Detained by the Alien Enforcer

By Liz Paffel

Persephone

I’ve stayed hidden for years on this unstable alien planet. Humans are being abducted left and right, forced into breeding, and kept in cages like pets. I didn’t survive a career as a paramedic in violent downtown Chicago to be stuffed into a cage, thanks. I’ve already been abducted once, and I’ll die before it happens again.

I’m a masked healer now, with the only apothecary on Tevron. I’ve got a bigger secret than being human… and it’s one every skin trader in the universe would kill to find out.

I have to keep my secret safe… and I was doing fine until the alien cop detained me. Tempted me.

And discovered who I truly am and what I’m up to.

X-n

My job is to collect humans and deposit them into safety at the human colony on Enlaan. I’m recovering from unfathomable trauma and working as a S.W.A.T. Enforcer. Nothing deters me from a mission.

The moment I removed the human female’s mask, I knew I was in trouble. I've renounced my name. Locked my emotions deep inside. She makes me want to feel something besides rage. To belong to someone. These desires shame me. And when I realize what she's done... I know I can never have what I think I want.

She fights me at every turn. So, I must take drastic measures. I have no choice. I need her to save the Orin Empire, and possibly my soul.

No matter if she's willing or not.

Detained by the Alien Enforcer is the third book in the Cosmic S.W.A.T. series. It is helpful if you read the books in order for the best reading experience, but not necessary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Publishing
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094460710

Liz Paffel

Liz Paffel traded a twenty year career in emergency medical services to write about strange lights in the sky and things that go bump in the night. She's the author of science fiction romance and paranormal romance and lives in the Midwest, USA with her family.

Book preview

BEFORE

Y ou ain’t never gonna be anything, girl.

"You’re kinda pretty for a fattie. Too bad no one’s going to want you, looking like that."

"Girl, when you gonna realize that this block is your home. For-ever. There ain’t nothing better out there for you."

Stop tryin’ to be better than everyone. You ain’t nothing, girl.

It’s hard to shut off the voices in your head, especially when it’s the father who’s supposed to love you doing the talking. No amount of loud music, reading for distraction, or false words dripping from the alcohol-stained lips of random men in a bar will make it stop when it wants to be heard. I eventually learned to let words pass right through me. I became so deft at tuning my father out that, eventually, his words hit my mind like a semi-truck hitting a titanium wall. I felt the impact, but they didn’t destroy me.

Or so I thought.

By the time I’d honed that skill, a lot of sharp words had already been said and embedded into my self-esteem, my mind.

I’d already absorbed them, shards and all.

And I believed them.

Stepping into my teen years was difficult anyway, thanks to my different skin and the shape of my body that I’d learned to despise. Makeup didn’t hide the dappled brown and white patches on the left side of my face, my chest and back and arms. Exercise and starving myself didn’t change the roundness of my hips and belly and the fullness of my chest.

By the time I was sixteen I truly believed that my body was broken, I was worth nothing, and the shitty apartment I shared alone with my father on Chicago’s South side was the best I’d ever get. The booze-stained wooden floors with the rotten spot under the kitchen table covered with newspaper. The broken windows that let the harsh winter wind rip straight through. The roaches that found more to eat in our bare cupboards that I did. Women getting slapped and manhandled in the hall—drug deals often blocking my path in the lone stairwell as I left for school in the morning.

I was the only girl in my building who lived alone with her dad. Most of the other kids had moms who had boyfriends. Sometimes lots of boyfriends who came and went, but never sole-custody dads. They weren’t missing out on anything. I would have traded anything for a mother. I would have offered my soul to make my father disappear. Instead, I got older, and he got drunker while I went hungry. The assistance checks were spent at the liquor store down the street moments after being ripped from the envelope. Sometimes, he’d leave a five on the table for me to buy a weeks’ worth of food. I made do ordering off the dollar menu and shopping the cheap food aisle at the Under-A-Buck down the block. But you can only consume so many wax paper cups of cold fast-food fries, and slabs of expired canned ham before you don’t care if you ever eat again.

I knew a lot of other girls who had nothing like me. Having a mama didn’t always make their situation better, but I bet their mamas told them they looked pretty, and they got hugs at night even if their tummies growled and their toes stuck out of the worn seam of their shoes.

One day, I passed a woman not much older than my seventeen years in the stairwell. She was huddled with her face in her hands, but enough of her showed that I spied a trickle of blood from her split lower lip. I handed her a clean tissue from my pocket. She wouldn’t take it, wouldn’t even look at me, so I did something I never did to anyone in my building.

I approached her, and quietly worked my way into her space. Bending down, I cautiously put the tissue on her lip and held it there. Her eyes finally met mine, briefly, before she put her fingers over tissue and turned her whole body away.

After that, I never left my apartment without a bandage or tissues in my pocket. By the end of the day, they were mostly gone. The feeling I got from these small offerings of help made me feel both satisfied and oddly guilty. I was glad that I could help people, but I knew handing out a bandage didn’t change the situation that made them bleed in the first place. It wouldn’t stop them from needing another tissue for yet another split lip in a few days.

But it was like I could help right now, yet not have to get mired in their whole pile of dirty laundry. There was a freeing kind of usefulness in that, but I always wondered what it said about me that I didn’t want to get more involved—to help on a deeper level.

I mentioned to my father, stupidly, that I figured out what to do with my life.

He scoffed from his sunken spot on the couch. It’s ‘bout time you put that fat ass to work. The Glitter Pole is hiring. I’ll tell them you’re eighteen. They’ll love a freak like you.

I didn’t remind him that I’d turned eighteen three days before, and that my high school graduation was a week away. I didn’t tell him that I was graduating with honors. That despite everything, and because of the nothing he provided for me, I worked harder than anyone in my class. And it paid off with a GPA and testing scores good enough for me to get into pretty much any college that I wanted.

I packed my duffel bag, grabbed the hundred dollars I managed to save, and walked my fat ass to the firehouse on the other side of town and asked how I got into the paramedic program.

I wanted to help people in their most urgent time of need without having to go any farther than that. I wanted to patch them up, wave goodbye, and hopefully give them a second chance at changing their life.

Like I was about to do.

The difference between my patients and myself is that I always patched myself up. There wasn’t anyone else to do it; there never had been. And the second chance? That was on me, too. I dove in headfirst, flew through my training and aced my tests and exams. The same firehouse that I’d approached nearly three years earlier hired me right out of the program. For the first time in my life, I had a family. The men and women of House 81 were my brothers and sisters, my fathers.

My mothers.

We took care of each other, looked out for one another.

I should have listened when they said the new guy I was dating was, off. That he was too clingy, too possessive. Too much everything that he shouldn’t have been.

But for the first time, I had someone for me. Someone who liked my skin and my generous ass and appreciated how far I’d come. Our romance was super-fast and… it just swept twenty-one-year-old me off my feet.

I should have seen the red flags that I was about to become one of the women in my old stairwell. But I didn’t. That’s not the truth. I did see them, but I chose to ignore and overlook because it felt so good to be wanted.

And then it happened.

New Year’s Eve. A drive to the park to see the holiday lights, except we kept going past the park, into the dark back streets where there was nothing to see but dirty snow and garbage. I didn’t get a chance to ask what was going on when he stopped the car, got out and ripped me from the passenger side. I never screamed. It froze in my throat as this man I thought I knew suddenly morphed out of his skin and turned into something…else.

Something not human.

I thought maybe I’d had too much to drink at the bar earlier, that someone had slipped something in my champagne. His cold hands touched me, long, tentacle-like fingers wrapping around my arms, reminding me that I’d let those hands touch me naked.

He stared at me with huge, dark and unblinking eyes. The next thing I remember, I was looking up at a gloomy metallic ceiling. Quiet sobs all around me in stereo. Sniffles. Someone was screaming with a voice that was running out of strength.

I was surrounded by other people, humans, all huddled together. All… female.

We were moving in that weird elevator sort of way where you know you’re in motion, but your body feels steady.

Aliens! We’ve been abducted.

I looked toward the voice to find a blonde woman staring at me. Her eyes were crazed and glassy, as if she’d cried herself into hysteria. I instinctively reached for her hand and held it.

They’re fucking aliens!

She mumbles aliens, aliens, aliens over and over, her fingers so tight around mine that it hurts. I don’t pull away. I just sit there, trying to block out the noise the way I used to block out my father’s voice.

His words are still there, though, like always.

This is what happens when you think you’re gonna make something of yourself.

Maybe there was some truth to his words. I got cocky, thinking I could be something. I half-assed it. I chose a job that made me feel good about myself.

Maybe this was my punishment for not caring enough.

1

Persephone

Y ou’re lucky the klaedis didn’t kill you.

I stand back from the exam table and assess my work. The young male packdekke managed to crawl his way to my apothecary after the vicious centipede nearly ripped his arm off.

I’ve sewn muscle and flesh into place. You’ll need several days of rest to let the wounds heal and the tendon to recover. You have a serious injury, Jattem. If you don’t follow my instructions, your shoulder joint will lock up and you’ll lose use of your arm forever.

He turns bright yellow eyes marled with brown my way. They have a unique glow as a feature of his species, but they glimmer now with something unexpected. Huh, a shimmer of tears. I wasn’t sure this stoic species was capable of crying. Like a true packdekke, Jattem quickly gathers his composure and the tears dry. There’s nothing he can do to hide the shocked pallor to his normally pale lavender skin, though. He’s in pain and his flesh is telling the story.

I’ll give you medicine to prevent infection, but you already know that I have nothing to give you for the pain.

He looks to the ceiling. There’s nothing in my arsenal of concoctions, herbs, and plants that effectively treat pain. I’ve gathered all the medicinal things I could from this wasteland of a planet and bartered for more from the traders when they come. My supplies have seriously dwindled, and the traders haven’t been here in what I think equals about a year. It’s hard to say. Time has no real measurement here.

The mines on Tevron closed, leaving the village destitute. There are no spare credits to throw at the traders for needed goods or anything else.

The teenager’s plump lower lip quivers. I feel bad for him inside the place I reserve for sympathy. I consider the residents of this village as a makeshift family. I care about each and every one of them, but I prefer to keep a professional distance. Nothing good comes from getting my emotions involved.

I’ve been working in this apothecary since the elder packdekke healer Gubratt purchased me from a breeding auction shortly after I was abducted from Earth. She saved me from a horrible life and, after realizing I had some medical experience, made me her apprentice. She taught me everything about healing these people, but the one thing she tried to encourage in me I never found easy to give— connection.

This always surprised her. She was under the impression that humans were emotional creatures. Not that anyone on Tevron knew that I was human. Being human in this sector was dangerous, as they were coveted for breeding and often stolen or sold at any price. My original captors hadn’t forced me to strip or change into other clothes, so none had seen my skin. Gubratt did, and worried the uniqueness of my coloring would make me more desirable to skin traders. She didn’t want trouble or violence, so she hid me behind the articulated metal mask and heavy, hooded cloak.

I’ve gotten so used to wearing my mask now, it’s like a second skin, and I prefer to have it on. It helps me to keep my distance from others. I suppose it’s allowed me the opportunity to hide in plain sight that I always wished for when I lived on Earth.

Jattem’s eyes turn glassy. I suspect now that his adrenaline is fading, he’s reliving the near-death experience and all the terror that goes with it.

Putting my instruments into a tray to be sterilized, I move away from the bed to allow him some space. He takes in a breath to speak. I know what he’s going to say.

When can I hunt again?

What part about rest didn’t you understand? Is my translator glitching again?

He looks at me sharply. If I can’t hunt, then I must fight. Which would be better?

I spin to look at him with one hand on my hip. "Neither. Jattem, if I see you in the Zap, I’ll pull you out myself after I’ve kicked your ass."

Life on Tevron turned brutal for the packdekke since the shilt mines dried up. This quad of the planet was literally mined into a desolate wasteland. They had removed trees to provide access to the soil where laser diggers created caverns and massive bore holes to extract the shilt. Gaping holes yawn everywhere around the small city. It’s only a matter of time before the village is gulped down whole.

Opportunists saw the possibility of quick profit from a desperate population. The no-good, repugnant Susser syndicate moved in and created a man-eat-man platform where aliens cage fight for credits, and rations inside an electrified cage called the Zap. They abduct creatures from other planets and force them to fight, while bringing in