Chapter Text
It took seven years for Norel-di to renounce Pre’tahn as her master.
Seven years and a nudge from Paya.
Becoming Pre’tahn’s bond mate was everything she hoped for and then some. As time went by, they had stopped being so insatiable with each other, although they were still busy enough that neither felt inclined to look elsewhere. Every heat cycle, Pre’tahn dutifully took her in the mating pit, and every time, her heat was satisfied in the absence of a pregnancy.
At first, Norel-di was happy with that outcome. She wasn’t interested in becoming a mother. Pre’tahn already had so many offspring that he was much more interested in coupling with his lovely mate than in producing young with her. After a time, there started being rumbles of complaint that the Clan Leader’s sperm was not being spread amongst his clan. Unwilling to hurt Norel-di, Pre’tahn ignored the disquiet.
As the years went by with no young, Norel-di began to feel empty and sad after each fruitless heat cycle had passed. The science corps ran tests on her again and could find no reason for her lack of offspring. According to all the results, she should be fully fertile with a Yautja male. A test of Pre’tahn’s sperm confirmed that it had as much vitality as ever. There was no medical reason Norel-di had failed to become pregnant with Pre’tahn’s child.
Norel-di began praying to Paya for a pregnancy. As each barren cycle passed, she increased her nightly pleas, wanting nothing beyond a healthy child. During her seventh year of bearing no young, a petition was brought forward to the Elders Council protesting the Clan Leader’s refusal to share his sperm with other fertile females in his clan. It asked that he take a Yautja female during some of the heat cycles, but Pre’tahn was remained unwilling to hurt Norel-di by doing so. However, he did broach the subject with her.
When she could bear the situation no longer, the bright lady came to her in a dream.
”You wish a child?” she asked.
“More than anything,” Norel-di replied.
“Then you know what you must do,” came the implacable reply.
“No, I don’t!” Norel-di cried. “I’ve eaten special foods, done special exercises, taken medicine to encourage fertility, and prayed to Paya incessantly. I don’t know what else I can do.”
“What have you not done?” she asked, just as insistently. “Something you promised you would do.”
Norel-di wracked her brain, sure she had missed nothing, when at last a thought occurred. “I never renounced Pre’tahn’s claim as my master.”
“Just so,” agreed the bright lady, pleased, although as she watched, she realized it wasn’t the bright lady who spoke at all.
“Paya,” she gasped, upon awakening.
The goddess had come to her at last. Or, maybe not. Maybe it had been Paya that had been speaking to her in her dreams all along. She would never know, although at least in this, the will of the goddess was clear. Norel-di immediately found Pre’tahn and renounced his authority over her as her master.
“Okay,” he agreed, perplexed. “This is sudden, but you did promise me you’d do this one day.”
“There is a method to my madness,” she confided, jubilantly.
She went to the next mating pit with renewed confidence and great hope. A short time after Pre’tahn finished emptying into her, when he took the perfunctory breath near her to check on her condition, his eyes locked on hers with amazement and delight. She knew she had been right. For the price of at last banishing her slave self, Paya had rewarded her.
However, there was a price for forcing Paya to spell it out for her. When she miscarried, Norel-di was devastated, but the fact that she had become pregnant at all got the displeased faction off Pre’tahn’s back. She had become pregnant again at the very next heat cycle, and this one proved viable.
Nearly eleven months later, Norel-di had borne Pre’tahn a son with her vivid green eyes. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy, birthing a fifteen-pound baby being especially difficult, but once she held the solid bundle of her son in her arms, she felt complete.
The clan’s position towards her changed once again. Her genes were now part of the clan and would be passed down from her child with Pre’tahn to combine with others in the clan. She was inextricably linked to them now; in a way she had not been before.
Once she was pregnant, however, the demand that Pre’tahn behave like a true Clan Leader increased. Norel-di didn’t like it, but gave in to the inevitable, with one condition, that she pick which female Pre’tahn bred from those eligible. Norel-di approached the Clan Mothers’ database like a scientist and chose his partners using criteria guaranteed to produce the highest quality offspring. She watched him impregnate them, too, with a starkly dispassionate face. Even Zarild was impressed with how Yautja she was in her approach to a situation she found difficult.
Norel-di presided over eight such heat cycles with the same stoicism, until such time as she went into heat again herself. Pre’tahn fathered a second child with her. This time around, she let Pre’tahn sit in on her considerations on who he should mate in her absence, but he let her have the final say. The birth of this baby came with such great difficulty that it nearly ended her. Paya must’ve known her body couldn’t tolerate any more, because her heat cycle never returned after the birth of her daughter.
******
Pre’tahn had sired hundreds of young over the centuries of his life, but due to the horrifically high mortality rate among hunters and among young females fighting for the right to mate or dying in childbirth, more than half of his children were already gone. Most hunters didn’t participate in rearing their young and often didn’t become attached to them until they had survived early adulthood and appeared likely to go on living.
However, when Norel-di placed their newborn son into his arms, he felt an immediate kinship towards the baby. Perhaps it was because she was his bond mate, the only female he had ever felt such great affection for, and he had watched the baby emerge from her body, a body he adored. Perhaps it was because Norel-di had already begged and pleaded that she and the baby stay with him instead of being sent to one of the female compounds to live, and he would see this little one on a regular basis. He wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter.
His unexpected attachment brought Norel-di’s ancestor, McEllery, into his mind. When he had discovered the human had hired a Bad Blood, Jaggart, to find his only living descendant, Pre’tahn couldn’t get over the Bad Blood part of the equation. Now, he wondered if the choice of a Bad Blood might have been because he was simply desperate to find Norel-di, and Jaggart had been his best option. That kind of desperation over offspring wouldn’t have made sense to him before. Holding their little son, who they had named Pre’dren, he understood it now.
McEllery’s descendant has a descendant now, he mused, stroking the baby’s bumpy skull. His line will continue, although much different from how he imagined it.
The more he thought about it, the more he wondered what McEllery would think if he knew about this baby. After much consideration over a couple of months, he summoned Yutanen.
“I have a special hunt for you,” Pre’tahn said.
******
A decade after McEllery had last heard from Jaggart about his captive granddaughter, after the other agents assigned to Jaggart had come up empty for so long he had released them from his employ, after he had finally accepted that his line was indeed at an end, it happened. They came in the night, startlingly silent for such large creatures, when he was alone with his thoughts in his beloved garden maze. He caught a strange shimmer from the corner of his eye, a distortion of his vision that had nothing to do with his advanced age, and then his mind went as black as the starry sky above.
He regained consciousness in what had to be a jail cell, though it was like no other. The walls were curved and a mottled orange, the bed on which he lay a wide bulge in the wall. It was clearly meant for someone much larger than himself, making him feel uncomfortably like a child who had snuck into an adult’s room. The entire front of the cell was sheer, but when he tried to walk out of it, the barrier sprang up before his eyes with such solidness that it challenged his previous belief that it had been absent. He stopped so abruptly that he involuntarily sat on the curiously misty floor.
I’m in that starry sky I was enjoying, McEllery acknowledged, having done enough interplanetary traveling to recognize the feel of a ship, even one as alien as this one. That would seem to rule out I’ve been kidnapped for my money.
It was hours before anyone came to see him. In the interim, he figured out how to use their version of a toilet. He also determined how to access drinking water, but nothing he did could alleviate the excessive moist heat of the alien air. Clothing quickly became optional. His captors, at least three of them, appeared in front of his cell as suddenly as they had in his garden, only here, they let him see them. From information Jaggart had relayed to him, McEllery knew that they could only be Yautja. Even though he was aware of how large they were, nothing had prepared him for the sheer presence of that size.
Letting his eyes rise up their armored bulk to their masked faces, the enormity of them was overwhelming. How could Cheyenne have survived sex with such as these? he wondered, yet Jaggart had presented credible evidence that it had been so.
“What do you want?” he asked, hoping they had some kind of translating device.
For a long time, they ignored him, staring impassively at him. Finally, one spoke, out of a mouth that made human syllables sound entirely new.
“McEllery,” it croaked.
“Yes, I am McEllery,” he affirmed, steadily, having lived entirely too long now to be easily frightened.
“Bad Blood,” it replied, and he sensed a condemnation in the words, even though he didn’t know what they meant, and the voice didn’t register human inflection.
The trio of Yautja started to turn away from him. “Wait! Why did you take me?”
Three massive heads swiveled back, the trinkets in the thick braid-like appendages that hung down from the sides of their masks clinking together. Looking more closely, he was chilled to realize that some of the sound makers were bleached bone. He had forgotten the Yautja were hunters, hunters who were known to hunt humans.
Surely I am not worthy prey, his mind reeled, shock and fear vying for dominance at the notion. Rationality beat them both. Even in my prime, I wasn’t as big as Siobhan’s Michael, and they didn’t take his trophies. They seek military men, fighters, not men like me … but what is a Bad Blood?
McEllery hadn’t recognized the term at first, but as he let his mind dwell on those long ago conversations with the erstwhile Jaggart, it came back to him. Bad Bloods were what he had said Yautja called their criminals.
“I’m no Bad Blood,” he insisted.
To his amazement, the one who had done all the talking, roared at him loudly enough to hurt his eardrums, and all three of them stalked away. After that, he only saw them when they brought him food, but none of them would speak to him again.
Days became weeks became months. Had he not been used to spending long stretches of time alone in space, McEllery might have gone mad. Instead, he schooled himself to exercise and sleep on a regimented basis, compartmentalizing even his thoughts into categories he only let himself dwell on for specific periods of time so as not to let them overwhelm him. In particular, he tried not to get his hopes up that his kidnapping in anyway involved Cheyenne. It was less emotionally fraught to assume that Jaggart, who would likely fit the Yautja definition of Bad Blood, had violated the aliens in some way for which they considered him, as Jaggart’s employer, to be responsible.
You knew what he was when you hired him. A ruthless, greedy bastard motivated only by money, but the best you could find at what you needed him for.
His mouth twisted at the irony of his long dead mother’s clichéd, The end never justifies the means, acknowledging that perhaps she had been more prescient than either of them realized.
The interminable journey ended as abruptly as it had begun. Landing must have happened while he slept, because McEllery awoke to find himself being dragged roughly from his cell by two of the Yautja. Hurriedly, he found his footing to spare his knees. As they exited the ship, he tried to look around at this strange new world, but a large hand shoved his head down, indicating it was best to study his feet instead.
The change in the air from sweltering to cool signaled their entry into some kind of chamber. Glancing to the side as best he could, McEllery caught glimpses of skulls. He was positioned in front of an empty dais and forced to his knees. One of them jerked his head up and around.
Coming towards them was the most fearsome creature he had ever seen. He, for surely it could be nothing other than male, was larger than his captors, a form and figure the very definition of broad. He was not fat, simply massive on a scale beyond anything McEllery was used to associating with bipedal species. Beyond the sheer spectacle of him, what drew McEllery next was the horror of his bare face. In all his months among them, this was the first Yautja he had seen unmasked.
Even without a mask, the male’s skull was huge, his forehead sloping sharply forward to collide with an intense, scarred brow ridge that circled his head. Shockingly white hair, bunched into fat braids, hung from beneath that gnarled ridge from either side of his face as far around as McEllery could see. The creature’s skin was mottled purple, etched with an intricate blue pattern, and its hide appeared to be lined with what he guessed could be age. The eyes buried beneath that formidable brow were startlingly green and sparkled with intelligence and suppressed rage. His mouth was the worst, a jagged maw surrounded by four mandibles that could be moved independently of each other. Skin stretched between the upper and lower appendages on either side of a mouth filled with sharp teeth. A sprinkling of white spines sprouted dramatically from his brow, trailing down the edges of his frightful visage. The creature’s eyes bored into his as he reached and settled into the large dais directly in front of McEllery.
When he motioned with one of his clawed hands, a lithe figure darted forward. As she positioned herself between the creature’s legs, leaning up against one of his broad thighs, McEllery felt all the blood drain from his face and tears well in his eyes. Here, in this hellish otherworldly place, was the face he had longed to see before he died, one he hadn’t seen in twenty-four years.
Siobhan! his mind shouted, but that was wrong. “Cheyenne,” he gasped, aloud, unable to contain himself.
The young woman froze, stunned, and seemed lost in thought. “Grampa?” she asked at last, as if the round sounds of English were unusual for her to make.
“Yes,” he affirmed, nodding, and pointed to himself, hoping she could interpret one of his positive signs.
She turned towards the large male and began to chatter excitedly at him, unearthly utterances far removed from any terrestrial language falling from her lips. The Yautja, watching her talk, gentled under her enthusiastic verbal barrage, a massive hand coiling affectionately around the dark braids that ran down her back. To McEllery’s surprise, he emitted what he could only describe as a deeply modulated purr.
Jaggart didn’t lie about Yautja and humans. That creature’s touch is a lover’s.
Cheyenne was so tiny against the backdrop of the male’s vast bulk that he wondered how it could be possible, but if Yautja males were constructed like their human counterparts—and Jaggart had insisted they were—he doubted it could be otherwise.
The Yautja stood up, pulled McEllery to his feet and affixed a device around his neck. Then he reseated himself, Cheyenne parking herself sideways on one of his massive thighs.
When he spoke next, McEllery heard him in halting English. “Why did you send a Bad Blood after Norel-di?” he demanded, coldly, pointing at Cheyenne.
“I was desperate to find her,” he responded, hoping his words would be as understandable. “No one else would help me.”
“Why did you wish to find her?”
“She is my daughter’s child, my granddaughter.”
“I’ve seen pictures and heard video of you before, but seeing you in person, now I can remember you from when I was little,” his granddaughter confirmed. “I’ve always dreamed of a beautiful female who called me Shy. She was your daughter, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, and you are as beautiful as she was,” he said, with a bittersweet mixture of happiness at finding her and sadness at how much she resembled his long dead child.
She laughed at that. “He thinks I’m beautiful,” she crowed to the male, and he sensed irony in her statement.
“You are beautiful to me,” he replied, without reservation, running his hand possessively down her back. “But perhaps among humans, you are beautiful to all. If that is so, perhaps it explains what the Bad Blood did.”
McEllery paused with sudden dread. What had Jaggart done to Cheyenne? “I hired him to find her and return her to me alive and unharmed. That was what I was paying him to do.”
“He was betrayed, Pre’tahn,” Cheyenne gasped at her companion, unwittingly naming him for McEllery.
“You didn’t know?” Pre’tahn asked, correctly reading his stricken face.
“What did that bastard do to her?” he cried, suddenly enraged.
The male’s mandibles flared briefly in surprise. “I brought her to Jaggart after he presented evidence that you had engaged him to find her, but I didn’t trust him. I monitored them and witnessed him trying to force sex upon her, just as the Yautja Bad Bloods had done.”
McEllery felt physically ill, acknowledging that their long association, and Jaggart’s success in uncovering any information at all about his missing kin, had led him to place undeserved trust in the man. “What happened to him?”
“His broken skull sits at the lowest level of my main trophy wall as a warning to all who would cross me or mine,” Pre’tahn explained, stabbing a claw towards it, his mandibles pulled stiffly up against his face. “Yours would have joined his had there been any deception in your answers to my questions.”
McEllery sought and found Jaggart’s skull, between two equally broken Yautja skulls, realizing with a chill that Pre’tahn had already known the answers to every question he had asked but the last one. “I sought only her safe return. How could he treat her that way and expect that I wouldn’t find out?”
“Jaggart planned to use her until he tired of her before bringing her to you. She remembers little of your language and by the time she would have learned enough to communicate to you what he had done to her, he would have been long gone with whatever reward you had given him.”
“I had him thoroughly screened before I hired him. I knew he was a Bad Blood, but his motivation seemed to be wealth. There was no suggestion it was also sex, but he did react to an image I had of her mother, whom she resembles. Perhaps I should have expected this,” he allowed, his unhappiness deepening, “but in my mind, I still pictured Cheyenne as the small child she had been the last time I saw her.”
The Yautja was studying him quizzically. “Why go to such lengths over one child? You are an Elder. You should have dozens of other young.”
McEllery sighed. “Yautja must not be like humans. We form long bonds between male and female. We only had two children before my mate died. My son was killed in an accident before he had any children. My daughter was killed during a Yautja hunt— “
“ –-by Bad Bloods,” Pre’tahn interjected. “No honorable hunter would deliberately kill a female with young.”
“By Bad Bloods,” he hurriedly agreed, “but she and her mate only had one child. Cheyenne is all there is of my line. I found out long ago that I can’t have more children.”
The male’s face drew back forbiddingly. “Did you seek to take her with you and breed her to a human male to continue your line?”
McEllery sensed he was suddenly on dangerous ground. “I hadn’t thought that far. I wanted only to see her again before I died. When Jaggart told me she had been taken by Bad Bloods, most likely for sex, I wanted to save her from that fate. I would assume … the life she has with you is of her choosing.”
Cheyenne smiled reassuringly at him. “I chose to be with Pre’tahn,” she confirmed. “He didn’t demand it of me. He saved me from the Bad Bloods and was the first hunter, outside of the medics, who didn’t use me, even though I made him want to. I wanted to be with him before Jaggart took me, but once Pre’tahn saved me from him, there was no one else for me.”
The shine of happiness in her face was unmistakable; there would be no joyous return to human space for her. She truly belonged among these creatures now. “It is possible for you to have a … relationship?” he asked, curiosity getting the better of him, because the idea that Cheyenne might have willing sex with a Yautja was beginning to register.
“You mean do we have sex?” she rephrased, bluntly. “Yes, often. Pre’tahn is my mate. It might look impossible, because of our sizes, but we manage it quite well.”
The male’s face relaxed into the epitome of mellow and he purred again, clearly relishing the truth of her assertion. “If you were here during a festival, you would see,” he promised, eyes shining wickedly.
******
Pre’tahn’s last statement had stunned the wizened old human before them into speechlessness. In the silence that followed, Norel-di pulled him down so she could whisper in his ear.
“Can we show him the children?” she pleaded. “He deserves to know his line has continued.”
“If you wish,” he rumbled, indulgently.
Norel-di brought her wrist up and contacted Ezka, who she had left their children with before she answered her mate’s summons here. “Bring them to the display hall.”
“Yes, Elder,” came the automatic response, one which always amused her, because at not quite thirty, Norel-di was still decades from elderly.
It took Ezka a little while to comply, but eventually she came in with the baby in her arms, holding a toddler by the hand.
“Grampa,” she addressed the old man, proudly, “these are our children. The little boy is Pre’dren. The baby girl is Izvek.”
She thought fondly of her children’s departed namesakes as she watched his face intently. Three-year-old Pre’dren, who was taller than the human’s waist, approached him with a fearlessness that was typical of Yautja children.
“Who are you?” he demanded, flaring his little mandibles slightly.
******
McEllery had thought Pre’tahn was large, until another Yautja—was that huge creature a female?--entered with two little ones in tow. The one who could walk was perhaps half as tall as he was. It had short, black unadorned locks in the typical Yautja style, but its mandibles were small and close to its face. The crown of its head was merely bumpy, not defined like an adult’s, but it was the child’s eyes that caught and held his attention. They were Siobhan and Cheyenne’s vivid green. Glancing at the baby, he saw it had the same eyes as its sibling.
These are my great-grandchildren, McEllery realized, thunderstruck.
Cheyenne introduced them. The boy released his minder’s hand and came to stare up at him, eyes wary. He spoke in the Yautja’s guttural language of snarls and clicks.
“Who are you?” he heard.
I’ve prayed for years for my granddaughter’s safe return, wishing that my line wouldn’t end with her. Perhaps a deity that isn’t mine heard me, he mused, struck by the unexpectedness of these little alien children.
McEllery squatted, a slow process at his age, to make his face level with Pre’dren’s. His serious green eyes, so like his forebears’ at the same age, demanded an explanation. The child was purple, like his father, but a lighter, more uniform, color. What would one day be a fearsome face wasn’t threatening in its softened child’s form. It would take some adjusting to get used to his lack of nose and lips, but the eyes that bore into his didn’t lack for intelligence. The little boy had approached what to him must be a frightening creature with admirable boldness.
McEllery’s eyes flicked up to the baby. Little Izvek’s features were softer yet, and largely toothless, but he didn’t know if that was because of her age or her gender. She regarded him with an innocent curiosity that would be instantly recognizable in any human baby. At his continued perusal, her little claws clutched her minder more tightly, not at all sure about the strange being before her.
These are my great-grandchildren, he acknowledged. Perhaps not the heirs I expected, but my heirs, nonetheless.
He smiled at the baby, who drew her delicate mandibles into what could only be her version of an answering smile and cooed at him. McEllery met the little boy’s gaze again, still awaiting his answer with amazing patience for one so young.
“I am your great-grandfather,” he replied, embracing the title as his own. “You may call me Grampa.”