Page 10 of Feral Tamed

When Hina suddenly pulled on my wrist I stumbled and nearly lost my easy stride. “Your com! Fierce! We should try it now that we’re in the open air again! You might get a signal.” Her words had heat scald my face, unease prickling along my spine. I should have thought of that, why hadn’t I remembered the com? I’d been thinking of the shuttle but not of how to reach my brothers.

Pausing in the shade of a few tumbled-down rocks, right where the canyon became even narrower, I slid my mate to her feet. Uneasy, because we’d been down in this funnel for some time now and I had yet to see any sign of the red-scaled creatures that had been chasing us. We were in cover here, but they would know this terrain, would they want to expend energy to continue chasing us? Or had we gotten away? They had appeared awfully determined to catch us.

“Why are you pausing Fierce Hunter? This is no time to mate with your female,” Snarl chose that moment to inject into my mind. My eyes found him crouching on a ledge against the rock wall, sniffing at the air. He was a black smear against the darker rock, his red glowing eyes the only thing giving him away.

“We need to try and contact the Vagabond,” I said to him. “If I wanted another round of mating, I wouldn’t bother with talking.” In response, Snarl said nothing but he made a chuffing sound that indicated laughter. He slunk away, back the way we’d come without another word. It was obvious that he was going back to check for pursuers.

Hina had quietly observed me as I conversed with Snarl, now she tilted her head to the side, her sleek black hair gliding across her softly rounded cheek. “I swear it looks like you have actual conversations with him,” she said. The Riho found her pants leg and scuttled up it with her claws, curling herself around Hina’s throat and staring up at me with her green eyes. A steady purr started thrumming between us and I found myself responding to it, rumbling in my chest. It was a very content picture, looking at my female with the Riho. I loved that Fluffy had taken to Hina immediately, it told me more about her character than words could.

I tilted my head at her with a smirk and raised a shoulder in a shrug before giving her a nod. I was almost certain that meant yes for the humans. Indeed her eyes went huge, “You can talk with him? Wow, what does he say? Is he sentient?” I knew what she was asking, but with no words to explain my bond with Snarl, I couldn’t do much more than nod again.

Diverting attention to what I’d really stopped for, I raised my wrist and checked the com device strapped to it. I had made it a habit on the Vagabond to simply strap it on just like everyone else did because while I struggled to handle the device, I had managed to figure out how to answer a call. Tapping at the screen now, I was relieved to see it light up, at least our dip in that river hadn’t broken it.

I could make no sense of the squiggles and symbols that filled the device, so I just tapped at them at random, hoping I’d manage to call any one of the stored contacts in there. Kitan had loaded them into all the devices before handing them out, and he’d given us a breakdown on how to use it. I knew Jakar had taken to using it like a starving man, that first week he’d called me a dozen times, and always for the silliest reasons. Just trying it out, getting familiar with it I supposed. Too bad that I was the only one who couldn’t fucking read. None of the instructions had made any kind of sense to me, if not for Jakar’s calling spree, I wouldn’t even know how to answer the com.

Now I just hoped that Hina didn’t realize just how little I knew, I was desperate to get this thing to work for her sake. I knew I could protect her, I knew I could keep her safe on this planet, but it wasn’t fair to her. She deserved to be rescued by my brothers on the Vagabond, and truthfully, I really wanted to be able to talk to her too.

There were a few beeps, followed by a more strident one that I hadn’t heard before. Did I break it? I had clearly done something very wrong. “Let me look, maybe I can figure it out?” Hina said, her small hands curling around my wrist to angle the device towards her face. I almost let pride get in my way, not wanting to admit to her that I had no clue what I was doing. Surrendering my arm, and the device, to her, I tried to focus on the points of contact her fingers made around my forearm. The way her side pressed against my body when she stepped in closer for a better look.

“I can’t read your language and this device is a little different from the one we use in the UAR territories… But I think this here means we have no signal. Correct?” she lifted her dark eyes to look at me, the black fans of her lashes delicately curling. Did I nod? Shrug? I had no clue what that symbol meant. My indecision decided for me. Her eyes widened, “Oh, you don’t know? Okay, that explains the button smashing. Let’s see if I can find another familiar point. But the no signal thing… I guess it means we need to get out of this canyon, something in the rock is probably causing interference.”

Unstrapping the com device from my wrist, I pushed it into her hands. If she couldn’t read this language then she wasn’t much better at figuring out the device, but at least she had prior knowledge to fall back on. She fumbled it a little when she caught it, but then strapped the band around her dainty little wrist. “Okay, I’ll be in charge of the com. I guess you’re not as used to technology as I thought when I noticed you had it.”

There was zero judgment in her eyes, she was just asking a question, trying to get her facts straight. But I felt the shame of not knowing anything in this huge universe heat my skin. My body struggled to hold on to my semi-camouflaged skin tones that matched the surrounding rock, red and vibrant green creeping over my chest in blotches before I got control of it.

Her hand patted me between the pectorals and Fluffy let out a rumbling purr, this time my own rumble didn’t echo her. “It’s okay Fierce, once we can properly understand each other you can tell me your story,” Hina said. Then I saw uncertainty waver across her face, her blunt white teeth nibbling on her bottom lip. “That is… If you want to, you’re not required.”

I reached out with my thumb and gently rubbed it across her soft, mildly abused lip. “I will tell you,” I said in my own language, giving her a nod to convey my affirmation. Then because I couldn’t resist at least telling her some of what I was feeling, I spoke in my native tongue. “Your scent tells me you are my mate, mine. Which means that I am yours.” I tapped my chest and hers, right over where I could feel her heartbeat. It was in the same spot as my own heart, which was reassuring, our bodies were different enough as it was. Not that I disliked any of those differences.

Heat surged through me when I saw her eyes glisten, and I scented a hint of arousal curling through the air. She liked it when I said that word, mine. She definitely knew I was stating a claim when I did that. “Come Hina,” I said, curling her into my arms and pressing her tightly against my body, tight enough that for a moment she could feel my hardening shaft press against her belly. Then I lifted her into my arms and started jogging down the slender beach, hoping for a way out.

Chapter 7

Hina

Being carted around in Fierce’s arms was not unpleasant, after I’d woken so warm, my body was struggling to maintain the right temperature. Right now, I felt exhausted, my legs all noodle-like, so I was grateful that I didn’t have to walk. Bonus points for the fact that Fierce blasted out heat like a furnace and was more than managing to keep me warm.

With one hand I fiddled with the com device he’d given me, I couldn’t read the language on it, but I had the sinking feeling that Fierce couldn’t either. He had a translation device implanted behind his ears, or he wouldn’t be able to understand me; he’d known about it because he’d tapped at his ear to indicate it. So why did he have tech that he didn’t know how to use?

Maybe my first impression, that he was a primitive native wasn’t so far off after all. What if he was one of those poor aliens displaced from his own society? That happened, it wasn’t even that uncommon. I had done xeno-botany on several different locations that had recently been absorbed into the UAR. After the primitive locals had been rudely exposed to space-faring people by one of the many lawless species in the outer reaches of the Alpha quadrant. One of those planets I’d worked on had a native sentient species that had struggled to adapt to the new tech they were introduced to.

This com device was very similar to the one I’d had before my arrest, close enough that I was certain I knew what most buttons had to do. At the same time… I couldn’t read anything so what I might think was the call button, might very well be the wipe data button. Would be terrible if I managed to wipe all of the contacts stored in the device. No, I just had to focus on that signal symbol, as long as it appeared we didn’t have one, there was no point in trying a call.

A sudden tension emanating from Fierce’s body warned me something had changed. One moment he was steadily jogging along the river, his pace even, with hardly any jarring. The next, his skin rippled with color for a brief moment before he turned colors and texture so closely resembling our surroundings that he seemed almost invisible even to my eyes, and he was holding me.

I glanced over his shoulder and saw that the big hound, Snarl, was racing in our direction, his long panther-like tail stretched out behind him. I was almost certain that Snarl had somehow tipped off Fierce there was some kind of danger, even across the distance. What had them so worried? More naga?

Looking ahead I still only saw sheer canyon walls rising up on either side of the river, and the narrow strip of shore we were on, it was shrinking. I had a feeling that in not too long, that river was going to disappear back underground. Would we have to climb? God I hoped not, I’d never make a climb this high. Not when I was this weak from nearly drowning and dying of cold. Maybe if I’d been in good shape and had the right gear, but this rock wall looked so slippery…

Fierce slid to a stop, he had me down on the ground and was pressing me into a very narrow crevice. It was a dead end, just a fissure that had cracked the face of this canyon wall. It was a hideyhole I fit into, but not Fierce, his shoulders were too wide, and the crevice was too shallow for us both to fit. “Hina, safe!” he gruffly growled out, his hand cupping the side of my face and briefly caressing it. Then his eyes dropped to the tiny creature curled around my shoulders. Fluffy stared up at him with her big green eyes, no purr for once, as if the small animal understood the danger we were in. In his own language, Fierce growled something at the pet, his big hand briefly scratching her behind her pointed, tufted ears.

I wasn’t sure what exactly Fierce was about to do, but the last I expected was for him to turn his back to me and block off the opening to the crevice with his body. His skin shimmered, taking on the texture and color of the rock. Ooh, he was camouflaging us, hoping we could hide.

Frozen in place, I strained my ears to try and figure out what was going on. Could I hear the sound of scales sliding across rock? Was that the hiss of one of those naga’s? My heart was beating wildly in my chest, it felt so loud that I worried they could hear it. I think Fierce could because one of his hands reached back into the crevice and curled comfortingly around one of mine. I held onto that warm point, even if it felt more like holding a living rock than a man with his extreme camouflage turned all the way on.

His uncanny ability reminded me a little of how squid could camouflage back on earth. Their skill to mimic their surroundings down to the finest detail was as amazing as Fierce’s ability was. I hoped it was enough to fool the naga. Would they rely mostly on sight or did they have a strong ability for scent too?

I wasn’t sure what Fierce’s plan was, but when he slipped his hand free from my grasp again and curled it around the handle of his ax, I knew he was about to do something. It was dark in the crevice, but I cast my eyes about my feet, looking for a sharp rock of some kind, anything to fight with. Through sheer luck, the bundle of things, including our water flasks, had stayed tied to my belt during my swim. There was nothing useful in there for this, just some copper cables I had thought to use as rope.