Candra nodded as she looked at Nick. “Maybe in a few hours?”
The look that passed between Nick and Orlando wasn’t exactly friendly, and never would be, both of them knew. “Whenever.” Nick said as he backed up, a lot of things going back and forth between him and Orlando in the look he gave the Shadowborn as he stepped away. As he walked off, Lea and William stepped up to walk behind him, guarding their Alpha as always.
Orlando watched him go for a long few moments without closing the door. “Poor Nick.”
Candra was confused by that statement, and she looked back over at Orlando with an eyebrow raised. “Why? What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s got Zara wrapped around him every waking hour of the day, and most sleeping ones, but he’s still the loneliest man in this whole army.” He shook his head and glanced over at Aura’s house a few hundred meters away on the other side of the fence. “And most of it’s not even his fault.” He swung the door shut afterwards, though, and sighed as he locked the half-dozen bolts that were in place on it to keep them safe. “Sorry about that.”
Candra sighed and kissed his lips lightly. “It’s not like he didn’t have a chance to be with Aura if he really wanted her.” Candra wasn’t quick to absolve Nick of his own fault in the scheme of things.
“Oh I’m well aware of that.” He returned the kiss and pulled her in against him tightly. “Make sure I never get like that? Please?”
“Are you lonely? Even with me around?”
“No, I mean…cold like that.” He nodded back through the door as if Nick was still on the other side of it. “Don’t let me take myself too seriously. It’s a pretty bad habit I’m prone to.”
Candra kissed him once more and she pulled off her blanket and tossed it over his head before she took off running. “Okay, I won’t!”
When he threw off the blanket again, he was grinning, and he shifted so fast he left the wrap around his waist in a tangle as it fell to the floor where he’d stood.
* * * * *
Nick had, it turned out, been mistaken when he said the party was dying down. In fact, it seemed the party had only taken a brief nap, since by the time Orlando and Candra had gotten themselves properly dressed and headed into the compound later that night, a great many people were out and about in the makeshift streets. There were hundreds of families sitting and lounging in groups everywhere, lovers sitting with each other in intimate conversation between houses, children sitting at their parents’ feet and listening to their reassurances as they talked about what was coming. Groups of men were everywhere having contests of strength or power, some of them with intricately detailed trials of skill with stone or roots, or just raw muscle. An Earthborn arm-wrestling match had a tendency to turn into a small earthquake, and Orlando and Candra walked past a good number of such events.
People always quieted when they noticed the two of them walking through the streets, and so after walking through a few crowds with tense, awkward silence, she leaned in and whispered to him. “Do you think that we should give them a show or something? You know, so that they have stories to pass on?”
He snorted at the suggestion, which made a few people flinch away from him, but he just kept laughing and didn’t show any surprise at the reaction. “What kind of show?”
“I don’t know.” She looked around for a moment and then she went to grab a bracelet that had been dropped in the middle of one of the roads in the compound. The stuff was easy to come by in that place, so she knew that most people wouldn’t miss a tiny bracelet like the one she was holding. She warmed her hand enough so that the metal became pliable, and then she snapped the bracelet into two pieces. She then put them together as two separate rings, one of which she held out for him to wear.
Most of the Ironborn winced, since she had done such a rough job with the metal, but it would suffice. “I’ll wear one, you wear the other, and then we can throw some jolts back and forth. That’s a show, right?” She could tolerate Orlando’s electrical stunts better than almost anyone, other than an Ironborn, of course, because she was holding a lot of heat herself in her light.
He smiled at the idea, and put on the ring she’d given him, but then stepped up to an Ironborn child at the side of the street where they stood. “Excuse me,” the little girl was cowering away from him, but her parents were trying to encourage her not to be afraid, though they looked pretty scared of him themselves. “Do you think you could help us out with these?”
The little girl was shaking as she held out her hand, and they both dropped their rings into her palm. Once she had the rings, though, the girl felt a little more confident and she looked up at Candra as though she was going to scold her. “You hafta be nice to it or else it gets mad and makes bubbles.” She pointed her small finger to the spot where Candra had welded the rings back together, and there were little bumps there that weren’t smooth at all.
“Can you tell it we’re sorry?” Orlando said without missing a beat. “We didn’t mean to make it mad.”
The little girl nodded, since she had already made friends with the rings in her hand. “You’re lucky. It likes me.” She gave a weak smile and she looked at both of their hands to make sure she got the sizes right. She had a hard time with that part the most. Commonplace as it was among the Ironborn
