Page 5 of Darik's Quest

Timtur turned as if to ward her off but she evaded his outstretched hand and fell to her knees next to Darik, grabbing at his hand, relieved to feel the warmth of a living man. Tears flooded her eyes and she fell onto his chest, weeping, but Darik never moved. “Wake up, sweetheart,” she said, brushing his hair, which was slightly disheveled, away from his face. She pressed a kiss to his lips but there was no response. “You’re scaring me, Darik,” she said as panic rose in her heart. “I can’t lose you too. I need you.”

Aydarr drew her to her feet, holding her in a comforting embrace.. Nicolle buried her face against his chest. “What’s the matter with him? Is he sick? Did he get bitten by a snake? Why won’t he wake up?”

Arms like bands of steel, he held her in a comforting grip. “Timtur is going to check for all those possibilities right now. He’s alive, we know that much.”

“I hesitate to remove the goddess’s flowers,” Timtur said, kneeling beside Darik, “But I fear I must.”

“I’ll do it.” Nicolle pulled free of Aydarr’s embrace and gently swept the blooms off her mate’s body. The perfume was hypnotic and she was afraid she might swoon too but persevered until there was a pile of the purple blooms lying about a foot away. She shifted position to cradle Darik’s head in her lap while Timtur called forth his healing powers and tried to come up with answers.

“He seems deeply asleep,” the healer said at last. “Not ill, not dying, but as if he was hibernating or in cryo sleep. This can only be an act of the Great Mother.”

“Which leaves us no closer to the answers we seek,” Aydarr growled. “What brought him here and to what end did she cast him into this state?”

“Can we pull him out of it?” Jamokan asked. “We’ve got two Alphas here and his mate.”

“I wouldn’t advise it,” Timtur said. “At least not right now. Give it time and see if the condition resolves itself.”

“We shouldn’t linger, boss,” Mateer said. “Gabe reports nothing on the scanners yet but our luck isn’t going to hold forever. There’s a reason we don’t allow travel to this spot.”

Nicolle continued to sit with Darik as an antigrav litter was brought from the flyer. She heard the conversations around her, about the flyer Darik had taken being found and soldiers dispatched to fly it to the valley and a decision was made to keep Darik in the hospital once they got him safely there. She was numb, her pain held deep inside. She wished with all her heart she’d taken the time to talk to him this morning, rather than hurrying out of their residence to avoid conversation. Maybe if she hadn’t been so self-protective, he’d have discussed whatever made him choose today’s actions. Maybe she could have talked him out of it.

After he was lifted onto the litter she walked alongside, holding his hand, which was warm but his fingers didn’t close around hers and he remained in his comatose state. In the flyer, she was allowed to sit next to the litter, with Timtur watching over both of them but unable to offer any true assistance.

The flight to the valley passed in a daze on her part, as did the walk from the landing field to the hospital. Darik was installed in a room and no one asked her to leave him. A reclining chair was brought for her and Jill made an appearance to assure her no one expected her to do anything else but sit with her mate. The packs and her assistants would handle her many tasks without her. Anything she needed she had only to ask for.

Finally she was left alone with Darik in the hospital room. Dr. Garrison promised to check in regularly, as did Timtur.

“None of this is going to help,” she said to Darik as she looked around the room. “Is it? Only the goddess can undo this situation, I’m guessing.”

The doctor had impressed on her that Darik could probably hear her even in his deeply unconscious state, so she knew she ought to talk to him but right now, Nicolle was so exhausted and scared she thought any words she spoke would have the opposite effect of encouraging him to wake up. So she held his hand and ran her fingers through his hair. She closed her eyes and studied the mate bond, dismayingly fragile. I need to build this back up, reinforce our connection.

“The most important thing is I love you,” she said out loud. “I’ll never stop loving you. I was lost in my own pain and regret over what we lost and now I’m understanding you were too. We were together but miles apart and we shouldn’t have been. You’re a stubborn Badari and I’m a stubborn mate-who-was-human and we’re going to have to do better at handling the rough spots of life.”

Chapter Three

Darik startled from a deep sleep and sat up, heart racing. He clutched his spear and gazed around, disoriented. Where the seven hells was he? Why was he carrying a spear and what was with this animal hide kilt he had on? And the woven brown cloak?

He’d been seated in a rocky crevice, recessed into a larger cliff, with a steep drop below. He had handmade boots on his feet and a small pack lay close at hand. The cloak was fastened with a golden clasp in the stylized shape of one of the goddess’s sacred flowers. Rising to his feet and setting aside the spear—his own natural weapons were far superior—he put his hands on his hips and studied the sky.

Cloudless, the expanse of blue was dizzyingly beautiful. It was the color of spring birds’ eggs, nothing like the cobalt hue of Ushandirr’s sky. He could stare at this sky for hours and meditate. It was simply the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The air was fresh and carried all kinds of scents which made his inner predator sit up and take notice, awakening a desire to explore and to hunt.

Sounds of people approaching on the trail far below his position recalled him to the moment and he crouched low. Only a watcher who knew exactly where he was located would see him if they happened to glance up. As he watched a small group of Badari natives went by below, accompanied by two crude carts drawn by shaggy horned animals strange to his eyes. There were men with spears like his, women and a few children, along with several canine-type smaller animals, which he guessed were pets, considering how friendly they seemed to the children especially.

The strangers were big buff people. The men weren’t as tall as he was but stood easily at least six feet in height and were well muscled. The women were close in size, fair of face, with their long hair braided. The group was making good time to wherever they were going. A few fragments of conversation drifted up to him on the breeze and he realized the travelers were speaking Badari, or a dialect close enough for him to catch words and phrases.

She really did it, she sent me to the time of the ancestors, he thought in amazement and shock as the travelers moved on out of sight. Be careful what you ask a goddess to do for you. Quickly he took stock of what he had. The spear, some kind of journey cake and dried meat in the pack and of course the double-sided bottle, which was now on a black leather thong around his neck. There was a woven shirt in the pack and he put it on to hide the bottle. Briefly he was tempted to stow the container in the pack until he found the mythical spring but he couldn’t risk losing it. He deployed his fangs and talons with a bit of trepidation, but his natural weaponry was intact and his inner predator seemed a bit dazed but present. Darik rubbed his chest over his heart and took a deep breath. The pack bond was gone.

He'd heard Nario and Faine discuss how they’d lost the pack bond when the men were taken to the Khagrish home world and how unsettling it was. Even when he’d been on long range missions away from the valley and his Alpha, he’d always had the bond to anchor him. There was a physical pain where it should have been rooted in his heart. But of course if the Great Mother had sent him to the world and time of the ancestors, there were no packs. The original Badari weren’t telepathic either although they had healers with powers.

His head spun a little, trying to sort out what parts of him were like the people who’d passed by on the trail below, what aspects were the alien predator DNA mixed with the original DNA ripped from these innocent barbarians and what was forced evolution, brought on by the Khagrish experiments. He was going to have to mingle with the ancestors at least once because even though he turned the crude sack inside out, there was no map, no clue to give him direction to the spring he was seeking.

He did find a small leather bag tied with a short thong and when he opened it and spilled the contents carefully on the ground he stared in stupefaction at a pile of brilliantly colored seashells. There were also a few unpolished stones of varying sizes. He picked one up to examine more closely and saw the shimmer of semiprecious gem embedded in the ordinary rock material.

The economy must operate by barter here. That’ll be a new wrinkle to master.

Taking a deep breath, he gathered his meager possessions, restoring his trade goods to their small pouch and then contemplated the sky. He reached for the mate bond and found it remained, faint but there. We shouldn’t have allowed ourselves to build walls between us, he thought with piercing regret. If he completed this quest successfully and made it home to Ushandirr and Nicolle he was going to pour out his heart to her and hope she’d do the same. He wondered what his mate and the Alphas were making of his disappearance. He hoped they didn’t count him as a deserter but there was nothing he could do about it now. If he brought home the special water, Aydarr would forgive any previous behavior once he knew what Darik had. The Supreme Alpha wanted his people to have families and to increase the Badari population. In Aydarr’s view the claimed mates became Badari and any children, like Hope, daughter of Mateer and Megan were Badari.

Thank you for this chance, he said to the Great Mother in his head, and for allowing me to keep the mate bond.

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