Tail, Dark and Handsome: Celestial Mates

Chapter 3-4

“Dad says you know ships?” Zero asked.

“I’m a pilot.”

Oh no. Winter knew exactly what Zero would do with that information.

He simply had to get through the next few hours. The storm could not last forever.

MarigoldOutside, the sky darkened, feeling almost like twilight. Rain hit the windows in sheets, distorting the lights of the village in the distance.

Despite the storm thundering outside, the house felt cozy with plenty of charm. Older, it had obviously been updated recently and decorated for tourists with money to spend. The dim lighting added to the cozy feel, like a warm, dry haven against the storm. The decor leaned toward bland, lots of tasteful gray and white, and little personality.

Honestly, Mari didn’t know if that was just Valerian’s own bright technicolor preferences burning away her optic nerves. She liked color. Her mother liked a lot of color. Like, a lot lot.

The comm unit chirped again with another message from Nox. This one was a photo of Meri and her mother at breakfast, taken that very morning.

“Don’t you have anything better to do? Babies to steal candy from? Puppies to kick?” she wrote. Distantly she was aware that she shouldn’t antagonize the moneylender because if Nox had people watching her, he also had people who could break her kneecaps or whatever his sort did.

She didn’t think he specifically sent people to Fortune merely to keep an eye on her. She didn’t owe that much money, and if she did, he wouldn’t have allowed her to leave Olympus Station. Fortune was a common destination from the station. Nox likely had resort and hotel staff on his payroll just as a matter of course.

Still, the idea of someone watching her and her mother made her skin crawl.

“Merry-gold,” Zero said, pulling up a stool to the kitchen counter.

“Please call me Mari.” She shoved the comm unit into a pocket, not wanting to see whatever new photos Nox sent. She wasn’t an expert on organized crime—though she did watch a documentary with Valerian—but harassing her hardly seemed a cost-effective use of Nox’s time.

“You told me you were called Merry,” Winter said in an accusing tone. His eyes were an icy blue. Sharp and rather beautiful, she thought.

“Mari,” she said.

“Merry-gold,” Zero told his father in a tone that questioned the intelligence of all adults, everywhere.

“Merry-gold,” he repeated.

Close enough.

“Your hair is fluffy. Is it always like that? It looks like an angry cloud. I like it. Can I touch it?”

Mari ducked to avoid his incoming hand. Her frizzy hair was a sore point. The island’s humidity turned her normally manageable waves into a mess. She had been relying on a leave-in conditioner to keep the frizz at bay but didn’t have any on her to reapply after her shower. She said, “Yes, my hair is frizzy. No, it’s not always like this. The humidity makes it frizzy. And it’s rude to touch other people’s hair. Could I grab your ear?”

He gasped. “No, that is impolite. My apologies.”

Winter set two plated sandwiches on the counter, along with water. The offering was basic, with some sort of cold meat and thick sliced bread, but she greedily ate every crumb.

The comm unit in her pocket chirped again. Groaning, she answered, because it wouldn’t stop until she did.

“Keep making the jokes. I add a credit to your total for every joke,” Nox wrote.

“What was that?” Zero asked.

“Nothing important.” She deleted the message and powered down the phone.

“Do you play King’s Table?”

“I do,” she said. Practically every pilot played the game. Flights often had long periods of downtime, and connection to the network for streaming entertainment was not always guaranteed. The game involved moving tokens across a grid. No token moved the same way as another. Every planet in the Interstellar Union had a similar strategy game. On Earth, it was called chess. Growing up, Mari had a battered old resin set. Sealant tape and goodwill held the cardboard box together. The instruction sheet on different planetary rules sets had long ago vanished, but Mari had the rules memorized.

The board Zero produced was Tal in origin with glossy green and white stones. Painted symbols indicated the rules the token had to abide.

“I played all the time with my brother. Do you know Earth rules?” she asked.

“Not as well as Talmar rules but I’ll try.”

The kid was being polite, because he beat her without trying very hard. Mari scrambled to anticipate his moves, but Zero seemed to know the outcome of the game by the third or fourth move.

While they played, he chatted and asked questions. It soon became obvious that he worked his way down a “ten questions to get to know someone” checklist. It felt a bit like a job interview.

What’s your favorite season? None. She lived on a space station.

What historical figure would you most like to meet? Probably the person brave enough, or hungry enough, to realize that they could eat a tomato and not die, despite it being a fruit from a family of poisonous plants. Then she had to explain tomatoes and nightshades and that Earth was not a death planet filled with tricky poisonous planets.

Favorite subject in school? She enjoyed literature and physics.

Best meal you’ve ever eaten? Mari waxed on about a vendor on Olympus station that fried balls of dough to order and then rolled the balls in sugar. They melted in her mouth and were divine.

And Mari’s personal favorite, if you could have a superpower, which one do you pick?

“I’m not going to pick. I’ll take whatever the universe gives me,” she said.

“That’s cheating. You have to answer,” Zero said.

“It’s too big. How can I pick?”

“That’s the point. It shows how you think about problems.”

“Ah,” she said, sliding her token across the board. She figured she had two more moves left before Zero captured her king. “Then I’d like to be able to give other people superpowers.”

“That’s cheating. That’s like wishing for more wishes.”

“How? I give people superpowers. What am I getting out of it?”

“It’s overpowered. Pick again, and only one that affects you,” he said.

“Well, then define the question better. You said any, not ones from limited criteria.”

Zero grumbled but good naturedly. “What is your age?”

“Thirty. What’s yours?”

“Fourteen. My father is forty-one. It sounds like a lot, but I bet it’s not when you’re thirty.”

“Yeah, that sounds like something a fourteen-year-old would say,” she answered.

A laugh drifted out from the other room. Winter had been lurking nearby but had not participated in their conversation.

Just as well. The man practically blamed her for the storm that ruined his bot, like she controlled the weather. Maybe that should have been her superpower and then she’d zap him with a bolt of lightning. And then she could fry Nox and Tomas’s behinds. Weather that had a lot of appeal at the moment.

Thunder boomed, and she jumped.

Maybe not.

Mouthwatering aromas drifted out of the kitchen. Mari offered herself up for manual labor and was set chopping fruit she did not recognize for dessert. Zero’s questions continued about her favorite film, book, and so on. She made the mistake of asking Zero about his favorite music, which launched him into a mini lecture about sociopolitical dynamics in Earth opera. He seemed quite disappointed that she recognized the opera names but didn’t know any of the music.

Winter listened as he prepared the meal but remained silent. Good. She liked him better when he brought her food and didn’t say anything.

When the storm passed, the sun returned and the roads cleared, Winter offered to drive her down to the village.

“I can call a transport,” she said.

“I know how to be a good host, so be quiet and let me concentrate,” he snapped.

Charming.

The entire trip, he clenched the steering wheel like he was moments from losing his cool. Rather than focus on how miserable her presence made him, she studied the landscape. The storm had made no impact at all. It must have been the location on the mountain that made the storm seem so vicious.

When he dropped her off at the hotel’s entrance as the sun neared the horizon, she honestly never expected to see Winter Cayne again.

Nor did she want to.