Star Bright (Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #22)

Chapter 15

Settling the fledglings in their separate rooms took longer than Vash expected. Atsu was tired from the day’s adventures, but still strangely restless, circling the room repeatedly with all his drakling senses on alert when he’d had no such worries about the much bigger lobby space. Finally, Vash rearranged the furniture to more closely resemble the pillow fort, and the little one settled into the makeshift nest with a sigh.

“We should get a gift for Darcy,” he mumbled as his eyes closed. “Because she has taken good care of us and it is almost Christmas.”

Vash tugged the blankets around the slackening little body. “That is a very sweet idea. We’ll come up with something tomorrow. Sleep well so you are ready for another day.”

He made it as far as the door before his son called out again. “Do you think Ammi would’ve liked Darcy? I think she would.”

Vash closed his eyes for a moment, breathing through pain and patience. He wasn’t as sure as his son. His mate had been a fiery soul of storms, hot and bright and fast. Darcy… She had a heat as well, but it was like the Earther peppers, slower and deeper and all through the body. Both of them had an inner strength and an innate kindness. If they’d ever met, he thought they would have shared dessert and drinks and, yes, maybe become friends. “I think we would’ve lost to the girls very badly in a snowball fight,” he said at last. “Dream sweet, my summer breeze.”

He opened the door.

“Addah?”

“What, Atsu?”

“Are the skies of our heart big enough for two planets?”

Vash bowed his head. “Big enough for every sky in the infinite universe.”

“Good night, Addah.”

Vash pulled the door shut behind him and leaned against it for a moment, his beast providing no strength to his knees in the moment. He had to rally himself without it to make his way across the hall to Yadira’s room. He knocked lightly and waited for her permission to enter.

She was sitting cross-legged in the bed, staring up at the snow gathering on the arching windows in scallops like icing on the tarts.

He lingered in the doorway. “I left a monitor in your brother’s room so he can call to me if he has any needs. Shall I leave one here as well?”

Still looking at the sky, she gave a head wobble and shoulder wiggle that meant nothing to him in any language, neither rejection nor assent.

He started to retreat, then hesitated. Reversing course, he went to the bed and sat at the corner. “What is it, Yaya?”

The tilt of her head stayed stubbornly averted upward, but her green gaze drifted toward him. “Can I ask for my beast like a gift?”

He let out a slow breath. “That’s not how it works.” But when she took a sharp breath, he reached out to put a hand on her knee. “The beast is not a gift because no one gives it to you. It is you. You know this.”

She flinched away from him. “Then I am nothing. Because my beast isn’t coming. All my friends—” She gave her head a violent shake. “No, I don’t even have friends, not anymore.”

“Yadira, I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t put us in stasis and—”

“No. This isn’t about you. It’s about me. I thought after I helped Darcy on the wall and I was nice to Atsu and—” She beat one fist on the bed, though the mattress just yielded accommodatingly. “I told you I didn’t mind coming here to Earth because I thought maybe I’d find my beast somewhere along the way. I haven’t. What if I don’t ever? What if I’m broken forever?”

He wished he might half shift, to wrap her in arms and wings and promises. But since he himself hadn’t come out of their sorrow and cryo unscathed, he could only give her a one-armed hug and a murmur of consolation. “Just as we don’t force eggs to hatch too soon, you mustn’t ask the beast to come before its wings unfurl. You are not broken. You are a song still putting your notes into place. Your time will come.”

“I can’t wait another hundred years,” she wailed. Then she collapsed in his arms. Since he couldn’t very well tell her that he would happily keep her another hundred years under his wing, he just held her as she cried. The storm passed, and she sniffled a few times into his shoulder before angling away again.

He brushed back her silky curls. “I made a pillow fort for your brother. Would you like one?”

“I want to see the sky.”

So he just tucked the blanket under her chin. “You are my gift, Yaya, in all shapes and times. Now sleep and dream and know your beast is with you always.”

She rolled her head on the pillow to watch him go. “Good night, Addah.”

He slipped out into the hall and again paused to steady himself, as if he’d been blown astray by terrible winds. Maybe he should be more worried for Yadira than he’d let on. A drakling was a drakling regardless of its skies, but what if…

Distracted by the chaotic thoughts buffeting him from all sides, he realized he’d walked down the hall, not to his own room but toward Darcy’s.

“You are not so sneaky,” he told the beast.

It chuffed at him.

But maybe he did need to see her and speak to her. No, not touch her or taste her, as his beast was vehemently suggesting. Just to talk, because she was kind and smart and had her own special ways that soothed beasts, his and his fledglings’.

Lengthening his stride, he turned the corner toward her hallway…and crashed into her.

His beast had warned him half a heartbeat before the collision, so he was able to catch her in his arms before she rebounded and fell.

It could’ve warned him an entire heartbeat before.

It only chuffed again.

Her hands were spread flush across his chest, so he knew she must feel his pounding pulse, as if he’d run all the way to find her. “Vash?” Her dark gaze flickered over his face.

He kissed her.

Too hard, he knew it, but then she raked one leg up the outside of his thigh and anchored him closer, wrenching at his tunic to break the seal.

He spun her against the wall, lifting her higher. As he sank his fingers into her backside, which he’d almost done when brushing the snow off her earlier, her other leg went around him in a glorious lock. The scent of her arousal teased him, just the faintest whisper of sweet musk, but he’d been primed, imprinted.

Maybe that was a problem?

But he was already lost in the sensations of her, needing to crash into her again and again, in a broken ship or on a spinning sled or drifting as a snowflake. Any way, all ways, he needed her.

Darcy. He didn’t say her name, not with his mouth, but with his whole self, as if projecting his admiration like light. But she was still too far away. Even with her grinding on his hips, he wanted her closer, connected. He trailed his lips across her jaw, down the column of her arched throat, kisses threatening to become a bite, just hard enough…

“Not in the hallway,” she gasped. “My room.”

She was still wrapped around him like the very air he breathed, his spirit buoyed upon her even though he was the one carrying her. They stumbled to her doorway, his feet moving with more urgency than sureness while his mouth was preoccupied with charting a course across every fascinating point on her face. He wanted to memorize each facet of her.

As they tumbled onto her bed, hopelessly entwined, he reached down between their sprawled bodies.

Only to stop when she wrapped her fingers around his wrist. Oh, how he wanted her fingers wrapped elsewhere.

“Wait,” she whispered.

He waited, reluctantly indebted to his fledglings for teaching him patience.

“What are we doing?”

He gazed down at her. “According to the handbook—”

She growled at him, which made his beast squirm with happiness. “You have a universal translator, so I know you know what I mean.”

Balancing with his elbows on either side of her shoulders, he smoothed her tousled hair to the pillow, coming to rest with his palms cupping her jaw. The pulse in her throat raced erratically against his inner wrists, blood to blood, feeling to feeling despite the fragile barrier of skin between them.

“I don’t know,” he confessed. When she drew a sharp breath, he amended, “I know what you mean, but I don’t know what we’re doing. Beyond the obvious.”

Her hands traced restless circled on his shoulder blades. “Then maybe…we shouldn’t do it? Because what if…”

She didn’t finish, but he heard the thunderous echoes of his own uncertainty in that silence.

“Maybe I could blame the crash, my beast, a loneliness as vast as the emptiness of space, for my not knowing.” He brushed his thumb across her lower lip. “What I do know, is that these days—and last night—with you reminded me what joy looks like, what it feels like.” Carefully, he lifted himself away from her. “If our time is over, I will forever remember it with that joy.”

Her eyes shimmered with reflected snowlight and tears. “Vash… I don’t want to hurt you. And I don’t want to be hurt.”

“No one does. And no one can promise that. We pray for wings that we might flee from pain and loss, but maybe we fly into the heart of the storm anyway. The only other choice is to stay on the ground, safe but never knowing the skies.”

She closed her eyes. “I’m an Earther. My feet in the dirt is all I’ve known.”

“But you’ve flown with me.” He couldn’t keep the wistful note from his voice. “Was that not joyful?”

“You know it was.” In the space he’d made between them, she wriggled up the bed, drawing her legs to her chest. “But I did that before, trusting someone else to carry me. And when he left me behind… This is just too soon, too fast.”

Vash tilted his head against the outside of her knee. “I understand.” Not because of her body language or the universal translator, because he felt it too.

Keeping his head down, he backed off the bed and straightened.

She gazed at him, her eyes shadowed with regret. “This hurts too, doesn’t it?”

He ached to return to her again, to soothe away her unhappiness. But he feared it would look too much like trying to tempt her, and while the beast would never add to her hurt, he also knew he wouldn’t want to stop touching her.

So he only bowed his head again, giving her that sideways quirk of lips that Earthers used when they wanted to acknowledge the universe’s unfairness without saying a word. “I would fly with you whenever you like, Darcy.”

For once, he wished someone would call him back at the door, but she only wrapped her arms around her knees, as if holding that last contact between them, and watched him go.

He closed the door softly behind him and kept his feet moving. Of course they owed each other nothing, but he only wished he could have given her more.

At least now he knew he still had it to give. In that blank time after Shanya’s death, it hadn’t seemed possible. Discovering that pleasure and laughter still existed in the universe was a gift, not just to him but to his fledglings too.

Maybe he should suggest an annex to this outpost: the Intergalactic Therapy Agency. Hearts that healed were hearts that could love again.

Love.

Even as his beast flexed its talent talons to grab hold of the word, he veered away from it. Dating, yes. Healing, yes. Mating, hopefully. But love? That wasn’t merely flying into a storm. That was summoning a lightning bolt to the heart.

+ + +

The next morning, he breakfasted with the children—and without Darcy again. The snow had continued through the night and drifted into fantastical shapes beyond the lobby windows, occasionally gusting into wild plumes like frantic drakling wings. Even without the IDA’s reclusive technologies, an entire marauding fleet of extraterrestrial invaders might’ve landed without anyone the wiser.

Of course Atsu wanted to go play outside.

When Vash rejected the idea, the little boy countered with, “Then we should decorate because tonight is Christmas Eve.”

“Christmas is not our holiday,” Vash said.

“But it could be, while we’re here,” Atsu noted with the blithe assurance that kept drakling fledglings in constant mortal danger.

Vash couldn’t very well say no to that when it was just his feelings at risk. Most of the facilities had finished the cleaning cycle and been unlocked, so with Kong’s access codes they were able to find a storage room of various party supplies.

“I once did a school report on holidays across the galaxy,” Yadira commented. “Some of these I don’t know.”

Keeping busy so he didn’t think about Darcy was all Vash cared about, so he just heaved various boxes onto the small hover cart and led them all back to the lobby.

Draklings loved treasure, whether their own or anyone else’s, and going through boxes of decorations and ornaments and streamers and party favors was everything a young drakling desire. Even Yadira looked happy again, despite their last conversation about her worries, and she asked the outpost sound system to play more of the Christmas carols, and she sang along this time. His bright, beautiful fledglings, making their little moment in the universe brighter and more beautiful yet.

“Shanya,” he whispered to himself. “You would be so proud of them. You would love who they are becoming.”

By the time they were mostly done, the selection of songs had repeated, and now Atsu was singing along, which very much did sound like a yowling larf. But Yadira just rolled her eyes and sang a little louder rather than shushing him. They took a break for lunch, making their own meal in the kitchen rather than dragging everything back to the lobby.

“Susu has eaten most of the dessert,” Yadira reported. “But there are enough supplies that we could make our own. The outpost system has a cookbook for the cooking classes they offer.”

“Christmas cookies!” Atsu yelled. “Santa Claus needs Christmas cookies.

So the afternoon was spent peacefully enough with something called royal icing and more kinds of sprinkles than just chocolate. They took their dessert back to the lobby where Atsu fussed over the correct placement of the platter to best tempt Santa Claus. Yadira eyed the towering pile. “I don’t know if an elf needs this many cookies,” she remarked.

“If he’s flying all over this planet in a night, he needs all the energy he can get,” Atsu argued, reasonably enough. But then he too eyed the pile. “Maybe one less wouldn’t hurt.” He set the top one carefully aside. “That will be for Darcy. When is she coming?”

Both fledglings looked expectantly at Vash, who managed to twitch only a little. ““She told me that sometimes holidays are complicated for Earthers, so—”

“Good thing we’re here then,” Atsu said. “She doesn’t have to do anything except come be excited about Christmas.”

Vash was not going to explain to his littlest offspring that sometimes knowing a thing would end made it harder to enjoy the time.

Instead half reluctantly, half defiantly, he tapped out an invitation on his datpad. “Just remember, with the outpost ship returning, she might have work to do.”

A short time later, she sent back a terse reply that there’d been an issue with snow accumulation on the gymnasium and it was taking longer to resolve than expected.

He relayed the message to the disappointed Atsu, replied to her asking if there was anything he could do, received a more clipped rejection in reply, and let it go. So when she appeared in the lobby doorway not too much later, he looked at her in surprise. “I thought you’d be too busy to come.”

Her gaze skittered past him, going to the windows beyond. “You sent a message saying that there might be a snow issue here too?”

He grunted a confused noise. “No.”

“There is a lot of snow,” Atsu said in an insufficiently innocent voice.

Yadira looked at him. “Were you playing on Addah’s datpad again?”

The little drakling scowled at his sister. “I just thought Darcy might want to see our party place.” Spinning on his heel, he ran to Darcy and threw his arms around her legs. “Merry Christmas Eve, Darcy.”

After the shortest hesitation, she bent down to put her arm around his shoulders for a return hug. “Merry Christmas Eve, Atsu. This is quite…festive, isn’t it?” As she straightened, she glanced around, both eyebrows rising. “That is the most colorful Christmas tree I’ve ever seen.”

“Addah said we couldn’t chop down one of the trees outside because that would be messy and rude, especially since we broke some when we crashed. So we just made an outline of a Christmas tree with those lights going up to the ceiling. And we didn’t have time to print enough ornaments and decorations, so we just used everything that was in the storage room.”

“I can see that,” she said slowly. “Valentines, Cinco de Mayo, Friendsgiving, Diwali. Um, I don’t know what that one is.”

“That’s a vrykoly auscultator,” Yadira supplied. “It’s for their bloodletting rituals.”

Darcy pursed her lips. “Um…”

Atsu grabbed her hand, tugging her forward. “I saved you a Christmas cookie. It’s decorated like a drakling in beast shape so Santa Claus would know who is here because there were no Skyearth holiday decorations in the boxes.”

“Well, there’s you three,” she said.

He chortled. “Does that count?”

“Definitely. Now tell me more about these vrykoly. Ah, they don’t date on Earth, do they?”

More than one of Santa’s cookies got eaten and Yadira brought out a tile matching game she’d found in storage. The directions said the game came from the aquatic planet of Tritona and was called “Go Fish”, which for some reason made Darcy laugh.

The sound of her echoed through Vash like the gentlest explosion, leaving him in shambles. But he’d take such ruination to stay in her company. Eventually, though, he had to declare bedtime. Atsu objected through a yawn but Darcy offered to carry him to his bedroom so he settled with his arms around her neck, his head on her shoulder.

His sleepy green eyes gleamed at Vash as they all walked down the quiet hallway. “Maybe we could have Christmas Eve forever.”

“But then it would never be Christmas Day,” Yadira pointed out.

“Then let’s just do Valentine’s Day right away. That one seems pretty. We’ll have to print roses though because the snow is too deep.”

Vash took his son from Darcy at his door while she walked Yadira across the hall.

As he snuggled into his nest, Atsu let out a sigh. “Addah? I know Santa has never heard of draklings, but is it too late to ask for a gift?”

“I don’t know if he has a universal translator, but I’m sure he knows every fledgling wants a gift of some kind. What would you ask for? Another tart?”

“To stay here on Earth.”

Vash held himself very still. Since he’d been dreading the thought of explaining that even a jolly alien holiday godling couldn’t bring a dead mother back to life, he wasn’t expecting this answer. “Do you like this planet so much?”

“I know we came here just so you could give us a new Ammi—”

“Oh, Susu, that’s not what—”

“But it’s you and Yadira who are different. You’ve been so sad, and Yaya’s been mad, and now we play in the snow and make cookies.”

Vash closed his eyes against the stab of shame. He’d thought he’d done a reasonable job of providing a stable, loving home without Shanya. To hear his son’s clear and brutal experience was almost too much. But that was his to bear.

He caught Atsu’s foot beneath the blanket and gave him a squeeze. “Playing and cookies are good. But not every day can be a holiday. Even here, someday the snow will melt.”

“I told you already, then there will be roses, remember?” Atsu blinked slowly, his little voice dropping to a sleepy murmur. “But it’s not Christmas that makes your eyes sparkle, Addah. It’s Darcy.”

The stab wound in Vash’s heart burst into scalding flames. “Darcy?”

“Darcy.” The glint in his son’s eyes was a sly beast. “She lives here and made pillow forts for us and beat you at wall climbing and has shiny hair and—”

“Oh, that Darcy.”

“If we stayed here with Darcy, you’d be happy, Yadira would have shiny hair all the time, and I suppose I’d get more tarts.”

“Atsu—”

The little drakling’s eyes snapped green fire. “You asked what gift I wanted for Christmas.”

Now Vash understood why Darcy had said the holiday was complicated.

“You wouldn’t want to see home again?”

“The sky of our hearts is infinite.”

Ah, the truth from between a fledgling’s fangs.

“It’s late, Atsu. We’ll talk about this again in the morning.”

The little one rolled over with a grunt, pulling the blanket over his head.

Complicated indeed.