Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43557 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 218(@200wpm)___ 174(@250wpm)___ 145(@300wpm)
The lower I get, the louder the voices become. I feel the love of my fans wrapping around me from below. When I let go and drop, I feel dozens of hands catch me. These are the people I owe my life to. These are the people who will not let me fall.
I am surrounded by love and positive energy. The first thing I do is take my jacket off and let it flow into the crowd. People take it and immediately begin to share it among themselves, each taking a piece and passing it on until there is no jacket, just dozens of bright yellow scraps.
“LYRIC! GET OVER HERE. NOW!”
A voice booms like literal thunder over the crowd. It’s not just incredibly loud, like the volume of your average fighter jet taking off, it’s that it goes all the way through each of us, immediately destroying the good vibes and replacing them with mad dad energy.
The crowd freezes and then starts to scatter. People shriek and flee at the sight of Zayne. We’re still not really used to aliens on Earth, even though Earth is technically an alien colony at this point. We’re trying to adjust to the strangeness of discovering that the universe is full of life and music and money. It’s an exciting time, and a scary time.
Zayne inhales deeply, opens his mouth, and breathes a stream of dragon fire over the top of the crowd. It’s a warning shot designed to make those who are not yet fleeing, flee. And it works.
Even the bravest and most open-minded of my fans lose their nerve as the air above their heads turns to roiling fire, singeing the tops of hair and wigs and threatening to barbecue anybody who decided to climb on top of anybody else’s shoulders.
No matter how cool humans are, when a massive, potentially fire-breathing beast appears out of the front doors of the hotel lobby, we very quickly become very much not cool with any of this. We don’t like aliens anymore. We’re afraid of aliens, and we all want to run.
The only problem is, the people at the very back of the crowd haven’t seen him yet, because they’re almost a block away. And that means there’s suddenly a surge of people in a direction they cannot go. This idiot is going to get us all killed.
“STOP!” I yell at Zayne.
But he doesn’t care about any of the other people in this mob. He only has big, glittering eyes for me. Zayne is several feet taller than anybody else, and he comes wading through the crowd, scattering people in front of him like an icebreaking ship through Arctic waters.
I am So. Fucking. Pissed.
And It. Doesn’t. Matter. At. All.
My big alien bodyguard grabs me under the arms and physically hauls me up and over the crowd, holding me over his shoulders like a farmhand with a bag of grain. I am cursing and squirming, telling him to put me down and go away, but he hauls me back into the hotel as though I am about as sentient as that aforementioned sack.
Zayne
They’ve already ripped her clothing to shreds, and they were going to start tearing her into pieces too if they could. I feel hands clawing at my scales, curses and hisses and sounds of insane desire. I can hear my client’s outraged shrieks as well, as she takes complete and total offense at being rescued from near certain death.
It’s not uncommon for starlets to have a lack of understanding regarding the seriousness of their situation. They think everybody loves them, because they love themselves and they think fame is about being adored. It’s not. Fame is just as much about being hated as it is about being loved. It is about being envied as much as it is being celebrated.
The hotel’s security closes the doors and arms the weaponry to suppress the crowd if necessary. I don’t bother looking over my shoulder, I just carry Lyric into the elevator and keep her over my shoulder as she curses, wails, and makes demands I have no interest in entertaining.
“Put me down!” She makes the demand stridently as I get into the elevator. I ignore it stoically.
“Don’t make me hit you,” she tries again.
I laugh at that threat. She has no idea what she has coming. It is ironic that she has the absolute nerve to threaten me physically. I need to establish some boundaries with this brat human, and I need to do it now.
I follow my laugh up with a good spank across her ass. My palm easily covers both of her cheeks, and the sound she makes as it lands is very satisfying indeed.
“How dare you! I’m going to get you fired! I’m going to get you fucking fired!”
Her threats only earn her more pain. I land a great many more satisfying swats to her ass, feeling the pleasing way her taut cheeks jiggle beneath my palm, and the just-as-satisfying gasps of outrage and pain — which is not truly pain. Real pain sounds different. Her wails and whines are performative.