we were in public, I’m almost certain I could cause enough of a scene to get free of him.
My eyes fall onto his bare torso, and his rippling blue muscles. I don’t want to be abducted by an alien, but God, if I am going to be abducted by one, I could have done a lot worse for myself than Raiska.
“We don’t have time for cheesecake anymore. We have to reach the portal.” He puts the car into neutral and hits the gas.
I watch as his brows furrow in frustration. When he looks down at the shifter, his horns scratch against the ceiling of the car.
Should I tell him? Can he seriously not drive?
“I put it in navigation mode,” he growls, hitting the gas harder. The engine revs loudly, but we don’t go anywhere.
“Raiska, ‘N’ doesn’t stand for navigation mode. It’s neutral. You want ‘D.’ for drive.”
He shifts into drive, and we start to move.
Once we begin to pick up speed, I pull on the parking brake. The car grinds to a halt.
“Tell me what is happening,” I say, looking over at him.
I find myself squeezing his arm. Despite everything that is happening, some kind of trust is building in me. Maybe it’s just Stockholm Syndrome, but I want to at least hear his justification for all of this.
“It’s very complicated,” he says.
I expect him to use that as an excuse to not tell me anything, but instead, he begins to tell me everything.
“The Ulkar are the race of my father. I’m a half breed. The eldest of my brothers, and the first of my kind, the Valittu. We acted as harbingers for the Ulkar for many decades, but my brothers and I—upon learning there were others like us—defected and rebelled against the Ulkar. We stopped their invasion of Earth, and now they’ve gone dormant. Some have said they’ve ascended, but I’m skeptical of this. One of the Ulkar came to me a few hours ago. He told me you were about to be targeted for some kind of breeding experiment or competition, and—”
“Wait. Breeding?”
“Yes,” he says. “They called it the Breeding Games. This Ulkar—”
“What is an Ulkar? Another alien?”
“You don’t want to even know,” he says. “I will tell you if you insist, but listen, little human. The Breeding Games have begun, and you are the most fertile prize.”
My face turns red, and I look down to avoid his gaze.
“The Ulkar have given me a head start, Annabelle, but I don’t know how long it will be until the others come for you.”
“The others?”
He nods. “The other competitors. There will be three others who are trying to take you.”
I summon the courage to meet his eyes again. “Do I really want to ask how you win the Breeding Games?”
“Whoever’s seed gets you pregnant wins the competition.”
God. I really didn’t want to know that.
“So...you are going to—”
He shakes his head. “A Valittu will not take something that is not offered freely. The Ulkar are blocking my usual escape routes, but I’ve managed to open a portal. If we can get there, I may be able to hide you from the other competitors.”
“Are they...Valittu?”
“No,” he says. “They will be other half breeds. The Ulkar want to know which of their children are strongest, which should inherit the lower dimensions now that they’ve ascended.”
I nod, as if a single thing he just said is anything other than batshit insane. If he weren’t very clearly an actual, living and breathing alien, I wouldn’t believe a word of it.
“Where’s the portal?” I ask.
“Squirrel Hill,” he says.
“Ah, the portal in Squirrel Hill. Of course.”
“It will take us to Lakria.”
“Where is that?”
“It’s a planet hundreds of thousands of light-years from here. My half-brother lives there.”
“What if the others just follow us through the portal?”
“If you stop asking me questions and let me drive, we can minimize the chances of that happening.” He looks down at the parking brake. “Disengage that device, little human.”
“Can you please stop calling me that?”
He shoots me a cocky look, which tells me that he is indeed going to continue calling me “little human.”
“One last question, Raiska.”
“Make it quick.”
“What if you just let me out? I go back to the library, and you go wherever you want to go.”
“One of the other competitors would breed you.”
“But you’d be fine, right? So why not just let it go?”
He puts one hand over his bare chest and bows his head down. His horns come dangerously close to my face. “When I first laid eyes