Page 2 of Married to the Alien Rogue

A patch of purple flashed in the orange underbrush to my left, and I slid to a halt. A tiny touch of something whispered across my mind.

“Here.” I pulled out the packet I’d tucked into the waistband at my lower back. Crouching, I opened it and placed it on the ground next to the fern.

It was quiet behind me—I’d lost the kids for a bit.

My little friend must have thought so, too.

A purple head topped with triangular ears and two little horns poked out of the orange underbrush, nose wiggling as the alien cat sniffed at the pile of meat. It came out into the open, larger than the one house cat I’d seen back on Earth. Long purple hair covered its body, and there was something sharp on the end of its tail, but it was still recognizably a cat.

“Eat before they get here.”

It turned big purple eyes on me for a second, giving me the impression that it knew what I’d said. Then it gobbled up the meat with the desperation of something starving, its head jerking with the motion as it swallowed chunks whole.

My heart pinched. The cat’s purple fur was gorgeous—and completely wrong for the colors on this planet. It stood out like a sore thumb against the orange and green and gold.

“You’re not from here either, are you?” I whispered. I felt pretty sure it had been the lizards’ pet, too, but had run away. I’d woken my first night in my small room to find it eating the remains of my dinner. It had bolted out a small window high on the wall, but had returned time and again. Fortunately, the lizards always gave me too much food, so now I shared and brought it out into the jungle so it wouldn’t need to enter the house and get caught again. Nobody—not even a cat—deserved to be locked in that room.

Brush rustled behind me, and the cat’s head shot up to peer into the jungle. It grabbed the last large chunk of meat off the plastic wrap, gave me one last look, and darted into the orange ferns. A whisper touched my mind again, a feeling of gratitude.

I crumpled the plastic wrapping into a ball and tucked it back into my pants a second before the kids found me.

Torrential downpours kept us locked inside the next few days. It seemed this alien planet didn’t do normal rain—it did “the sky splits open and dumps an ocean on your head.” The power of it was amazing! I fell asleep each night listening to the rumble of rain on the tile roof and worrying about the purple cat.

The days were endless boredom. I’d been allowed into the family rooms of the house when I first got here. I’d stumbled across an office, and my curiosity got the better of me. I’d searched the desk, looking for information on where I was, who these people were. My touch activated a computer screen, and even though all of the writing was strings of undecipherable symbols, I recognized the machine pictured.

The kids’ mother found me, her diamond-pupiled eyes cold and hard as she yelled, her throat pouch inflating like a yellow balloon. The lizards did that when they were angry, but I’d never seen her upset before.

“You don’t understand,” I said, tapping excitedly at the screen. “I know what this is! It’s a mining bore. I’m a mining engineer. I can help you! I can be so much more than a pet.”

She understood that I was intelligent and trying to communicate—I could see it in her eyes. She yelled again, and the first lizard I’d ever seen—the one who took me from the gray aliens—stormed into the room.

He grabbed my arm in a flash of pain.

“Oww! Watch it, asshole!”

He dragged me straight back to this cell and tossed me inside so hard I fell, my knees thumping into the floor in twin bursts of pain. The door slammed shut behind me, the lock clicking home.

I hadn’t been let back into the house since.

So it was a relief when the storm finally broke, and Prurg and Prarr came to get me. They pulled me up the winding staircase of the house’s tallest tower.

The top floor was like a gazebo, with wide, glassless windows looking out in all directions. The beige adobe mansion sat in the middle of an open clearing, surrounded by an eight-foot high adobe wall. Behind the house, a couple of shuttles rested on the ground, but the front “yard” held a huge sand pit the lizards liked to wrestle in. The jungle pressed close all around the walls.

Wind brushed my face, damp with lingering humidity, carrying the rich smell of plants laced with cinnamon. Bars of sunlight broke through the clouds, highlighting the rounded tops of the trees with bright patches of lime green.

Prarr tugged on my hand, making me turn.

I spun around and gasped.

Rainbows painted the open yellow sky, double and triple ones spanning the width of the horizon.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

The kids let me look until asshole guard yelled at them from inside the house. Then they took me back to my small room for the night.

I woke the next morning to the brightness of sunshine pouring in through the small window. The soft straw under me crinkled as I stretched. I had to endure the indignity of squatting over a hole in the back corner. At least they kept the room clean, and one corner had a little fountain with constant running water. I could wash and drink whenever I wanted.

I snorted. The lizards took good care of their pets.

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