Their bodies had been violated without regard for their consent. They’d been treated like something less than people.
“I am angry for what has been done,” Orishok said, though his raspy, layered voice was oddly gentle. “I am sad for what has been lost. But those things have been done and cannot be changed. Quinn is here now, and what may come will be different.”
She offered him a small smile. Despite everything, he was trying to see the good in his present situation, and she needed to do the same. Needed to put the past behind her. They’d both had their lives altered by events largely beyond their control, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t make the best of what they had here, now.
“Are you happy I’m here?”
“It is the only happiness I have known in a long time.”
His words extinguished the pain and anger simmering in her heart. Quinn had lived alone. Her life had been her work; hours upon hours in her studio, sculpting and shaping, pushing toward goals that left little time for social activity. The only person she’d gone out of her way to visit had been Khloe, her baby niece. Khloe had been the only bit of happiness in Quinn’s life, and seemed to be the only person to enjoy Quinn’s company. Until now, she hadn’t realized how empty her life had been. All her time and energy had gone toward the future, toward her lofty dreams, had been poured into her art.
But what was art without living? She couldn’t live in the future any more than she could in the past. It was time to start living in the now.
Quinn grinned and splashed water at Orishok. “Better be careful, or I’m going to start thinking your intentions aren’t so innocent.”
He tilted his head down and looked at the droplets trickling over the plates of his chest as though he’d never seen such a thing before. Quinn couldn’t contain her laughter. His eyes snapped back to hers, and the corners of his mouth crept up in a smile.
“I do not know your words, Quinn, but your actions speak loud.” Cupping a hand, he swept it forward, sending a splash the size of a tidal wave at her face.
She squealed, turning away and throwing up her arms as a shield.
“Oh,” she blew water and hair away from her mouth and looked at him, “it’s on!”
“What is—”
Water hit him in the face, cutting off his words, and Quinn didn’t wait for him to recover. She ducked underwater and swam around Orishok, resurfacing to splash him from behind.
“Bet you can’t catch me!”
Orishok spun toward her as she swam away, rivulets of water streaming down his face. He didn’t blow them away as she had; didn’t blink them clear of his eyes, or lift a hand to wipe the moisture away. Whether he knew her words fully or not, he seemed to understand their meaning; he came for her, water sloshing around his waist, and Quinn might have been afraid were it not for his gentle smile.
She pushed forward, allowing herself only a glance over her shoulder. He was already in the deeper portion of the pool, advancing quickly. Quinn kicked her feet, spraying him with more water, and tried to put more distance between them.
He turned his head away, but didn’t stop walking. Water resistance didn’t seem to slow his progress much, and even if he couldn’t see her, she was making more than enough noise for him to follow. The space between them dwindled rapidly.
Quinn made a final attempt to lose him, counting on her superior maneuverability; she altered direction abruptly, turning along the edge of the pool and doubling back toward the entrance.
She swore there were at least ten feet between them as she passed. She focused on swimming, pumping her arms and legs as fast as she could, struggling in vain to move them as quickly as her heart was beating. It had been more than a decade since she’d last gone swimming. She’d been a teenager, then, long before the cares of the world had kicked her down.
This...this was the most fun she’d had in all the time since. Maybe in all her life.
There was a huge splash. The water moved, pushing her closer to the wall before she was lifted by hard, strong arms. She let out a scream of delight, limbs flailing in the air. Orishok wrapped her in an embrace — one arm over her breasts and the other around her middle — and drew her closer.
She placed her hands on his forearms as she laughed. His grip was firm and unyielding, but not painful, his chest warm and solid against her back. There was no escaping this time.
“You win,” Quinn said, grinning. She rested her head against his shoulder and caught her breath.
“Quinn,” he rasped.
He straightened, and tension rippled through his body, making his grip almost painful for an instant.
“Orishok?”
She felt the change overcome him, felt his segmented chest plates altering. When she looked down at his arms, his armor — it was never armor, it’s him — seem to melt away, just as his mask had, flowing like molten stone into his skin. His heat intensified.
Orishok’s arms had the same color and rough-looking texture as his face. One of her hands was over his, and she felt bony protrusions at his knuckles, just like those at his brow and cheeks. Abruptly, he released her. Quinn gasped in surprise as she fell into the water.
She came up sputtering, and swept water and hair from her face with both hands. “What the hell, Orishok? Why—”
The question died on her lips when she turned to face him.
He was as big as he’d always been, but the imposing armor was gone. If she hadn’t seen him do it with the mask, if she hadn’t felt him change, she might have wondered how he’d removed his armor so quickly.
The being before her looked like flesh and blood, though she knew he wasn’t.
His chest and shoulders were broad, his thick arms heavily muscled. Her eyes trailed down from the cords of his neck, over his dark powerful chest, along the ridges of his abdomen. Like the statue of Kelsharn, Orishok’s musculature wasn’t quite human, but it wasn’t unsettling. She found beauty in the art of his body.
She dropped her gaze a little lower, and her eyes widened.
“Oh, my god. You...you...”
“I am sorry, Quinn, if I made you afraid.”
“Shit.” She covered her breasts with an arm and squeezed her thighs together. Suddenly, she was very away of her nakedness. It hadn’t mattered a minute ago while she was swimming around him, but that was before. It mattered now.
Orishok wasn’t just an animated statue. He was a male.
Quinn stared at the evidence through the water. Though it was distorted by the rippling surface, there was no mistaking his hardened cock.
“Are you okay?” he asked. There was confusion in his strained voice.
Her eyes jerked away from that part of him, meeting his. “I didn’t know you were a man.”
“A man?”
Quinn cleared her throat and pointed at his cock, making sure to keep her eyes level with his...because she was tempted to look again.
He glanced down for a moment. “Yes. I am a...man. Does this...make you afraid? You do not look well.”
“I just...didn’t know. I didn’t think you were a man.” Was she afraid?
Shocked, yes, but not afraid.
“Why did you not think so?”
“Because,” she glanced down but quickly returned her gaze to his, “you said the armor was you. I thought that was it. That it was you.” She probably should’ve realized it wasn’t so simple when he’d changed his face.
Orishok extended his arms to either side and looked down. Muscles shifted beneath his skin. There were more of the bone ridges on his elbows, emerging from his skin like bare rocks from a hillside. “This is me, too.”
“I see that now.” She shifted her feet, water lapping against the underside of her breasts and the arm concealing them. “Did your women look like me?”
Though he did not lift his head, his eyes moved up to her again. Slowly.
“The same...parts. But they did not look like you.” There was an intensity in his gaze she’d seen before, bu
t hadn’t placed. She hadn’t thought about it then, because she hadn’t known. Now it sent a shot of heat right to her core. Was she so sex-starved that she found an alien being attractive as soon as she discovered it was a male? That he possessed...the right equipment?
No. It was because he was Orishok. She liked him, and knowing he was male didn’t change that. It did, however, change the way she looked at him. She’d always seen beauty in his strange form, and there was only more in this one.
“Is this...how you used to look? Before?”
“Yes. Before I was changed. This—” he bent his arm and raised a fist, staring at it “—is not that body, but it looks the same, or close enough.”
Quinn studied his hand. It was large, like all of him, and the knuckles where his fingers connected to his hand were lumps of solid bone. She felt sorry for anyone who took a punch from him.
“It’s a very nice body,” she said, and was mortified to feel her cheeks heat.
He moved closer, water rippling silently around his hips. “Are you okay? I know your skin changes color, but I have not seen it do so that fast.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She tried to ignore his nearness. How his cock was only a few inches away, the tip breaking the surface of the water.
God, she’d been without sex far too long.
“Your body is also nice, Quinn. It is...beautiful.” He said it in English, and his accent — which seemed to lessen with each passing hour — drew that last word out and changed it into something special. Something just for her.
His voice — deep, raspy, and multilayered — swept her into a web of seduction and danger that thrilled her as much as it should have frightened her. Quinn’s heart beat rapidly, and her breath ragged and shallow. Her breasts ached, nipples hardened to points, and heat spread low in her belly.
“Did I say the right words?” he asked.
She laughed. “Boy, did you.” She backed toward the steps. “It’s probably getting dark out. We should go back to your...home?”
Orishok raised his hands and brought them together, lacing his fingers. “Ours.”
Oh, fuck.
ORISHOK STOOD NEAR the window, staring down at his hands as he turned them slowly. How could they be at once familiar and alien to him? He’d not worn this shape since the early years following Kelsharn’s departure...not since his tribe had made their first — and only — attempt at reclaiming a semblance of normalcy. It was strange, now, to see himself as he once had been.
He dropped his hands, brushing his palms over the cloth wrapped around his waist. To revert to the form Kelsharn had shaped for him would’ve been easy. It was natural, now, to exist as an armored valo, to look the part he was intended to play — walking death. But he did not want to. After Quinn had exited the bath and dressed in one of her new garments, Orishok had used a spare to cover his lower half rather than reshaping his armor.
His eyes drifted to Quinn. She sat near the heat stones, eating a river fruit. Her clothing — a vibrant green that didn’t quite match her left eye, but brought out the color nonetheless — had been cut for a being much taller than she, but the fabric cinch around her waist had the garment accenting her hips and breasts.
She’d turned away from him as she dressed, and though her skin was already pinkened by the warm water, he’d noticed the deeper color on her cheeks. She had not realized he was a male. It was clear that she thought of him differently, now that she knew. Would she want to leave?
Orishok looked around the room; this building had been meant to serve as quarters for one of Kelsharn’s kind. An entire building for one being, in a city built for luxury and excess, in a city built by people granted no choice but servitude. There’d been no place for the valos in these rooms. Orishok and his kind were meant to be the guards who defended Bahmet from the beasts outside, the silent workers who serviced the city and kept it functioning, the living décor for a place built on death.
An ever-present display of Kelsharn’s power and control.
Bahmet was Quinn’s; Orishok had meant what he said. It was hers to rule, hers to enjoy. Hers to live in. That Kelsharn’s city was now in control of a being so small, so seemingly meek and delicate, brought Orishok a strange pleasure. Quinn was in almost every way the opposite of Kelsharn and his ilk.
Quinn rose and walked to the fountain to wash her hands. Orishok’s eyes followed her, transfixed by the way the sheer fabric moved over her backside and legs, giving him hints of the body beneath. She returned a few moments later and stopped.
“What?”
“You...did you have enough to eat?”
She smirked. “Enough that I might turn into a riverfruit.”
Orishok tilted his head, a pang of worry bursting from his heartstone. “Do such things happen to hoomins?”
She laughed, shaking her head as she approached. “I’m johk ing with you. No, we don’t turn into the things we eat. I meant that I am full.”
“Full,” he repeated, and placed a hand over his stomach. He could almost remember the feel of it — a belly full of savory, roasted meat, the reward following the thrill and toil of a successful hunt.
“Do you still feel hunger?” She lowered herself onto her pile of blankets.
“No. I remember hunger, especially when Sonhadra was cold, but I do not feel it anymore.” Though there were other sorts of hunger, weren’t there? His tribe hadn’t the words for them, but Kelsharn’s tongue had many words for many feelings, with several related to various appetites.
Orishok didn’t need food anymore, but he hungered for companionship. For light. For life.
Quinn lay down, hair bright against the dark fabric beneath her. She turned her body toward him, the dress pulling taut around her like a second skin. Curling one arm beneath her head, she rested the other on her side, hand settled over her stomach.
“What do you miss most?”
He was silent as he thought back on impossibly ancient memories; if he’d have lived to see forty winters, he would have been considered old by his tribe, but he’d seen hundreds now. There was so much lost, so much obscured by time.
“I missed having someone to speak with,” he finally said.
Quinn smiled. “You have me now.”
“Yes. I do.”
Did this mean she meant to stay? The way she’d acted after he lost control of his shape in the bathhouse had cast doubts in his mind. If she wasn’t comfortable here, he’d do whatever he could to remedy it...but if he was the reason she was uncomfortable, what could he do?
She opened her mouth and yawned, covering it with the back of her hand. “I missed that, too. I was never very so’shul, before, but once I went to prih’zun...I felt it. Felt...alone, even though there were people all around.”
Orishok smiled to himself. “You have me now.”
Quinn released a sigh. “Yeah, I do.” She opened her eyes; they shone with the light of her smile. “Too bad I didn’t meet someone like you back on urth, or things would’ve gone a lot differently for me.”
Closing her eyes again, she nestled down into the blankets, pulling one over herself. Orishok watched her features relax as her words tumbled through his mind. He understood each word on its own; urth was the place she came from, a place beyond his imagination, as unreal as the place from which the Creators had come. The words together, though...did she simply mean she enjoyed his company, or something more?
He waited until her breathing slowed and he knew she was asleep before finally moving away from the window. Quinn’s figure was obscured by the blankets, which was good; he needed to distance himself from his desires. They’d only make things more difficult.
She’d called the mess of blankets a pal et; Orishok wasn’t sure if the word meant nest or not, but that’s what it looked like to him. The nest of some animal, built in the ruins of an abandoned city. If Bahmet truly belonged to Quinn, she needed better, she deserved better.
Orishok crossed the room and mounted the steps to the bed. The fa
bric atop it was sun-damaged and brittle, having been too long exposed to the light from the window. The cloth Kelsharn had used was immensely durable, but it was not impervious to the effects of time.
Nothing was.
As quietly as he could manage, he removed the coverings from the bed and wadded them to tuck beneath this arm. Without the blankets, the bed looked like a large, solid slab of stone; Orishok knew better. He wasn’t sure if it was made of the same material Kelsharn had used for the valos, but it was no more shaped of solid rock than was Orishok.
He leaned forward and placed his free hand on the top of the slab. The surface changed with the pressure of his touch, forming around it to provide resistance and support. When he pulled his hand away, its shape remained for a moment before the entire slab rippled like the surface of a pond, and the depression was gone.
Even after all this time, he found it unsettling. He reminded himself it was just another of Kelsharn’s luxuries; it was another step toward an easy, carefree life, a life so at odds with the everyday struggles of Sonhadra’s native creatures. Orishok’s people had battled and bled for their survival.
This was a luxury Quinn deserved, after all she’d endured.
Orishok left the room. His worry for her safety was unfounded, surely; nothing came into Bahmet. Nothing would harm her. He tossed the ruined blankets into one of the unoccupied chambers on his way out of the building.
The streets were — as usual — quiet. Mist had rolled in with sunset, roiling with a silver glow in the light of tonight’s lone moon. Orishok’s people had tracked the passage of time by the moons; if he dug deep enough, he’d find that knowledge, he’d reclaim those skills. But it didn’t matter, anymore. Time held no meaning for a valo.
At least it hadn’t, before Quinn arrived...
He wove between the frozen forms of his people as he walked toward the building of making, offering them gentle greetings and brief prayers that they would soon find their way back into the world, back into Sonhadra. None of them replied.
The first of them to stop moving had been Yaruk, hundreds of years ago. He had been old before the change, old enough that his skin was dull and his knucklebones were worn down to nearly nothing. One day, he’d simply given up. He lost his shape and solidified on the balcony of one of the many residences, overlooking the mountains of his youth.
Undying (Valos of Sonhadra Book 7) Page 8