by Presley Hall
She shakes her head, grinning up at me. “No, I could never afford something like that. I didn’t really mind though. It’s too fancy for me. What about you?”
“No,” I tell her. “But I’ve been to a few banquets at Prince Khrelan’s palace, when myself and the men I fight with were honored for victory in battle. I imagine it’s something like that.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Not really,” I confess. “It was… constraining. The clothing, the rules, the formality.”
“I think I’d feel the same way.” Autumn makes a soft noise in her throat as we turn down the street toward the part of the city that’s still alive and bustling at this time of night. “My family never had a lot of money, so we always did things more casually. Even my mother’s wedding was small and intimate.”
“Wedding?”
“A ceremony where two people promise to spend their lives together.” She glances at me through her long eyelashes. “Don’t you have anything like that?”
“We… did,” I say hesitantly. “But I’ve never seen one.”
She knows about me and my fellow warriors being captured by the Orkun, and she’s well aware that they are our sworn enemies. But I haven’t told her about the state of my planet yet, about what happened to our women—how the Orkun unleashed a deadly virus that killed almost all of the females on Kalix.
I don’t want her to feel that pressure. Our mate bond could prove significant for my entire race, but I don’t want that to influence her decision about whether to accept the bond.
Because if she accepts it, she won’t be mated to my entire race. She’ll be mated to me.
And I have to know that she wants me.
I see her look at me curiously, probably wondering at my somewhat vague answer. But before she can question me further, the aroma of cooking meat wafts past us. Her eyes light up, and she reaches for my hand, pulling me toward a street vendor.
“Let’s get something to eat here,” she says over her shoulder.
I follow along happily, not wanting to let go of her hand. The feeling of her delicate fingers entwined with mine is something I could get used to.
She orders food and then steps back to let me choose mine.
We argue briefly over who will pay—Autumn insists that on Earth whoever asks the other person out pays, and besides, women pay all the time, and I’m adamant that I can’t let my mate pay for her dinner. In the end though, I let Autumn win, and she smiles brightly at me as she hands the vendor a few of the tokens she has in her dress pocket and we take the small paper cartons of food.
“So what else happens on a date?” I ask her, and she grins.
“Well, you might take me to a movie. It’s these big screens where people act out stories.”
“A holovideo,” I agree. “I’ve seen them. Although on the planet where I saw them, they weren’t for, erm… the general public to view.”
Autumn laughs aloud, nearly dropping her food. “We have those too,” she says, blushing. “Not the kind of movie you’d go to on a first date though. Or watch anywhere other than the privacy of your home.”
“You can get these ‘movies’ at home? The normal ones, I mean.”
She nods. “Pretty much everyone has smaller screens where you can watch all kinds of things. You pay to have it streamed into your house. Endless entertainment.”
I frown, trying to imagine that. “Do you go outside, ever?”
She shrugs. “Depends on what you like to do.” She considers for a moment. “Or you might go see a play, which is like a live movie.”
“We have that,” I tell her. “Kalix has few holovideos, except in the capital, but live performances are very popular in our culture.” I pause. “You’re telling me about all these things, but what would you want to do on one of these dates?”
Autumn brightens at that, and she reaches for my hand again. “Come on,” she says softly. “I’ll show you.”
We leave the town center and head down another street, and I’m on the verge of suggesting to her that maybe we’re too far away from the more civilized part of town when I see the lights of the spaceport in the distance and recognize where we are. She leads me up a small hill, one of the few grassy areas I’ve seen on Wauru, although it’s sparse. When we reach the top, she sits down, heedless of the dust.
“Come on.” Looking up, she pats the spot beside her.
I sit down next to her, setting my food to the side as I look at her curiously.
“You can watch the ships coming and going from the port.” Her voice is soft, almost wistful, as she looks out at the sky. “I used to come here sometimes and just sit, watching the ones that were leaving, dreaming about getting away from this place.”
I look at the profile of her face, the expression there, and feel my heart ache for her. “I know what it’s like to miss home,” I tell her gently. “When I was a boy, all I wanted was to leave Kalix. I dreamed of joining the Alpha Force and exploring the galaxy, of all the things I would see, the battles I would fight, the brave things I would do. And now…” I shake my head, following her gaze out to the wide, starry black sky. “All I want to do is to go home.”
Her small hand covers mine, her fingers stroking the back of it gently, and for once there’s no thought of lust or desire in my mind, only the soothing feel of her touch.
I never dreamed of having a woman touch me like that—that there would be a woman who might care for me one day, who might even love me. And though I’m sure she doesn’t know it yet, when Autumn turns and looks into my eyes, I can see the beginnings of love there.
“Why have you been away from home for so long?” she murmurs.
I swallow hard, wondering if I should tell her, if it’s the right time. I’d hate to ruin our “date.”
But she gave me a piece of her past, however painful it was, and I know that it’s time for me to do the same. To open up to her.
“My people have a history with the Orkun that goes back long before the other members of Alpha Force and I were captured by them.” I take a deep breath, looking away from her, out over the hill. “When I was a child, they attacked our planet. We’d been at war for years, decades even, but neither of us could entirely vanquish the other. Our warriors are fierce fighters, the fiercest in the galaxy, but the Orkun have technological achievements beyond what we do. They released a virus on our planet, one that targeted the females alone. In a matter of months, every female Kalixian still able to bear children or who might one day be able to, adult or child, was dead. My mother among them. Only a small handful of our women survived.”
My jaw clenches as my words die out. I feel tears rise in my eyes and fight to hold them back, not wanting Autumn to see.
She stares at me, her mouth falling open slightly. “So without any women there…”
“Our species was doomed. We had never mated outside of our species, never formed mate bonds with any other female. So those of us that remained, every male of fighting age, every child old enough to be trained to fight, had one purpose from that day on—to eradicate the Orkun from the galaxy before we die out. Alpha Force, the one that I’m a part of, is the most elite of them. We’ve been away from Kalix for years, hunting the Orkun, stamping them out wherever we find them. We were on our way home when we crashed here.”
I pause, shaking my head. “Sometimes I wonder if I will ever see my home planet again. Every night that I go into the arena… there’s always a chance that I might not come out. And sometimes it seems like just a dream, going home.” I turn back to her, clearing my throat. “I’m sorry. That was a lot for a… first date.”
“No,” Autumn says softly. “I’m glad you told me.”
She hesitates and then reaches up, her fingers caressing my cheek as she searches my face, her eyes drifting over me as if she’s learning me, taking me in bit by bit. She drops her hand back into her lap at last, biting her lip.
“I miss my mother too,” she murmurs. “She’ll never meet Chlo
e. She’ll never know that she has a grandchild.”
“When you ran from Ivuk… why didn’t you try to get back to Terra? To Earth?”
“I did,” she says quietly. “I found someone who I could buy passage from, an alien named O’Hozo. I knew he wasn’t legitimate or honorable. He’s some sort of alien crime boss, but he was my best chance and I was desperate. I had stolen money from my… husband—”
She chokes a little on the word, and my jaw clenches. I have to work to keep my hands from curling into fists as rage rises inside me.
But my anger isn’t what she needs right now.
Autumn clears her throat, gathering herself a little before she continues.
“O’Hozo named a price I could pay, but only just barely. Wauru was meant to be a stop on the way, a transfer to another ship that would take me back to Earth. But when we got here, he tripled the price.” She chews harder on her lip, and I can see that she’s trying not to cry at the memory. “There was no way I could pay it—I could never have paid it. He would have handed me back over to the Orkun for a reward, so I did the only thing I could think of to do… I ran.”
“You escaped O’Hozo?”
“Yes.” She nods. “I made it to Monri, and I’ve been hiding from him and his men ever since, trying to save enough money to pay for passage off-planet. But there are no legitimate ships to Earth, only Orkun vessels and smugglers. And I won’t risk it again, not with Chloe. So my only choice since then has been to try to get us to some other, safer planet. Someplace where hopefully neither O’Hozo nor Ivuk will ever find us.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, chewing so hard on her lip that I’m worried she’ll draw blood.
I want to say something, to comfort her, but I realize instinctively that that’s not what she needs. Instead, I wrap my arm around her waist, pulling her closer to me as we sit in silence, watching the ships take off into the night sky.
After a while, I feel her relax against me just a little, her warm body fitting into the curve of mine.
“I was always close to my mother,” she whispers. “We were more like best friends than mother and daughter sometimes. I’m glad she re-married before I was kidnapped.” She sniffs and reaches up to brush away the tears that have started to fall down her cheeks. “I don’t think there’s any way I’ll ever be able to go back. She was a single mother for most of my childhood, and she depended on me a lot, so I’m glad that she has someone else to lean on now. Someone to take care of her.”
My brows pull together, and I lean away from Autumn a little, looking down at her curiously as she dries her face.
“What is ‘re-married’?” I ask. “And I wondered this earlier—how were you at your own mother’s bonding ceremony, this ‘wedding,’ at all? You would not have been born yet.”
“What?” Autumn looks confused for a second, then shakes her head. “Oh! Oh, no. My mother was dating someone—it was kind of casual—when she got pregnant with me. They got married because of it, but he didn’t really want a wife and a family, and it didn’t work out.” She purses her lips, clearly trying to decide how to explain. “So he left when I was still a baby. I don’t even remember him. My mother met someone else much later, when I was a teenager, and they got married a year or so before I was kidnapped. That was the wedding I went to.” She looks up at me. “Don’t your people date, or have casual sex, or anything like that?”
I frown at her, still baffled.
“Some of the men do now,” I say hesitantly, “the ones who leave the planet, such as our warriors. There are women in spaceports and… well… I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”
“Um, yeah. I get it.”
Autumn flushes a little as she nods, and I continue.
“Those kinds of things aren’t uncommon for my people. But that would never be for more than a night, and there is no emotion in it. For us, the concept of mating and claiming one’s mate—there is nothing casual about that. Once a Kalixian finds their mate, their Irisa, that’s it. That’s the one for them, and there is no ‘re’ anything. The bond chooses the one most compatible for them in every way. And the feeling it creates, the desire and emotion… it can never be broken.”
I turn to face her, and now it’s my turn to reach for her, my thumb tracing the outline of her cheekbone as I look into her wide, beautiful eyes.
“Autumn,” I murmur roughly, my hand against her cheek. “You are my Irisa. The bond has chosen you for me. And whatever happens, whatever lies in front of us—I will never feel about anyone the way I feel about you.”
I see realization flood her face at last, the full understanding of what this is, and tears come to her eyes. But even as a crystalline tear slides down her cheek, she leans toward me. I feel it before she even moves, her body drawn to mine as she turns into my arms, all of her softening against me as she lifts her chin, her gaze fixed on mine.
“Sorsir,” she whispers.
There’s so much I want to tell her. So much more I want to say.
But in this moment, there are no words I can think of that express what I feel, what I want.
Her hands go to my face, fingers around the back of my head as she draws my mouth down to hers. My arms wrap tightly around her as she kisses me of her own volition, holding me against her. She brushes her tongue softly over my lip, tasting me as she deepens the kiss.
I don’t know what this means for us.
Is it a kiss of acceptance or a kiss goodbye? A last kiss before she tells me that she can’t stay?
But no matter what it means, in this moment it’s enough that her lips are on mine, that she is in my arms.
I crush her closer to me, wanting to imprint the feeling of her skin on mine, to remember the softness of her lips, the sweetness of her mouth, the way she holds my face between her hands as if she wants to keep me there forever.
And I want to stay here forever.
Everything I could ever dream of is in my arms right now. The cool desert breeze brushes my skin as the night sky watches over us, and I don’t let myself worry about the past or future.
Instead, I drown in the bliss of Autumn’s lips on mine, kissing me as if I’m what she’s been waiting for all her life.
18
Autumn
As we return home from the date, my lips are still tingling from Sorsir’s kiss.
Dozens of emotions swirl inside of me, so tangled that it’s hard to pull the threads of them apart to examine them. We shared more in that hour on the hill than we have in the many days that I’ve lived here, and I’m still reeling from everything I learned.
It gave me a window into who Sorsir is that makes it impossible for me to deny the truth of what I’m feeling any longer.
I didn’t want to let it happen, but it is.
I’m falling in love with him, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. Should I fight it or give in?
Lucy was right about the Kalixians being honorable. I know beyond any doubt that Sorsir is a good man, a brave one, someone who will fight anyone or anything to protect me and keep me safe. And we share more than I thought that we did—a common grief, a common longing, a shared knowledge of what it is to lose someone you love deeply and to throw yourself headlong into one purpose afterwards, to keep yourself alive… to give your life meaning.
I don’t know if it’s this Irisa concept that his people believe in, or fate, or a simple accident of two people finding each other… but whatever it is, it doesn’t change the feelings I’m developing for him.
And I’m getting tired of fighting them, especially after tonight.
I never allowed myself to dream of something like this after the kidnapping, of a night out under the stars with a kind, handsome man. I never let myself fantasize about breathless desire or love. But now that I’m faced with the possibility of it…
God, I want it.
Something inside of me is screaming at me to stop fighting so hard, to give in and let myself be happy for once.
&nbs
p; When we reach the building where the Kalixians all rent pods, Sorsir holds the door open for me, smiling down at me as I walk inside. But when we reach his living pod, we find Chloe sitting on the couch, red-faced and tearful. Lucy is seated next to her, whispering soothingly.
“She had a bad dream.” The blonde woman glances up with an apologetic look. “I thought I’d bring her back to a place a little more familiar.”
“There were monsters, Mama,” Chloe whimpers.
“Oh, baby. I’m sorry. Come here.”
I step forward to scoop her up, and she clings to me, sniffling a little as she buries her face in my shoulder.
Guilt floods me instantly. Chloe never knew her father or any Orkun, because I ran away before I could give birth to her. But it’s been impossible to keep her completely sheltered from the life that we live. I know she’s absorbed some of my fears and worries, no matter how hard I’ve tried to shelter her from them.
As a result, she has nightmares sometimes—always some amorphous, shadowy thing coming after her. It’s a source of never-ending guilt for me, although I’ve done my best to shield her from all that I could.
Sorsir comes up next to me as Chloe starts to cry harder, her little hands fisting into my hair, and he reaches out gingerly, touching her back in a soothing motion.
“It’s all right, little one,” he croons in his deep voice. I look up at him in surprise, but he’s entirely focused on Chloe.
“It’s okay to be afraid,” he tells her, gently stroking her hair before running his large hand over her back again. “But I won’t let anyone harm you, not ever. I promise.”
I swallow down a lump in my throat, my heart pounding, because I can hear the truth in his words—and what’s more, I can feel it down to my bones.
He means it.
He will protect us both, forever.
And it seems that I’m not the only one who believes him. To my shock, Chloe relinquishes her tight grip on me and reaches for him. He takes her without a thought, soothing her as he carries her into the bedroom to put her back to sleep as he murmurs something low and reassuring to her.