Breath of Life (The Gaian Consortium Series) (12 page)

I found myself wanting to stare at his features, at the way the firelight caught those delicate scales and shimmered with glints of sapphire and emerald. His eyes were blue, a startling cobalt against his black skin.
 

Instead, I moved a little closer to the hearth and tried to tell myself I wasn’t quite as cold as I thought I was. That didn’t work too well—I ended up sneezing and sending a fine spray from my wet hair as my head jerked from the violence of the sneeze.

“You’re soaked,” he said.

“So are you.”

“True.” He reached up toward his head, to the sodden black mass of his hair. For the first time I realized it was actually quite long; most of it had been caught into a clasp of dark metal at the nape of his neck, but some straggling pieces had escaped and clung wetly to his neck. “You wish to talk. I understand. But I propose we both get ourselves more in order first. In the library in one half-hour?”

My lips parted as I began to voice a protest, and then I stopped myself. He was right—it would be foolish to sit here in our wet clothes and try to sort all this out. As much as I hated to delay, I didn’t want either him or me to catch cold. If Zhores even got sick. We Gaians could cure a cold within a day, but so far there still wasn’t a workable vaccine.

I nodded. “A half-hour.”

Despite having to dry my hair back to something resembling normality and having to strip to my skin and work my way back out with all clean, dry clothes, I was still the first to enter the library.
 

It appeared Sarzhin had given some orders to the mech, however, since another fire burned in the hearth here, and on a table that sat between two small divans was a square bottle and two fragile-looking glasses that had to be antiques of some kind. I moved closer so I could see the label on the bottle, but the words on it were written in a heavy, flowing script I didn’t recognize.
 

“It is called
zharis
,” came Sarzhin’s voice, and I looked up to see him enter the room, once again in the familiar black robes. He had left the hood down, though, and met my curious gaze directly.

“From your home world?” I asked.

“Yes.” He moved past me and picked up the bottle, then removed the silvery stopper that sealed it. When he poured the liquid from it into the two glasses, I saw the
zharis
, whatever that was, had a pale green hue that seemed quite alien here on Lathvin, where everything was gray and black and dark red.
 

He handed a glass to me, and I lifted it gingerly to my nose and sniffed. It smelled sweet and delicate, and rather like some of the flowers he raised in his greenhouse.

“It is quite safe, I assure you. It is considered a gift between friends, back on Zhoraan.”

After a statement like that, I knew I couldn’t do anything except take a sip. So light it felt more that I was inhaling it rather than actually drinking it, the
zharis
slipped over my tongue in a burst of effervescence, and then left a trail of tingling warmth down my throat.

Sarzhin watched me as I drank, and for some reason I felt terribly self-conscious, as if it had been I who had hidden her face all this time and was only now revealed. Those startling blue eyes were grave, intent. A heat that had nothing to do with the
zharis
flooded my cheeks as I glanced from his eyes to his mouth and recalled the touch of his lips against mine. Yes, I’d been trying to save his life, but now—

Now I wanted to lay my mouth against his again, and for an entirely different reason. I hadn’t wanted to think it, had tried to couch my feelings in insipid terms such as “fond” or “like,” but those horrible moments when I thought I might have lost him had taught me a very different story.

I cradled the delicate glass between my palms, and then said, “Why?”

His mouth lifted slightly at one corner. “Only one ‘why’?”

“I thought I’d let you decide which one to answer first.”

Sarzhin chuckled a little then; somehow it sounded different when it wasn’t muffled by the folds of his hood. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”

“We missed the shuttle. My stupid sister and her stupid shopping trip—” I broke off and watched him lift his own glass. He still wore the gloves, I noticed. “It certainly wasn’t enough for you to kill yourself over!”

“Wasn’t it?” He drank a little of the
zharis
, then added, “Perhaps I answered the wrong ‘why.’ Let me start over.”

I nodded. “That might be a good idea.”

He smiled. His teeth looked human enough, although I got the impression that there were somehow more of them than in a regular human mouth. “The Zhore are empaths, Anika. Not telepaths—we cannot read minds—but we do sense emotions. Among other Zhore, this is not an issue, as we have had millennia of practice protecting ourselves and refraining from unrestrained projection of emotion. Out in the galaxy at large, however, we are at a disadvantage. This is why you see us go cloaked and hooded as we do; the very weave of our garments contains elements that block some of these emotions. But this is also why we don’t allow off-worlders on Zhoraan.”

It made some sense, I supposed. But his answers only brought up more questions. “Then why live here at all? I would think your people would feel uncomfortable if they were surrounded by humans.” Never mind the little matter of inviting me into his house, or repeatedly asking me if I would be his wife. One would have thought a member of an empathic race would have done everything possible to protect his isolation. Now I was beginning to be very glad I had come here after all, but that didn’t explain why he had requested my presence in the first place.

“You’ll notice that I have no near neighbors,” Sarzhin replied. Then he shook his head. “That is no real answer. The truth is—” He hesitated, and again regarded me carefully. “The truth is that our population has been declining for some time. Our scientists have applied themselves to the problem, as you might well imagine, but as of yet they have found no solution. One thing they did discover, however, is that the Zhore are compatible with humans. Biologically, that is.”

For a few seconds my brain didn’t quite know how to process that particular piece of information. Then it caught up, and I said, “Oh.” Well, I supposed that explained why he kept asking me to marry him. Or did it? After all, marriage wasn’t exactly a necessary prelude to procreation.

“‘Oh,’ exactly.” Another smile, but this one looked rather grim. He lifted his glass and took another drink before continuing, “For my people, though, it is one thing to know your race is compatible with another in the purest genetic sense, and quite another to make the mental leap necessary to do anything about it, especially for a people as reclusive as the Zhore. The dispute over Lathvin provided an opportunity, however—we were given a chance to live among you and attempt to see if such unions were at all feasible.”

I reflected then that the Zhore had an odd way of going about the process. After all, it’s sort of hard to meet people when you’re holed up in a mansion all the time. I certainly had yet to see a Zhore hanging out in the Filling Station and offering to buy the women getting off-duty from the commissary or the GRC’s office a round of drinks. I refrained from saying so, however, and waited for Sarzhin to continue. After so many months of mystery, it was a relief to finally be getting some answers from him. And after seeing him lying there, still and silent, I wanted to hear his voice, if only to reassure myself that he was all right and hadn’t done any irreversible damage to himself.
 

 
“I had sensed you,” he told me, and his eyes met mine and held. For a second I felt as if I might drown in those depths, blue as the world where I had been born and yet could not remember at all. “Faintly, of course, but still, I knew when you drove past, felt your comings and goings. This was the first sign, the first realization that compatibility with a human might be more than simply biological. I could not think how to approach you, though. Others of my kind have encountered similar difficulties.”

That didn’t seem too surprising. After all, if your entire race makes it a habit to keep to themselves, then any outward sign of changing its behavior would of course be met with suspicion. All Sarzhin could do was wait, and hope for a chance—

“You didn’t—you didn’t make my father have that accident, did you?”

Sarzhin’s eyes widened, and he said immediately, “No, of course not. You saw how bad the weather was.”

“Yes,” I replied, suddenly ashamed I could even have thought that of him. I wanted to step forward, reach out to touch him, but somehow I couldn’t quite work up the nerve. Maybe, since he was an empath, he’d be able to pick up from me that I wanted more contact than I’d previously allowed. “I’ve never seen a storm like that, before or since.”

But he made no move toward me. “While I did not cause the accident, I did take advantage of it, and for that I must apologize. By then I’d begun to feel quite desperate, as the months and years went by, and I found no way to initiate a meeting with you.”

I wanted to tell him—what, that it was all right? That blackmailing my father was a small thing compared to being a member of a race that was slowly dying and needed to do whatever it could to survive? The ends never justified the means, or so I had been taught, but I understood what he had done even if I couldn’t completely condone it.

“Is that why you settled where you did?” I asked. “So that you would be near a homestead with two daughters?”

“That was why I chose the site initially. Lathvin presented a number of difficulties, among them being the sparseness of the settlements here. To have two young women nearby increased the odds, although I did not count on your sister going off-world to attend college. That turned out to be of no import, because it became obvious to me soon enough you were the one who mattered.”
 

As much as I wanted to reach out to him, one logical part of my brain was crunching the numbers and coming up with a sum I didn’t like very much. “So I was just supposed to be…what? Convenient breeding stock?”

At once he came to me and took my hands in his gloved ones. “Oh, no, Anika. You misunderstand. While some races may go about such things coldly or carelessly, it is not that way for my people. We must be truly one with our partners, or there can be no consummation, no children. It was only by having you here with me, and learning who you truly are, that I could confirm we were compatible. I felt that we were. My soul told me so, but it also told me to be patient.”

That reassured me a little, but something else occurred to me. “Then why ask me to marry you from the beginning? Why not wait and see how things progressed?”

“You’ll notice that I did change my course midway, after you requested it.” He shook his head—at himself, I was fairly certain. “Eagerness, I suppose. I knew from the second you crossed the threshold that you were the one. I suppose I hoped you would have a similar reaction, even though such things are not as common in humans. I soon learned I was wrong—and yet, the way you responded to me each day told me something more about you. I saw a change in you, a gradual softening, even if you did not yet recognize it yourself. It gave me hope.”

I couldn’t deny that. The truth had come to me slowly, but even during those months of willful ignorance I had seen a change in my feelings toward him, from alien captor to fond companion. It had only required a crisis to allow me the final realization of what he meant to me.
 

He gazed down at me, hands still wrapped around mine.
 
“And so you became a part of my life, your spirit so interwoven with mine that when I said it was impossible for you to be away any longer than three days, I told you the truth. With you gone, I would die.”

He spoke simply, as if relating a fact so obvious it needed no further explaining. I shivered then, thinking of how close it had been. Damn Libba and her carelessness! It was, I realized then, something I had always overlooked before that moment. My sister thought of herself first—not maliciously, but with an airy disregard for the things other people might consider important. It was what had spurred her to stay on as a graduate student, even though I’d been itching to get off Lathvin, and it was that same heedlessness which had allowed her to dismiss my concerns about getting back on time.
 

Because of her, Sarzhin had almost died.
 

Because of her, I had almost lost everything. Only now was I beginning to understand how terrible a loss it would have been. Not just for me, but for his people as well.

“I’m so sorry,” I murmured. I blinked then, watching as his dark form began to dissolve in a blur of tears. “So, so sorry.”

And then he did pull me toward him at last. Surely he must have known how much I wanted him to hold me. Truly, my need in that moment must have been so obvious that even a non-empath could have sensed it. His arms went around me, and he pulled me close. His touch seemed somehow familiar, no doubt because of the echoes from that one dream, but the reality was far better. Under the robes he wore a close-fitting dark tunic of a softer weave than his outer garments, and I laid my head against his chest and listened to the beating of his heart. It seemed to be located on the opposite side from a human’s, but the sound itself was familiar enough. He smelled good, too, of something warm and woodsy that somehow reminded me of the greenhouse and its rows of lovingly tended plants and herbs.

Just the softest brush against the top of my head, a feather touch telling me he had placed his lips there. I tightened my arms around him, and we stood, clinging to one another, for some time. Finally, though, he pulled away—only a little, so he could gaze down into my face. I stared up at him, at every elegant line of his features, at the mouth I wanted so much to taste.

He said, “I’ve asked you the same question many times before. May I ask it again now?”

I nodded, but told him, “Only kiss me first.”

As quick as lightning his lips met mine, and there was something electric in the shock that meeting sent through me. I hadn’t realized a kiss could be like this, where every nerve ending in your body seemed to catch fire, and the universe narrowed down to the perfect symmetry of his lips against yours. What would come next, I couldn’t begin to guess, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, except that I could finally give him the answer he’d been waiting so long to hear, the answer I had been hiding in my heart all that time, even if it had taken far too long for me to recognize the truth of my love for him.