Deven's Leap of Faith (Triads in Blue Book 10) Read online

  Deven’s Leap of Faith

  by

  Alyssa Hope

  Text copyright 2017

  Alyssa Hope

  All Rights Reserved

  Is it necessary to say that any resemblance between aliens (blue or otherwise) and any living people (real or otherwise) is purely coincidental?

  All beings engaged in sexual acts are over the legal age of consent in their own particular universes.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  Chapter 1.

  He ran until he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even think any more. He could still hear them behind him, so he kept going, with the brush beating against his bare legs, and the harsh leather collar chafing on the soft skin of his neck. None of this seemed to make any sense, but he was certain that stopping would be far worse than any injury he did to himself while running.

  It had started a few weeks ago with arguments between his parents, more so than usual, and then his mother walking out in the middle of the day, when his father was out in the fields. She had kissed his forehead as she left, and apologized, although he didn’t know for what. She had never been able to protect him from his father, protect any of them, and he didn’t expect her to now, whatever was about to happen. This time, though, she hadn’t come back, and his father didn’t seem to expect that she would.

  Maybe she had gone to stay with her married sister who he had never seen? Women were not allowed to live by themselves, so that must be it. He was old enough to take care of himself now, and happy enough working on the farm, so it didn’t matter.

  That’s what he thought until the men came. There were two of them, and he disliked both of them on sight. There was something wrong with them, with the way they looked at him, and he turned to leave the room but his father stopped him.

  “Take off your clothes.”

  He stared in disbelief, but his father raised a hand so he stripped off the tunic and loose pants that he wore. Fathers were to be obeyed. The two men circled him like predators around a wounded animal, and the look on their faces was greedy. He tried to cover his genitals but his father slapped him, hard.

  “Stand up straight. They want to look at you.”

  That was obvious.

  “He’s a virgin, untouched,” his father said. “I’ve kept him close to home.”

  That made no sense at all. Why would these men care …

  One of them grinned, and ran a hand down his pale back and over his rounded ass. He tried to move away, but his father raised a hand again and he froze in place.

  The shorter one smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “Pretty. Very pretty, and you’ve got a good start on the training. The men will like him, and he’ll bruise nicely if he disobeys, won’t he?”

  That one reached out and fondled his genitals, and he cried out in protest. The hand tightened brutally, and he bent over from the pain, gasping.

  “Don’t pull away from me, boy, you’re going to be mine, and I’ll do what I want with you.”

  He looked at his father in horror, hoping to be rescued, but his father just looked out the window, with his hands in his pockets now. He was smiling. How could he be smiling while this was going on?

  The one behind him slapped his ass. “Good little red-head, they’re rare. We’ll break him in, get him trained, then if we don’t keep him for ourselves we’ll maybe sell him to the men in one of the mining colonies. They’ll love him! You have a deal.”

  Some coins passed between the men and his father, and then one of the men snapped a heavy leather collar around his neck, grinning nastily at him. The man reached for a leash that was hanging ready on his belt, and it was at that point that Deven came out of his shock and realized the awful truth. He had just been sold as … what … a whore, a sex slave? No …

  He had heard rumors of such things, and most of the boys he had grown up with had disappeared, but his father had said they went off to work in town, and he had believed him, even though he’d never heard from his friends again, and some of them had been quite young.

  He didn’t even think about the consequences or where he was going, he just had to get away. He was out the open window and running, and heard shouting behind him, and then laughter.

  “There’s a tracker in the collar, so we’ll get him back easy enough ...”

  He clawed at the collar, but it was locked on, and he couldn’t get it open. He ran, pulling at the collar as he went until his throat was raw and bloody, and then he just ran.

  There must be a way out, somewhere to go, but he couldn’t think of anything. His mother hadn’t been able to protect herself, let alone him, and he had indeed been kept isolated, with only the most rudimentary of educations, from tablets he’d read when he was supposed to be working. He had few skills that he could sell to an employer. He stopped to catch his breath, and shuddered. His father had found something worth selling him for, but he’d rather die than belong to anyone to be used as a whore.

  He headed toward the neighboring farms, but his friends from there had disappeared last year. He thought about the main road to town, but he was naked, and where was he going to go in town?

  He found himself circling back and around towards the cliffs, and realized that he had already made up his mind. They might think they owned his body, but he could set his spirit free and then they’d have nothing.

  He thought he heard a voice in his head, ‘Hang on, little one, we’re coming for you’, and it was a kinder voice than that of the two men behind him, but he knew that was just an illusion from running too much and being short on oxygen. Hallucinations, brought on by desperation. He thought he must have read that somewhere.

  He was almost within sight of the cliff edge when he saw a small shuttle craft sitting there, with the door open. He came to a panting halt, and then approached it cautiously. There was no-one in it, and for a minute he thought he’d found his escape. Had the gods brought him this little space craft so he could get away? He slipped inside, but there was nothing about the control panels that he recognized, and it didn’t respond to voice commands. Not surprisingly, it was far more advanced that the old farm vehicle he was used to driving. There was nowhere inside of it for him to hide, either.

  It felt good, though, almost safe, and he wanted to stay there, but then he heard the two men yelling behind him, and knew he’d run out of time. He bolted out of the ship and heard more yelling, and turned towards the cliffs. He would be a bird and fly away. Surely the gods would take mercy on his soul.

  Some of the yelling was different now, more like the voice he’d heard in his head when he was hallucinating.

  Someone was yelling for him to stop or they’d shoot him, someone else was yelling for him to run towards them so they could save him. That, he decided, was the gods, calling him to the cliffs. He didn’t even slow down at the edge of the ravine, leaping into the air to be free. As he became airborne, he heard one of the kinder voices yelling.

  ‘Nevi, no, get him …’

  Then he had the breath knocked out of his lungs as he was tackled in mid-air over the bottomless ravine by a large body who yelled, inexplicably, ‘Now, two of us ...’

  He did fly then, in a strange way, and ended up still in someone’s strong arms in something that looked like a building but without any windows. Had the slave buyers caught him after all? No, this felt too safe for that. He twisted around to see who was holding him, and thought he must be
hallucinating again. It wasn’t one of the slavers, and it wasn’t like anything or anyone he’d ever seen before.

  The being holding him was almost the same shape as a human, but completely hairless and more rounded, and a rich shade of blue. All over that he could see, the skin was blue, nearly the same blue as the sky on a summer day. Was he flying after all? He gasped and tried to pull away from the being, but it held on tighter.

  “Whoa, just wait, little one …”

  He didn’t want to wait, he’d already had enough for one day. He sank his teeth into the being’s arm, and then froze in astonishment when it bled in blue. The being took a firmer grasp on him rather than letting go, pulling him back against a wall. A panel in the side of the building slid open and the little shuttle craft he had seen beside the cliffs flew in and landed, giving him an excellent view past it of where they were. Not in a building, not beside the cliffs, but up in the sky, over the planet.

  There wasn’t anywhere to run to anymore. The flying option was still there, at least for a moment, but then the panel slid shut.

  “It’s alright, they won’t find you here, little one.”

  He shook his head and managed to pull his thoughts together enough to point at his collar. “Collar. Tracker.” Whoever these people were, maybe they were better than the two his father had sold him to, and anyway he wasn’t keen on the two different lots of them fighting over him. He was pretty sure he couldn’t win that battle.

  The being holding him said something to the one getting out of the shuttle craft, and between the two of them they managed to remove the collar. They placed it into a heavy looking box beside the wall.

  “They won’t be able to track that now.”

  One of them reached to touch the bloody mess that was Deven’s throat, but he got his feet on the ground and backed away from them, still looking for a way out. He wasn’t going to be anyone’s slave.

  “Not our slave, sweet one, our beloved. But right now, you need to see the doctor, please. Will you come with us?”

  It was a request and not a demand, so he hesitantly obeyed. They both had weapons, and the minute he could relieve one of them of a gun he would have a few more choices. Hopefully the guns wouldn’t be as different to operate as the little craft had been.

  “You have lots of choices, little one, and you don’t need to take a gun away from either of us to be safe. We’ll protect you.”

  Forget that, he thought, I want to be able to protect myself. I’m not a child or a toy.

  “No, you’re not. Although you are beautiful, sweet one.”

  It was only then that he realized that they were reading his thoughts. He thought about the call he’d heard, that had interrupted his flight to the gods. Or had it? Were these gods? Gods didn’t bleed, though, in blue or any other color. He was fairly sure about that.

  “You’re Nevi?” He looked at the one who had caught him.

  The one who had come in the shuttle craft stared at him. “You heard that, when I was calling Nevi?”

  He shrugged, wondering if he should have or not. Which would bring the least punishment?

  “No answer brings punishment, little one. Come on, we’ll go to the doctor. And our Captain will want to talk to you.”

  The thought of there being more of these strange people didn’t make him feel any better, and he wondered which of them he would be given to, and how to get away again. His wild thoughts were interrupted.

  “Little one? It’s alright. I am Nevi, this is Eva. Who are you?”

  He couldn’t think of a reason not to tell them. It was old women’s stories that giving someone your name gave them power over you. And those evil men with his father hadn’t asked his name, or wanted to know it, and they’d thought they had power over him … He shuddered again.

  “Deven, my name is Deven. And I am not little.” For some reason it felt better to assert his name, to make it clear that he was a person and not a thing.

  They moved through a long hallway through the ship, and everywhere there were more of these blue people. Gods. When the evil men had talked about giving him to some men, would there have been this many? Would he even survive rape by this many?

  “Don’t think about it, little one, Deven. You aren’t going to be given to anyone. You are the only one who can give yourself, and then only to those you choose.”

  With his father’s bruise darkening on his cheek, the bloodied skin on his throat burning and his legs bleeding in twenty places, he doubted that, but he was getting too tired to argue.

  They stopped at a door, and one of them looked at him.

  “The doctor’s name is Karo. The human with him is Tad, and he is the beloved of the doctor.”

  There was a human? Surely a human would help him to escape from all these alien things.

  “Escape to what, little one? To free your soul over a cliff? No, there are no slaves on this ship, and no one here is used, abused or raped. We are not things, we are people, our ship is the Crusader and what we do is free slaves. This is a good place to be, trust us.”

  He swore again at the knowledge that these ones could read his mind, and then tried to keep his thoughts quiet. That was lost when they opened the door to chaos. Big blue things, or rather people, a smaller dark person, several humans, and an assortment of babies of all colors. He wasn’t sure what was happening but the babies seemed to be winning, and he smiled before he could help himself. He didn’t see the relieved smiles that the two blue ones with him exchanged over his head.

  The one that must be Karo looked startled when he saw them enter, and then shocked when he saw Deven’s bleeding throat and all the cuts and scrapes on his legs.

  ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear anything over this. Baby weighing day. Babies all go away now, maybe they can go play in the pools, Jevan? Is Oki coming down …’

  ‘Captain Oki, sir, please come in.’

  The Captain was the largest of any of the blue people that Deven had seen so far, and he flattened himself against the wall in the hopes of being invisible. Oki looked around until he saw him, and frowned.

  ‘Nevi, what …?’

  ‘We couldn’t find out anything about any of our own people, sir, but we interrupted a transaction, this one’s father was selling him to some slavers, and he ran. He was about to throw himself off a cliff, so we had to intervene. They had put a tracking collar on him and he was trying to pull it off, that’s why his neck is so raw.’

  Tired as he was, Deven had just about had it. “I have a voice.”

  ‘You can hear us?’

  “Obviously.”

  ‘We are mindtalking, not out loud.’

  “Oh.”

  He thought about it, and focused. ‘Like this?’

  And then he heard Nevi say, ‘He is ours …’ The door didn’t open automatically for him the way it had seemed to for everyone else, and he hit it so hard he knocked himself out, still screaming inside as he slid to the ground. They had lied to him, after all.

  Chapter 2.

  ‘That was clever, Nevi. I can’t think of anything you could have said that would have scared him more.’

  ‘Well, I just wanted to let the Captain know that we had no choice but to rescue him, that this little human is part of our triad …’

  ‘And he almost dented the door trying to get away. Clever. And he is awake now and pretending to be asleep still, so keep an eye on your gun.’

  ‘Well, at least we found out where these young humans are coming from now, despite the humans claiming they don’t sell slaves.’

  A different voice said, ‘They don’t, probably just the one colony, and now the Ambassador can deal with it. And we still haven’t found our Lost Children that Caleb’s map says might be here.’

  ‘Deven? We know you’re awake.’

  He didn’t want to open his eyes and have to look at these two who had lied to him, after he thought he could trust them. He couldn’t pretend to be asleep forever, either, even if the bed was softer
than any he’d ever slept in and the blanket they had wrapped around him was warm. He opened his eyes slowly, and stared at the wall. That was safe, the wall hadn’t hurt him. At least not yet.

  ‘The door wouldn’t have hurt you if you hadn’t tried to hurt it first.’

  ‘Deven, you don’t know anything about our people, do you?’

  He shrugged, still staring at the wall. It was none of their business what he knew, or how ignorant he was about the world outside of his father’s farm.

  ‘Our people, the blue people, bond – mate – in triads, and we do it for life. Nevi and I knew as soon as we were on that planet that you were our beloved, the third in our triad. But it is freely offered and freely given, always. When Nevi told the Captain that you were ours, he meant that we recognized you as our triad partner. Not that we owned you or anything like that. There is a bond, and I think that if you give yourself a chance, give us a chance, you’ll feel it too. We three are one. We love you and will protect you, always.’

  That didn’t make any sense to him, so he didn’t say anything. Not saying anything was usually safer, and the concepts of loving and protecting were foreign to him.

  ‘Deven? What do bonds, matings, look like on your world?’

  He knew the answer to that. It had been beat into him, and into his mother in front of him.

  ‘Fathers are always right. Women shut up and do as they are told. The mating part, I just heard through the wall, but the man is usually drunk and there is a lot of hitting and crying. My sisters were given to whoever my father decided, and we never saw them again. And it was my father who did this to my cheek and tried to sell me to those men, to be used as a whore.’

  He added, out of fairness, ‘I only know my own house. My friends from the neighboring farms went away and never came back, but I don’t know why.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Captain?’

  He rolled over, holding the blanket around himself, surprised that the Captain was still in the room. So was the Medical one, it turned out, and they were all staring at him. He wrapped the blanket around himself even tighter.