Pairing with the Protector Read online

  The main dish was an enormous insect which looked a little bit like an Earth cricket grown to the size of a prize bull. Its skin was brown and crispy from roasting all day in a pit dug at the base of the tree, its compound eyes replaced with round red berries. The chief told an elaborate story about the bravery of the tweedle hunters ambushing it and killing it before it could hop away, even though it had eaten one of their number before they could bring it down.

  At this revelation, Whitney looked strangely pale and put a hand to her mouth. She took a portion of the insect meat with the crispy skin but Rafe noticed she didn’t do more than push it around her leaf plate, though she ate the seeds and nuts eagerly.

  They listened to Yancy and Yarrow tell about their captivity, with Yancy carefully saying that they had been kept in different cages with different mates, both of whom had been Mindless Ones. Whitney and Rafe nodded along with this seriously, corroborating their story.

  Though Rafe didn’t like to lie, he also didn’t want to taint their homecoming and ruin their standing among their tribe. They had done what they thought they had to in order to survive—he could not condemn them for it.

  Dessert was served, a large, luscious bright purple berry made up of many small, juicy pods about the size of Rafe’s fist. He took one and it burst tart-sweet over his tongue and stained his fingers with its juice.

  Whitney seemed to really enjoy it as well. She had several of the pods while they listened to a tweedle poet who had made an epic rhyme on the spot about their daring escape and the time the royal prince and princess, Yancy and Yarrow, had spent in the awful house of their Tusker captors and the way visitors from the stars had rescued them and brought them home.

  But at last, it was time to go. The tweedle king rose and thanked them once again, inviting them to come back any time. An offer, Rafe thought dryly, that it might have been best to accept. It was much safer, anyway, than taking their chances on the rogue wormhole that had brought them here in the first place. But once again, he felt Whitney’s firm determination and urgent need to try and get home, so he held his tongue and simply nodded his thanks after the old tweedle’s speech.

  “But before you go,” Yancy said to Whitney. “Will you please sing us a song? One in your own language—your voice is so beautiful. It makes me sad to think I’ll never hear it again.”

  Whitney smiled at her. “Well, I don’t really have any accompaniment but I guess I could do something A Cappella.”

  Standing up from the table, she took a deep breath. Rafe thought she had never looked more beautiful and wild than she did now, wearing the gown made of green and purple leaves which accented her creamy chocolate skin.

  Truly he could never deserve such a goddess and he hadn’t even been trying to deserve her, he realized. He had hurt her over and over and had been unable to explain to her why he didn’t want the love he felt for her, which cut him like a treacherously sharp blade.

  She would be better off without me, he thought grimly. If only she would stay here as a revered guest of the Great Tree Tweedles so he knew she would be safe, he would have let her live her own life and left her alone, as difficult as that would be. But since she was determined that the two of them should try to get home, he would have to stay close to her, as much as his presence hurt her.

  It made him feel low and unworthy to be hurting her this way. He despised himself and wished again that they had never bonded, since it could only bring both of them pain.

  Whitney gave him a penetrating look and he wondered if she had caught his thoughts, though he had been trying his best to shield them. Her large dark eyes looked wounded but then she began to sing for the tweedles—a song about being friends forever and never forgetting each other, no matter how far apart they were.

  Though the tweedles couldn’t understand her words, since she was singing in English, they were clearly captivated by the power of her voice. They hummed along and even broke into song in their own language during the chorus. Whitney smiled and switched to the tweedle tongue, making up rhymes to go with the song on the spot, which the tweedles loved even more.

  After she was done, Yancy begged her to teach the song to their best bard—a young tweedle male who played an instrument made of a twig and several long pieces of tightly-stretched twine. Whitney obliged and then the king offered to let them stay the night.

  But though the sun was sinking in the sky and it had been a long, tiring day, Whitney shook her head firmly.

  “Thank you but no—we really must get going,” she told them. She hugged Yancy one more time and whispered something Rafe couldn’t hear in her ear, then turned to him. “Come on—let’s go.”

  Rafe nodded and they climbed carefully down the tree trunk to the ship waiting below. Whitney was wearing her new baby caterpillar pet around her neck like a living scarf and the bright green wool-making insect was already safely stowed in a stasis case in the ship so they were underway in no time.

  As the ship lifted off from the planet for the second and hopefully the last time, Rafe wondered where in the vast universe they would end up.

  It would almost certainly not be home.

  Thirty-Five

  “Well, there it is. The rogue wormhole that started all of this.” Rafe’s voice was neutral as they stared at the whirling blue hole in the blackness of space. “You realize it almost certainly won’t lead us back to the vicinity of Vesuvius Two, the planet we were originally meant to explore,” he said, looking at Whitney.

  Whitney lifted her chin. “No—it’s going to take us home,” she said firmly. She was thinking of the voice of the Kindred Goddess, telling her that if only she could find her freedom, the way would be made clear before her.

  “If you ask for miracles, you have to have faith to see them when they happen,” her Grannie Washington always said and Whitney believed it. She was determined to fly with both eyes open, looking for the miracle she had been promised to come true.

  “You really think that?” Rafe’s voice was flat and unbelieving. “Look, Whitney, I can feel that you have an urgent desire to get home, though you would not reveal to me exactly why—”

  “No, and I’m not going to, either,” Whitney snapped. She pressed a hand protectively to her belly, and looked straight at the viewscreen. “Now fly, Rafe. We’re going to be home in time to sleep in our own beds tonight.”

  The fact that she had said “beds” plural, couldn’t have been lost on him. Not that they’d been sleeping in the same bed since the Tweedle Beautiful Show, which seemed a lifetime ago now, but still, Whitney saw his mouth tighten as he looked at the viewscreen.

  “Very well,” he said in a low growl. “In we go.”

  And then the little ship jumped forward and was sucked into the swirling blue maw of the wormhole which had started the whole mess in the first place.

  “I can’t believe it. I just cannot believe it.”

  Rafe was stunned. The wormhole had spit them out, but not in another strange galaxy or one of the vast, empty reaches of space as he had expected. It hadn’t even taken them to Vesuvius Two, where it had originally picked them up.

  Somehow Whitney had been right and it had taken them directly home.

  The Mother Ship was right in front of them, her vast white side gleaming like a precious stone around the Moon’s neck as she orbited it. There were other shuttles too, zipping up from Earth to land in the Docking Bay at a frantic pace. Suddenly the com-link crackled and a voice said,

  “Unidentified shuttle, state your destination at once!”

  “This is Commander Rafe of the BEGI program requesting clearance to land aboard the Mother Ship.”

  “If you’re landing, you’d better hurry,” the voice advised. “We’re expecting that solar storm any minute.”

  “Solar storm?” Rafe and Whitney looked at each other uncertainly.

  “But…weren’t they expecting a solar storm right before we left?”

  “Must be another one,” Rafe said—it was the