Publisher's Synopsis
Bianca Lombardi is living on the edge. With excessive drinking and drug use about to destroy her life, she vows on her twenty-first birthday to clean up her act. But a cigar smoking jerk from outer space and a voluptuous prostitute with an axed-off face arrive unexpectedly to derail her plans.
Abducted by the Tultoromae--tobacco-loving extraterrestrials who have been decimated by a merciless enemy--Bianca is transported to an alien base deep beneath Earth's surface. Believing she is the key to their salvation from extinction, the Tultoromae will stop at nothing to force her compliance--no indulgence, cruelty or psychological warfare too great. To escape the sadistic torments of her chief abductor and warn her world of the insidious threat growing below, Bianca must gamble her life and that of the one alien with whom she is forging a powerful bond, Cdr. Raddo Rotic.
Unable to look away, Bianca watched as the general slowly, almost affectedly, opened his mouth and plugged the coarse brown cylinder between his glossy lips, flashing her as he did with long fangs sheathed in scrolling platinum and tipped with ruby gemstones to match his eyes. As if to further test her sense of reality, from within his jacket he produced a battered Zippo featuring a gold US Marine emblem. Fluidly, the rectangular device began tumbling and snaking through his large cadaverous fingers--back and forth, forth and back, blue-and-gold fire leapt and slithered, a glowing boa, a living thing. Abruptly, he caught and held the one-inch torch to the tip of his cigar, sucking bright life into the tobacco. He snapped it shut. And the lighter disappeared.
Fascinating. Hideous, amazing and weird. An alien, a real live alien, sitting across from her, performing sleight of hand and smoking a cigar! a sideshow freak from space, up close and personal, he was no less demonic than she remembered.
