Page 6 of Delivered to My Alpha Alien Lovers (Mail-Order Matings #20)

Tylan

Farsel thought I didn’t know what he was going through, but there were no true secrets back home among close friends. We didn’t call them out, of course. Certainly didn’t let anyone who could have made an official record know about it. Because families that suffered from this particular issue were often denied opportunities. And not just for those who actually experienced the problem.

Or if they were already mated, which in theory should fix the problem. Some scientist had come up with the theory that if an affected party should be widowed, it could trigger a recurrence or a first occurrence in need of another mate who might or might not turn up. It wasn’t a study or anything because nobody had ever had it happen.

It could…in theory.

Just never in fact.

But it was for reasons like this that people kept their own counsel.

My friend would never be here with me if they knew about his family’s problem. And in recent days, I’d seen the signs of mating sickness coming upon him. We had to find him a mate and soon. As long as he had one, the symptoms would abate and Farsel could return home, when the opportunity arose, with no one the wiser.

If the rescue arrived before that time, not only he but his family would be logged, their future down the generations dimmed. Once marked as carrying mating sickness, it became nearly impossible to find someone outside another such family to mate with. No matter if they were fated, most would be pressured not to tie their children’s futures to this potentially deadly genetically transferred illness.

So, while I hoped for a quick return to our planet, it would be up to me to ensure that we did so in the best of health. And that would mean our mate would need to come with us because if she didn’t, he’d be even worse off.

And so would I.

But how?

We had gone to local bars and clubs and had no luck. Mostly the atmosphere told us we were unlikely to meet our mate at a place like that. Unless she was here doing the same thing we were, looking for a fated mate, she wouldn’t want to be in the kinds of dives we found ourselves in.

We’d joined a book club, a bowling league, and anything else social this world had to offer, but nobody we encountered was the right person, and we’d given up.

Farsel’s condition had made it imperative that we find her now. I’d hoped he did not share his family’s weakness, but he did, and I didn’t have any ideas on how to look for her. Frustration had me stomping around the kitchen, and when I slapped my hand on the counter, his phone, which lay there, lit up.

Lucky I didn’t smash it with my violence, but it just seemed like everything was going wrong with us getting stranded here for who knew how long and now his symptoms. Worrying about our people coming for us was probably foolish. If my memories of how it worked when someone got the mating sickness were correct, we only had weeks at best to find our mate before the damage to my friend became irreparable.

He could even die.

His phone home page was cluttered with apps, and I scanned them, grinning in spite of myself at his multiple weather and traffic icons as well as some related to his passion for gaming and one…what was that?

I picked up the phone and swiped it to open, hoping he hadn’t put a password on it. He had. I tried to think of what he might have used. Birthday? No, that wouldn’t make sense in our home planet’s system. A special holiday? Then I thought I had it. I typed in the date of our arrival, month and year. Bingo.

I didn’t get too far into it, just opened the app and glanced to see what it was. No need to violate his privacy by doing more. Nope. Well not too much more. He’d sent a message to a female, short, one line, but it expressed the desperate straits in which we found ourselves. But it seemed Mail-Order Matings was an app for shifters and other paranormal beings, even humans if they managed to find it and were looking for someone out of the ordinary.

How cool.

I closed the app and left Farsel’s phone where I’d found it and went to find mine. I hadn’t seen any response from the female, but a glance at her bio and I knew I had to try as well. How long could it take?

Long. It took a long time to fill out the bio with all its questions. Who did I want to date? Who was a definite no? Vampires. I wasn’t sure what alien blood would do to them, but I didn’t want to find out. And orcs. But other than that, I was willing to accept any mate they chose to send us.

As I entered all the information, I tried not to let the anxiety get to me any more than it already had. What if our mate was back home all this time? Seemed likely that would be the case, but if there was even the slightest chance that she was here, I had to try.