Suck (Feed and Feast #1)

Prologue

EVEREST

Iwas fifteen when the monsters arrived, fresh in a wave of grief, having lost my parents in the latest of the pandemics that were sweeping the globe. My mom and dad were older—no business having children when they did—but I’d loved them.

A lot.

And then the illness swept through, leaving me bedridden for weeks and them six feet beneath soft earth.

I was too sick to attend their funerals.

I came back to full consciousness with a state worker holding a duffel bag, telling me I would be living with my Aunt Sheryl and Uncle Aaron, two people who didn’t like me very much.

And I didn’t really like them either.

The only kindness about it was that they lived two miles away from my old home, which was now on the market, along with all my parents’ old stuff.

But I didn’t lose my friends. I didn’t lose my school—once I was well enough to go back.

My best friend came over every day, and bit by bit, I started to heal.

But as the rift inside me began to close, a larger one within our tiny town of Grand River, Michigan, was opening. It was a gateway into another world, another dimension full of creatures so profoundly unlike us that no one really knew what to think.

But the portal near Lake Superior didn’t open with war and destruction like so many movies and books had predicted. It was a polite, soft knock from another world, and then they stepped out.

The Vyastil.

A military border was set up around the perimeter of the city, and we were quarantined in our homes, glued to every news streaming network as we watched for something to happen.

Movement, maybe.

A figure of some sort.

A message.

It took six weeks before something happened, when each of us caught a single glimpse of a blue, opalescent figure with sea-green hair before all the cameras cut out.

And then there was nothing for eight full days.

My aunt and uncle, who normally didn’t want my friends over, allowed Zane to stay with us.

Probably only to keep me from asking them incessant questions and to save them from having to field my minor panic attacks—but whatever the reason, I appreciated it.

He and I barely moved from my bed, laptop open on our thighs, staring at the livestream of the portal as we waited to find out whether or not these things—the Vyastil—were some kind of alien beings who were taking over the world.

The transmission came at one in the morning. The exhausted-looking governor was flanked by the National Guard with the blue—for lack of a better word—monster at his side.

“They mean us no harm.”

“Famous last words,” Zane whispered.

“The Vyastil are offering us peace, health, and prosperity. We are currently negotiating the terms of their stay here and everywhere else the portals have appeared. Their numbers are vast, but we are a welcoming species, and we’re happy to come to an agreement.”

And then the transmission cut.

“Everest?” Zane murmured.

“Hmm?”

“That’s going to go over like a turd in a tub,” Zane said.

I sighed, but I couldn’t disagree. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

And I was right.

The monsters, as people were calling them, were offering peace, but humans—as we know—were not a peaceful people. Before we even got a glimpse of them beyond the figure who was brave enough to speak with human leaders, there were protests.

Riots.

Looting.

There were factions of people who were ready to go to war, and factions of people ready to give themselves over to their new monster overlords.

Most of us, of course, simply sat around and waited as information trickled in. They began appearing more and more in the streets, watching, staring, touching whatever came within reach of their long, willowy limbs.

They were gorgeous, too—otherworldly and kind of terrifying, but nothing about them seemed hostile.

If they had gender, it didn’t show on their bodies the way it showed in humans.

They were flat-chested, long-limbed, tall, and had long hair in a wide variety of colors.

Each of them had eyes like an oil spill over hot summer pavement—a rainbow reflection, like a galaxy over pitch-black sclera that locked on you and didn’t let go.

They had tails that they kept wrapped around their legs, thick and ending at a blunt point.

Their ears were slightly pointed, and long, silver hoops dangling from their lobes. Some of them had rings in their noses as well—and later, we’d come to find out some were pierced in their delicate places, but that information was withheld for quite some time.

Until humans started interacting with them in ways no one would have suspected anyone would be willing to do.

I was one of the more curious humans—wanting to venture out and maybe have an encounter, but I was banned from leaving my house to try.

They were always clothed in flowing robes, opaque but thin enough to make out their muscular outline, and their clawed feet were always bare.

Some began adapting to human styles of clothing, which the news loved reporting on, but none of them would speak to journalists, and it left us to speculate.

Why were they here? And what exactly did they want from us as they adapted to our society?

After they began showing themselves in public more often, the second announcement came, this time from an appointed global official who was handling the “monster invasion,” as my aunt and uncle were calling it.

“We’ve begun a human-alien integration program.

The Vyastil are offering us technology that our world has desperately needed for some time, and in exchange, they’re asking to know us.

But their requirement for this program is that the participants must be unmarried, semen-producing people over the age of twenty-one and under the age of sixty.

We’ve set up a website, and everyone who meets these conditions is required to apply.

Training will be provided, and the volunteers and their families will be compensated. ”

Something in my chest jumped. A strange desire—an almost desperate need.

“The hell this is legal,” my uncle whispered, horrified. “There are going to be protests. People are going to stage a fucking coup.”

“I’m going to sign up as soon as I can,” I whispered.

My aunt stared at me in horror. “The hell you are, Everest.”

When I turned twenty-one, she wouldn’t be able to stop me, so I said nothing else as I watched the website scroll across the screen. My aunt turned off the TV as though that would hinder me from being able to absorb the information.

As though it wasn’t going to be posted to every website on every computer from now until the end of time.

The monsters, we would later learn, were hungry for something only we could provide. And they were here to stay.

As the first wave of volunteers signed up, so came the first gifts. Clean, renewable energy sources in brand new factories all over the world that replaced coal, petroleum, nuclear, solar, wind, and water power.

There were protests against that, too—billionaires who had invested in the infrastructure destroying our planet railed and raged, but it was a losing battle. The first year saw elections sweeping across the nation, ousting anyone who opposed the monsters from their political positions.

Things got more peaceful. Everyone returned to their lives and tried to achieve normalcy. I returned to school, though my aunt and uncle kept me on a strict curfew.

Just after my seventeenth birthday, the monsters gifted clean water for everyone—a filtration system provided to every person at no cost. The water crises across the globe ended.

Six days before my eighteenth birthday, as I sat at the kitchen table making quiet plans with Zane to move out and get our own shitty little apartment so I could be free of this house, they announced the next gift.

A cure.

For damn near everything.

Cancers, chronic illnesses, viruses that killed off millions in pandemics, and bacteria that were growing so antibiotic-resistant that people were dying of infections they used to fight off naturally.

We were humans, and our bodies would adapt, and there would always be a risk, but now there was hope.

“If they’d only come before Mom and Dad—”

“Don’t you dare say it,” my aunt said, her voice tense. “Nothing like this comes for free.”

I knew that. I more than knew it.

“If you don’t think we’re anything more than zoo animals to them, getting our vaccines to keep us healthy enough for their entertainment,” she spat, “then you’re more foolish than I originally thought.”

So much hate in her voice, but what did I care? I was almost free, and whatever the monsters wanted in exchange for all of this, it had to be worth it.

Didn’t it?

Zane had answers two days later.

“My cousin applied,” he said, breathless as he burst into my room while I was packing. We had a lease now, ready to be signed in five days. I had a small inheritance to pay the rent for a while, and Zane had a job.

My heart skipped a beat as I turned to him. “Tell me everything.”

He was pink at the tips of his ears as he sat, his hands twisting together restlessly between his spread knees. He didn’t meet my gaze.

“It’s not…a breeding thing,” he said. That had been one of the conspiracy theories floating around web forums. “But it’s close. They need us. They need…” He bit his lip. “No one has been able to give exact details, but he says that it’s more than a pleasure thing. They need it to survive.”

I swallowed heavily as that hit me. I didn’t know much about that. I was a house-bound virgin, after all. But that was going to change. I still had three more years before I was old enough to apply, but I had made my mind up long before Zane told me what he knew.

And now, I was even more ready.

I waited, practically holding my breath until the clock ticked over to midnight and my personal internet profile unlocked. I was eighteen now. The parental controls were null and void.

I half-expected a knock at my door, that my aunt and uncle were going to burst into my room to make one last attempt to control me.

But there was only silence as I began to scroll, and while they had both insisted there wasn’t any real information on what the monsters wanted or what they were asking for, it was no surprise to learn they had been lying.

The Vyastil hadn’t come with plans of war and domination, but they were master negotiators. They didn’t want to fight us, they didn’t want to occupy us, they just wanted a way into the human world.

They had a craving. They had a need.

And at first, it really had been just an agreement to let them travel between worlds freely without their movements being controlled, but a year after they appeared, they came to the government tables with a new request.

The real reason they wanted entrance to our world.

And in order to continue with the technology that we had come to rely on, they wanted something in return.

They wanted access to human semen. They need to suck, as people had been describing it, a need to consume what some human bodies produced.

And, whelp, as a virgin with intact balls and an average-sized cock, I supposed I was on that list.