Page 5 of Abalim

For now, the main thing to do was to prevent those assholes from locating those isolated missing women. He had to do everything in his power to keep them from becoming the extensive experiments the Krystalii planned on making them.

Especially before their Krystalii leader discovered a whole planet of them.

Lisa Ivy was no dummy. She knew darned good and well the alien in front of her was full of shit.

Aja, the alien liaison for the human women on theStarChanceheading to an alien exchange program, shouldn’t be here at her quarters this early.

Especially dressed like some kind of freak show at a steampunk convention.

Lisa swallowed a nervous sigh. She should know, since she’d done some serious research into the steampunk-romance genre when she’d contemplated creating a new series. As a successful science-fiction-romance author, she totally got off on researching various tropes of paranormal romance and would’ve killed to come up with the outfit Aja currently wore. Instead of her normal uniform of a one-piece, cream-colored suit, the liaison had on a bizarre outfit that would be right at home in any comic-book movie. The best part was the formfitting costume shimmered whenever she moved. Over her chest was a silver plate decorated with swirls that matched those on her wristbands.

On her feet were a pair of black leather boots that reached over her knees. The steel over the toes bore the same pattern as her chest plate. A shimmering cape flowed dramatically behind her to the top of her butt. Its slight silver sheen brought out the glittering colors of her suit and accessories. The strangest thing she had on was something that looked like the tip of a spear poking up between her shoulder blades. What in the hell was she going to do with that? In all the training about the Exchange over the last thirty days, Aja never hinted it might be dangerous.

But it was the sinister leer (damn, seeing the actual expression in person was sure different from what her imagination came up with when she wrote a scene with the creepy villain) that crossed the beautiful alien’s face. Lisa took a step back.

Aja’s dual-colored eyes with their light shade of clear green around the iris with an outer dark shade of yellow carried the unmistakable marks of a life steeped in self-righteous corruption. The colors had a sickly khaki hue, as if reflecting the sulfurous depths of hell itself. They were cold, devoid of empathy or compassion.

Aja’s full lips curled as if permanently pulled upward.

The sight had the haunting power of nightmares. Lisa frowned. No doubt the woman was there for nefarious purposes (heh, nefarious. Another word she’d never dreamed of using in real life). And talk about an Oscar-worthy performance. Who’d have guessed Aja was anything but the helpful hostess she portrayed this past month to Lisa and the other women under her care?

“Aja?” Lisa crossed her arms. “I didn’t know you personally were going to take me to the Exchange.” She glanced behind the woman. Not that she expected any of her fellow “classmates” to be with her. Her brows furrowed. So what wasreallygoing on? Obviously nothing good. “Wow, what an honor.” When in doubt, sarcasm to the rescue.

Aja’s eyes narrowed. The leer deepened, creating deep brackets at the side of her mouth. “Oh, I’m personally going to escort you, all right.”

Quicker than Lisa could react, the Zerin female jumped in front of her and squeezed something sharp into her neck.

“Owe, you beeeccch…” Lisa’s words slurred as she tried to slap her neck. No such luck. Then something hard and cold clicked around her neck. Every motor skill her body possessed packed its bags and left town. Any second now, she’d turn into a puddle of floppy, useless, noodle-like nothingness, as if her inner heroine hung up her battle gear for a career in blobbery.

“Follow me, you stupid human.” Aja turned and strolled down the empty corridor.

Yep, no arguing her stupid status. Only a stupid human would get caught like this. To pile on the stupidity, she’d made sure no one on Earth would miss her. She let the Zerins erase everything about her, like she never existed. Which was easy enough, since she had no family or close friends back on Earth. And being a self-employed author who released all of her books under various pen names, it was easy for the aliens to make her disappear.

Lisa’s traitorous feet followed the alien without missing a step in the eerily silent hallway. Well, at least she had some decent clothes on. She’d gotten up way earlier than she needed to, beyond excited to meet over a hundred hunky alien men in order to find her one true love. She’d barely slept, her mind and body racing throughout the night. When she finally gave up trying to sleep, she ran into the refresher unit and got ready for the exciting event in record time.

At least she wasn’t getting kidnapped by aliens half-naked, like she’d made some of her fictional heroines endure. Hah! Take that, fate.

Too bad it wasn’t a gorgeous, muscular man, er, male taking her away. Anything but this snarky bitch leading her to who knows where. She meekly followed Aja down the corridor, which was empty. Great, no one was around to witness anything.

Aja hurried to a dim part of the ship that didn’t look like it’d been used in years.

The Zerin opened the airlock and pushed her inside, and a gust of stale air rushed out, making Lisa’s throat burn. Once Aja closed the portal behind them, the creepy silence was heavy.

Dust particles danced in the low, flickering light, showcasing the walls that once must’ve gleamed with a futuristic sheen but lost their luster long ago. The empty room was some kind of cargo bay, the massive emptiness broken only by one thing—a small one-man spacecraft with an honest-to-God alien typically called a “Gray” standing next to it.

Chilling little shit was around three feet tall with an oversized head in comparison to its body. Its gray skin didn’t boast anything remarkable for its skinny, non-clothed form. Long arms with spindly fingers and elongated almond-shaped eyes with a black background and tiny white dots where their pupils might be. A couple of horizontal slits for a nose and a minuscule slit underneath that had to be its mouth.

All in all, a disgusting creature who smelled like burned fish.

“Hurry up, take this one.” Aja shoved Lisa at the diminutive creature. “I’ve got to get the rest.”

Without a word, the thing grabbed her arm and wrapped its long, reed-thin fingers around her upper arm.

Lisa shuddered at the feel of its slimy, cool flesh. Still unable to move voluntarily or speak, much less protest, she let it pull her to the small craft. The sound of Aja’s fading footsteps hardly registered when the only thing to see was where the creature forced her to go—a one-seater ship that looked like a Lockheed F-104 without wings.

On the side, a small coffin-shaped pod slid out without a sound. She didn’t need her writing chops to recognize it as some kind of stasis pod.

She tried to pull away. To scream. To run. To do anything but let the smarmy little bastard shove her into the scary blackness. She swore the damn place shrank the minute her back hit the inside of the hard surface. A bubbling, thick gel started at her feet and wiggled its way up as the lid to the steel coffin closed with a silent seal.

---