Page 4 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride
The thought of those horns. That size. The hand that had caught me before I fell.
I sat down on the shelf with my back against the wall and pulled the blanket over my legs. It was warm, heavier than it looked. I pulled it up to my chest and made myself breathe.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. You're alive. That's something. Whoever took you went to a lot of trouble to make a nice comfortable cell. That probably means they want you alive, which means you have time."
Time for what, I didn't know. But it was better than the alternative.
I'd counted to eight hundred and forty-three when the hatch opened.
Not slowly. Not with any warning. One moment it was sealed, the next it was sliding sideways into the wall, and I was on my feet before I'd decided to stand, the blanket falling from my lap, my back pressed flat against the padded wall behind me.
He filled the doorway.
Eight and a half feet, maybe more. I couldn't tell exactly, because the hatch was built to a larger-than-human scale and yet he was ducking to fit through it, his horns nearly brushing the frame. His eyes found me immediately. Huge, liquid, almost all pupil in the dim light of the corridor behind him.
He looked at me the way he had in the cargo bay, like something he'd spent a long time searching for.
I didn't move. I wasn't sure I could.
He stepped through the hatch, and the space that had seemed small before became tiny. He had to stoop, his horns angling down, his shoulders seeming to take up the whole width of the cell. I came up to about the middle of his chest. If he'd reached out, he could have touched me without moving from where he stood.
He didn't reach out.
He crouched.
He sank down slowly, folding his legs beneath him, and I noticed the hooves then, dark and heavy, clicking softly against the floor as he settled, until his eyes were level with mine. His tail curled around behind him and lay still against his calf. One slow sweep. Calm, I thought, and then wondered how I knew that.
From his belt he drew something small and metallic. He held it up, not towards me but between us, and pressed something on its side. A light blinked amber.
"Can you understand me?" His voice was low. I felt it in my chest before I heard it properly, a vibration that ran through my ribs. The words came out slightly off, the cadence strange, as if they were being assembled in real time.
Translator. The device in his hand was a translator.
"Yes," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "I can understand you."
"Good." He set the translator on the floor between us. "I am Keth. You will not be harmed."
"You drugged me and put me in a box."
"Yes."
I waited for an explanation. An excuse. Something. He just looked at me with those enormous dark eyes, patient and utterly unselfconscious, as if he had all the time in the universe and intended to spend it crouched on the floor of my cell, watching me breathe.
"Why?" I demanded.
"Because you are mine."
The words landed flat and certain. He said them the way other people state the obvious. The sky is blue. Water is wet.
"I'm not yours," I said. "I don't know you. I've never seen you before in my life."
"I have seen you." He tilted his head slightly. The motion was strange on a face shaped like his, all heavy brow and wide-set eyes and a broad flat nose with flared nostrils. Bovine, I thought. He looked bovine. Like a bull, if a bull stood upright and had hands and watched you with an intelligence that made your skin prickle. "Three rotations ago. Your scent, in the atmospheric data. I knew."
"You–" I stopped. "Atmospheric data. From where?"
"Not your homeworld – Earth, our records call it. You were far from there." The translator gave the words a strange weight, as if the names were foreign to his mouth. Which they were, I supposed. "A mining relay, alone in the dark. A survey ship passed through the sector three rotations ago and sampled what the station vented into space, and your scent signature was in the data. A Peritan trace, faint and alone."
"Peritan," I repeated. "What's that?"
