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He glanced at the other marks, then back up at my face. “What about the rest of them?”
“They do other things,” I said, and it sounded casual, almost glib, as though each mark hadn’t been torture to attain, and wasn’t worth my life to me. “Healing broken bones, slowing my enemies when they near me.”
“But I can’t touch that one?” he asked, pointing back at my neck.
I had to work not to flinch. “It is new. It might hurt you.”
“Hurt me?”
Somehow, that seemed to fascinate him even more. Was he fascinated by pain, my little human? But no, he didn’t touch, just leaned around and up to try to get a better look at it.
“Why would it hurt me because it’s new?” Then his eyes went round with sudden realization. “You said a star gave this to you. It’s like... it’s like a sunburn. A magical sunburn that gives you powers? That’s amazing and also... a little awful.”
It was succinct and well said. I found that I liked this human more and more. I breathed in to get his attention, and it worked strangely well, his gaze snapping immediately to my chest.
“Did you just growl at me? Did I do something wrong?” He winced. “I guess calling your magic powers a sunburn is rude.”
“It was to get your attention.” When he raised an eyebrow at me, I sighed. “To get your attention off my marks and back onto me.”
“Oh.” He flushed and glanced away, so I reached out and tipped his chin so I could look into his eyes.
“I am not disturbed that you like them. I am proud of them. Each one”—I motioned from one to another, all across my chest—“is a trial. The first three nearly killed me.”
His mouth fell open in a horrified gape, an expression I was used to in the humans who saw me. Somehow, strangely, I thought perhaps in this one case, it was not horror at my appearance or existence. So I did something I never did, with anyone.
“I am Vorian, son of Crux. And you?”
CHAPTER5
BEAU
There was good and bad in the world—I guess, in the whole universe—and lots in between. But the last thing I expected on an alien planet was a very human sympathy for our situation. With how he looked, almost human but definitely not, I wondered what kind of experience he had with what I was going through, if he’d been taken from his home, or if he was even part Earthling. At the same time, he was impossibly strange and so familiar.
Was it rude to ask a guy’s genetic heritage? I mean, I knew how not to be an asshole on Earth, but what were the rules in space?
He offered his name, while his enormous, rough hand was so gentle on my chin as he held me still. With difficulty, I swallowed.
“Beau,” I croaked. But he’d offered me more than that—the name of his father, the guy who’d taken us. A breathy laugh escaped me. My dad wasn’t worth mentioning either. “Son of a real jackass.”
Vorian cocked his head to the side. His eyelids were faintly blue when he blinked twice. “Jackass?”
Right, okay. Not everything translated. I’d heard words on the prince’s ship that didn’t make sense—all with hard, buzzing sounds that didn’t seem of any human origin. Not that I was familiar with every human language or anything, but, you know, the big guys had this weird ability to make a growling sound that was different from anything I’d heard outside, I don’t know, a house cat? But so much bigger.
I didn’t have any one-on-one experience with lions or tigers (or even bears, surprisingly enough), and as I tried to contextualize Vorian’s stranger habits, my understanding fell apart.
With a shrug, I fought the urge to move, not entirely sure whether I wanted to pull away from his hand or lean in, start crying, and ask him to protect me because, well, he’d been gentle so far. “A jackass is a donkey. Dick. Jerk. Somebody who sucks.”
“Sucks what?” His strange eyes were wide, curious. His brow furrowed in the middle in a manner so familiar, except for how his sleek black hair refracted light. Still, I couldn’t quite make him fit with anybody I’d ever met.
And, honestly, with a big old mouth that could swallow me whole, how lovely his smile was on such a serious face, I didn’t want to think about Vorian and what anybody might suck at the same time.
Okay, okay. Maybe I was riding the edge, nervy and thinking about kids, and how you got kids (spoiler: sex, unless you were trapped on a tropical alien paradise where they put embryos in glowing blue tubes), and, you know, inevitable anal probing.
Nope! Back to language, and how I was going to get Vorian on the same page as me.
Sure, some of these guys seemed to speak English, and the interpreter implant went a long way toward helping us understand each other, but in addition to being from another freaking planet, I was born and raised in the American South. It was a point of pride down by the Mississippi to talk in circles, around the meaning but rarely directly at it.
“I mean, like, he’s not good. Disappointing.”
