Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

see now, in his peripheral vision, the man who held him fast by the neck. Ratt couldn’t see much, but he had the impression that his captor was similarly dressed to the many palace guards he had seen coming and going all night. Ratt’s mind was a maelstrom of conflicting emotions: fear, audacity, courage, terror.

Continuing to smile, the woman playfully bit her bottom lip with a sharp, golden canine. The light from the torches caught the gold and glinted in Ratt’s double eyes.

“The queen asked you a question, meat!” the man barked and tightened his superhuman grip. Ratt heard his neck pop and felt a trickle of warm blood running down the side of his neck, under his shirt collar, and down his chest. The cold breeze felt cooler against the warmth of his blood. He made an involuntary whimpering sound, and the man relaxed his grip slightly, not as much as before, but less than the excruciating crush that he’d felt for a moment. The man noticed the crimson rivulet running down Ratt’s neck and announced, “This one is ripe!”

“I’m not a witch. I, I just got too close to a Drop,” Ratt grunted.

“And why are you down here, meat?” Sofia pressed closer and ran her tongue over the pointed tips of her gold-clad canines.

“I got lost, I heard screams,” Ratt tried to explain, unable to keep the fear inside from raising the pitch of his voice higher than normal.

“Awww. You got wost.” Sofia mocked Ratt with feigned sympathy, tilting her chin and pouting her plump lips, causing their deep red tint and black outline to stand out all the more. She stepped toward him slowly with a gait he had seen before, and it made him tremble with fear.

It was the way Lucy walked. It was the way a jaguar walked when approaching its prey. It was simultaneously alluring and frightening. She tapped at her lip with one of her impossibly long, lacquered fingernails. Ratt secretly thanked the gods that it wasn’t her nails digging into the side of his neck. She stepped as close as one could get. She smelled like expensive perfume. Her manicured hand disappeared from Ratt’s line of sight, and he felt her cup his balls. Ratt inhaled sharply from shock.

“You didn’t answer the question, meat. Do you want to play with us? Eating makes me so horny,” she whispered lustily into his ear, and nibbled on his earlobe. The sensation was pleasurable at first, but then she bit down hard, turning his ear flesh into a torn, bloody flap.

“Ahh!” Ratt exclaimed, despite his attempt to hold back the pain and appear tough.

He wasn’t sure if playing with them meant getting laid or getting eaten, but he knew he wasn’t interested in either option. He hesitated to answer and wiggled uncomfortably in the grip of the vampire duo. Sofia signaled her impatience by tightening her claw-like hold on his nuts. The pain was extraordinarily unique and mighty. Ratt moaned as a sickness rose through his lower abdomen up into chest. He squirmed and would have collapsed to the cold floor if the vampire behind him were not holding him up by the neck.

His moan turned to a high-pitched shriek as her nails came closer together. He was sure that his skin was punctured in more than one place, and his groin felt wet, like he had pissed himself. His mind became plagued with unwanted, white-hot images of cherry tomatoes and grapes sliding onto a kabob skewer.

As if by some blessed act of providence, her sadistic game stopped suddenly, and she all but brushed Ratt aside, her attention caught but something urgent.

“Raphael! They are getting away!” she shrieked, releasing Ratt’s traumatized scrotum and running past him.

The man, Raphael, also released his grip on Ratt and ran after Sofia.

Cursing himself for not being strong like Lucy, or the new guys, Jon and Carbine, Ratt slumped to the ground like a tired canvas bag filled with ground maize.

They? he wondered as he lay there. He rolled over, turning his gaze out to the arena, and watched in helpless grief as Sofia and Raphael leapt down from the landing onto the ground below and ran down the fleeing woman and her bundle of rags, which had begun to make sounds horrifyingly like the cries of a human baby.

Oh God, no.

Ratt hated himself. He was the helpless child who stood by and watched his family shot down like dogs in the street all over again.

The human woman, clutching her child, tried to run, but Raphael sprang into the air and landed in front of her, cutting her off. The vampire thug turned and spread his arms out wide, shimmying to the left and then the right as the terrified mother tried in vain to dart around him.

In the time it took for the mother's panicked heart to pulse a single beat more, Sofia was upon her.

The queen of New Puebla grabbed her human ward from behind by the hair and pulled her to the ground. The mother spun around so fast her feet left the ground, and she was thrown several meters when Sofia released her grip. The mother hit the ground and slid across the dirt floor.

Somehow, she’d managed to maintain her grip on the crying baby through the spin and slide. Her screams for mercy joined the wails of her child, but she remained on the ground.

Ratt could take no more and willed his fear and pain away. He pushed himself up and staggered to the edge of the landing just as Raphael and Sofia pounced on the mother and child like two cats springing onto a trapped mouse.

“Stop it, you animals!” Ratt yelled. Both vampires heard him and, surprisingly, stopped what they were doing to look up at him. Even from this distance and with only the light of the wavering torch flame to illuminate the scene, Ratt could see that both Raphael and Sofia had bloody maws. They looked the way a toddler did on