Chosen Read online

  Xaiser reached for him, grabbed his arm to steady him at the edge of the bed. He never took his black gaze off Halen and slowly a smile curved the perfection of his lips. Senses reeling from renewed contact with alien flesh, Halen found himself caught again in that sultry black glare. The gaze raked through him, searching for something, utterly demanding in its need to have what it wanted.

  “Halen,” Xaiser whispered, finally, a sardonic smile curving the perfection of his lips. The smile was so charming, so beautiful and genuinely amused, Halen thought his heart might melt in the dazzling beauty of the expression. Beneath it, just beneath, there was such wickedness—an iniquitous will that was as seductive as it was certainly stronger than his own.

  Static shock raced up Halen’s arm. He uttered a little screech of indignation and snatched away, tumbling off the side of the bed and hitting the cold metal floor, hard.

  “Stop fucking touching me!” he practically snarled from the floor. He wouldn’t have yelled but he couldn’t think and the cry had been torn from him in sheer desperation.

  “Okay,” Xaiser said, and the mirth in his tone was maddening. What was even more maddening was the lackadaisical attitude inherent in the creature’s short reply.

  It brought a riot of harsh, hurt words to Halen’s tongue. He bit them back. Things were much better from the floor, Halen thought. For one, he no longer had to look at the creature, to both desire and fear the sensation of his touch, to become lost again in those incredible eyes. He just laid there, the metal floor beneath him warming to his body temperature, the collar clasped tightly around his throat issuing a series of attention-seeking beeps. Secondly, the floor made what had happened to him in the odd swinging contraption of a bed seem somehow less real—even surreal. If he laid down here long enough he could likely convince himself that it had never happened…that there had not come for him in the middle of that ravishment, a point of divine surrender where he had never wanted anything more in his life…couldn’t he?

  His body ached—not from the short fall—but from where Xaiser had touched him. There was a mark, bruised and blue, on his left shoulder blade. The imprint of Xaiser’s teeth against his flesh, seared there like a mark of possession far more personal than the collar around his throat. He touched the wound and it burned beneath the gentle pressure of his fingers, setting off a ripple of pleasurable vibrations that caused his dick to go rock hard. He fought not to cry out with the sudden influx of unrelenting desire and his mind sought any distraction.

  Unfortunately for him—save for Xaiser himself whom he staunchly refused to look at or acknowledge in any way—there was no distraction about that was good enough to compete with the mad pleasure coursing through his cock in riotous waves. He spied the tray, sitting on four short legs only inches from him. Even though his stomach growled demandingly with the promise of the food, so close, so easily attainable that he had denied himself for so long, he couldn’t quite make himself reach for it. He couldn’t manage to draw his hand away from the aching wound on his shoulder long enough. With each new pressure of his treacherous fingers a new wave of random titillation assaulted him, with that pleasure came the soreness of the wound, stirring just beneath, adding enough agony to hold him transfixed with the bizarre form of masturbation.

  His free hand sought the hard length of his cock and the fact that he was rather horrified to be doing it stopped nothing. His palm slid over the tip of his cock, just as it erupted in a slight wash of pre-cum. He wanted to scream. What the fuck is happening? he wondered as his hips arched in order to fit his cock into his fist.

  Contact tore the breath from him and a panicked cry issued from between his clenched teeth.

  He watched as cerulean feet hit the floor on the opposite side of the bed, the muscles in tapered calves and hard thighs stretching enticingly with that minimal exertion. There was a terrible scar on Xaiser’s left thigh, just above the knee. Several inches long and jagged it looked to have been seared shut. Just looking at it, Halen imagined the thing was singing to him a song of agony. Such a wound could not have been gained in any other way but in a battle where the prize was either life or death.

  A wave of sympathy for such pain rose in him, battled lust, and confused him completely. Why should he care anything of the alien’s suffering? It had kidnapped him, had its way with him, brought him into this strange new way of being that was little more than sensation after sensation, teetering on the brink between absolute pleasure and absolute pain…

  He stroked his cock and thought about it, his nails teasing the veins and lending wave upon wave of shuddering delight to that already gifted him by his helpless massaging of the strange bite mark in his shoulder. His hips moved to meet the shaky rhythm attained by both of his hands. His mind became a gray place, whitewashed in need. It occurred to him to be humiliated by his actions, and even as he watched his flesh managed a rose tint all over, as beads of sweat ran across it with the fury of his concentration.

  Xaiser padded along the edge of the bed, taking his leisurely time in doing so. Halen refused to look at him—to look anywhere above the blue thing’s thighs actually, even when Xaiser was standing right before him. Mortification suffused him underneath the hot weight of the alien’s uninterrupted regard.

  “You are mine,” Xaiser said, matter-of-factly. “You are going to have to learn to do as you’re told.”

  “I am not yours.”

  “No?”

  “No!”

  “Humph,” Xaiser said with annoying confidence, “liar.”

  Halen pulled at his cock. It was like rock in his hands, hard enough to burst. As much as he wanted to stop the repetitive action, he found that he couldn’t any more than he could stop touching the bruise that inspired it. Humiliation took a back seat to the pure need to cum and be done with it.

  Xaiser crouched before him, balancing on the balls of his feet in a comfortable manner that would have been impossible for a human to hold for long. Halen got a bird’s eye view of those twin royal blue cocks, and the muscled stomach above them.

  “Look at me,” Xaiser demanded.

  Halen was too lost in the stroking of his own hands not to obey. Looking at the alien didn’t help matters any when it came to his need for gratification. As a matter of fact, it only made it worse—made the need stronger, more demanding.

  “The manner in which you have spoken to me in the last few minutes is unacceptable, Halen,” Xaiser said, in a fashion that Halen took to stand for reasonableness. “The use of your ugly foreign curse words is unacceptable. Raising your voice to me is unacceptable. The collar won’t allow you to finish this way. Surely you’ve noticed that by now.”

  Halen’s body went into spasmodic, agonizing, proof of the truth of Xaiser’s words. His whole body arched with the demanding power of the orgasm that swept through him. It lit a fire in his cells with its savagery. He stopped breathing, stopped thinking in that instant, his whole soul centered in the release. The pain of its denial sent him sprawling to the floor in a tense ball of utter desperation. The need within him did not abate with the denial of his body to comply with the combined will of his mind and hands…it blossomed into something painful, something near maddening. He clenched his teeth against the cruelty of it and glared at Xaiser, who was just crouching there contemplating his sublime misery.

  The collar barked again. “My Lord, we have arrived at the energy planet. It seems that Gozar-9 is in the midst of a small civil war. The Ambassador for the Zyrnosi crystal miners wants to speak to you personally before allowing us to set down in their zone and refuel.”

  Xaiser growled. It was not a nice sound, but irritated and interrupted. He reached out for Halen and Halen flinched although Xaiser’s hands did not fall on his flesh, but the mark of bondage around his throat instead.

  The assault of near crippling desire in Halen spiraled to bearable levels with the touch. It did not go away however, but instead became something that he could deal with and rationalize his way through
. So great was his relief that he wanted to thank Xaiser for ending the torture. His thoughts were scattered, but most of them centered on never disobeying again.

  He felt Xaiser’s fingers on the flesh of his throat, the touch and his body’s helpless, impassioned reaction to it, achingly gentle compared to what he had just suffered.

  “I suppose my impatience makes me unkind,” Xaiser said, his voice soft and seductive as any snake charmer’s. “I am not used to being thwarted, little human, and I am even less used to rejection. You have been chosen. By me. It is an honor.”

  The sheer arrogance in his words would have been funny had Halen not been utterly caught up in how stunningly beautiful Xaiser was—how aesthetically perfect—like a thing sculpted rather than born. Xaiser could say these things that would seem so ridiculous from the lips of another being because they were true.

  And then Xaiser’s head was by his own, his lips rushing hotly against his ear.

  “I can read your thoughts, you know,” he reminded him in dark amusement.

  The collar growled again, and Xaiser uttered a curse that apparently was so foul that it had no human translation. He stood, crossed the room grabbing up clothes and armor. He did not spare Halen another glance, all business all of a sudden. He paused as the door slid back for him to leave the chamber. “Eat,” he said without bothering to turn around. And then he was gone.

  Shuddering, the after effects of desire still on him, Halen moved toward the covered tray. He pushed it toward the window-wall, where the earth had disappeared from his startled eyes. Beyond the glass, he saw moons and spinning stars, worlds turning in the inky velvet space of utter blackness. He pulled the cover off the tray and did as he had been told.

  * * * *

  He had not quite finished eating the little cubes of meat floating in pale blue broth when the door slid open behind him and someone came into the room.

  “I am Ogema-Aziel. I have come to see the creature that Prince Xaiser would have me train to become cannon fodder for the K’Amazi Raiders.”

  Halen turned to face this new alien, and watched as the alien drew a single finger to his lips in what had to be the universal gesture for silence. It removed a small device from its trousers and pushed a button so that a blinking tangerine light winked on and off upon it.

  Halen noted that he was roughly the same height as Xaiser, but there was less finely honed muscle to him. His skin was a shade less blue, his features less keen and perfect.

  Ogema-Aziel stared, his inky gaze raking over Halen’s naked flesh. “I must say, from those of you that we took, you certainly are the pick of the litter.”

  Halen couldn’t bring himself to blush under the heat of Ogema-Aziel’s stare, though he did wish that he had some clothes. “There are other humans on this ship?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” Ogema-Aziel answered. “Three thousand others.”

  It was bad news that others had been taken, but he was grateful that he wasn’t completely alone. “And they were all taken for the same purpose as I?”

  “Yes. I am here to evaluate you for training. Our prince’s word is law usually, but should I find you lacking, I will be forced to take this matter up with his sire. It makes no sense to waste good war training on little more than pleasure toys.

  Halen bristled. “I am not a toy,” he said.

  “No?” The alien stepped closer to him, the metal on his armor jangling as he came. “Are you aware that Xaiser could have and should have killed you in mating with you? That rarely do alien lovers survive the experience and that he was well aware of that fact when he took you?”

  The pain that assaulted Halen upon hearing these words was not physical, but far worse and a thousand times more confusing to him than any physical pain. He shoved the broth away from him as hunger dissipated along with the tentative need to do as he’d been bidden. The pain grew, and suddenly he was thinking about earth and home—his tiny neat little apartment, his boring cubicle at work. He thought about the brilliant golden glow of the sun and longed for it fiercely. And the pain grew. He didn’t even try to understand it beyond the simple recognition of its existence. He was hurt and nothing that Xaiser had done to him physically rivaled this. He didn’t need to understand it…It just was…like he was on an alien ship, bound for an alien planet, love toy to an alien prince.

  “I can help you, human,” Ogema-Aziel said. “The High Council is wrong in this. The problems of the Sylvian Cluster are not the problems of earth. To take you humans from your lives and institute you into an alien existence is a desperate miscalculation. War has taken many of our people…and now we take yours.”

  Halen was studying the lack of pattern on the smooth metal floor at the alien’s feet. “I want to go home,” he said softly.

  “They justify their actions by studying you before the abduction. They took only humans with no visible attachments. It’s not like you won’t be missed, but King Coor wanted your removal as painless as possible for your people…should you die in blackest space, no one need cry. But even a carefully plotted out wrong—is still a wrong, is it not, human? I must be the voice, mind and hand of reason for my people. I can see that now.”

  Ogema-Aziel crouched before him, leaning in on the balls of his feet in much the same fashion that Xaiser had. The touch came only a second later, a gentle brush across his jawbone.

  The pleasure was instantaneous—a low blossoming flower of want that settled in the pit of his stomach. It was not the wild, flowering pleasure-pain that Xaiser commanded on a whim, and he found himself disappointed in the mediocrity of the sensations flooding through him. His gaze locked on the alien’s dark regard, but no pictures stirred in that familiar liquid blackness beyond that of his own startled, half aroused reflection.

  “Would you like me to take you home, human?”

  “What about the others?” Halen asked as a rough blue thumb worked the line of his jaw.

  “You can not expect me to free three thousand people. But I can help you. Should all go well with the prince’s negotiations with the miners, the runner ships will be refueled first. All we need do is take one.”

  Halen felt like a cat in the sun under the alien’s tender ministrations. The gentle pleasure of his touch, though lacking in passion, was almost hypnotic. It calmed his nerves, allowed him to see through, sadness, disappointment and fear and look totally at rage…at Xaiser. He would have killed me, he thought. And at the same time, he thought that the manner of death wouldn’t have been so bad. The weakness within himself, the desire for the prince, once recognized, only served to enrage him further.

  “But why would you help me above any of the others?” he asked.

  The alien’s eyes darkened if that was possible. “Because Xaiser must learn that he must be more careful in choosing with whom he will play. The weight of The Three Planets will soon rest even more heavily on his shoulders because his father is not much longer for the Worlds. Should the Great War Prince lose his toy, others will not be so quick to play with them. Your people will be returned to their planet and their lives. That is what you want, is it not, human?”

  Drunk on pleasure and mad as hell were an odd combination of sensations and Halen found himself saying yes before he knew it. The word coming out of him in a rush, born of feelings of betrayal that the pleasure coursing through him could not quite take away. He felt the tiny blinking box being pressed into his hand. Felt the jolt of quick ecstatic warmth of Ogema-Aziel’s lips on his for but an instant before the alien was standing up again.

  “Hide the disruptor well,” Ogema-Aziel said, before striding across the room. As the door opened for him, he said, “It won’t keep him out of your head, but it will keep our little secret hidden long enough for us to make our escape. Be warned, human, if he finds it, he will kill you. Wait for my signal.”

  Halen looked around the barren chamber. Hide it where? he thought and almost laughed. In the end, he shoved it beneath the odd circular pillows on the bed and went back to loo
king at the stars.

  * * * *

  When Xaiser entered the chamber and the human pretended to sleep and did not stir, he knew that he was being ignored and was amused by that fact. The fact that the human chose to feign sleep on the floor when there was a perfectly good bed did not amuse him, however. True enough, there was a limit to the luxuries available in a holding cell usually reserved for prisoners of war, but still…this action was as ridiculous and annoying as the human’s refusal to eat and the fact that he thought that he would rather die than exist in servitude. Servitude indeed, Xaiser thought, unable to keep the scowl from his face, I have made him a prince. All the human had to do was look to see the truth. Their race was capable. If he so chose, Xaiser could look into Halen as if he were made of glass…

  He shrugged off the heavy battle armor and boots and stood there waiting for some form of acknowledgment. He got silence in return for his attempt at patience. He crossed the small expanse of the chamber, his irritation growing with every step. He spied the more than half empty bowl. It pleased him that he had been obeyed.

  Halen had his back to him, one of his hands and all of his face pressed against the glass of the window as if he thought he could somehow meld through it. The gold reflections of his eyes were wide, and Xaiser thought there might be tears in them, which was even more irritating. Warriors did not cry.

  He pressed his toes against the small of Halen’s back and got the little gasp of pleasure soaked reaction that he wanted. Finally, he had the little human’s attention.

  Enough was enough…

  He crossed the room and touched the place that would expose the shower. The wall slid back, the tiny space revealed, the winking lights pulsing on the walls in multicolored rhythm much like a heartbeat. With a thought he turned the diamond blue water on and gave it warmth. Still the human did not stir. Fine.