But it’s hours later, in the dark of night when I wake to find that I’m alone.
I’d fallen asleep curled into Aloryk’s side, his arm and tail wrapped around me. I remember watching his skin-stars react with each of my breaths as my exhales ghosted across his chest. I’d watched those twinkling little colorful lights while Aloryk’s big, warm hand had stroked my hair, my eyelids seeming to feel heavier with each comforting slow glide of his palm.
Funny how quickly I’d gotten used to him just being by my side at all times that I feel so irrationally cold now that he’s missing.
Hauling myself off the huge feathered nest, I absentmindedly finger-comb my unruly hair and step toward the open doorway. The moons seem almost as bright as a stage-lights illuminating this little corner of this alien planet as if Aloryk’s Goddesses were watching everything unfold. Blinking, I walk out into the village at night, intent on finding my mate.
“You are meant to be sleeping,” a low voice drawls from behind me. My heart leaps to my throat. Gasping, I spin on my heel to see a Trixikka male leaning back against the wall of mine and Aloryk’s hut. “Aloryk will pluck my flightless wings bald if I let you wander around in the darkness, female.”
The hand that had flown up to cover my heart falls back down to my side when I recognize the male in question. ‘Jaxyn’ I think his name is. He’s Tryk’s brother, the one who ‘hatched’ with a deformity to his wings. “Where is he?” I ask.
Jaxyn tips his head back against the stone wall, his face turned up to the night sky, the moonlight kissing the line of his exposed throat. He sighs and works his jaw, his tail flicking at his feet. “Yourmateis with the beautiful one.” I purse my lips, about to ask what the hell that’s meant to mean when Jaxyn straightens. “All of you females are…captivating… in some way or another,” he pauses to tilt his head this way and that, stretching the muscles in his neck. When he starts to talk again, there is a faint smile of adoration on his lips and a touch of awe in his voice. “But thatDelphi…” My heart thumps painfully once, twice. Jaxyn pushes off from where he’s leaning against the wall and stalks toward me. “She is truly made in the image of a Goddess. In my lowly opinion.”
He stands before me, all seven-foot-something. And I can barely speak. All I do is gape up at him, my whole brain glitching. “Wha-… what is Aloryk doing with Delphi?” I manage to stutter out.
Jaxyn sighs and shakes his head. “Chasing a dream. A dream he should forget if you ask me. He already has his mate, why push the Goddesses for more?”
I… what?
“A…dream?” my voice is small and hoarse when I ask, “he dreamed about-” I can’t say the words.
He dreamed about me.
He dreamed about me.
Jaxyn snorts to himself. “Stupid fool. I have told him to just be grateful for what he has been given.”
“I…” my arms come up to hug my body without much thought. “He’s with Delphi?” I ask again, just to be sure, just to make sure I’m not having some kind of nightmare. “Aloryk snuck out in the middle of the night… to meet with Delphi?”
Jaxyn nods his head. “He asked me to watch over you while he was gone. Perhaps when he comes back, you can talk sense into that head of his.”
I make a shaky sort of huffing noise - like I meant to laugh at that suggestion, but couldn’t quite get the laughter out. “Yeah… maybe… I’m gonna…” without even looking at Jaxyn, I hitch a thumb over my shoulder and head on back into the hut.
The very empty hut.
* * *
It must be another hour or so when Aloryk comes back. An hour of my mind racing to all the worst places.
I feel him slip right in beside me on his nest-bed. He smells different. It’s an almost floral scent, but there’s something coconutty about it too. Like a massage oil or something. He’s never smelt like that before.
“Where have you been?” the words fly out of me into the dark of the hut just as he’s arranging his limbs around me.
Aloryk tenses. The silence in his held breath is deafening and has me counting the heartbeats between my words and his. One… two… three… four…
“I was needed to cover another male’s patrol,” he says.
My pulse booms loud in my ears as soon as I hear his lie.
Chapter 29 - Aloryk
I had laid awake, aching this last night. Not just from how Daffy had pulled and stretched my wings, making me hold them in various positions and repeat motions over and over that they have not done since before they were broken. But the aching in my heart was almost more painful. I had told a lie to my mate and this felt wrong. It felt like something else had burrowed into my chest and lodged itself there - something that was not welcome or wanted. But still this feeling stayed this whole last night before I had eventually drifted off into a restless slumber.
Polly was quiet, and I believe she had fallen back into her sleep straight away. I tell myself that if she had not done so, I would have taken back my lie and told the truth. But I am not so sure of that. The image of her pale expression when she had first seen my wings unbound that day still burns in my mind. If I try to fix my wings and it does not work, she will have to accept a broken male as her mate. I do not want to get her hopes up, and I do not want her to see me as weak.
I do not want her to know me for a liar, either, but that is what I have become, it seems.
Jaxyn had called my wishes nothing more than a dream, but what is so wrong with dreams? Polly was once nothing more than a dream, and then the Goddesses plucked her from my mind, and put her here on Trixikka lands for me to find. I think perhaps he is too jaded to have dreams of his own. I do not blame him. The Goddesses made him with broken wings after all. But I saw the way he looked at the female, Daffy… or ‘Delphi’… whatever Polly had said was her correct name. Perhaps the Goddesses will finally gift him one of his dreams with this new female?
