the blades on my tail making snick, snick noises as I flick the razor-edged plates open and shut. A hob rushes up to rescue the sniffling females, but before I let him play their hero, I reach out and catch him by a wing, shaking him until my breathing evens.
As I release him, I think, Tevek. Now I’ve got his wing’s powder on my hands.
I catch him again by the scruff of his neck and wipe my hands off on his shirt before I let him fall to the ground.
Gracie glowers at me. “I’ll have a talk with the girls. But no more roughing up the hobs.”
I snort—and nearly blow fire out my nose. That this puny alien female has the audacity to think she can give me an order—!
A second hob is looking for a place to land by the weeping pair of women. I snatch him out of the air.
I have plans to shake him too, but Gracie’s eyes have gone warning-slitted, and her hands slide from the roundness of her pup-growing stomach until she’s reached around herself to the small of her back. She raises the back hem of her tunic to draw out a weapon. She aims it at me, and I’ve never seen it, but I have a fair idea of what it’s capable of and who gave it to her.
My eyes cut to her approaching mate, a hob named Dohrein. His cool gaze assesses me. It’s his dam who specializes in weapon’s design, and it just so happens that she’s worked extensively on weapons that will drop an enraged Rakhii.
Gracie’s thumb flips a mechanism that makes the whole piece glow green. “That,” she tosses a look to the hob I have ahold of, “is Jonohkada.”
I squeeze the hob until he stops kicking and falls limp. “I don’t care.”
Gracie’s eyes almost glow with fury. Incidentally, they’re the same savage shade as her activated weapon. “You do not want to piss me off. Let me give you a pro tip: hurting that hob,” she indicates her Jonohkada, “is a one-way ticket to royally pissing me off.”
I turn over my wrist, giving some attention to the hob who is not her second mate—really, he’s more like her pet—I have seen him trailing after her, obedient to her every whim like so many of the hobs are. Why does she get so protective of this one?
To his credit, he’s doing nothing to enrage me further. His eyes are mutinous, but his fangs barely sink into my arm. A hefty shake and those venom-injecting teeth of his are clacking together.
“Bash, STOP!” Gracie’s mouth has a fierce set to it, and her stance is determined. Some part of me has to admire her backbone, even if I want to peel it out of her body and snap it into minuscule flecks. I’d use the remains of it like confetti to celebrate her demise. “Jonohkada is under my protection,” she informs me—as if she hasn’t tried claiming all of these colorful flying males. She’s human, but just like a Gryfala, she collects hobs. She breeds with only one, but she’ll stand for each and every one of the rest of them, even if they’re tasked under my hands and have been under my control in this quarry for solars.
Have I ever seen her claim a Rakhii? No, I have not. Gracie leaves this task to the mates of the Rakhii. Like a Gryfala, the hobs are the only males she defends.
Although no Rakhii needs the protection of an alien female (certainly they could do better alone against any threat than their so-breakable human mates), I can almost admire the fierceness of the matebond between humans and Rakhii. When I’ve moved to chastise a Rakhii worker, it seems as if every one of them now has a human, and the moment I move on her mate she’s immediately facing off with me, giving me a hell’s load of tongue lashes.
At the rate my employees are being claimed and protected, I’ll have no one left to punish when the aliens drive me to the brink. I’ll snap and go mad, and every human here will die.
Creator, I’m sick of humans. I glare at Gracie and drop her hob to the dirt, watching with distant satisfaction as his wings drunkenly stab at the air with the thumb-like talons they have midway up their long wing bones. “The next time a human irritates me, a hob gets whipped until he can’t fly,” I warn.