My Alien Beast (Draci Alien 3)

Her eyes flash with concern. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me. Was that a lie?”

It was not, but is she such a fool as to believe her captor?

“Do you think this will now make me treat you more kindly? Is this your game? Do not think I have forgotten that it was your fault I was harmed in the first place. If you had not run away, I would not have met that foul feline’s teeth in the first place.”

Giselle shoves her chair back from the kitchen table and throws her napkin down. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should have just left you here to die. But since I guess I’m an idiot and didn’t, I’m not likely to leave now that you’re up and awake again. So how about you go and shower off that stink from sweating out your body weight twice over, plenty of it all over me last night. And if you don’t want me to starve, find a way to get some more food, Oh Great and Mighty Provider. I’m vegetarian, but I’ll eat eggs if they’re humane to the chickens and cage-free like these. I could use some reading material while you’re at it. Pick me up some mystery novels and thrillers while you’re at the grocery store.”

She grabs her plate from the table, then turns her back on me as she begins to wash it and the pan at the sink.

Such disrespect to a Princeling of the Draci would not have been borne only three months ago. No one turns their back to me! Draci hundreds of years my elders would bow and scrape humbly before me just for a chance at having a scrap of my favor when I became King after my father.

But this insolent female human shows me none of the deference due my station or the superiority of my species—

…and yet she stayed and cared for me when any among my own race would have used such a situation to their advantage, had they managed to get me in such a vulnerable situation.

I shove another bite of protein in my mouth as I consider.

Almost any but my own mother would have killed me in Giselle’s place, if it would have benefited them. And then I thought of what my own mother did do to me, plotting and using her soldiers to knock me out so I couldn’t try to save any more of our kind.

It would have been far easier for Giselle to justify harming me to save herself.

So why didn’t she? Is she more manipulative than even the females I am used to? Is she playing some larger game I cannot yet see?

Perhaps she tried to run and realized the desert stretched too far on all sides. Perhaps she realized she needed me, and that nursing me back to health was her own best chance at survival. As she said, the food is dwindling. She has little left to sustain her. She needs me and my wingspan to replenish the resources.

Yes, I nod to myself. Her actions finally make sense to me.

And yet... Town is not so far away. Had she but walked south or east for more than six hours, she would have run into a road. Any of her own species driving on that road might have helped her.

But she does not know there is a road. She must truly believe we are too far from civilization to contact anyone else. Her fraught attempt at escape that ended with me in the mountain feline’s jaw must have scared her from making another attempt.

I frown, unsettled at my logic, unsure if I am seeing the true picture. These humans are strange creatures and I am bothered to not know if my insights are correct.

I stand and take a step toward Giselle, but she turns suddenly and glares at me. “I wasn't kidding about the shower.” She's holding a cooking utensil and she waves it in my face.

She finds my odor offensive? Ha. Dragon females find the blood and sweat of battle aromatic and alluring, no matter how many days it has been since a male has fought. A Draci female would lick the blood from my scales and delight in my kill.

But I will bow to the human female’s strange little sensitive nose and wash myself. Frankly, the human odors I myself am emitting are strange to myself and I would like to be clean of them.

When I go to the room for bathing, however, the contraption for bathing oneself makes no sense.

“Female,” I eventually bellow, feeling frustration at the useless mixture of knobs and levers and complete lack of plasma interface.

When she does not arrive, I yell for her again.

“Good Lord,” she says, eventually showing up in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. “I do have a name, you know. And the house isn't that big, you don't have to shout to get my attention.”