Still, I couldn’t help remembering her fear when she had thought I was buying her to gratify my sexual appetites. The terror in her big, brown eyes had truly bothered me. I had no intention of using her as a Sex Pet, though there were, regrettably, others from my planet who would have no compunction about doing that exact thing.
In fact, my main rival, the Overlord of the Southern Continent, was rumored to make much of his income from the Sex Pet trade, which I found wholly disgusting and wrong. I wouldneveruse a creature that was mentally inferior to me for sexual gratification.
No, I comforted myself. My new little pet was quite safe from any kind of molestation. And it didn’t matter that she had a lovely, curvy body with full breasts and hips and long silky fur on her head, and those big brown eyes—I would never allow myself to see her as more than a pet.
At that point, I realized that I was going nowhere. The control band couldn’t work unless I gave it my complete attention. Instead of steering the ship, I had been focused on the little female locked away in my sleeping chamber.
Frowning, I pushed all thoughts of my new pet out of my mind and focused on uncoupling from the Commercians’ ship and navigating a course to the nearest spaceport. Later I would read the pamphlet I had been given about my new pet’s care and feeding and start her training. She would also probably need a bath, to get the Earth bacteria off of her smooth skin. But first, I had to refuel my ship—the fuel cells were running quite low after traveling all the way from my own galaxy to this primitive one.
Concentrating hard—it was surprisingly difficult to push aside the thoughts of my new pet—I finally got my ship on its way. I had a long way to go and much to do before I could return to my own galaxy and my home planet of Korrigon Four, where I was the Overlord of the Northern Continent.
I just hoped that the research I was doing here would save this galaxy from the predatory plans of my rival, the Overlord of the Southern Continent.
FIVE
ELLI
When the gray giant left me alone in his bedroom, locked in the coffin-like “crate,” I felt at first like my heart might burst from fear and claustrophobia. But I knew that getting hysterical wasn’t going to help me get out of this situation—which was definitely the weirdest and scariest fix I had ever been in, in my entire life.
“Breathe,” I told myself out loud in a shaky voice. “Justbreathe.”
I had done some meditation classes at my local YMCA—they actually helped me a lot when I was dealing with Aunt Maizy’s bullshit. So I closed my eyes, pushed everything out of my mind, and just concentrated on my breathing for a little bit.
When I opened my eyes, I no longer feltquiteso close to having a panic attack, and I was able to assess the situation calmly. Well, as calmly as anyone who’s just been abducted to serve as an alien’s petcanbe, anyway.
First things first, I looked at the door to my crate. (By the way, I still couldn’t believe he had crated me like a naughty puppy who had piddled on the carpet!) The sides of the crate were made of some rigid material that wasn’t plastic but also wasn’t glass or metal. Was it some kind of alien material? Possibly but I didn’t have time to worry about that now.
There were some air slits in the sides and back of the crate, but none was big enough for me to crawl out of. A skinnier girl might have managed it, but I was just too curvy. It occurred to me that maybe this was one reason why my captor had chosen me—because I was too big to escape the crate.
But no—the look in those full-black eyes of his when he had said he liked my “lines” had been unmistakable. He had promised not to use me as a “Sex Pet” but I wasn’t going to trust him about that—I had to get out of here before he showed his true colors!
The floor of the crate was padded with a strange, spongy substance that gave under my feet when I stepped on it. I frowned—was this some kind of absorbent lining? A piddle pad, like you’d put down for a puppy who wasn’t housebroken yet?
It was infuriating, but I thought that was probably the truth. I hoped the gray giant didn’t plan to leave me in here until I wet myself—I had no wish to test the absorbency of the alien piddle pad. Which meant I needed to escape, because I already had to go. Being in a stressful situation always makes me have to pee and this wasinsanelystressful, as I’ve mentioned before.
Since the back, sides, and floors of the crate held no options for escape, I began examining the front of the structure I was in. It had a lattice of metal bars, woven into a crisscross pattern which at least allowed me to see out.
Looking through this lattice, I could see the latch to one side of the door. It was difficult to see in the weird, blue glow, but after a moment, I realized it wasn’t that different from the latch on a pet carrier back on Earth—the kind where you pinch the two halves together, compressing the internal spring to free the metal pins from their holes, and then the gate swings open.
I was kind of an expert on pet carriers after working for Aunt Maizy for so long, so I figured it should be no problem to get this one open. I reached both hands through the bars—the metal squares that made up the lattice were about a foot square, which made this possible—and began fiddling with the latch.
It was, indeed, the kind of latch I was used to but what I hadn’t counted on was howstrongI would have to be in order to work it. The springs inside it weren’t light and also, it was built on a much larger scale than the pet carriers I usually worked with, which were made for small dogs. In the end, I had to use both hands to push the two metal bars together and it took every bit of my strength to unlatch the cage and push the metal gate open.
I was panting and sweating by the time the gate finally swung open and my arm muscles felt like limp spaghetti noodles—but at least I was free. Well, free to explore the bedroom, at least.
Everything looked strange and huge in the blue, underwater glow. It reminded me of the restrooms they have in some of the convenience stores in and around Atlanta that have blue overhead lights. The reason behind the blue glow is that it’s supposed to keep drug addicts, who go into the bathroom to shoot up, from being able to find their veins. But in this case, I was pretty sure the glow was just what my alien captor liked. Who knew what spectrums of light those strange, full-black eyes could see?
All the furniture in the room was built on a much bigger scale than I was used to. At 5’4, I’ve never been the tallest one in the room, but the enormous furnishings made me feel like I had somehow shrunk back down to the size I’d been when I was ten or twelve. Like Alice after eating the mushroom, everything was simply toobig.
The bed was massive—a thick pallet raised far off the ground on some kind of platform whose legs seemed to be made of the same alien material as my crate. I had to stand on my tiptoes to see the top of the mattress, which was covered in a kind of duvet that was made of thick, silky, silver material that gleamed softly in the blue glow. The mattress itself was so big, it reminded me more of a silver sea than a bed.
I flipped the silver duvet up to look under the bed and was met with a vast, black space that gave me the shivers. The dim blue glow didn’t give enough light for me to see what was under there and I decided I’d rather not find out.
But this time I was nearly bursting with the need to pee. I’d had to go even before the doggy wedding, which now seemed like about a hundred years ago, though it was probably barely an hour. I wondered if Great Aunt Maizy had found Princess Prissy and her soiled wedding dress in the bathtub yet and if she was wondering where I had gone to. Would she think I’d had enough and had decided to abandon her precious Pomeranian and hit the road? No matter what she thought, she would never guess what had actually happened. Nobody would.
That led me down the road of worrying about what my mom and sister would think. Mom would want to call the police right away but Taylor would say to wait because maybe I was just “cooling off” after that ridiculous doggy wedding. Of course, it didn’t matter when they called, nobody on Earth would be able to find me.
The thought made me sad and scared but I did my best not to give in to it. This was a bad situation but I wasgoingto get out of it.