Page 3 of Alien's Luck
Ari stopped in front of the mask hanging on an illuminated wall panel. Light glowed softly through the eye sockets and around the edges. As an anonymous mask, it had little value. If this were truly Crai’s death mask, it was valuable beyond imagination and the royal family would want it back.
His own family had a horrifying collection of the faces of deceased ancestors. Actual faces. That was the nature of theKhargal death mask. Khargal skin had the ability to turn to stone. After death, the facial skin was removed, and with the correct preparation and chemical treatment, the skin could be petrified into a mask.
The process was as terrible as it sounded. Most families kept death masks at an altar or family shrine, brought out for special occasions. In his family’s aerie, however, the masks lined the central corridor. Passing them several times a day was unavoidable. Shadows contorted the masks into a fearsome shape. Young Ari could feel the empty eyes watching him as he hurried past.
The family estate was now his to do with as he pleased. He could have the death masks removed and placed in storage or pulverized into gravel. That idea held appeal and knowing his sire would be livid if he knew only made it more so. Alas, Ari could not return thanks to a pesky legal situation.
Duras had a particular punishment for criminals: the Stone Sleep. When injured, a Khargal could assume their stone form and sleep until the damage healed. It was a slow process but natural. In many families, the eldest members assumed their stone forms and slept, waking rarely. Ari’s grandsire several times removed chose that fate for himself, waking once a decade to make demands and then fall asleep again. The stone forms were not impervious to wind or water. They had to be cared for, tended to, and that responsibility fell on the younger generations.
The Stone Sleep twisted a natural part of a Khargal life cycle, confining a person to their stone form for a century, but not asleep. No. Awake. Conscious and frozen for a hundred years.
Faced with such a fate, Ari fled Duras for Reazus Prime. He was fooling himself if he ever believed he could be a hero. He was selfish through and through, and it was better to be a fugitive than a living statue. After a century, perhaps he could return tohis home world and complete renovations on the family estate. Modernize it. Scrub it clean of his sire’s presence.
He stretched his wings, muscles aching and stiff from an injury that failed to heal properly.
Ari pulled the mask off the wall and said, “You are causing a great deal of trouble.”
He should dump it into the ocean and wash his hands of it, historic relic be damned, but no. That would not stop the royal family’s agents. If the mask was rumored to be in Mer’len’s possession, it was only a matter of time before those agents would swoop into his nest.
He needed to dispose of the mask and do so in a manner that led away from him.
This required thought. At the moment, he had a prospective client to interview.
CARLA
As it turns out, the aliens did Carla a favor when they abducted her from her crummy life.
Should she have been concerned about the reason the aliens abducted her? Sure. Absolutely. Alien abduction was never good, right? Lenore read one book where a woman was taken for her brains—the alien needed a human specialist—but that was it. In all the other books and movies, humans were destined for breeding, food, to be pets, or to fight gladiator -style. Nothing good.
Well, the joke was on them. The abductor’s ship exploded in orbit, or so she was told after the fact. Carla was very much unconscious at the time. Her pod, or whatever the alien stuffed her in, crashed into a salvage ship, so that was two explosions she missed while in storage. When she woke up, she was stranded on a planet called Reazus Prime, which apparently wasthe kind of place where high-class aliens locked their proverbial car doors when they flew past.
Honestly, it felt like home.
Poppy held out the pair of dice, her tail lazily swaying from side to side. “For luck,” she said.
Carla smiled, pressed her fingertips to her lips, and blew a kiss. The act was over the top, but that was the point. Poppy worked her hustle at the gaming table while Carla distracted the marks with her human wiles.
“Human tradition,” Poppy explained to their companions at the table. They nodded and murmured about quaint humans.
Humans were fairly unusual on Reazus Prime. While the ship that abducted her had a cargo hold full of humans, how many survived was impossible to know. Exploding ships tended to do that to inventory manifests. The rate of discovering survivors had slowed to a trickle after three years.
She was so fortunate that Poppy had been the one to find her. She was a good one, pulling her from the wreckage and never asking for anything in return. Most importantly, she was her friend. Her only friend in the universe, considering her lack of social skills on Earth.
Poppy—Popilyn if you were being formal—was a Nakkoni, an alien with reptilian features including dark red scales, a tail, spikes along her jawline, a ruff on her neck, and feathery quills on the top of her head. Some people might describe her as lizard-like but she was a dragon in her eyes. Big. Red. Spiky. Carla might have screamed the first time she saw her, but they moved past it and were besties now.
“She’s very tame,” a fellow Nakkoni with a coppery-red complexion said. His gaze lingered on her, and Carla honestly needed a bath because it felt so disgusting. “Do you intend to breed her?”
Yeah, disgusting.Sometimes, she wished she could turn off the translator chip in her head.
The thing that made humans so popular as property wasn’t because of their rarity—although that was part of it—but the universal breeder thing. Humans could knock up or get knocked up by almost any alien species. No idea why. Call it an evolutionary quirk.
“No,” Poppy answered.
“Would you sell her?”
“No.”
“Not even for a night? Jealous? Do not fear. I’ll let you join.”
