Pairing with the Protector

by Evangeline Anderson

  The main dish was an enormous insect which looked a little bit like an Earth cricket grown to the size of a prize bull. Its skin was brown and crispy from roasting all day in a pit dug at the base of the tree, its compound eyes replaced with round red berries. The chief told an elaborate story about the bravery of the tweedle hunters ambushing it and killing it before it could hop away, even though it had eaten one of their number before they could bring it down.

  At this revelation, Whitney looked strangely pale and put a hand to her mouth. She took a portion of the insect meat with the crispy skin but Rafe noticed she didn’t do more than push it around her leaf plate, though she ate the seeds and nuts eagerly.

  They listened to Yancy and Yarrow tell about their captivity, with Yancy carefully saying that they had been kept in different cages with different mates, both of whom had been Mindless Ones. Whitney and Rafe nodded along with this seriously, corroborating their story.

  Though Rafe didn’t like to lie, he also didn’t want to taint their homecoming and ruin their standing among their tribe. They had done what they thought they had to in order to survive—he could not condemn them for it.

  Dessert was served, a large, luscious bright purple berry made up of many small, juicy pods about the size of Rafe’s fist. He took one and it burst tart-sweet over his tongue and stained his fingers with its juice.

  Whitney seemed to really enjoy it as well. She had several of the pods while they listened to a tweedle poet who had made an epic rhyme on the spot about their daring escape and the time the royal prince and princess, Yancy and Yarrow, had spent in the awful house of their Tusker captors and the way visitors from the stars had rescued them and brought them home.

  But at last, it was time to go. The tweedle king rose and thanked them once again, inviting them to come back any time. An offer, Rafe thought dryly, that it might have been best to accept. It was much safer, anyway, than taking their chances on the rogue wormhole that had brought them here in the first place. But once again, he felt Whitney’s firm determination and urgent need to try and get home, so he held his tongue and simply nodded his thanks after the old tweedle’s speech.

  “But before you go,” Yancy said to Whitney. “Will you please sing us a song? One in your own language—your voice is so beautiful. It makes me sad to think I’ll never hear it again.”

  Whitney smiled at her. “Well, I don’t really have any accompaniment but I guess I could do something A Cappella.”

  Standing up from the table, she took a deep breath. Rafe thought she had never looked more beautiful and wild than she did now, wearing the gown made of green and purple leaves which accented her creamy chocolate skin.

  Truly he could never deserve such a goddess and he hadn’t even been trying to deserve her, he realized. He had hurt her over and over and had been unable to explain to her why he didn’t want the love he felt for her, which cut him like a treacherously sharp blade.

  She would be better off without me, he thought grimly. If only she would stay here as a revered guest of the Great Tree Tweedles so he knew she would be safe, he would have let her live her own life and left her alone, as difficult as that would be. But since she was determined that the two of them should try to get home, he would have to stay close to her, as much as his presence hurt her.

  It made him feel low and unworthy to be hurting her this way. He despised himself and wished again that they had never bonded, since it could only bring both of them pain.

  Whitney gave him a penetrating look and he wondered if she had caught his thoughts, though he had been trying his best to shield them. Her large dark eyes looked wounded but then she began to sing for the tweedles—a song about being friends forever and never forgetting each other, no matter how far apart they were.

  Though the tweedles couldn’t understand her words, since she was singing in English, they were clearly captivated by the power of her voice. They hummed along and even broke into song in their own language during the chorus. Whitney smiled and switched to the tweedle tongue, making up rhymes to go with the song on the spot, which the tweedles loved even more.

  After she was done, Yancy begged her to teach the song to their best bard—a young tweedle male who played an instrument made of a twig and several long pieces of tightly-stretched twine. Whitney obliged and then the king offered to let them stay the night.

  But though the sun was sinking in the sky and it had been a long, tiring day, Whitney shook her head firmly.

  “Thank you but no—we really must get going,” she told them. She hugged Yancy one more time and whispered something Rafe couldn’t hear in her ear, then turned to him. “Come on—let’s go.”

  Rafe nodded and they climbed carefully down the tree trunk to the ship waiting below. Whitney was wearing her new baby caterpillar pet around her neck like a living scarf and the bright green wool-making insect was already safely stowed in a stasis case in the ship so they were underway in no time.

  As the ship lifted off from the planet for the second and hopefully the last time, Rafe wondered where in the vast universe they would end up.

  It would almost certainly not be home.

  Thirty-Five

  “Well, there it is. The rogue wormhole that started all of this.” Rafe’s voice was neutral as they stared at the whirling blue hole in the blackness of space. “You realize it almost certainly won’t lead us back to the vicinity of Vesuvius Two, the planet we were originally meant to explore,” he said, looking at Whitney.

  Whitney lifted her chin. “No—it’s going to take us home,” she said firmly. She was thinking of the voice of the Kindred Goddess, telling her that if only she could find her freedom, the way would be made clear before her.

  “If you ask for miracles, you have to have faith to see them when they happen,” her Grannie Washington always said and Whitney believed it. She was determined to fly with both eyes open, looking for the miracle she had been promised to come true.

  “You really think that?” Rafe’s voice was flat and unbelieving. “Look, Whitney, I can feel that you have an urgent desire to get home, though you would not reveal to me exactly why—”

  “No, and I’m not going to, either,” Whitney snapped. She pressed a hand protectively to her belly, and looked straight at the viewscreen. “Now fly, Rafe. We’re going to be home in time to sleep in our own beds tonight.”

  The fact that she had said “beds” plural, couldn’t have been lost on him. Not that they’d been sleeping in the same bed since the Tweedle Beautiful Show, which seemed a lifetime ago now, but still, Whitney saw his mouth tighten as he looked at the viewscreen.

  “Very well,” he said in a low growl. “In we go.”

  And then the little ship jumped forward and was sucked into the swirling blue maw of the wormhole which had started the whole mess in the first place.

  “I can’t believe it. I just cannot believe it.”

  Rafe was stunned. The wormhole had spit them out, but not in another strange galaxy or one of the vast, empty reaches of space as he had expected. It hadn’t even taken them to Vesuvius Two, where it had originally picked them up.

  Somehow Whitney had been right and it had taken them directly home.

  The Mother Ship was right in front of them, her vast white side gleaming like a precious stone around the Moon’s neck as she orbited it. There were other shuttles too, zipping up from Earth to land in the Docking Bay at a frantic pace. Suddenly the com-link crackled and a voice said,

  “Unidentified shuttle, state your destination at once!”

  “This is Commander Rafe of the BEGI program requesting clearance to land aboard the Mother Ship.”

  “If you’re landing, you’d better hurry,” the voice advised. “We’re expecting that solar storm any minute.”

  “Solar storm?” Rafe and Whitney looked at each other uncertainly.

  “But…weren’t they expecting a solar storm right before we left?”

  “Must be another one,” Rafe said—it was the
only explanation. “Permission to land in the Docking Bay,” he said to the com-link.

  “Permission granted but make it quick,” the voice said.

  “Understood.” As they piloted into the transparent atmosphere dome which covered the Docking Bay of the Mother Ship and allowed ships to pass freely through while keeping the atmosphere inside stable, Rafe knew what he had to do.

  He had to let Whitney go.

  The moment they landed, Whitney was already eagerly fumbling with the straps of her harness. She had to get out of here—had to go see Kat and Liv and Sophie and call her mom. No, but first she ought to get a test—she knew Liv could help her with that. Then she would call her mom. She—

  “Whitney.” Rafe’s voice was almost as heavy as the hand he laid on her arm, stopping her from getting out of the shuttle.

  A feeling of dread came over her, thick and stifling as a blanket made of lead but somehow she forced herself to face him.

  “Yes?” she made herself say.

  “Whitney…” He seemed to be trying to find a way to say something difficult but she wasn’t about to help him—she was dreading whatever it was too much for that.

  “Just…just say it,” she urged him, when he still hesitated. She felt her stomach clench like a fist. “Whatever it is, just say it, Rafe.”

  He sighed heavily.

  “Whitney, if we had been lost in the universe together, as I thought we would be, I would have stayed bonded to you for all of our lives.”

  “Would have? What do you mean would have?” she demanded.

  Rafe raked a hand through his thick, wild hair.

  “I mean, that now that we have somehow come home, there might be a way to break the bond. I have heard of a device designed by the Scourge which is able to cut soul-bonds between people. If you wish, I can seek it out and—”

  “So now you don’t even want to stay bonded to me? What do you want to do—forget about me and everything we went through together entirely?” Her voice didn’t sound like her own—it wavered and dipped and came very near to tears, though she was trying her best not to cry.

  Rafe’s golden eyes filled with pain.

  “Try to understand—I don’t deserve you. Don’t deserve to be bonded to you now that we are safe when I was too cowardly to wish to be bonded when we were in danger.”

  “So you’re saying it’s not me, it’s you—is that it?” Whitney demanded. God, she’d heard this line before from Earth guys but she’d never expected it from a Kindred!

  Rafe shrugged helplessly. “Essentially. I can’t…can’t explain it any better than that. I’m sorry—I wish I could.”

  “No, you’ve done quite enough explaining,” Whitney snapped. “I understand what you’re saying perfectly. You want to end our bond and never see each other again—I get it.”

  “Wait!” His face was stricken. “I never said—”

  “Goodbye, Rafe.” Eyes filling with tears despite her best effort, she fumbled open the door and slid out of the ship, almost falling in her effort to get away from him as quickly as she could.

  Her heart was breaking into pieces and she didn’t want to let him see her cry.

  Rafe watched her go with a heavy heart. Though he knew he had done the right thing, offering to set her free in order to pursue her own life with a male who was worthy of her, it didn’t seem as though Whitney had been happy with his offer. Well, at least he had brought her home safely, though he knew well enough that it hadn’t been any of his doing.

  Had the Goddess herself sent them home in response to Whitney’s faith in her? Or was it simply a trillion-to-one chance—a spatial anomaly which couldn’t be explained?

  Rafe was leaning towards the second explanation. Back in the tweedle cage, he had believed that he’d heard the Goddess’s voice. Now he was wondering if that might not have been some kind of auditory hallucination, brought on by extreme stress. It sounded reasonable when he thought of it—how else could he explain such a thing?

  Sighing, he slid out of the ship and turned, only to come face-to-face with Commander Sylvan.

  “Commander,” he said, saluting. “We are back.”

  “Back?” Sylvan frowned. “But you never left. You couldn’t have had time to get through the fold yet—your ship only cleared the Docking Bay five minutes ago. Why did you come back?” He studied Rafe’s leaf trousers and shirt. “And what is that you’re wearing? Where is your uniform?”

  Rafe looked at him blankly. “Five minutes ago? Surely you must be joking.”

  “Of course I’m not.” Sylvan frowned. “Why would I joke about such a thing? Well…” He shook his head. “You’ll have to defer your mission until after the solar storm now. There’s no way the Mother Ship can fold space for you again with such imminent danger coming.”

  “But Commander, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Rafe said urgently. “Dr. Washington and I went through the fold. We’ve been gone over a standard week, but we never got to Vesuvius Two. We were forced through a rogue wormhole and found ourselves in an uncharted area of the universe.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We had to land on an unknown planet which turned out to be a land of giants. Whitney and I were taken prisoner and held as pets in a giant cage with an exercise wheel and a huge water bottle—much like the Earth people imprison and hold small, fluffy rodents because they think they are ‘cute.’”

  “What?” Sylvan looked at him uncertainly. “Commander Rafe, maybe you ought to report to the Med Center. This sounds…most irregular.”

  Rafe shook his head and had a sudden inspiration.

  “Come see the specimen Whitney brought back—it’s still in the stasis chamber in our ship,” he offered. “A giant wool-giving insect the size of an Earth sheep—come and see.”

  Reluctantly, Commander Sylvan allowed himself to be led back to the ship. When he saw the giant bug frozen in the stasis case, his expression began to change from one of doubt to one of wonder.

  “Gods, I’ve never seen an insect this size,” he muttered. Looking up from the sheep-sized beetle to Rafe he asked, “And you say the two of you found it on a planet where everything was on this scale?”

  “Almost everything.” Rafe ran a hand through his hair tiredly. “I’ll put it all in my report. But at this moment, I am weary, Commander. Weary beyond anything I have ever felt before. May I be debriefed later? Right now I just want to rest.”

  “Of course.” Sylvan’s pale blue eyes softened. “But this is most irregular—both the report of where you’ve been and the fact that you’ve been gone over a standard solar week and yet somehow came back only a few minutes after you left. There is much I don’t understand.”

  “That makes two of us,” Rafe growled wearily. “Thank you, Commander—with your permission I’m going to my quarters. I’ll speak to you later.”

  Then he left the ship and the Docking Bay, walking fast despite his weariness to try and put what had happened with Whitney behind him. He walked faster and faster until at last he was almost jogging.

  But try as he might, he couldn’t outrun the pain.

  Whitney almost ran headlong into Kat and Sophie and Liv as they charged down the hallway leading to the Docking Bay.

  “Here she is!” Kat exclaimed, gripping her by the shoulders. “I told you we wouldn’t miss her, girls!”

  “We…we came running as soon as Sylvan bespoke me and told me…told me he was sending you out early,” Sophie exclaimed, puffing for breath between the words. “Wow—that’s a pretty dress,” she added, looking Kat up and down. “Where’s your lab coat?”

  “We wanted to tell you goodbye and good luck—and to make it back before the Halloween party,” Kat added. “There’s going to be a karaoke machine you know—I got it just for you.”

  “I’m so glad we were in time,” Liv added, smiling at her. “We got to you just before you and your Protector blasted off!”

  “What?” Whitney stared at the three of them. “What are you talking about? Rafe and
I already left and came back. Hell, we were gone over a week and got taken prisoner and held in cages as pets. Then we escaped and came back here—but not without a whole hell of a lot of trouble.”

  “What?” Kat stared at her blankly. “What are you saying, doll? If you don’t mind me saying so, that sounds like crazy talk.”

  “It felt even crazier to live through it,” Whitney assured them. Suddenly the words came pouring out of her and she couldn’t stop them. “We were held by these huge blue elephant-looking aliens called Tuskers and Rafe and I were put into a kind of pet show. Then Mama Tusker—the one who captured us—gave me a special food that made me, uh, kind of crazy. And after that Rafe had to…we, uh…we kind of bonded and oh, Liv,” she said, turning to the blonde woman who was looking at her anxiously. “I’m so afraid I’m pregnant—can you please give me a test? Right now? Right away?”

  Then she broke down crying and her knees buckled as she sank to the ground with her three friends surrounding her anxiously.

  * * *

  “When will we know?” Whitney looked at the tiny machine which looked a little like a miniature coffee-pot sitting on the counter in Liv’s office. She had cried herself out and now she only felt a cold sense of anticipation—a feeling of being resigned to knowing the news, no matter what it was.

  Kat and Sophie had tried to talk her out of taking the pregnancy test right away but Liv had overruled them both.

  “She needs to know and I’m going to help her find out,” she’d said firmly. As a former nurse and now currently a doctor, her word carried more weight and they all trooped over to her office as soon as Whitney had been able to stand.

  Liv had drawn a vial of blood and placed it into the little machine on her desk. Now they were all just sitting around, waiting for the news.

  It only took five minutes but Whitney felt they were the longest five minutes of her life. Finally, after it seemed like an ice age had past, the machine made a soft chiming sound and something fell out of its slot.