Carmen took another chair to fill in the circle. “Tell us more about what you saw when you went out to explore the city. It’s so interesting to hear the experience of someone seeing it for the first time.”
Anna laughed. “You’re here for the first time yourself.”
“That’s what’s so interesting,” Carmen replied. “I want to hear the impressions of someone in my same position.”
“I went down to the Medical Center,” Aquilla told her. “I wanted to see the technology you use to heal the sick and the wounded. I heard so much about it, I wanted to see it for myself.”
“Did you see Taman and Faruk there?” Emily asked.
Aquilla nodded. “They were hard at work, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to them. I never saw people in such a fever of activity. They were using all sorts of machines on people. I wish I knew half as much as they do.”
“What were they doing?” Aria asked.
Aquilla chuckled. “I don’t understand enough even to answer that. Dozens of people surrounded one patient. They were shouting orders and reading the machines to each other. I couldn’t understand a word they said. They were speaking another language known only to themselves.”
“Taman and Faruk must have acknowledged you somehow,” Emily exclaimed. “They wouldn’t have ignored you.”
“They never knew I was there,”Aquilla replied. “They were so busy, I made sure I stayed out of sight. If they saw me, they would feel obligated to come talk to me. I didn’t want to interrupt their work. I’m only one person, and I’m not sick. They have no reason to leave off their work to kiss up to me.”
Emily shook her head. “I’m sure they would want to know you were there.”
Aquilla shrugged “Their work is much more important than I am.”
Donen returned with Caleb and Turk. “Good. You’re here,” Aria told him. “Now we can eat.”
Donen glanced around. “I’m sorry we made you wait.”
“We weren’t waiting for you,” Aria told him. “I just finished putting the food on the table. Now come on, everyone. Let’s sit down and have a nice dinner together.”
A struggle ensued to fit enough chairs around the table. Even after they succeeded in finding everyone a place, so many chairs couldn’t sit in a circle close enough for every visitor to reach the food. In the end, they compromised and sat in an enormous ring around the room. They passed the food one to another so everyone got something. The Avitras kept the bowl of nut mix to themselves, while Carmen and the Lycaon kept the meat on their own end of the circle.
No one said anything for a while until a bell rang near the apartment door. Aria jumped up. “Who can that be?” She opened the door and jumped back. “Renier! We didn’t expect you until tomorrow.”
He shook hands with the men and hugged and kissed the women. Then he threw himself down on the long seat and rested his shaggy head on the back rest. “I left early.”
“Did Reina sort out those colonists?” Chris asked.
Renier nodded. “She had them eating out of her hand the moment she walked into the room.”
“I’m glad you settled the question early,” Carmen replied. “Reina’s got enough to do before the official hand-over.”
Renier shook his head. “She’s still out there. She agreed to stay for another week to help them complete a few urgent projects.”
Carmen started forward in her chair. “A week! But that means she’ll miss the official hand-over ceremony.”
Renier closed his eyes. “This is more important than any ceremony. Can you believe it? She found out the colonists have been agitating and threatening rebellion because they thought I didn’t do enough for them. They never told me, but they told her, all right! They said I never paid enough attention to their needs and their priorities. I never even knew about these problems. Well, now they’ve got Reina working on them.”
Carmen remained quiet in deep thought.
Renier shrugged. “Look, it doesn’t matter. She’ll make more friends and gain more credibility than any ceremony could ever give her.” He sighed. “I’m glad she’s taking over. I’m getting too old for this.”
“What do you think of the decorations?” Carmen asked.
Renier hauled his eyelids open and looked around the room. Then he closed them again and leaned his head back. “Very nice.”
The women exchanged glances. “Is that all you can say?”
Renier lifted his head with a sigh. “Tell me again what we’re celebrating.”
Aria started clearing the table. “It’s a seasonal celebration of the deepest, darkest part of winter. It’s supposed to bring friends and family together and bring light to the darkness.”
“That doesn’t really apply to Angondra, does it?” he countered. “Winter isn’t really dark with the aurora in the sky, and we can get together any time.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Aria replied. “You’d have to be from Earth to understand this holiday. It means a lot to us. That’s the important thing.”
Caleb pushed back his chair. He crossed the room and sat cross-legged on the floor the way he would in the Lycaon village. “You’re right. What it means to you is the most important thing, and it must mean a lot to you if you went to all this work. I can see what it means to you when you look at that tree.”
At his word, the women gazed as one at the decorated tree. Sunlight streamed through the big apartment windows and glittered off the tinsel and shimmering ornaments. The star shone at the apex, and the warm branches suffused the room with a spicy aroma.
Everyone sighed. “I still wish we had an open fireplace,” Chris murmured.
Emily faced her. “There must be a way to get one.”
“How?” Anna asked.
“What’s the point of an open fire?” Piwaka asked. “We’re not cold, and we don’t have to cook our food.”
“An open fire would be a terrible hazard,” Donen replied. “It would set off the city’s emergency warning system. The whole subfloor would be evacuated.”
“Well, that settles it,” Chris exclaimed. “We won’t be having a fire.”
“We can’t have Christmas without one,” Penelope Ann pointed out.
A deafening crash startled them all out of their seats. They spun around to find Aria standing in a circle of shattered crockery. To their horror, she snatched another empty bowl from the counter and hurled it to the floor, where it smashed into a hundred pieces just like the first one. “We aren’t celebrating Christmas!” she shrieked. “How many times do I have to say it?”
The friends stared at her. Only Aimee answered. “Okay. We’re not celebrating Christmas.”
Aria grabbed another bowl and sent it hurtling to the floor. Despite the advanced warning, the friends jumped out of their skin when the bowl shattered. Even Donen winced. Aria bellowed to the ceiling and threw up her hands in exasperated contempt before storming out of the apartment.
Chapter 7
A door clicking shut woke Penelope Ann in pitch darkness. She sat up in bed. “Who’s there?”
“It’s only me, darling,” Aquilla murmured. “Who did you think it was?”
She settled back on the pillow. “I forgot where I was. I didn’t recognize that sound. Where have you been?”
“I went for a walk.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and ran his hand over the sheet where it covered her lower leg. “I wanted to see it all again.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” Penelope Ann pointed out. “Everyone’s in bed.”
Through the bedding, she sensed him shaking his head. “Have you forgotten, my darling, that the Avitras can see in the dark? I wanted to see the city again in darkness, but even so, there’s still so much activity going on. It’s just before dawn. The power will come on in a few minutes, and already I can hear the buzz of activity through the walls. People all over the city are preparing for their day’s work. The medical center, for example, has
n’t been silent all night.”
Penelope Ann turned her face toward him. She couldn’t see him in the dark the way he could see her, but his presence electrified her now as much as it had when they first met.
“You can’t stay away from that medical center. What attracts you to it?”
“Have you seen it?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve been wrapped up with my friends ever since we arrived.”
“You should go have a look, at least once before we leave,” he told her. “I’m sure your friend Emily could arrange for Faruk or Taman to show you around. It’s fascinating.”
“Is it the machines you find fascinating?” she asked. “This city is crawling with machines. They make me nervous. I wish we were back in our own village.”
“I don’t care for the machines, either,” he told her. “They make the place so impersonal. But the medical center, that’s another matter altogether. It’s the people I can’t get away from. You should see them at work, Penelope. Dozens of people, all bent on helping their fellow citizens. They make healing the sick their only job, and they commit such incredible energy and dedication to it. Do you know, just now, I walked past the medical center—it must have been several hours ago now, so it really was the middle of the night—and I heard Taman, Emily’s son. He was talking to two other people about a patient they had. They were earnestly debating how to treat this patient and negotiating exactly what they planned to do and in what order. Can you imagine? They must have stayed up all night to help this person.”
“People do that in the Avitras village, too,” Penelope Ann pointed out.
“Maybe one or two people sit up to tend a sick person,” he replied, “but never dozens. We don’t have a whole corps of people dedicated to that, who do no other work.”
Penelope Ann snorted. “They must be a very sick population to need that many doctors.”
Aquilla shook his head again, but said nothing. The first light of day snuck down into their room through the tube in the ceiling. He stared into space and took no notice of her.
Penelope Ann peered at him. “Are you all right? I’ve never seen you like this.”
He shook himself. “I’m all right.”
Penelope Ann sighed. “I’m ready to go home.”
He started out of his reverie. “What? Already? You haven’t finished your celebration.”
“Some celebration,” Penelope Ann snapped. “Everyone’s on edge. They can’t decide what to talk about to whom, and the best parts of the celebration won’t even happen because we’re in a cavern city buried deep inside a mountain instead of in a log cabin in the forest back on Earth, which is the only place this celebration makes sense.”
“Well, you aren’t on Earth anymore,” he pointed out.
“Exactly,” she replied. “So what’s the point?”
“If that’s the way you feel,” he countered, “why did we come at all?”
“I didn’t know it would be like this,” she went on. “Aria has some hang-up about giving gifts, which takes all the joy out of the holiday. She even insists we’re not celebrating Christmas, which is ridiculous.”
Aquilla didn’t answer. He gazed toward the light tube.
Penelope Ann let out a long breath. “You’re a million miles away.”
She ran her fingers through the feathers along his shoulder, and they arched to meet her touch. She settled herself farther back on the pillows and pulled Aquilla toward her with her hands on both his shoulders.
His eyes snapped to her face. The pensive air vanished from his features, and his eyes hardened. His feathers stood up on end, and the frill of luminous quills formed a fan around his head. He loomed over her with smoldering eyes. “If you really want to go home, we will.”
She said nothing. She locked her eyes on his face and drew him toward her. He leaned over and kissed her. A quiet mew escaped her, and her body stiffened against the bed. She opened her eyes to find his fixed on her face. She closed her own eyes again. She couldn’t handle the intensity of his gaze. Lying with him and touching him transported her into realms she couldn’t fathom. His burning eyes carried her too far beyond the reach of sanity. She always kept her eyes closed when they came together, and when she snatched stolen glimpses of him, she always found him staring at her with the same searching stare.
His lips pressed her mouth to bring her attention back to him. If she couldn’t look him in the eye, she could connect with him through his lips. His feathers rustled, and his body descended over her. She understood this better than anything. She’d experienced him so many times in the past years, her body responded to his with no effort on her part. His presence alone sparked a desperate need in her, and only he could fulfill it.
His body crushed her into the bed and squeezed the breath from her lungs, but that wouldn’t last. She gasped for air between the ruffles of his lips parting her mouth and exploring with his tongue. She met him, and they tasted their shared essence. His hands stroked her sides, and she pressed her chest up into his hands.
He slid his hands into the space she created under her back. The gravity holding him down on top of her eased, and air rushed into her lungs once again. She expected this. She always expected this. He lifted her in his arms off the bed. He levitated into the space between the bed and the ceiling, and carried her with him. They hovered there in mid-air, with his feathers swirling eddies of air around the room.
The air swept Penelope Ann’s clothes off. How he did it, she never understood. She never felt him touch her clothes, and the next instant, she floated naked in his arms. She never felt him hold her up, either. For some reason she couldn’t explain and never bothered to analyze, they defied gravity when they hovered between heaven and earth in an eternal embrace. The laws of gravity didn’t exist for them here. She didn’t know if all Avitras mated like this, and she never mustered the courage to ask.
In fact she never got that close to any other Avitras. She made friends with Aquilla’s sisters and their families, but never good enough friends to ask a sensitive question like that. She could have asked Aimee if Piwaka and Aquilla weren’t on chilly terms with each other. At times like these, though, she didn’t care. She lost herself in the weightless bliss of his arms and in the cosmic ether of their fulfillment.
She let her skin graze his. His clothes no longer separated them from each other. How he got them off while holding her up remained one of the unexplained mysteries of her life. His feathers caressed her limbs. He pressed his hips against her and pushed her knees apart. She opened to him, and her legs snaked around his back. Between his legs, his swollen member dug into her tender pubis and sent a shiver of desire through her.
That’s when he made his first tumble. Gravity flipped, and Penelope Ann lay on top of him. Her weight brought her down over his hips, and she straddled his engorged shaft. She welcomed it with a song in her heart, but the next minute, he tumbled again and she found herself hanging in his arms with his cock driving between her legs from above.
Their coupling always followed this pattern, and she relaxed into it. He would slip inside her and they would tumble over and under each other into intoxicated bliss. He would fall into her and she would fall away from him....then she would fall down on top of him and he would fall away from her.....and on and on it would go, with both of them rising to touch the summits of climax before floating down toward the floor in exhausted ecstasy, then rising again together on scorching thermals to the heights of orgasmic rapture.
To her surprise, though, something changed. She let her eyes flicker open for a fraction of an instant, but Aquilla wasn’t suspended over her. He didn’t drill into her soul with his penetrating eyes the way he always did. Where was he? She didn’t have time to look around before a shadow blocked her vision. He hung above her on his outspread wings. Her mind whirled, and almost before she could comprehend where he was or what he was doing, he nudged his cock into her mouth.
&nb
sp; She welcomed it with a greedy mouth. Each tumble brought it in, then out, between her lips. Her saliva bathed it in a slippery film, and her lips kissed it and cradled it. She could tumble like this, in pure worship of Aquilla and his majestic manhood, when out of the misty clouds, a hot vice clamped over her sensitive flesh. He spread her legs, and his mouth closed over her vulva.
She moaned out loud, but the cock filling her mouth stifled the sound. She lost herself in sucking him, and the glorious warmth and love flooding up through her from his mouth filled her mouth with luscious wet delicious salty juice. She sucked the life out of him, and he drank it back from the font of delight between her legs.
Over and over they tumbled. Penelope Ann sighed and whined and gasped, but his cock kept her quiet. He gripped her around her thighs and stroked his cock in and out of her mouth. His fingers tickled her insides and drove her wild, but as wild as she went, she only sucked him harder, deeper, stronger, faster. She stretched every nerve to the limit of her endurance, but he dangled her over the precipice without letting her drop.
His nerves tightened, and the pace of his tumbling increased until they whirled through the air. Gusts of air cooled the sweat on Penelope Ann’s forehead. She took him deeper into her mouth and bucked her hips against his mouth. From faraway, his cries rang in her ears. He was coming closer. She increased her rhythm to match him.
His fingers slithered in and out of her in time to his mouth stroking her throbbing flesh. She panted to the same rhythm. She pulled her climax closer until she dangled on tenterhooks and waited for his fresh hot syrup to fill her mouth.
Her own saliva, intermixed with salty spunk, spattered her face. She closed her eyes again and drifted into that dreamworld where she met Aquilla. Her being went soft and limp, and the waves broke over her. Aquilla exploded into her mouth, and she let her own passion overflow its banks.
Chapter 8
Marissa and Caleb sat together on the long seat with Donen and Aria across from them. “What do you make of it?”
Angondra Holiday Special Page 5
