Page 12 of Infala: The Alien's Bond
“Yes, I heard,” he said, then slid back onto his bunk.
“Okay. Good talk, there,” she said, walking away.
Mei seemed to snap out of her daze when she witnessed the exchange, hurrying over to Darla with a fierce look in her eyes. For a damn near vegetative prisoner, she was certainly anything but that at the moment.
“What are you doing?” Mei hissed. “Do not converse withthem.”
“By them, you mean aliens?”
“They are beasts, all of them.”
“I don’t know, he seems more or less all right to me. And besides, he’s locked in here just like we are.”
“And do you know why?” the woman growled.
“Uh, no. Just got here, remember? Probably his tattoo skills.”
“So he claims, but I heard the guards talking. He is some sort of great warrior. Now he’s going to be a trophy for their leaders when we arrive at our destination.”
“A trophy?”
“Yes. Quite a catch for the Raxxians. And the way they talk about him, even they appear scared of him.”
Darla glanced over at the man on his bunk, the gold in his eyes, glinting for just a moment as the light caught them just right. She felt a little rumble in her belly, and not the kind brought on by hunger. At least, not hunger for food. Mei saw the look and shook her head.
“Donotthink it,” she snapped. “He may be pleasing to look at, but that is an alien species.”
“Relax, a girl can admire, can’t she?”
Mei shook her head in either frustration or disgust. Either way, she was not amused. “You are not the first to have such ideas, you know. But he is not interested in our kind. Something about the Infala deciding his fate, not the meat between his legs.”
“He said that?”
“Yes. He was very rude about it as well.”
“Wait, what’s an Infala, anyway?”
“I’m not entirely sure. All I can tell is that it seems to have something to do with his tattoos. You saw that he’s covered in them, right?”
“I noticed.”
“They all have different meanings, from what I’ve gleaned. The symbols and pigments create some kind of energy, and apparently that all has something to dictate important aspects of his life.”
“Like what?”
“Like who he can mate with. And as none of us are inked up like that, humans aren’t even a possibility in his mind. It’s why he pretty much treats us like we’re barely even here. We’re lesser beings so far as he’s concerned. Or, at least unimportant in his grand scheme of things.”
“What a dickish way to live. Letting some silly ink dictate who you can and cannot be with? It’s ridiculous.”
“And how his kind operate. As you say in your country, it is what it is.”
“I hate that expression.”
“So do I, but in this instance, it does seem to be rather appropriate given the situation.”
Darla allowed herself one more glance at Heydar’s muscular form reclining in his bunk, then returned to her own resting place. She may have recovered from whatever the Raxxians did when they’d abducted her, but she was still a bit low on energy.
She had been staring at the smooth curved metal forming the top of her bunk space, her eyes slowly becoming heavy with both exhaustion as well as boredom, when the secondary door to their holding chamber opened. A pair of Raxxians strode in and surveyed the lot of them. Darla felt her adrenaline surge, taken aback by their frightening appearance. At least she’d had an initial exposure to take the edge off of their dramatic entry.
