Page 15 of Claimed By her Alien Prince

"Those gargoyles you saw?" Homer explained. "They are here to findyou! They will kill anybody who stands in their way or who isn't you, until the Daemons have their seven maidens."

"Daemons? Do you mean demons?" Judith tried to clarify.

"No, Daemons. That is the name of the alien's race," Homer explained in a slightly softer tone.

"So there are more of us then?" I said, putting the lipstick I had been applying down.

"Yes and no," Homer said vaguely. "At any given time, there are about a hundred of you on Earth—"

"Then let the aliens take one of them," Sara screeched.

"They won't find them," Homer said slowly and patiently. "They are all securely tucked away in underground bunkers."

"Why us?" Andrea wanted to know. "I mean, if there are a hundred of us, why are we the lucky ones?" She pointed at each of us.

"Because the seven of you are the purest," Homer said.

Phoebe rolled her eyes. "Yay us."

"I'm still not going. You will have to tie and gag me," Sara insisted.

"We can't do that. You have to go willingly." Homer still sounded patient.

"Fine, get somebody else." Sara threw her hairbrush against a stone wall where it shattered. The sound was loud, reminding me of a gunshot, and I flinched.

"If you refuse, we will have to take your sister," Homer threatened.

At that, Sara stilled. "Rachel? Over my dead body."

Homer arched an eyebrow at her. Sara glared back. "Rachel won't go with you either. She and my parents are already in the underground bunker and—"

"Your parents and sister were intercepted and brought somewhere else. Your sister will be kept safe, but your parents will have to face the Daemons attacking Earth because they broke the rules." Homer sounded so matter-of-fact, that Sara broke. She visibly shrunk in her chair as a single tear rolled down her face.

"Now, would you like to join your parents out there," Homer relentlessly continued, pointing outside the temple, "and have Rachel take your spot, or will you willingly play the role you were born and bred for?"

"What about Sergio?" Sara's voice was a bare echo of how she had sounded before.

"Sergio will receive his punishment as well. As your match, he should have never been in contact with you until you turned twenty-five, the official age out."

"Match?" I asked numbly.

"The man we were supposed to bang and produce kids with, before we would be allowed to live our lives," Sara said sharply.

"Is that what our parents did?" Phoebe asked.

"Yes," Homer said. "You would have been introduced and given time to get to know each other, to choose if you wanted to spend the rest of your life with your match or only enough time to produce two children."

"This is so fucked up." Azubah shook her head and I agreed with her.

"So Ben…" I trailed off.

"Was chosen to be your match, yes," Homer confirmed. "He is a very high profile architect, like your father, but he was also trained as a soldier, like everybody else, like you."

"What if I don't want to bang mymatch?" Dina piped up. "Would we have been given a choice in that matter? Or would our matches have raped us until we popped out the required babies?"

Homer sighed deeply. "Not in this day and age."

His words created another shudder running down my spine. He wasn't denying that it had happened in the past, only that it wouldn't have happened to us.

---