Page 110 of Orc's Possession
As I sink against the bedding, clutching the blanket to my chin, the sun sets and sleep overcomes me once more. I pray I’m not harming my child by starving myself.
“What the fuck?” Earl rises from the desk on the other side of the jail. As he fingers the blaster at his side, he peers out the window. “The entire colony’s gone dark.”
Yelling and screaming reach the jail. “What’s happening, Earl? It sounds like a war zone out there.”
He draws his blaster. “Those animals are carrying off the women!”
“Animals? You mean racannas?” No, that doesn’t make sense. We don’t have any racannas in the river that irrigates our fields and those water beasts can’t survive on land.
“No. Them orcs you’re so friendly with.”
“They’re here?” Hope radiates through me, feeding me the energy to stand. “Earl, release me. I can talk to them. They’ll listen to me.”
“No way. Stay here,” he says as he charges out of the jail.
“Stay here? I’m locked in a damn cell, you fool! Let me out!”
He doesn’t return, but the screams outside intensify. Smoke pours in through the window high in my cell. “Earl, get me out of here!”
A huge male enters the jail. An orc so large he barely fits through the doorway.
Atox!
He turns, green eyes with yellow flecks, tall, muscular with long tusks and disheveled hair. Not Atox. I’ll never see my brooding, controlling, loveable warrior again.
As my luck would have it, it’s the new grak, a male who never wanted me among the orcs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
VERIG
Atox won’t speak of the day the humans shot him and took his female, but we all see the change in him. He is… less.
The grak I served on Orcos would have wasted no time taking revenge against the humans. The warriors who ride with us to New Earth now question Atox’s ability to lead. They see a warrior who will not take what is his, but I see behind the mask he wears. I know the reason he hasn’t retaliated.
He's broken.
Losing a female does that to a male. Breaks him inside. Makes him lose his will to live.
I will never forget my Haaka and the way she rested in the crook of my arm in our furs, telling me how proud she was to be mine. Or how her eyes lit when I held our little Veeya in my arms, rocking her to sleep.
Losing them broke me, but I could not give up. I’d sworn an oath to my grak in the name of my female and our youngling. I will never see them again, smell the sossa blooms in my female’shair, or feel the softness of Veeya’s skin as I hold her against my chest.
They were taken from me. Atox’s female walked away.
Different situations, but the result is the same. We’ve lost the females that make us whole. Except his situation doesn’t have to remain as is. His female still lives.
To be a powerful grak and not go after his own female… the very notion confounds me but I must honor his decision. He is our grak. He saved our people, and he will again, though he will never be the male I knew… not without her.
Our graka changed him, for the better. When she was with him, vek, Atox was unstoppable. I fully believe she mended the damage Narzik The Cruel caused Atox’s spirit.
I understand how having a female can affect a male like that. Or rather, I did.
As I stand on the periphery of the human colony, watching warriors reach down and lift human females from the ground and setting them across the backs of their gorjas, I wonder if Atox will ever heal.
I don’t suspect I ever will. But Atox has a resilience I lack. One day, he will wake from this haze he’s in and then I will ask him what the vekk he’s doing not retrieving his female. Me, I’ll never have anything but memories.
A human female with long blonde hair and blue eyes the color of water ducks behind a tree, narrowly escaping Yanzu who guides his gorja left. He’s a skilled warrior, though the female appears equally adept as she fades into the shadows, remaining calm unlike the other females yelling and running in all directions.
