Pheromone, page 7
part #1 of For the Love of Aliens Series
When I stand back up, I realize there’s a massive computer screen on my right, and it’s got a blinking pink cursor with a prompt.
“Hello? I hear a new voice. Perhaps you can read one of the six million languages that I currently understand. I have attempted to assess your language based on the sounds you’ve made; please tell me if I’ve guessed correctly? You are English.”
Um.
The computer is mostly right—I’m American, but I do speak English. Also, what the fuck?
I decide to ignore that for now. The ship is obviously non-functional. Maybe it’s like, ChatGPT on steroids and solar power or something? Bet this planet would be ripe for solar panel sales. Outside of the woods, it’s unbearably hot.
Dragon Dude is stalking down the length of the ship on all fours. He disappears into a nook off to the left, and I follow after. When I get to the doorway, I look in and see that only half the room remains. There’s a structure that looks a bit like a bathtub, but behind it, the wall is gone. Instead, curtains of vines create a living canopy of green.
The dragon crouches by the bathtub, curled over the end of it in an almost comical sort of way. He massively overshadows the tub, lowering his head down and lapping at the water with that long tongue. My own mouth waters, and I decide that I can’t resist. If this water isn’t good to drink, what will be?
I stumble over and drop down to my knees, using my hands to scoop water into my mouth. As soon as it hits my tongue, I swear that I can feel my cells dancing happily, expanding and plumping with each sip.
“Fuck me, that’s good,” I murmur, and the next thing I know, I’m on my back and Dragon Dude is pinning my arms to the floor. He snarls at me, and I feel the strange press of something hot against my torn and battered lace panties. Um. My body reacts wildly to the feeling, but I really, really don’t think he would fit. Not even close. “Wait, wait, wait.”
He takes the headset with his wing-hand and puts it on again, tilting his head at me as if to say repeat yourself, human.
“Wait. Don’t.” I’m well-aware of the translator’s limitations, so I keep it simple.
“Fuck,” he growls in English, still staring at me like I’m insane. “Mates?”
Fuck. Mates.
…
Oh!
“Right, okay. Listen up, Big D. I think we have a certain misunderstanding here.” I wait for that to register on the headset, but either he doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say or he doesn’t believe me. I’m leaning toward the latter. The words he was saying before—too little!—now make a whole lot of sense. “Fuck doesn’t always mean to mate; sometimes it just means … that the situation is bad.”
The translator gurgles in his ear, and then he places it back on my head.
“Not … too … little … later.” He draws back from me, releasing my arms, and returns to his crouched position at the end of the bathtub, lapping up the water while I sit propped on my elbows, trying to understand what’s going on here. So, Dragon Dude speaks enough English to think that I’ve been demanding that he fuck me?
Wow. Okay then.
Yesterday, when I thought he was going to eat me, did screaming ‘fuck’ actually save my life?
“Wait until I tell my mother that cursing saved me on an alien planet,” I joke, but he ignores me. One purple eye watches me as I approach the bathtub and drink as much as I can stomach. I have never in my life been as thirsty as I am now. The water is relatively cool, and it looks perfectly clear. I wonder where it comes from?
I’m finished long before Dragon Dude, sitting back on my haunches to watch him.
A large beetle with way too many legs falls into the bathtub when the wind blows, knocking it off one of the hanging vines and into the water. Within seconds, it’s dead. I stare at it as it begins to float, and then Big D leans in and eats it.
I almost vomit.
He notices my reaction as I turn away, and he growls at me again.
“Picky … starving.” He grumbles what might actually be a laugh and stands up on all fours, leaving what I really do believe is a bathroom. My gaze catches on something too amazing to be real, and I creep forward, digging through vines until I find a porcelain wonder waiting for me.
It’s a toilet.
It’s literally a toilet.
Tears fill my eyes and I wrap my arms around it.
“Oh thank God, I’m saved!” I quickly lift the lid and peek inside, finding myself staring down at a straight drop to the forest floor. So … more like a pit toilet. Not surprising. Doesn’t mean I can’t use it. My eyes dart around for a suitable leaf, but how will I know if I’ve just picked up the alien equivalent of poison oak? Or worse.
“If only it had a bidet,” I murmur as I browse the vines hanging over the side of the ship in a thick blanket. I select the softest leaf and tear it off, carrying it into the main portion of the ship where I find Dragon Dude licking the nearly non-existent wound in his side.
He healed it.
He healed the giant hole made by the laser. I’m not surprised, but I am impressed. His saliva saved the day more than once, didn’t it? So the guy has two cocks and magic spit? Totally OP. I bet he tells horrible jokes. Or maybe he’s a two-pump chump? Four-pump chump if you factor in the double shafts. I grin.
Yeah. There must be something horribly wrong with this guy’s personality that I’m just not keying into due to lack of proper translation. I should probably be grateful we can’t carry on a real conversation.
“Hey.” I shake the leaf in his direction. “Is this safe for my skin?” I rub it along my arm to see if he reacts. He just keeps staring at me, hunched over with his wings lifted and curled partially around him, like a gargoyle or something. His spike mane looks like hair when he’s sitting this way, and it’s a very pretty, glossy sort of black to match his scales. Purple designs pulse faintly on the underside of his body and along the arm-like portions of his wings. “Do you want to take the headset so you can understand me?” I point at the glowing pink nightmare, but still, nothing from the guy.
With a sigh, I head back into the bathroom area, wondering how a very human-looking bathroom ended up on this planet. As far as I know, we haven’t discovered any planets with intelligent life that are reachable by modern space travel. Maybe the world governments have banded together to hide the existence of this place from us plebs?
Seems more complicated than that though. There’s a full-blown marketplace with at least five different species, not including humans. I’m no expert, but it appears that there are several civilizations with access to advanced space travel. Doesn’t seem like they give a shit about human governments if they’re trapping us like stray cats and then selling us off for a few measly coins beneath some shitty, hand-drawn sign.
I exhale past the sudden spike of fear, taking my moment to pee in a proper toilet, and then using my leaf. It’s no Charmin, but I drop it down the hole and then close the lid. I don’t want to dirty the drinking water, so I have to settle for not washing my hands. Bummer.
Dragon Dude creeps back into the room, nostrils flared. I’m not sure if an alien dragon monster with no visible mouth can look surprised, but if it can, this guy does. He prowls over to the toilet on all fours and sniffs it—vigorously.
“Excuse me,” I grind out, but he ignores me. “Could you please stop being creepy?”
He rises to his full height, and then whips out one of his dicks. It swells from the slit at his groin, and then he’s clutching it in one hand and pissing all over the closed lid of the toilet.
Seriously? So, I guess it doesn’t matter what universe we’re in: men will be men.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I ask, and he growls at the word fuck. Doesn’t stop pissing though, not until the toilet is soaked. His cock slips back into the slit as he crouches and then gets back on all fours again. “Were you … marking the toilet?”
“Mark … you.” That’s his response. His eyes narrow then, and he explodes across the room, surrounding me in a cloud of black and purple. His horns pulse with a bioluminescent glow, and he inhales so deeply that his nose slits flare wide. “Stay … here.”
He slips past me, but the length of his body slides sinuously along mine, and those strange hormones in me start to go nuts again. I’m convinced that he put them there somehow. Convinced of it.
I follow him back into the front of the ship, watching as he hops nimbly outside and then takes off into the trees. My gaze drifts to the ground. I’m not sure how easy it would be to get down from here; I’d probably break a leg in the process.
A deep sigh escapes me, but I’m not particularly worried. It’s clear that this place is the dragon’s … house? His lair? His den? Somehow that last word feels right. Regardless, he’ll come back here. At least I have a moment to look around without his unnerving presence.
I wander the ship, but there’s not much to see beyond the bathroom and the main area with the computer. It’s still talking to me, by the way, typing out line after line of text. Some of it’s in English, but mostly it’s not. I continue to ignore it, deciding to explore the last of the three rooms.
I step past the shredded curtain in the doorway to see that there’s a significant dip in the floor. It appears that this room was falling away from the ship, connected by a single thick cable and some wires. Over time, the forest took over and filled in the space, bracing the tilted room with a huge branch and tying it back to the main part of the ship with vines.
I test it carefully with my foot before I step in, but it seems sturdy enough. If the dragon sleeps here—it really looks like he does—then it must be pretty stable. The center of the room is a circular dip layered in dozens of furs and dotted with old, discolored cushions. Once upon a time, I think they were pink. I wonder if the headset originated from this ship, from these people with their human toilets and their clawfoot bath.
My curiosity piques and I find myself standing in front of the computer screen and its massive pink keyboard. It’s covered in symbols that pulse and glow faintly, as if in time with my breath. There’s no way I could use this if I wanted to. I look back up at the pulsing cursor—also in pink—and wait for another line in English to appear.
“I am blind, but I can hear you. Don’t worry about the keyboard and speak to me, please. I’ve been bedmates with an angry alien for years. Even after all this time, I cannot understand him nor can he understand me.”
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” I ask, and another frantic line of text appears.
“Oh, thank you! Thank you for reading and responding to me. Who are you and how did you get here? I am in desperate need of your help.”
“You’re a computer?” I ask. “Like ChatGPT or something?”
“I am not familiar with ChatGPT, but I can assure you that I am not a product of artificial intelligence. I was fatally wounded during a routine flight to Jungryuk; my neural center was placed in a stable facility until we could find a suitable host body for transplant.”
“Mm-hmm.” I’m officially done with the computer thing now; it’s creeping me out. If it is AI, then it’s reached AGI—artificial general intelligence—and it’s probably going to try and kill me. I walk away from the screen. It might be able to hear me, but I don’t have to listen to it.
The massive energy burst that Dragon Dude gave me earlier seems to be fading. My lids feel weighted, and my mind is such a mess of thoughts that I decide that sleep is in order. There’s only one logical place to get it: in the dragon’s bed.
Am I risking something by climbing in there? It looks pretty personal. At the same time, it’s getting cold and dark outside. My only light in here comes from the headset, the glowing keyboard, and the faint flicker of the computer screen. It’s hard to see from the tilted room, but that should make it easier to drift off.
I decide to go for it.
Fluffing some pillows and dragging one of the heavy furs over me makes for a fairly comfortable bed.
“Maybe when I wake up, I’ll be in a jail cell with a hangover trying to explain why I was found with the mayor’s bloodied lawyer on the roof of a luxury apartment building.” A snort escapes me, but then my cheek hits the pillow and it’s lights-out.
At some point in the night, I wake to find myself still alone in the bed. Frantically, I climb out, desperate to see if Dragon Dude has returned. If I’m going to make it back to the market in the morning, I’ll need his help.
I find him crouched over a corpse in the front room.
The scent of blood washes over me, making me feel queasy and, grotesquely enough, like I’m starving.
I don’t dare move, watching that muscular body hunched over his prey lest I become his prey. Doesn’t matter. He notices me anyway, craning his neck around to stare at me. His wings flare and then tighten against his back, tail twitching. He rests his second pair of hands on his shoulders, like epaulets or something, and snarls at me.
“Hey Big D, are you in the mood to share?” I joke, but obviously he doesn’t understand me. Slowly, so as not to panic him, I creep forward and find myself staring down at the dead body of the kiyo. It’s the same one, too. I recognize it by the reins still hanging from its face. Damn. Savage.
Dragon Dude growls at me with his oversized mouth, and then backs up, curling around me with his body and essentially forcing me to take a step closer to the dead animal. He moves and appears to be a shadow at times, almost ethereal, like he isn’t fully embedded in this plane. Also, he is definitely smaller now. I’m not imagining it. My new alien monster friend is shrinking.
By shrinking, of course, I only mean getting smaller in comparison to how large he was before. He’s still fucking huge.
“Eat.” The command is easy enough to understand, but who knows if I can even eat this thing without having an allergic reaction or something. I remember reading this article about scientists in Australia who cloned woolly mammoth meat and made a meatball. They didn’t dare eat it though, unsure as to how a five-thousand-year-old protein would react with their bodies. Same deal here.
“Humans can go for three weeks without food. Hopefully I’ll be home by then, so I won’t need to eat at all.” My mouth waters, but I turn away from the animal, gesturing at it with my hand. “You go ahead. You eat.” I point at him and then at the food.
That seems to piss him off. He grabs me with three of his four hands, using the last free wing-hand to dig around inside the corpse and draw out a small organ from the animal’s body. I know some people eat ‘sweetbreads’ or whatever, but organ meat is not my thing. I gag as he brings it to my mouth, utilizing his other wing-hand to pry my lips apart.
I’m struggling in his grip, but he’s at least fifty times stronger than the strongest person I’ve ever met. It’s hopeless.
The meat goes down easily enough, but it tastes like I’ve just swallowed a mouthful of pennies mixed with stewed beets. My gag reflex kicks in, but Big D holds my mouth shut until he’s sure that I won’t throw it up. Then he releases me and I resist the urge to punch him. He could take my head off in a single bite; it’s not worth it.
“You might’ve saved my life, but you’re a fucking dick.” I snap this out without thinking, and then he’s on me again, licking the side of my neck and clutching me against his massive chest like he wants to mate with me. Goose bumps take over my entire body as I shiver under the weight of my own zealous carnal appetite. For an alien dragon? The fuck, Eve? “Wait, wait, wait.”
I’m breathless, the words falling from my lips even as my body reacts to the masculine heat surrounding me, a cloying musk in the air that I swear I can taste as well as smell. It gets worse when Big D’s tongue traces up my neck and over my jaw, slipping between my lips. Is … is he kissing me or healing me or something else entirely?
I’m consumed by that tongue, my hands sliding along the smooth scales of his chest and the purple swirls across his ebony skin. He’s warm and impossibly hard, flexing with feral strength as he moves. My stomach erupts in anxious butterflies, and an insistent pulsing heat clenches in my lower belly. His tongue slips from my mouth and he sets me down, turning away abruptly and heading back over to the meat.
“Ready … not.” That’s what he growls before he sets to finishing the animal by himself. It doesn’t take him long at all, so I just stand there and watch until he grabs the creature’s bones in his long tongue and swallows them whole.
He spends a few minutes cleaning the blood off of his body like a dog or cat might, and then turns to me, eying the tilted room behind me. He rises to his full height, walking over to me like a person, and my heart goes absolutely nuts inside my chest. He looks both more and less human like this; I can’t explain.
When he takes the headset and puts it on, I find myself paralyzed by the idea of having a conversation with him.
“In the morning, can you take me to the market?” I ask, and he growls at me, tearing off the headset and chucking it at the wall. He drops back to all fours, climbs into the nest and then sits back, as if he’s waiting to see what I’ll do. “Wow. Seriously? You let me ask all of two questions and didn’t answer either of them.”
In protest, I leave the headset where it is—with my luck, it’s probably broken—and then I join him in the bed. I keep as far away from him as I can get, trying to find myself a comfortable spot against the wall. He paces the space as I rearrange it, fluffing furs and cushions as he glares at me from glowing purple eyes. As he turns, his horns scrape the wall, gouging the metal.
When he finally settles down, it’s in the center of the bed. He’s maybe two inches from touching me.
“There’s plenty of room in here and that is where you’re choosing to sleep?” I glare at him, and he glares right back at me. I sigh. “If you’re going to crowd me out, could you at least take care of this?” I gesture at him with the bit of dangling leash, and his massive maw ripples in a low warning growl.
When I move to draw my arm back, he reaches out with a hand and snatches my wrist. Everywhere he touches me, I burn. I ache. He’s poisoning me, I tell myself, watching as the glowing purple marks on his fingertips trace the edge of the bracelet. As his finger glides across my skin, he leaves a hot sticky substance that soaks into my blood, thrumming through me as my heart rate mushrooms into something catastrophic and wild.
