Enduring (Valos of Sonhadra Book 8) Read online

  “You were unconscious, and we didn’t understand right away why the furs got wet—”

  “Oh, my God!” I groaned in English and buried my face in my hands, wishing I’d just fall through the slab of rock I stood on that very moment.

  “You see, we don’t drink water, we absorb moisture from the air through our skin. We expel any excess of it through the skin too. It just evaporates. Apparently, your system works differently.” He was talking about all of this as if it were not a big deal at all, and I wished he would just shut up and pretend none of it had ever happened. “Occasionally, we do expel solid waste, of course—”

  “Vlunn! No.” I realized he wasn’t going to stop on his own, and I had absolutely no desire to discuss this bathroom topic any further. As a biologist, I would be definitely much more intrigued by the differences of our digestive systems if, as a woman, I wasn’t so mortified by the realization that the two of them had to clean not only my vomit.

  “There is nothing to be embarrassed about, Zoya.” Vlunn stroked my hair reassuringly. “You go expel water now, and I’ll watch to keep you safe.”

  I knew he meant well, but his words only made me laugh.

  “I will not expel water while you’re watching, Vlunn.”

  “Would you rather be attacked by a wild animal? For the sake of privacy?”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said with absolute certainty, letting him know once and for all that there was no watching happening. I hated to be difficult, but this was nonnegotiable. “You’re a man. You can’t watch. I need my privacy.”

  His brow furrowed, as he considered something for a minute.

  “Fine.” He lifted me up again and walked back to our cave.

  “Hey!” I protested. “I still need to . . . um . . . expel. You know.”

  “I know. I’ll take you somewhere where you can be safe and have your privacy.” He grumbled.

  Vlunn carried me through the tunnel, picking up a glowing stick from the fire on the way before proceeding to the dark end of our cave.

  It was pitch dark in here. All I could see was a meter or so of space in front of us lit by the weak light from the stick.

  After a while, I realized that we’d entered a much larger area, as the sound of Vlunn’s hard soles on the stone floor of the cavern echoed high and wide in the distance.

  “Where are we, Vlunn?” I hugged his neck.

  “Corfoha, The Stone City.”

  “The city is inside the mountain?”

  “Yes, we all used to live here when there were more Stone Valos alive. With just the two of us now, we don’t need that much space. I prefer to be closer to the entrance when Qlraensuekx—when Rock goes away on a hunt.” I heard a note of amusement in his voice when he said the nickname I had for his friend.

  “Do you worry about him?” I was still not entirely sure of the nature of their relationship. Clearly, my Earth references could not be applied here without allowing for differences between our cultures. Straight men on Earth didn’t display that much care and affection for each other, but maybe it was normal for valos. Generally, both Rock and Vlunn seemed to appreciate physical proximity, and required much less personal space than was customary in my world.

  “I do. I always worry about him.”

  “He has his invincible fighting form.” I attempted to make him feel better about Rock being out there on his own.

  “I know. And he’s a skilled hunter.”

  I smiled, remembering the crushing blow to the head that killed the giant beast of a hog in the valley. That time, it appeared to require more force than skill, but I had to admire the pride and affection in Vlunn’s voice when he spoke about Rock.

  “He was created to be a hunter. He’s strong and fast. I don’t envy anyone, be it a valo or a wild beast, who would try to harm him. But I still worry about him every day when he is away. We share a bond, and I love him.”

  There was passion in his simple admission that surpassed any brotherly love one tribesman might have for another, this was an emotion only a lover would feel. It was touching, admirable, and somehow it made me inexplicably sad, almost envious again.

  “Here we are.” Vlunn set me down, interrupting my thoughts before I had a chance to ponder my reaction to his words.

  The glow from the torch in his hand fell on an ornate door in front of us. Vlunn pushed the door, and it opened with a low creak, betraying the fact that it hadn’t been used for a while.

  We entered a large room, with high vaulted ceilings, polished in the same fashion like the walls of the tunnel where we slept.

  “It’s a house.” Vlunn shrugged at my enquiring glance. “One of many in the city. I haven’t been inside one for a long time. The toilet room should be this way.” He kept his arm firmly around my waist, leading me across the floor.

  He opened another door, and we walked into what definitely looked like a bathroom. I grabbed Vlunn’s wrist and moved his hand holding the torch in a wide arch, getting a better look at the place around us.

  The fixtures looked odd, but on closer inspection I could find similarities to the ones on Earth.

  A large corner area with a raised curb on the floor and hundreds of small holes in the ceiling must have been a shower.

  A slanted, flat slab of rock inserted midway into the wall with a narrow grooved stone directly above it must have been used as a sink. I could imagine water running down the groove of the stone then hitting the slab below it to eventually disappear into the narrow opening where the slab met the wall.

  Finally, an inverted cone structure with a rounded rim looked definitely like it could be a toilet. It was significantly higher than a normal Earth toilet, but then the valos were much taller than me too.

  “I’ll leave the torch here for you.” Vlunn stuck the glowing stick with the handle end into the drain of the sink then unexpectedly lifted me up and sat me on the rim of the inverted cone toilet.

  “Vlunn! I can do it.” I felt very much like a toddler being put on a potty.

  “It’s too high for you. You could lose your balance and crack your head open if you climbed it yourself. I’ll find you a stepping-stone for the next time. Knock on the door when you’re done. Or call me if you need help to get down.” I could have sworn I heard a teasing smile in his voice.

  Climbing off the structure once I was done proved to be much easier than I imagined climbing up it would have been. With both feet firmly on the floor, I felt along the walls, looking for any kind of a nob or a handle to activate the running water in either one of the three fixtures and found none.

  “Zoya? Are you alright?” Vlunn sounded worried behind the closed door.

  “Yes, I’m done. You can come in now.”

  He walked in with a square rock under one arm and with a large bowl filled with water in the crook of another.

  “Stepping stone.” He smiled brightly and dropped the rock in front of the toilet cone then dumped the water from the bowl inside, solving the problem of flushing for me.

  “So, there is no water here?”

  “No. The system is there, but nothing works. None of it has ever worked. The city is dead.”

  “It has never been used?”

  “Well, not the way it was designed to be used. Decades ago, when there were more of us and we all lived in these houses permanently, we used whatever we could in here, the way you did just now.” He gestured at the toilet with the empty bowl in his hand. “The running water, the lights, the fountains, all of those things were meant to be activated by the combined power of our heartstones.” He shrugged. “Never happened.”

  He left the bowl by the toilet and lifted me up again then headed back towards the tunnel.

  “Vlunn?” I asked wrapping my arms around his neck. “Can I come here again? Not just to use the toilet but to see more of the city? Can I bring more light next time?”

  I could feel the large space around us, but couldn’t see anything beyond the stone floor in front of Vlunn’s feet
.

  “Today you’ll rest. I’ll take you to the toilet room again whenever you wish, of course, but you’ll need to eat and rest.”

  “After I eat and rest, can I come here again?”

  It occurred to me that I must really be getting better if I felt curious. Curiosity was among the many emotions I hadn’t had the luxury of feeling for a very long time.

  “Zoya, you’re not well, you’re shaking again.” Vlunn pressed me tighter to his chest. “Rest today. I’ll finish the hide for your cover. We both will come here tomorrow after breakfast when the sun’s up. You will be able to see it much better in the sunlight anyway.”

  “Sunlight? How does the sunlight get under the mountain?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Chapter 10

  It was soft, fluffy and so, so warm.

  Best blanket ever, I thought with a huge smile on my face, wrapped into the feather-light black and white fur that Vlunn finished for me that afternoon.

  On Vlunn’s orders, I spent most of the day in bed, watching him as he finished working the fur and made soup for lunch for me.

  He had a piece of raw meat himself. That’s all they ate, it seemed, not a shred of fruit, grain or vegetable, just meat, raw or grilled. The soup was also a simple broth with small cubes of meat floating in it.

  Despite the pungent smell of meat, I ate everything, grateful to have any food at all. I needed to build up my strength if I ever wanted to be able to at least walk to the bathroom on my own.

  As he worked, Vlunn told me more about their people, the Stone Valos, and the world that I had found myself in.

  Using my by now very much expanded vocabulary, I explained the best I could where I came from. Vlunn had never heard of Earth, our Solar System or even the Milky Way Galaxy. If the Creators knew, they obviously used different names for everything. In any case, they didn’t share this information with valos, and to Vlunn’s knowledge, none of the Creators remained on Sonhadra.

  Without the Concord and with Creators gone, there didn’t seem to be any hope for me to make it back to Earth. Valos simply didn’t have the technology.

  Even if I didn’t get re-arrested by some miracle upon my return, I realized with some regret that there was no one for me to truly miss back home.

  I had made such an effort to avoid upsetting or irritating anyone with my mere presence that I had eventually succeeded in becoming invisible to the people around me. There was no one who would truly miss me either.

  My parents divorced when I was a baby. Both started their new families almost immediately, and I became an inconvenience. Eventually, I was sent to live with Aunt Judie, the younger sister of my paternal grandmother. She was unmarried and had no children of her own. She was also super conservative in her views on everything, but especially on the upbringing of a proper young lady. And a proper young lady was exactly what she had set out to make out of me.

  All my younger years I tried and failed to please my aunt, who blamed my mother for my parents’ divorce and would never miss an opportunity to point out all the ways I looked and acted like her.

  Aunt Judie came to visit me in jail once. All she said was that she was bitterly disappointed that my mother’s faulty genes prevailed over her own best efforts at my upbringing. She wasn’t prepared to listen to any explanations I wanted to give her, not that there was much to explain.

  When Rock came back that evening, carrying another dead hog-beast like the one that had attacked me—which I now knew were called brualdak in Stone Valo language—it felt like a family member returned home after a long absence. Vlunn was excited to have him back, and Rock was clearly pleased to be home.

  The three of us had dinner by the fire, and for me, sitting between my two valos, it again felt like being part of something I’d never truly had—people who cared for me and whom I was beginning to care about too.

  That night I went to bed alone. I assured Vlunn and Rock that between the fur blanket and the fire, I would stay warm.

  Now that I was better and that keeping warm was no longer a matter of survival, it felt like it was a good time to remember basic decencies. In my understanding, friends shouldn’t be cuddling in bed naked.

  IT WASN’T THE COLD that woke me up way before the sunrise this time. It was low grunts and heavy breathing. The realization of what the sounds and their rhythmic pattern meant shot through me like lightning, startling me wide awake.

  Heat flushed my cheeks, and I squeezed my eyes tighter, wishing I were anywhere else but here—listening to my newly found friends having sex in the bed across from mine.

  This left no doubts about the nature of their relationship.

  Mortified, I lay quiet as a mouse for a while, hoping I could just ignore the noises and fall back asleep again. What other behavior would be appropriate in this case? With all her long lists of rules, Aunt Judie failed to mention anything like this.

  I couldn’t ignore the sounds, however. They were like nothing I’d heard before. Deep, low rumbles mixed with rough, muffled moans of pleasure. I found myself following their pattern in my head, rising and falling waves of building passion.

  One of the voices stopped for a moment then suddenly erupted into a long, loud groan. The sound was so deep and raw. It felt like it shook the whole mountain to the core.

  Now I needed to know what could have caused a man to roar with abandon like that. I opened my eyes a little to see Vlunn on the other bed propped on one arm. He was on his side, facing the opposite wall. His head was thrown back, and I could see the profile of his upturned face. His eyes were closed tight and his teeth bared as another roar of rapture tore deep from inside of his chest.

  Enthralled by the raw masculine power of his climax, I forgot all about any proper behavior and stared unabashedly at the rippling muscles of his wide back and tight buttocks. The sound he made echoed off the walls of the tunnel, eventually dying off in the distance as the waves of his pleasure subsided.

  Vlunn dipped his head back down towards the bed then, and Rock’s raised knee came into my view from behind Vlunn’s shoulder. I heard another long groan as Rock’s head and chest rose from behind Vlunn’s hips.

  Propped on an elbow, Rock wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and his multifaceted red eyes met mine, catching me completely off guard.

  My first instinct was to duck back under the cover and pretend that none of it had ever happened, but his glowing gaze stopped me.

  He breathed hard, in sync with the new movement of Vlunn’s head in front of his hips. His eyes commanded me to stay with him, making me part of his pleasure whether I wanted it or not.

  I forgot how to breathe. Feeling every shudder of his body in my very core, I pressed my legs together in a desperate attempt to alleviate the pressure rapidly building up between my thighs.

  His chest rose with every heaving breath he took. His eyes slid over my face, slowly moving lower. My cheek, my lips, my collarbone . . . Sweet tingles spread along my skin wherever his heated gaze landed. It felt like it burned through the cover and caressed my naked body.

  Frantic with the arousal that his glowing eyes ignited in me, I pressed my thighs even closer together and rocked my hips. A small, teasing quiver of pleasure rippled through my body.

  It was so good. Unintentionally, I let a soft moan slip past my parted lips, and to Rock, it must have sounded louder than a shotgun because his eyes immediately grew wild. He bared his sharp teeth and growled at me like a savage predator. His body bent in an arch, hovering over Vlunn, as he thrust his hips forward in the rhythmic, powerful spasms of his climax.

  Through the deep rumble of his growl reverberating through the tunnel, I almost felt his orgasm vibrate through my own body, excruciatingly tantalizing and making me crave more.

  The ache of unfulfilled desire tore a frustrated groan out of me, and I buried it in the thick fur of my bedding. Trembling with the emotions overwhelming me, I dragged the cover over my head, shutting out the scene happening in the oth
er bed.

  I didn’t need to see either one of them. I didn’t want to deal with the fact that the only place I wanted to be right now was in that bed, with them, between them. I wished those to be my lips wrapped around Rock’s shaft. I wanted it to be my thighs with Vlunn’s head trapped between them.

  These emotions and physical urges were so sudden and new to me in their intensity. They mortified and confused me.

  I’d never felt anything like this before.

  Jeremy was the only man I ever had sex with, and with him it had been rather unfulfilling. I thought I was in love with him, and I wanted to believe that our sex life shouldn’t matter. I never knew sex could be as passionate and all-consuming, as I’d just witnessed.

  Lately, I’d been afraid that Dr. Zukov and his manipulations had killed anything feminine and sensual in me altogether, but now . . .

  Neither of the valos had even so much as touched me. Yet just their sounds, Rock’s gaze on me, the sight of Vlunn’s massive back rippling in ecstasy set me on fire. I was sure that the sexy growls they made intertwined in my mind as a soundtrack to any sexual fantasy I’d have from this night on.

  Personally, that was the most unsettling part for me. I couldn’t even decide which one of them I wanted more. The glowing intensity of Rock’s eyes and the bulging muscles of Vlunn’s ass were both branded in my brain.

  Wanting not one but two men. Who did that? No one, as far as I knew.

  What was wrong with me? Aunt Judie would have called me a whore just like my mother who cheated on my father, forcing him to cheat right back.

  I was staying with the valos as a friend, I reminded myself. That was what we had decided, hadn’t we? I wasn’t their mate, and they were obviously a couple. I must rein in my emotions and take control. I had no business watching them have sex, even less being turned on by it. And I absolutely shouldn’t have any feelings either than of gratitude and friendship for either one of them, let alone both.