Alien heart, p.3
Alien Heart, page 3
Jozelyn shook her head up and down, making her tightly-wound, shoulder-length curls bounce with the movement. “Razek said you wanted to come on the journey with us after you found out Camille was going. And now we come out here and find you harassing her at the fire.”
“Harassing?” I whirled instinctively, my eyes searching for Cam-Eel, scanning the darkness of the tents. I needed to catch sight of her back, to somehow confirm that what Jozelyn had just said was not true. But Cam-Eel was not there.
I spun back to the Gahnala, forcing my hackles down. “I was not harassing her.”
“You basically told her that her food was terrible! I heard you!”
“I did not,” I growled, losing my patience with this entire evening. “I told her it did not taste as terrible as it smelled.”
Jozelyn laughed, but it sounded bitter. It had none of the warmth Cam-Eel’s laugh had had a few moments before.
“I know there are a lot of cultural differences between us, but sometimes you guys are just way too thick.”
I looked down at myself. I was thicker than some men, it was true. I’d worked harder than most to build muscle after my injury, which left me bulkier than many other Death Plains warriors.
My head snapped up at the sound of Jozelyn stepping forwards.
She stopped directly before me, planting her hands on her hips. “Camille is kind and sweet and considering the circumstances, almost insanely happy. I won’t have anyone, alien or human, changing that. I mean it, Varrow. Live by the old Earth adage: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”
That was... A stupid saying. Lots of things were necessary even if they were not nice.
But she was the Gahnala, and Gahn Razek’s sight stars were burning a hole in my head, so I held my tongues.
With a raise of my tail, I turned and stalked from the fire. I moved through the settlement, out onto the open sands. As an unmated warrior, I was one of the men whose tent was not sheltered by the cliffs. This did not bother me. The open sands were vicious. But the Death Plains were worse.
In fact, I’d put my tent further out on the sands than any other man, so that if any danger came I would be the first to meet it. The first line of protection. The first one to die, if needed. My tent was a spiked shadow, alone on the sands, beyond all others. Set far apart from the group.
Just as I was.
My social isolation, the way I did not converse easily with others, had never really bothered me. Until now.
Now, it made me feel weak and stupid. I did not know how to communicate with Cam-Eel. I did not know how to make her happy.
Why I was so suddenly intent upon making her happy was a mystery. As I’d told Gahn Razek, she was not my mate.
But moment by moment, it seemed I was growing as bizarrely obsessed with her as she was with her beans.
Fool.
I gripped the hide of my tent, my claws nearly shredding it as a hope with sharp fangs dragged itself through my body.
Jozelyn and Gahn Razek chose each other before the mate bond awoke...
No.
I would not allow myself to give into a madman’s hopes. Not long ago, I’d known I would never have a mate from among my tribe. I’d accepted that fate. Coming here and meeting the new women had not changed things. I knew how to be alone. I was good at it. And...
There are better men than me.
So when the sacred, silver glow suddenly appeared on the horizon to my left, signalling the arrival of the revered Lavrika, I immediately looked behind me, wondering which other man it sought.
But there was no other man out here.
No other man but me.
CHAPTER FIVE
Camille
I tried not to let the presence of the grumpy, short-haired Death Plains bastard ruin my excitement about the journey ahead. He may be blunt and obnoxious with eyes that seem to penetrate bone, but he’s not what’s important here. No, what was important was staying focused, helping the group...
And maybe meeting my mate.
A flutter in my stomach made me squeeze the straps of my pack as I settled it on my back. I could be meeting my destiny soon. Today was just the very first step.
“Ready?” Priya whispered. Like me, she was dressed, wearing all her gear except her sunglasses. It was dark inside the tent, and we wouldn’t need the sunglasses outside yet as the sun hadn’t fully risen. We’d both applied sunscreen, though, so that we didn’t have to do that later. I’d worked the thick cream vigorously into my skin, trying to make the white cast disappear as Varrow’s words had echoed annoyingly in my head.
I absolutely do not look like a bean.
I nodded in response to Priya’s question, and together we picked our way quietly through the tent. It felt strange to leave in the quiet dark like this, not saying goodbye to the sleeping girls bundled in their hides. But we’d said our goodbyes last night. Actually, I’d said au revoir. I’d avoided the Japanese phrase sayonara. Au revoir referenced a future meeting – until I see you again. Sayonara was a much more permanent goodbye, used when you didn’t expect to see the other person again. It made tears prick in my eyes to think of never coming back here.
No. I would come back here, healthy and happy and maybe even in love. Everything will go to plan.
But I couldn’t help but feel that things were already veering away from my perfect plan when I almost collided with a hard wall of alien chest as soon as I stepped out of the tent.
I flinched backwards, bumping Priya from behind, almost sending her tumbling. I wrenched back to steady her, but a dark arm shot past me, too fast for me to keep up with.
Just one arm.
Varrow.
Jocelyn had told me his name last night. She’d come to see Priya and me before bed, making sure that we were ready for the journey.
Once Priya was stable on her feet, Varrow released her elbow. I jutted my chin up at him, scowling.
“And just what, exactly, are you doing out here knocking ladies off their feet first thing in the morning?” I asked with a harsh sigh.
“I didn’t knock her off her feet. You did.”
This fucking guy...
I sucked in a breath, ready to come up with a barbed retort, but my words died in my throat when my eyes found Varrow’s face.
The sun was starting to rise, and this was the first time I’d seen him up close with any significant light source beyond fire or asteroids. If I’d thought his gaze was intense last night, it was a hundred times hungrier today.
I was used to the Sea Sand people’s sight stars pulsing and swirling. But Varrow’s seemed to move with a more harrowed sort of intensity. They practically throbbed, misting outwards then drawing in tight as he stared at me. I hadn’t realized it before, but his sight stars were actually pale blue, not white or grey or violet like Razek’s. It wasn’t a cold or icy blue, though. It was... Strangely warm. Almost smoky. A stray bit of his dark bangs had fallen forward, and I had the bizarre urge to brush the hair back away from those piercing eyes. It wasn’t just bits of his bangs, either – his whole body seemed to be leaning down toward me, muscles tight, thrumming with tension.
“I was waiting for you.”
His voice changed from his earlier statement about me knocking Priya off her feet. It had somehow both softened and gotten rougher. Harsh but lyrical.
A sudden onset of goosebumps made me shiver.
“Well, I’m here now. We’re ready,” I replied.
Varrow’s eyes lingered on me for a beat longer than was natural. His clawed fingers twitched, drawing my eye. They stretched towards me for the briefest of moments before curling into a rock-hard fist.
“Come,” he said brusquely, turning and beginning to stride away.
“We will come, but not because you told us to” I called after him. If he heard me, which I was sure he had, considering the slight twitch of his high, dark ears, he gave no other indication.
Glowering, I turned to find Priya snickering.
“This is better than the telly,” she said, smiling wider. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on with you and that bloke, but it’s massively entertaining.”
Trying to sort myself out, I raked my fingers through my hair, tucking the smooth strands neatly behind my ears. But that just made me think of the way Varrow’s bangs needed to be fixed. And it made my fingers itch in the most annoying way.
Pushing all of that aside, I took a breath and began to walk, following the beacon of Varrow’s muscled back lined with all its blades.
CHAPTER SIX
Varrow
The mate bond did nothing to ease things between Cam-Eel and me. If anything, it made everything worse. It stuck my tongues fast to my fangs. Made every word come out wrong.
So I stopped saying so many words.
Instead, I watched her. Like a creature in the shadows.
It was all I could do. As we began our journey, Cam-Eel rode on the back of another man’s irkdu. That made all my blood rush into my grip on my spear. I ached to hurl it and kill the man, named Dalk, for even deigning to help her into the saddle.
She should have been riding with me.
But there was no way I would have been able to convince her of such a thing. The fact that the human women did not feel the mate bond was abundantly clear. While I seethed with the kind of love that made a man feel like he was on the very brink, Cam-Eel seemed only to dislike me. And even outside of that, even on the unlikely chance that she had not hated me or that she had wanted to ride with me, I would not have allowed her to. With only one arm, I would not be able to both hold her steady and use a weapon adequately if we entered into danger. I would not let my blood-thick desire for her get in the way of good sense. I could not risk her safety to please my own heart.
So instead, I raged in murderous silence as she smiled and chatted with Dalk on his irkdu. Luckily, the attention she gave him did not seem unusual or special. She did not give him more smiles than she gave to others. If anything, she was more generous with her smiles than I would have thought possible, sending them to everyone who offered her a word or wayward glance.
Well, everyone except me.
I was not just love-sick. I was jealous. Jealous of Dalk who got to ride with her. Jealous of all the others who got her smiles.
I am beyond love-sick, I thought miserably. I am love-wounded. Love-killed.
I had survived so much before.
I was not entirely sure I would survive this.
I scraped my hair violently back from my brow, giving off a quiet, unintentional growl that had Cam-Eel turning her elegant head back to look at me from behind her shiny eye-shells.
She offered me no smile.
Of course she doesn’t give you a smile, you dolt. You stare at her, and instead of speaking, you growl. You’ve earned nothing from her. Not even the smile she gives to all the others.
I could tell I was doing things all wrong. “Blowing it,” as Jozelyn had said last night. I just didn’t know how to fix it.
Digging my fangs into my inner cheek, I pondered the issue for the entire day’s ride.
But by the time we stopped to make camp, I was no closer to a solution. The only thing I did know was that I could not reveal myself as Cam-Eel’s mate. Not yet, not like this. Not before I’d eased some of the dislike she clearly felt for me. If I were to tell her I was her mate now, it would seem terrible and desperate and would likely send her even further away from me. Gahn Razek’s words tumbled through my mind. These women have a stubbornness that you cannot imagine...
Gahn Razek’s voice tumbled in my ears, then. Not just my mind.
“Will you not dismount, Varrow?”
I realized that everyone else was standing on the sands while I remained above them, still seated upon my irkdu. Even my irkdu seemed to be judging me, casting its many eyes towards me, as if asking me what I was still doing upon its back. Clearing my throat, I leaped down to the sands to join the others.
We were not a large party. There was one warrior from each tribe: me; Oxriel; Vaxilkai; Bariok; Dalk (whose neck I currently wanted to wring for being near Cam-Eel all day); a Bitter Sea giant named Kohka who had scales in shades of brown, ash, and silver; and the only Gahn among the group, Razek. Then, of course, there were the new women. The Gahnala Jozelyn; the one who reduced landscapes and mountains to clever black lines, Priya; and...
Cam-Eel.
My mate.
She was making a show of not looking at me with just as much force as I stared at her.
The sun was setting. As Cam-Eel bent and then rose with hides to set up the tent she and Priya would share, the golden-red light caught on the edge of her cheek and the lashes I could just see peeking out from beyond the glistening curtain of her hair. That cheek was pulled upward into a smile. Because of course it was.
The perfection of her was a pain inside me. A pain I wanted, more than anything, to grasp by the root and rip out. Because if I let it get any further into me, I’d lose more than just another arm. I’d lose more than a brother.
I’d lose everything.
If life in this world had taught me anything, it was that that which we loved fiercest destroyed us most powerfully when it disappeared.
It would have been easier to have never been granted a mate at all.
Such a thought was unnatural. Blasphemy so foul no man should dare to think it. Most men clamoured for a mate, having been denied one for so long. Most men would have considered me lucky beyond what pale luck had ever afforded me before.
But I did not feel lucky now.
I felt... Undeserving. And out of place.
I felt once again like that small boy with the blade at his shoulder as healers severed the arm that had been left blackened and infected by the ablokoi’s grip. The boy who howled, not from the pain of the cutting, but with the force of the fact that he should have done more, should have done anything, even died, if his brother could have lived.
But then the light shifted, or maybe it was just Cam-Eel turning more towards it, and suddenly every curve and stretch of her face was lit by the full force of the shimmering sky. I was overcome, delirious, haunted by it. By her. And every thought of luck or worth or the pain of the past and the future vanished, replaced by my unrelenting need for her. A desire that drove so deep down into my bones I knew, I knew with a certainty so violent it almost cut me down, that I would never get it out.
“You’re staring,” came the drift of Gahnala Jozelyn’s voice from below my shoulder.
I let out a low breath then muttered, “I know. Is there a reason you are narrating this observation?”
“Is there a reason you’re staring?” she countered.
More reasons than I could ever hope to explain. So instead I settled, rather irritably, on saying, “Perhaps it is different where you come from. Perhaps you and your kind can easily look away from something beautiful.” Then, my voice lower, softer, more broken: “But I cannot.”
The Gahnala said nothing else, eventually moving away and leaving me alone with my staring and the endless, unfamiliar rhythm of a newly revived heart.
This love had not killed me after all. I felt more alive than ever – blood rushing, nerves singing, my body thrumming with ardent life whether I liked it or not.
No, I was not love-killed.
Just love-doomed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Camille
I was starting to regret not bringing some of the fermented beans mixture on the journey. Un, because Priya, Jocelyn, and I were getting tired of plain old meat as the days went by. Et deux? Because Varrow was driving me so insane with his endless brooding looks that I wanted to smear the stuff he hated all over his dinner, just to spite him. I’d never had an urge like that before. My parents had always taken so much care with their cooking, both at the restaurant and at home, wanting to please whoever was eating. That same instinct ran through me – to take care of people through food. To please their palates. To give them something they loved.
Well, I felt none of that instinct towards Varrow.
Or maybe this is just a reaction to the fact that you can’t take care of him, can’t please him...
Ta gueule! Shut up! I told that icky little voice inside me.
I didn’t like to think that maybe the voice was right. That, after Varrow had so obviously rejected my cooking before and had gone on and on about my apparent obsession with beans, I now wanted to lash out at him. It was probably petty, but hey – could anyone blame me? The endless staring, as if telling me with his stormy eyes how incompetent I was, would drive anyone up the proverbial alien wall.
And it only got worse the closer to the Death Plains we got. If Varrow was excited about seeing his homeland, he certainly didn’t show it. If anything, his staring got more heated. More... Hateful. It seemed excessive for him to hate me just because I’d had the audacity to create a recipe he hadn’t liked, but I couldn’t figure out any other reason for the rage that simmered in his gaze whenever it landed on me.
So, I avoided him. I kept the distance between us nice and wide. But that, too, became more complicated. Because he just wouldn’t stay away. He barely spoke, but somehow, he was everywhere. Beside me at the evening fires. Waiting for me outside my tent in the morning. Around stony corners when I came back from peeing.
It was the night when we reached the outer edge of the Death Plains, after ten days of riding and feeling his stares, that I finally decided to tell him to fuck right off. I’d had enough of the obsessive hovering, the quiet fuming, the dagger-filled looks. If he hated me that much, he never should have come on this trip in the first place!
“What?!” I cried, jumping back as Varrow stood, once again, where I wasn’t expecting him to.
The edge of the Death Plains was marked by an intimidating stretch of toothy-looking mountains. Unlike the copper-gold deserts we’d travelled from, this stone, and from what I understood, the land beyond, was ghostly pale. The mountain range before us glinted like shards of broken bone under the glowing asteroids and stars. I’d just gone pee in a hidden spot, and I sighed, raising my chin to Varrow who apparently had been right there the whole time. He wouldn’t have been able to see me peeing, but still...
