Alien Prisoner of the FBI
By Charlotte Mistry
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012 Charlotte Mistry
Discover other titles by Charlotte Mistry at
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/charlottemistry
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of this author.
Halas wakes to pain and confusion. He doesn’t know where he is. All he knows is
that he feels wrong. It’s hard to breathe. There are someone else’s hands on him, and he
can feel them as well as he can feel the hot, sharp metal shard embedded in his side. It’s a
radiating spike of pain and he flinches, barely perceptible.
He tries to lift his head and fails. His face feels wet, and whether it’s with blood or
something else he can’t tell. When his split tongue flickers out to taste the air all he gets
is a bitter impression of dirt and acrid chemical smoke. Someone yelps in surprise.
The hands touching him go away as suddenly as if he’d turned red-hot. He tries to
move his own hands, in turn, but he can barely make them twitch. He feels gritty, dirty.
Someone says something he can’t decipher. It’s a language he doesn’t know.
Halas pries his eyes open.
The stars wheel dizzily above in a thousand little pinpoints, dimmed by floodlights
and his own inability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. He feels
concussed. Tastes blood and dirt. A cluster of tall shapes in black clothing loom over him
like carrion-feeders. They speak to each other in some garbled quick tongue that he can’t
concentrate enough to make sense of. It’s their hands on him, their voices that woke him.
Their faces are blurred shadows.
He tries to move and the pain comes back tenfold. He can’t figure out how to get up.
When he tries, all he gets is his fingertips twitching and a shortness of breath. He feels
like he’s underwater, and all those dark shapes are converging on him. Trying to
remember how he got here is a sickening blur of colors, shapes, and sounds.
There was a ship. He knows that much. The only question is why he’s here, on this
planet, with these creatures, instead of up among the stars where he belongs. Had they
crashed? They must have. There’s no other explanation that makes sense, even in the
state he’s in. He spares a though for the others who’d been on the ship with him. Judging
from the orange glow of fire on the horizon, he doesn’t hold out much hope.
He can feel himself slipping. His own mind is dragging him down, and he realizes
with a burst of panic that whatever the things around him are, he doesn’t recognize them.
They’re no species he knows, for all that they’re shaped more or less the same way, and
he doesn’t know what they’ll do to him.
He throws himself into the little change he’s still capable of in his exhaustion. The
chromatophores that coat him ripple yellow-beige-pink-brown until he’s more or less the
same color they are, and bony plates under the surface of his skin slide and crack into
new configurations. The shape of his body- his face- changes. It only takes a few
seconds.
When he’s finished, he looks markedly more like they do, with their flat faces and
rounded eyes. Under normal circumstances- after a change like that- he might have been
a little sore for a few days. Now, he doesn’t know. He felt shaky enough before. Now it’s
worse. He can feel the ache, feel the exhaustion. The creatures watch his every move.
They do it with caution, but not the slightest trace of fear.
The world blurs grey in front of him and the things advance. Halas realizes that there
was really no point in changing himself. Whatever these things intend, they’ve already
seen him. There will be no hiding. The best he can hope for is that they’ll be kinder to
something that looks like one of their own.
Darkness drags him down, and he drifts.
Time comes in chunks, in fragments. He’s looking up at the stars and then he’s inside

some kind of vehicle, the floor swaying beneath him as one of the creatures extracts
metal shards from beneath Halas’ skin. He tries to move and finds himself bound; a
needle in his shoulder feeds him thin clear fluid. It spreads numbness through him like a
plague.
He blinks and the vehicle is gone. There’s a fragment of dark sky, of a white ceiling,
of trying to fight his way up through the thick soft chemical fog inside his head. He’s on
a hard narrow bed as someone pokes at him, something he can only feel as dull distant
pressure. He’s together enough to understand the language, now, not that it does him any
good.
“It changed,” one of them says, “when we found it. Like putting on a second skin.
I’ve never seen anything like it.”
A man swims into view above him. He’s wearing a long white coat, a stark contrast to
the others and their black. A badge clipped to his lapel might be identification, but just
because Halas has sifted through enough of the language to understand it doesn’t mean he
can read it. It’s all spiky shapes and curves, meaningless.
The man takes Halas’ hand and bends his wrist like he’s investigating the range of
motion. Halas tries to pull away but can only manage a halfhearted, uncoordinated twitch.
The man hardly notices. “It’s not human at all. If it was trying to hide, well, it’s not very
convincing. Look at this structure, here, the bony plates beneath the epidermis. They
seem quite movable, and the color shift-”
There’s a blur of time like a finger smeared through thick paint. There are hands, and
cold metal, and bright lights.
When Halas finally swims up out of the depths he doesn’t know how long it’s been.
For what seems like the first time in a very long while he’s clear-headed.
There’s not much to focus on. The ceiling above him is stark white. He’s lying on
something hard and cold. Metal, it seems like, and his hands are pinned at his sides. If he
cranes his neck, he can see the thin black squiggle of stitching where they’d pulled out
the shrapnel and sewn him shut- and more than that, he can see the padded metal
restraints that rise out of the table to encircle his wrists and ankles. He tests them. They
don’t budge.
His head lifts too far and suddenly he can’t breathe. Halas drops his head back down
in a hurry. There’s a matching metal band around his throat, loose enough not to choke
him, so long as he doesn’t fight with it.
He turns as head as much as he’s able. He can see little bits of the rest of the room out
of the corner of his eye, but there’s not much to look at. He’s alone. The table he’s lying
on is a dull silver, and his skin has stayed that peculiar uniform beige-brown, even
without his guidance. The floor is white tile. The walls are white, the deep sink against
the wall is white. The only thing that isn’t is the wheeled tray covered in shiny bright
metal tools, the light glinting off their razor edges.
Terror turns his pupils into pinpricks. No. God no. He pulls at his restraints. They
don’t shift, and his struggling turns desperate, frantic, bruising his skin and making the
table rattle. He can’t look away from those sharp steel edges, blades and worse-
“It’s awake.”
Footsteps echo loud on the tile. A long white coat swishes into view, and Halas
cranes his neck as far as he can without choking to see the man peering at him from
upside-down. He looks deathly pale against all that endless white, sunken and sallow. He
smiles. Halas doesn’t. “Now, what are you?”
Halas’ lips move. He tries to answer, but no sound comes out. When he tries again, all
he gets is a thin pained groan. Apparently the question was rhetorical, because the man
doesn’t ask again. Instead he turns his head, and Halas realizes that they aren’t alone. He
can’t see them, not properly, and can’t turn his head far enough to track them. All he can
hear is the swishing of their coats, the soft susurrus of fabric echoing off tile. Their words
blur together into a chorus.
“We’ll start with the number ten scalpel, I think.”
“Yes, if you would pass-”
“Set up the cameras?”
Equipment is dragged into place, and when the tray of instruments is dragged closer
he starts struggling again in earnest.
“Set up the sedative drip before it hurts itself,” one of them says, “or maybe just a

paralytic?”
“Set it low to begin with, we don’t know what kind of side effects there might be.”
A needle slides into his shoulder, a quick sharp bite of pain that’s just as quickly
numbed into nothing. He can’t feel his shoulder. Icy tendrils seep down his arm like
creeping infection. Very soon it’s like he doesn’t have an arm at all. His fingers don’t so
much as twitch when he tells them to. The light glints so brightly off the blade as they
bring it down.
“No,” Halas gasps, “no, don’t-”
They pause. There’s a beat of silence, and then the scalpel goes back on the tray, no
less threatening for the distance.
“It speaks English?” Someone mutters, and someone else leans over Halas with a
clipboard, clicking a pen. Halas can’t see his eyes for the light off his glasses.
“You can understand us?”
He nods as much as he’s able, slow and uncertain. Their language is still slippery on
his tongue. He puts it together as best he can. “Don’t- don’t cut.”
The man ignores him. “How did you learn English? You certainly didn’t understand
anything yesterday.”
It’s already been a day?
Halas struggles for an explanation in the limited words he has, and most of all he
doesn’t understand why they don’t understand. There’s a kind of resonance in language,
mathematical in its rhythm and complexity. All languages are like that, so long as you
can find the patterns. They can do the same, surely? “The shape of sounds. The- the
syllables? Patterns?”
It’s no good. He sounds brain-damaged. He doesn’t know the details of the language,
only fragments. The man notes it down anyway, sharp little black pen-strokes on white
paper. The numbness is still seeping into him, cold across his shoulder and down into his
heart, like icy claws.
“What are you? Where are you from? We found the remnants of your ship, are there
others coming-?”
The questions come like a tidal wave, so many and so fast that he finds himself
dragged under. It’s too fast to process and he can only stare, until the man shakes his
head. “I don’t think it understands at all.”
“No,” Halas says, mouth dry, “I do. I understand. Don’t cut.”
“How did you change your face? How many of you are there among us, watching?
Who are you spying for? What do they want?”
Halas’ mouth works, silent. He scrambles for the answers he can give. Even then, he
doesn’t think it’s going to be enough. “Bone. Under the skin, to change. Not spying, just
here, by accident.”
He can tell by the looks in their eyes that they don’t believe him, and curses the
fractured half-language he has. If he only had more time to learn it. One of them frowns.
Halas turns frantic.
“No others, just me, only me-”
“Mm,” says the man with the glasses, “not very compelling.” He holds out his hand.
“The number ten, please, and if you could set up the recording equipment, Sandra. Thank
you.”
They begin.
***
The next time he opens his eyes the room is dark.
He feels sluggish, half-conscious and strangely detached from his own body. There’s
something that might, in another lifetime, be pain. It’s muffled and strange, prickling and
distant. It’s centered on his torso; something inside him says that looking will only make
it worse, and so he does not look.
Halas drifts, drugged and heavy and stuffed full of cotton. The IV bag at his side is
nearly empty, but it’s still feeding him its last drops. He watches them fall one by one,
perfectly measured. The restraining band around his neck is gone, but the ones at his
wrists and ankles remain.
The lights snap on like an ice pick to the eye. He hisses and flinches like an animal. It
makes his head ache, makes his teeth ache right down to the roots. Something clatters to
the floor, ringing loud.

“Damn it,” someone mutters.
It’s a younger voice than the ones from before. Male, Halas thinks, but not quite so
rough with years. He keeps his eyelids shut tight and listens. He hears the rustle of fabric,
the light scrape of something being picked up, and then footsteps getting closer.
Halas cracks an eyelid against his better judgment. What he sees isn’t exactly what he
was expecting: a young man, clean-shaven and dark-haired. He’s wearing a white coat
like the others, but this one has a pocket packed full of pens and a greenish stain on one
sleeve. The man frowns at the IV stand as he switches out the bag. He bites his lip in
concentration and Halas can see blunt white teeth on pink flesh.
He glances down at Halas, does a double-take, and leaps back. “Oh shit, you’re
awake!”
Halas doesn’t do more than watch, and after a second the man comes creeping back,
cautious and curious. He reaches out a hand, slow, and pokes Halas in the side. Halas
flinches. For a moment, all that staticky not-pain flares into agony- and then it fades. He’s
breathing hard, muscles clenched tight as the drugs in his veins dull it all down into
nothing.
“Sorry,” the man says, and wonder of wonders, he actually sound like he’s serious.
“Let me go,” says Halas, or at least he tries. It comes out as a slurred,
incomprehensible nothing, and he grimaces as he tries to make his numb tongue
cooperate. The man tilts his head like a confused dog and Halas tries again. “Let,” he
enunciates, “me. Go.”
“Uh. Not authorized to do that.” The man doesn’t seem inclined to leave, though, and
leans on the metal table Halas is strapped to. The angle he’s at puts pressure on Halas’
abused ribs- whatever they’ve done to him- and he can feel the pain building. “Why’s a
space alien speak English? You are a space alien, right?”
“Because.” He grinds it out from between clenched teeth. “Because is why. Stop
touching me, hurts-”
The guy backs off in a hurry. “What, are you injured or something? I thought the docs
took a look at you already.”
That’s one way to put it. Halas raises his chin and squints down at himself. He’s
covered, knee to shoulder, in a thin white sheet. Well, nearly white- where the man had
rested his hand, blood is starting to stain it, dark and slow.
“Oh, for- I can’t stop fucking up, today,” the guy says despairingly, and pulls the
sheet back.
He seems to freeze there for a very long time. Halas can make out the long trails of
black sutures he can’t feel, winding snakelike across his skin. Some of it has been
bandaged. Some hasn’t. Bruises bloom dark as night flowers along his hips, his
shoulders, his ribs. The longer he stares at it, the more the feeling starts to come back,
like connecting a circuit. Pins and needles at first, and then worse, and worse-
The man puts the sheet back down. Halas lets his head fall back with a thump. He
presses his eyes shut. Gradually, the pain fades.
“Did,” the man starts, and then stops, and starts again with something else, “what
happened to you?”
Halas just looks at him. The man already knows, he can tell- he’s just hiding behind
denial, behind the comforting illusion that lets him do his job without asking too many
questions, without thinking too hard about what he’s helping to do. He opens his mouth
like he’s going to speak.
There’s a noise from outside. A footstep or something else, and he steps away from
Halas with a jerk. He’s out the door and gone before Halas can blink, and the room snaps
back into dimness.
Halas shuts his eyes and lets out an aching breath.
At least he turned out the lights.
The anesthetic- or whatever it is- spreads through him like numbing fingers. He lets it
drag him down, down, to a place where nothing hurts at all.
***
He doesn’t know how long it takes them to get their fill of poking at his insides. He
gets the impression of weeks, months, years passing in a numb haze punctuated with
bursts of reality like waking dreams; on the other hand, maybe it’s only been days, or
hours. There’s no way of knowing. The hands on him- the needles and the knives- are as

blurry and interchangeable as his dreams. It’s so hard to hang onto anything.
One day he wakes up to a ceiling that’s an ugly off-grey instead of white. He lies
there staring, but it stays solid and still. Realer than anything else he’s experienced.
Everything feels realer; too intense, almost overwhelming.
The air is stale and bland and only remarkable for how it doesn’t smell like antiseptic.
He’s lying on something soft. The blanket under his hands is scratchy.
Oh, he thinks, and realizes that he is somewhere else.
His fingers twitch, and slowly, so slowly, he raises them up. The rest of his arm and
hand comes with them. He’s not restrained. Halas looks wonderingly at his own palms
for a long time, tracing their once-familiar shapes. He pushes up his sleeve and finds the
hundred pockmarks, scars and scabs left by needles in the crook of his elbow. They’re
ringed strange colors where his chromatophores have reacted to the trauma, blooming
black and yellow like spider-web cracks. Halas concentrates, and they fade, sluggish.
Sitting up is a slow and arduous journey. When he manages it he spends a few
minutes sagging against the wall, heart going too fast. He feels weak and shaky. It has to
have been at least a few days since the crash, or maybe longer? Is his dizziness hunger or
blood loss or both?
His hands go to his chest. Under the blanket he finds a pair of loose, shapeless scrubs,
pale blue and thin. They don’t fit him, the arms and legs too long. When he pushes them
out of the way to get a good look at his own skin all he can do is stare. He’s a ravaged
canvas of bruises and stitches, cuts and scrapes and scars. Halas nudges the edge of a new
scar with a fingernail, uneasy. It’s been longer than he thought.
He wonders if they took anything out of him, or if they were just looking.
The room is tiny, concrete, and mostly empty. A bunk, a sink and toilet, the slowblinking
eye of a camera on the ceiling, and a single door. Halas levers himself off the
bunk and stumbles over to it. There’s no handle, no nothing. He can’t get so much as a
fingernail in the cracks around the edges. His legs threaten to give out under him and he
pounds on the door with the heel of his hand. It echoes loud and hollow.
“Hello? Can anyone- can anyone hear me?”
There’s no answer.
“Let me out,” he tries, “let me go, I’m not useful, I’m not- anything, you don’t need
me.”
He feels awful, and lets himself slide down to sit on the floor and rest his forehead
against the cool wall. He doesn’t even want to think about the state they’ve left him in, if
he can’t cross a room without collapsing. Halas wraps an arm around himself- for warmth
or for comfort he doesn’t know.
“What do you want from me?” He yells, sudden and bitter and anguished, and his
only answer is the camera, above, with its little red light blinking.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there, curled up against the wall. He just stares at
the patch of floor between his feet, thin clothes clutched tight around himself. Time
trickles away like water down a drain. How long has he been here already? How long
will he remain? Is anyone looking for him?
Does anyone outside this place even know he’s alive?
He shuts his eyes. Tries to pull the crash up in his mind. No matter how hard he tries,
all he can remember is smoke and fire; was he the only survivor? Did even the ship itself
survive?
It hits him that there may be no rescue coming. This may be his life, for as long as it
lasts, and the thought is terrifying.
Beside him, the door opens.
Halas pushes back against the wall, defensive or just hiding, and a man steps inside
with a tray. Halas doesn’t look at him. He keeps his eyes low, makes himself small- as if,
if he can go unnoticed, nothing will happen to him.
The door closes and the seconds stretch out.
“You, uh, you don’t look so good.”
Halas opens one eye, cautious, and looks up to see a familiar face. It’s the man who’d
come to change his IV, the younger one. He’s not wearing that long white coat, and he
looks different without it. Smaller.
He sets the tray down in front of Halas, on the floor. Halas looks at it. It’s plastic- the
kind that doesn’t break sharp, just bends. There’s a meal on the tray, but even as hungry

as he is none of it looks vaguely familiar. He eyes it with trepidation.
The man is looking at him expectantly, when Halas finally raises his eyes. Halas
looks back and doesn’t move.
“It’s just oatmeal and toast,” the man says, “it’s fine. They think it’s simple enough
that you can probably handle it. Unless you’re a carnivore. Are you a carnivore? I don’t
think you’ve got the teeth for it, but-”
Halas hunches further into himself. “What do you want?”
“…I’m just an intern, man. I don’t want anything.”
Halas doesn’t buy that for a second, but the oatmeal- if that’s what the beige goop on
the tray is- is steaming, and smells disturbingly enticing for something that looks so
unappealing. He’s not sure if he quite dares to take it, but his mouth is watering, and his
long tongue slips out to lick his lip.
When he glances up, the man’s staring at him in fascination. Self-conscious, Halas
picks up a plastic spoon between two fingers, scoops up some of the stuff, and puts it in
his mouth.
It’s bland. Starchy and unexciting and just as beige as it looks, and yet his hunger hits
him like a punch; he finds himself wolfing the stuff down until he feels warm and slow
and stuffed full. Even if he can’t remember much of the recent past clearly, he gets the
sense that he feels better has he has in a while.
While he was eating, the man’s crouched down in front of him to watch. Halas gives
him the side-eye, and he doesn’t seem to take any notice. Instead, he watches Halas,
intent. “What’s your name?”
Halas tells him.
“That’s not very alien.” The man sounds almost disappointed. “I was expecting lots
of consonants, you know?” He holds out his hand. “I’m not really supposed to be talking
to you, but… I’m David.”
Halas looks at David, then his hand. He doesn’t know what the man expects him to do
with it, and finally David puts it down. Halas turns the plastic spoon over and over in his
fingers. “Please, let me go. I don’t know what you want, I didn’t mean to come here-”
David rocks back on his heels. “I- uh, I’m not really the guy to ask for that. I’m not in
charge of anything, I’m just a lab monkey.” He seems to get from Halas’ blank look that
it doesn’t make any sense, and he amends it. “I mean I’m at the bottom of the pecking
order, here. Cleaning the cages, as it were, not lion taming.”
That makes even less sense, but Halas doesn’t want to pursue it. The part about cages
is clear enough. He tosses the spoon back onto the tray.
And suddenly, he gets it. He understands what David’s doing here, why he’s treating
Halas like something sentient when none of the others do- it’s just another form of
information gathering. And it was working, the more fool him- but the joke’s on David.
Halas doesn’t have anything worth knowing, and even if he did, he wouldn’t tell them.
“Just let me go,” he says miserably, “please.”
“They just want to know what makes you tick,” says David, “I’m sure that once
they’re satisfied, they’ll-”
“They know, they already know! They took a look themselves!” Halas tugs up the
edge of his shirt in sudden anger, baring the patchwork skin underneath in all its jagged
glory. Just as quickly he’s pulling his shirt back down, ashamed of his own skin as he’s
never been before. Even if he can change his color, scars are forever, splayed across his
body like fault lines.
“You were injured when you came in,” David says uneasily, like he knows full well
but doesn’t want to face up to it.
“Not half so bad as this.”
There’s silence, and then David picks up the empty tray, and goes. When the door
shuts behind him it’s with a final-sounding clunk that makes Halas feel more alone than
ever.
***
They start in on a different tack: they take him to another small room, and they sit
him down, and they ask him questions. When they don’t like his answers, they run a
current through his palms until they blister, until they bleed.
They don’t like his answers very often.
They still don’t speak to him like something that can think. They treat him like a

trained animal: smart enough to speak and smart enough to lie but still subhuman. A man
in a dark uniform comes to ask him things- who he’s working for, why he’s here, are
there more like him- and all he can say is I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.
They go back to physical testing. How fast he can run (not very), can he breathe
underwater (he can’t), how tolerant is he of high pressure? Of hard vacuum? Of
ultraviolet radiation?
They discover quite by accident that they can overload his chromatophores with
electrical stimulation, and he goes around with swollen black blotches under his skin for
a week. They don’t fade and no one takes care of them and finally he has to cut the skin
with his teeth and drain out the excess, like ink down the drain, before it starts causing
problems.
They keep him restrained for days afterwards. They think he was trying to hurt
himself, he realizes, and can’t summon up the energy to tell them any different. The
medication starts again, the sedatives, and it becomes very hard to care about anything at
all.
***
“I brought you breakfast,” says David.
Halas doesn’t answer. He barely turns his head toward the sound of David’s voice.
There doesn’t seem to be a point; to that, or to anything. He’s never getting out of here,
he’s come to realize. He’ll never walk free again, never be more than a lab animal. The
bunk he’s lying on is hard and uncomfortable, but he doesn’t care enough to shift.
“You should eat something, you’re getting thin.”
Halas shuts his eyes.
There’s the quiet clunk of the tray being set on the floor, and then David gets closer.
Halas can hear the unease in his voice. Maybe in another time, another place, he’d have
been able to use that. Not here. Not now. David gets close enough that Halas can feel the
heat off his skin. “You’re really not doing well,” the man mutters, and then Halas feels
the man’s hand, cool and soothing on his forehead.
That simple little thing, the act of being touched, cuts through all his defenses. It
pierces the haze of apathy like an arrow, so warm and so real like nothing has been for so
long, and before he realizes what’s happening there are tears gathering at the corners of
his eyes, threatening to run down his cheeks in fat ugly streaks. His teeth are clenched
tight, and he tries to turn away.
“Are you crying?” David says, so quiet and so gentle that it nearly breaks him.
Halas takes in a breath, shaky and uneven and hurting. “Stop it. Just stop.”
“What-?”
“Don’t do this to me!” Something inside him feels like it’s breaking. “You can keep
your kindness. You’re just the same as they are, taking me apart, I don’t want your pity.”
His throat feels tight, his face wet and twisting as all that hurt claws its way to the
surface at once. He pushes away from David and his shoulder hits the wall, a painful
blunt concrete bruise that he barely feels.
“You’ll never let me out. I’ll live and die here, trapped in a concrete box underground
until the rest of you forget about me and leave me to rot.”
He covers his face with his hands and hides there, just like that, until the emotion
ebbs away. That’s the worst part of what it’s like, now- he can’t hang onto anything.
Anger, fear, any of it- it just drains away into that uncaring abyss inside him, leaving him
feeling hollow and exhausted and somehow worse than before.
Halas sits slumped against the wall, his legs curled up against his chest. He wants to
go to sleep and never wake up. He just wants this to be over.
But David doesn’t leave.
Instead he stands there like he’s thinking, like he’s coming to a decision. Slowly,
slowly, David leans in. David’s hand finds his, down at his side where the camera can’t
see. Halas can just see the shadow of him on the bed, only close enough that it looks like
he’s trying to make sure that Halas hasn’t broken down completely.
“This isn’t right,” David says, so low it’s almost inaudible, so low that Halas can
barely hear it himself. So low that, if David’s ever asked, he could say he’d never said it
at all.
“Then help me,” Halas whispers back.
David doesn’t answer. He only gets up, takes the cover off the meal tray, and leaves.

But he squeezes Halas’ hand before he lets go.
***
The next time the door opens, it’s not David.
Instead it’s something he’s a little more familiar with: two of the men in black suits
that ferry him to and from the labs, or carry him, when he’s too far gone to walk. At the
beginning of this they’d been cautious around him. Now they treat him with as much
caution as a housepet. Halas drags himself to his feet. There’s no point in fighting with
them. He’ll end up doing what they want, one way or another. It’s easier not to waste the
energy.
He keeps his eyes on the floor as they lead him toward the labs. It reflects a dull offwhite,
stained from time and the passage of feet. He keeps his mind blank. There’s no
point in considering what might befall him today; what will come will come, and he’d
rather not dwell on it.
An alarm blares to life with a shriek. Halas nearly runs into the man in front of him as
the lights snap to dull orange-red backups. There’s a rumble that sounds like it comes
from far below. The floor vibrates, and the fluorescent fixtures above swing on their
tethers. Halas heart goes double-time. Was that an explosion or something else?
“What the hell,” one of the men in black says, and the other pulls a radio from his
belt.
“Charlie one, this is Lima three, what’s your status?”
The radio produces nothing but a slow static hiss. He swears and puts the radio back.
A man in a long white coat runs by faster than either of them can ask any questionstowards
the sound, whatever it was, and Halas takes one step back, and then another until
he’s pressed against the wall. The alarm wails loud and the floor vibrates again, low and
ominous.
One of the men says, “if we’ve got a containment breach, Dawson-” And the other
cuts him off.
“I know. Section seven, again.” He jabs his thumb in Halas’ direction. “Get him back
to his cell and meet me there.”
“It’s against procedure to-”
“Never mind, just do it.”
“I’ll take him!” Someone says, “don’t worry, I’ll take him, you go do your jobs, I’m
just a lab assistant anyway.” Halas knows that voice. He looks up, disbelieving. It’s
David. He’s got an expression that’s earnest and young and utterly guileless, and if Halas
didn’t know any better, he’d almost believe it.
“You should be evacuating.”
“Yeah,” says David, “but I know what happens if that thing gets all the way out, and
evacuating’s not gonna do a lot of good then. Just go, I can handle this one. He’s
harmless.”
One of the men looks at the other, and then they’re shoving Halas at David. They run
off down the corridor to another earth-shaking rumble, and Halas stares after them. When
he looks at David, David’s grinning.
Halas can feel the low vibration up through his feet and reverberating in his chest.
When it dies down, he looks to the end of the corridor and then back at David. “What did
you do?”
“Come on, now.” David’s fingers lace with his own. He’s still smiling, and it turns
out that David is devious. How about that? “Did you think you were the most dangerous
thing down here?”
Then they’re off and running. Or, David is, and Halas is keeping up as best he can.
The red-lit corridors all look the same, but David seems to know where he’s going and
they whip by in a blur. David throws a door open and hauls him inside; it’s lit in the same
reddish half-light as the rest of the place, but the alarm goes muffled when the door shuts.
There’s nobody in here with them. It smells of sweat and dampness, and Halas
realizes that they’re in a locker room. As he turns around he sees David wedging a mop
handle through the doorjamb to keep it from opening. And… There doesn’t seem to be
any way in or out of the room except for that.
“What are you doing?” Halas says cautiously, “getting stuck in here isn’t getting out.”
“Calm down, it’s fine. I’ve got it all figured out.” He gives the mop handle one last
shove, and, satisfied, he leaves it. “You need to wear something that’s not obviously

prisoner’s clothing, just in case, and we’re right around the corner from the motor pool.
We’ve got about,” he checks his watch, “ten minutes until they finish evacuating. We’ll
make our move then.”
“If they finish, then how are we getting out?” Strange how, even in his head, it’s
suddenly we and us. As if he trusts the other man. As if he thinks they’re going to pull
this off.
David holds up his hand, glittering metal looped around one finger. “They can’t take
all the cars if they don’t have all the keys.”
Halas sinks down onto a bench, mad laughter bubbling in his chest, and he tries to
suppress it. The idea of leaving this place is almost too big to grasp. How long has it been
since he’s seen the sun? Since he’s seen anything other than concrete and steel? He
doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to ask. Maybe it’s better not to know. To let the whole
stretch of time be one long, ugly fever-dream.
David is rifling through the open lockers, picking out and discarding clothes in a blur.
Finally he finds a pair of pants and a loose, long-sleeved shirt that’s to his satisfaction,
and tosses them at Halas. Halas manages to catch them, and David continues on in search
of shoes.
Halas gives the clothing an experimental sniff. It smells faintly sour, like someone
else’s sweat, and he pulls a face before shucking off what he’s already got. Beggars can’t
be choosers. His ill-fitting slipper-shoes come off, and then the shapeless sack of the
scrubs he’d been issued.
He tries not to look at himself too closely, but can’t help noticing the damage with
dismay; he’s ravaged, scar-lined and ugly. He takes a deep breath, and feels the
cartilaginous borders between bone-plates stretch, uncomfortable. One or two of them
feel wrong, loose under the skin. They’ll heal, he hopes, in time.
His skin is discolored around his scars. With a moment’s concentration he sees it
shade back to pink-brown- too dark at first, and then he gets it right.
It’s then that he realizes that David is staring at him. The man’s got a pair of
someone’s sneakers in his hand- once white, now grayish- and he sets them down on a
bench as he gets closer. “I’ve never actually seen you do that, before.”
Halas shrugs, self-conscious. To him it’s nothing special.
“They said you could change yourself, but I was never sure what that really meant.”
He’s close enough to touch Halas, now. “Do it again.”
There’s no reason not to. Halas holds out his hand, and the space between wrist and
fingertip ripples blue, then gold. His chromatophores prickle under the skin like an itch
while they settle. David looks on in fascination and grabs his hand, running his thumbs
across vibrant skin and the point where it meets pink-beige.
David’s fingers are soft, uncallused. They’re the hands of a man who spends his days
typing and brewing coffee, and pale from his lack of sun. Up close, Halas can see all the
little variations in David’s skin, freckles and patches of light and dark, the blue-purple of
veins under the skin, a barely-there paper-cut on the heel of his hand.
“Why are you doing this for me?” Halas asks.
David doesn’t quite meet his eyes. Instead he keeps them low, on Halas’ hand, “I told
you. What they were doing to you- it’s not right. Whether you’re human or not, I couldn’t
just let them cut you up until there was nothing left. I should have done it sooner, that’s
the thing. Right at the beginning, I should have…” His mouth twists in an odd half-smile,
half-grimace. “Guess I blew this internship to hell.”
And then he goes up on his toes, and presses his lips to Halas’.
Halas freezes up in confusion. Just as soon as he’d done it, David pulls away. “Sorry.
That was, uh. Shouldn’t have done that. Ignore me! I’ll just-” he lets go of Halas and
scoops up the sneakers. “Shoes! You still need shoes. See if these fit. I’ll just, uh. Be over
there.”
But Halas catches his arm before he can retreat. “What was that?”
“That was me being a dumb idiot, is what it was. Never mind-”
That doesn’t help clarify anything. “No,” says Halas, and his free hand goes to his
mouth. He can still feel the imprint of David’s mouth, hot and dry, and doesn’t know
what it means, only that the idea of it sends a warm prickle down his spine. Maybe it’s
just that no one has really looked at him in so long, no one has touched him. “I mean,
what did you just do to me?”

“You don’t…?” David goes flustered and uncomfortable, his hand in his hair. “You
don’t kiss. Okay, yeah, that was probably extra weird, then. It’s just. I, uh.” He looks up
at Halas, and then away again. “That was just, I- I don’t know, okay?” His face is going
ruddy pink to the tips of his ears. “Heat of the moment, and I fucked it up like I’m
fucking up everything, lately.”
“I didn’t… Mind it.”
David, if it’s possible, goes pinker. “Oh god, just forget I did that,” he continues on,
but he’s muttering more to himself than to Halas, barely audible. “Can you not see one
attractive man without turning into a raging moron, he wouldn’t even want-”
“You find me attractive?” Halas cuts in, and he can hardly believe that to be true. He
knows what he looks like better than most, and scars or no, he’s not even the same
species as David. What the other man sees in him he doesn’t know, but he supposes that
David himself isn’t unattractive. There’s an alien tilt to his jaw, an exotic strangeness to
the way he’s put together- maybe David sees him the same way?
“That’s not why I helped you- I mean, I’m not expecting anything because I…” He
makes a low frustrated sound and looks away. “And now I’m just making myself look
worse. Look, just forget it-”
He doesn’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just loneliness, or maybe it’s something more.
Maybe it’s just clutching at the first spark of something good that’s happened to him in
god knows how long. Halas leans down and cuts David off mid-sentence with his mouth,
and David goes still.
The feel of it is strange, alien but enjoyable and somehow right. David’s lips part, and
for a moment their tongues touch; Halas can feel the wet heat of David’s mouth, and he
tastes of himself and, faintly, of mint.
David’s eyes flutter shut. He groans into the kiss and Halas can feel the vibration
against his own lips. It’s powerful, electric. He doesn’t know if it’s just the adrenaline
rush of escape, of being close, for the first time in a long, long time, to seeing the sky, or
only the proximity of another warm body, but Halas finds he doesn’t much care.
What he’s doing, this kiss, may be alien, but he throws himself into it with
enthusiasm. His long split tongue coils out to trace the edges of David’s white teeth, to
duel with the other man’s tongue. When David tugs at Halas’ bottom lip the shiver of lust
that goes through him nearly staggers him. He finds himself groaning, his body molded
against David like a second skin. His skin prickles hot.
This close up, he can feel the way that David’s body differs from his own. It’s harder
in some places, softer in others. There’s no give to the bony places, but his exposed belly
seems so vulnerable. He wonders distractedly how humans have managed to survive for
so long with such an obvious weak spot. Halas’ hand settles on the soft skin there and
David shivers.
David’s hands are on him, then, and Halas has to restrain himself from flinching as
the soft pads of his fingertips run along the long edge of a scar, as they skirt around an
incision that hasn’t quite healed. But he’s careful, so careful that it almost breaks his
heart- like he half-thinks that Halas will shatter into a million pieces under his touch,
spun glass.
Halas concentrates, and then color is rippling out of the places that David touches,
like paint. David makes a startled sound. Halas laughs- the first thing he’s found to laugh
at in so long, and he looks at David’s face to see the fascination in his eyes as he draws a
finger down Halas’ chest trailing blue, red, vibrant orange. It takes fierce concentration to
make it follow only David’s touch and nothing else. David’s thumb brushes a still-tender
scar and Halas winces; the color bleeds a little like dye in water, and David snatches his
hand back.
“Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to.”
The pain is fleeting- or, at least, it’s something he’s gotten used to, and it fades. “Not
your fault.”
David pushes back, a little. “Of course it’s my fault. I should have- god, I should have
gotten you out of here earlier, but I was too pathetic to do it.”
“But you did do it.”
David looks at him, a question in his eyes.
“It’s more than I got from anyone else.” Halas’ hand comes up to cup David’s cheek,
and for a moment David shuts his eyes. With his body pressed up against David’s he can

feel the other man’s heart beating, rabbit-fast, and when he shifts his leg a little, a
hardness between the other man’s thighs that hadn’t been there before.
Halas shifts again, experimental, and David hisses through his teeth. It’s a shaky
sound, a needy sound, and it bolsters his confidence when David pushes back. It’s not
quite what he’s used to but it’s similar enough, and the little sounds that escape David
are, if nothing else, encouraging.
All Halas is wearing are the underclothes he’d been provided with alongside his
cheap thin scrubs, and even through them he can feel the radiating heat of David’s body.
He can feel himself reacting to that warmth, to the sounds David is making; it’s like a
flush of heat inside him, almost startling in its intensity.
No one has touched him with a kind hand in so long. He’s hyper-aware of David’s
hands so careful where they’re wrapped around his back, of the friction between them, of
the way David grinds into his touch when he shifts his thigh that little fraction higher.
David’s breath comes in a little gasp; his eyes open half-lidded and wanting, and for a
second he catches his lower lip between his teeth. Halas’ eyes are drawn to it as if the
white flash of his teeth are magnetic, and he leans forward before David can speak and
drags his long tongue up the column of David’s throat.
He can taste salt-sweat, and underneath it, a pheromone tang that Halas doubts David
knows he’s making. Nevertheless it’s heady, and Halas finds himself ferreting it out from
the places where it lurks- the underside of his jaw, the cartilage curve of the backside of
an ear, his lip, kissed swollen- and lapping it up on a rasping tongue like suede.
It feels like waking up from a dream, like surfacing after a long, long time
underwater. For the first time in ages he feels alive, and the ache in his bones, instead of a
constant enemy, is just a reminder that he hasn’t yet given up. Halas makes a low hungry
purr against the underside of David’s jaw and David squirms against him.
He can feel his own cock hardening, and when David’s hand comes down between
them to press against the thin layer of fabric separating them, his breath stutters in his
throat.
“Let me,” says David, and he drops to his knees. Halas braces himself against a
locker, and when David mouths at him through his underwear, his knees nearly give out.
The noise he makes is strangled, undignified, and David looks up at him through long
eyelashes. He smiles as he drags that wet tongue across fabric and then down the inside
of Halas’ thigh.
Halas’ chromatophores bleed color in the wake of that tongue, like ink dropped in
water, uncontrollable. David follows where they bloom in shifting patterns like strange
tattoos. His hands are braced on Halas’ thighs, and Halas gives up on keeping his feet and
leans back against the lockers instead. The alarms outside are still going- muffled in here,
but loud out there- and as little sense as it makes he bites down on the back of his hand,
trying to muffle his own sounds so they won’t be overheard.
David catches Halas’ waistband in his teeth and tugs down, one smooth motion.
Halas shivers as his cock’s exposed to the air, and David pauses. “Oh,” he says, “that’s…
Different.”
Halas looks down. David’s kneeling in front of him, his mouth so close to the end of
Halas’ cock that Halas can feel the hot brush of his breath. He brings up one fingertip to
run the length of it, base to tip, and Halas groans as the chubby, tapered curve of his cock
tries to wrap itself around David’s hand.
“Oh my god,” David says, startled, “that’s- holy shit.”
The self-consciousness returns. “That’s not what you-?”
“Not what I was expecting,” says David, but it doesn’t seem to be putting him off.
Instead he licks his lips, and tries running his tongue down the side. Halas groans, and his
cock squirms in David’s grip. “Are you, uh, can you control that?”
Halas is doing his very best not to fall apart. “Not- not really,” he pants, and he
scrabbles for more support against the lockers, palms flat on metal. His cock is a long,
gradually narrowing curve of muscle, sinuous as a snake. It hardly has any
chromatophores at all, and it’s a ruddy dark red with his blood under the skin.
He can feel the hot press of David’s hand around it, the slick wet slide of David’s
tongue, and bites down on the back of his hand again. David mouths experimentally
down the sides of his cock, wraps his fingers around the length of it and strokes. Halas’
knees finally give out and he slides down onto the floor, wobbly and panting and

suddenly at David’s eye-level.
David blinks at him. “Are you all right?”
“Fine. I’m fine.” And he is, really- it’s just that he’s not strong right now, but he
doesn’t care. He wants this, and the intensity with which he wants it is almost frightening.
His cock rests against his belly, neglected, and he reaches out to touch David.
He can feel the hardness through the layer of David’s pants, and as he undoes the
zipper he can hear David’s breathing quicken. Halas slides his hand down inside and
David groans. What Halas feels is hot and rigid, and when he eases David’s cock out of
his pants he looks at it in bemusement. He sees what David meant by different; David’s
cock is thick, and rigid, and as wide at the head as it is at the base. The tip is leaking thick
clear fluid, and when Halas drags his thumb through it, David whines and bites his lip.
It feels different, in his hand. Solid, and alien, and oddly appealing for all that. He
wraps his hand around the shaft and gives it a solid pump. David bucks against him,
breath hitching. “God, yes.”
He moves closer, and Halas kisses and licks his way down David’s throat; he rests his
head against David’s shoulder and looks down at the purple-red head of David’s cock in
his fist, and they’re close enough that it’s a simple thing to cant his hips and grind their
cocks together. Halas’ cock coils around the length of David’s, and David makes a
strangled, hungry sound that makes Halas want to sink his teeth into David’s smooth pink
shoulder.
They rock just like that for a minute, all short little thrusts and friction, groans and
gasps muffled in each others’ skin. Halas’ hands roam all over David’s body. He’s
fascinated by the soft places, the unprotected places, his belly and the hollow of his
collarbone and the gap where his ribs come together. His skin goes white and then pink if
he digs his nails in. Not chromatophores, just unconscious color, and it stays. He writes
his name down the back of David’s ribcage and David bucks against him.
“H- hang on a minute,” David says, and there’s a raw edge to his voice, “I want to,
just,” he pushes himself up and away, out of Halas’ grip, and when his cock loses that
delicious friction he moans in frustration. David stumbles to his feet, his cock bobbing
between his thighs hard and leaking. He goes to one of the lockers and digs through it
one-handed. He comes up with a little plastic bottle and brings it back.
When David unscrews the top and dips a finger inside, it comes back coated in
something thick and clear, jellylike. He smears it across Halas’ cock and Halas hisses,
first at the cold and then at the slick, frictionless slide of David’s hand. He makes a
choked sound, feels every nerve in his body light up electric. But almost as soon as he
does it, David’s hand goes away.
“No,” says Halas, “keep doing that, don’t stop.”
“I’ve got something better planned.” David fights his way out of his unzipped pants
and underwear, leaving him in nothing but his shirt. He bends awkwardly and puts his
slicked-up hand between his legs- farther back, behind his cock, behind his balls, and
Halas feels heat spread through him as he watches the other man slip a lubed-up finger
inside himself, one knuckle at a time. “I want- I want you to fuck me.”
The idea of it nearly takes Halas’ breath away. “Yes,” he says, and he can imagine his
cock inside David’s body, curling and twisting in David’s most sensitive places. He
watches as David’s fingers slip deeper inside himself as he stretches himself open.
David’s head falls back, and Halas can see the long gorgeous stretch of his neck, the
way his back arches, and can hear the little sounds David makes as he fucks himself
open. His skin’s flushed, his eyes nearly shut; his lips are pink, and his tongue darts out to
wet one. Halas groans at the sight.
David’s fingers slide out of him with a wet pop. He crawls forward on his knees to
close the short distance between them. Halas can feel the heat coming off his skin, can
almost see his neediness. David tilts his hips up, and finds Halas’ cock one-handed; Halas
gasps at the sudden touch but then David’s steering it into himself, and it’s a struggle to
stay still- if he thrusts up into David as hard as he wants to he thinks he might hurt the
other man, and it’s so, so difficult not to.
David eases himself down the squirming tentacle of a shaft, inch by inch, and the
tight wet heat of it is maddening. Halas whines low in his throat and his nails dig hard
crescents in David’s thighs. When David is finally fully seated, he gives a shuddering
groan, and Halas can feel David all around him as his cock undulates inside.

“God,” David groans, and Halas can feel the tremble in his thighs. Then he moves,
sudden and glorious, Halas’ slicked-up cock sliding out a few inches and back in. Halas
thrusts up into David for all he’s worth. David feels amazing around him. His hands find
David’s hips and he drags them closer together. David’s cock is trapped between them as
Halas drags him into a kiss, biting at his lower lip as David moans. They’re like a furnace
together, the two of them, the heart of a star.
Halas makes a broken sound against David’s mouth, and he can feel every twitch of
muscle and every hitching breath David takes. The other man’s ass is so hot and tight
around him, and the sheer presence of him- not just that, but the smell of his hair, the heat
of him, the friction-drag of skin on skin and the feel of his hands wrapped tight around
Halas- is overwhelming. It’s been so long since anyone has touched him with kindness
and this is almost too much.
David writhes against him. Halas can feel the hard shape of David’s cock trapped
between their bodies. When he wraps a hand around it the sound David makes can only
be described as a sob; he bites Halas’ lips like an endearment.
David comes fast and sudden, come striping Halas’ hand and belly as his back arches
like a bow. He’s babbling, incoherent, and wraps himself around Halas like he might die
if he doesn’t. Halas can feel every twitch of muscle, every involuntary convulsive
contraction of the muscles of David’s tight asshole around his cock. David just clings and
keens and Halas fucks up into him, sharp fast desperate thrusts as his cock coils and
uncoils inside that delicious tight space. He can feel the heat building inside him like a
miniature sun.
David scrabbles at his back, and when Halas comes it’s a train-wreck, a supernova,
like he’ll shake apart as he comes deep inside David and holds so close. David hisses as
one of Halas’ fingernails pushes too hard and punctures a little crescent in his hip,
welling ruby red. Halas barely notices. Everything is glittering, everything is gold, and
everything is perfect.
He comes back to himself panting and shaking and sweaty, body aching and a little
dizzy. There’s come smeared on his belly and on the hem of David’s shirt, going tacky.
There’s a little bit of David’s blood smeared on his second finger- can’t be more than a
couple of drops- and he licks it away absentmindedly. It tastes of metal and salt. David
makes a face at him, for that. “Just don’t develop a taste for it.”
When David gets up, Halas is treated to the sight of his cock sliding out of that
stretched pink pucker, and then David is standing on wobbly legs. A drop of come makes
its slow way down the inside of his thigh and Halas watches it, transfixed. David
stumbles bowlegged over to the dingy little shower cubicles in the back to rinse himself
clean, and after a moment, Halas levers himself upright to do the same.
They throw their clothes on afterwards- or, David does, and Halas takes whatever
seems like it will fit- and as David checks his watch, Halas feels like he’s looking at the
other man with new eyes. There’s an emotion burning in his chest that he can’t name;
underneath his clothes, he’s peppered with handprint-marks in a rainbow of tones, and
has absolutely no desire to wipe them away.
The alarm is still going outside, a muffled whine that will ratchet up to piercing when
the door opens. David flexes his fingers and pulls his sleeve down over his watch. “I
think- yes, if they’re going, they’ll be gone by now. We’ll have to make a dash. It’s not
far, a hundred feet of hallway and then hang a right, then a left. You got that?”
Halas nods. He can feel the nervous energy building up in him, but he’s not afraid.
“Good.” David takes the car keys out of his pocket, loops the key-ring around one
finger and fists his hand around the metal. He knocks the mop handle wedging the door
shut free. It clatters to the floor, and then he yanks the door open, and they’re running.
The alarm is earsplitting in full force. Halas resists the urge to cover his ears and just
runs behind David, head ducked low as the corridor blurs by. He can feel his body
protesting but doesn’t care. He’ll push himself until his legs give out, if that’s what it
takes.
They screech around a turn, and blessing of blessings the connecting hall is deserted.
Faintly, as if from far, far below, he hears something that’s either a low rumble or an
even lower growl. Neither is a good sign.
The motor pool stinks of gritty tracked-in dirt and old, spilled fuel. The place looks
picked over- nearly everything that can go is already gone, and what’s left is either in a

state of advanced disrepair or questionable- except for one black van, and it’s that one
that David makes a beeline for. He unlocks the doors and they clamber inside. Another
growl comes from below, louder and longer and angrier, and David starts the car.
Halas looks back, but there’s nothing behind him “What did you let out?”
“Nothing they can’t put back. It breaks out every so often anyway, so there are
procedures.” David fiddles with the controls. “Don’t feel too bad for it, it’s not sentient.
I’m not even sure if it’s technically alive.”
They leave the garage behind them in a plume of exhaust. No one’s manning the
guard booth, and no one stops them as the van bursts out into sunlight and asphalt. Past
the buildings and past the barbed-wire perimeter is an endless desert, and Halas’ eyes
water at the brilliance. He squeezes his eyes shut and blinks hard until he can look at it
without flinching.
A helicopter buzzes low overhead, but it’s not for them; his nervousness is
transforming into elation, into joy with an edge of madness. He’s out. He can see the sky.
He’d thought that he’d die never having seen that deep, deep blue again.
“I’ve got a place,” David says suddenly, “up in Montana. My granddad left it to me
when he died. It’s just a little summer cottage and it doesn’t have internet or anything but
at least it’s got plumbing. Have you ever been to Montana?” He pauses. “Of course you
haven’t. Never mind. The point is, it’s a good place to go if you don’t want to get found,
and right now, I’m pretty sure being caught’s the worst-case scenario.”
He keeps talking, about where they’re going and what it was like when he was young,
the fields and the cold streams and the long yellow grass in fall. Outside the car, the
desert slides by like brilliant glistening waves. Halas doesn’t listen to the words so much
as he listens to the sound of David’s voice. The rise and the fall, the way he punctuates by
hitting the rim of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. He thinks that even if he
never finds a way home, even if he lives out his entire life on this one planet, he can live
like this.
###
About the author:
Charlotte Mistry is a romance and erotica author who can’t get enough (take that as
you will). When writing, she’s never without a keyboard to hand, a cup of tea by her side,
and dirty thoughts in her head.
Blog: http://charlottemistry.blogspot.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/CharlotteMistry
Discover other titles by Charlotte Mistry at
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/charlottemistry
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Concubine of a Space Conqueror!
Kastya Orvana is an alien conqueror determined to grind the Earth under his bootheel,
but when he captures an earthling, he finds himself in over his head. He may be able to
make the human kneel, but his prisoner seems to be enjoying it a little too much!
Warning: This 4100 word erotic short story contains aliens, explicit gay sex, xenophilia,
pulse rifles, prehensile appendages, and more!
Trapped on Earth
Tanis is a pilot, but not a human one. When he and his partner crash just outside a
small town, it's a race against time to stay ahead of the FBI. But when his partner gets
hurt, Tanis has to figure out how to take care of him- and how to deal with the feelings
developing between them. Warning: this 14000 word story contains explicit gay sex,
frottage, scars, xenophilia, hurt/comfort, and aliens.
Dark Descendants
Edwin Blackwood has just come into his inheritance: a lonely manor by the sea, grey
and desolate. But he won't be alone. He's been given a butler he can barely keep his eyesor
hands- off of, and deep beneath the manor something lurks. Something old and
dangerous, made of tentacles and teeth, and it only wants to welcome Edwin home...
Warning: this 8800 word erotic short story contains tentacle sex, eldritch monsters,
double penetration, blowjobs, mindfuckery, restraints and more. May be too hot to
handle!
Sea-Born Slave
Too scarred to be a pleasure slave, Connor expects to be sold to the mines. When he's

purchased by a rich man he thinks it's a reprieve. It's anything but. The man has another
slave, something exotic and dangerous and half-human, and Connor has to make it
behave... Or else. Can he tame the creature, or is there a way out- for both of them?
Warning: this 17400 word story contains explicit gay sex, xenophilia, breath play,
whipping, slavery, mermen, and violence.
The Lord’s Pet Wolf
When wolf shifter Erik collapses in the snow by the side of the road, he expects to die
there. But when he's rescued by Lord Martel, it's a second chance, and a strange one.
Martel wants him for an obedient pet. Is this just a chance to stay out of the cold, or will
Erik find happiness- and a master? Warning: this 10600 word story contains pet play,
wolf shifters, toys, and explicit gay sex.
Cult Sacrifice
When Lucien is lured into a man's home with the promise of food, he thinks he'll be
paying with his body. Little does he know that the man is one of the last worshipers of a
dark god. Lucien is the latest offering, and it doesn't want his life- it wants much, much
more. Warning: this 6600 word erotic short story contains corruption, mind control,
tentacles, violence, eldritch creatures and more!
Pregnant with Alien Eggs
When Layla's alien boyfriend goes into an unexpected breeding cycle, the last thing
she expects is to wind up pregnant with eggs! Now she can't stop eating, and her belly is
growing by the day. Can their relationship survive, or will things get way too scrambled?
Warning: this 4400 word erotic story contains pregnancy, aliens, explicit sex, egg laying,
sex in the shower, and more!
The Soldier and the Wolf
When soldier John Wood is invalided out, he doesn't have much to live for- but when he
finds a stray dog during a rainstorm, he can't help but take it in. Unbeknownst to him, this
dog has a secret: he's actually a wolf shifter, and he's determined to show John just how
grateful he is! Warning: this 8100 word short story contains wolf shifters, hurt/comfort,
69ing and explicit oral and anal sex!
Wolf Wedding
When Thorvald is signed into an arranged marriage to seal a treaty, he doesn't expect
it to be to a prince. Now, he has to navigate politics, and a nobility that's not fond of his
wolf nature. As things heat up, can Thorvald survive until the wedding day- and seduce
his handsome prince? Warning: this 10000 word story contains explicit gay sex, knotting,
wolf shifters, and more!