“Now, we leave you,” one of the guards told her. “Soon the Master of Whipsss will come and your Ssacrifice will commence.”
Jodi didn’t know what to say to that so she just stood there silent and tried to close her eyes and take herself away. But a strange music was coming from the crowd that surrounded the stage now—a low, thrumming, humming sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Opening her eyes, Jodi saw a strange sight—the male Varians in the crowd had large red chin pouches that were rhythmically inflating in time to the thrumming. No—they were actually making the humming sound, Jodi realized. They were puffing their scarlet chin pouches out like some kind of signal to the females as they hummed and thrummed.
In turn, the females were turning their backs and lifting their tails. Under each tail was an orifice which seemed to iris open for just a moment to show a flash of white. Then the white thing would disappear and the opening beneath the tail would iris shut again.
Jodi squinted, trying to make out these strange details from high on the stage. There were lizards who lived in Florida who had those same kind of chin pouches, she remembered. When they inflated them, the pouches were almost the exact same size and shape as a penny. So she and Melli had called it “showing their money” when they saw the male lizards inflating their pouches. Was that what the male Varians were doing now—showing their money to get the females aroused? Was it some kind of mating signal?
And what about the females and their behavior? Were those white flashes beneath their tails the eggs that needed to be fertilized? Maybe they needed the male’s seed on the egg before they could lay it and be sure it contained a viable embryo.
It was actually a fascinating mating pattern and the academic in her would have loved to study it more closely. But her intellectual curiosity was abruptly nipped in the bud by the sight of someone new ascending the stage.
It was a huge Varian—as big as any Kindred warrior she had ever seen—and he was stripped to the waist. His scaly hide rippled with muscles which just looked wrong to Jodi—it was like watching an alligator who had gotten into body-building. Weird.
He was followed by the High Priestess of Fertility who raised her arms above her head in a gesture for quiet.
At once the thrumming-humming fell silent and all the yellow, lizard-like eyes of the crowd raised to rest on the priestess.
“My people,” she called, her hissing voice filling the vast auditorium. “Let the Festival of Fertility begin!”
Forty-Three
Melli couldn’t seem to stop crying. The Varian guards had taken Jodi away and led her up to the tall stage-like platform in the center of the auditorium. Now her big sister was standing there, chained to a hook, completely helpless and waiting to be killed.
She almost wished she couldn’t understand the Varians’ hissing language so she didn’t know what was coming next. But Liosh had offered her some of the Kindred translation bacteria which enabled the taker to understand almost any language and Melli had accepted, thinking it would be fun to understand all the languages around her without having to work to learn them. She was pretty sure Vorn had given some to Jodi as well. Never had she imagined she would be using the bacteria this way, though. This was awful.
I can’t stand this, Melli thought. If Jodi dies, I want to die, too! I don’t want to live in a world without my big sister in it!
Jodi had always been there for her—protecting her, taking her to therapy after the awful night with Jason Sykes, putting Melli back together piece by piece when she felt like she was falling apart. How could she bear to lose her? What would she do without her?
Suddenly one of the Varian guards—an extremely tall one—came closer to the metal bars of her cage.
“Melinda,” he murmured. “Melinda, can you hear me?”
Melli looked up at him and frowned. His voice was oddly familiar but he looked the same as any of the other Varian guards—well, except for being much larger than most of them.
“What do you want?” she asked, sniffing. “Who are you and how do you know my name?”
“It’s me, Talli—it’s Liosh,” the guard murmured. “Vorn and I are here in disguise.”
Another extremely large guard nodded at her as though to corroborate the first guard’s statement and Melli realized it must be the big Beast Kindred.
“What’s going on here?” he asked in his low, growling voice. “Why is Jodi chained up in the center of that platform?”
“Because she volunteered to be the…the sacrifice.” Melli could barely get the words out. “The Sacrifice of Blood, the Varians call it. They say it’s the only way they can mate and fertilize their eggs and since we stole the T’lix Kruthe, we have to be the ones to pay for it and make it so they can breed. Only Jodi asked them to let her be the only one and send me home. But I don’t want to go home without her!” she ended in a sob.