Page 6 of Taken to Nobu
I don’t have time to watch and see if they scattered, but turn and punch the male again. This time when his head flings back and he manages to right himself, he’s got copper blood smeared across his mouth and nose and a forehead that’s red and angry. He cocks a hand, I block, but then his other makes contact.
I knew it would hurt. Jaxal hit me a thousand times in preparation for this moment. It wasn’t preparation enough. Ithurts. His fists are made of marble and I feel my whole body take the hit all at once.
Suddenly the females are shrieking. I can feel someone’s hands on the front of my suit, pulling me out of the mud, but I lift my feet to my chest and kick with my whole being. Anuffpuffs out of the male and I start to backstroke as fast as I can across the mud. He grabs my ankle. I kick with my foot, feeling as my heel makes a lucky connection with his throat. He curses. I curse louder. He curses again. I’m still cursing.
Then both our cursing and our fighting is punctuated by a roar that stalls us too. The sound lights up the white sky, effulgent and deafening. It’s louder this time, closer. I glance up towards the perimeter of the mire and as soon as my vision settles, I see something that numbs my withered core.
Like a treeline sprouted in the beat of a breath, there are at least eight males standing there, shrouded in shadow. The one I’d been fighting moves swiftly ahead of me, wielding a swatch of fabric from my hood like a sword. He stands in front of me, blocking my body with his own, and shouts something to the rest that my translator doesn’t catch.
“Oki phondaeron!”
Hisses sputter through the males, and even the females behind me gasp and whisper. But then there’s a silence. The fog stirs. The men glance around between one another and I can see foreheads flashing in nature-defying colors, and I can hear meaty fists pounding against plated chests, and I can feel masculine energy whipping through the air like a tornado, that riotous undercurrent.
But then my heart catches and the fog clears just enough for me to be able to see a male even larger than the rest, more terrifying, more imposing, moresevere.He steps forward, slashing a line through the amassed crowd that does nothing but part to make way for him. A few of the males actually scatter until only three remain.
“Taka’ana,” comes the booming, terrible bass, the one that seems to let loose something inside of me as I drink in all of his form. Alien and huge and imposing and decidedly male, I know that my first thoughts of him should be of hate, and yet, only one thought comes to me.
He’s purple.
He’s not red, which means I was wrong about something — many things — that the females said. The male they spoke of before — the one who says I’m his mate, the one who told them stories about me — isn’t the one who broke my soul.
Instead the male they spoke of has arrived before me now in all of his glory and as he looks at me with matte black eyes that angle towards his hairline, the world goes quiet.He’s not the red one. He’s not red.He has black hair instead of white. A single white streak runs through it right at the front in the middle. It makes him look like a blade, a knife that will cut me through to the bone, if only he could reach me. But he won’t. I won’t let him.
I break his gaze and turn back to the mud, ferociously charging through it now. I can see the other side. From there, I’ll make it to the tundra. From there, I’ll be able to make a stand. My final stand. He may not be red but he’s still an alien and what I said was true.No alien will take me alive, no matter if they’re pink or green or red or blue.Or purple.
“Oki phondaeron Xiveri. Taka’ana!” His roar chases me and the ground seems to shake on a cause of it. Or maybe it’s just me. A strange vibration sizzles through the air, electrifying it, and a pulse beats in my chest that I swear hadn’t been there before.
I reach the other side of the mire and as I pull myself free of the pink, I think about the words he said and what they could possibly mean as the translation turns over in my mind. “With this challenge, I claim my Xiveri.”
Fuck it. Now it’s time to run.I take off into the tundra, into the cold white.
3
Okkari
Where is she?I am savage in my need now that the battle is ended. The males who vied for my human lost. I took the plates of the one who refused to yield. He crumbled before me. By my bloodright. By the right of Xana.
The rest competed over the remaining females and at my last countninepairs were made. It has never happened before in a Mountain Run. There are always many females too feeble to fight or run or too afraid, or males that are bested by other warriors and left too injured to proceed. Too often, the Xaneru within awakens for no one.
I wonder if it was not because of the decoys that my human gave to the others that on this solar so many pairings were created — that even one Xiveri mating revealed itself between Tre’Okkari and Vren’Hurr. I came upon them in the act of their first coupling, distracted by the scent of my own female’s clothing in Vren’Hurr’s possession. I know it wasshewho gave them. The only she in existence. Who else would have had such cunning but the same carnivorous human who defied our Raku and helped to withhold the Rakukanna from her mate?
Pride surges in my breast, only heightening the desperation of my Xanaxana, which could not be less at rest. I am a calm, calculating male. I am a male who abides by order and tradition. I am a male who needs not seek understanding for in my thirteen rotations, I have seen and experienced more than the elders. I have fought battles. I have shed blood. I have commanded a nation. I have guided our current Raku and his Raku before him.
But now as the fiery winds become threatening, battering me as I charge across the snow, I understand something new. Somethingmore. Everything that scripts have ever told me of the Xanaxana and its power were weak analogies for what I feel burning in my chest. It has demands.They will be sated.I do not care if I have to tear the mountain down stone by stone.
I pass by males in rut and feel my own xora’s steel shaft brush against the barrier concealing it. Given the severe temperatures, my fur coverings are constructed to allow only my xora release for this first rutting. It is late in the season for a Mountain Run. Too late. But it could not be avoided. The moment she woke from the merillian tank, I knew I needed to organize such a run, no matter the conditions or how extraordinary they are. Because nothing about finding my Xiveri mate on that meager, nondescript moon was ordinary. Nothing aboutheris ordinary.
When I returned for her on that moon, it was to find that she had battled khrui, vicious creatures that my own warriors avoid for they demand respect. And even here on this Mountain Run she battled the warrior who came upon her before me. Of the fight I saw, I was impressed. Humbled, even. When I take her to our den, I will need to tend to her wounds, for she fought like something from the depths of the sea. A she-beast, a gift for our nation.A gift for me.
I have been favored by Xana and Xaneru and by the Okkari ancestors to have been given the fiercest of all females — a warrior — for my Xiveri mate. Among all females in the universe, I know that I could have no better. Because there is none.
Every male on the mountain vied for her.
Every male. And I defeated every single one.
My injuries are not enough to stop me from hunting her scent, marred by the mire, towards the tundra. I wonder if she seeks to lose me in the mist. If so, fortune does not favor her, because it’s thinning, the storm settling as it prepares for the icefall that will come upon us quickly and with reckoning.
As soon as I am free of the mud, I arrive at the tundra’s closest edge. I peer into the dark, watching as white ice and falling snow swirl to meet the darkening sky. A deep maroon, it can scant get any deeper. This is the night here. Almost, but not quite deafening. But not quite.
