Page 18 of Claimed By her Alien Prince

I didn't know if this person, alien, whoever he was, was a figure of my imagination or real, but considering everything, and even giving Ben the benefit of the doubt that he wasn't a creepy creep, I would do what Homer expected me to do.

I had no one who would mourn me, for shit's sake. My own parents were holed up somewhere, waiting for me to sacrifice myself so they could crawl back out of their hidey hole and live their lives again.Until I remembered the EMP the aliens had unleashed and thought snidely,Yeah good luck with that.Without power this place is going down the drain. That wasn't the point though, my parents had enough resources to live comfortably and safely, power or not.

I took a deep breath, realized I was digressing. So I had nobody who would mourn me, but there were thousands, millions of people out there who did have people who cared about them and whom they cared about.

Did I want to return to my life? An alternate version of my life where I started my first day on the job this morning? Absolutely. But I also realized that this would never happen, and with the devastation that took place today, I highly doubted I would ever work that job. The future I had envisioned for myself was gone.

Besides that, I didn't have a life. Not really.

I knew the other six girls I was to join as well as anybody else, maybe more, so I figured, what the hell?

"This is my fate," I told Ben, not dramatically, not the way the words sounded, but I meant them.

He looked resigned and nodded. "As you wish. Truthfully, I didn't expect anything less of you."

His words gave me pause for a moment. Maybe I had been unfair, and he truly had fallen in love with me. From a distance. Was that possible?

For just a moment, I looked at him and allowed my mind to go down another path, a path where none of this had happened, where Ihadstarted my new job, and where Ben and I met. Where I wasn't frigid any longer and wanted him like he obviously wanted me.

I rose to my tiptoes and kissed his lips. "Goodbye Ben Von Wutenhaus."

With a sad smile, he took my hand and kissed it. "Goodbye, Lilith Vanderkamp."

Wewerenotbeamedup like in some old TV series. Instead, an egg-shaped transporter landed on the same uneven, sandy landing strip as the Gulfstream that brought me here, did earlier.

Except, the egg-shaped spaceship didn't need the runway; it came down like a helicopter, creating no wind whatsoever, hovering about four feet off the ground. A ramp extended, and the seven of us, holding hands and with shaking legs, climbed to board the alien ship.

The ship's interior lights flickered ominously, as if a fire raged inside. Depictions of gargoyles and demons decorated the doorway, creating the illusion of us walking into the mouth of hell instead of boarding a high-tech spaceship.

The flickering lights turned out to be some kind of rays that, at my best guess, sanitized us as we boarded. No licking flames awaited us, no demons from hell either.

Instead the seven men and seven women (what was it with the number seven?), who awaited us, appeared model perfect. Human looking even, once you saw past their red eyes and pointed ears. Still, when one of the men gave Azubah a lascivious smile, exposing his teeth, we nearly bolted at the sight of elongated, sharp-looking fangs.

"Vampires," Dina hissed.

"Welcome maidens. We have waited a long time to meet you," a woman greeted us in a pleasing, warm voice, which made me feel as if I had bitten into something bitter. I recognized the language as the same as the man in my dreams had used, Sumerian.

None of us responded as we were led to our seats lining the far wall. Holding hands, we sat. Azubah clasped my right hand tightly and Andrea my left.

"We will soon be aboard theAsphodel, where you will meet your mates."

Asphodel? Mates?

Asphodelus was a Greek plant, connected to the dead in Greek legend, planted on graves if I remembered correctly. Also, according to Homer—the old Greek Homer not the one we had just left at a Mayan temple—it was associated with the afterlife and said to cover the great meadow known as Asphodel Meadows or Asphodel Fields, a section of the Greek underworld where ordinary souls were sent to live after death. It was part of the three divisions of the Greek underworld, the other two were Elysium and Tartarus, the places where souls were granted eternal pleasure as a reward or eternal punishment, respectively.

At the mention of mates, both Azubah and Andrea jerked, and I imagined I did as well. The good news was, we weren't about to have our hearts carved out, the bad news:mates?

First my heart dropped when the door through which we entered closed, and then my stomach as the ship lifted straight off the ground. The seven men and women stood in the middle, hanging on with one hand to an extended looped cord, but none of them as much as wavered. Their stance would have made them look like statues, if it hadn't been for their animated chatter with each other. Even though I recognized words also spoken in Sumerian, they were talking too fast for me to understand. Only fractions reached my ears. Words likeexcited, fun, mating, princes, betting, and killing.

After the last word, I tuned them out. My heart was already thumping hard enough; it didn't need any further encouragement.

Instead, I chose to turn my neck as far as it would go, to look out the narrow, tinted window that ran the length of the wall behind us.

As the ship lifted higher, the temple and narrow landing strip soon became invisible, lost in the thick foliage of the surrounding rain forest. And still we moved up higher.

So high, that I soon made out the continents. I noticed the entire continents of the Americas were completely darkened before we flew over an ocean, also hidden in shadows. At some point I thought I saw some flashing lights as if from a ship, but we moved too fast for me to doublecheck, and I wondered if it had been a figment of my imagination.

Soon I realized we were returning to New York. A very dark New York, but even shrouded in blackness, I recognized the Statue of Liberty as we descended. And if that hadn't clued me in, the giant, round spaceship that looked more like a small moon, hovering high in the air above the city would have.

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