Barbarian Alien(28)

“So, what is that creature called?” I ask him, rubbing a hand up and down my arms to stop the goosebumps from rising on my skin. I’m totally turned on right now, damn it. Raw meat and an asshole captor should not be making my girl parts juice but I can’t seem to help myself.

He glances down at the raw meat and cuts another piece for me. “We call it two teeth.” He pulls back the lips of the creature to show me two gigantic fangs. It’s like a beaver. Kinda. A vampire beaver. With a row of spikes along its back and fuzzy, fluffy feet.

Okay, so it’s nothing like a beaver, but my brain feels better associating it with earth animals.

“You’re not eating,” I point out to him as he holds another bite out for me.

“My mate comes first,” he says, and gives me another scorchingly-intense look as he pops the meat into my mouth and then brushes my lips with his thumb. “I will eat when she is sated.”

I squirm a little. This is the most bizarrely sexualized meal I’ve ever had. I shouldn’t be enjoying myself half as much as I am. “Tell me about your tribe? Your family?”

The hungry, aroused look on his face vanishes, and I see his expression tense, becoming a mask of indifference. “I have no family.”

“None? But what about your parents?”

“Dead.” The look on his face is closed off.

“I see. No brothers or sisters?”

He shakes his head. “My mother only resonated the once for my father.”

“Ah.” Raahosh seems lost in thought, so I continue on. “Do you have close friends in your tribe?”

“Vektal.”

Getting this guy to open up is like prying teeth. “I met him. What about the others?”

He eyes me. “Why do you wish to know?”

“Because I’m going to be living there soon? They’re going to be my tribe, too?” Saying it aloud makes me a little heartsick. “What if they don’t like me?”

His thick, ridged brows draw down, as if he doesn’t quite grasp this. “You are my mate. There is no like or dislike. You will be part of the tribe.”

“Easy for you to say,” I tell him. “You grew up with them. You’re the same species. I’m a weird outsider who won’t stop talking, remember?”

He gazes at me for a long time, expression inscrutable. Then, after what feels like forever, he offers me another chunk of meat. I take it, and he says, “There are two kits in our tribe currently. With Georgie, that will be three. And if the others resonate, that will be more.”

I absorb this information. “And women? How many women?”

“Without the humans? Four, if you do not include the kits.”

I blanch. That leaves a lot of unsatisfied men. Maybe it’s a good thing that Raahosh hid me away in this cave for a bit. I wonder if the other girls that didn’t resonate are going to be fought over like scraps at dinner. “How many men?”

“Twenty four of us are left. Twenty unmated.”

“Left?”

He nods, carving another piece of meat away. “Life here is difficult. We lost many of our tribe several years ago on a bad hunt. Four of our men were killed and one female before we could bring down the ta-li.” He shakes his head. “It was a bad time.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“It is why the women no longer hunt. It is not that they cannot, it is that we will not risk the life of the tribe by putting them in jeopardy.”

I open my mouth to reply and he immediately pops another bite of meat into it. This feels like a shushing tactic, so I chew quickly and then continue. “But you have the human chicks now. That means that you’re no longer one big sausage party. That’ll bring the tribe up to…” I count for a moment. “Twelve humans and thirty of you guys means there’s forty two of us. Plenty of hunters.”

“Not many will wish to risk their mates on a hunt,” he said, offering her another piece of meat. She refused it, and he ate it, instead, his expression thoughtful. “Many will no longer want to hunt at all.”

“Why not?”

“Hunts are very solitary by nature. We got out for long periods of time into the snows. We might be gone a full turn of the moons before returning home.”

“Like a month?”

He shrugs. “Most hunt alone. It is easier to cover more ground that way. We hunt smaller game in many different directions and cache the kills under the snow so we can recover it later, when the land is forbidding and all the good game has gone to hibernate to get out of the ice.”

“So hunters…are alone a lot? It’s probably not the worst thing in the world, given that you’ve only got four girls back at home,” I muse. “Is that what you do?”