Chapter 10 Bath
Bath
Listen, you know what would make getting shoved into a lake, falling through time to the Pleistocene Age, and finding out your fated mate is an actual dragon who may or may not want to kill you in your sleep even worse?
Adding in daily exercise.
Also, outside was the exact opposite direction of where I needed to go to find that door in the floor. Ceiling? Didn’t matter. Wherever it was, opening it would possibly be my ticket out of here, and it was farther inside the castle.
But outside was an inch, and holoscribes were known for being able to make a mile out of those.
“Okay,” I agreed. “See you tomorrow.”
“Mid-morn, after you have fully digested your first meal,” he rushed to add in a tone I couldn’t quite read. It somehow came off as agitated and eager at the same time.
I practically limped back to my cavern after agreeing to the kind of outdoors bootcamp course I’d been dodging for years in Toronto.
And, I did decide to take that bath after sticking a cautious toe in.
I nearly broke down in tears of relief when inviting warmth, not the ice cold of the Three Gods Lake, greeted my tentative poke.
Then immediately had more questions after I climbed into it.
I’d been afraid I’d have to cling to the side while fighting off traumatic thoughts of slipping under its clear surface. But a bench lined the wall, wide and high enough for me to sit on without any fear of being sucked into another bottomless abyss.
I let out a soft curse, though, when I realized I’d forgotten the camp soap. Then discovered there was no need for it.
The water suddenly began to agitate, swirling around my body with a firm and efficient scrubbing pressure. Grit lifted from my body in pale brown ribbons. Dirt and dead skin rose to the surface, then vanished when small eddies appeared to suck them in like tiny whirlpool vacuums.
Then, what in the Moana?!
The water splashed over my face, gently exfoliating that skin, too, with a slightly more gentle swirling action.
“Thank you?” I said after it finished, not sure how else to respond.
Was this water sentient or filled with some kind of god tech like my jumpsuit?
Either way, I’d just been exfoliated from head to toe. I’d never felt cleaner.
And it still wasn’t done.
The water shifted with another controlled splash. It began to press and undulate over my scrubbed skin in a way that felt like climbing into a hydromassage machine.
Only much, much more intimate.
The water worked every aching muscle Diarmuid had introduced me to that afternoon. My calves. My shoulders. The hollow of my lower back. The space underneath my shoulder blades that I could never get to with a massage gun.
It moved with a knowing pressure, easing, then releasing, then easing again until every ache in my muscles melted away under its liquid fingers.
This was easily the best bath I’d ever taken in my life.
But it kept going.
Warm water slid between my thighs and lingered there, circling with slow, deliberate swirls before pushing into my cleft with an action I could only describe as soft laps.
Soft laps that made me feel funny. While thinking of the weight of my trainer’s body when he pressed me into that wall. And that mysterious bulge inside his stomach…
A soft moan fell from my mouth before I could stop it. The water felt so good. Not just soothing, but pleasurable.
I wanted more. I instinctively widened my legs, opening myself further to the water’s strange pressure as another helpless moan escaped from my lips.
“Are you enjoying your bath, Dorcas?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the smoke-and-glass voice sounded behind me.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded, angrily bringing my knees up as I scrambled to cover my breasts with my hands.
“It might assuage you to know that our eye receptors do not work in the same manner as yours,” he answered in a tone I could only describe as “happy to advise.”
“We sense skin purely on a burn level. With or without clothing, we perceive you mostly as a living flame.”
“Wait, are you trying to say you’re basically blind?” I furrowed my forehead. “Like, you have snake vision, and can only see the heat I’m emitting.”
“We would not refer to it as blind,” Aengus-Diarmuid answered. “We perceive much more than you can with your relatively weak hominid eyes. But if it will ease your discomfort, we have brought a robe with which you may cover yourself, and we will not perceive you until you do so.”
It did make me feel better, actually. I turned around to find him standing directly behind me but a few feet away. He’d changed back into the gray linen buttonless shirt and wore what looked like the Pleistocene Era version of a leather messenger bag over one shoulder.
“For you.” He held out a fur robe with his glowing green eyes averted, if not closed.
It smelled like the reindeer I’d encountered during my research visit to the Norwegian wolves.
I took the fur robe from him but found myself much more curious than self-conscious as I put it on. “Can Drakkon close their eyes?”
“We can.” A small smile played on his lips, as if he’d been expecting the question. “However, we only do so when we take our daily slumber, as we have no need to constantly clean and lubricate them as your kind does. May we gaze upon your burn again, Dorcas?”
Something caught in my chest. That was kind of a dramatic way to term looking at me. Like poetry—but with snake vision.
The fated mate possibility pulsed like something living between us.
“Sure.” I managed to keep my voice level as his gaze returned to me. But I still had to crane my neck to meet it—and to point out, “You never answered my question.”
“About what kind of creature we are?” he asked.
I squinted, wondering if he was messing with me. “No, you answered that question before you kicked my peach emoji with all those drills. I mean, the one about why you came in here while I was bathing in the first place. I’m assuming it wasn’t only to give me a reindeer robe.”
“No, it was not,” he confirmed. “We thought you might be interested in learning how to eliminate without our assistance.”
I inwardly cringed at the “without our assistance” part. But… “I think that means you’re going to show me where the toilet is. Yes, do that, please!”
Fifteen very awkward minutes later, I was back in my jumpsuit and wishing I hadn’t asked. As it turned out, the lower two wall tubes were the toilet system, and I soon found out why my self-cleaning jumpsuit had bottom flaps in the front and the back.
What. The. Eggplant Emoji.
The tubes worked exactly as I feared, with an octopus-tentacle amount of assistance. No matter how nice—and weirdly sexy—that bath had been, my first experience with the tubes truly lit up the “you cannot stay here” portion of my brain.
Especially since Aengus-Diarmuid, who I’d decided to privately call A.D. for short, stood over me the entire time, “In case you are in need of our aid.”
Thankfully, I only needed one of the tubes for my first visit, even if it felt like I should file charges after it was done emptying my bladder.
My holoscribe brain wouldn’t let me not ask. “What are the two top tubes for?”
“The one on the right will dispense healing to whatever area you apply it, and the other one is for feeding. You may use it right now if you have hunger. Otherwise, we will bring you a physical version of last meal.”
“I’ll take the physical version, please!” I immediately answered. “Thanks!”
At least the meal he brought into the cavern on a tray less than an hour later wasn’t some weird sci-fi version of real food.
Medallions of something that smelled unmistakably like the mega-deer I’d seen outside, charred and still faintly smoking.
A small heap of greens that tasted like eating nature straight, without any factory production.
And something dark and jammy in a shallow bowl that had no modern equivalent I could name but tasted better than any fruit I’d ever bought at the store.
All of it was served on a bronze plate with a rough-hewn fork.
The meal was simple but shockingly delicious. I’d eaten most of it before I looked up and realized A.D. was just sitting there across from me with his legs folded in a loose lotus position. Staring with a ravenous look.
But not at the food.
My cheeks heated under the intensity of his emerald gaze. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“No. We have already consumed our required sustenance for this day.”
“You’ve got tubes in your bathroom, too?” I tried to ignore the squicky feeling that came at just the thought of eating from a tube located directly above where it would come out.
“No, those are only for emergency use. We have cultivated the herd of megaloceros giganteus that you sighted beyond the station’s east wall. There are also several wild herds of beasts all over Zone 4 from which we can hunt. Drakkon enjoy hunting. We are engineered for it.”
For some reason, when he said this, a gloomy look came over his face.
Personal questions…
This was my weak spot as a holoscribe. My style was more like a tennis ball machine, lobbing question after question until answers I could use came back.
I thought of that signed Taffy Brodesser-Akner photo on my wall and wished I had more of her legendary skill for turning celebrity interviews into pieces that made you feel like you knew her subjects personally.
I didn’t quite know how to follow-up that drop about his species’s hunting instinct. Instead, I asked about something my former editor would have sent back with an “unnecessary detail-delete” tag. “So that’s what you call Ireland? Zone 4?”
“Yes, we have labeled this collection of islands and some of the land mass east of it Zone 4.”
“And what exactly are you doing here in Zone 4?” I asked. “I mean, are Drakkon some kind of apex dinosaur species that my time’s scientists never found out about? Like, did you evolve here, or…?”
“No, we are not reptiles.” A.D. gave me a look that could sour buttermilk. “And we do not hail from your primitive planet.”
“Well, to be fair, the version I come from is way more advanced,” I pointed out before I got back behind my tennis ball machine. “So you’re aliens. Are you here on a cultural visit or something? How did you decide on the Zones? Are there more of you?”
A.D. gathered my plate and fork and placed them back on the tray.
“This is a longer story with more answers you will perhaps not like. And we can see from the way your flame dims gray at the edges that you are tired, even if your ever-burning curiosity is lighting up your heart center. You will sleep, and we will resume this conversation tomorrow at first meal.”
I wanted to protest, but he was right. The massage was beginning to wear off, and my brain had that same sluggish feeling as when I’d been pushing too hard on a story that hadn’t quite gelled. Not from lack of sleep, but from too much input with no framework to hold it.
“Thank you for the last meal.”
“You are welcome, Dorcas.” He unfolded himself from the lotus position and stood with the tray balanced in both hands. An impressive amount of agility for someone pushing eight feet tall.
I was not nearly as graceful, scrabbling to my own feet. “Um, about the knife-wielding incident from last night. We’re cool, right? I’m not going to wake up to more shouting and you putting another one of your blades to my throat?”
It was a joke, meant to elicit a simple promise. But A.D. didn’t laugh. Or even smile.
“We are sorry about that,” he said again. His eyes shifted to the side, then came back to me. “We would not wish for it to happen again. But if it does, know that a simple command will make it cease. You only need to ensure you issue it as an order.”
I frowned, wondering if he was kidding. “So you’re saying that if I find you at the foot of my bed again, I should just say, ‘Hey, Aengus, Diarmuid, or whatever you want to be called when you’re like this. Don’t try to kill me. That’s an order.’”
I was being highly sarcastic, but A.D.’s expression shifted to pure relief. “Yes, that is exactly what you should say, and you can use the name Orpheus.”
Wait, there was another name? My mouth opened to ask way more questions.
“Before we go, we have a gift for you,” A.D. said before I could get them out.
Then, he pulled an object out of his leather bag that made me forget all about his weird split personality issue.
“Oh, wow…” My entire chest lit with hope. “Is that what I think it is?”