The VaDorok: The Mate Index Book 1

by SJ Sanders

  The doctor gave her a cursory examination before the guards picked her up and carted her off, trailed by the breeding male. The red blush from his mating heat slowly receding from his spines. A sharp tongue licked the smear of blood from his lips and he rumbled with pleasure as they exited the cell block.

  Sara couldn’t stop her heart from hammering. As far as she could tell, they started with what they consider the elite specimens among the women, separating them early on into testing groups. Sara’s group was literally bottom of the barrel. Hunt was organized no more than once a month; otherwise the daily routine of tests rarely diverged.

  Never had Sara been more grateful for being a short curvy woman with pin straight brown hair. She made damn sure, out of the gate, to wash it as little as possible to keep it stringy and a muddy color. That way the golden natural highlights, from the intersecting blondes and reds blending through her hair, wouldn’t be visible. She hadn’t want to even minimally risk getting kicked into an earlier breeding study group if they thought something was marginally appealing.

  Unappealing is my new byword.

  Sara considered this alone a testament to her determination, she hated being unclean more than anything else. The yuck factor made her skin crawl just thinking about it. Even worse living with it. She went from being a woman who was driven to bathe daily to one who sponge bathed and never washed her hair. She suffered daily with her skin and scalp itching demonically. But time was up. Out of only a hundred women, there are only twenty left. Out of those, ten would be leaving within the next couple weeks once their pregnancies were confirmed. Leaving it down to one remaining study group. And according to the guards they had their own special suitors due to arrive.

  Trish, although perhaps the most bad-ass among them, started sobbing quietly in the cell next to hers. All of the women in the cell-block were crying. Sara had no hope of stopping the flow of her own tears from running down her cheeks, as she choked on her own sobs.

  Gods, we need to get out of here.

  Furiously Sara turned back to her cot and renewed her efforts with a vengeance, pulling and wiggling at the scrap of metal. When it finally broke free Sara wanted to cry victory with relief.

  Chapter 2

  The bang of the cell door sliding open woke Sara from troubled sleep. After the first month she had been plagued with nightmares that wouldn’t cease. Morning light never gave her any reprieve either as she forced herself to spring out of bed before any guard got the idea in their pea brains to try to sneak into her cell while she was asleep. The Lech worked morning patrols, and she was onto his game. He nearly caught a couple of the women a few times. If nothing else, every lady in the cell block became very light sleepers.

  Sara jogged quickly into the sanitation room at the end of the cell-block before heading over with the other women trickling into line-up. The Lech practically ran down everyone down when he entered. Sara would have laughed at the look on his face if it wouldn’t have gotten her a severe beating. He didn’t expect the ladies in the cell-block to be awake and ready. Sara bit her lip to keep it from curling at him in mockery.

  “Clever females,” he sneered. “Lab tests will be done after your exercise. The doctors says no food until after the tests are completed as they need to be done on an empty stomach. I don’t want to hear any crying about being hungry, or about being cold and wanting back in before the period is over. Enjoy the outside,” he snickered unpleasantly as he waved the other guards in his company into position.

  Lech looks pissy. I guess he must have got the memo about his application being denied in favor of the upper crust from home world. Sara chuckled to herself silently. Not that she favored the alternative, but she got a certain pleasure out of his little evil bubble being popped.

  As a group they were led down a long hall terminating in a massive square entrance. The guards handed out protective thermal coats and coverings before punching in the code to release the door locks. Not even waiting for the doors to completely open they started to shove women through, several stumbling and falling into the snow. Sara just barely kept her footing, and managed to snag Macy before she went head first into the embankment. As Macy mumbled her thanks from between chattering teeth, Sarah glared long at the door, her hand absently caressing the shank in her pocket.

  She didn’t want to risk using it on anyone, but oh how a large part of her wished she could stab the hell out of the Lech with it. All he needed to do was just come through the door, just for a minute. That is all it would take. Of course she was under no delusion that the act would be her swan song but still...it would almost be worth it.

  Sara slinked slowly away from the door, careful to not draw attention to herself as she visually took in the sight her squad huddled together in small shivering groups. With their cold weather gear they all looked alike, exactly what Sara needed. The guards didn’t bother doing more than a vague check out the single port window looking out over the yard. Anyone they put out in the blistering cold was simply left to shiver in misery until they were finally brought back indoors.

  It was so routine it was like clock-work. None of the women have ever bothered to make a move to wander more than several feet from the door over the months. It made the guards confident that they were secure out there on their own. An icy wasteland made a pretty effective deterrent for escape, Sara had to admit. But it also worked in her favor. They wouldn’t notice she was gone until they brought the women indoors. She felt bad abandoning the others, but someone needed to take the risk to find help. With a silent guilty goodbye, Sara sank down, crouching in the snow and began to quickly inch her way back from the building.

  Once the building disappeared behind a large drift of snow, Sara turned and broke into a run, making sure to keep low in the snow, her breath coming out in steaming pants as she pushed south. She had no particular destination in mind, but hoped that, like Alaska, the climate would change the further south she went, even if the whole planet was a block of ice. She prayed it wasn’t, but one never knew.

  Several times she flattened herself in any impression she could find, or create in a hurry, burying herself in snow when she heard the engine of a scout ship. After several passes over the course of the day, she was relieved when they seemed to have given up when she no longer heard them. Likely presuming her lost to the hostile environment.

  To her horror, rather than snow retreating the further she went, it got deeper, and thick crusts of ice were everywhere, making her footing tricky business. Sara had to slow down to carefully pick her way over the stretches of uneven snow-covered sheets of ice. She wondered if she had accidentally misjudged her path and had wandered out onto a glacier of some kind. If that were the case, she was fucked. Her muscles had already started to slowly tremble with the exertion hours ago. With little choices in front of her, Sara decided to continue to push doggedly south. Dying of exposure there would be no worse than anywhere else after all, she reasoned.

  Nightfall was worse. Her visibility was non existent on the dangerous terrain. And she had a more immediate concern. Although Sara had a thermal blanket rolled up in one of the pockets of her jacket, the temperature dropped at an alarming rate. Each breath she took burned her lungs as she inhaled the shards of ice crystals in their air. Her movements got sluggish, although thankfully her limbs were still warm from activity. But she was exhausted, and afraid of sitting down on the chance that she would not be able to get back up, and end up freezing to death after going through all the trouble of escaping.

  That would be ironic. My epitaph can read: Here lies Sara, the stupid Earthling who decided that being Alaskan born and raised meant should could survive on an alien tundra with no provisions or training.

  I am such a dumb ass.

  As exhaustion set in deeper, and her bones and joints began to scream with pain. Sara just wanted to sit down in a ball of misery and cry. Every step racked her body with pain. She couldn’t even stop the tears that were leaking from her eyes and freezing on her
numb cheeks. Every bit of exposed skin felt terribly raw and chafed.

  She started replaying in her mind the horrific pictures she had seen in her youth of the blackened flesh from severe frostbite. She rubbed her ears, cheeks and nose in attempt to get some feeling back in them. She wiggled her toes painfully within her boots to keep the circulation going in them, and then did the same with her fingers inside her mittens.

  Crying out, Sara stumbled, her left foot sinking into the hard packed snow, bits of ice bruising the tender flesh of of her shin.With one hand braced on the snow, Sara panted uneven breaths as she cried harder, letting her tortured soul express all its misery before the elements on this fucked up planet killed her. She screamed and wailed, raging to the heavens. She hoped the gods themselves could hear and witness how fucked up the situation they gifted her was. She vented every bit of anger she had. It didn’t help really, but the released did make her feel marginally better.

  Sliding down, she let her butt sink down onto the snow as she blinked at the flakes falling down around her. Having wept and raged, she felt curiously empty. She admired the delicate complexity of each flake in a way she hadn’t since childhood. Her eyes blinked heavily as she felt their weight gather on her lashes. She just wanted to sleep. Everything was so beautiful, it was a good place to sleep.

  Groggily she stared ahead and blinked at a large white blur pushing toward her.

  What is that? An angel? A spirit or god of the snow rising up?

  Is it death coming to take me to the endless halls of my ancestors far from here?

  That would be nice, she sighed.

  ***

  Vidok felt the lines of his face arrange themselves into a familiar frown. He had just settled into his shelter, after burying the kills from his hunt in the snow to safeguard them against scavenging beasts, when he heard an unworldly wail rise over the wind. At first he thought to ignore it. This far north it could be an ice demon, or an unhappy spirit of the dead lost in far north territory. Or, more likely, just the wind moving through pockets in the ice flow, playing games with his imagination. In either case, he didn’t relish leaving the warm comfort of his alpak shelter for any foolish reason.

  When the cries continued on in earnest, sounding of such heart break, he couldn’t find it within himself to ignore it any longer. Muttering oaths to the four corners, Vidok drew a thick alpak hide over his own thick fur, so to cut the worst of the wind, and left the hand-sewn leather dome of his shelter. His boots sank into the drift of snow as he walked north, following the cries carried by the wind. His ears twitched forward, hearing the feminine undertones to it. The more he listened the more concerned he became.

  Is a female lost out here?

  Vidok had never known a VaDorok female to travel any great distance from their tribe’s northern territory, and certainly not this far north. Even the warrior females wouldn’t come so far alone. Few braved the coldest region for hunting, but Vidok came because the game was the best. He simply had the ill luck to encounter bad weather on his return to his den. Now he was wondering if some god or spirit hadn’t orchestrated it to keep him trapped out on the ice flow.

  As a warrior-priest Vidok knew that the spirits and gods could act in strange ways to bring together threads of fate. He felt in his soul that he was now on a fated soul journey of some kind, the purpose of which was as of yet unclear. Or he was being foolish, and would end up wasting his night exhausting himself searching over the brutal territory for nothing.

  Vidok drew up to a halt, ears turning so to catch any sound, when the night suddenly went quiet. His head jerked from side to side as he widened his eyes in attempt to catch a bit more light in hopes of seeing someone on the ice flow. His nostrils flared in hope that maybe he was near enough to catch a scent of someone, if there was truly a tribal member lost. For a long moment there was nothing, but then a subtle shift in the northern wind brought him a olfactory flavor that was indescribable. Like some unknown sweet fruit and the musk of summer flowers.

  Inhaling deeply Vidok paced forward through the snow, tracking without error the source of the perfume. He was practically snow blind from the raging weather around him so he didn’t see the small huddled form until he was upon it. A tiny figure, wearing some thick outer garments, curled up in the snow dying.

  Slowly he reached a hand towards it. He had never seen the like before in his life. This was no tribal member, or any of the VaDorok. Aside from the pitiful clothing it wore, it was bald without a lick of fur aside from the length of fine fur, hair he recalled other species calling it, trailing from its head. Vidok thought the cries had been of a female, but on study he wasn’t entirely sure. He couldn’t get a good look at it in the storm, and a species was so small it could easily have made such soft noises regardless of the sex.

  The only thing Vidok was certain of was that he could not let it die if he was able to save it. As a warrior-priest he believed in the destiny woven by the gods. Although he had his doubts, it was now clear that they had delayed his return and brought him here in time to save the offworlder.

  With great care so not to harm the fragile little being, he gently scooped up the tiny body and nestled it up close to his body, tucking it against his chest under the alpak skin. The tiny body shivered pitifully, but that was a good sign. Shivering meant it was still struggling against death’s shade, determined to live. Vidok tucked it higher more firmly against him so that the warmth of his body and his fur would thaw its frozen muscles. From this position the delicate fragrance of the creature wafted up, and Vidok froze as he felt his cock harden in response to the flames of heat suddenly licking through his body.

  Part of him wanted to cast the creature back into the snow in fear of how strongly his body was reacting to it. The rest of him covetously wanted to hide it away. Wanted to lick the delicious smell, and fuck it until the rising heat was spent and satisfied. Vidok began to purr at the thought. He had pleasure partners many times in his youth, but never had he been so ruled by lust. It was both terrifying and exhilarating.

  It wouldn’t be wise to throw away that which the gods put before me.

  If it turns out to be a threat I can always kill it then, he nodded to himself.

  That settled , Vidok blew out a determined huff and swung back the way he had come, heading to his shelter with the offworlder. In the distance another VaDorok, a young Scout from what he could tell, likely also investigating the source of the cries, raised his hands in signal of greeting. Vidok raised one hand, signaling that all was well and carried on.

  It took half the time, with his loping trot, now that he was no longer on the hunt, to return to his hunter’s hut. Vidok sighed with relief when the little body relaxed against him, curling into his warmth and ceased its violent trembling as they neared their destination.

  Ducking inside, Vidok shifted his small bundle briefly onto his shoulder sot hat he could lace the ties shut, before gathering it once more to his chest. Curious, he pulled back the alpak fur to expose the tiny offworlder. Bending his head down he bumped his nose against the top of its head, sniffing deeply at it, taking deep lung fulls of its delicious scent.

  “Getoff,” it mumbled, a small pink hand shot out, striking the end of his nose.

  Vidok jerked his head back, his lip momentarily curling in a silent snarl. He snorted, wrinkling his stinging nose and peered intently down at it. For a tiny thing it reacted almost viciously. But still, he was curious.

  With a single thick finger he gently prodded the small hand, turning it this way and that in his investigation. Vidok snorted to himself. Tiny. Pink. Hairless. Five digits rather than four. No retractable claws, just thin translucent tips. Tsking deep in his throat he shook his head, surprised that it had lasted any time at all on the ice flow. If the cold hadn’t killed it, a predator wouldn’t have had any difficulty picking it off once the storm cleared.

  Pulling the alpak fur further back, he completely exposed the tiny thing as he set it down. First thing was first, he nee
ded to built a fire in the shelter. Even with his thick fur, he was wet and chilled from being out in the brutal elements. He stepped several paces away to not further wet the little thing on the ground and roughly shook out his fur. To help him dry. The warmth of a fire should do something to revive the offworlder too, he reckoned.

  Keeping the creature in the line of his sight, Vidok bent down to build back up the banked fire. Once he had a small blaze going, he drew up his bedding furs into a pile, laying out a comfortable nest. Setting the offworlder in the center, Vidok crouched back on his haunches fully taking it in.

  No, he decided, not an it...her. Although the species was one unfamiliar to him, not taking the fire building in his loins into consideration, the delicate features, now that he could clear see them, were definitely female. A small rounded jaw, pointed chin. Delicate arches of fur over closed eyes, fringed with dark lashes. A head of long golden brown hair, the filaments badly tangled. Full pink lips. A tiny cute nose. Vidok’s eyes crinkled, oddly charmed. Then there was the full swell of her breast and hips beneath the dull white cloth she wore that made his balls fill with fire and need. And that scent. He couldn’t enough of breathing it in, each breath stoking the fires within him.

  Vidok paused. Fire. He eased forward speculatively, his cock swelling within his coital folds, the thick shaft pressing forward, eager to extrude. He flicked an ear thoughtfully as he draped the length of his tail across his lap. The tiny metal cuffs on the long locks from his head clinked together, the only sound outside their breathing and the moan of the wind outside. Vidok scratched at a horn. This was new. No female had, in all his long solar cycles, summoned the mating fires of his soul.

  Oh, he could fuck, but any pleasure partner would never mature his sex organs and summon forth his breeding seed, nor would his souls take comfort and join with theirs. Many have tried in his youth. Vidok had a great many females come to his den to seek him out as a pleasure mate, to see if they could inspire the ulukskinon, the mating heat. A warrior-priest was a desirable mate to secure if one could. Until he reached the second decade of his primary adulthood, he enjoyed much female attention. All that stopped when the iridescent filaments began to thread through the coils of fur around his horns and females begin to seek out younger company.