AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Or what?”
His sight stars glittered in narrowed eyes. And then, the movement so slow and deliberate I couldn’t tear my eyes away, he leaned forward so that our faces were level and stuck his tongue out at me.
I said tongue, but really, it was tongues. And that wasn’t the only difference in how he did it. Instead of holding his mouth tight and mostly closed, his lips tense around the protruding tongue, he actually opened his mouth in a wide, snarling sneer before the black tongue – or tongues – emerged. They rolled out of his mouth, together as one wide organ that reached all the way past his chin, before the three tips of the tongues, trident-like, diverged from each other. The result was actually slightly terrifying – his mouth pulled open in a jagged gash across his face, his fangs glinting like knives, his tongues spewing forth like black tentacles from some dark fucking hell mouth.
And yet...
I wasn’t terrified. Not one bit.
Nope. I was instead overtaken with the batshit crazy urge to reach out and touch one of those dark appendages with my fingertips.
Or my mouth.
I was saved from doing something that colossally stupid by Oxriel’s voice suddenly piping up from the other side of the fire.
“What are you doing, Dalk? What is wrong with your tongues?”
What is it with these aliens and thinking something’s wrong with your tongue?
Dalk pulled his tongues back into his mouth, spearing Oxriel with a dark glance.
“Nothing,” he grunted. “It is a human thing. Do not worry about it.”
“Are you certain?” Oxriel said dubiously. “I have never seen a new woman make a face like that.”
I chuckled, because I was pretty sure that no human, no matter how hard they tried, could have mimicked the exact effect of Dalk’s tongue-out expression from a moment ago. Maybe if they were wearing a Halloween mask...
I was about to stick my tongue out at Oxriel, but Dalk must have seen or somehow sensed that I was gearing up to do it, because he suddenly said, only for me to hear, “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t show Oxriel your tongue.”
“Excuse me... I... What?” I asked, blinking at him. “You’re not in charge of my tongue!”
“Of course I am.”
“What do you mean, of course you are?!” I stammered, not sure if I should be angry or burst out laughing at the absurdity of the declaration.
“I am here for your safety. You are, quite literally, in my charge,” Dalk countered, unfazed.
“And you think me sticking my tongue out at Oxriel is dangerous?” I asked, hissing it so that the other male wouldn’t hear.
“For you? Likely not. For him? Absolutely.”
“And why, exactly, is that?”
“Just don’t do it,” Dalk growled, rising up from his seated position. He towered, staring darkly down at me. “Don’t show him your tongue.” He turned and headed back to his place on the other side of the fire, and I would have crossed my heart and sworn on my own Nan’s grave that as he went I heard him mutter, “And do not kiss him, either.”
CHAPTER TEN
Dalk
The vaklok was due to begin at dawn, so Zoren, Oxriel, and I rose early to prepare. Not that there was much to prepare besides sharpening our blades and checking our spears. We had nothing else with us to bring or use in the vaklok, whatever the event might entail.
We were quiet about it, all three of us, despite the new women’s promise to be up before dawn so that they could watch us compete from the beginning. I heard some soft rustling in the cave where Tilly and Fiona slept, and based on their usual sleep schedules and the lack of sleepy stumbling and quiet-loud, grumpy-cheerful human cursing, I assumed that movement came from Tilly, not Fiona. Or maybe Nasrin, though her cave was deeper into the mountain and that made it more difficult to catch her sounds.
Soon the noises intensified, not in volume, but in quantity. The sound of heavy claws on stone told me Grim was up, and not long afterwards he came into our cave with Valeria. I ground my fangs together at the thought that he’d had to come through Fiona’s sleeping quarters to get out here. Unlike him, I had no reason to walk through that inner cave. Not unless I was trying to reach Valeria and Grim’s cave beyond, or Nasrin’s.
