Page 13 of The Alien Reindeer's Bounty
Home.
Home finally.
Mads might have been born on Reilen, but Earth had always been his home.
He reared back on two legs and took off at a gallop. Dried grass crunched under his hooves, every step bringing him closer to his mate.
Home.
Home to finally claim his mate. A clumsy misstep had tied him to Odessa but he regretted nothing, only the time and distance between them.
He snuffled the ground, catching the scent of a fox. Interesting. He followed it into the forest, but the heady perfume of moss, moldering leaves, and freshly gnawed tree bark erased all thoughts of chasing down the winter fox. He found a creek, not yet frozen over. The water was cold and clean. In the mud and the leaves of the creek, he caught the scent of a lynx. So interesting. He followed, his hard hooves striking against the frozen mud.
The sights and sounds of home wrapped around him. He didn’t care that he left his herd behind, he felt more at ease than he had in a decade, trying to conform to rigid expectations. He felt more aware of his wild surroundings and more alive.
He feltmore.
Mads caught a familiar scent. Another reindeer. His herd? Instinct told him to join his herd, to surround himself with the safety they provided, but a steady voice told him he returned to Earth alone. He had no herd, but that couldn’t be true because he left his heart on Earth twelve years ago.
The four-legged reilendeer form cast a gray veil over his memories, keeping them distant and just a bit numb. Longing, guilt, anger, and frustration poked through the veil, piercing the numbness with vivid emotion, but the distance remained. In his two-legged form, he felt those emotions keenly. They had grown stronger as his journey brought him closer to Earth.
To his mate.
The raw emotions emitted from humans coupled with his own need to seek out his mate threatened to overwhelm him. His uncle advised Mads to shift into his four-legged form as quickly as possible until he reached an equilibrium.
The shift didn’t help. The ache of separation from his mate had only grown over the years. At first, when a misstep on ice caused him to bite and taste her blood, he barely felt the bond. Distance convinced him that he imagined the faint mate bond but at night, when he had nothing else to occupy his mind, the tug of it kept him from sleep. He threw himself into his mandatory military service, physical exhaustion being the only way he could quiet the bond.
By the end of his compulsory service, thoughts of Odessa consumed him. She was his first thought, a constant yearning, and his last desperate wish before oblivion finally claimed him. Exhausted and a preoccupied mess, reilendeer mates, once bonded, could not tolerate such a lengthy separation.
Last year he had applied for temporary leave, just long enough to journey to Earth and ease the pain of the neglected mate bond, but his request had been denied. His superior officers informed him that a mate bond was impossible with a lesser species. What he felt for the human female was a product of his imagination.
Lesser species.
The phrase tasted bitter and wrong. Humans might not have the technological advances of the reilendeer, but they were not lesser. True, they were still closely tied to their emotions, a trait many on Reilen considered primitive, but the bright, sparking emotions from humans appealed to him. And no human had a brighter light than Odessa.
He feared too much time had passed. He had wanted to explain his departure to her all those years ago but found he could not break the First Edict, which prevented him from revealing reilendeer presence on Earth. And what did he expect would happen if he told? That she would wait for him?
When he imagined her sitting and waiting, growing older as life passed her by, his heart hurt. That was not the fate he wanted for his spark. She would never sit idly by, passive and meek. She would have found a mate and had calves.
He should hunt for her. Find her. Beg forgiveness for decisions he had no part in. If he could just see her lopsided smile, so human and so perfectly flawed, he’d die a happy male.
And then what? Shake hands with her mate? Give an affectionate pat on the head to her calves?
His uncle warned him. Pity dripped from the older male’s every word. Karl did not have to accept Mads back into the herd, but he did, even if Mads’ bond to a human female offended him.
Odessa might never forgive him for leaving. She might have a human mate. She might have no room in her heart for a childhood friend. He needed to accept that. Currently, that knowledge was swaddled in the gray veil, distant and incapable of causing hurt. Soon enough he would walk on two feet and the realities of his exile would return.
He was alone in a herd that despised him and a mate who couldn’t feel their bond.
The mate bond would never fade for him. Odessa had sparked feelings in him like no other. If she could not forgive him and would not accept the reality of their mate bond, he’d find a way to live—even a dull, colorless life—away from his spark.
Unconsciously, his hooves took him back toward his house. His mate might reject him but he would still bring courting gifts to her door. The first he would leave on her doorstep. He could sense her aura, even at a distance, and it pulled him toward the neighboring house, so the first offering belonged there.
A black velvet bag sat on the back porch. Gently, he lifted the bag with his teeth.
A twig snapped and his ears flicked, locating the sound. The lynx?
No. Heavier. Footsteps. A human.
