me.

Now it was just me, the pregnant woman, and the male she was with. He looked almost human. With shimmering anthracite skin showing from beneath a white doctor’s coat, or was that a lab coat? Was this when I would be taken to some freaky alien lab and used as a science experiment?

“So Meena, is it?” the woman said but I barely heard her through the rushing in my ears. I dug my right hand into the coat pocket to curl my fingers around my knife, ready to defend myself. When I nodded, the pregnant woman jerked her chin once in response but she didn’t smile. “I’m Noa and this is my mate and the Doctor on the ship, Luka. We’ll take care of you, alright? Starting with taking that nasty collar off your neck.” She gestured with her hand at the pain collar locked around my throat and my eyes snagged on the colorful flower tattoos that decorated her bare arm.

The spaceship I’d just boarded looked gray and utilitarian in the hallways we traversed but I caught a glimpse of a corridor with doors each decorated in their own unique way. Then we were standing in front of what was clearly the medical area. It looked like a hospital, white and sterile. I wanted to balk at the sight of it, even if it didn’t smell pungently of cleaning agents. Was I about to get a needle in my neck? Get strapped down to a medical cot?

All hell seemed to break loose the next moment, a voice speaking in a strange alien language through some kind of loudspeaker somewhere. The alien male with us seemed to leap into motion at the sound, racing into the medical room, snatching up a ready-made bag, and then rushing out the door. As he passed Noa, I saw him lift a hand to briefly brush it over her protruding belly, then he was gone.

Noa on the other hand remained calm, urging me further into the room by gesturing with her hand. But I’d seen something else, someone else. A humanoid shape detached itself from the back wall of the large square room, lined with four hospital beds. I realized it was probably a male from the sheer size of him. He was colored like a sunset, ocher, gold, bronze, and even hints of red. Two long tentacles draped from his head, twisting and moving with agitation.

I clasped my hand over my mouth to muffle a scream at the sight of black eyes filled with pinpricks of white, the eyes the most bizarre ones I’d seen to date. They were locked onto my face, boring into me as if he thought he could see straight into my mind that way.

“Akri, maybe you should, you know… skedaddle? There’s about to be a lot of scared and injured humans incoming.” Noa walked into the medical room with a confident stride, rushing for a cabinet to start pulling out supplies and laying them out on trays next to each bed. She knew what she was doing in here, and I wanted to fade away, hide.

Shuffling to the side, my eyes on the newest creepy alien, I kept my back to the wall and found a corner. This Akri lurched gracelessly into motion, one hand on the nearest wall. His bare, three-toed feet were clumsy as he stumbled along, but his eyes never left my face while he walked, not until he reached the exit and ducked out of sight.

“Sorry about that,” Noa was saying, her eyes on my face, blonde short hair hanging in cute, pixie-like layers down to her sharp cheekbones. “Akri isn’t very used yet to interacting with humans. Now, let me remove that collar, alright?” When she came my way, she was holding some kind of weirdly shaped phone in one hand and a scalpel in the other. I flinched away, my hand coming up defensively with the knife.

Damn it, this wasn’t how I wanted to respond. I was acting like a lunatic. That knife wasn’t to hurt me; she wanted to cut that thing from my neck. But I couldn’t make myself trust. I couldn’t stop shaking and I was suddenly so freaking angry about that. Since when was I this much of a scaredy-cat? I wasn’t afraid of a silly spider. I hadn’t been afraid to walk home in the dark at the end of my workday. One stupid little abduction and a bit of blood later and here I was, trembling like a leaf.

Noa lowered the hand holding the scalpel, her eyes on my face with a thoughtful expression in place. She watched me for some time while I struggled to get myself under control, the knife-wielding hand trembling so hard I felt it rattle up my shoulder.

Then suddenly our attention was snatched by noises outside this hospital room, Noa shrugged and turned to face the newcomers. I slunk back even further into my corner, hiding the knife again in the pocket of my stolen coat. Grateful that I could pretend for a little while that it hadn’t happened. A whole crowd was stumbling into the room, one human face after the other. Suddenly, nobody was paying any kind of attention to me at all. Perfect.

Most were speaking English and it was easy to separate out the new ones, the ones just rescued from the ones that lived on this ship. For one, I recognized the simple shirt and pants from the auction house. When I’d been woken up from that stasis pod, that’s what they’d put me in too. They were all confused and emotional, hanging onto each other for support.

The women from the ship, like Noa and like the African American woman I’d met before, and Aggy, wore clothes that expressed their own personal tastes. They moved confidently, speaking reassuringly, urging humans onto the medical cots to get their collars removed and their vitals checked. That anthracite-colored doctor was back too. He seemed to be directing the medical part of things.

Soon my eyes snagged on one particular woman with black hair and a petite figure; her arm draped around what was clearly a younger sibling. At first, I wanted to feel sorry for her. Like me, she wasn’t dressed in the auction house clothing; she was dressed in revealing lingerie. Then I realized that she had several of the human men clustering around her as she talked.

She gestured with a graceful hand, and when my ears tuned in on the conversation, I could tell that she was using a soft trembling voice to evoke sympathy. I just… something about the entire act rankled. It felt like it was just that, an act. Maybe it was the way in which she moved her scantily clad body, giving off vibes of seduction rather than fear.

“I see it too,” an electronic voice said just to my right and I spun, my fingers twitching around the handle of the knife. It was Sunder again, standing a couple of feet away, his hands open at his side, wings tucked tightly against his back. Everything about his posture screamed that he was trying not to be a threat.

What did he mean by that? Had he seen the same thing I had? When he tilted his head to gaze at the small black-haired woman with a nod, that seemed to confirm it. I drew in a relieved breath. Somehow, that was the first thing he’d said that was truly helping me calm down. Then he started to try to convince me to let the Doctor have a look at me and I wanted to retreat again. After what I’d been through… what I’d done… I didn’t want anyone to touch me, look at me. Especially not when there was no privacy to be had.

My hand drifted up to the pain collar around my neck, contemplating whether it was worth it to stick around just long enough to get that off. A rumbling noise drew my attention, not the same noise Sunder made when he spoke… My skin prickled, breaking out in goosebumps when I realized it was an animalistic growl. I felt heat low in my belly, and instead of wincing back, or trying to get away from the noise, I found myself craning my head around to look at the source.

Far too much red, gleaming skin, shimmering with health, glinting almost gold in the stark light. My eyes widened when I realized I was staring at an alien with four arms, two stacked above each other, each arm bulging with muscle. He was wearing a sleeveless black coverall, a belt around his hips and one thigh to hold several knives. He wore boots laced up all the way to his knees and his feet look absolutely giant.

It was his face that drew my attention the most. Chiseled jawline, jutting chin, a sharp nose, and the most extraordinary pair of yellow eyes. They were on me, watching me, and it was the first time since this whole ordeal started that I felt normal when someone looked at me. Well, not normal exactly, but definitely not scared or distrusting. That was a definite improvement.

He had black hair curling in gentle curls around his head, almost down to his shoulders. They were a little messy, a little wild, and it matched the primal way he looked. Down to the leather bands around his many thick wrists, the weapons strapped to his body, and his warrior physique. The only in-congruent thing about him was the smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose and across his sharp cheekbones. They were a dark purple that flashed to a bright pink the moment our eyes met.

“What have we here? You’re that super strong guy. You were so fierce and protective!” a voice interrupted our intense staring. My eyes snapped away from four-arms, heat crawling up my neck, shocked that I’d had such an intense reaction to a complete stranger and an alien at that.

The woman I’d noticed before had approached, one arm clutched around her middle, almost in the same way I was clutching my arms across my chest. Except she’d done it in such a way that her breasts were pushed up, blatantly on display. I was not the only one who’d noticed. Four-arms turned to look at her when she spoke, and his yellow eyes dropped from her face down to her boobs before he yanked his chin back up. His colorful freckles turned a deep, dark brown, and I wondered if it was a blush.