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Basically, for as stoic and tense as the other Deep Sky Gahn appeared, I did have just a little sympathy for him and for some of the stuff his people had gone through. He’d treated us well when we’d stayed here before – even Vaxilkai and Bariok, whom he’d once imprisoned – were treated like guests in his mountain last time. There wasn’t any real danger for us humans staying here for a week at a time. I was even looking forward to seeing some of the people we’d made tentative friends with last time, like the young Deep Sky woman named Zaria.
But Dalk was insisting on accompanying us, and I knew he didn’t want to, and that made this whole situation into a big, uncomfy, awkward thing that poked at my insides. The man could not be called jolly at the best of times. Playing bodyguard in Gahn Thaleo’s mountain, he was going to be downright miserable.
And I had a feeling it had a lot to do with me.
I withdrew my hand from the place I’d touched his back, my fingertips still echoing with the sensation of his hide. He was so warm, so smooth, with not a hint of sweat despite the blistering heat.
I was a bit jealous of that, to be honest, because I was sweating my pale human ass off right about now. Still in the shade, I reached up and pushed back my hood then fanned myself with the cards, trying to get some airflow. I could feel the way my fringe was sticking to my forehead. I didn’t have a flat iron or a hairdryer and my fringe was always wonky these days.
I should probably just grow it out. Or pull a Kat and shave everything all off...
I found myself wondering if Dalk was into the bald look when movement distracted me. Tilly and Nasrin were now passing over their Valentine’s Day cards to Gahn Thaleo and the small group of gathered warriors.
“Oh. Oops. I better pass mine over, too. Dalk, can you move?”
He didn’t.
I poked a hard, muscly spot between his taut shoulder blades. God, he had good posture.
“Dalk? I need to give the cards.” I held them high in the air, flapping them near Dalk’s dark, pointed ear. When the breeze from the flapping touched his ear, it twitched like a cat’s. I snorted because, fuck me, that was actually super cute.
“I will do it,” he grunted, swiping the cards from my hand without even looking at them. “Give them here.”
“Kind of redundant to say, ‘Give them here,’ when you’ve already taken them right out of my hand.” I said, crossing my arms. “You’re seriously going to give a gift of friendship to the Deep Sky men? Never thought I’d see the day.”
“No,” Dalk bit out, glaring back at me, “But I would rather do it than see you do it.”
Before I could respond to that, he took two big steps forward and slammed the cards down into the hand of the nearest Deep Sky male, accompanying the delivery with a scowl so fucking murderous that I was surprised the other male didn’t nock an arrow in self defense.
Well, that’s one way to say happy Valentine’s Day...
“It’s for Valentine’s Day,” I said, feeling like I had to contribute something now that I had no cards to pass out thanks to Mr. Grumpy Grabby-Hands over here. “It’s a day where you give cards – which are like little paper greetings – to your friends and family.”
“I see. Thank you,” Gahn Thaleo replied, but he was looking at Nasrin instead of me. “You have also come at an auspicious time for our tribe. Tomorrow is our vaklok.”
I didn’t have a clue what a vaklok was. It seemed to be a Deep Sky word that didn’t translate well to the Sea Sand knowledge in my head. But it sounded a lot like baklok (the competition to determine a tribe’s new Gahn if one is not chosen by the old Gahn) and taklok (that fight to the death we saw that almost killed Gahn Errok.)
Maybe some worry was showing on our human faces, because Gahn Thaleo explained before any of us could ask him what he meant.
“A vaklok is not a deadly match. It is a competitive display of strength and skill that every unmated adult male participates in. The rest of the tribe watches, but the true audience is the unmated females who are yet to be bonded. It allows the women a chance to see their future mates display themselves. As there are no unmated females left among us, the tradition was going to feel rather hollow this time. But now...” Still looking at Nasrin! “We have you.”
“So it’s, what, the single alien dude Olympics?” I said in English to my friends. “Honestly, that tracks. Remember when Errok came to woo Stephanie and he did all those squats with that boulder on his back? Like, ‘Heeey, girl, I bet I could bench press three of you.’”
Tilly chuckled and shook her head at the memory. Being the early bird that she was, she had been the first one to see Errok out there at the Sea Sand settlement that day, doing squats like his fucking life depended on it as the sun rose, up high on that cliff. Even Nasrin shot me a grin, despite the way she always got a little quieter and more serious in the unnerving presence of Gahn Thaleo’s almighty stare.
Gahn Thaleo ignored my little divergence into English. “As you will be here for the event, you are of course invited to watch as our honoured guests.”
“Honoured guests or future mates for his men?” Tilly whispered in English. I nodded back at her. It definitely hadn’t escaped my notice that we single human ladies had been slotted into the position usually held by unmated female members of his own tribe.
But honestly? Alien Olympics sounded kind of cool. As long as nobody was going to die, I was into it. I used to love watching the Olympics with my Nan when she was still around. Our favourites to watch were what at first seemed like diametrically opposed sports – pairs figure skating and boxing.
Figure skating because it was just so beautiful with the costumes and the liquid grace with which the athletes moved, and boxing because that was what Ireland tended to earn medals in. I’d made the comment once, about how weird it was that our two favourite sports seemed so completely different, but my Nan had looked at me over her cup of tea and said, “But they’re both a sort of dance you need a partner for, aren’t they?”
I wondered if boxing, or something similar, would show up in these Deep Sky games. I highly doubted figure skating was on the table.
“And of course,” Gahn Thaleo added, snapping me out of my reverie, “you unmated Sea Sand men may compete in the vaklok.”
Knowing Dalk and his hatred for all things Gahn Thaleo and Deep Sky in general, I expected him to come up with some sneering rejection of that idea. But to my surprise, it was Dalk who snapped his tail in vicious agreement, growling his answer without a single moment’s hesitation.
