Chapter 21
Linsea
Iwas flying high, living my best life with the most amazing male.
Three months after the symposium, I couldn’t stop poking fun at him for how silly he had been in his belief that people would snub him.
Sure, the occasional idiots like Taylor and his brother approached him with a haughty demeanor.
But many members of the less advanced species—without actually falling into the primitive category—were greatly pleased to see a service catering to other groups than just the elite.
More importantly, they were blown away by his personality. My husband was smart, knowledgeable, insightful, charismatic, and genuinely passionate about improving other people’s lives, especially those deemed weird or freaky. You couldn’t fake that.
Colin had been extremely clever by requesting all this early socializing for Kayog. His reputation grew quickly, in no small part due to that extremely lucky pairing between the Daigan and Stornian. The amazing information he shared regarding the lumoths benefited my own career.
I became the main negotiator between the UPO and Straef regarding all the ways his research could be further funded.
Needless to say that Kateros was over the moon when he received the grant I helped them secure for the trial run of the program.
Countless other people came knocking at both our doors hoping for the same type of windfall.
Obviously, we didn’t have any magic trick to dish out such beneficial outcomes to the masses. It still opened many doors for us.
Simultaneously, Colin had not been playing by saying our public relations and marketing department would go all out for the official launch of the Prime Mating Agency. They had the coolest and wildest ads playing in a loop with a countdown to the registration site opening.
And the day it did, the site crashed within ten minutes from too many simultaneous signup requests. It shouldn’t have been surprising to the extent that the clever ads from the UPO essentially guaranteed that any match would be a perfect one. That resonated with those desperate for love.
Due to the insane numbers of candidates, Kayog went straight to a fair format.
Candidates within a given region were chosen lottery style from the pool of applicants to come to the three-day fair in their sector.
Each candidate only got a ten-minute one-on-one meeting with my mate.
An assistant recorded those meetings and entered all the information thus gathered in a database.
But Kayog didn’t need it.
Although he didn’t possess the traditional eidetic memory, my mate never forgot a person’s name or face.
They were literally carved into his memory.
Despite the limited time afforded for each meeting, people absolutely loved him.
Kayog had a way of making you feel like no one but you mattered whenever you were together.
His entire focus was on you. He made you feel understood, respected, and like he truly cared about helping you find happiness.
And he absolutely did.
Although he was no longer part of a band, I often felt like I was married to a rock star always on the road while touring. To the candidates, that’s exactly what he was. And that became even truer once he started making matches.
At first, it was a trickle. Each time, he would message me as soon as the candidate left his office and would pretty much lose his mind. He would jump all over the place, doing a happy dance that had me in stitches. He was so excited. To him, every match was like winning the lottery.
In no time, the number of pairings almost became a tsunami.
He traveled so much and met so many people that it became easier with the massive database organically stored in his wondrous mind.
He only deplored the cases that would sit idle on the shelf of his brain as he failed to find their partner.
It messed with him receiving messages after a few months from candidates he had met and who were distraught that he kept finding mates for others but not for them.
Some of them truly broke his heart, but others were downright infuriating.
Entitled messages demanding he get off his ass and find them their partners happened a few times too many.
The worst were those who became flat out nasty, calling him names and insulting him for ‘not doing his job.’ And then, there were the idiots spreading rumors that he was lying about those pairing being true soulmates.
The candidates were just brainwashed into believing they were actually in love with their match but that it was all an illusion, a hoax that would eventually come crashing down and leave them devastated.
I wanted to tear them a new one, but Kayog always calmed me down, truly amused by their nonsense. He wisely reminded me that there was no point arguing with fools, in that time would prove him right.
A few of those ‘fools’ turned out to be rival matchmaking agencies, pissed off that many of their candidates would just flock to the PMA.
A few even tried to sue my mate over unfair practices over the fact that his services were free.
The incentives from the UPO in the form of free relocation and dowries further constituted unfair advantages in their eyes.
Those lawsuits were dead on arrival as they were founded on the false premise that they were competitors.
Kayog catered to a very specific group that those agencies always snubbed.
It wasn’t his fault that their other candidates came to him instead.
Anyway, my husband was far too proud and honest for that kind of shady behavior.
It turned out that Kayog was constantly cataloging the soul of every person he encountered, even those who were married.
He was almost obsessive in his need to hear people’s songs.
To my shock, he revealed that he had defined a personal chart based on those melodies.
Apparently, the rhythm, tonality, amplitude, and complexity of a person’s song revealed specific common traits about them.
For example, he could already narrow down certain things about people only with that, which in turn help him identify the species or type of candidate that might be a good match.
It still boggled my mind how he could recognize two people from the insane pool of potential partners. But he made it work.
Above all, he got to live his dream of visiting and interacting directly with countless primitive species under different levels of restrictions of the Prime Directive.
He was taking very seriously writing amendments and reforms to the guidelines specific to different planets.
What I loved most about him was the fact that he didn’t simply push for his personal ideas and opinions on the matter.
He used his incredible empathic abilities to discreetly assess the local population’s feelings about his ‘innocent’ comments regarding specific issues faced by that species.
Each time the laws were modified to reflect his suggestions were a massive victory.
However, all of this made coordinating our respective missions harder. We parted often, though thankfully for fairly short periods. But our steamy reunions more than compensated for it.
We had just gone out to celebrate his 250th official pairing when I suddenly felt faint.
Before we even reached our table, I got hit by three dizzy spells back-to-back.
Not wanting to take chances, Kayog insisted that we go to the doctor immediately.
I wasn’t too thrilled about it as it was a forty-five-minute flight back to the research center where we still lived. But my mate’s genuine worry swayed me.
I simply thought low blood sugar from not having eaten a proper meal all day had been the cause. The verdict I should have seen coming instead actually took me by surprise.
We were pregnant.
My excited squeal—not to say screech—instantly died in my throat when Kayog remained stoic.
A wave of worry surged within me when I perceived nothing but great tension emanating from him.
Why such a cold and reserved reaction? We had spoken about having children, and my mate always expressed his desire to have lots and lots of them.
I shifted my attention to Arafin. Discovering that he had blocked his emotions from us—something he had never done before—had my blood turning to ice.
Of all people, Arafin knew that he couldn’t block his emotions from Kayog. So either he had done so subconsciously, or he was deliberately trying to hide something from me. I opened my mouth to ask what the fuck was going on, but Kayog spoke first.
“There’s something wrong, right?” Kayog asked, his voice as devoid of emotion as his face.
I held my breath, fear wanting to take root in the pit of my stomach as the doctor lowered his eyes for a moment, an air of sorrow and guilt fleeting over his features before he collected himself.
“Currently, we cannot see any anomaly with the fetus,” Arafin said carefully. “However, Linsea’s blood tests confirmed something we dreaded.”
“Something you dreaded?!” I exclaimed, torn between fear and outrage that he might have kept some vital information hidden from me. “What’s going on?”
He glanced at me with an apologetic look before turning back to Kayog.
“To be frank, we thought you would be sterile. Your hormonal discrepancies affect many of your organs, which in turn grants you those incredible powers,” the doctor said instead of answering my questions.
“Clearly, I’m not sterile,” Kayog retorted in a clipped tone. “So what gives?”
“Based on the blood samples taken from Linsea, your child is provoking the same hormonal imbalance in her, but to a lesser degree,” he explained.
As one, Kayog and I recoiled with complete shock.
“Linsea is becoming an Edal?” he exclaimed, reaching for my hand, fear soaring inside of him. “Is she going to suffer like I did?”