PROLOGUE PART TWO | Dalk
Istood in the valley of the Deep Sky, arms crossed over my chest and tail thwapping back and forth, and watched.
I watched the humans and their mates having what the new women referred to as a party. When I heard the word party, I always thought of a war party. A group of warriors primed and ready to attack.
But this was instead some sort of celebration.
“Dalk!”
I grunted as young Oxriel bounded over to me. Even after all this time, I was not used to mingling with the males of other tribes. But Oxriel was a somewhat tolerable fellow. For the most part. When he didn’t smile too much.
He was smiling now, fangs glinting in the star and moonlight, and he waved something steaming in the air between us.
“Try this! The new women call it a pee-tzaw. It is delightful.”
I grunted, eyeing the thing in his hand with distaste. Anything that lumpy and soggy did not conjure up words like delightful. Then again, few things did.
Laughter cut through the noise of the celebrating group. A voice I recognized instantly as belonging to Fiona. The one with the dark flowers on her arms.
The word came back, jabbing in my head rather aggressively for one with such a soft meaning.
Delightful.
“Take it! I saved you this one!” Oxriel said. “They were being entirely devoured. Gahn Errok alone ate about fourteen of them and it was only by the grace of the stealth gifted to me by my father and his father before him that I managed to wrangle one from the fray for you.”
“You need not have bothered,” I muttered, scanning the group before me, willing my sight stars not to go to the female they seemed so constantly drawn to. “I don’t eat anything but meat.”
“This has meat!” Oxriel grabbed my hand, leaving me to gawk at his forwardness, then slapped the pee-tzaw into my palm. “There’s some squishy doughy thing on the bottom, then a very odd fruit sauce, then a solid milk product melted on top, and then they’ve added meat! Everything but the meat came from the supplies on Valeria’s ship.”
I stared down at the thing in my hand. Nothing Oxriel had said sounded remotely appetizing.
“I find it’s best if you roll it up into a tube,” Oxriel said, as seriously as if he were expounding upon the best way to kill a man. “It’s less messy, and you get all the flavours in one go.”
Despite having absolutely no intention of eating the abomination, I found myself rolling it up into a cylinder anyway, just to see what would happen. It looked even less like food now, if that were even possible.
“Take this tube of new women’s nonsense back,” I grunted at Oxriel. But when I lifted my sight stars, he was already gone.
And Fiona was standing there instead.
“Aw, now that’s not very polite,” she purred with a grin. “Calling pee-tzaw nonsense? What would the Italians say?”
“What are Italians?” I asked. I clutched at my squishy tube of nonsense – because it really was nonsense, how could such a thing be considered food? – to keep myself from thumping the centre of my chest. Whenever Fiona popped up around me my heart did stupid things. Like... beating. Too hard.
“Humans from Italy. That’s where pee-tzaw is from.”
“Are you one?”
“No. I’m Irish, remember?”
I was about to bite out that if she was not Italian, whatever in the Sea Sands that meant, then I really had no interest in learning anything more about it. But then would come the question of why I’d be willing to learn more about it if she were a so-called Italian, and that was not a question I was willing to broach even in the sanctity of my own head, let alone in conversation with her. So I kept quiet.
Then I tried to foist the pee-tzaw on her, as if by abandoning the soggy thing I could escape the discomfort of this entire conversation. “Here. You take it,” I growled.
But, shocking me to my very core, she was too quick for me. Her hands shot behind her back. It was cool out here, cold by the new women’s standards, and I could not see the intricate drawings beneath her cloak’s sleeves tonight.
“Nope. You have to eat it now.” The dark sight stars in her white eyes glimmered. “I dare you.”
“What does that even mean?”
The pee-tzaw was growing limp and cool in my hand. A fat drop of the red fruit sauce fell from one end of the tube, and it was only my warrior’s reflexes that had me moving fast enough to keep it from landing directly on one of my toe-claws.
“It’s like a point of honour among humans,” Fiona said. Her voice was much sterner than the look of giddy challenge pulling her mouth into a smirk was. “If someone dares you, you have to do it, or be labelled a coward.”
I inhaled sharply, and then fought down the instant need to defend myself against such a ridiculous charge, though Fiona had not technically charged me with such a thing at all.
She did not say you were a coward. This is fine. This is all fine and you are acting like a fool.
“The customs of human males are stupid and I do not abide by them,” I said finally.
“What about the customs of human women?”
She waited, that look of challenge hardening on her face. She was trying to goad me into making a mistake – testing me, seeing if I would call the ways of the new women, and therefore her, stupid.
But she knew as well as I did that I couldn’t say such a thing. Wouldn’t. Why that was was anyone’s blasted guess at this point. I would have had no problem calling any number of new women’s quirks foolish in front of Valeria or Priya or even Zuh-Tephanie as her ridiculous strutting Gahn threatened to bash my head in for the insult.
But with Fiona...
I just couldn’t. Not tonight.
If my great Gahn Fallo could only see me now. See what his man Dalk had been reduced to – standing in the middle of some new day’s eve party holding a sodden tube of misery while a new woman stared at him and tried not to laugh.
“If you want to test my courage or might, may I suggest a more worthy challenge?” I ground out. I was excellent with a spear and even better with a sword. I narrowed my gaze and fought the urge to shift from foot to foot like a child.
“A more worthy challenge? I don’t care about worthiness. I care about the original challenge issued,” she said with surprising formality, sniffing slightly. Absurdly, I suddenly wondered what I smelled like to a new woman, if she could even smell me from there with her decidedly weak human nose at all. She held out her hand half in triumph, half in feigned defeat. “But I suppose I’ll take it if you’re not willing to-”
She swallowed her words just as I shoved the entire tube of pee-tzaw into my mouth. Slimy sauce coated my tongues and the hardened milk topping curdled in my throat. I refused to spit it out or even to cough. It settled uneasily in my guts, and I glared down at my tiny adversary, smashing her dare to bits.
“There. Now you see I am no coward.”
That brought forth a laugh from her, strong and hearty and musical. Her mouth went so wide I could have counted her shiny blunt teeth if I’d wanted to.
I got to twelve before she closed it.
“No. Definitely not. So, how was it?”
“Foul.”
She laughed again, this time more softly.
“You’re so dramatic. It’s pee-tzaw. What’s not to like?”
“I have three tongues,” I muttered, crossing my arms once more, the way I’d been standing before Oxriel had wandered over like some over-eager, untrained irkdu pup. “Therefore, any very bad taste is multiplied by three.”
I was not sure why I expected her to laugh again. I was not joking – the pee-tzaw really was quite awful – and I’d never been considered a particularly good-humoured or funny male. But for some reason her lack of laughter came as a surprise to me then. Her sight stars, black in the night – though in brighter times of day they were much lighter, warmer, verging on dawn-gold when the sunlight hit them just right, not that I’d been looking too closely of course – lingered on my mouth for a moment. Then she did that odd human gesture of nonchalance, lifting her narrow shoulders up and lowering them down.
“Well, fair enough. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. What do you think of all this, though?”
She turned so that she was standing beside me, facing the same way I was, and gestured a small hand out at the crowd gathered. The party’s attendees included all of the new women here – Valeria, Priya, Zuh-Tephanie, Taylor, and Abby, along with their mates and, in Abby’s case, her child, sleeping against her shoulder. Nasrin and Tilly were in attendance as well, milling about the group, untethered by the large, looming males who remained so close to their mated friends. Some of the Deep Sky women had been here earlier, but they’d largely trickled back to Gahn Errok’s mountain. I had to imagine they were as unimpressed by the pee-tzaw as I had been.
“I do not understand the new day’s eve party,” I admitted.
She chuckled. “It’s not ‘new day’s eve,’ it’s a New Year’s Eve party.”
“What’s a New Year’s Eve?”
“A year is three-hundred and sixty-five days. It’s like a Sea Sand age but for humans. When one ends, we celebrate everything that’s happened and look forward to what’s coming.”
I let that settle, then gave a grunt of acknowledgement.
“At least that makes more sense than Zanta Claws day,” I said. Fiona shifted slightly, and the crinkly coat of her sleeve brushed my arm, ceasing all thought in my head for so long that I almost missed her next words.
“‘Zanta Claws day?’ You mean Christmas?”
“Yes,” I said. Blast, now my arm was tingling. I uncrossed them and hoped she would not notice as I subtly shook them out at my sides. “The one where the man with long claws dressed all in red comes into your home at night and you fight him.”
“You what!?”
She rounded on me with such a look of disbelief upon her little face that I knew I must have gone wrong somewhere. But as this was what I’d gleaned from the little bits I’d heard of Zanta Claws day, I doubled down.
“He comes into your home at night,” I said slowly, wondering if she’d be offended that I was trying to explain her own strange celebration to her. “And then you fight him. And you’re rewarded with gifts if you win.”
“You don’t fight Father Christmas. Are you insane?”
I frowned.
“It seems rather more insane not to fight an unknown male who wanders unbidden into your dwelling. And I’m not talking about the krizzmas father. I’m talking about Zanta Claws. The red one. With the chin hairs.”
“Father Christmas is Santa Claus. Same bloke, different names. And he doesn’t wander in unbidden! He comes in to deliver gifts!”
“But you have to fight him for them.”
“No! You absolutely do not fight Santa Claus!”
There was a beat of silence.
“Well. I would fight him,” I finally muttered.
She gave a short laugh, then shook her head.
“And I’d beat him,” I added, just for good measure.
Her mouth opened in some as-yet unspoken retort, but the sudden human cry of, “Oh my God! Ten! Guys, guys! Eight! Seven-” cut her off.
“Why are they counting? And why are they doing it backwards?” I asked, watching in confused fascination as the other new women began to count as well, as if in some sort of sacred chant.
“It’s the countdown to New Year’s!” Fiona said quickly. “Fuck me, I’m supposed to kiss somebody.”
She looked around wildly while I stared, hard, hard, hard at her.
“Five!”
Her eyes reluctantly met mine.
“Four!”
She was supposed to kiss somebody. She’d said so herself.
I may not have been somebody to her but I was somebody.
And I was closest.
“Three!”
She didn’t want to kiss me. I should go get Oxriel. That half-daft warrior would have licked a new woman from head to tiny toes if one had only asked him to. But for some reason – selfishness, maybe, or perhaps lack of time left in the countdown, but not jealousy, surely not that – I refused to run and fetch him.
I refused to move at all, really. Just stood and stared down at Fiona with such intensity that it was a slightly woozy relief my sight stars didn’t slice right through her.
“Two!”
Fiona whispered something that sounded a lot like, “Never been without somebody to kiss at New Year’s and I’m not about to bloody start now,” and flung her arms so forcefully around my neck I was obliged to stoop.
“One!”
The word fizzed out into a shimmery echo as an incredibly soft human mouth pressed to mine.
She touched my lips with hers and it was like she touched me everywhere. My hide glowed with the sensation of nerves screaming beneath it. Heat in my throat and my chest and, toss me on a blasted funeral pyre, my groin.
I have to touch her.
I was just about to, claws reaching for her, when suddenly she was gone.
Well, not entirely gone. Just gone from the shuddering, searing, world-smashing position of having her hands at my neck and her mouth against mine, and in that blackened moment I felt her absence so acutely that it became something to mourn.
She did not pour out words of mourning, though, but rather ones of human celebration.
“Happy New Year, Dalk.”
Her cheeks were dark with some unnamed human emotion or condition or, curses, maybe even illness. Could I make a new woman sick just by putting my mouth on her? Her voice was oddly breathy. Which was better than my own, because it sounded like it had crawled, cracking, out of the depths of some long-forgotten cave when I replied.
“Happy New Year,” I croaked.
I stared at her as she looked everywhere, everywhere, but at me.
Finally, she gave me a flash of a smile, a flimsy human nod, then disappeared into the laughing crowd.
And once again, I was standing at the edge of the party.
Alone.
But watching.
This time, I did not even try to deny it.
This time, I watched her.
Only her.