Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
MINERVA
ONE WEEK LATER
As soon as the light streaming through the scriptorium window starts to dim toward dusk, I clean my pens and close my inkwell. Excitement fizzes like fermented fruit in my stomach. It’s time.
For the past week, I’ve been saving the last hour of daylight to help Claudia with her writing. It’s quickly becoming the hour I look forward to the most.
Alexander smirks as I pass him on the stairs. “Time to visit your sweetheart, eh, Minnie?”
I make sure to “accidentally” whip him with the end of my tail as I pass.
Cresting the stairs, I pause as always to admire the vaulted reading room on the top floor of the library.
With four glass walls providing a stunning view of the city, the reading room is this building’s main tourist attraction.
The room’s natural lighting is great for reading, but the constant murmur of visitors violating the quiet-room rule and getting shushed ruins it for me.
The reading desks in the middle of the room are suffused with the golden glow of oncoming sunset. Most of the guest patrons are glued to the windows, ooohing and ahhhing at the brilliant horizon.
But at a desk in the corner, scribbling away like the most dedicated scholar, there’s Claudia.
Her knee is bouncing as she skims over her last few pages, checking her own work. I watch her finger trace lines across the page as she reads. A triumphant smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. Something twists low in my stomach. Like hunger, but not quite…
When she looks up and meets my gaze, her eyes light up in a way that only intensifies my craving. She waves me over and holds up the page she’s working on to display her work.
A beautifully bawdy illumination sketch, depicting a human man and a pterosaur engaged in a romantic embrace, takes up the top half of the page.
The lower half is covered with Claudia’s much-improved script, using quality ink instead of smudgy charcoal.
If I’m not mistaken, this is her finished copy of the story of the time that her friend Cassian and his wife Eudora had their clothing stolen by a rodent looking to line its nest. It still needs color—I don’t lend my precious colored inks to anyone else, not even Claudia—but her drawing is quite skillful.
Good enough to make my feathers prickle when I get close enough to see the details she’s drawn.
“Oh my.” If I could blush like a human, my skin would be tomato red. “That’s…ah…very passionate.”
Claudia sucks on her lower lip, holding the drawing out to cast a critical eye over her work. “Is it too much?”
“The presses won’t be able to print fast enough,” I say firmly, pushing down my embarrassed reaction.
There’s no law against erotic artwork, and it is, in fact, one of the more popular art forms in Balexonia.
My shyness around mating-related topics is a product of my own inexperience, and I refuse to shame Claudia the way her family did.
She flashes me a smile that’s genuinely flattered and also ever-so-slightly sly.
“Wait. Are you teasing me?” I demand. “I am not above eating a human, however tame you might think I—”
“I’m counting on it,” Claudia purrs.
I hiss in a breath, blood rushing south. A couple of the traitorous feathers on my neck stand up before I shake them back down. “You can’t say things like that to me in public!”
“Why not?” She reaches out and deliberately draws a line down one of my arm feathers with her soft fingers. My skin feels electrically charged. Preening is intensely familial and, between dinosaurs not bonded by blood, is considered a romantic overture akin to a human kiss.
If she’s close friends with a pterosaur, I have a feeling she knows this already.
“I had a different idea for tonight,” Claudia says. Her tone stays low and sultry. “What if, instead of working on the project tonight, we go out for a drink? I found a bar a few blocks away that accommodates all species.”
I gulp. This is very clearly a date invitation. I’ve been both hoping for and dreading the moment Claudia asks ever since the two of us were trapped in that closet. It’s undeniable we’re attracted to each other, and yet…
Unlike my mother and siblings, unlike most raptors in fact, I’ve never been interested in casual sex.
I’m already considered something of an odd bird for exclusively desiring women.
While bisexuality is common in predator cultures, where mature raptrixes tend to hunt and raise young in single-sex groups, not having any interest in mating with raptors even during a heat cycle is considered unusual.
But romantic inclinations are even more so.
That was the main reason my siblings felt I ought to be destroyed.
They believed my shy little crushes were signs of weakness.
That my capacity for affection would weaken our mother’s family line, even though I protested often that I had no interest in procreating.
Certainly not if it meant mating with one of the stupid, brutish raptors who courted my sister during her heat cycles.
I don’t want Claudia just for a night. If she’s soon to disappear back to her adventures, I’d rather not know what I’m missing.
Because I will miss her. This last week has been the brightest of my life.
I hadn’t realized how lonely I still was, even here in the library surrounded by colleagues who respect my work.
I’ve never let any of them know me. There’s no one I get drinks with after work, and certainly no one I bring home to my little single-room apartment.
If Claudia can’t stay, it’s better if she just leaves me.
All this emotion stays locked in my throat. Unsurprisingly, my upbringing left me ill-equipped to communicate my feelings.
Claudia catches the indecision in my long pause, and her face falls. “If you would rather keep this professional, I understand.”
Her disappointment stabs me like a knife to the ribs. “I’d love to go out for a drink,” I choke out. It doesn’t have to be anything more than that, does it?
CLAUDIA
I know I’m not misreading the current of lust that’s been brewing between us.
I know when a woman wants me. I especially know what it looks like when she thinks she shouldn’t want me and does anyway.
I can’t count all the times I’ve been cast as the bad girl, the unsavory element tempting well-mannered young maidens to misbehave.
Except I don’t think that’s quite what’s bothering Minerva.
I also don’t think it’s the fact that I’m human.
I’ve caught her checking me out from across the table enough times to be sure of that.
No, it’s something else that holds her back, even as the pupils of her eyes dilate when she watches me walk.
I can’t imagine what she’s waiting for. I’ve been trying to seduce her for a week. It usually doesn’t take this long—most of the time, I have a girl in the palm of my hand (in more ways than one) by day three. My ego’s taking a bit of a hit here.
I’m also running out of excuses to keep asking her for help.
My penmanship has already improved massively, especially since she lent me some proper pens.
Charcoals are hard to write neatly with.
Plus, with Minerva’s help, I’ve started using the drawing skills Cassian taught me for a whole new purpose: illustration.
I never thought the pictures of my companions I liked to sketch by firelight would interest anyone—I usually just fed them to the fire, unless Eudora noticed and rescued them for “sentimental reasons.” My parents never let me read books with pictures, so it never occurred to me that art could be part of a story.
I took the three stories I’ve completed so far to show the microraptors at Balexonia Press yesterday morning.
Just as Minerva predicted, their acquiring manager, Scipio, bubbled over with excitement at the prospect of publishing them.
He was fairly jumping up and down on his perch when I spread them out on the desk.
I’d promised he could buy the rights to print them, but only if he helped me make two bound copies of my collected stories. One to donate to the Great Library…and one to send home.
My parents will probably burn it. I don’t care. I want them to know who I am now. I want them to know that I’m proud and happy, even if they hate it.
I turn my head to look at Minerva again.
Although she could easily outpace me with her powerful thighs, she keeps her gait slow at my side as we weave through the evening crowd on the streets.
The wind flutters through her feathers and lifts the hem of her toga.
Her chatelaine jingles when she moves, as elegant as any fine lady’s jewelry.
She holds her tail politely steady, careful not to hit any passersby.
We round the corner to the multispecies bar, and I groan. There’s a line snaking out the front, all the way down the street. It must be payday, when the Ruling Council officials hand out everyone’s weekly living allowance.
Balexonia City works differently than the rural towns.
Most people work trades here, just like farmers and smiths and lumberjacks, but a great number of city-dwellers are employed as artists, philosophers, and other bureaucratic jobs (like librarians) that don’t easily translate to payment.
As such, the Ruling Council provides every citizen with small, basic lodgings and a weekly handful of coins for food and necessities.
Payday often leads to a splurge, especially at food stalls and breweries.