It’s not cold. It’s not stone. It’s the opposite of every horror story I’ve ever been told about a negative clasp.
It’s like being plugged into the planet.
And it feels likehome, which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever thought and also completely true.
And Cayzor changes.
I watch it happen from two feet away with my hand in his. He gets bigger, I don’t know how else to say it, he doesn’t grow but he takes up more space, every muscle drawing tight, his shoulders spreading. His fangs drop past his lip. His claws lengthen against my skin. The ridges along his forehead come up dark and prominent. His eyes go black and enormous and fix on me with an intensity that would frighten me if I weren’t burning from the inside out.
He drags in a breath like a male surfacing.
“My Be’Ih,” he says, in a voice made of grinding rock.
And the compounderupts.
I can hear them, roaring, actually roaring, Cannibal bellowing something and Hook shouting and Jana sobbing and somebody’s child shrieking with delight.
Chief’s voice is the loudest. “It’s positive! It’s confirmed!”
And I don’t see any of it, because I can’t look away from my mate.
I don’t remember gettingto the holosuite.
I remember being carried. I remember Cayzor’s arms and the road going past too fast and his hearts slamming against my ear and the way he was holding himself together — I could feel it, the sheer effort of a male keeping a leash on something with his teeth. Somebody was clearing the way ahead of us. Somebody was laughing.
And then a door, and the air changing, and the smell of green.
He sets me down on wet grass.
The forest goes up forever.
Trees the width of transport pods, red-barked and enormous, jutting into a night sky I’ve never seen. Two moons hanging low and pale, the wrong color for Timbur, the wrong size, because these aren’t Timbur’s moons. Stars scattered thick as spilled salt. The grass under my bare feet is damp and cool and the air smells like rain and wood.
A claiming forest. A real one, four sectors away, copied down to the water in the air.
And my mate walks out into the middle of it and turns around and starts to speak.
It’s Xylan, but not the Xylan I know. It’s older and lower and more formal, all guttural rolling syllables I can’t follow, and I understand exactly none of it. He speaks it to the trees and the moons and to me, and I stand there in a silky blue tunicsomebody put me in and I don’t interrupt, because whatever this is, it’s four thousand rotations old and he’s giving it to me.
He stops.
He looks at me down the length of the clearing, and every line of him is strung like a cable, and he says the only words in the whole ceremony that are in a language I have:
“You may run.”
I run.
And here’s the thing nobody warned me about:I want to be caught.
It’s in my blood already, whatever comes through a clasp came through mine, and my whole body is one long ache pulling backward toward that male, and about nine strides in I understand that the hardest thing about this chase isn’t the terrain or his speed.
It’s me.
Some traitor animal part of me wants to lie down in the wet grass and let him have me and it’sscreaming, and I’m running away from it as hard as I’m running away from him.
Behind me a roar goes up that shakes water off the leaves.
Oh gods.
