I release my arms and sink into the mud real slow and when I surface, it’s to the sound of laughter — the leader and the green one both. Only the leader looks at me though, while the green one tries to cover her mouth with her hand. I squish pink gunk back from my face, feeling so much heavier for it as it sticks to my hair and coats my fur coverings without penetrating. The edge of my mouth tilts up threateningly, but I quickly remember where I am and squash the sensation.
I wrap my mud-wrecked hair up in my fist and knot it at the base of my neck and as I work, I feel myself starting to slow. My mind skips, like a rock over packed sand, and my ears cock back. It sounds like thunder. I turn, but everything is the same. Just white, even if a strange smell is calling me forward. That startling fauna is back again, bringing an oasis with it. Minerals and rich, fragrant earth. It smells like something ancient. Like something known.
“Xhea,” I hear the leader call. Known, but not by everyone. Known by me alone. “I think we have gone far enough. Soon we will be out of the mire and on the tundra. We may be too far for even the most fearsome warriors to follow…”
“I thought you said we were supposed to be far.”
She considers her answer. “There is far and then there is dangerous. It is expected that we want to live, and since we do, we should act accordingly. We shouldn’t go onto the tundra. There are creatures there far more fearsome than a few males.”
There is nothing more fearsome. I plunge ahead without answering.
She tries again. “There is a place we can rest…” Her voice cuts off. She hears it. I heard it a few seconds before. The sound of pounding. There’s a scream — no, not a scream, a cry of rage. A deep, booming cry. A resounding decree that makes my toes curl and my tailbone tuck under. It’s a roar that hearkens only death and demands. He’s here. He’s coming for me. And I’m supremely fucked.
I don’t know who I am anymore, all I feel is my bones start to unravel. Jaxal wanted me to be strong but he didn’t prepare me for this. For seeing him again and the horror that it would bring because right now it’s washing over me like a frontal assault. I can’t stand. I can’t fall either. The mud holds me in place and I feel carved into it now and I don’t dare move as the mist to my right shifts and parts.
I duck down lower, quickly trying to kick up into a horizontal position so that the top of my head doesn’t stick out of the mud. I kick and stroke the mud, but I must make too much noise because I can hear the male roar, his cry different and more imminent than the last had been because he’s right here, right on us.
The green female squeals, giving away our position entirely and I hear thrashing in earnest now. It feels like eternities pass in less than a heartbeat. I lie there, still, hoping not to be found. Hoping he doesn’t find any of the others either. Where did that thought come from? Just leave them. They’re aliens. They’ll probably enjoy it anyways. But when the leader lets out a shout and I hear the sounds of struggle return in earnest, my whole body is propelled into motion.
I come upright to see the leader just a few paces from me, though the mud made it feel like she was so much farther. There’s an alien — a male one — curled over her. He has a strip of my fabric in one hand and seems to be staring between her and it in confusion. I feel lightning rip up my spine at the understanding that I’m what he was looking for, but I also feel an equal lightness. His skin is blue. Not red. A little balloon bursts just below my lungs and suddenly I can breathe again. And if I can breathe I can fight.
The male isn’t armed, which sucks because I’d been counting on being able to take his weapons away from him. Doesn’t matter. I wade closer towards him and see that he’s got the same idea, only he hasn’t let go of the female even though he’s looking at me. Like he thinks he’ll be able to take the both of us. Fat chance.
He stretches his other hand towards me, intending to grab me by the neck. I block with my left forearm and upper cut with my right. He’s tall so it takes some effort, but I reach his chin with my fist.
When his head whips back, I feel like I’m alive. I also feel grateful for my fur lined gloves because otherwise I might have broken a fist. Jaxal luckily had me practice on wooden boards until my hands bled. He said their skin would be stronger, tougher. That they’d be hard to kill. And I’m ready.
I grab the leader’s arm and wrench her out of his grip. “We have to fight him together!” I shout to her without waiting for her answer.
I turn back to the male and watch pink mud spray across his stupid lit up face when I hit him again and then a third time, and then another. Frustrated, he swipes both claws for me, catching my forearms and tearing through the leather covering them.
Nicking me, he doesn’t wound me or slow me down. There’s too much mud between us, and I’m wearing too many clothes and him, almost nearly as many. His hides look thinner, more agile, but are no less tough when I try to gouge them with my nails. Fleetingly, I long for claws. The fact that they have them puts me at a severe disadvantage.
The fight lasts ages. I’m alone. The other females don’t help. I hope that they’re running away but somewhere in the fray, I catch a glimpse of them. They’re just standing like twin pillars in the mud wearing mud on their cheeks and white on their foreheads.
“For fuck’s sake!” I shout, “Do something! Anything! Move!”
I don’t have time to watch and see if they scattered, but turn and punch the male again. This time when his head flings back and he manages to right himself, he’s got copper blood smeared across his mouth and nose and a forehead that’s red and angry. He cocks a hand, I block, but then his other makes contact.
I knew it would hurt. Jaxal hit me a thousand times in preparation for this moment. It wasn’t preparation enough. It hurts. His fists are made of marble and I feel my whole body take the hit all at once.
Suddenly the females are shrieking. I can feel someone’s hands on the front of my suit, pulling me out of the mud, but I lift my feet to my chest and kick with my whole being. An uff puffs out of the male and I start to backstroke as fast as I can across the mud. He grabs my ankle. I kick with my foot, feeling as my heel makes a lucky connection with his throat. He curses. I curse louder. He curses again. I’m still cursing.
Then both our cursing and our fighting is punctuated by a roar that stalls us too. The sound lights up the white sky, effulgent and deafening. It’s louder this time, closer. I glance up towards the perimeter of the mire and as soon as my vision settles, I see something that numbs my withered core.
Like a treeline sprouted in the beat of a breath, there are at least eight males standing there, shrouded in shadow. The one I’d been fighting moves swiftly ahead of me, wielding a swatch of fabric from my hood like a sword. He stands in front of me, blocking my body with his own, and shouts something to the rest that my translator doesn’t catch.
“Oki phondaeron!”
Hisses sputter through the males, and even the females behind me gasp and whisper. But then there’s a silence. The fog stirs. The men glance around between one another and I can see foreheads flashing in nature-defying colors, and I can hear meaty fists pounding against plated chests, and I can feel masculine energy whipping through the air like a tornado, that riotous undercurrent.
But then my heart catches and the fog clears just enough for me to be able to see a male even larger than the rest, more terrifying, more imposing, more severe. He steps forward, slashing a line through the amassed crowd that does nothing but part to make way for him. A few of the males actually scatter until only three remain.
“Taka’ana,” comes the booming, terrible bass, the one that seems to let loose something inside of me as I drink in all of his form. Alien and huge and imposing and decidedly male, I know that my first thoughts of him should be of hate, and yet, only one thought comes to me.
He’s purple.
He’s not red, which means I was wrong about something — many things — that the females said. The male they spoke of before — the
one who says I’m his mate, the one who told them stories about me — isn’t the one who broke my soul.
Instead the male they spoke of has arrived before me now in all of his glory and as he looks at me with matte black eyes that angle towards his hairline, the world goes quiet. He’s not the red one. He’s not red. He has black hair instead of white. A single white streak runs through it right at the front in the middle. It makes him look like a blade, a knife that will cut me through to the bone, if only he could reach me. But he won’t. I won’t let him.
I break his gaze and turn back to the mud, ferociously charging through it now. I can see the other side. From there, I’ll make it to the tundra. From there, I’ll be able to make a stand. My final stand. He may not be red but he’s still an alien and what I said was true. No alien will take me alive, no matter if they’re pink or green or red or blue. Or purple.
“Oki phondaeron Xiveri. Taka’ana!” His roar chases me and the ground seems to shake on a cause of it. Or maybe it’s just me. A strange vibration sizzles through the air, electrifying it, and a pulse beats in my chest that I swear hadn’t been there before.
I reach the other side of the mire and as I pull myself free of the pink, I think about the words he said and what they could possibly mean as the translation turns over in my mind. “With this challenge, I claim my Xiveri.”
Fuck it. Now it’s time to run. I take off into the tundra, into the cold white.
3
Okkari
Where is she? I am savage in my need now that the battle is ended. The males who vied for my human lost. I took the plates of the one who refused to yield. He crumbled before me. By my bloodright. By the right of Xana.
The rest competed over the remaining females and at my last count nine pairs were made. It has never happened before in a Mountain Run. There are always many females too feeble to fight or run or too afraid, or males that are bested by other warriors and left too injured to proceed. Too often, the Xaneru within awakens for no one.
I wonder if it was not because of the decoys that my human gave to the others that on this solar so many pairings were created — that even one Xiveri mating revealed itself between Tre’Okkari and Vren’Hurr. I came upon them in the act of their first coupling, distracted by the scent of my own female’s clothing in Vren’Hurr’s possession. I know it was she who gave them. The only she in existence. Who else would have had such cunning but the same carnivorous human who defied our Raku and helped to withhold the Rakukanna from her mate?
Pride surges in my breast, only heightening the desperation of my Xanaxana, which could not be less at rest. I am a calm, calculating male. I am a male who abides by order and tradition. I am a male who needs not seek understanding for in my thirteen rotations, I have seen and experienced more than the elders. I have fought battles. I have shed blood. I have commanded a nation. I have guided our current Raku and his Raku before him.
But now as the fiery winds become threatening, battering me as I charge across the snow, I understand something new. Something more. Everything that scripts have ever told me of the Xanaxana and its power were weak analogies for what I feel burning in my chest. It has demands. They will be sated. I do not care if I have to tear the mountain down stone by stone.
I pass by males in rut and feel my own xora’s steel shaft brush against the barrier concealing it. Given the severe temperatures, my fur coverings are constructed to allow only my xora release for this first rutting. It is late in the season for a Mountain Run. Too late. But it could not be avoided. The moment she woke from the merillian tank, I knew I needed to organize such a run, no matter the conditions or how extraordinary they are. Because nothing about finding my Xiveri mate on that meager, nondescript moon was ordinary. Nothing about her is ordinary.
When I returned for her on that moon, it was to find that she had battled khrui, vicious creatures that my own warriors avoid for they demand respect. And even here on this Mountain Run she battled the warrior who came upon her before me. Of the fight I saw, I was impressed. Humbled, even. When I take her to our den, I will need to tend to her wounds, for she fought like something from the depths of the sea. A she-beast, a gift for our nation. A gift for me.
I have been favored by Xana and Xaneru and by the Okkari ancestors to have been given the fiercest of all females — a warrior — for my Xiveri mate. Among all females in the universe, I know that I could have no better. Because there is none.
Every male on the mountain vied for her.
Every male. And I defeated every single one.
My injuries are not enough to stop me from hunting her scent, marred by the mire, towards the tundra. I wonder if she seeks to lose me in the mist. If so, fortune does not favor her, because it’s thinning, the storm settling as it prepares for the icefall that will come upon us quickly and with reckoning.
As soon as I am free of the mud, I arrive at the tundra’s closest edge. I peer into the dark, watching as white ice and falling snow swirl to meet the darkening sky. A deep maroon, it can scant get any deeper. This is the night here. Almost, but not quite deafening. But not quite.
A scrap of movement floats between ice and sky, as if carried by the mist herself. I charge for it, using my skills on the ice developed and honed since I was a kit when I learned to glide atop water and swim beneath it at the same time that I learned to walk. My chest is burning with the Xanaxana I have so cautiously repressed this past rotation without my Xiveri mate. Now it is fully unleashed and unrepentant.
A snarl disintegrates the composed male I once was. I feel light burst from the ridges above my eyes in an unbecoming display of emotion, but I do not attempt to tamp it. I will let her see just what it is that she does to me.
She cloaked her scent from me, and I am still savaged by the fact that I was not the first male to root her out. I sate myself with the knowledge that though I may not have been the first male to have found her, I will be the last.
Thoran’El discovered her first in the mire and was the male that delivered the bite in my side, but I do not know what he was thinking, attempting to challenge me for her. Did he not know that it would take much more than claws ripping through flesh to slow me in my pursuit? Did he not know that I would take his plates just for his attempt? I will not be shamed by him or any male. Not before her.
Nox, my Xiveri mate, my Xhea, my Va’Rakukanna, my warrior queen, does not demand weakness. I must be worthy of her and this I must do in the human custom. I must not only defeat males of my own tribe, but I must best her in battle as well. The thought makes my chest swell. The custom is not mine, but I feel honored to be able to meet her on the battle plain and prove to her in her own traditions that I am the male that she seeks.
Wind whips my hair into a rage around my face as I close the distance to her by half, and then by half again. She must sense my approach for she glances over her shoulder and begins to slow. I slow in response, proceeding with greater caution as I watch in wait for her body to face me. When it does, I am not prepared for it. Neither for the heat of her fire nor the depth of her beauty.
Even caked in pink mire and the copper blood of my kind, the sight of her catches me. I stumble. I am my nation’s Okkari and yet, I stumble before my queen like an infant.
I could say it is her eyes, as dark as screa and just as cutting. Hard. Scalding. And somehow that makes the beauty of them all the more potent. The sharpness of that heat-filled gaze against the delicate curve of her cheek. They sit slightly rounded and high before tapering to a smooth chin.
Her mouth is large. Obscenely so. I have never seen a female with pillows on her mouth like these. And stranger still, they contrast the darkness of her skin with a lightness not found in Voraxian biology. Much lighter than the mire, they are the palest pink — a color that could be interpreted as either mild anger or fear, even embarrassment. It makes me embarrassed to see it, as if I am seeing something sacred, a permission not yet given. But I do not look away.
Even in her swollen gar
ments, I have seen no greater beauty. The cloud of her hair is tucked away inside the hood of her coat, but I remember what it had been like to see it, and the rest of her, fully bare on the hot, gritty sands of that human moon. Full breasts, a taut abdomen, delicate collar bones…
My Xaneru had wept for her and the Xana had pulled at me, daring the Xanaxana to come forth. I had locked it down and battered it back, knowing that my Raku would never have allowed me to take home my Xiveri bride when he was denied his own. I am a strong warrior, a disciplined Va’Raku and a fair Okkari and it had taken every ounce of power I had to not challenge the younger Raku there. But I had resisted. And I have already used up the reserves of that resistance. What is left behind is but a tendril, a thread, diminishing smoke.
My xora is in a state and all three of my stones pulsate beneath it. Clenched hard against my body, they do not care that the winter winds of the tundra are enough to douse even the brightest flame and take life from the strongest warrior. I had never been foolish enough to consider braving it, but for her, I’d have continued on until the last breath left my lungs. Not even for her, but for the promise of her. For her in the flesh, watching me with the hatred in her eyes that she carries, I’d do much more. I feel as if I am Okkari no longer. Nox, I am Kinan. The male I was before I took my title. The boy.
“What are you waiting for?” Her voice rips from her lungs and even though I can sense she is shouting, the words arrive to me bitter and torn. They are a battle cry, I sense, a challenge. My Xiveri mate is not to be disappointed.
I charge.
She jerks, as if surprised by my speed, but she does not run. Warriors far larger and more fearsome than she have withered beneath the coming of the Okkari. I am known. But she does not know me. So she fights me without context, without history. A fight I have not fought since I was a kit. Since I was Kinan. I am impressed, proud and above all else, grateful.
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 3
