Chapter 6:
Kavryiss
It felt like forever since I had been in the Octantis Colony back in Graynar, down in the safety of the inverted spire of caves that protected the Weredragons from the ridiculous heat.
I had spent four cycles out in the scorching fields watching over Diana as she gathered research. She’d taken different sun samples from the soil, water, and the dead ground trees, all to see where the most intense heat was coming from.
Like a desert, nights were freezing, and the days were unbearably hot. We were leaving in the morning and I couldn’t sleep at all.
I could hear Diana stirring. She couldn’t sleep either. The curvy girl yawned and sat up, watching me pace the length of our makeshift camp. The Zallu was at my side, hopping around to catch up with my stride.
I felt a pinch against my immense wing, sending it flying back on instinct, snapping as it flexed against the sting.
“Sorry!” Diana laughed, covering her mouth with her hands as she continued to giggle.
“You scared me!” I seethed in fury, whipping around with my wings before feeling the ground beneath my feet once more. I watched her with annoyance for a moment before a laugh pulled at the base of my throat and suddenly emerged. I shook my head at her and shooed her away playfully, shouting, “Get out of here!”
She smiled at me and, not surprisingly, didn’t listen. Dragging her toes in the dirt behind her, she came up beside me and took my cold hand into hers and pulled me back toward the fire.
“What are you doing up?” she asked quietly.
“I heard something,” I said and felt a nervous pit form in my stomach. “Turns out it was just your little fur ball,” I said, nodding toward Zallu.
“Oh, good,” she said with a relieved breath. “Sorry.”
“Two apologies in one night,” I teased. “Must be a record for you.”
We reached a large scrap of metal that had no doubt been salvaged from a crashed ship and sat with our backs against it, burying our feet in the warm sand before us.
“My family helped build the caves in Graynar,” I offered stupidly. “It was a big task and we received accolades from the D’Karr. Did I tell you that?”
“You didn’t,” she said, almost proudly. “Where are your parents now?”
As soon as the words left her mouth, the answer registered on my face, and she thinned her lips awkwardly. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she said slowly.
“It’s fine… We hadn't cultivated Graynar yet for food, so they didn’t last long in the pit. They gave my brother and me the best of what we had, but they worked hard jobs.” I shrugged helplessly. “I suppose that's what parents do.”
“It's what I would do,” she agreed.
I looked over at her, and suddenly everything between us changed. I looked over her curves of her body and the gentle but determined way she spoke of defending her child, and it hit me. She was a mother.
The skin in the corners of my eyes tightened as I watched her; something was warming my demeanor.
“I just did my duty since then. Tried to please the D’Karr. Worked my way up the ranks,” I continued slowly, suddenly living in slow motion as she tilted her neck up to rest against the metal slab behind us. She turned her head to me and smiled. A smug curve of the lips.
“Thanks for sharing that,” she said quietly, crossing her long leg over the other. “I know you’re not a man of many words.”
I watched her legs with guarded interest and briefly wondered if I should use this moment of relative quiet to kill her. Choke her and leave her to the fire. Then I looked back at the Zallu and imagined it ripping my leg apart for taking down its new little friend. I’d been in exactly one exchange with a Zallu before, and they didn’t mess around.
“A taciturn,” Diana said softly, the thick glaze of sleep tugging at her voice. “That's fine. That's hot.”
I swallowed and narrowed my gaze at her: the glowing fire illuminating her delicate features. “You must be kidding.”
She laughed and waved me off and at that moment, I began to wonder what it must be like to set my hands on her, to feel the delicate parts of her body. I wanted to feel her breasts and get a taste of them: a taste of her skin. The more she spoke, the more the lust rose up in my body. I could feel myself harden under her gaze: from a hateful passion or a newfound respect, I wasn't sure.
“So, if you could do anything, what would it be?”
I bit my lip at the comment and thought, I’d rip your clothes off. Instead, I swallowed hard and said, “I'd stop fighting. I’d leave the pits. Come back up and take our desecrated lands and make them beautiful again. We used to live in the most envied planet in the system. Now we live in a hole in the ground.”
Diana raised her finger in protest. “For protection.”
My brows rose and quickly lowered. “So they say. We used to have creatures come try and fight us for our land, and we thought they were pond scum. We had rich resources. Now we're just as they were.”
“Fighters,” she said passionately, as though she were correcting me.
I laughed. “Desperate.”
“Well then… How would you do things differently?”
I shook my head. “I'm not big on making a difference.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, almost seductively. “Is it because you don't know how, or because you don't feel like you can?”
I thought on the question and couldn’t seem to find the answer or just couldn’t say it out loud. She let the silence hang between us and then uncrossed her legs, stretching them out and rubbed her hands up and down her calves.
“I think you can,” she said finally.
I looked at her and smirked. “Hm.”
“Do you know how long humans live?” she asked, and I shook my head. “Say we have eighty years. That's, what?” she said quietly, counting on her fingers one after another. She twirled her tongue and concluded, “Maybe one hundred and six ‘full cycles’?”
“It’s actually more like—”
“—Not a math assignment,” She interrupted, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. “My point is... You guys live ten times that long.”
“So…” I ran my cold hand across my forehead and then frowned, perplexed. “Sorry? What is your point?
“Humans eighty years to make a difference, and we try like hell. Shifters live for a thousand, and you’re just hoping to survive.”
I frowned, suddenly realizing she wasn’t being sweet with me; she was telling me off. A deep heat rose up in my chest, and I set my jaw. “Shouldn't that make you sympathetic to us?”
“No,” she said stubbornly. “Take over a planet, force an alliance with the Earth, just do something. You're not even trying.”
“Pardon me. It's not as easy to secure a treaty when your people are dying off.”
She shrugged playfully, giving her patented ‘So?’ expression. She leaned hard against the metal behind her, and I could feel the heat radiate from her body. “I think you can.”
“Is that so?”
“Why not? You're strong, and you're smart enough. You've crawled your way up the totem pole; you're running around for the D’Sharr. You should be able to get whatever you want.”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “Not all of us have riches at our disposal. Not all of us—”
She cut me off, and I speared her with a hard gaze as she said, “I think you're just a coward.”
“I think you're spoiled and delusional,” I snapped. “You want to rule, just like every other self-serving creature, and once you realize Boradrith will toss you aside like the rest of them, I bet you'll be the first in line to leave us.”
She cocked a brow and scraped her teeth along her bottom lip in fury. She turned to me, our bodies so close that our thighs were touching. Then she slapped me across the face. Her hand mishit, and I could feel her stiff fingers crack against my mouth, mashing my lip against my teeth in a pang of sharp pain. Dots of blood trickled down the center of my mouth, and I bore daggers through her with my eyes.
“Take that back,” she seethed.
I turned to her and nearly growled with the deep, dragon’s roar. I grabbed her shoulders, my claws emerging and digging deep into her skin. I should just kill her now and get it over with.
Diana swallowed hard and tried to pull away, but my grip was firm. I slammed her into the metal behind us.
“Boradrith loves me,” she said sharply.
“Boradrith loves many, many women,” I corrected, enunciated my words. “And besides, you don't love him,” I quieted, loosening my grip gingerly.
Diana’s dark brown hair fell in front of her face, and she jerked from my grasp, flipping it out from her sightline. Her breasts heaved with heavy breaths, and we glared at one another as though breaking the contact would send us careening down a dangerous cliffside; like something unseen surrounded us and we were too afraid to look.
I wanted to tell her she was a pawn; that she’d be in better sorts if she left the D’Karr and gave the D’Sharr no reason to hate her. But before the words could leave me, Diana leaned in and just barely grabbed my lips with hers, stealing eye-contact the whole while.
Her lips softly grazed mine with their sticky pull. The kiss was hesitant and aware, as though she were testing me. As our lips found one another, her contact became more aggressive than before, more passionate.
I released my grip on her shoulders and found her face, bringing her closer to me and dancing my mouth around her delicate features, my stubble scraping against her skin as I went in hungrily for more.
My tongue invaded her small mouth, and the taste of her filled my soul, sending a wave of pleasure through my body. I could feel myself getting hard as she pressed her body into mine.
I slipped a free hand down to her waist, my fingertips tickling their way up her shirt until they were splayed out over her breasts, squeezing them and holding the weight of them in my palm.
I felt a spark of electricity run from the back of my neck down to the pads of my feet, and she pulled away suddenly, taking a firm grip on my hands and leading them out of her blouse.
"I think we should leave," she whispered.
"Is that right?" I said slowly, unbelieving.
"Yes,” she said in a sultry tone that I don’t think she meant to sound like.
My eyes flicked back and forth from hers; her eyes were searching me for some alternate ending to our brief tryst. Then all at once, the lust that once glazed over her stare fell away and she stood from my company.
“Let’s go,” she snapped.