She again cut him off before he could ask questions to hopefully clarify her words. She spun back to face him and stabbed her finger in the air, her eyes sparkling with her outrage. “One of those things killed a man, right in front of me. Just slashed his throat open the way I might slice open an envelope. Some mad scientist released a monster into those tunnels, and it started killing people. It hunted me. It almost killed me too. It would have succeeded, if it wasn’t drawing out the experience, enjoying itself. I only escaped it because I accidentally impaled it on some broken wood.”
The thought of the danger Sarah had faced made him glow with aggression and frustration that he couldn’t have found her sooner and saved her from any threat she’d faced. It must have been Seta Zul’s will that protected her long enough to reach the boundary. Yet the other nixirs had followed her. They had been hunting her too. Now, he knew that for a fact, though he had always suspected it. They had followed her trail across the boundary.
“Why was it coming after you, Sarah? Was it because of this… man? Was he your… partner?”
He had to bite off the bitter word as he thought of Sarah with some nixir male. He had not allowed himself to consider if she’d had a mate before crossing the boundary. It was not something he wanted to think about. That mate would never see her again, so it didn’t matter. She belonged to him.
Sarah shook her head. “I think we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s no other reason I can think of why the government would want to kill us. None of us was anyone special. We were all just normal people.”
He took both her hands, tugging her closer to him. “You are very special to me, Sarah.” He felt his head spines lift to fully extend as his glow increased, sparking an answering glow from her zayul. “If anyone else ever threatens you again, I swear that I will hunt them down and tear them to shreds.”
She wrapped her arms around his waist, laying her head on chest as she embraced him. “I hope you never have to keep that promise, Jotaha. But I appreciate it. It feels good to know that someone will fight for me. I never wanted to fight all my battles alone. There was just never anyone else willing to stick around to face them with me.”
31
Jotaha took her back to his bachelor home, though the yan-kanat called it “waiting quarters.” Unlike some human men who seemed to revel in living single, most yan-kanat males apparently desired the chance to find their drahi and start their families.
Jotaha explained this to her on their sky lift journey to the “left wing.” He also told her that he had grown up near the bottom of the wing, pointing the area out to her. The house pods looked like large, peaked tents formed of bones and hide and attached to a vast framework connected to the wing bones themselves. The “lattice” was actually a series of walkways that snaked back and forth and up and down the wing, connecting all the various levels. At the base of the wing, where Jotaha had grown up, the pods were densely packed and much smaller than the ones at the highest point, where each pod looked to be the size of many of the smaller pods sewn together.
Each wing district possessed its own suspended marketplace, complete with small buildings of bone and hide, as well as brightly colored fabric pavilions shading a variety of stalls packed with goods.
The whole city was fascinating, but this was the first time she got the opportunity to walk among the regular citizens. The bouncing walkways were both exciting and unnerving as Jotaha led her to his “pod” that sat at the halfway point between the top and bottom of the wing district. It was much smaller than the house he had taken her to earlier, but she liked the cozy pod far more than the large home filled with strange fixtures and items she suspected were things Farona wanted in her home.
This space was clearly Jotaha’s only, and it was sparsely decorated. A wooden framed bed, a variety of unmatched seating around a large wooden table, shelves stocked with a selection of equally mismatched pottery, and a few scattered rugs. The nicest silken rug was laid out in front of what appeared to be a small shrine in one alcove framed by crystals. The shrine itself had a dragon statue on it that appeared to be carved of a reddish orange stone, wings outspread and jaws open as if caught mid-roar. The chest and throat of the statue glowed with the luminescence of the inferno stone that had been inlaid into the carving. Small gilded pots of sand sat on either side of the dragon statue, with half-burnt cones of incense smoking inside them.
“I know this dwelling is inadequate for you, Sarah. I have put in a request for temporary quarters for both of us until the ceremony.” As she turned to him, he gestured to another alcove, formed by a curtain of sewn hides. Shelves laden with fabrics and furs nestled inside the tight space. “I will sleep on the floor until we move.”
“You don’t have to do that, Jotaha.” She shot a glance at the bed, noting that it was spacious, probably because he was so large. “We can both fit on the bed.”
His gaze was intent when she turned to meet his eyes. “I can’t sleep in the same bed with you right now.”
“Is it… are there rules against sharing the bed before the ceremony?”
He huffed, finally breaking his eyes away from her as he looked around the pod. “I want you so badly that I won’t be able to contain myself if your warm body is curled against me, at least not until I end up doing permanent damage to my salavik.”
Heat flushed through her body at his words until her core felt like it burned as hot as the seal that kept them from consummating their relationship before the first mating. “That’s… it’s probably a good thing, Jotaha. I want you too, and I don’t think I’d be able to wait until the ceremony either.”
He swept a hand over his head spines, flattening them from their bristled state as he turned to look around his quarters as if seeing them for the first time. “I’m sorry about this place. I didn’t plan on bringing my drahi here to stay before the ceremony. Faro—I had believed that my mate would have a home of her own in Draku Rin already.”
She pretended she didn’t hear his slip up, because any other option stung, reminding her that she wasn’t his first choice, and that another woman still held onto a part of him, no matter how much he wanted Sarah.
“I never spent much time here. As Jotaha, I live mostly within the urvaka, only coming here during rest periods before taking on a new generation of chanu zayul. It’s not a beautiful place fit for my drahi.”
She smiled at the embarrassed tone his voice took on. “I love it, actually. It’s cozy, and all the different fabrics and pottery glazes make it colorful and bright.”
His gaze returned to her, his pupils rounding from their usual slits as he studied her. “You say things to spare my feelings, even though I don’t think you are always being honest. You did the same in the home I showed you. That is… kind.”
Sarah chuckled. “Don’t sound quite so surprised. Humans aren’t all bad, you know. We’ve got some good qualities too.”
He closed the distance between them and swept her into his arms, tucking her against his chest, where she felt like she fit perfectly, despite the differences in their sizes. “I’m learning that, Sarah. You make me reconsider everything I’ve ever known about nixirs.”