Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
up on one arm, feeling the need of the advantage. Height, his only advantage, he
had become frightened watching her back. Alien, his mind gibbered at him. The
Zimmer or the god? In the moist heat, he was chilled and sweating.
Smiling, she walked her fingers to his lips. Instead of flesh, he hit his teeth on
metal and tasted silver.
“Don't,” he whispered.
There wasn't a transformation. He remembered touching her, her nails
scratching his face to draw blood, the taste of her skin, how the sand stuck to
hers as well as his, sandpaper where they rubbed together. He remembered the
feel of the knot of bones that ran the length of her spine and ended with a short
tail that wagged under his fingers. Breasts like summer-ripe apples. The brush of
her short hair in his hands as he held her head while kissing. The feel of the
metal rings against his skin, like sparks.
And he remembered her dead, her face a pulp of exploded flesh. And burying
her. When he sat up, she wiggled closer to him.
“Why all this?” he asked, still not looking at her, but at the water instead.
Stone walls and reeds, lavender colored tuffs of grass. Crystal rings on some of
the reeds, like her rings were of silver. En'talac's brown eyes - had they always
been her eyes? Cassa's? “The first time I saw you, you didn't even know who I
was.”
“You didn't know how to ask.”
He shook his head. “You did the asking.”
Cassa ran her hand along his arm until they were skin to skin along the length.
His eyes were to the water, but he couldn't help but see, drawn by the movement
and the feel. There was no difference in how the two arms looked, or they were a
mirror rather. Left to right. Olive skin lightly covered with brown hair, short and
fine, lacking the curl of the mat on his chest. He closed his eyes and bowed his
head to his knees but didn't draw away. The feel of his own flesh was more alien
than anything he had ever experienced. He lost any shift of the memories to a
loud buzzing between his ears.
But he heard her voice as though from his own throat. “You want too much,”
she said. “You always ask for too much.”
- 27 -
Rit woke up in his own bed, Tika curled up against the back of his knees. He
was lying on his side. When he picked her up, the cat was limp with sleep and
then she stretched, digging claws into the blanket and his arm before curling up
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca