"I just can't seem to get a hold of my brain recently."
"Why not? Is something going on?" Ero asked.
"I just have all these thoughts and I've been feeling particularly aggressive and angry lately. Ever since the battle, I just feel like I can't keep control of myself."
Out of the corner of his eye Bannack saw the other men exchange glances.
"Are you feeling like you want to kick the living hell out of just about every guy that gets near you, including us?"
"Well, I did just almost punch Ty in the face because he came up and patted me on the back."
"And are you having any other interesting changes? Physical changes, perhaps?"
Bannack squirmed on the bench. He was rethinking how good of an idea it actually was to get the other men involved in this conversation. Ero glanced down at Bannack's lap and Bannack saw him grin and look back at Ty and Pyra.
"I can definitely confirm that he is."
Pyra gave a short, knowing laugh and shook his head at Bannack.
"So who is she?"
Bannack felt his stomach turn. It was exactly what he had been dreading hearing from any of the men. He shook his head, refusing to make eye contact with any of them.
"Come on, tell us," Ty said.
Ty had always been the kindest and most romantic-minded of the Denynso men, a nurturer rather than a warrior though he had recently embraced his incredible inherited power and joined in the final fight against the Klimnu, and looked far more excited about the situation than Bannack felt.
"It has to be one of the Denynso women," Ero speculated, "There haven't been any other girls who have come around here recently."
There was a pause and then Bannack saw Pyra staring at him.
"Except Loralia."
Bannack shook his head again, but there was no use, they had figured it out and now he had nowhere to hide.
"Oh, shit," Ero said, "It is her. You have a thing for the weird little mirror creature."
Bannack knew that he meant it teasingly, but his anger at that statement nearly overwhelmed him. He stood sharply, slamming his hands down in the middle of the table and glaring down at Ero.
"I do not have a 'thing' for her," he snarled.
"Your reactions to her seem to beg to differ," Ty pointed out.
"Have you slept with her? Your eyes aren't orange."
"No, and they wouldn't be even if I had. There's no way that my intended mate is some freakish creature from underground. I am meant to bond with a Denynso woman, like I’m supposed to. I'm not going to fall for some other species, especially one that I know absolutely nothing about."
As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Bannack saw the other men tense. A stiff moment of silence fell over the table as each of them stood slowly from their benches. He met their gazes in turn, seeing a darkness in each of them that he hadn't anticipated.
"Another species?" Pyra snarled, his hand clenching into a fist beside him, "You mean like humans?"
Chapter Five
I could hear the women still talking around me, but it was as if their voices were lost in some kind of fog that was closing in on me. I was trying desperately to process what they had just told me, but no matter how hard I tried to work through it in my mind, I couldn't force myself to let it sink all the way in.
"Bannack is leaving?"
I repeated my question, hoping that somehow I had mistaken what they had said, but deep down knowing that I had heard them exactly right.
Leia came up beside me and rested a hand on my arm. So small and fragile looking, she had a presence that was strong because it had to be, like a delicate flower that had been forged out of pure steel. It was the fire and chisel that created her as she was.
I felt them guiding me towards the furniture in the middle of the main room of the house, and I allowed them to. I had no reason to distrust these women and in that moment they were my only source of information about Bannack and what was happening around me.
"The warriors have decided to leave the compound and explore the rest of Uoria," Leia explained.
"After the battle with the Klimnu down in the mirrored realm they all realized that none of them, not even the king, knows what the rest of the planet holds, or what types of threats there might be out there. They're unwilling to just sit around and wait to find out if there is another species out there like the Klimnu that might want to destroy the Denynso and take over the compound. It seems that discovering your existence made them even more insistent," Eden said softly.
"Why me?" I asked, looking into each of the women's faces in turn.
"You have lived under the ground that they walked on every single day and they had no idea," Zuri said, "It upsets them that they are known for being the best and most fearsome warriors in all the galaxy, yet they were unable to protect their compound from invasion, and didn't even realize that there was an entire other species living just beneath their feet for as long as they have been around."
"My mate, Pyra," Eden continued, "is especially worried about our child. He or she is the very first child born of this generation of the Denynso, and Pyra doesn't like that he doesn't know what could be out there that might pose a threat to his baby."
"He or she?" I asked.
I had never heard that particular phrase used before, and it struck me as strange that she would use it to refer to her unborn child.
"We don’t know what the baby is," Eden explained, "We have no way of knowing. If I were going through my pregnancy back on Earth there would have been ways for me to know long ago if I am having a son or a daughter. The Denynso don't have those ways, though."
There was only a hint of stress in her voice. With the words she had said I would have expected to feel bitterness, or even anger, coming off of her. Instead, I just felt nervousness and the sweeping love that came over her as she mentioned her mate, just like the love that Zuri had felt when she thought of Ero.
"Do you wish that you were back on Earth rather than here with the Denynso?" I asked.
Eden looked at me and shook her head emphatically.
"Absolutely not. Uoria, this compound, is my home, much more so than Earth ever was even though that's where I was born and raised. I didn't know it until I came to this planet as a scientist sent to do a project for work and met Pyra, but this is where I was always meant to be."
I envied the confidence and absolute security that radiated off of her. She had total conviction in what she said, and her heart fully believed every word of it. This really was where she belonged and she couldn't imagine leaving.
"There are other ways than the Earth ways to tell what child you are carrying, you know."
Eden tilted her head quizzically at me and rubbed her belly tenderly.
"The midwives told me that they don't have any kind of technology that can show the baby like they do on Earth, that they take care of it through their own forms of medicine. None of them have ever been able to tell what a woman was having until it was born."
"Ah, but that's the Denynso," I said, smiling for the first time since Bannack had left, "and I'm not a Denynso. My kind has always been able to tell. I could find out for you now if you'd like to know."
Eden nodded and I could feel the hesitance she had felt toward me disappearing. She was learning to trust me, and as she did, the other women did as well. It was a nice feeling, something soothing and comforting in a time when I needed those feelings more than I had in my entire life.
I gestured for Eden to lie down on the couch and I sat beside her, perching just on the edge so that I was close enough to rest my hands on the sides of her swollen belly. It took me a moment to orient myself to the positioning of the baby. Once I did, I reached up to my neck to take my compact, but realized that it wasn't there. I looked around frantically, terrified that I had lost it somewhere between climbing up from out of the ground and removing my dress for Bannack.
Leia dipped down
and scooped something up off of the floor.
"Is this what you're looking for?" she asked.
Relief washed over me and I nodded. Before she handed it to me, she opened the sides of the silver compact, revealing the two mirrors within it.
"What is that?" Zuri asked, walking over to look at the compact more closely.
"Please don't touch it," I said sharply when Zuri lifted her fingers to touch the mirrors, "I was born with that compact and I will die with it. If it's broken, there is no way to replace it and I will no longer have the abilities that it gives me."
I hadn't meant to sound angry, but it terrified me to think of my compact getting broken. It was the one remaining link that I had to my family and to my kind. Without it, I would lose everything within me that made me me. I didn't know how to function without it.
"I'm sorry," Leia said, leaning forward to hand me the compact.
"It's alright," I replied, hoping to calm the fear that had started to build in her, "Do you remember when the other woman, Elianna, stepped out onto the floor and it turned back into the sky? I explained that it was a reflection and that she had to believe in what the reflection was showing her in order for it to be real?"
"Yes."
"This," I held up the compact so that she could see it clearly, "is how I made that reflection. This compact enables me to do many things, and one of them will be to tell Eden what type of little one she should be expecting very soon."
The mention of the baby broke the tension in the room and the women all smiled. I opened the compact and placed it with both mirrors flat against Eden's belly close to where I knew the baby's head was positioned. I flattened my palm against the mirror and concentrated on what the mirror was reflecting to me. It was far more difficult to reflect a baby, especially one that was unborn, because they don't know yet how to understand what they are feeling and associate it with concrete thoughts. Instead the compact reflected the essence of the child back to me. This was the inarguable elements of that baby that were stitched into him from the moment of his conception and that would stay with him throughout his entire life. These were the very core of a person, the basic foundation on which all of that person's thoughts, feelings, and perceptions would build.
Having gleaned all I needed to from the reflections of the compact, I closed it, and carefully looped the repaired chain back around my neck. I smiled at Eden.
"You will have a son," I told her, "A boy with the power and spirit of his father, and the strength and courage of his mother. He will have within him the capacity to do amazing things."
Eden had tears sparkling in her eyes and I knew that my description had surprised her. She didn't think of herself as nearly as strong and courageous as she truly was, but I knew that through this baby that she was carrying, one that would be entering the world very soon, that she would learn to see herself in the way that she was made and to see herself in him.
Chapter Six
Bannack could see the fury in the other men's eyes and he immediately regretted what he had said to them. Not wanting the situation to turn into a conflict within the entire clan, he stepped away from the table and left the meeting hall. Either Pyra, Ero, and Ty would follow him and they would hash through the situation on their own outside, or they wouldn't follow and he could escape into the darkness of the night and deal with his feelings alone like he had been for the last couple of days. He honestly wasn't sure which one of them he would prefer to happen.
As soon as he stepped outside, he realized that the other men had, in fact, followed him and they were seething with so much anger it was almost as though he could feel the waves of energy rolling off of them. He didn't pause on the stairs leading up to the meeting hall but continued down into the center of the compound, bringing him closer to his house and further from the rest of the tribe.
"What did you mean by that?" Ero asked.
The youngest and smallest of the warriors, Ero had always been teased and bullied for his size. This had made him bitter and angry over the years, creating in him an unpredictable violence that often led him to major conflicts with the other warriors and even non-warrior members of the tribe. When he met Zuri and she became his mate, much of this anger and instability disappeared, replaced by a sense of confidence and control. That new control, however, seemed to be gone now as the temper returned and his eyes flashed aggressively at Bannack.
"I didn't mean anything by it," Bannack said, trying to brush off the comment that he made even though he knew it was completely out of line.
"You obviously meant something by it," Pyra said, stepping closer to Bannack, "You said that there was no way that you were supposed to mate with a species other than the Denynso. Do you think that there is something wrong with other species?"
"It's not that, Pyra," Bannack struggled to find the right words to express what he had been feeling, but they seemed to die and disappear before they could get from his mind to his mouth.
"Well, it seems to be exactly that," Ty said, showing uncharacteristic anger on his face, "It seems like you're saying that the only acceptable mates for us are Denynso women, and that you are too good to have a mate that isn't one of them."
"Let me remind you that each one of us, as well as Gyyx and Ciyrs, found mates that are most certainly not Denynso women. We fell in love with humans, a species that none of us knew anything about any more than you know anything about Loralia's kind."
"You knew something about them," Bannack snapped back, "We have encountered humans before; even had them come and stay with us for a few months at a time. You might not have known a lot about humans before the women came, but you knew something. You had spent time talking with humans and you had heard about them from Creia. They weren't a complete unknown."
"Why does that matter?"
"With Loralia, I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. We didn't even know that there was a species that existed below ground, much less what they are like. So how am I supposed to be OK with the fact that apparently I am falling for her when I don't even know who or what she is? Mating with a Denynso woman would mean that I understood her. I would know what she is, where she came from, and how we were going to live our lives together. We would have a shared history and the same perspectives. It would be easier and more realistic to bond with her and stay bonded with her because we would be able to know each other more quickly and more easily."
"So you think that because our mates are human women and not Denynso women that our bonds are not as close as the men who have Denynso mates? Or that somehow our relationships are not as good, or as 'realistic'?"
"Be honest, Pyra," Bannack said, staring directly into Pyra's raging orange eyes, "Don't you feel better knowing that Eden is technically a Denynso? Didn't it make you happy that Ciyrs somehow changed her from a human to one of us?"
"I was happy that he saved her life and that I wasn't going to have to live without her. I didn't care what she was. All I cared about was that he got the Klimnu toxins out of her and kept her alive. If that meant turning her into a Denynso woman, that was what it would take; but I wouldn't have loved her any less if she had woken up still completely human."
"After everything that's happened in the last few months with the Klimnu and Jem, and now with the idea of going out into the other areas of the planet to find out what else is out there, I just don't think I'm ready to even think about having a mate, much less having one that I will have to learn everything about."
"Do you really think that any of us was really ready when we found our mates? Or that we didn't have to learn everything about them, too?"
"If you haven't noticed, those five women might all be humans, but they are in no way exactly alike. Each one of them is so different it barely even matters that they are the same species," Ty said, "I know that being with Samira doesn't mean that I understand Eden like Pyra does, and that Ero wouldn't be able to trade Zuri for Leia and just expect that Gyyx would be able to pick right up
with her without any problem. That's part of finding your mate. You have to learn her and she has to learn you. Remember, you're just as much a different species to Loralia and she is to you."
That statement struck Bannack harder than he would have anticipated it would have. He had been so wrapped up in how conflicted he felt about her that he never stopped to think about how Loralia perceived him. She hadn't shown a single moment of hesitance when it came to him, and had given herself over to her feelings for him immediately, never once worrying that he wasn't one of her kind, or even that he was a part of a species that had taken over the land where her kind used to live, something that the Denynso would have responded to with violence and anger. She had soothed him and offered herself to him in a way that was so trusting it now made him feel sick at the way that he had treated her.
"What am I going to do?" Bannack asked, looking at the men around him.
The anger in their eyes faded and he could see compassion build in their expressions. Each of them had been through their own personal struggle when they were finding their mates, and they knew how difficult it was to overcome those feelings. Ero had even had to go so far as to travel from Uoria to Earth, becoming the first of his kind to ever travel through space, in order to find Zuri and apologize to her after offending and hurting her so deeply that she had left the planet only a day after arriving. They understood what it was like to be unsure of the intense, all-consuming feelings that came with finding their mates, and now he needed them to tell him how to get through it.
"What in the hell is wrong with you?"
A shriek from across the center of the compound pulled Bannack's attention away from the other men and he saw Eden stalking toward him with a ferocious look in her eyes. Somehow her belly made her look even more intimidating, like a mother animal ready to fight something that was threatening her nest. Bannack took a step back, but Pyra stepped up behind him, forcing him to stay in place and confront the fiery redheaded woman.
Alien Romance Box Set: Uoria Mates II Complete Series (Books 1 - 10): A Sci-fi Alien Warrior Invasion Abduction Romance Page 7