Feast: A Rough & Twisted Sci-Fi Romance Read online

  FEAST

  Lizzy Bequin

  Feast

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events reside solely in the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters are eighteen years of age or older.

  © 2020, Lizzy Bequin. No portion of this work can be reproduced in any way without prior written consent from the author with the exception for a fair use excerpt for review and editorial purposes.

  This title is for adults only. It contains explicit sex acts, adult themes, and material that some folks might find offensive. Please keep out of reach of children.

  lizzybequin.com

  Table of Contents

  Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue 1

  Epilogue 2

  Also by Lizzy B.

  About the Author.

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  CHAPTER 1

  A storm was coming.

  Mara Thompson glanced skyward through the dark and twisted branches that intertwined above her like a wicker cage. The low clouds showed through the interstices, gray and roiling like muddied water, bringing an early evening to the world. Thunder growled like a hungry belly, and a cold wind rattled the limbs overhead, bearing with it the scent of the coming rain.

  Mara pressed on. She had to find shelter before it started coming down. She had to find a place to hide and weather the storm. But shelter was hard to find on this harsh alien world.

  The farther Mara ventured, the denser the forest became. Dark, gnarled trees hemmed her in on all sides as if intentionally trying to slow her progress.

  And Mara’s progress was slow enough already, considering her condition.

  She was pregnant.

  Nine months. Ready to pop at any moment. The child residing inside Mara’s distended belly weighed her down. Her back ached from the strain, and her thighs burned like fire with each awkward, waddling step that she took.

  To make matters worse, she was naked too. The nith had stripped her bare.

  Those vicious aliens had taken every article of clothing from her. Everything except her silver ring inscribed with her name. A gift from an old boyfriend that she’d hung on to all these years. The nith bastards had missed that, and now she took an odd comfort in that small, simple item. It was the only remnant of her humanity that the nith had left her.

  To those horrible aliens, Mara was nothing more than an animal. A piece of chattel to be traded and sold like livestock. A piece of meat.

  Mara hated the nith. She hated and feared them.

  Not that her own fellow humans were any better. After all, weren’t they the ones who had sold her out? She had been traded to the aliens along with hundreds of thousands of other humans like herself.

  Earth’s government justified this by only selling criminals to the nith.

  And that’s what Mara was, after all.

  A criminal.

  A whore.

  Mara had only done what was necessary to make ends meet. On Earth, jobs were hard to come by, but the so-called oldest profession never went out of style. It had been unpleasant work, and dangerous too, but it had put food on the table and a roof over her head. For a while at least.

  Then she had ended up with a baby in her belly. Not long after that, she had been arrested.

  The cops didn’t really care about prostitution. They had only arrested Mara to meet their quota of criminals. It was important that there were enough human bodies to trade away to the nith every month.

  It hadn’t mattered that she was pregnant either. At the spaceport loading docks, the merchants had joked that the nith would be happy about it. Two for the price of one, they had snickered. It was a sick joke, but it wasn’t until later that Mara understood just how sick.

  She had been loaded onto a nith cargo ship along with hundreds of other criminals, and they had all been carted across the reaches of space to this horrible planet, the name of which Mara did not even know.

  She had thought they were being sold into slavery, but once they landed, she had learned otherwise.

  The place where she and her fellow humans were taken was a slaughterhouse.

  The nith were going to butcher them and use them for meat.

  Had it only been a matter of her own life, Mara might have resigned herself to that fate. But she was carrying a child in her belly, and some primal maternal instinct drove her to escape.

  Her bindings had not been attached properly, and in the noise and darkness and stench of that alien abattoir, her escape had been surprisingly easy.

  Now, in the shadows of this dark forest, the memory of that slaughterhouse was what kept her going. The sounds of human screams still echoed in her ears, and her nose remembered the stench of blood on the hot, humid air.

  Actually, the scent of blood was not merely a memory.

  Mara was bleeding now as she fled through this dark forest. There were no trails here, and the thorns and brambles bit at her naked ankles like fangs. Hard stones and twisted roots stabbed her soles and stubbed her toes.

  Still, she pressed on.

  She needed shelter. A hiding place. Somewhere safe to hunker down and ride out the coming storm.

  Lightning flickered ominously in the gathering clouds. A moment later, thunder boomed across the sky. It reverberated through the forest around her and rattled her own weary bones. Flurries of wet snow sifted down through the trees.

  Mara’s head ached. Her mouth was dry, and her heart felt like it would explode from overexertion.

  She wanted so badly to stop. To give up. To just lie down and fall asleep forever.

  But another peal of thunder roused her senses and spurred her on. If she stopped now, the nith would surely catch up with her. They would take her back to that slaughterhouse again. Her and the baby inside her too.

  Suddenly, Mara halted.

  Ahead of her, the shadowy foliage opened up, revealing a mountain blocking her path. A steep incline of scree and rubble angled upward into a sheer rock face that soared hundreds of feet into the air. Even a professional climber wouldn’t be able to scale that stone wall. Certainly a pregnant woman who was dying of exhaustion couldn’t do it.

  Tears sprang to Mara’s eyes, blurring her vision.

  So this was it. The end of the line.

  If exhaustion didn’t kill her, exposure to the coming storm certainly would. Her skin was already wet and chilled from a residue of melted snowflakes. And even if she somehow survived the elements, she would only face a far worse fate.

  The nith would find her. They would take her back to that place. They would slaughter her and eat her.

  Mara’s skin crawled at the thought.

  The baby stirred inside her, and she smoothed a hand over her belly.

  “I’m sorr
y, little one,” she whispered. “I tried. I really did.”

  She smudged away the tears with the heel of her palm and looked around for the most comfortable place to lie down and die.

  Then something caught her eye.

  She hadn’t seen it before in the growing darkness, but there it was. A small opening at the base of the rock wall practically beckoning her inside.

  It was a cave.

  A shelter.

  Mara’s weary heart lifted inside her chest. Renewed energy surged through her cold limbs. If she could just make it to that cave, there might be some hope.

  But first she would have to climb the steep grade of rubble.

  Mara started to ascend, picking her way up the loose boulders and busted gravel that gnawed at the raw soles of her bare feet. It was slow going, but she was making progress. If she could just reach that cave before the storm hit.

  Suddenly, a sharp pain clenched at her lower abdomen, doubling her over. Wetness burst and spilled down her thighs.

  Oh God. Not yet…

  Mara scrambled up the incline with renewed vigor. Loose stones rolled and fell away beneath her feet. One time she nearly lost her balance, and for a heart-stopping moment she wheeled her arms as gravel slid under her heels.

  She caught herself and climbed onward.

  More contractions stabbed at Mara’s core. Her lower back ached like a bone bruise. A hot surge of nausea began clawing its way up her throat.

  Not yet. Please, not yet.

  Just a little farther…

  At last Mara reached the top of the incline on buckling legs. Above, the storm had started to break. The wet snow had transformed into half-frozen tears of sleet that pelted her back and shoulders with stinging cold. In front of her, the dark mouth of the cave yawned. It seemed to exude a warm and welcoming breath scented of granite and charred wood.

  As she stepped across the threshold, Mara’s legs finally gave out. She dropped to her knees, no longer able to stand or walk.

  She crawled the rest of the way into the cave on all fours like an animal.

  The floor of the cavern was cold but mercifully smooth. The stone walls and ceiling shielded her from the sleet and biting wind. Mara crawled several yards inside and flopped onto her back.

  Her contractions were coming faster now. Faster and harder. The pain was almost too intense to bear, but Mara bore it in silence. She was simply too exhausted to even groan or whimper.

  Her heart squeezed weakly in her chest. The blood felt thick and sluggish in her veins. Her consciousness was gradually slipping away.

  Outside, blue-white lightning flashed, illuminating the interior of the cavern. That’s when Mara noticed the drawings on the stone walls.

  Her pulse jumped.

  They were like the cave paintings Mara had seen in history books back on Earth. Only these drawings looked fresh. Black lines drawn with the charred end of a stick. Animals were depicted. Bizarre alien creatures Mara had never seen before, and others that she recognized as nith. Tall, hideous beings with black scales and long crocodile snouts.

  But there were other figures drawn there too. Figures that looked like men.

  Mara blacked out from pain and exhaustion.

  When she came too, she was aware of something pushing below her. It was her own body, but in her delirium, it seemed to be miles away.

  Pushing. Pushing…

  Mara slipped in and out of consciousness. She was only dimly aware of the storm raging outside. Of pain, of something being expelled from her body.

  When she came too for the last time, a tiny, fragile voice was shrieking. The sound reverberated off the stone walls. It was incredibly loud. Louder even than the voice of the storm outside. Angrier too.

  Something squirmed between her legs. Tiny feet kicked at her inner thighs.

  Mara tried to sit up, tried to move into a position where she could see her child, but her muscles wouldn’t obey. Her body was dead weight, heavy as a bag of sand, insensate as the stones of the cave where she lay dying.

  Something moved at the entrance of the cave.

  The sound of footsteps.

  With a great effort, Mara managed to loll her head to the side, turning her eyes toward the cavern’s mouth. Another burst of lightning lit up the opening, backlighting a figure who stood there in silhouette.

  It was not a nith. No, it was far too big for that.

  It looked like a man, a primitive man dressed only in a simple fur kilt, his muscles hard and rough hewn like a chunk of mountain rock come to life. Though she could not see his face, he seemed to be staring at Mara. Staring at her and the wriggling, screaming baby between her legs.

  That was the last thing Mara Thompson saw. A moment later, her exhausted heart stopped working—a clock that had finally wound itself down. Her ribs squeezed one last time, pushing a final breath from her lungs, which she used to form a word. A single plaintive syllable.

  “Please…”

  Mara closed her eyes, and the darkness took her.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rolf stood at the entrance of his den, struggling to process what he was seeing. Behind him, lightning flared and thunder rumbled through the stones of the mountain while cold sleet peppered his bare back.

  He had been caught out in the storm like a fool, and now he was freezing. His long hair and grizzled beard were dripping wet, and so was the kilt of animal pelts that covered his lower body.

  He needed to get inside and start a fire. Get himself warm again. But for the space of a dozen heartbeats or more, he just stood fixed in place, staring wide-eyed and gape-jawed at the two uninvited creatures that lay on the floor of his den, one big and one small.

  Another strobe of lightning illuminated the scene with a shuddering glow.

  The bigger creature of the two was not actually very big at all. Far, far smaller than an ukkur like Rolf.

  Yet it had an ukkur shape to it. Two arms, two legs, a head atop its shoulders and all the rest. But the facial features were different, fine and delicate. No tusks protruding from the lower jaw. As for the body, the muscles were small and weak beneath the soft flesh.

  There were other differences too. Most notably, the large mounds of flesh on the creature’s chest. And down between its legs, something appeared to be very, very wrong with its piss stick.

  The creature’s lips moved. A sound came out that could have been a word, though it was not any language Rolf had heard before. In fact, it had never even occurred to Rolf before that there might be languages other than the one that he spoke.

  The lightning stopped, and the cave was cast back into shadow.

  Rolf’s vision glittered as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  Something was shrieking. Howling in rage. That sound was coming from the other tinier creature between the bigger one’s legs. Rolf could scarcely believe that such a tiny thing could make such a racket. It was even noisier than the roar of thunder that followed the lightning flashes.

  Rolf advanced, wincing in pain as the sharp, shrill cries stung his ears.

  “Shut up,” he growled.

  The little creature did not understand. If anything, its screams redoubled at the sound of Rolf’s growl. Had he frightened it? Whatever the case, the tiny thing was clearly determined to continue expressing its utter dissatisfaction with the state of affairs.

  Fine. Rolf would deal with the little one later.

  First, however, he wished to inspect the larger creature more closely.

  It seemed to be dead already. When Rolf touched the body at the places where there should have been a heartbeat, he felt nothing. Not even the merest flicker of a pulse. Cautiously, he held a finger in front of the creature’s nose. No breath either.

  Perhaps it had given all of its breath to the little one. That one’s lungs were still working well enough.

  Rolf studied the big creature a little more.

  His attention went to those mounds on its chest which were tipped with pink nubs. Pale fluid had
spilled there. Rolf gathered some on his fingertip and tasted it. Warm and sweet.

  Was it food?

  Could this creature produce its own food?

  Stranger and stranger.

  Rolf examined lower. When another strobe of lightning lit the cave, he noticed a marking on the animal’s hip. A series of perfectly straight black lines etched into the flesh. Clearly not natural. That had to be a nith marking. A sign of ownership.

  Had this thing been a nith pet then?

  More lightning, and something glinted on the dead creature’s hand. It was a metal ring around one of the fingers. Rolf worked it free. Metal was hard to come by out here in the wilderness. He slipped the ring into the pouch at his hip for safe keeping.

  At last Rolf turned his attention to the other creature. The tiny one with the loud voice.

  He crouched over the little shrieking thing, waiting until another flare of lightning let him get a good look at it. What he saw was an ugly little wriggling animal. Utterly weak and defenseless. Eyes sealed shut, red face twisted in rage, skin slathered in white mucus and blood.

  Red blood, like an ukkur.

  There was a tube attached to its small belly, and that connected between the bigger dead creature’s legs. In the darkness, it took Rolf a long moment to figure out what he was even looking at.

  At first he had assumed the tube was the dead creature’s piss stick. What else could it be? But that didn’t make sense. For one thing, it was much too long. And for another, why would a piss stick have a tiny screaming monster attached to the end?

  It made no sense. None at all.

  Rolf gave that cord a tug. Something soft and wet and smelling of blood fell from between the dead creature’s legs.

  So, the creature didn’t have a piss stick at all.

  It had a hole between its legs.

  Is that where the small one had come from? Had it come from inside the bigger creature? It certainly seemed that way. Rolf’s brain churned with a welter of thoughts that were as wild and chaotic as the storm raging outside.

  It crossed Rolf’s mind that he could cook and eat these creatures. After all, it had been a difficult year, and meat was hard to come by.