Not that it looked like she was going to get to move from the middle of the stage, Jodi thought as the guards nudged her towards the center.
Hanging from the ceiling, was a long, heavy chain that looked like it would be strong enough to support a truly massive chandelier. Instead, there was a large hook attached to its end, which dangled about three feet above Jodi’s head.
“Here,” one of the guards hissed and lifted her hands, which were bound in front of her with rope, to hook them over the curving hook. This stretched Jodi’s arms high above her head, making her feel utterly vulnerable.
“It wasss conssiderate of you to dresss in the color of breeding,” the other guard remarked to her.
Jodi looked down at herself. She was still wearing the outfit she’d had on to greet James—a nice black pencil skirt and a red button-down silk shirt which was now stretched taut over her breasts. She had on thigh-high hose under the skirt and black heels completed the outfit.
He must mean the red shirt she had when he referred to “the color of breeding” since all the female Varians were also wearing red. They also had their tails unwrapped, Jodi noticed distractedly. Was that a sex thing here? Was wearing a naked tale like baring your breasts or pussy for an Earth female?
Whatever the case, she was at least glad that the Varian guards didn’t strip her. She was standing here, feeling horribly vulnerable and afraid and about to be whipped to death, but at least she wasn’t naked in front of all these people.
She had often had fantasies of being paraded nearly-nude by her Master through a crowd, but those were sexual desires and despite what the Varians seemed to think about Blood and Lust being interchangeable, there was nothing even remotely arousing about the situation she found herself in now.
“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
