Star Side

Chapter 38

Something was wrong.

He'd felt it the moment she woke up and her brain waves weren't any different from what they'd been the night before. He didn't expect her to suddenly love him as he loved her, because he knew that took time. Then when he tried to explain the mating bite, it suddenly occurred to him that, maybe, divine beings didn't marry through bites. Their teeth were duller, being omnivores, but they'd still had little fangs. But never once had he seen those little fangs extend.

Despite having learned so much of their language, he struggled to convey something his kind simply didn't put words to. Emotions could be conveyed through mind waves. That's why one of the most basic lessons one learned as a child was how to keep your mind waves inside. But these divine beings they had no such training. Their minds were free, and Gilrack had supposed that was their way of making up for having weaker changes in their scent with their emotions. They'd already told him he stank and wrinkled up their entire faces whenever he got frustrated or angry. It had been insulting, but enlightening.

The wrongness became certainty when his beloved maiden didn't so much as flinch or change course when she met up with the dead-eyed male. She didn't act any differently, nor did the dead-eyed male react as he thought he should on smelling her mated scent. Perhaps the other was more civilized and controlled than Gilrack had presumed, but as he listened to their conversation—and he could always understand more of their language than he could speak—it became a certainty.

She didn't know they were mates.

Being rejected would have been far much better than this. How could she not know? Surely she remembered him moving through her. Surely she remembered his touches, his praises, felt the remains of his love when she woke up.

But the more he listened, the more he remembered, and the more horrified he became.

The poison. The poison these strange beings drank for fun. It could interfere with memory. Not only did it make them silly and honest, it could make them not remember.

Gilrack hardly noticed himself moving as he followed Jolene, his thoughts racing and screaming soundlessly. There was no precedent for this. He'd never heard of this happening. He'd heard fairytales of evil males drugging females into a deep sleep to mate them against their will, but Jolene had been awake. She'd touched him too, she'd pulled him in, her mind waves had keened to be held and loved by him. He'd never been told what to do if a female simply didn't remember, there was just no way!

Well, really, there was only two options he had.

One, he could not tell her and continue to try and woo her and hope his seed hadn't taken root. Once she loved him too, and by then he should know more of the language, he could fully explain what had happened.

Or, two, he told her right now and hoped for the best. He had their word for mates, 'spouse.' He also knew their words for marriage and copulation. It would be a painfully, blunt, and raw explanation of the bite.

Neither option reassured him, but the second option terrified him the most. There was a word the chieftess Naomi had told him about which the divine beings looked upon with just as much hatred as his people did towards the villains who drugged the females and forced mating upon them: 'rape.' Such was one, not out of desire, but also out of hatred and violence.

If he were to tell his beloved she might assume he had done this 'rape' to her, and such an act of savagery was the farthest thing to the gentle love he had made to her. For her to think of that of their mating...her one day returning his love would be the least of what would become out of his reach.

His spines and stomach began to hurt as his most base instincts flailed at the very thought. For his mate to be so wounded, by him nonetheless, how would he live with himself? How did one deal with such a thing?