Needles shoot up my leg and I curse a thousand times before grumbling, “If only every blasted thing on this planet wasn’t made out of screa.”
Tre’Hurr laughs and tries to cage it behind her hand. “Deepest apologies, Xhea.”
“Xhea?” The word I hear everyday spoken in a voice I know only from another lifetime rattles me to my core. I turn and see a ghost and grin.
“I must be dreaming,” I say. In my peripheries I see that everyone has stopped working and is focused on me and the female standing near the entrance. Nothing but packed earth and pebbles separate us. I take a step forward and she grins when I do, her red face reflecting a heritage that I could never begrudge her, just as I can’t begrudge any of them, no matter how badly I’ve tried to. We can’t help the skin we’re born in.
Her hands move instinctively to cover her stomach, which bulges noticeably despite the many fur layers she’s wrapped in. Foreheads beaming with color tip forward as she waddles and wobbles further into the cavern.
I burst out laughing. “Oh my stars, I can’t believe it’s you!” I rush forward, dropping my paintbrush and throwing my arms around her shoulders. Half-Dra’Kesh, she’s taller than I am and when I step back, I have to look up at her.
“What are you doing here?”
She laughs and there is a glaze to her eyes that she wipes at. “Oh stars, Kiki, you don’t know how good it is to see you.” She brings me back in for another hug and when she turns this time, she drags me with her. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“Well you definitely have. I didn’t know it was safe to travel yet.” My stomach is in knots. My tasks forgotten. I can’t believe it. She’s here.
A flash of a memory. Another life. Miari squats inside of the cave, knees tucked under her chin, chewing on a piece of fruit leather and loaf of sand bread. Her eyes are wide and scared and still she’s smiling at me at something stupid she’s said or that I wrote down. I wasn’t speaking then, but when the khrui came for us, I stood up and held my grabar out in front of me. Of one thing I was certain, if it came to me and the khrui or Miari, I was prepared to die. She means so much to me.
Her belly presses against my belly in a way I find just a little unsettling. I make a face and hold her back and she laughs. “I know. I’m still not used to it myself. But to answer your question, the first icefall has passed and the next won’t start up again for another thirty solars or so, giving us just enough time.”
“Enough time for what?”
“To catch up.”
“I thought that’s what we’ve been doing on our calls these past solars.”
“I didn’t mean with me.” She pulls me to the entrance of the cave and when she steps out of the way, my jaw drops and I’m rendered completely speechless. Miari laughs, “So how about now? Are you still surprised?”
I must be hallucinating. Maybe the fumes from the dolloram really did kill me. Because standing ankle-deep in the snow close enough to touch are my favorite people in the world. All of them. Svera, Jaxal and my mom. And of course, just behind them, Kinan. He stands beside Miari’s Raku and a small contingent of warriors, looking on.
I shriek like a little girl and storm forward, embracing my mom first. “Oh my,” she says as she takes my weight. She’s shorter than I am and she seems much older than she had the last time I saw her. But she still smells the same. Like sand and earth and lavender-scented root butter, the kind she uses in her hair.
“It’s so good to see you. I can’t believe you’re here,” I exhale into her shoulder. Her braids twine with mine and when I pull back, she looks even more surprised than I feel.
Her mouth works. Finally, she says, “Well, it’s not like they could have kept me away. When Svera announced that a group of us would be allowed to travel to a far and distant planet to visit Kiki, you can bet your bottom dollar that I was the first one in line. Even had to ruffle Mathilda’s feathers since she and Deena thought they should be the first ones on board, but of the twelve of us here, they weren’t even selected. Svera saw to that.”
Svera cuts in, her face turning a brilliant scarlet everywhere except for the silver scar cast high on her cheek — a product of her abduction by the pirate king of Kor. “It’s not that I wanted to exclude them, but the rules state that priority be given to females and families of females who have been through the Hunt. Mathilda and Deena haven’t.”
“Oh honey, we understand the rules,” my mom says, throwing Svera a carnivorous wink that has Miari and I howling — even Jaxal cracks at that. I turn to him next and step forward to hug him, but he jerks away from me awkwardly, his dark cheeks flushing and his gaze flicking back over his shoulder.
“Not allowed to hug you,” he grunts out through gritted teeth before refocusing on me. “But it’s good to see you though. You look…different.”
I feel myself warm, embarrassment making me shift my weight from hip-to-hip. It’s hard to meet his gaze. For too long we’ve fed off of each other’s hatred. Now that mine’s gone, I don’t know what to say. “I feel different,” I try.
“You look healthy.”
“You sound surprised.”
“I am.” His tone is flat and bleak. His hair, which falls in locks to his shoulder blades, is tied back from his face with a band. He looks so out of place here wrapped in furs, the white cold they called snow falling so softly around him. So gently. Meanwhile, he looks like he’s ready to lift both fists and shred apart the world around him. Is this what I looked like? My spine prickles. My teeth ache.
I step forward despite what he says — the order he’s been given — and wrap both arms around him. I close my eyes and breathe in his scent. Minted steel, dry wood, arid desert winds promising nothing but thirst. It reminds me of so much pain. His. Mine. The whole damn colony’s.
I squeeze him tight and as his arms tentatively come around my shoulders, I whisper against his chest, “I don’t know who I am anymore. But whoever I am, I like her better than who I was after the Hunt. I just…” I exhale. “Thank you for helping me through the darkness. I wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for you.”
Behind me, a dark voice calls my name — my title. “Xhea.” It’s a threat, loosely veiled and leveled straight at Jaxal’s heart.
Releasing Jaxal and whatever burden of guilt I felt at him seeing me here, now, like this, without hate coloring my every inch, I turn and smile at the Okkari. His forehead is a blank slate except for a single escaped note of copper. I’ve seen this color a few times before when I spar with some of his soldiers. I know what it means — that acute jealousy — because I’ve felt it too whenever he speaks with the tribe’s females. Even Kuana who tends our home isn’t immune.
I step up to him and take his arm, bringing him forward. “Okkari, I want you to meet my family. My mom, my brother and my sisters.”
“I have made a brief introduction, but I am pleased to be reintroduced.” He steps forward to my mom first and extends his hand.
My mom looks at it, then looks at me, unsure. Her brown eyes are full of questions and hesitation and indecision, but the laughing lines around her mouth and that crease the corners of her eyes remind me that there isn’t a hateful bone in her body — not even the Hunt could change her.
Women on the colony, as a rule, don’t speak of the Hunt, but I wonder now as I watch her watch me standing next to an alien male I’ve claimed in body and devoured in soul, if maybe I shouldn’t have. If I still should. Because I never believed her when she said her time in the Hunt wasn’t bad…that it was even good.
“Mom, this is Okkari. He’s my man.”
Infectious laughter pours out of her, even though she has tears in her eyes, which she quickly rubs away with her thumbs. “Oh is he now?”
“He is.”
“Well then, I suppose that makes you family now too.” She bats his hand away and hugs Kinan, her short arms hardly fitting all the way around his chest. “If you’re family, then I’ll be calling you son.”
A
s Kinan smiles down at her, his hand takes mine and brings it to his lips. He kisses the back of my palm and very quietly, so only the three of us can hear, he says, “You may call me son. But you may also call me Kinan. This is my given name.”
The surprise in my mom’s expression lets me know that Svera has clued her into what a big deal this is. I feel shocked too, but more than that, deeply grateful. “You may call me by my given name, Mirella, or you can just call me mom.”
Kinan grins and my mom shines back and for a moment we all just stand there stupidly smiling at one another until Miari laughs. She waddles back over to Raku’s side and he kisses the top of her head in a gesture that surprises me in how human it is.
“The other humans have been called now to join us. We wanted to give you a chance to meet with your family privately before we give them all a tour of the village.”
“Thank you,” I tell her. She just shrugs and waves a hand dismissively. I turn to Kinan. “And I’m guessing you had quite a lot to do with this shindig.”
“I would not be Okkari if I did not.”
I grin. “Cocky brute.”
“Hexa,” is all he says.
I laugh and look up at him and meet his gaze head on and in a way I never ever want to break from. “Thank you.”
“No thanks is required. It pleases me to please you.”
Standing up on my tiptoes — and with him bending down — I manage to reach his ear with my lips. I kiss the lobe, nipping it with my teeth, and say, “Then perhaps I can thank you this lunar, in other more creative ways.”
Kinan clears his throat gruffly and straightens, ridges flaring a dark and dusky purple, much deeper than the color of his skin. “That will be acceptable.”
I laugh. “In the meantime, if it’s a tour of the village they want, let’s begin.”
18
Kinan
I have not seen my Kiki so radiant as this. She flits through the village and with every word spoken to her humans, every introduction made to the Voraxians of our tribe, every explanation of the smallest thing and most subtle nuance I am reminded of a startling truth, one I never thought to hope for: Kiki has claimed this village for her own. She wants to be here. She returns always to my side, her eyes filled with warmth and satisfaction and hope. She wants to be here with me.
I encourage her as she shows Jaxal and one of the other males the armory in the training hall, even if every shared look and glance of their fingers as she hands him various weapons makes me want to skewer him with the helos spear she values so highly. No, something duller. Then it will hurt more. But begrudgingly, I trust her.
I believe her when she calls Jaxal her kin even if the concept of brothers and sisters does not exist here on Nobu — for females that are able to produce kits, there is only ever one — and even if they are not kin by blood. I believe her.
Raku, Krisxox and I hover near the rear of the group with the contingent of warriors that accompanies this human delegation. Of the twelve humans, eight are females and four are males and though I do not know if they are all considered exceptional beauties on their moon, I do know that they would all be held as rare and treasured prizes here on Nobu.
Despite the threat of the coming icefall, the village has never looked so full and bustling as it does today. Doors are wide open, faces of those old and young and everything in between peering out of them as villagers hope to be introduced or, at the very least, see the humans. My Kiki does her best to make introductions to each villager we come across, but they are too many and there will be other opportunities and the lunar approaches and on this lunar, more than most, Kiki will need her rest.
“Okay okay,” she says as I remind her of this for the fourth time. “Just let me show them our place, okay?”
Floored by the way she says our, I nod my ascent. A strong Okkari, Kinan is weak and can deny her nothing. She nearly skips up the screa steps to our home, her humans following closely behind. I notice that, while most are curious, there is one female who seems quite frightened, and then there is Jaxal who views all he sees with disgust or revulsion. He makes no effort to hide it.
It is clear his reactions hurt Kiki, even if others may not see the slight tensing of her shoulders or the surreptitious way she watches this male she calls brother as we enter our home and she introduces him to her — to our — things. I will need to speak with him if his attitude does not change. Or fight him. He calls himself a warrior, yet I do not doubt I would defeat him in combat in the span of a heartbeat. The thought brings me pure delight. I believe on this trip, I may be able to manufacture a way…
“Oh my and who is this?” Kiki’s mother, Mirella says as Kuana appears in the doorway of the overlook room.
“This is Kuana,” Kiki answers when Kuana does not. “Kuana this is my mom, the Rakukanna, Svera, and other humans from our colony.” She goes through them name-by-name, but Kuana seems distracted, her gaze unfocused, her ridges flashing white and then pink and then gold. “Kuana, are you okay? Is she okay?” She goes to Kuana and places a hand on her shoulder while I push my way to the front of the crowd.
There, Svera joins me, Krisxox stalking her like a shadow. “Alhamdullah,” Svera coos in her light, strange hymn that could not be more opposite Kiki’s deep snarl. Svera’s gaze pans across the humans gathered in the overlook room and I believe we both make the same observation at the same time.
“Guards, please help Jacabo and bring him here,” she says in nearly unaccented Voraxian. Krisxox nearly lunges to arrive at the male in question first. He grabs him gruffly by the collar just as the male buckles. He falls forward with a cry, but Krisxox does not show him reprieve, instead dragging him forward too roughly. Raku issues a stern warning while the Rakukanna orders space to clear.
The human called Jacabo is a burly male with medium brown skin, a broad chest, short-cropped hair on his head and a bewildered look on his face. He wrenches free of Krisxox’s hold when Kiki, behind me, issues a startled curse, “Kuana…comets you’re heavier than you look…” She sinks under Kuana’s weight — Kuana whose colors have suddenly dimmed as her body collapses onto itself, like a dying star.
Miari reaches forward to help, but Raku, ignoring her protests, scoops her up and places them both out of the way in the rear of the room where she cannot be injured in the commotion. It is best, because then Jaxal tries to intercept the meatier human male, but is shoved off of his feet by a palm to the chest. The male continues forward and his stare shifts to me where it burns.
“Don’t touch her,” he snarls, and though I am the closest male to Kuana and my Xiveri mate requires assistance, I am not stupid.
“I will do no such thing, but you will calm yourself before you approach the females. In your haste, you may injure one of them or yourself. My Xiveri mate is a warrior and she will not hesitate to defend herself.”
The thing that is broken in his brain clicks into place. He staggers in his next step and I watch as he slows his approach, my own feet rooted to the ground even though my muscles itch and twitch and flex and burn. The restraint may be the death of me, but I am Okkari and master of my own body. For Krisxox, the same cannot be said.
Impertinent and ever impetuous, he rushes forward. With a terse order to the warriors, I have him blocked so that there is only a wall of warriors on one side, Svera, Kiki and Kuana on the other, and myself and Jaxal flanking the male called Jacabo as he slowly advances. His eyes are wide, his expression tortured. A sensation I know well because I have lived it.
Calm now — at least outwardly — the male drops to one knee at her feet. He reaches out, his hand trembling, and touches the curved edge of her foot. On contact, she starts awake. Blinking, she looks up into Kiki’s face and though her mouth opens, she does not speak.
“You’re okay,” Kiki answers. “I think you just felt the first effect of the Xanaxana. Jacabo, do you feel a burning sensation? A desire to be with Kuana more than anything else in the world?”
The male in quest
ion nods, mute, before an expression of pain twists his features. Svera sits up straighter at Kuana’s side, as if pricked by a pin. “So humans can feel the full effects of the Xanaxana right away. While Miari felt it’s presence right away, the full effects only occurred for her after some solars.”
Kiki responds, words instinctive and spoken with no great ceremony even though I am deeply humbled by each and every one. “I felt it right away. Took me just a few moments before I was like this. Or worse. We should get them out of here, back to Jacabo’s place. He does have his own place, right?” Svera nods. Kiki grins impishly. “They’re going to need some time alone.”
Kuana looks up, dazed, and holds a hand to her ridges. Her pure white hair spills over her shoulders as she rights herself and finally sees the male she will be bound to for this lifetime and the next — the male that she has always been bound to. Color intensifies in her ridges, the full effects of the Xanaxana becoming apparent in a way that embarrasses all of the Voraxians in the room and visibly confuses the humans.
Jaxal, in particular, watches the pair on the floor with a contempt shared only by Krisxox who shines a bloody burgundy. With his red skin, white hair, and high breeding, Krisxox carries an even fiercer pride in his Dra’Kesh heritage than most, and views inter-species mixing as an aberration. I feel momentary anger that either male was permitted to join this expedition, however, as neither Krisxox nor this human male who I glibly wish to gut dishonor themselves, I remain rooted and silent.
Kuana gasps, “Xivoora Xiveri.” She blinks wildly, flashing white, as if surprised by the words she herself has said.
The human male grins, as if he understands her words for what they are. Perhaps, between his translator and Svera’s manual, he does. Or perhaps he knows in the way we all know when we encounter our one true mate.
“Ziv-ooh-rah, Ziv-are-hee,” he says, the words butchered as he attempts the Voraxian language.
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 20
