There was also no sign of the visitor supposedly waiting for me with urgent news. Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen a strange ship docked at the airlock either. So, how had this visitor gotten here? I doubted they would have let them into the hangar bay, too dangerous.
Frederique was pulled into hugs and checked over twice once we reached Mandy. The captain’s mate was acting commander of the ship in his absence—and mine—and I now got to relieve her of that duty. First, though, she took a moment to make sure the one who had slipped from the ship on her watch was unharmed. I might be angry that my Frederique had been in danger in my absence, but I knew not to blame anyone for it. Except, perhaps,Ysa, who should have contained the bastard when we arrived from the water world. Thatwas, after all, what I’d demanded she do.
“Your visitor is waiting in the ready room, Sin,” Mandy said. “I assume you’ll want to go there first?” Behind us, the rest of the crew had disembarked the shuttle, and the relief party had begun boarding. It would be a matter of minutes until their departure, quick and efficient. I could not have arranged that better myself.
“Do you want a change of clothes first, Frederique?” I asked as soon as the airlock hissed shut. “He can wait,” I added, more stubbornly, and that made her mouth twitch into a tired half-smile. She had said it, but damn if it wasn’t true. I needed this woman, needed her like the air I breathed. That had to be love, but how could I be feeling that without Val freaking out all along my skin? She still lay placidly, calmly, and, dare I say it, with a sense of satisfaction, like armor across my flesh. As if she either didn’t sense the fuzzy feelings at all, or… didn’t mind them? I felt a stronger stirring of hope, but I couldn’t give in to it yet.
“Let’s just get it over with, shall we?” my mate said, denying me the chance to delay the inevitable. I sighed, then decided she was right. I was not about to let her call me a coward again if she figured out I was dragging my heels on purpose. There was justastrong sense of foreboding that whoever it was, I wasn’t going to be happy to see them. The lack of a ship docked to theVarakartoomniggled at the back of my mind, a clue I needed to decipher.
The shuttle had departed. The crew, coming back from Xio, was trudging off to their bunks or the med bay to crash. It was justMandy and her two female escorts waiting for Frederique and me. I waved my hand, and Mandy turned, leading the way. We didn’t need a guide—I knew this ship better than the back of my hand—but I appreciated that the captain’s mate took her role on the ship seriously. It suited her, and I could see how much more relaxed it had made my friend.
We reached the ready room off the bridge after a quiet walk. It was no surprise that the skeleton crew manning the bridge was casting me all kinds of curious looks. I was the Sineater, I never had visitors. Rumor had it I’d do more than eat their sins if they looked at me the wrong way. Raukesh was manning the helm, having returned with the first shuttle that had brought Dravion and the critical Jaxin back. I did not expect to see the Tarkan there—he’d worked three days straight—but the male was clearly dedicated to his job. I needed to remember to pass that on to Asmoded when it was time to evaluate crew after the Xio job was over.
Frederique slipped her fingers into my hand again as we reached the door. I glanced down at the gesture, wondering if she meant to offer me comfort or was asking for her own. Did it matter? Damn it, I was so not used to any of this. The stares the crew were giving only seemed to grow more intense, but I refused to let Frederique go. Fine, let them stare. Maybe they’d get used to it eventually. They had with Asmoded, so why not?
The door slid open just as I caught a hint of a scent. Val quivered in excitement, her sleek Gracka tail swinging back and forth. She was definitely bigger than she used to be, and she’d gathered some of what had protected Frederique back into herself. Now my mate had silver boots, on account of not having any shoes when she crashed to Xio, and sleek silver at her throat andwrists. It was still undeniably visible that some of my symbiont was on her skin. It was the first thing my visitor noticed when we stepped into the large conference room. His silver-gray eyes went from my face, full of recognition, to her neck with eerie swiftness.
A Talacan male just like me, but it was more than that. Black armor encased his body from chin to toe, and a helmet hid the sleek, gray baldness of his skull. The armor had a sleek shine and grew in sharp, impressive spikes over his shoulders and helmet, organic in design and molded to skin the way only one substance in the universe could: a symbiont. He was a Son of Ragnar—a true one—with a properly bonded companion.
Like me, this male had been around for a long time, but unlike me, his symbiont had fed and grown steadily over all that time. That’s why there was no ship: his symbiontwasthe ship he’d traveled in, and when he’d arrived, it had slipped into a different form. Hulking and huge, it stood behind his left shoulder, shaped like the terrible icebeasts of Talac’s northern polar region. This symbiont was easily triple the size of my Val, healthy and proud, more powerful than anything on the ship.
“Val’Damor,” the Son of Ragnar said in a deep, sonorous tone. His expression was unreadable, his gray eyes too close to those of my dads not to pierce me sharply. In that look, I was certain everything I’d run from when I left the Alpha Quadrant was contained: disappointment, rejection, all the distaste of a society that rejected my inability to share. He was Talacan, and he was from Ragnarok; he embodied both factions I had failed to fit in with.
The size of his symbiont alone made it clear he outranked me in every way. The instinct to defer to him was immediate, but I was not that male anymore, and I did not bow or scrape to anyone—least of all those who deemed me unworthy. I found my mouth curling into a snarl, my voice dark with my anger at seeing him here. “What do you want?”
“Want?” the Son of Ragnar said, his voice cool and unaffected by my hostility. “I want nothing, Val’Damor. I am here about whatyouwant. Nay, what youneed, Son.” He moved to pull out a seat at the table and gestured for us to do the same. His confidence was obvious—immortality, knowing you were virtually indestructible, did that to a man.
“I am Devan’Car,” he said as he seated himself, elbows on his knees, leaning forward to pierce us with an intense stare. Devan—that was his name; Car, the name of his symbiont—and they were pulled together, as was common practice. That’s how he’d been calling me, and he was definitely here for me. No one knew my true name, and only Frederique knew the name of my symbiont.
I could feel my mate’s eyes on me, and the stares of Mandy and the other ladies piercing my back. They knew they were witnessing something extremely out of the ordinary. Harper, especially, I could hear her old-fashioned pencil scrape over paper as she made avid notes.
Drawing Frederique further into the room with me, I paused beside the chair next to the Son of Ragnar. Devan was very similar in height and posture to me, but he embodied everything I had never managed to achieve. He was, no doubt, the perfect Talacan, with several males and a female waiting for himsomewhere safe, and his symbiont was perfect. Not that I didn’t love Val with all my heart, even when it hurt to do so. It was on me that she hadn’t been nurtured into the magnificent and imposing shape that Car had become.
Devan’s symbiont had lowered to his impressive front paws, head cocked. He was inviting Val to approach, nose sniffing at the air, and Val was hesitant to go the same way I was hesitant to approach Devan. Shrugging off the anger born from feeling like I had failed her, I took another step and then sat down, my fingers still around Frederique’s—they were definitely formycomfort now. I knew she was not in any danger, not from him, and still, I struggled with the desire to pull her behind me, to hide her.
“Devan’Car, of the research unit?” I asked, the name sparking a faint flicker of recognition. This male was older than I was—which was saying something—but at least that meant the size of his massive symbiont was for good reason. Only a handful of Sons of Ragnar ever stayed on that long, and his name had already been something of a myth back when I’d gone through training.
“That is right,” he agreed amicably, though his tone still couldn’t be called warm. Perhaps I heard too much of the frozen plains of Talac in his voice to ever hear the warmth. Perhaps his research had set him on too lonely a path for there to be much practice in it.
“I am here because your situation”—he flicked his hand at the slowly forward-slinking Val—“has always bothered me.” Val looked even stranger than she normally did, with her sparkling silver hue. She was streaked black across her haunches, and more of that black had begun to spread over the armor thatcovered me. If this kept up, she would look like Car, the way she was supposed to, but I doubted it was a good sign. Perhaps this visit was more welcome than I’d thought. For Val, I’d swallow my pride and work with this male to heal her. I had discovered I could do many things I didn’t like, if it meant the safety of my ladies.
Frederique squeezed my fingers, then lifted her hand to place it on my shoulder instead. And I knew right then that, no matter what Devan’Car had come here to say, we’d be all right.
Chapter 24
Frederique
I could tell that being faced with another Son of Ragnar—because I had no doubt that’s who this male was—was hard for Sin. Or should I say, Damor? That’s what this man called him. Was that his real name? I knew I’d asked who he really was when we first met, and he’d denied me, but I couldn’t believe I had never bothered to ask again. Of course he wasn’t the Sineater; he had a true name beneath that surly, tough exterior and all that armor. It shamed me that I could profess to love him and not have known that at the same time.
Mandy and Harper slipped out once the conversation turned more private, beyond the simple introduction of names. Perhaps the captain’s lady had wanted to stick around long enough to make sure Sin would be okay with this visit. Harper wasn’t ready to go, but she obeyed the light shove out the door readily enough, her curious eyes lingering until the door shut in her face.
That’s when Devan’Car and his extremely imposing symbiont truly got to me. How massive the black creature—somewhere between a polar bear and a shark—truly was, and how menacing the spiked black armor worn by the Talacan male appeared. They looked so similar, he and Sin, and yet at the same time, they were worlds apart. I knew without thinking which of the two I preferred.
“My situation?” Sin asked with that typical, mocking drawl. It was so full of dark anger and spitefulness, like he couldn’t helpbut cut with each word so that nobody else could cut him back. My fingers dug a little harder into his shoulder, and I hoped it was enough of a reminder that I was there, on his side, no matter what.
“Yes, the fluke during bonding that caused the dark quirk,” Devan’Car agreed, heedless of how the words made my mate bristle. Pain, not anger, because I knew—without having to be told—that he’d internalized all of that throughout the long years and considered it his own failure. This guy had no clue what kind of wound he was poking at, and it was obvious he had no tact, no bedside manner. “You vanished before I could properly study the situation, or I might have come up with a solution sooner,” he added, with a good dose of censure in his voice, like it reallywasSin’s fault.
Dark quirk? Was that why it always felt like Val soaked up and drew out my sadness and my fear? Did she feed on that? Nothing in the literature I had on the Sons of Ragnar explained what the Symbiont got out of the equation. For it to be a symbiotic relationship, the advantage had to be mutual, though—that had been obvious. Did she feed on feelings? On the energy they generated? And if it was a dark quirk between Val and Sin, did that mean other symbionts fed on everything? The goodandthe bad?
