“That’s all,” Gahn Thaleo repeated softly, and I could not tell if he was agreeing and trying to emphasize Valeria’s point, or if there was an offended sort of disbelief in him that made him echo the words almost without meaning to.

  “I mean... We’ve stayed here before and it was fine,” Tilly said from behind Oxriel. “Other than the whole Errok taklok thing. But otherwise... What do you think, Nasrin? If you don’t want to, we’ll just say no.”

  “I don’t love that we’re being shifted around based on the fact that we three don’t have big alien boyfriends yet,” Nasrin muttered, crossing her arms. “That we’re being told where to go just because we might end up as somebody’s mate. Back in the Sea Sands, the other tribes relocated to be near us, not the other way around.”

  “But that isn’t exactly fair, either!” And that was Fiona now, speaking with an intensity of emotion that surprised me. She was usually quite smiley and cheery around her human friends.

  Her voice quieted then, as if she didn’t want Gahn Thaleo to hear. Or maybe even me. But it retained that intensity. “These guys... They have no hope of ever having a family of their own. The Sea Sand men all abandoned their homes just to follow their Gahns and maybe, just maybe, get a chance at the kind of life they’ve been longing for! I didn’t think about it enough at the time. But now I’m not so sure having them all get forced into that move was the best course of action. I’m glad we didn’t get split up, don’t get me wrong. It’s just... I don’t know. There are no truly fair options for everyone.”

  “At least they’re still on the same damn planet,” Nasrin muttered. Now in the shade of the shuttle, she took off her eye-shells and her green and black sight stars were shadowed. She gave a sigh, her dark brows drawing together. She rubbed at her forehead, as if to force the muscles there to relax. “But when you put it like that... I do see what you’re saying. I know when my parents left Iran for Australia before I was born, they left a lot of themselves behind. Sometimes they would tell me about it, and it sounded so fucking beautiful. But sometimes it was just too hard.”

  She returned her eye-shells to her face, but I did not miss the glimmer of moisture in her eyes before they were hidden. The phenomenon of water leaking from the eyes of new women was still largely a mystery to me so I did not bother trying to understand what it might mean.

  “A week in each mountain,” Nasrin said loudly. “I’ll agree to that for the alliance if my friends are alright with it too.”

  Tilly agreed right away. Fiona hesitated, and my guts snarled in an ugly sort of way when she finally acquiesced as well.

  “They will not be unaccompanied,” I interjected, slamming the butt of my spear upon the stone. “Where they go, we go.”

  Where she goes, I go.

  Gahn Thaleo gave me that unnervingly blank yet calculating stare.

  “Agreed,” he growled. I supposed he realized, just as I did, that though his tribe was a small one, we Sea Sand males would still be outnumbered if anything were to happen. Though I knew a Sea Sand man had to count for at least two Deep Sky men. It had taken two of his guards to drag me into this mountain, after all.

  I jolted when something touched my back. The stroke of a tiny hand between blades.

  Fiona.

  I would have turned around and told her not to distract me so, not to unspool my very brain with nothing but the tiny touch of her hand while I was trying to negotiate with a Gahn as poisonous as Thaleo. But I did not get a chance, because that very Gahn spoke yet again.

  “I have another condition for our alliance,” he said.

  Valeria looked taken aback. She exchanged looks with her big red mate, then with Nasrin, before facing Gahn Thaleo once more.

  “Alright. Hit me.”

  Oh, this was entertaining indeed. Because once again, a new woman had managed to find a chink in his hard exterior, get her claws into it, and crack it wide. Gahn Thaleo balked.

  Valeria’s comment had not translated well. I felt myself puffing with pride that I recognized the meaning of the phrase from time I’d spent around Fiona and the others.

  “I understand you are a warrior,” Gahn Thaleo said slowly, regaining some of his composure, “but it is not our way to hit a female.”

  “That is not what it means,” I could not stop myself from snapping at him, seething with vicious delight at his confusion. The hand at my back pressed a little more firmly now. A warning.

  “He’s right,” Valeria said, whipping her head back and forth in that distinctly human way. “It just means... Like, lay it on me.”

  Gahn Thaleo paused. His men glanced at each other.

  Ha! Fools. They think they can house the new women? They cannot even understand their strange phrases!

  It was much easier to indulge in the feeling of superiority than it was to examine the uncomfortable fact that I, too, often had these moments of confusion with the new women. I remembered, rather unwillingly, the moment earlier today when Fiona had told me that other word for breasts and I’d just about knocked my own head from my shoulders by crashing into a boulder in response.

  I still maintain that it was the boulder’s fault for being in my way.

  “What should I lay upon you?” Gahn Thaleo finally grunted. He glanced at the cloaks the new women wore, then up at the sun. “Surely you cannot be cold.”

  Oh, how he hated this. I could see it in the tight vibration of his sight stars. He felt uncertain. In that uncertainty, he was weak. And he knew that we could see it.

  “No. Sorry,” Valeria said quickly. “It just means, ‘tell me.’ Tell me your other condition.”

  “Ah.” Gahn Thaleo paused again, and in that pause I was sure that there was thunder in his head. “The other condition is that if any of my men get a mate vision for one of the new women left back in the Sea Sands, then she will journey to the Deep Sky to join him.”

  Valeria’s jaw tightened.

  “I don’t think we can agree to that,” she said. “We wouldn’t do that for Gahn Errok when he saw Stephanie in his mate vision. And we won’t do it for you or one of your men, either. If one of your men sees one of the women at the settlement in his mate vision, he’s welcome to travel to the Sea Sands to meet her and then they can make their decisions from there. If she wants to come back here, that’s fine. If she doesn’t... Well, they’ll have to figure that out on their own. But...”

  There was a hesitation, like she wasn’t sure how he would take the next part. But Valeria was a bold new woman, a commander in her own right, and she was not easily cowed by any male. “But I should tell you that there aren’t many single human women left at the Sea Sand settlement.”

  “How many are there?” Gahn Thaleo asked with what had to be feigned calm.

  “Three,” Valeria told him. “Miriam, Catalina, and Sloane.”

  The Deep Sky warriors flanking Gahn Thaleo looked at each other uneasily. Three was not a very large number. And even with the unmated new women here, it only became five.

  Five, not six, because I had already decided to kill any other male who tried to claim Fiona, so she did not count. As far as I was concerned, she was unavailable. Even if she was not mine.

  Even if she told me she’d never kiss me again.

  Blast. How that blackened my insides.

  It’s been far too long since I’ve hit another male.

  “Fine,” Gahn Thaleo said abruptly. “We are in agreement on all terms.” His sight stars found Nasrin once again. She met that gaze steadily, if tensely, from behind her eye-shells, as Gahn Thaleo uttered his final command. “The first set of seven days in my mountain begins now.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Fiona

  Well. This was certainly going well. Just dandy. Absolutely fine. We’d come here for a short visit and now we were stuck here for seven whole days. And there would be another seven after that. And after that. And after that...

  Honestly, on the surface of it I didn’t really mind that much. Gahn Thaleo’s mountain was just as comfy as Gahn Errok’s. And for all of Gahn Thaleo’s intense staring and presumable horniness when it came to Nasrin, he’d never actually done anything overtly weird to her or any of us now that the alliance was in place.

  Well, other than Errok, I guess. But I also knew that, as bad as that whole taklok/attempted murder situation had been, Errok had been a brutal enemy to Thaleo and maybe, just maybe, just the teensiest, tiniest bit, had kind of deserved an arrow through him. I felt a bit bad thinking that about Errok, even just inside my own head, but I knew enough about how badly Thaleo’s people were hurting for hunting grounds and resources before his territories were expanded in this alliance to know that Errok, though good to us and his people and Stephanie, had not been good to Thaleo’s tribe.

  Basically, for as stoic and tense as the other Deep Sky Gahn appeared, I did have just a little sympathy for him and for some of the stuff his people had gone through. He’d treated us well when we’d stayed here before – even Vaxilkai and Bariok, whom he’d once imprisoned – were treated like guests in his mountain last time. There wasn’t any real danger for us humans staying here for a week at a time. I was even looking forward to seeing some of the people we’d made tentative friends with last time, like the young Deep Sky woman named Zaria.

  But Dalk was insisting on accompanying us, and I knew he didn’t want to, and that made this whole situation into a big, uncomfy, awkward thing that poked at my insides. The man could not be called jolly at the best of times. Playing bodyguard in Gahn Thaleo’s mountain, he was going to be downright miserable.

  And I had a feeling it had a lot to do with me.

  I withdrew my hand from the place I’d touched his back, my fingertips still echoing with the sensation of his hide. He was so warm, so smooth, with not a hint of sweat despite the blistering heat.

  I was a bit jealous of that, to be honest, because I was sweating my pale human ass off right about now. Still in the shade, I reached up and pushed back my hood then fanned myself with the cards, trying to get some airflow. I could feel the way my fringe was sticking to my forehead. I didn’t have a flat iron or a hairdryer and my fringe was always wonky these days.

  I should probably just grow it out. Or pull a Kat and shave everything all off...

  I found myself wondering if Dalk was into the bald look when movement distracted me. Tilly and Nasrin were now passing over their Valentine’s Day cards to Gahn Thaleo and the small group of gathered warriors.

  “Oh. Oops. I better pass mine over, too. Dalk, can you move?”

  He didn’t.

  I poked a hard, muscly spot between his taut shoulder blades. God, he had good posture.

  “Dalk? I need to give the cards.” I held them high in the air, flapping them near Dalk’s dark, pointed ear. When the breeze from the flapping touched his ear, it twitched like a cat’s. I snorted because, fuck me, that was actually super cute.

  “I will do it,” he grunted, swiping the cards from my hand without even looking at them. “Give them here.”

  “Kind of redundant to say, ‘Give them here,’ when you’ve already taken them right out of my hand.” I said, crossing my arms. “You’re seriously going to give a gift of friendship to the Deep Sky men? Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “No,” Dalk bit out, glaring back at me, “But I would rather do it than see you do it.”

  Before I could respond to that, he took two big steps forward and slammed the cards down into the hand of the nearest Deep Sky male, accompanying the delivery with a scowl so fucking murderous that I was surprised the other male didn’t nock an arrow in self defense.

  Well, that’s one way to say happy Valentine’s Day...

  “It’s for Valentine’s Day,” I said, feeling like I had to contribute something now that I had no cards to pass out thanks to Mr. Grumpy Grabby-Hands over here. “It’s a day where you give cards – which are like little paper greetings – to your friends and family.”

  “I see. Thank you,” Gahn Thaleo replied, but he was looking at Nasrin instead of me. “You have also come at an auspicious time for our tribe. Tomorrow is our vaklok.”

  I didn’t have a clue what a vaklok was. It seemed to be a Deep Sky word that didn’t translate well to the Sea Sand knowledge in my head. But it sounded a lot like baklok (the competition to determine a tribe’s new Gahn if one is not chosen by the old Gahn) and taklok (that fight to the death we saw that almost killed Gahn Errok.)

  Maybe some worry was showing on our human faces, because Gahn Thaleo explained before any of us could ask him what he meant.

  “A vaklok is not a deadly match. It is a competitive display of strength and skill that every unmated adult male participates in. The rest of the tribe watches, but the true audience is the unmated females who are yet to be bonded. It allows the women a chance to see their future mates display themselves. As there are no unmated females left among us, the tradition was going to feel rather hollow this time. But now...” Still looking at Nasrin! “We have you.”

  “So it’s, what, the single alien dude Olympics?” I said in English to my friends. “Honestly, that tracks. Remember when Errok came to woo Stephanie and he did all those squats with that boulder on his back? Like, ‘Heeey, girl, I bet I could bench press three of you.’”

  Tilly chuckled and shook her head at the memory. Being the early bird that she was, she had been the first one to see Errok out there at the Sea Sand settlement that day, doing squats like his fucking life depended on it as the sun rose, up high on that cliff. Even Nasrin shot me a grin, despite the way she always got a little quieter and more serious in the unnerving presence of Gahn Thaleo’s almighty stare.

  Gahn Thaleo ignored my little divergence into English. “As you will be here for the event, you are of course invited to watch as our honoured guests.”

  “Honoured guests or future mates for his men?” Tilly whispered in English. I nodded back at her. It definitely hadn’t escaped my notice that we single human ladies had been slotted into the position usually held by unmated female members of his own tribe.

  But honestly? Alien Olympics sounded kind of cool. As long as nobody was going to die, I was into it. I used to love watching the Olympics with my Nan when she was still around. Our favourites to watch were what at first seemed like diametrically opposed sports – pairs figure skating and boxing.

  Figure skating because it was just so beautiful with the costumes and the liquid grace with which the athletes moved, and boxing because that was what Ireland tended to earn medals in. I’d made the comment once, about how weird it was that our two favourite sports seemed so completely different, but my Nan had looked at me over her cup of tea and said, “But they’re both a sort of dance you need a partner for, aren’t they?”

  I wondered if boxing, or something similar, would show up in these Deep Sky games. I highly doubted figure skating was on the table.

  “And of course,” Gahn Thaleo added, snapping me out of my reverie, “you unmated Sea Sand men may compete in the vaklok.”

  Knowing Dalk and his hatred for all things Gahn Thaleo and Deep Sky in general, I expected him to come up with some sneering rejection of that idea. But to my surprise, it was Dalk who snapped his tail in vicious agreement, growling his answer without a single moment’s hesitation.

  “We will.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Dalk

  Somehow, I had gone from escorting Fiona and the others into Gahn Thaleo’s territory for a day trip to being their chaperone for a period of seven long days. And this would not be the only time, either. It would be seven days after that, and after that, and after that, alternating with stays in Gahn Errok’s mountain until, presumably, the three remaining new women were mated and settled.

  Either that or I lost my patience, which was not abundant to begin with, and did something so violent that it put this new arrangement, or even the entire alliance, in jeopardy.

  But even if I went rogue and ended up killing half of Gahn Thaleo’s stupid men, I doubted even that would put an end to this new back-and-forth agreement. Gahn Thaleo wanted access to the new women, and perhaps especially Nasrin, no matter the cost. I had no doubt he’d be willing to shed a little blood to do it. No, if I were foolish enough to sacrifice my good sense to the hot anger of my blades and launch some sort of attack, I would likely only get myself banished or even killed.

  If I were forcibly removed from these lands or left to bleed out in some dark blue cave beneath the ground, then who would guard Fiona?

  Who would make sure she pulled up the hood of her cloak and put on her eye-shells in the sun?

  Who would stand beside her – stand right in front of her if he had to, so that no other male was in her line of sight – to help her fulfil the New Year’s Eve kiss the next time it came around?

  Though she’d already made it clear such a thing would not happen again, so maybe the point was moot. Although, a human year was much longer than a Sea Sand age. It was 365 days to our 100. That meant I had more than 300 days left to somehow change her mind.

  But either way, it was very clear to me now that I would have to hold back my tongues and my weapons. If I caused undue violence here, I would be separated from Fiona one way or another, and that had become a far worse prospect than the idea of stewing in sullen silence under Gahn Thaleo’s insufferable rule.

  But the vaklok...

  Oh, the vaklok sounded excellent indeed. Though we did not have this exact event in the Sea Sands, I had no doubt there would be some kind of sparring or wrestling involved. At the very least, I’d get to hit some Deep Sky men, or maybe even Oxriel if he participated, and it was with that buoyant thought of inflicting future pain that I forced my feet into step beside Fiona’s as we entered Gahn Thaleo’s mountain.

  The first thing I noticed was the light.

  This was not so unusual – Gahn Errok had also installed lanterns throughout his mountain – but these lights had not been in Gahn Thaleo’s mountain before, at least not back when I’d been taken prisoner. No doubt they’d been installed at some point after that for the new women’s comfort. The new women did not see well in the dark. Or the sunlight, now that I thought about it, watching Fiona as she removed her eye-shells, folded them up, and placed them in a pocket of her cloak. Something twanged inside me, maybe disbelief, maybe worry at the fact that any creature could be so very vulnerable that she could barely see in either day or night.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22