“Huuman,” he repeated, his lips pursing as if tasting the word. “Lusheenn never mentioned this word to me. But you found his—our heart. It sparked for you. Human.”
She licked her rapidly chapping lips. “Can we land please?” The hand that was around her back snaked up into her messy, mottled, and quickly tangling hair. It made her skin prickle as he pulled it enough to keep her facing him. His wings flapped and moved upward until they blocked her view of the world. “That doesn’t help. I don’t know you. I don’t trust you to not let me fall—”
“—Do you want to know me, Yahiro?—”
“—I thought I wanted to die, but not like this!”
His face shifted back into the golden sinister look he’d displayed earlier. It frightened her almost as much as being a mile above ground did, where her only seatbelt was the arms of a strange alien man with a large erection. The hand in her hair gripped tighter. Her nails dug into the muscles under the stems of his wings.
“Death isn’t an option for you. Not while you’re in my sight.”
Yahiro licked her lips as a breeze snapped loose tendrils of hair between them.
She didn’t know this being. In fact, she didn’t even know whether or not they were compatible, but it didn’t stop her from wanting him and it didn’t stop her from considering his words.
He doesn’t plan to kill me, but... he’s an alien. An A.L.I.E.N.If she hadn’t seen a world beyond her imagination, illusions conjured by drugged hallucinations, she considered that a sane person would’ve had a nervous breakdown.
Oh, wait.
“Quist...”
They remained hovered far in the sky, her breaths short for many reasons, but he continued to look at her as if he’d spend enough time at it, he’d understand her.
“We’ll figure it out.”
The words caught her off-guard and instantly put her at ease.Maybe he can read me?Yahiro studied him as thoroughly as he studied her.
“We will?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you...” The wind whipped their hair in a torrent around and between their faces.
The dinosaur let out a long, low groan, like a deep vibration, and startled her gaze away from Quist and back toward the creature. Its head had turned in their direction and from as far as they were, she could tell the beast was staring at her.
“It found me,” Quist answered before she could muster a response. “Sundamar, my brother, had it look for me. I never would’ve thought he’d let it off the world-path...”
Yahiro glanced back to him but he was facing the dinosaur.Nothing you say makes sense.
“You live on its back?” she asked.
“No.” He licked his lips, catching her eyes, and making her tummy drop between her thighs. “I live among Sonhadra now. I’ve never lived on Dawn.”
The beast released another long vibration, straight at her and Quist. She decided she didn’t like it focusing on her with such intensity. “Why not?”
“I lived in Light, the first city of Lusheenn, where I was created, deep in the Sonhadra deserts, but it was destroyed by the Psions and our Creator did nothing to protect my brothers and I. He vanished before the slaughter and has never returned—the coward. Afterwards, when we left the deserts behind and Sundamar took the last of Lusheenn’s creations and started anew, I left them and stayed in the wilds, searching endlessly for our Creator.”
“Oh.”
“I feel him being near you.”
He gripped her tighter and moved her farther up his body until their faces were aligned. She had never held onto another being as hard as she held onto Quist. The golden beads sparkled like ocean sand across his face.His stern face.
“I don’t know him. I have nothing to do with him!”
“Are you a Psion?”
His eyes narrowed and went dark all the sudden. Yahiro plastered her body as close as she could against him regardless, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms over his shoulders, her hands still clinging to his stems.
