Page 1 of My Monster, My Choice
Prologue
Planet Earth, long after World War III:
“Christina!”Dori hisses as I walk by the front desk. Her face is red, her eyes are wide, flitting back and forth as if she is afraid someone might overhear us talking.
When it’s obvious no one else is in the entryway, she points a shaking finger toward the dining room, currently unused. “You have a visitor.”
After World War III, Earth was visited by an alien race who offered to clean up our planet in exchange for a place to live.
The Britonians would start with our water because they would plant their mother ship in undisclosed depths of the ocean. They’d get to our soil, our air. When they noticed our vastly mismatched sexes due to the trauma of war? They offered the Match Program.
It seemed exciting in the beginning, until the president’s own daughter, Lilaina, was the first to go. Imagine our horror when the news feeds showed her potential alien mate emerge from the portal between our worlds.
He was a monstrosity.
A seven-foot-tall alien, his skin a hideous shade of grayish purple, or he looked that way compared to the First Daughter. His fingers were clawed, and his forearms looked too muscular to be real. Hell, tendons stood out along the back of his hands, twitching, as if he could barely control the urge to fight. He reeked of power, of danger. Of violence.
But worst of all hit below the waist. Instead of legs, he had a mass of writhing tentacles.
Looking back at those feeds, I would have expected her to run screaming. But she sucked it up and went through with it, heading off to his planet for six months on a trial mating, at the end of which she would return to Earth and tell us all her choice as to whether to stay or go back to him. During those six months, we all debated what she would be like when she returned. Would she be scarred? Would she cower like a kicked puppy? Would she be so emotionally abused she’d need deep therapy to recover? What was she thinking by not backing out when the monster emerged from the bushes that hid the portal and stepped fully into the light of day?
No one expected her to choose to stay. It was the talk of the century.
As soon as she left for his planet, another scandal quickly hit. The president’s own fiancée was matched to Lilaina’s new brother-in-law. Earth had never had such drama.
Tessa, the second woman, also chose to stay on the planet Pimeon, and Earth women began to see a pattern.
The third match hit. Not a lot of details were given out, but the scandal came when the third maiden returned to Earth to make her decision.
There was none. The mating was annulled. Apparently, the chosen alien had married her sister six months earlier in a mock ceremony and didn’t realize the quickie marriage was valid. The sister, Anya, was a dancer, and it wasn’t a coincidence that the universe offered me this sign. It was fate.
Because my own daughter, Tera, was a dancer.
I hadn’t seen her in six years; President Montgomery had refused to give me her location, saying that the dance troupe was best protected by no one knowing their whereabouts, despite his promises to the contrary during the negotiation of her contract. But she had managed to come visit recently, only I wasn’t here. I’ve been waiting for a return visit ever since.
I’m hoping by the size of Dori’s eyes that Tera has found a way to come back.
“In there,” Dori hisses again, waving her hand toward the room with the deliberately closed doors.
I hurry that way, opening the huge double doors and letting them swing shut behind me.
My heart is full, wondering what she’ll look like. She’ll be beautiful, I know, but this time is the first time I’ll see her as a woman instead of a child, the teenager who’d left.
Shock makes my breath huff out of my lungs at what’s inside the room. It’s not Tera.
It’s one ofthem.
The Adroki aliens; this one in the flesh. I’ve never seen one up close but he’s absolutely terrifying.
He’s huge, a purplish-gray, writhing bulk of muscles and tentacles. He’s gritting his teeth and it makes him look harsh and unsmiling.
I move my gaze up the muscled forearms, over the enormous shoulders and across a powerful, broad chest clothed in a purple and gold uniform. His musculature is similar to humans but much heavier. He’s all hard, bulky strength, not an ounce of fat anywhere.
His face has a strong jaw and full lips, but instead of a nose, there’s a flat bone and two slits where it should be. The top of his head is smooth and swirled with intricately colored designs. His eyes are much scarier in person than in any vid I’ve watched. The sclera is yellow with long, horizontal pupils. The iris is a deep shade of black, barely discernible from the depth of his abnormally large, purple pupil.
At the bottom of the uniform, tiny gold chains dangle, merging with the mass of thick tentacles.
“MamanChristina Garrett? My name is Captain Elex Neriah Mahogani. I’m here about yourkishren, Tera and Kenneth.”