Chapter 14 Brynna
The guards tried to stop me from entering the pool. One look at Jorusk in just his shorts, all rippling muscle and powerful, hot veins of angry light, was all it took to crave a private moment with him.
Jorusk carries me out of the pool and sets me down in the steamy haze. I can’t quite tell who all is around us, but many other racers arrive to peer in at the pool.
Within seconds, Jorusk is dry like he never touched the water.
“Is the pool open?” a woman asks.
“Yes, it’s a little hotter than normal,” Mike, the mechanic, warns.
She eagerly runs in, sets her things down, and kicks off her shoes. More racers enter in swimsuits.
A staff member hands me a towel.
“Thanks.”
Jorusk replaces the arrestor over his chest and returns to his usual red hue. The moment the arrestor lights up and gives him a green indicator, the squads of security return to the complex.
Jorusk puts his race suit and boots on while I dry my suit until I’m no longer dripping, then step back into my boots.
“Sorry that got cut short.” Jorusk hoists me up by the hips and loops my legs around his hot body. He carries me along the path back to the complex and through the planetarium atrium to the simulation rooms.
Outside a room with a metal badge above the door resembling a pair of wings, Jorusk sets me down again. The doors slide open, and he leads me inside by the hand.
He studies a digital chart of the dark cliffs of the rectangular tower, some twenty stories high. It reaches up and down, below the moon’s surface, with rock formations throughout its interior, and a transparent ceiling with a view of the stars.
“Hello, Jorusk. You are the first visitor. You may have first pick of any nesting site you like,” the computer says, displaying a schematic with a neatly arranged grid of private corners built into the rock.
“Ohni wishes for all species to feel welcome, as long as they play by the rules. No nest kicking, no playing chicken with other fliers, and no pecking or scratching at the rock.”
“Understood.” Jorusk removes his bands and hangs them on a hook on the wall, then taps the screen.
“Location: Starview Nest One, claimed for… Jorusk. Drathious.”
The map highlights his chosen spot.
“Hang on,” he says, unfolding his wings. Jorusk wraps his arms around me, flaps his wings hard, and rises off the floor before diving over the edge.
My stomach greets my throat, strangling my cry of disorientation as we glide down, among the lower nesting sites in the darker corners of the wing room.
Then he circles us upward, higher and higher, catching synthetically infused warm jets of air that levitate us toward the stars.
Every movement of his wings sends a hot wave through his body and into mine.
The wind dries my hair and my race suit. Jorusk’s gentle way of flying is soothing. He flaps rapidly as we reach the top cliff inside the tower. Jorusk sets his boots down.
“How was that for a trial run?” he asks.
“A bit of a stomach drop at first,” I admit, looking around the rocky cavern from the highest spire. “But this is amazing.”
Jorusk eases me down, and I put my feet on solid ground again. The stars overhead fill the room with a soft milky glow.
He walks to a large, round divot in the rock and looks at it. “Good site. Big. I’ll be right back. I think I saw nest material below.”
Then he just walks to the edge, tilts forward, and drops into a dive. Watching him makes my heart stall for a beat. His dark wings open with his delighted yell, and it makes me laugh. It’s clear that, of all the places at this complex, he’s going to be happiest here.
He rustles around below, at another slot in the rock, grabs an armful of something, then flies back up to me.
“Figured you’d want blankets. They are softer. But traditional material is usually damp moss because it’s soft and can take the heat. They didn’t have any. Just twigs and rocks. Depends on which Talhuskin clan it is, but that’s what they like. So blankets it is.”
He crawls into the bowl in the rock and stuffs the bottom with rumpled cloth, then lays several more blankets over it. “Come on. We’ve got a great view tonight.”
Jorusk gets up on his knees and offers me a hand. I take it and let him help me down, into the nest. “If this is how you normally sleep, how do you not end up in a bowl of water when it rains?”
A grin decorates his face. His red eyes brighten. He brings his wings together behind him, forming a dome, then grabs me and guides me beneath him. “The males’ job is to protect the female and the nest.”
“And your kind…lay eggs,” I say, just to confirm.
“Yes.” Jorusk shakes out his wings, then folds them behind him, adjusts some of the blankets so he’ll have back support, then lies back beside me and looks up at the stars.
“Why do you want a human mate?” I finally ask when the silence feels like too much.
“Our females are…so desperate to protect their hatchlings that they have bred them to be embodied fury. It is how we have survived. But I want to revive the caring tendencies that were once natural. Humans still have them. You clearly do. And you don’t run from us like other species usually will.
“Why is that? I mean, why stay with me? You could be with that Leosantian. Or a Nytheralian. Alustri are much closer in physical appearance to humans than my kind and far less physically dangerous.”
I roll over to study his radiant eyes and the muscled arms that flex as he tucks his hands behind his head. “It’s not about a kind. It’s you. You are loyal. Aura told me what you went through in your recent battle.”
“When?”
“I had recently arrived to the Amphiran ship and was confirming inventory for distribution. He is one of the few I trust with my ship while I’m gone.
Aura told me about the Talhuskin ship’s power generation explosion and how he saw a winged man fall from the ship to the surface.
He was in his Hellion suit and charged to the surface after you. ”
I look up at the stars, remembering the pain in Aura’s green eyes.
“He thought he’d failed you. He tried so hard to catch you.
Redlined his suit. Destroyed it. Burned his feet from the heat.
All he could say was that you couldn’t die.
Anyone who has a friend willing to risk dying for them, in my mind, has to be someone special. ”
“I’m not,” he mutters.
“That’s not what DIA says or Fieri or any of the Draths on you StarEmber. I worked with them all night while you were healing from the poison.”
He tilts his head back and quiets for a moment. After a slow blink, he says, “I don’t care. I don’t want to be different or special or whatever. I just want to serve and protect and fight and know I have fulfilled my duty to my kind.”
“You have.” I think back to how Sidius spoke of Jorusk risking his life to save Osiris as Talhuskins rained poisoned ice bullets down on them.
How Osiris said Jorusk heard a hatchling and abandoned his own chance at safety to save two boys, then ended up saving an entire squadron when he went full Dragon mode.
Dragon…right. I look around for Jorusk’s tail. He’s slipped into a sad mood since our conversation turned to his past, and I’m hoping I can make him feel better.
Where is his tail?
I see the end of it flick lazily on the side of the bed, opposite me.
He darts his red eyes at me, and I wonder if I’ve been caught staring. “I’ve killed a lot of Talhuskins, Denarso, leader Bakka included, and Novarks. Does it bother you that I am a killer?”
He’s got a killer body for sure. I admire the mounds of his pecks stretching the front of his Abr suit. “No. You’re a soldier, defending your people.”
“I tell myself that. But sometimes it feels like it isn’t enough. Why does it have to be this way?”
His tail flicks again, and I watch it, wondering how I can sneak a hand over there and grab it.
“Because some don’t listen to facts and reason. They only operate based on emotion and need. They don’t have concern for higher intellect.” I’m only half paying attention as I watch his tail idly dance under the moonlight like Freckle’s did in the barn window on nights she was mousing.
He jerks and follows something across the sky.
I look up. “Shooting star.”
“Not a missile?” he asks.
I’m familiar with his instinct, his hyper-vigilant state. “No.”
He points to another. “That?”
“Space junk. There’s a lot of it after the Mars war. We have junker crews that salvage around Earth. Anything they miss usually ends up in a farm field. We had a Ginarigon-Nytheralian hybrid superflux motor core land in our spinach field. It’s how we learned to work on starships as kids.”
“Never thought those pieces would work together.”
“I’m certain it was a scavenger design, built from compatible items they adapted to one another.”
An echoing clunk makes Jorusk sit forward and check his wristband. “Be right back.”
I barely sit up before he simply rolls himself out of the nest and over the edge.
My palms sweat from the mere idea of it.
Seconds later, I hear the heavy flapping of wings, and Jorusk rises to the top with a large Tupperware container. He smiles as he sets it before me. “I ordered nest service.”
“Room service?”
“This is not a room. It is a nest.” He opens the lid and draws out a platter of meats, cheeses, crackers, and fruit. “And, they had…”
“Is that an elephant ear?”
He chuckles. “We call this a fynni ynni. It’s fried bread with a spiced buttery glaze and dark canyon berry purée inside. I have not had one in many long years.”
Jorusk eases into the nest and sets the plate before me. He picks up one of the palm-sized fynni yinnies and adds, “I imagine you’ll like it since the other humans on the squad did.”
I finally get the chance I’ve been waiting for and gently close my hand around his tail that gently sways in the air behind him. “All I want is a taste of you.”