The Bind

Mate

ALEXI POV

She looked me in the eye for the flicker of a heartbeat. Arctic blue, with the intensity of someone who has seen everything, yet knows nothing. The world shifted out of focus, until all that existed was the call of our souls, reaching for each other through the windows of our eyes.

So softly, her windchime voice whispered 'mate' from an untouched place so deep inside my mind it felt like it came from a part of me.

An overwhelming rush of at least seven different emotions stole my breath, and would not give it back. I balled reaching fingers into fists and let all my tension melt into the cleanch of those little muscles under the table. Wrenching my attention away from Claire, back to the meeting. It took everything I had.

Don't look.

Don't look.

Don't look.

Ok you can look, but not directly.

From the very corner of my eye I could see the puzzlement plain in her gaze, then a flash of fury before her own poker face took back over. For the rest of the meeting barely half of my attention was where it needed to be.

Most of it was caught replaying that look. It was searching for the touch of where her voice had come from. I was throbbing under the table, from that one flutter of connection...before I had shut it down with the callous proficiency of the fearfully vulnerable. Reaching out to her with the only truly uncontrollable part of me.

One side of the room had a large panel of windows looking into a private garden filled with tall leafy bamboo stalks, and a climbing wall flower filling the spaces in between. The other side was dull metal, polished to a sheen so fine that it provided a muted reflection. Overall the visual stimuli parroted the feel of being outside, with the temperature control and sound proofing afforded by being inside. In the ordinary course of events this would foster a calming environment for creatures.

This was not the ordinary course of events. Thank the Goddess - or more likely, the intern - that secured this room for today. The mayhem would have been multiplied by actions with dastardly consequences had we been booked into a central room with no windows.

Last year Sherman had lost an eye to a debate in a windowless room. Changing the legislation pertaining to normies camping in the shared forest territory bordering the metropolitan areas shouldn't really have elicited that kind of conflict. The bears were still sour about the whole shebang.

Even so, the room was loud as small spats broke out across the large table and spread like wildfire until our military marshall called order. This pattern repeated several times, then several times more, and the odds were good that it would happen several times again.

Claire kept silent for the most part. Sapphire eyes darting to and fro to whoever was speaking, and more often between creatures who were not speaking. Attention skipping from creature to creature like a hummingbird landing for the briefest of kisses in search of nectar. Xavier had told me she could hear linkages between anyone at anytime, but I didn't really believe it till now. He also told me her eyes changed hue with her emotions. I hadn't believed that either.

But when they carefully glazed past the area I occupied they flashed and burned like the angry blue of fire.

When Claire did contribute it was always to drive home some point that the others were tip-toeing around, or to ask a pointed question nobody else had the balls to. Where everyone else asked questions pertinent for their own species, she only raised points that encompassed importance for the community as a whole.