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“I don’t need to see anything to know how she makes me feel.” He pressed a clawed hand to his chest, trying to convey how serious he was. “She sees me, sister. She makes me feel brave. When I speak, she laughs at what I say. She takes the gifts I give her and treats them like they are treasures that I stole from the gods themselves. And when she lies against my chest...” He tapped twice over each heart. “I feel that I am whole.”
With every word, his sister’s mouth dropped open wider and wider. If she wasn’t careful, a fish was going to swim into that open maw of hers. And yet, she didn’t close it even when he finished.
His statement hung between them. If he had been with any other person, he would have feared judgment. He would haveworried they would slice him along the tail and leave him for the sharks after they decided he had clearly lost his mind.
But his sister wasn’t like that. She understood that there were different people out there. She had chosen a male that no one else had ever thought she would choose because she saw the value in who he was.
Her mate had been a good man. And now his name was lost to the sea, because she had not been gentle enough to preserve him.
Virago snapped her jaws shut, the echoing click making him flinch. “You truly feel this way?”
“With both my hearts.” He sighed. “I cannot explain the feeling much more than that, Virago. I know that I am where I should be when I am with her. And I know that she is not of our kind.”
“You see how difficult it is going to be?”
“Of course I do.” His words came out harsher than he’d intended, spitting them at his sister, who had always treated him like a child. “I see how difficult it is going to be. She cannot stay in the water forever, and I cannot go onto the land. But if I must chase her sunlight across the seas, I will. Just to bask in the light of her smile.”
Something changed in Virago’s expression. She went from confused and perhaps concerned, then calm and serene.
It was unnerving.
He flicked his tail to put distance between them. “What is that expression?”
It took her a while to respond, and when she did, he almost didn’t hear the words. “I believe you, Imber.”
He was... stunned. He hadn’t thought she would believe him, let alone admit it. Imber had never dreamed it would be this easy for him to tell her, either.
This was his little secret. His greatest hope delivered to him in a package that his own people may very well never understand. How he wanted them to. He wanted them to see her and love her just as he did.
“Oh,” he muttered, sinking down onto the sands with a horrified expression on his face. “Oh, no.”
“What?” His sister’s spines rose. She curved a clawed hand around her child, looking around for whatever danger might be upon them.
“I love her,” he breathed. “I think I love her so very much. I might have loved her for a long time. But I just realized...”
Virago breathed out a sigh of relief, all the tension in her easing as she wrapped herself around him. Her tail flopped on top of his, heavy enough to squeeze out some of the anxiety. “Of course you do. You don’t want her just as a mate, even I can see that. You want to keep her, Imber.”
That was the problem, wasn’t it? He couldn’t keep her. No one could.
Trailing his hands over his niece’s back, he let the soft skin remind him of what he had always wanted. A family. Someone to love him as much as he loved them. “I chose an impossible path, didn’t I?”
“Maybe,” Virago replied with a chuckle. “But you also could have chosen a path that changes the way we all see the world. Your achromo might be the reason we all need to help us get along. They don’t even know we exist, Imber. If you continue down this path with her, maybe they will see that we are a people they have to contend with.”
“Why would we want them to know we are even here?”
“Because they are doing something.” His sister frowned, her eyes turning in a direction he couldn’t see. “They’re going to an area near where we hunt, very close to where the pod sleeps. We’re not sure why.”
There were more of the shells that she traveled in? He hadn’t seen many in this area, but they were far from their hunting grounds. “What are they doing there?”
“None of us are sure. There’s just strange bubbles always in the same area. The last time I went scouting, there were green rays coming out of the shells.” His sister shuddered. “The light made me frightened, brother. I’m not sure they were there for a good reason.”
That strange pit in his stomach was back. The same pit that happened when he smelled her fear.
Suddenly, he wondered if Alys hadn’t been telling him everything. “I can ask her.”
“You can speak with her?”
“She gifted me her language, and I gave her ours.” The lights along his tail brightened in embarrassment as his sister thumped his tail with hers. “Sorry. I should have asked before I did that.”
