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Dalk didn’t seem to care at all that he’d won. His face didn’t budge from its usual look of pissed-off-ness when his name was called.
But I did notice... at least, I thought I did...
I thought that when the winner was announced, when it was his name that was called, that he looked at me. Just for the tiniest fraction of a second. A mere whisper of a glance. As if to make sure I was looking, too. As if checking to make sure that I’d heard.
When our gazes met, I grinned widely and gave him a thumbs up. His sight stars gave a single pulse before he turned and stalked out of the hall.
“Well, happy Halloween to you, too,” I muttered, watching as he disappeared further into the shadows of the mountain. When he was gone, my gaze found its way back to his vakta once more. A small candle had been placed inside it, and Dalk’s flower glowed so brightly that when I closed my eyes in bed later that night, it was all that I could see.
PROLOGUE PART TWO
Dalk
Istood in the valley of the Deep Sky, arms crossed over my chest and tail thwapping back and forth, and watched.
I watched the humans and their mates having what the new women referred to as a party. When I heard the word party, I always thought of a war party. A group of warriors primed and ready to attack.
But this was instead some sort of celebration.
“Dalk!”
I grunted as young Oxriel bounded over to me. Even after all this time, I was not used to mingling with the males of other tribes. But Oxriel was a somewhat tolerable fellow. For the most part. When he didn’t smile too much.
He was smiling now, fangs glinting in the star and moonlight, and he waved something steaming in the air between us.
“Try this! The new women call it a pee-tzaw. It is delightful.”
I grunted, eyeing the thing in his hand with distaste. Anything that lumpy and soggy did not conjure up words like delightful. Then again, few things did.
Laughter cut through the noise of the celebrating group. A voice I recognized instantly as belonging to Fiona. The one with the dark flowers on her arms.
The word came back, jabbing in my head rather aggressively for one with such a soft meaning.
Delightful.
“Take it! I saved you this one!” Oxriel said. “They were being entirely devoured. Gahn Errok alone ate about fourteen of them and it was only by the grace of the stealth gifted to me by my father and his father before him that I managed to wrangle one from the fray for you.”
“You need not have bothered,” I muttered, scanning the group before me, willing my sight stars not to go to the female they seemed so constantly drawn to. “I don’t eat anything but meat.”
“This has meat!” Oxriel grabbed my hand, leaving me to gawk at his forwardness, then slapped the pee-tzaw into my palm. “There’s some squishy doughy thing on the bottom, then a very odd fruit sauce, then a solid milk product melted on top, and then they’ve added meat! Everything but the meat came from the supplies on Valeria’s ship.”
I stared down at the thing in my hand. Nothing Oxriel had said sounded remotely appetizing.
“I find it’s best if you roll it up into a tube,” Oxriel said, as seriously as if he were expounding upon the best way to kill a man. “It’s less messy, and you get all the flavours in one go.”
Despite having absolutely no intention of eating the abomination, I found myself rolling it up into a cylinder anyway, just to see what would happen. It looked even less like food now, if that were even possible.
“Take this tube of new women’s nonsense back,” I grunted at Oxriel. But when I lifted my sight stars, he was already gone.
And Fiona was standing there instead.
“Aw, now that’s not very polite,” she purred with a grin. “Calling pee-tzaw nonsense? What would the Italians say?”
“What are Italians?” I asked. I clutched at my squishy tube of nonsense – because it really was nonsense, how could such a thing be considered food? – to keep myself from thumping the centre of my chest. Whenever Fiona popped up around me my heart did stupid things. Like... beating. Too hard.
“Humans from Italy. That’s where pee-tzaw is from.”
“Are you one?”
