Page 29

I enjoy cleaning my mate up this time, sucking down her juices and my seed like a Sarkarnii starved, despite her protestations, her squirming, and ultimately, her pleasure at my efforts.

“Nothing goes to waste, Kerra. You have taken the seed you need and the rest is mine, little snack.” I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “You probably need to tell your friends where you got to.”

“Shit!” Kerra sits bolt upright. “They’ll be terrified.”

“I doubt that.”

“Where’s my swimming costume?” She looks around us in a cursory search.

“You do not need clothing to swim with me, my Kerra.”

“Unless you want me parading around naked, I need it.”

I cast an eye into my aquium where the ruined costume floats, unlike my shed which has already been absorbed into the filters.

I consider her pink skin, shining in places from the heat, red in others from our activities. It is true my experience is limited, but this mating was even better than the last, with my skin so new and her bite on me.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to show off my mated female.”

Kerra’s eyes widen in alarm before she narrows them again.

“If being naked was a thing, you wouldn’t bother with the pants,” she says carefully. “I call bullshit.”

“I do not know what sort of shit this might be, but plenty of Sarkarnii do not like to wear the pants. They are, however, our clan uniform, and it is enforced, unlike Dante’s clan.”

“They don’t wear pants at all?”

“He claims to dislike them, insisting they are ‘itchy,’ which is a nevving lie,” I growl. “Dalox always gave him too much because Dante reminded him of his brother, Drekkan, whom we lost when we went through the wormhole.”

“Do you have anyone left…on the other side, as it were?” Kerra asks. “My parents passed when I was in my teens, and it’s been me, on my own, since then.”

“I had a brother,” I say, teeth gritted. “But he was badly affected by the wormhole.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Darax,” Kerra says, sliding her hand into mine.

It makes the anger the rut makes so much worse rise within me. I have made many mistakes, many missteps, but I have created a good place here. A place which contains its specters well. A place I want my mate to be happy.

And happiness is not something the Sarkarnii usually crave.

I shake her free and stride out of my aquium. Her friends remain in theirs, only one of them making a slight shriek as I appear.

“What have you done with Kerra?” the one she calls Rosalie demands.

“You know exactly what he’s done with her. We heard plenty,” the one with hair like flame replies.

“Oh lord,” the smallest one says, and I wonder why she is exhorting the ancestor old greeting for a member of the High Bask.

I scent out Kerra’s clothing and bundle it up.

“Your friend is fine,” I growl at them as I pass back through the aquium. “She will remain with me, but you are welcome to visit.”

Oddly, I do not get the response I was expecting from my generous offer. Instead there are a chorus of derisory snorts.

“I think we’ll leave that decision up to Kerra,” Rosalie says. “But good luck explaining it to her.”

“I doubt very much there will be explaining going on.” One of them chuckles. “Unless there are body parts involved.”

I return to my aquium, where Kerra is sitting on the edge of the pool, her feet in the water.

“Your friends do not believe you belong to me.” I put her clothing down and extract a set of spare pants I keep in my aquium.

“Because perhaps it is the human way for the males to belong to the females and not the other way around,” she says without looking in my direction.

I bark out a laugh which I was not expecting.

“Maybe that is how it is with Sarkarnii too.” I touch the area on my shoulder she sank her teeth into.

It is slightly tender, but there was no venom.

I do not think I angered her too much and the mating, such a glorious mating, may have had enough of an effect to put me back into Kerra’s affections.

If she didn’t envenomate me, it has to be a good thing. Plus, her teeth have left enough of a mark on my freshly shed skin I can demonstrate I have survived a mating with a female.

That, if my rut is fatal to my sanity, means I die with the respect of my fellow Sarkarnii.

The mere thought makes my body swell, my shift threaten, but I cannot shift, not yet, not if I want to keep her mark on me, to show her it is necessary for me to claim her too, to mark her fair skin with my fangs.

To give her my venom and my life. To reverse the damage my rut is already doing, the way my venom is slowly poisoning my body. Something which will end when our DNA combines.

The one opportunity my brother did not get.

Away in the far distance, there is a long, low howl of pain.

“What is that?” Kerra asks.

“No doubt warriors misbehaving,” I say swiftly.

“Sound certainly carries in this place,” Kerra says, as she gets to her feet and pulls on her clothes.

“Yes.” I smile. “It does.”