His to Command (Alien Masters Book 1) Read online

  On her other side, a little girl who looked to be about four years old, wearing a miniature version of the woman’s shapeless garment, walked along silently, as though already realizing how different her place was in this society. She held a little puppy tightly in her arms, half swaddled in her voluminous robe.

  The mother turned away for a moment, softly urging her son to keep up. The little girl took advantage of the moment, holding her puppy up to show it a cage filled with baby chicks displayed on a wooden table on the other side of the narrow lane. The puppy lunged forward and started barking wildly, struggling to get out of the child’s embrace. Tiny as he was, he still proved too strong for her. Wriggling away, he darted across the lane and under the table, where half a dozen other cages of chicks sat on the ground.

  The little girl cried out and ran after him. She never paused, never saw the team of horses barreling down the lane, pulling a cart piled high with wooden barrels of wine. AJ glanced around, but no one else had the vantage point she did and the driver was too busy trying to control his horses to notice a little girl dashing in front of his wagon.

  AJ shoved half a dozen shoppers out of her way and dove headfirst into the path of the galloping horses. Grabbing the girl, she rolled in the dirt with the child in her arms, both of them narrowly escaping the hooves that would have trampled the little body into the dust.

  They laid there for a minute, both trembling. Then the child’s mother let out a bloodcurdling scream. She ran over and fell to her knees in front of them, reaching for her daughter as she babbled her thanks. AJ barely heard her. She’d banged her forehead hard on the wooden leg of a stall as she rolled out of the way clutching the child. Putting a hand to her head, she stared at it blankly—as if it belonged to someone else—when it came away covered with blood. Her vision blurred and she felt dizzy as the part of her mind still functioning registered the fact that she must have suffered a mild concussion.

  She sat up slowly, head pounding so much she half-hoped it would fall off. The market went silent. Even the mother’s weeping stopped. She looked around. Everyone was staring at her. AJ put a hand to her head again and then she understood. It was hot and as was the custom here, she wore nothing underneath the djellabah. Her hood had fallen back and the woolen robe, torn at the neck, hung down off her shoulder on one side. Both her long dark hair and the unmistakable upper curve of her breast were fully exposed.

  Quickly, she gathered together the edges of the djellabah, pulled the hood back over her head. But the damage was done. Angry shouts from the spectators replaced the cries from the shocked mother. Strong arms seized her. She was held prisoner by half a dozen men in the crowd, all yelling and cursing at her. Abram and Mohzan had disappeared into the crowd. She’d made them promise not to rescue her if she was discovered, knowing that in all likelihood they’d be killed or imprisoned. As a female, she hoped she’d be treated differently. Besides, AJ felt certain that with her training she could handle these relatively primitive beings.

  Two soldiers appeared out of nowhere, dressed like Roman legionnaires, wearing short tunics and leather sandals laced halfway to their knees. One grabbed her wrists and hauled her to her feet, forcing her to let go of the torn robe. It slipped down again, baring her nearly to the waist on one side. She heard a loud gasp, followed by a lewd hiss from one of the spectators. The other soldier bound her wrists together in front of her with a long leather strap that apparently took the place of handcuffs here. AJ didn’t even try to resist. She’d be more likely to gain access to the information she sought if these people didn’t see her as a threat and instead treated her as just another inferior female.

  She managed to curl her fingers around the edge of the robe again, pulling it up to cover herself. The soldiers took their places. One stepped in front of her, using the leather strap to drag her down the narrow lane, while the other walked behind, poking her sharply from time to time with the tip of his sword to hurry her along. AJ walked with her shoulders hunched, head down, to make herself seem smaller and weaker.

  From the few words the soldiers exchanged, AJ realized they were taking her to a place called the Citadel, to see General Tok. She willed away the pain in her head and vowed to keep her wits about her. The accident had been a stroke of luck. She’d be able to meet the general in person and gather information right from the command center of his desert fortress.

  As they marched her through the city, AJ was shocked to see fountains and pools everywhere, surrounded with lush plantings. Date palms, banana trees, a riot of colorful flowers blooming—it was all the more amazing after the hectares of nearly barren land the caravan had crossed in the last few days. The builders of Petra had apparently discovered a bountiful supply of water in the mountains, channeling it to run freely everywhere in the city. It reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Las Vegas, the emerald green metropolis of flowing fountains in the heart of the American desert. That city lay in dusty ruins now, the stuff of legends. The river the reckless inhabitants drained for a hundred years to feed their dancing fountains had long ago dried up and disappeared.

  She looked around, trying to take in as many details as possible. Walls higher than her head surrounded most of the homes in the city, with gated entrances leading to small inner courtyards. Vines covered with purple and red blossoms cascaded over the walls into the street and she could see the tops of more trees inside the courtyards.

  They passed quite a few men and boys in the streets. All of them stopped to stare at her and several made lewd remarks to the soldiers who accompanied her. The soldiers ignored them, intent on getting her to their destination. She never saw another female, but she heard soft voices and children laughing inside some of the walled compounds.

  Carved into the side of the mountain, as were so many of the structures here, the Citadel was an imposing building. It faced an enormous square plaza. The stone columns all across the front of the building, easily sixty or seventy feet tall, dwarfed anyone seeking entry. A flight of wide stone steps put the entrance high above the plaza, making the structure look even more impressive.

  The soldiers led her up the steps and through a set of carved wooden doors that looked small from below but were three times her height. Inside, the building was cool. Flickering flames from massive silver candleholders reflected off the blue crystal walls, creating the effect of being inside a giant ice cave.

  They marched down a long hall, past side passages that led to a warren of other rooms. Stopping in front of another set of double doors, this one a mere ten feet high, one of the soldiers knocked briskly.

  “Come.” The command was sharp, the voice deep.

  The guard in front of her opened the door. Although windowless, the room was bathed in light from a skylight piercing the rock ceiling in the center of the room. Beneath it, with the sun’s rays illuminating him like a saint in a medieval portrait, sat a pudgy little man with a swarthy complexion and a beaked nose. Dressed in a deep crimson robe that stood out sharply against the blue walls, he sat at a wooden table covered with piles of books and ledgers. The fringe of black hair around his balding head made him look even more like a holy scribe.

  The man stood up and walked toward her, staring intently. His eyes were so dark they were nearly black, peering out at her from under bushy brows. AJ stared back, sending out a telepathic wave of control. The man gave her a cold smile, and she felt the wave crash and break as it touched his mind. Somehow, General Tok had created an instinctive defense against the tactics she’d been trained in for years. For the first time, AJ felt a tiny shiver of fear.

  He moved closer, motioning the two soldiers to stand back so he could walk all the way around her. She stood a head taller, but that didn’t seem to intimidate the general. She knew she must look odd to him. Her eyes were a soft bronze color, nearly golden, set in a slim face with high cheekbones. Her body slender, without the lush curves she’d seen on the women of Neodyma. Although he would scarcely be able to tell that with the loose-fit
ting man’s robe she wore.

  “You have come here uninvited. We deal harshly with intruders in our home.”

  She kept her voice deliberately low and soft. “I have heard this is a place where women are welcomed, even revered as goddesses. I come seeking a better life.”

  The general stopped in front of her, locking his eyes onto hers. She shivered again as she felt the full force of his gaze. It was almost hypnotic. Had she not been schooled in the art of mental combat, she would have succumbed immediately. AJ understood now why reports described Tok as charismatic. It wasn’t his physical presence, but rather the aura of complete authority he radiated.

  “That is not true. Only women who have gone through a rigorous process of testing and interviews in the cities where they dwell are welcome. If they pass, they are escorted here as converts and trained in our ways. We do not accept willful, rogue females who deceive us to sneak in. Only the most worthy are anointed as goddesses in Petra.”

  He looked her over coolly. “You are not from our world.”

  AJ realized being accepted as a convert into the community offered her the best chance of finding the information the Federation sought. The idea of claiming she was a reporter seeking a story about the wonderful opportunities for women in Petra would never work. This man was not eager for publicity, unlike other self-appointed rulers throughout history.

  She lowered her gaze as she’d seen the women do in the marketplace and patterned her speech after his formal tone. “That is correct. My parents came here with me from Earth when I was a child. My father and mother were assigned to Alexandria to work in the Interstellar Consulate there. They succumbed to one of your planet’s illnesses, one we no longer have any immunity to on Earth. I also fell ill but I survived and was taken in by a local family. They raised me as their own. Sadly, they too are dead now.”

  Acting purely on instinct, she dropped to one knee in front of him, holding out her bound hands in front of her. Anything she could do to project an air of humility, of powerlessness, would go a long way toward erasing the mistake she’d made of mentally challenging his authority in those first few moments. She didn’t know if he was capable of probing her thoughts, so she did her best to create an aura of fear and anxiety in her mind.

  “I have nothing, no one to care about me, either here on Neodyma or back on Earth. I knew that being foreign-born I would never pass the screening process back in Alexandria, so I took the risk of coming here in the hope that you would make an exception once I had the opportunity to present myself before you. I ask that you forgive my feeble attempt at deception and I humbly request you consider taking me in as a convert. I am willing to learn your ways, to undergo any tests to prove my worthiness.”

  He reached out a hand, surprisingly gentle, and touched the wound on her forehead.

  “By what name are you called?”

  “At birth, I was given the name of Amanda Jane Norris. I am known as AJ.”

  “Once you set foot inside the city, your fate was sealed. I will allow you to be tested. If you pass and are accepted as a convert, you will be given a new name, one befitting the position assigned to you in our society. If not, you will remain nameless and be assigned to other duties here. Either way, you will never leave Petra alive.”

  Tok nodded once, as though making up his mind. “Take her to the examination room,” he ordered. “See to her injury and then prepare her for the High Priest. I will join you there shortly.”

  The two soldiers hauled her to her feet and led her down a series of long corridors deep into the heart of the mountain. They ushered her into another windowless chamber carved out of the blue crystal. An involuntary shiver rocked her. With no source of natural light, the sensation of being inside an ice cavern was overwhelming. These extremes of heat and cold were still foreign to her. On Earth, she spent her time in climate-controlled environments where the temperature never varied more than ten degrees.

  The space was bare, except for a square wooden table sitting in the middle of the room. They dragged her over to the table and forced her onto her back, one of them at the head of the table, holding her shoulders down, and the other pressing her lower body against the rough surface. With the table barely long enough to support her from head to hips, her legs dangled over the edge.

  The soldiers made no attempt to draw up the torn edges of the djellabah and her left breast was almost completely exposed. AJ shivered again when she saw one of the soldiers staring at her nipple, tightened into a small nub from the unaccustomed chill in the air. She looked around. Torches lit the room, mounted far too high on the walls for her to reach. She saw nothing she could use as a weapon, no means of escape except for a door at each end of the room. AJ used her power to project an order into the minds of the two soldiers.

  It was as though she’d hit a blank wall. They seemed to have no advanced telepathic skills, no ability to receive or respond to the commands she projected. AJ was stunned. Was it possible that these descendants of a more primitive culture had never developed the ability to access their psychic powers? If so, all her years of training in the art of mental combat would be worthless on this world.

  One of the men held her down on the table while the other disappeared through the opposite doorway. He came back carrying a clay bowl and pitcher. Pouring some water into the bowl, he dipped a soft white sponge into it and dabbed away the dried blood on her forehead. Then he ran the damp sponge over her face and neck. The warm water felt heavenly. It was scented with mint and lavender and some other herb she couldn’t identify that immediately soothed the lingering pain in her head. Despite her precarious situation, AJ sighed in relief.

  She was horrified a moment later when the man dipped the sponge back in the water and then held it over her exposed breast. Water dripped onto her hard nipple and the man bent his head toward it. But before he could do anything else, General Tok appeared from the door at the other end of the room. Seeing that she was already in place, he walked toward her, calling out to someone behind him.

  A huge man stepped through the doorway. AJ shivered in spite of herself. He stood roughly seven feet tall, towering over General Tok and the soldiers. He wore laced sandals and a white pleated tunic like the soldiers. But his was only half a garment, covering him from waist to just above the knees. His upper body was bare, displaying a massive chest rippling with muscle and thick forearms ringed with wide gold bands. His obsidian skin gleamed as though it had been massaged with oil, as did his shaven head.

  The soldiers bowed as they greeted him, addressing him as Holy One. He strode to the table and uttered a single command in a language AJ had never heard before. The soldier at her feet nodded briskly and moved to the head of the table, where he took hold of one of her arms, leaving his partner to grasp the other. Her wrists were unbound, then tied up again, this time to hooks on the sides of the wide table, stretching her arms apart. The men took their places on either side of her head, each with a heavy hand on one of her shoulders.

  The man they called Holy One stepped to the foot of the table. He stuck his huge hands under the djellabah. AJ cringed as she felt his smooth palms moving up her legs. He slid the garment higher and higher, uncovering her thighs, then her hips, until she was completely exposed from the waist down. Her pulse raced and she forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, keeping her mind blank.

  General Tok stood at the foot of the table, his eyes sharp under the bushy dark brows. The High Priest grabbed her dangling legs under the knees, pulling them up and bending them back toward her stomach until her thighs were apart and her heels rested on the edges of the table on either side. AJ flushed in shame. It became impossible to purge her mind of thoughts. Tied down on this table, she was flooded with a frightening sensation of helplessness. And now her pussy and her bottom hole were completely exposed for the first time, open to the lustful stares of all four men.

  In her modern world, adults did not appear unclothed in front of each other. Illness was virtually
unheard of and rarely needed medical procedures utilized scanning machines that sent focused lasers and electron beams into the tissues. No one had seen her naked body since she was a small child, except for her holographic lover.

  The big man said something else. Her language chip hadn’t been exposed to this dialect long enough for her to understand him, but General Tok seemed eager to translate.

  “This is Thelo, our High Priest. He will be the sole judge of your worthiness to join this community. I suggest you give him your complete obedience, since he alone decides what group you will be assigned to. The Holy One says you are to remain in this position while he conducts his examination. Do not move—or you will be punished by the guards.”

  AJ shuddered. Her skin already tingled from the unfamiliar touch of the High Priest’s huge hands running up her bare legs. The fingers of the soldier on her left tightened convulsively around her shoulder as he stared at her half-naked body. The general remained at the foot of the table, just behind the High Priest and off to one side, his position obviously chosen to give him a clear view of what would happen next. She closed her eyes, unwilling to see their faces as they witnessed whatever humiliation was in store for her.

  The High Priest leaned forward between her legs. Using both hands, he spread apart her vaginal opening. Her eyes snapped open. His fingertips were hot and rough against the silken folds that had never been touched by a man. AJ tried to clench her legs together, but he wedged his upper arms and broad shoulders between her thighs, forcing them apart.

  He looked up at her. His eyes narrowed. Then, slowly, he slid one long thick finger inside her, watching her face the entire time.

  Chapter Two

  Kaden strode through the marketplace, keeping out of sight of the soldiers as he tailed behind them. He’d been half a block away, too far to avert the tragedy himself, but he’d seen the tall merchant in Bedouin robes dash out in front of the wagon, risking life and limb to rescue the little girl. He had been as shocked as the other bystanders when the merchant turned out to be a rather stunning woman.