14

Fásach and Roz had walked for two sols already, keeping an eye on the storm clouds gathered in the distance. The whiteout ahead of them thickened with each passing hour, only visible against the green glow of Big Blue upon the snow-laden mountain pass. Traveler had warned them that the storm would thicken over the course of a couple days. They should take their time approaching Relay Station Pahadthi 03 so they’d be in sufficient cover when they passed it by, but Fásach felt the itch of impatience under his hackles.

He was slowing them down too much.

Not only did he insist on taking a belly position every hour, covering Safia and Misila in the white thermal blankets he and Roz were carrying to observe the landscape, but he also wasn’t strong enough to move at a clip with all the equipment weighing him down. He needed the breaks to catch his breath, and his paranoia was the perfect excuse.

Was that a predator in the distance or a rock?

Could an arctic sea creature bust through the ice from below?

Was the ice even thick enough to walk on?

The polar cap wasn’t ground at all but Svargapan Samudr. They caught glimpses of the black sea beneath the ice more and more frequently as they walked towards the permanent blush of pink on the horizon. The ice was so ancient and clear, there was no telling how thick it really was. Fásach found himself staring down at his feet as the wind tempered and the snow gathered along their path in pristine, glittering dunes.

“We should stop here,” he panted. The vital pods whirred to a standstill, the horizontal tear drops hovering ten feet from both their positions. Roz called Misila’s in as she set her pack on the ground with a heavy thunk. Fásach’s ear twitched and he scolded her, “Don’t do that. We don’t know how thick the ice is now that it’s warming up.”

“Sorry. My sensors estimate a thickness of seven inches though, so we shouldn’t have any problems,” Roz said with a frown. She squeezed her eyes closed as she unlatched her pack, withdrawing her set of auto-stakes. Fásach unpacked their shelter and secured one side to the ice before unfurling the rest of the enclosure.

Roz wasn’t lying but she wasn’t chiming either. In the deepest darkness of the polar cap, with the wind roaring and the moisture of their breath freezing on their faces, they’d focused entirely on the trek out. They hadn’t spoken except to coordinate the shelter and call for breaks. But now that Fásach could hear her, he wondered if there was a problem.

As soon as the shelter was up and the vital pods stowed safely amongst their packs, Fásach turned on the space heater and latched the double-insulated entrance. Both he and Roz removed their hoods, and he brushed the frost off his facial velvet, watching her with deliberation.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

Roz sat on her heels and hugged her knees with a pinched smile. “I’m okay.”

“You can tell me if you’re not.”

“I know.” She hugged herself a little tighter. “I’m not used to the silence, that’s all.”

Fásach’s ear twitched. Silence? Then it dawned on him.

“You mean the echoes?”

Roz nodded, then squeezed her eyes shut again, patting her ears. “It’s not really silence, but—” She let loose a shaky exhale. “There’s this constant bump, bump, bump inside me. And an incessant ticking. They’re different rhythms and it’s driving me mad.”

Fásach set down a pack of rations and crawled across the thermal mat. “That’s your heart beating. The ticking though, I don’t know.”

“It’s my atomic clock,” Roz sniffed, rubbing her nose with a haunted look. “And now I just hear rhythms everywhere. Our feet crunching in the snow and the hum of the vital pods…”

Fásach’s heart clenched. Roz looked miserable, tapping her fingers against her knees in an arrhythmic beat that probably didn’t help at all. He pulled up a vid on his holotab, one of the sing-a-longs that Safia was currently obsessed with, then opened several apps. His vitals deck, a seismometer, a game.

“What are you doing?” Roz asked.

“Making some noise. Is it helping?”

Roz blinked, sitting up straighter, and nodded. “Actually, yes.”

Fásach then unlatched his polar coveralls and doffed the arms so the suit hung around his waist. He held his arms open with a chuff of heat, maintaining a neutral expression even if he wanted to swallow the lump in his throat. “Do you remember the market?”

Roz unlatched herself enough to press her arms to her chest, then leaned into Fásach’s warmth.

Touching her was like coming home. Exhaustion melted off Fásach’s fur like frost as he squeezed her tight, splaying his claws across her shoulders and waist. She was supple from head to foot, covered in a soft brown fuzz that was nearly invisible if you didn’t look closely. So different from venandi plates, or shilpakaari muscles that couldn’t relax. Her flesh slipped over the bones of her hands and elbows, and her pillowy breasts spilled against his chest when he squeezed her shoulders.

Scocite,it was getting harder to deny harmony.

“Thanks, Fás,” she sighed, sitting back. “I owe you.”

“Anytime,” he rasped, flexing his claws.

Rut, rut, rut.

He was so fucking hopeless.

Instead of thinking about how warm she was or how the rut was turning his silver stripes black, Fásach busied himself with preparing snow melt for a pot of tea and rehydrating a ration meal to share. But the distraction didn’t last nearly long enough.

Roz hummed, running their daily diagnostics on the vital pods, recording their battery usage and making sure that Safia and Misila were healthy in stasis. She sang a song in Yspaenyol while Fás pointedly kept his distance. Harmony warbled through the shelter like a delicate gong as her mood improved, the chime tickling his ears, shivering down his spine, making his cock swell and his gums itch.

It didn’t matter that she was singing off key and under her breath, it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. Tears wet his lower lashes and he brushed them away, leaving a streak of dark across his knuckles.

And then she stopped singing.

Fásach’s ear twitched. He wanted her to keep going, but he clenched his jaw shut. All it did was stoke the fire growing in his groin to hear her, and there was no way to alleviate the ache unless he was willing to sneak out and risk his hand freezing to his shaft like a tongue to a metal pole.

He closed his eyes with a self-deprecating snarl. As frustrated as his body felt, it was the best option for pushing further into his pred state. He swallowed hard, directing his words over his shoulder.

“I like when you sing,” he murmured. Roz didn’t respond, filling the shelter with a thick silence. Fásach scraped his claws along the sides of the metal canister working up to a boil. “It… It fills my silence.”

When Roz still didn’t respond, Fásach’s brow creased. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see her staring at him.

His eyes shot wide open.

She wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the shelter.

Fásach slid across the shelter barely tall enough to stand in and whipped the entrance aside.

He found Roz immediately—the eerie night glow bouncing off her polar suit—but a tight, anxious wire in his chest snapped as her hair bounced and her feet pounded down on the ice. She was running as fast as she could.

Instinct took over, saliva pooling in Fásach’s mouth. He fixated on her with unblinking eyes, and flexed the muscles in his padded fingers so his claws would fully extend. He sank each tip into the ice like miniature ice picks, ripping through the open flap and into the wild wind on all fours, scrambling to give chase.

As soon as he got his feet beneath him, he was sprinting. Cold air pierced his lungs, and even though he was pushing himself to the limit, his inner hunter couldn’t help expending breath on a hollow war chuckle.

Roz glanced over her shoulder, and he felt her gasp. Relished her wide, fearful eyes. Licked his teeth when she nearly tripped. He was close enough now to hear her gulp down lungfuls of icy air, and he timed his own breaths to the rhythm of her fear.

Fásach lunged, tackling Roz to the ground in a wave of snow so cold it pelted them like glass as the wind picked up the spray from their thunderous fall. A whiplash echo snapped across the ice like a buoyant wire as the clear sheet beneath them cracked in a web of white.

“Fás! I—”

Roz struggled to get out from under Fás’s weight, but he snarled, pressing her cheek to the ground with a claw gripping her head like a ball.

Panting in time with his prey, Fásach’s body moved of its own accord. He pressed his fangs into Roz’s pulse, ground his hips into her ass from behind, and when she struggled again, encased her throat in his jaws with just enough pressure to make her submit. Training his ears on the frantic beat of her heart, Fás waited until her muscles relaxed and she lay limp beneath him, vitals as thin as a baby bird.

The submission summoned his war chuckle. The stuttering bass dripped with violence and lust rather than lighthearted excitement. He rolled his hips and his cock jumped, enthralled by the heat of where they touched and the chill of the wind. He forced her head back and dragged his tongue up the length of her esophagus as she swallowed. Hackles high and sensitive, Fásach’s shoulders bulged as he shifted his free hand, holding himself up on one elbow near her face. If they wouldn’t freeze to death, he’d have torn her clothes off and found out if she was as hot and wet between her legs as he thought.

“Don’t make me chase you if you aren’t prepared to get fucking caught,” he menaced in her ear, clutching the frayed threads of his sanity.

Roz nodded, grinding her cheek into the ice. “Yes—” Fás pressed his hand harder into her mane and she gasped, that cute little mouth popping open. “Yes, Fás. Y-yes, sir.”

The quiver in her voice settled his aggressive streak and he chuffed, scraping his claws gently through her twists. The hunter’s fog dissipated slowly, but a headache lingered right above his eyes, sharpening with each clarifying blink.

What had he done?

Fásach slid off her carefully, his claws trembling as she stayed down, her hands red from the biting cold. Fásach’s heart clenched, oily shame jetting through his veins. She didn’t know that running was primal for the yiwren. How could she know?

“Roz… Fuck! Roz, are you okay?”

She turned her face towards him with a beaming smile, and the ice fell right out from under his butt in shock.

“Did I help?” she asked.

Fásach blinked at her, dumbfounded. She sat up on her knees, unaware of the angry scrape on her cheek where he’d tackled her to the ice. He fixated on it, then pressed his fists into his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut.

She ran to help him transition.

“Roz, you can’t do that ever again,” he rasped. She shifted and Fás’s entire body twitched. He nearly pounced on her, holding himself back only by the iron grip of his claws in the ice.

“My database says chasing is the fastest method for bucks to transition though,” she said with confusion. “Did I overstep again? Did it not work?”

Fásach chuffed bitterly, the echoes of his war chuckle bubbling out of his chest. “Oh, it definitely worked. But it was dangerous.”

Roz scootched a little closer, putting a hand on his knee. He opened his eyes and pressed his palm against his forehead, watching Roz’s mangled twists flag about her face in the wind as his vision throbbed with the hammering in his skull.

“But you’re just Fásach. You wouldn’t hurt me, I know that,” she said with sincere, clueless concern.

Fás leaned in. “Roz, you’re not food. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

She beamed. “Exactly! It’s not like you’re going to eat me if you catch me. We could do this every day, if you want. Actually, it was pretty fu—”

Fásach got to his feet with a snap of his teeth.

“A buck doesn’t think about eating when he chases a doe!” If she said it was fun, he was going to lose his shit and say yes. A month-long journey where he got to rut-hunt Roz every day was more tempting than water on Huajile. Extending his claw, he helped her to her feet and yanked her closer to make his point. “Do I need to go into more detail? Please tell me I don’t, because if I talk about this right now, I might lose my mind.”

Roz searched his eyes, then nodded once. “Okay. I won’t run again. I’m sorry. I should have asked you if it was okay. Like the slapping and biting.”

Fásach hung his head against her shoulder. He felt for the latches of her coveralls and closed them up without looking, gathering his wits. She was trembling from the cold, teeth chattering now that the adrenaline was wearing off. The snow wasn’t melting from her skin anymore, but rather collecting around her eyelashes and brows.

“You really did help, Roz,” he said, taking an agonizing step away, catching her brown, round eyes with his. “I just don’t want to hurt you.” He swallowed hard, the knot of his throat sore and tight. “I promise I’ll tell you if I need another chase. Then we can plan it together.”

Roz’s fractured confidence smoothed over and she smiled at him with timid hope.

“Okay. I’d like that.”

If ads affect your reading experience, click here to remove ads on this page.