“Your skin is so soft, Patty. I can’t wait to sample it with my tongue,” he murmured against my lips, before pulling his face away from mine, his eyes alight with humor and heat. “But you’ll just have to wait for that.”
My mouth dropped open as his hands caressed my breasts a final time before he moved them out from under my shirt. He leaned back from me with the cockiest, most smug ‘gotcha ya’ grin I’d ever seen in my life.
My body was one big hot ache, and he’d done it with a kiss and a titty squeeze!
I bit my bottom lip as I shook my finger at him, eyes narrowed. “Oh, you’ll pay for that.” The trembling in my limbs made my threat weak.
Rema just smiled wider, coming to wrap his upper right arm around my waist and the lower one under my ass, lifting me into his side as his wings flared.
“Ah, but I will enjoy the punishment, so I will look forward to it.”
Oh, what a brat. I had a goddamned brat on my hands!
Rema bent his knees and flapped his wings twice to get us airborne, cutting off my witty reply. The crowd of the arena were still cheering and throwing colorful squares of cloth into the arena. They floated around like tissue paper, creating a confetti effect in the air. From my new vantage point, I could see that the arena was in the center of a maze that stretched for miles in a massive circle. The palace could be seen in the distance, a tiny fleck of red against the paleness of the mountain side. The maze was set in a deep valley, bracketed by the pale cream stone mountain ridge to one side, and a wide river on the other. I’d been right. There were gardens along the outer walls of the maze, pretty flowers and trees, probably to make the red walled maze more welcoming.
There looked to be a village of sorts settled between the river and the red of the maze’s outer wall. It was done up in criss-crossed pastel ribbons hanging between stone houses and booths with milling Neldres roaming in the narrow streets. I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the scene, even out here in the boonies, the roads below were red stone. What was with aliens and color themes?
I pointed at the village. “Can you take us closer?”
Rema nodded and swooped left, bringing us closer to the village so I could see the towering gates that opened into the start of the maze. There were couples waiting in a line at least twenty deep before the gate, all of them holding hands or giggling at each other. More happy couples waiting their turn for the Founding challenge.
With a tilt of his right wing, we wheeled back around over the maze, passing over the teeming masses at the arena and towards the palace in the distance.
The air was hot under the heat of the star, buffeting me as Rema soared. The slight dip down, then up of each flap of his wings was like the rocking of a cradle and I found my mouth stretching into a yawn. He caught an air current, shooting up in a momentary burst of speed that had my belly flipping before leveling out and coasting with his brown wings outstretched, their flight feathers tilting ever so slightly at the ends to keep us on course.
We were covered in bug guts, dirt, with the added blood of the males Rema had killed now smeared all over me as well, and yet, warm fuzzy contentment settled in my chest like a curled up cat, purring away as I snuggled harder into his side. His other two hands gripped my thigh and calf, pulling me into him even more, and I rested my head on his hard shoulder with a sigh.
“We are scheduled for dinner with the Queen tonight, but it isn’t yet evening. Would you like to rest with me?” he asked, his lips brushing my forehead as he spoke.
I tilted my head back to look at him, some of my hair blowing back away from my face by the wind of our passage while at least half of it was stuck to my face and neck by bug guts. “That sounds awesome, yes please.”
After a lengthy shower, of course. The gritty, sticky feeling of gunk under the scales of my neck, especially the ones just under my hairline, was starting to irritate. My forehead was itchy, and while my armor had kept the rest of my body mostly clean, recalling the armor had left my clothes soiled. The leather of my pants was never going to recover from the damage of bug guts. Which was a real shame, because they fit like a glove and had felt good against my skin before they’d dried stiff from viscera.
My stomach rumbled loud enough to hear over the rush of air, and I remembered that we hadn’t eaten anything today. My metabolism was faster than normal now, so I needed to eat more than usual. The shower was going to have to wait until I’d eaten something. Skipping meals made my stomach cramp and we’d been in the maze for at least a few hours.
“I’m starving,” I whined at Rema. He nodded, swooping down towards the rapidly approaching palace. A half moon balcony with vines spilling over it to hang down in the open air was just before us. Rema flared his wings, bringing his legs forward to land with a graceful stop.
“Lyees told me that a small meal would be provided for us in our rooms,” he explained, pushing the glass doors open to lead the way into my sitting room. Vines covered the ceiling and walls, making the room look like a terrarium. They stopped short of the furniture, and I stepped around Rema when I spotted the buffet table weighed down with food. There were some familiar looking pink vegetables in a bowl, and it made me think of Callie and Sam.
“Do we have any news from Sam or Izari? How’s the battle going?” I asked, loading my silver plate with morsels and taking my bounty with me as I moved to sit on the couch.
Rema gathered his own food, and sat down on the couch across from me, his wings draping over the low back.
“I haven’t received anything, no. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t updated us,” he said, cutting off my complaint before I could even open my mouth, “it just means we have been busy and haven’t had the time to check. We can find out more during our dinner with the Queen.”
I looked over at the orb Anu had given me, linking with it to see that there were no more recordings for us.
“Yeah, you're right. No news is good news, as the saying goes,” I said, more to reassure myself than anything.
“Precisely. Sam is secure on Korsal, and if there was a major update for either the war or for Callie, we would have been told already.”
I nodded, taking a bite of pink root, the odd bitter flavor flooding me with a memory. On the Vrax ship, right after Jack had broken us out of our cages, we’d found the kitchen and all the weird alien food. Sam’s face had twisted in disgust at the texture of the pink veggie, a cross between a carrot and maybe a tomato. Crunchy on the outside, but slightly chewy on the inside, with a bitter aftertaste. Sam still had an aversion to most alien food, except she’d become obsessed with these triangle pastries that were a cross between donuts and cinnamon rolls but with a velvety smoothness to them that made you want to eat forty in a row.
There were five of the pastries on my plate now, and I bit into one with a smile. Rema smiled before digging into his meal of mostly green things and fruit.
“Are you a vegetarian?” I asked, pointing my two pronged fork at his plate.
He frowned for a moment, looking down at his plate before his face cleared in understanding. “Ah, yes. I don’t eat meat. I had a hunting incident when I was a child, a badly placed shot and the prolonged suffering of the animal permanently put me off of the consumption of animal meat.”
