My human lunges out of my path. As she dives, I snag a swatch of her muddy sleeve. She brings her right arm across my wrist hard enough to break my hold. I feel white flash along my ridges, followed by a splash of black and on its heels, a wave of green — surprise, bloodlust, amusement — before finally my ridges settle on a fierce orange pride.
The wind picks up speed and when I grab for her, she ducks and I catch only fluttering ice crystals. She holds both fists at her chin, just below her eyeline and though I understand the posture, I have never before seen a female assume it. This is why, when she strikes, my hands are lowered and my torso is left exposed. She strikes me. My warrior queen is savage.
The pressure is enough to slow my advance when she strikes me again with her other hand, I realize she is a dual handed warrior. I am impressed. Not all of my most seasoned warriors are and yet she attacks me with both hands and with confidence.
I block the second attack with my forearm, but she uses her legs. She kicks up — or tries to, but she is limited in her mobility by the thick padding that covers her, weighted by water and filth. I had feared it was not enough when I allowed the elder females to clothe her for the Mountain Run and I worry still.
She comes from a planet equally harsh but entirely opposite, plagued by suns that whither their fauna to sand and dust, whereas we on Nobu almost never see Voraxia’s suns for our world has been claimed by ice that covers everything. Even the sky. My warrior queen is likely cold down to her bones.
Her eyes are slits and I see the way her lower jaw trembles, teeth chattering against the upper in a way that resembles the younglings in their first encounters with weather like this.
She grunts when she kicks and I can tell it is work for her. She is too slow to make contact with my groin and as her left leg lifts, I sweep her standing leg and lurch forward, catching the back of her head and her waist before she hits the ground.
She does not attempt to dislodge my hold on her body — my Xhea is too smart for that. Rather, she punches up, striking me squarely in the face. Immediately after her first strike, she repeats her attack until I feel the skin around my mouth break open on her fist and I taste my own viscous blood. White and then black, green and then yellow are the colors of my ridges once more. This combination of my emotions will know her well. She pleases me to no end. Even as she strikes.
I do not dare drop her, but let her punch me twice more — once against my right eye and I feel the skin above my ridges tingle at her punch, but when she hits my left cheek, I hear a slight crack and watch her expression twist into one of pain. Furious that she would bring injury to herself, I growl out my displeasure and the delicate hairs on her eyelids flutter in a way that sends pulses fluttering through me.
I hiss so loudly she flinches, and in her hesitation, I lower her all the way to the icy ground below and plant my palms on either side of her head. Her momentary calm lasts only until I position my lower body on top of hers and she registers my weight.
She resumes her fight in earnest now, body ripping from side-to-side, fingers forming claws even though I know they are not tipped by them. Her hands attempt to score my skin, but she is injured. I snarl. Her bottom mouth pillow shakes.
A momentary grapple ensues, in which time she is able to lift up one knee and spear it into my thigh. She makes contact with sensitive flesh and the pain is palpable, but fleeting. I feel green again, and then orange. And on my tongue, I do not taste the blood of the other males on my skin or the mud from the mire on hers, I taste zxhoa, that delicate, flowering herb. A desert canyon bathed in sunshine. The dizzying dazzle of a faraway star. I hallucinate the Great Ocean of the After and for a moment, bask on the tide. What is she doing to me? What has already been done?
Her grunt of frustration drags me into the present as I settle my weight onto her once more. My xora presses against her stomach and I feel my eyes roll back into my skull. The pressure is not something I instinctively know how to fight through. Rather, every instinct in my body is screaming its demands. Demands for release. The Xanaxana in my chest is pitching. It wants to find unity with its pair. And I am the male. The one responsible for guiding the mating. I need to move quickly or rutting fever may grip me and I need to remain in control if I am to satisfy us both for our first time together. I want to satisfy her. I want nothing more.
I reach down the length of her body, finding a small panel taught to us males that will allow my xora entry, but before I can unlace the binds, she slips her hand from beneath mine and swipes for me. I release her covering to snatch her wrist mid-air. Taking precious seconds, I fasten both of her arms over her head and hold them down at the wrist with one of my hands, careful with her injured fingers.
She continues to struggle, to seethe between her teeth. She bites at me and I have to lurch back out of the path of the strike. When I do, she wriggles more fiercely and that’s when I see and feel what she’s done.
She slips her arms free of the sleeves and jolts forward out of her coverings. Is she mad? Is her fight truly so desperate she would endanger herself? Rage swims through me as I take in the sight of her beautiful ioni body surrounded by so much white. The wind is strong, the ice, unforgiving. In trying to stop me, she will kill herself.
Cold fury rips the plates clean off of me. I level my forearm across her chest and press her back. I grab the arms of her suit and force her into it, one wrist at a time, and when I have the front of her suit secured, I yank up on her hood, and use it to cover her thick, mud-sodden hair. The need to claim her quickly dawns on me. I must remove her from the cold and take her back to my nest where I will warm her, clean her of the filth caking her skin and tend her wounds. And then mount her again and again, into the next solar.
I take her wrists and hold them to the center of her chest with one hand. I find the flap covering her core and untie the strings. My fingertips press forward to find damp fur and beyond that, a searing heat.
Shock.
I did not know what to expect but it was not this. Too curious not to continue my exploration, I delve one finger forward, careful not to cut her with my claws as I explore this mystical fur and this tantalizing heat. My spine stiffens as I finger something wet and so soft catacat silk traders would be jealous.
This cannot be the place where my xora will enter. It cannot be… Withdrawing my fingers, I bring them to my nose and breathe deeply.
Miaba is a winter flower with large, blood red petals and even more violent red thorns protruding from tough, black stems. Rare and highly valued, the flowers carry the most intoxicating scent. But they are deadly. The poison takes effect over days, slowly making it impossible for its victims to take in sustenance until eventually, they starve. A violent death, I never understood why anyone would risk so much for a scent.
But I understand now. My entire body shakes as the Xanaxana rages through me unchecked and unbridled. A scent is worth the risk. Worth coming too close to the thorns. Worth raking them over my flesh.
I inhale again, press the tips of my fingers to my tongue and shudder. This is what the universe smells like.
My Xiveri mate has been watching my vulnerable display, but there is little else I can do except hope that she understands the Xanaxana and that she feels it too. She continues to fight until the moment I bring my fingers to my lips, needing to taste that miaba nectar. Then she stills, watching me with enormous, rounded eyes. My fingers slide against my tongue and I suck hard, unwilling to let so much as a droplet of her miaba go to waste, for it is just as sweet and bitter as its scent promised. And even more deadly.
I moan. She whimpers.
“Shh,” I tell her, stroking her mud-soaked hair back from her face. “I will not leave you to this pain.”
She blinks rapidly and begins to fight again as I pull the strings to my own covering and release my xora. I guide my xora forward, finding first her fur before gliding lower to reach the exquisite softness I felt on my first exploration.
I glide the bloated he
ad of my xora over the plump, fat mound of her sex and then delve inwards, through the first of her folds. They part exquisitely around my xora as I stroke up and down and up and in becoming softer and softer the closer to her core I come. Am I truly supposed to slide my xora into this softness? Even my xora, softer than the plates on my body, is no match for this. I will surely tear her. The thought makes me cold. One hand in her hair, the other on her hip, my body stills.
Her eyes blink and they are full of gloss. Like the surface of still water, subtly rippling. Seeing me, or sensing my hesitation, she surges up again as if to strike. But this time she speaks — snarls — and I am surprised by her.
“Just do it already! Don’t you dare stop! Don’t you dare let me win!”
There is some hidden weight in her words I fail to understand, though their meaning is clear. I am failing her as a warrior male, for I have not yet fulfilled my right of conquest. And yet…she is so soft…
I position myself fully over her and snarl brutally as my xora presses forward, diving past the first of her folds and reaching a fountain of fire and silk. The pleasure is inundating. She must feel it too because she turns her face to the side, ripping back and forth. Her breath forms in clouds. Her eyes, she shuts.
“Xiveri,” I whisper, hating the tint of a question coloring my tone. Okkari does not question. He commands. Yet, I have never been less sure.
The pounding in my chest is riotous but the honeyed thread of the Xanaxana beneath my breast sours and stills. Something is not right.
“Xiveri, I wish to look upon you for the ritual mating.”
She shakes her head and her bottom jaw sets fiercely. “No. Never.”
I frown. This is not the way. I have never completed the Mountain Run before this, but I have heard the tales. I have seen Xiveri mates in each other’s presences. The connection between them is visible to anyone within sight. Yet she turns from me as if she attempts to shut such a connection out. She is human. Perhaps she does not feel Xanaxana in the same way we do. If this is the case, then what I attempt to do to her here will not be a union. It will be a rape.
A hiss barrels out from between my teeth and my xora shrinks at the thought. Rape. A scandalous, treasonous thing only for those with no honor. I am Okkari. I am its very definition.
I lift my hips and quickly cover my xora, still straining for her. When I settle against her again, I move one hand to the side of her face, the other to her neck. We lay still for some moments while the wind gains in intensity and the cold of the night rises around us. But no matter how gently I stroke her clear, unblemished skin, or how calmly I inhale and exhale — showing her that I am a male in control of his inner beast — she does not release the tension that warps and rattles her frame. She does not stop shaking.
Something is very wrong.
I reach down for the panel still open at the front of her coverings and very carefully tie them back into place. As I work, the backs of my fingers brush against the outside of her mound, finding soft fur there, slick with wetness. I try to swallow my desire, but a haggard groan escapes me, one full of male desperation.
My xora bucks against her thigh and I can feel cream bead along its tip. I am tortured by it, yet it is she who releases a tortured sort of sound. She must sense her defeat is near. She does not know that I will not claim her. Not like this. Not ever like this. I have waited all my rotations to claim the female the universe created for me, not even knowing if I would find her. I will not spoil this moment. Claiming her when this sensation of wrongness hangs so heavy between us I can scarcely breathe its cloying air, would ruin everything.
Pressing my weight down onto her, she tenses even more, but this cannot be helped. Ice crystals form on her skin. I need to warm her. I need to remove her from this. But the Run has not been completed. My Xiveri mate remains unclaimed. This is not the way things are done on Nobu. This is not tradition. A flash of irritation. A thimble of shame. Tradition is not worth keeping if it causes pain.
“My Xhea,” I say and she winces at the sound of my voice. Wrong. This is wrong. Against tradition. Against Voraxia. But she is not Voraxian. Perhaps this is not her culture.
Perhaps she has never heard of a Mountain Run or a Hunt as is practiced by the ancient Dra’Kesh, once rooted here on Nobu before migrating to Cxrian. The Dra’Kesh left behind many of their genetic traits to mix with those of the Voraxian populations that remained, resulting in the varied skin tones of my people. And then they left this. But if she is not Dra’Kesh and is not Voraxian, perhaps she does not know of this. Perhaps, to consummate our Xiveri union, she needs something else. Wants something else.
“Xivoora Xiveri.” I sound pained as I speak. Realizations have not in any way dimmed the desire coursing through me, threatening to unbecome the male that I am. It is painful, but for her I would suffer through the vilest of tortures, drown in the deepest of seas.
I push her matted, freezing hair from her face and arch my body over hers to try to bring up her declining body temperature. Our foreheads touch and in the quiet space between our mouths where not even the savage wind can reach, I whisper, “Warrior, what do you need?”
4
Kiki
“Warrior what do you need?”
My thoughts are fucking haywire. Every emotion and nerve ending and sensation and thought and breath in my body is wired to stay alive. To block this out. To fight. Fight! Don’t stop fighting! But I do stop fighting because I’ve lost. Now all that’s left is to wait for him to do to me what the other one did. What he brought me here for.
Then why did he stop?
His huge fingers invaded me against my will and then he tasted my insides. He’d looked wrecked by the taste, like it was some exquisite meal, and me, the full fucking feast. I tried to ignore the heat of his passion. I tried to ignore everything about him, but his scent. I just couldn’t block that out. In a way that can only be described as ancient and primal, it called to me.
The oasis. A lush green plant, that rich fauna, a gentle heat. No. Don’t get sucked in. Fight! Kill! But how do you kill an oasis? Not even the desert can do that.
I moan — sob. Pathetic. Weak. To silence the sounds slipping out of me, I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood. Pain is better than fear. Pain is better than capitulation. Anything is better than capitulation. I’m supposed to be fighting. But I’m so exhausted. And the scent. I just want to give up and dive in.
“Xiveri, what do you need? Speak to me.”
“No.” He’s the enemy. He positioned himself between my legs without my permission. He was going to rape me. He’s still going to rape me. Why hasn’t he? I’m so confused. The smell is cloying. I can’t breathe through it. I blink in the sight of his face. He’s staring down at me and his strange purple face is illuminated by fuchsia and pink lights beaming from his forehead — a lamp to the counter of the dark red sky behind him and the white swirling through it. The cold white. But it’s so warm in the cage of his arms.
He frowns and starts to pull back. Hope flares for a second that he’ll leave me be — that he’ll leave me to die — but when he sits back on his heels, he grabs the front of my suit and drags me up.
I try to push him back, but my hand sings from hitting him earlier and I’m slowing down. No. I trained. Endurance. I can do this. But I’ve been in that syrup for who knows how long and I haven’t eaten or drunk any water in a day at least and I’ve fought warriors and battled this beast of a male and somehow none of this matters as much as the scent of his purple, alien skin and the havoc it’s wreaking on my mind and will and body.
“Are you injured?” He says and there is a strain in his tone I hate.
I try to push him away. “Get away from me.”
“Kiki, desist immediately. Stop fighting. You cannot seriously have expected to come out victorious on this day. It is not the Xanaxana’s way.” Kiki. He called me Kiki. He knows my name.
Tears come to my eyes but I refuse to let them fall. Patheti
c. Weak. Small. Oasis. I grab onto his suit, which matches mine except that it’s a hundred times larger. He’s huge. What good is fighting? He’s right. I was always going to lose. No!
His black hair whips in the wind, spraying across my arm as the next gust of cold charges against my skin. It burns. It burns so badly, but it’s nothing compared to the strange pain bubbling up inside of me. It’s the smell. Get away from it!
I try to stand, but my body buckles and I fall into his outstretched arms. “Are you injured?” He says. “Tell me this at least.”
I shake my head, willing him to stop talking because the more he says the more potent the smell gets and the more the pain flowers and blooms, but I don’t speak. I can’t speak. And he doesn’t stop speaking. “I will take you down the mountain to the healer. Do not attempt to fight me on this. Your life is too precious to me. I will not risk it.”
He starts to stand with me cradled in his arms, but the moment he moves, it hits me. A pain so surreal it’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. And I have felt the purest torture. No, this is like that, but a thousand times more painful. I’d rather be tortured again by Bo’Raku than feel this sort of pain.
No, I wouldn’t. No, I don’t.
Because it isn’t pain that rips through me like a hundred knives through cloth. It’s a pain that isn’t painful. It’s a pain that’s demanding something of me and I know exactly what it is but I’d never in a million years do what it wants. It's a pain that says, this monster is mine, bound to me across every lifeline, across every lifetime and there’s nothing I can do to prevent it. Nothing I can do to stop the pain. No thing, but the one thing.
“No…” I moan, grabbing hold of his collar to stop him from standing. I look into his pure black eyes and take in his purple face and I commit it to memory. Here is the male that I will hate most for the rest of eternity, and it is because of what I will say next. The words that barrel out of my throat like a bruise as the barbed wire in my abdomen tightens and a surge of liquid and heat spills from my core and wets my suit, all the way down to the thighs.
Taken to Nobu: A SciFi Alien Romance (Xiveri Mates Book II) Page 4