Chapter 8 #3
I slide across the floor until my shoulder is inches from his arm. Kol goes perfectly, unnaturally still. The furnace heat of his skin instantly swallows the freezing draft.
I lean slightly toward him.
A deep rumble starts vibrating in his chest. He shifts, slowly lowering his head until his face is level with mine. The heat rolling off his body is suffocating. When he parts his lips, showing a flash of sharp teeth, my heart hammers wildly against my ribs.
I tilt my chin up, squeeze my eyes shut, and press my forehead flush against his.
The contact is like an electric shock.
The mindspace bridge erupts. The shock of his presence hits the front of my skull so hard it makes me gasp.
Without the delay of my earpiece translator, his mind is just there. Instantaneous. Fluid.
His thoughts aren’t even words. They are sensory, instinctual feelings. The smell of hot stone. The instinct to protect. The urge to... mate.
I swallow hard on that last one, forcing myself to keep my forehead pressed against his.
“How do you do it?” I whisper aloud. A raw image of a crushing weight pushes across the mental link from me to him. “How do you carry them all?”
Nothing happens. For several long heartbeats, I don’t hear a thing.
My face flushes. Of course it didn’t work. I don’t know how to project actual thoughts. We aren’t mated, and I don’t really know how any of this works.
I start to pull back, utterly humiliated.
But a blisteringly hot hand instantly clamps over the back of my neck. Kol’s long claws thread forcefully into my hair, holding my forehead firmly against his.
A low, steady pressure pushes straight against my mind.
“Not carry,” Kol projects. His mental tone is a physical weight inside my head. “Lead.”
I gasp out loud. It is a deep, clear voice vibrating directly behind my eyes, echoing through the center of my own thoughts. His voice.
I swallow hard, not sure what to say next. This is so unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before.
“I-it’s the same thing,” I finally manage to breathe, closing my eyes against the overwhelming proximity of his face.
The silence sits thick between us.
“...yes.”
I let the mental connection pull the panic directly out of my chest. The bitter taste of the contaminated water. The frantic counting of rations in the dark. The sickening dread of stepping up because someone has to, and now having to pretend I know how to keep us all alive.
The low, steady furnace heat of his skin grounds me. I expect him to pull back, heck, I’m not even sure if I’m doing this mindspace thing right, but he does not recoil from the panic.
For a moment, he doesn’t respond. I squeeze my eyes tighter, tears welling behind my eyelids as I wait. That’s when he pushes his own raw, unfiltered intent across the connection.
A sense of duty slams into the front of my mind.
“A dra-dam does not choose.”
He lifts a claw and taps his bare chest, directly over the steadily vibrating purr.
“Weight. Here. Always.”
“Did you want it?” I whisper, the emotion bleeding through the mental link. “Did you want to be the dra-dam?”
He does not understand the concept of ‘want’. Instead, a barrage of vivid images hits my mind.
A glowing monolith deep in the sand. Ancient, thrumming with forgotten power.
The memory crashes into me, followed immediately by Kol’s own birth.
A small boy gasping for his very first breath as he emerges from the glowing Giving Stone, his hands small and shaking.
Then, the literal crushing weight of the old dra-dam’s mind slamming into his newly formed skull, wiping his consciousness before he could even learn who or where he was.
He shoves the raw, unvarnished feeling directly against the front of my brain. I flinch. It is the complete absence of a choice. He was not elected. He was not trained.
He was engineered from the rock, forged from millions of microscopic, vibrating golden particles suspended in the air, and reborn from the old dra-dam to replace the dead one.
“Made for the burden.”
The concept slams into the front of my skull, knocking the air out of my lungs.
A sharp ache splits open right behind my ribs. My eyes burn. He is trapped. Exactly as trapped as I am.
“Is this how all of you are made?” I whisper, the emotion bleeding across the link. “You just... emerge from the stone?”
“Yes. It is the only way a Drakav can survive the dust. We are carved from it.” His broad hands slide around to cup my jaw, his thumbs sweeping slowly over my cheekbones. “The mated females told me something in the Hall of Knowing. They claimed humans do not have a Stone. That they are not carved.”
“We aren’t,” I swallow, keeping my forehead pressed flush against his. “We aren’t engineered. We grow our young. We carry them.”
His chest rumbles, a soothing, resonant vibration. “You carry the newly-formed young after the males carve them so you do not tire your delicate limbs.”
“No.” I reach up to cover one of his hands resting against my jaw. Slowly, I pull it down along my body, pressing his broad, scorching palm flat against my lower belly. “We carry them here. Inside our bodies.”
The utter silence that drops over his mind is deafening.
I tilt my head back just enough to look at him, breaking the physical connection for a second. His golden eyes are wide, the pupils growing until they are pressing against the amber and pushing it back. The glow along his arms flares.
“Inside you.” He chases me, pressing his forehead actively back to mine to slam the telepathic connection open again. The thought is feral.
“Y-yes.”
“For how long?”
“Nine months,” I whisper, my throat tight. “I reckon we’ve been here for about four or five months already so basically double that time.”
A harsh, guttural scrape rumbles out of his chest. Not a purr this time. More like a tight, rough noise that makes the hairs on my arms stand up.
He goes perfectly still. The claw resting over my low belly flexes once, his fingers pressing firmly through my shirt. Then his mind cracks wide open across the link.
Every single rational thought in his head disappears. The war council, Lucek, the starving clan. Gone. Replaced by a single, blinding image slamming through the connection so hard my vision whites out.
Me. My belly, round and taut under his spread palm. His claws curved protectively over the swell.
A raw need floods through the link after it. It’s hardly a thought. It’s a drive. Singular and so focused on the soft skin beneath his hand that it drowns out everything else in his brain.
His fingers spread wider over my stomach. Pressing down. Claiming the space.
My thighs clench involuntarily, my pulse spiking.
I cannot breathe his breath anymore.
I pull back sharply, breaking the physical connection of our foreheads.
The freezing desert wind bites through my thin shirt, immediately replacing his heat.
I scramble to my feet, wrapping the furs tightly around my shoulders. I purposely avoid his glowing eyes.
“Goodnight, Kol,” I say, my voice thin.
I turn and take two rapid steps away.
“Eh-ree-kah.”
I freeze.
I do not turn around. My pulse hammers wildly in my throat.
“You carry...” The low, rough rumble of his Drakavian travels across the cold stone. “...good. Weight. Here.”
My entire body locks up. For one blindingly hot second, I am certain he is talking about carrying young. That the feral image he slammed through the link is now a statement of intent. My stomach drops straight through the floor of the cave.
Then I hear the deep intake of his breath. Through the corner of my eye, I see his fingers tapping the center of his chest. Right over his heart.
A lump rises so fast in my throat I almost choke on a sob.
The cold desert air suddenly feels suffocating.
I walk rapidly back toward my sleeping space without saying another word.
My right hand dives into my pocket, my fingers locking in a desperate grip around the small, carved black stone.
I pick up the pace across the dark cavern floor. If I stay one more second, my knees are going to give out, and I am going to let him carry that weight for me.