Page 4 of Bela's Bounty
CHAPTERTHREE
Bela
It’s not a dream.
That horrible realization comes to me with my forehead pressed against the top of one of my knees. The headache I woke up with isn’t letting up. In fact, it’s worsening, and now my skin is hot and dry, and I’m starting to feel nauseated from the constant throbbing.
The other women don’t seem to be in the same kind of pain I’m in, which has my stomach clenching with worry. What if they—whoevertheyare—really did fuck up whatever they did to me? I don’t know much about anatomy, but I can imagine it wouldn’t be hard to do some real damage by drilling into the side of someone’s head.
Danielle thinks we’ve been given some kind of language translators. Since none of the other aliens we’re caged with have been very chatty, we haven’t been able to test her theory.
Another wave of nausea hits me, followed by a sharp flare of pain that forces me to squeeze my eyes shut and to breathe through it. This one is particularly bad. So bad, in fact, I swear I can feel the ground tilting under me. It isn’t until I hear the other girls crying out that I realize it’s not my head tilting, but the ship.
“Y’all, I think we just landed,” Sasha announces.
The other aliens begin clamoring in their cages, and at first I’m so focused on the racket they are making, I don’t notice the other women have gone still and silent.
That’s when the most god awful noise fills the cavernous room, a sound that has me covering my ears. Then my eyes peel wide when I catch sight of the two frightening aliens making their way toward us.
“Oh. My.Gawd,” one of the women breathes. “Am I really seeing this?”
My jaw drops, and I can’t look away from the insect-looking aliens. They look like grasshoppers, or maybe those creepy praying mantises. Only they are a mottled mixture of brown and red. Their bodies are long and thin, with no distinguishing gender under the strange shiny sheath-gowns they are wearing.
“Hurry,” one of them growls. It’s strange the way the word seems to twist itself from the guttural sound it makes into something understandable. Maybe Danielle is right about translators. “The auction has already begun, and they will not wait.”
“I thought they wanted this merchandise?” the other alien grumbles.
“The Auction House waits for no one,” the first whines. “But you would think they would make an exception in this case.”
Danielle and I look at each other. Our expressions mirror our worry.
“Is this for real?” I whisper to her.
Apparently it is, because while we’re staring, the aliens move to the cage with Sasha and Skylar. The bars vanish, and with surprising speed, one of the aliens grabs hold of the younger girl.
I watch in horror as it wraps its three long fingers around her throat and applies just enough pressure to make her mouth gape open and her cheeks turn pink as she gasps for air.
“You will behave, or I will kill this one,” the alien warns as Skylar begins to thrash and choke.
“Okay. Alright.” Sasha holds her hands out, beseeching the monster. “Please, just don’t hurt her. We’ll do what you want.”
“The fuck we will!” one of the women—Shae, I think—snarls from the cage behind ours.
“Shut up! What’s wrong with you?” the other woman, Nita, hisses.
When I turn back to Sasha, she’s standing on shaking legs while the other alien snaps something around her neck. A second later, she lets out an ear-splitting shriek and drops to her knees with her fingers clutching at her throat.
“This is what will happen if you misbehave,” the alien growls at us, and whatever he did to Sasha stops abruptly. She falls to her hands and knees, but before she has a chance to catch her breath, he’s pulling her to her feet by her arm. “Understood?”
We all nod silently, and one by one, we allow them to collar us, too terrified to fight back and receive the same treatment Sasha got. The younger girl is sobbing and trying to cover her nudity. Sasha is visibly shaking, while the rest of us are lined up single file and marched out of the ship between the two aliens.
“There are six of us and only two of them,” Shae mutters behind me. “We should try to overpower them.”
“By all means, go ahead and try. See how far you get once they zap you,” Sasha grumbles under her breath.
“Quiet!” one of the aliens growls. “Or you will all be punished.”
Everyone shuts up.
