Page 117 of Catastrophe

CHARLIE

“What’s going on, Clawdicat?” I asked as she headed to the roof door and … locked it? Why would she lock it?

“Please stop asking.” Her lip wobbled, but she bit down on it. “I’m just … waiting.”

“Waiting. Until you feel better?” She didn’t look at me, didn’t touch me, she just stared at the sky like secret answers were written in the clouds. “Until the alien spaceship comes into view? Why the fuck do you keep looking over there?”

Her distance, as well as the emptiness of our bond, made me feel cold even as we stood in the glow of a setting sun.

When she glanced in my direction, I saw a flicker of fear in her violet eyes and my heart lurched in response. Why is she scared?

She must have seen my discomfort, because she reached out and stroked my arm. “Charlie, you trust me, don’t you?”

Trust with my heart? Yes. Trust with preserving her own life? No.

When I said nothing, her lip twitched, and she nodded once. Then, as she looked back at the sky, she said, “Please shift. Dralie needs to be here.”

Dralie was as confused as I was. “Why? I cannot copulate with her.”

“What makes you think she wants to be copulated with right now?” I asked as she headed to the rail around the roof.

“Is that not what you do to calm a female?”

She gasped when she saw something and turned to me. “Charlie. What’s Dralie saying? Are you going to shift?”

You’d know if you opened your bond to us. But my anger and frustration faded when I saw her shoulders shaking. “You’re trembling.”

“P-please turn,” she begged. A quick waft of nausea washed over me. Not my own. But Clawdia’s. And then it was gone again as locked her emotions down behind a steel gate.

“Is that you? Why do you feel sick?” I shook my head and put my hand on her back to guide her downstairs. “You need to rest. Maybe a doctor. You aren’t well.”

“Charlie, you aren’t listening to me.” She shook out of my grip and glared.

“Dralie isn’t coming out right now. He’s got performance anxiety.”

“He needs to get over it. Now.” She tried to be firm, but her nervousness ruined the effect. What is going on with her?

“What do you know?” I asked, but she just shook her head and looked back at the sky. Maybe she needed us to fly somewhere?

“Regardless of our confusion, we should strive to do as our mate says if it makes her feel better.”

Suck-up. “Fine. Fine. Fuck’s sake.” I started stripping my clothes off.

“The air smells strange.” Dralie told me.

“You can smell from in there?”

He ignored my question. “I do not think it is safe. We should go somewhere else.”

“Just change and then we can fly off somewhere else. I’m freezing.”

“Such a weak, fleshy body.”

“God, I hate when you call me fleshy.”

The transformation wasn’t getting easier, but it seemed to happen faster.

“Charlie, Dralie, forgive me for this,” Clawdia said from somewhere at my side. I couldn’t even swing my head around to see her before she’d already climbed our scales up onto our back and settled down in the space between our wings.

---