Chapter 4
Levant
The camp seemed miles too far, and I worried with every passing minute that Felicia, my mate, would get too cold.
Humans were fragile, I knew that, but I had not yet appreciated how frantic that made a male to ensure her health.
I relished the anxious feelings anyway. My mate.
She was my mate, just like I’d known! I wanted to shout with happiness, dance across the snow like a male possessed, and I wanted to sweep her into my arms and try the mouth-mating humans seemed to like.
Felicia, it was such a beautiful, melodic name that my tongue curled around with pleasure each time I whispered it under my breath.
So pretty, just like she was. I tried to see her face, but she was curled deep into the furs and almost entirely obscured.
Pale hair, I recalled, and skin dotted with tiny spots across the bridge of her nose.
A bit like the gold and green dots that decorated my scales.
Getting her and the sled lifted from the hole to the surface had been tough.
My shoulders ached from the strain of pulling on the ropes to raise her, even with the help of several pulleys and cogs to lighten the load.
The climb up had been tough too, but I’d felt such urgency to get to her that it had only taken a short time.
Now I was dragging the sled across the ice back toward my tent, each gust of wind, each rush of snow into my face making me anxiously peer back at Felicia to assure myself she was fine.
I breathed a deep sigh of relief when we reached the tent at last. More snow than usual had begun falling from the sky, and it had piled high against the tent walls in drifts, covering most of the sensors.
I’d have to dig those out before I went to sleep later, or we wouldn’t have advance warning if that Revenant came back.
The Burrowing Revenant had not attacked my shelter but had passed it without harm, though I didn’t believe we’d be so lucky a second time.
Felicia was awake, her eyes huge, but her energy was clearly flagging.
I unstrapped everything on the sled and then hurried to lift her, blankets and all.
She needed to get warm in a hurry, and my tent was kept pleasantly heated at all times.
She might have tried to say something, but I was not touching her skin, and the wind whipped her words away.
The flap was frozen stiff and briefly didn’t budge when I pulled on the closing ties with my tail, and then we were through.
The front entrance was still cold, but here there was no snow and no wind.
It was imperative I secured the flaps again before I unsealed the second barrier into my domain.
When Felicia bit back an obvious whimper, I ached with the need to throw out that rule, but it wouldn’t help her in the end.
It was only a handful of seconds anyway, and then I was carrying her inside, snow drifting onto the thick carpets from our clothing and melting into wet spots right away.
“Holy Hannah, it’s warm in here,” Felicia said.
Her crystal-clear voice was easy to understand without the wind and snow interfering.
It immediately reminded me of another fact: I’d installed my own translator implants when Artek had shared the human language database with me.
I didn’t need to touch Felicia’s skin to understand her, but she needed to touch me to understand what I said.
I did not want to let go of her, but we needed to strip off our wet layers.
She was very wobbly when I lowered her to her feet, the perfect excuse to keep a loop of my tail curled around her.
She was so sweet and pretty, already trusting me to care for her.
Her face turned up to mine as I undid the knots of her hood and slipped her scarf from around her slender throat.
I lingered with my fingers against her skin and told myself it was to check she wasn’t too cold.
“I always keep my home heated. A male could get hypothermia in a hurry out there. If it is too warm, I will adjust it, of course, but I’m used to the deserts of Serqethos normally.
” Oh, that was skirting a little too close to the subject of my banishment.
I worried she’d ask why I was on the northern pole now, but she didn’t.
Perhaps that was because she was exhausted; she wasn’t just a little unsteady on her strange, human feet, she was beginning to sag.
“This is fine,” she said faintly, but she sounded anything but fine.
I ignored the thick and somewhat wet layers I was still wearing and hurried to sweep her back into my arms. Laying her down on my nest, I swept the tunic over her head and nudged the footwear off her small feet with my tail.
My healing device hummed as I slid it over my hand and raised it over her head.
“I’m fine,” she told me a bit more firmly.
She wasn’t; her eyes were drooping shut, and then she was out like a light. Asleep, or something more sinister.
It should be a relief to discover that my healing device could not find anything wrong with her beyond exhaustion and some depleted nutrients.
It was not a fact that wanted to sink in, that she simply needed rest and food.
I wanted to see her eyes, such an intriguing shade somewhere between brown and green, and I wanted to hear her voice.
Humans were curious creatures, or so Artek had told me, and I wanted to listen to all of Felicia’s questions. This silence ached.
Needing a distraction, I focused on the things I could do to make her better.
First, she probably wanted to be more comfortable, and I still worried that she wasn’t getting warm properly.
So I stripped all the furs and improvised clothing I’d supplied from her.
Then I puzzled over the strange foot-coverings I didn’t recognize.
They had laces all the way up her ankle, a joint I did not have, but which I recognized from many of the legged creatures of Serant.
The laces had tangled weirdly, and though I knew my knots, I also knew these had hopelessly fused together from the wetness.
I had no patience to undo them, so I shredded them with my claws.
The foot coverings were surprisingly heavy, and they thudded loudly to the floor beside the nest. Her garments were a little harder to get off, and I did not want to damage them the way I’d shredded her laces.
She might want to wear them again, and warm clothing was important out here.
Laces, though—those were easy to replace.
Once she was down to simple undergarments, her arms and legs achingly bare and vulnerable, I piled furs on top of her.
Then I found my water kettle and heated water to fill a waterskin and tuck it at her feet.
There, that would get her warm. Now to see about nutrients.
I scoured my supplies to gather exactly what I thought would best replenish her deficits.
A bit of dried Varkarsa meat for a stew, perhaps, and several of the spices for flavor and minerals for her health.
I had it all in a bowl on the stove before I’d even gotten around to stripping off my own layers.
I was beginning to overheat by then, and my scales shivered along my spine, lifting, rising, to help cool my flesh.
It was a small discomfort, one I hardly cared about.
I was used to far greater heat in the heart of summer on Serqethos.
As the last of the tail-warmer segments dropped to the floor by the tent entrance, my eyes fell on my workbench.
My suspiciously empty workbench. Hadn’t I been working on that Vakarsa miniature Revenant before the sensor got tripped?
Confused, and with a growing sense of trepidation, I began a methodical search of the tent.
Where could it have gone? More importantly, how could it have gone anywhere in the first place?
I had to find it, and fast, because that thing—if it powered on—could be dangerous. I had to find it now, before it could harm my mate.
***
Felicia
I woke slowly. Normally, I was one of those wake-and-be-instantly-alert types.
Years of training had taught me to go from one breath to the next and be fighting-ready.
This time, I rose from the depths of sleep slowly, almost lazily.
My eyes blinked open once, then closed again because I was just not ready to face the day yet.
Perhaps for the first time in a long time, I also did not feel the need to prove myself or protect myself. I felt safe.
It was the scent, I concluded after a few moments.
It was spicy but sweet, almost becoming a taste on my tongue that made my mouth water.
A male scent that wrapped around me with warmth and safety.
The second time I tried to open my eyes, it was with a bit more focus and a little more stamina.
My vision adjusted to the light, and then everything began to come back to me in a rush.
The Future’s first flight, testing the experimental FTL drive, and overshooting our target.
I had been forced to adjust the course myself, and then I’d put myself in stasis because I feared the journey would take too long.
Levant. That name struck my brain like a gong, and I jerked upright with a gasp.
The alien, the one who’d woken me from stasis after somehow finding me thirty meters beneath a layer of ice.
I was inside a tent, the ceiling above me a pale gray dappled with beautiful geometric patterns—waves that seemed to undulate like the dunes of a desert.
Furs ranging from pale lavender to deep aubergine lay piled high on top of me, but I’d been stripped down to my underwear beneath them.
A hot water bottle was pressed against my feet, soft and squishy and definitely not made of rubber like the one I had at home.