Chapter 21 #2
I watch it happen from two feet away with my hand in his.
He gets bigger, I don’t know how else to say it, he doesn’t grow but he takes up more space, every muscle drawing tight, his shoulders spreading.
His fangs drop past his lip. His claws lengthen against my skin.
The ridges along his forehead come up dark and prominent.
His eyes go black and enormous and fix on me with an intensity that would frighten me if I weren’t burning from the inside out.
He drags in a breath like a male surfacing.
“My Be’Ih,” he says, in a voice made of grinding rock.
And the compound erupts.
I can hear them, roaring, actually roaring, Cannibal bellowing something and Hook shouting and Jana sobbing and somebody’s child shrieking with delight.
Chief’s voice is the loudest. “It’s positive! It’s confirmed!”
And I don’t see any of it, because I can’t look away from my mate.
I don’t remember getting to the holosuite.
I remember being carried. I remember Cayzor’s arms and the road going past too fast and his hearts slamming against my ear and the way he was holding himself together — I could feel it, the sheer effort of a male keeping a leash on something with his teeth.
Somebody was clearing the way ahead of us. Somebody was laughing.
And then a door, and the air changing, and the smell of green.
He sets me down on wet grass.
The forest goes up forever.
Trees the width of transport pods, red-barked and enormous, jutting into a night sky I’ve never seen.
Two moons hanging low and pale, the wrong color for Timbur, the wrong size, because these aren’t Timbur’s moons.
Stars scattered thick as spilled salt. The grass under my bare feet is damp and cool and the air smells like rain and wood.
A claiming forest. A real one, four sectors away, copied down to the water in the air.
And my mate walks out into the middle of it and turns around and starts to speak.
It’s Xylan, but not the Xylan I know. It’s older and lower and more formal, all guttural rolling syllables I can’t follow, and I understand exactly none of it.
He speaks it to the trees and the moons and to me, and I stand there in a silky blue tunic somebody put me in and I don’t interrupt, because whatever this is, it’s four thousand rotations old and he’s giving it to me.
He stops.
He looks at me down the length of the clearing, and every line of him is strung like a cable, and he says the only words in the whole ceremony that are in a language I have:
“You may run.”
I run.
And here’s the thing nobody warned me about: I want to be caught.
It’s in my blood already, whatever comes through a clasp came through mine, and my whole body is one long ache pulling backward toward that male, and about nine strides in I understand that the hardest thing about this chase isn’t the terrain or his speed.
It’s me.
Some traitor animal part of me wants to lie down in the wet grass and let him have me and it’s screaming, and I’m running away from it as hard as I’m running away from him.
Behind me a roar goes up that shakes water off the leaves.
Oh gods.
Okay. Think.
I’m small, I’m barefoot, I’m three moon cycles postpartum and I have never been fast. He is seven feet of male built by rock, he can see in the dark, and he can smell me.
So I’m not going to win this in a forest.
But I’m not in a forest.
I’m in a holosuite.
And I have spent nine years of my life inside systems, and a projected environment is a system, and a system has architecture, and architecture has seams.
I stop thinking about trees and start reading the room.
There. Twenty paces left and the ground repeats.
It’s subtle and it’s beautiful work but it’s a loop, the same three fern clusters and the same fallen trunk cycling in a band around the edge of the program, which means I’m near the boundary, which means the projection is folding space to make a small room feel like a wilderness.
Which means if I run the seam instead of the forest, I’m running a circle he thinks is a straight line.
I cut left along it.
He crashes through the trees behind me and he’s fast, gods he’s fast, and I hear him overshoot — hear the footfalls carry on past the point where I turned, because he’s following a scent trail through a wood and I’m following the edge of a machine.
I get maybe forty seconds out of it.
Then I hit water — a stream that isn’t a stream, it’s a texture-and-sound loop, but it’s cold and it’s real enough to break a trail — and I go in and wade upstream, teeth clenched, and haul out onto a flat rock and double back along the bank and press myself into a stand of ferns with both hands over my own mouth.
Silence.
Just water and my own thundering heart.
I’ve done it. I’ve actually done it. I’ve beaten a Margol Xylan in a claiming forest using load-path analysis —
The ferns explode.
I don’t even get a shriek out.
An arm like a support strut comes around my middle and takes me off my feet, and we go down, and even now — even gone to the fever, even blind with it — he turns us as we fall so that his back hits the ground and mine doesn’t.
I land on him. He rolls me under him in one movement.
And then his mouth comes down on mine.
It’s our first kiss.
Nine months in the same bed. Nine months of lying six inches apart with my mouth full of things I couldn’t say. Nine months of wondering whether Xylan even do this, whether he’d know how, whether I’d ever find out.
He knows how.
Or he doesn’t and it doesn’t matter, because what he does is devour me — fangs against my lip, tongue in my mouth, a growl coming up out of his chest that I feel in my teeth and my spine and low in my belly.
He tastes like rock dust and something warm.
His hand is in my hair, huge and careful even now, cradling the back of my skull off the ground.
I have been kissed before. I want that on the record. I have been kissed by a number of perfectly adequate men across four sectors.
This is not that. This is a male making up for thirty-one years in about nine seconds.
I sink my hands into his braids and I kiss him back like I’m drowning.
And then the last clear sliver of me remembers the rules.
Make it hard, Mara. The mark is a gift.
Every single one of them told me. Leah in a corridor, Roxy with relish, Lila seriously, Ines with her eyebrow up. The harder you fight, the better. It’s your whole job. The males want the wounds. They show them off.
So even drowning, even burning, I get an arm free and I hit him.
I punch Cayzor of Eighteen in his ruined face with everything I have.
His head turns about two inches.
He looks back down at me with blood on his lip and an expression of such pure, radiant delight that I nearly laugh.
“Good,” he snarls.
Then I fight him properly.
I buck and twist and get a knee up. I claw at his chest and my human nails actually draw blood, four red lines, and he growls like I’ve handed him something.
I get out from under him — genuinely get out, I’m astonished — and scramble up and make it three whole strides before he hooks an arm around my waist and takes me down again into the wet grass.
We roll. I’m shrieking at him, furious and burning and half-laughing, hitting at a chest like a wall while he takes every bit of it. I bite his shoulder and taste blood and he throws his head back and roars, and it isn’t pain, it’s triumph, and it echoes off trees that aren’t there.
He pins me. Both wrists in one hand, over my head. He has both my wrists in one enormous fist. He outweighs me by four hundred pounds. Every ordinary avenue of resistance available to a human female is closed.
But I did eleven months of a self-defense course in a community hall in Singapore province when I was twenty-six, because my mother made me, and I hated every minute of it and complained the entire time.
And the one thing I remember — the only thing, the thing the instructor said over and over — is that no matter how big somebody is, no matter how strong, there is always one joint on them the same size as the one on you.
I get my left hand loose. I find his little finger.
And I wrench it sideways with everything I’ve got.