His to Claim: A Sci-Fi Alien Romance - Taylor Vaughn

Prologue

“No! Noooooo! Don’t take my baby! Please…I’ll do anything!”

The anguish in the young mother’s voice tears at my soul. It’s not the first time I’ve heard a girl screaming and begging during the Xalthurians’ annual Breed and Reap. I can’t remember a time before the screams, though I’m told it exists…existed.

But this scream is different.

This time the voice belongs to my sister, Elle. With my poor eyesight and a wall of Xalthurian soldiers between us, I can’t see her. But I can clearly hear her, begging the reaping force for mercy.

We’d been working in the community potato field when the Xalthurians appeared in the sky with one short electronic blast of sound. Their way of ringing our planet’s doorbell, before landing their bright silver ship in one of our settlement’s many barren red clay fields.

The Xalthurians always came in the same way, and at the same time of year, during the month of what the New Terrhans called May, even though a year in this solar system was made up of fourteen months, not twelve like on the old planet. But the Xalthurians almost never come on the same day or even the same time of day for that matter. Last year, when Elle was twenty-one they came in the very early morning. But this year it was late in the afternoon.

Before the ship appeared, Elle and I had been debating about whether to keep pushing in the community fields until sunset or take a break. Elle was tired after working the fields all morning with the red and ebony swirled hybrid infant she hadn’t been allowed to name perched on her back in a sling. She’d wanted us to go home to curl up for a nap with the baby tucked between us.

I was bone tired, too, not to mention hot—that afternoon, the sun seemed really eager to remind us that scorching season was right around the corner. But I wasn’t on full rations like her, and I worried we’d both get punished with an even smaller share tonight if any of the leaders saw us cutting out early.

To nap or not to nap, that had been the question. Until the Xalthurians showed up, dressed in three distinct ways, as they came bounding out of the ship.

From experience, I knew those dressed in leather loin cloths were here to grab the twenty-one year-old females and drag them back to the ship for the Breeding Ceremony. While the ones wearing silver uniforms with a diamond-eyed insignia stamped into the back, were here for last year’s crop of babies.

Breeders and Reapers, that’s what we called them. And as always, they were accompanied by a few green Xals, dressed in flowing white robes. From what I could tell, these green guys were the only Xals who could actually understand and speak our language. That’s why we called them Diplomats, even though they rarely try to negotiate anything with our settlement. They only instruct us in what the other Xalthurians wanted us to do.

I had given my sister a sympathetic look. Though she hadn’t named the little hybrid boy, I knew it wouldn’t be easy for her to let him go. Most of the mothers with baby boys went directly to their red clay houses, so that they could grab a few things to send back in the blankets of the babies they’d never see again: drawings and trinkets and sometimes little notes written in the New Terrhan language, even though they knew the babies would most likely never be able to understand it.

It’s always been like this. For as long as I can remember, and maybe for as long as Elle can remember, too.

But Elle hadn’t gone back to the house like the other mothers of hybrid boys when the Xalthurians set down. Instead she’d stood there frozen, her short curly black hair almost seeming to stand on end as her dark eyes darted back and forth.

At first I thought she was afraid of encountering another Xalthurian. She was still pretty traumatized by the Breeding Ceremony. However, when a group of Xalthurians in silver uniforms had approached her, she’d taken the baby out of the sling she’d made for it, and instead of handing the squalling child over, she’d hugged it close and ran. Ran and ran until she reached a cliff and couldn’t run any more.

And now here she stood, surrounded by Xalthurian Reapers at the precipice of a cliff with a fifty foot drop down to a dry red clay bed