Thirst
Her apartment she’d worked so hard to pay for, her unfinished knitting, her massive, never-ending pile of debt, her parents and the hungry goats.
Her cheap suits and smart blouses. Her love of Cheetos.
The unfinished puzzle on her coffee table.
The smell of grass. The nightly song of katydids.
Car exhaust. Car payments. Endless car repairs. Gasoline and riding the tank of her ancient Hyundai to empty.
Tuna fish sandwiches and warm, sun-ripened tomatoes.
Men who never called back. The abortion she’d had when a condom broke and her high school sweetheart dumped her.
Endless regrets. Endless goals.
Endless space out that window.
Stars.
Burning before her. Their light blocked by whatever mechanism served as a window, but she could feel it warming her all the same.
Heat loosened cold limbs, left her groaning in pleasure as she stretched on the softest fur human flesh might know. And just as soon as that sense of comfort came, doubt rode hard on its coattails.
Doubt rocked through her like a bolt of lightning. All at once, all too much… because she was human, and startled, and in a spacecraft. She been repeatedly seeded by a giant of a being that almost looked human but was so far from one, there was really no comparison. Which made her laugh.
The caught throat noise of a fracturing thing.
An Evangeline with a brain not evolved enough for a simple information transfer. Making her keeper all the more God-like and terrifying.
To him, she must be little more than a monkey who could sign and pet a kitten.
That must be how the horny alien viewed her. Despite her state education and her efforts. Despite her love of stars and goats and family.
Forget about a life of straight As. Forget the Master’s Program in New Orleans she knew she had a real shot at. Forget helping people in pain deal with their issues and find peace once she’d become a therapist.
Forget and pin all her future on that view, those stars, the fact that life finds a way to survive even the most crazy of scenarios.
God, how her breasts ached.
“There is a species of wisp-like beings, beautiful beyond compare by the opinion of many. They flitter and move like wind. They laugh as they evade. No Necrimata has ever seeded one. Impossible to pin, evasive, deceptive, and also dangerous should they chose to lure you in with their delicious scent.” Fingers she’d been utterly unaware of moved across her belly, a massive palm cupping slender flesh and pulling her tighter to the reason she was warm in the first place.
He was here with her. In the furs, its tentacles so still she had failed completely to notice she was caught in their net.
“You, tasty human, resemble such a being. Though you have been caught”—those appendages wrapping her flexed—“and pinned. The wisps too are classified as social creatures. Corner one away from its partner and they waste away in a matter of phases. They are like clouds; no flange can find an anchor in them. They weep. Yet still, it is a Necrimata warrior’s challenge to attempt the seeding.”
How awful for the wisps.
“But I have caught one, and she pleases me—though in the future she may try and fail to lure me to my death.”
Sniffing, deeply embarrassed by the flush working its way from chest to cheeks. Reminded once again how superior this being was to have gone unnoticed for so long, Evangeline said, “We have a mythological creature on Earth much the same. A siren.”
“Siren? A fitting name for a demanding pet.”
“My name is Evangeline…”
“And you
wish to retain it? Nothing else from your former existence will keep. You are not even speaking your born language, though you have yet to notice the change.”