Devi’s Distraction: Icehome Book 7 Read online

  Devi’s Distraction

  Icehome Book 7

  Ruby Dixon

  www.rubydixon.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Ruby Dixon

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Photo by: Sara Eirew, Photographer

  Cover Design by: Kati Wilde

  Edits by: Aquila Editing

  Created with Vellum

  DEVI’S DISTRACTION

  It's hard to make friends with the other women at the Icehome camp when you'd rather be dissecting the local fauna. Which is why I'm surprised when one of the big, brawny islanders asks me to help him make a prosthetic leg. I don't know N'dek, but since I'm a scientist, he wants my help. And while I'm more into dinosaurs than anatomy, I love a challenge.

  As we work together, I come to see that N'dek's not just clever and determined, he's also protective and sweet. And he kisses like a fiend.

  He's a distraction I don't need...but he might be everything I've ever wanted. Too bad he says he's going to resonate to someone else.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  The People of Icehome

  Ruby Dixon Reading List

  Want More?

  1

  DEVI

  The beach is my favorite spot at camp. Not only is it peaceful and quiet, but it has the largest biodiversity that I’ve seen on this planet so far. Every time I look out into the rolling, slushy waves, I see creatures. I see birds stalking through the waves, bracing their spindly bodies against an incoming crash before returning to their fishing. I see fish jump out of the water. I see tentacles—like, a lot of them—slither through the ice. I see crablike things walk along the sand, only to burrow underneath the surface when I approach. There are dead things that wash up, and creatures that feast on them. There’s seaweed and crustaceans and mollusks, vertebrates and invertebrates. As biomes go, this is a well-populated one.

  But mostly I like the beach because it’s quiet.

  Even now, I can hear shouting back at camp, and I mentally wince even as I use my stick to carefully turn over a half-eaten scorpion-spider that’s washed up in a pile of seaweed. I eye it, poking at the carcass with my stick, but this one’s too rotted for me to get good samples. The stink of it is eye-watering and I regretfully use my boot to kick some sand over it to bury it. Ten million years from now, maybe it’ll make a lovely fossil for someone to examine, and that thought brightens my day.

  “Why are you such a fucking jerk?” Bridget bellows.

  “I jerk nothing!” A’tam roars at her. “Why do you say I do these things?”

  “Oh my god. Just leave me alone, all right? I don’t want anything to do with you!” I straighten and glance over at the distant camp, watching as Bridget flings her arms in the air and storms off to the sleeping cave.

  A’tam doesn’t take no for an answer, though—never does—and follows behind her, saying things that sound angry and are too distant for me to make out. A moment later, Bridget snarls something back and then they’re squabbling once more. A baby cries, and I hear Liz’s angry voice even as I see a group of hunters edging away from camp to go on one of their daily trips. A few people remain by the fire, and then a new conversation starts up.

  Another baby cries.

  I bite back a sigh. Even today, the beach isn’t all that quiet. Everyone’s so darn tense. Things were happy for a while, and lighthearted. Most of the Croatoan and sa-khui have gone back to their home at this point, with only a few couples staying on to help guide us in our new tribe. For the most part, we’re on our own. And that’s when the trouble began, I suppose. It’s been tense around camp. There are the islanders, who don’t seem to like each other all that much. There are a few botched relationships—like Callie and M’tok, who died an ugly death before they even started. There’s tension with the one-legged guy, N’dek, because his buddy ran off with Hannah on a camping trip and now he’s more or less stranded in one spot and so people keep volunteering to help him out—which only makes him more pissy.

  And there’s Bridget and A’tam. They flirted, they slept together, and now he thinks they’re married and she thinks he should die in a fire.

  It’s complicated.

  Which is why I like to hide on the beach and look for specimens.

  I poke my little mound one more time and then continue farther down the beach, moving away from the smoother sand toward the rocky areas with the tide pools which are really just ancient trackways to some claw-footed monster that hunted the shallows once upon a time.

  It’s all so very fascinating, a paleophysiologist’s wet dream, I like to joke…or I would if anyone here understood me. Most of the time I just talk and talk and they stare at me like I’m growing another head.

  I really miss the academic community. At least there, I was understood. Overall, though, I’m still enjoying this world. Maybe not the people as much as the environment, but that’s just me being awkward.

  I notice off in the distance that the colors shift and ripple in the waves, and I straighten for a moment before I realize what I’m seeing. Oh. It’s one of the hunters from the island. His color floods to a bright blue again and then he begins to wade to shore, a large net in his hands. He’s also coming towards me, which makes me inwardly cringe. I’m probably gonna babble at him for twenty minutes, make us both uncomfortable, and then mentally play it back in my head for the next two days.

  Just then, I see one of the “spaghetti monster” invertebrates lying in a clump of seaweed and I immediately nudge it with my stick. It rolls over and I bite back a squeal of delight at the sight of the serrated teeth on the underside of its belly. When I first saw them, I thought they were related to Earth jellyfish thanks to their tentacles, but the more I study them, the more unusual they seem. This one has a beak and comb-like teeth, which remind me of squid, and his tentacles aren’t spread all over the sac of his body but clustered onto two sides. That definitely confirms my hypothesis that there are at least three types of the spaghetti monsters…or three different stages of development.

  It’s so terribly exciting that I feel my heart hammering as I crouch low and slice it open with my shale knife. If I were in a lab, someone would be screaming in horror at my dissection techniques, but since there’s no one here but me, I don’t care. I study the innards, comparing it mentally to the last one I opened up. This one has an egg sac tucked inside, next to the digestive tract and so I flip the creature over, looking for an orifice for the eggs to come out of. I thought they only had one opening—the mouth—but unless it mutates to allow the eggs to emerge through its skin, they have to come out somewhere.

  I’m so focused that I forget all about the hunter that was approaching me.

  “Ho,” a deep voice says.

  “Hi,” I respond automatically, and when he comes to stand right over me, casting a shadow, I gesture for him
to move. “You’re in the light.”

  “What do you do, human?” He sounds puzzled. “Are you hungry?”

  “I’m examining this invertebrate to determine its physiology,” I say, squinting up at the guy and trying to place his features. The islanders are as interesting as the rest of the life on this planet, what with three distinct recessive traits prominently displayed in their people. This one is of Shadow Cat, judging by the beard on his jaw and the thickly furred forearms. “Who are you again?”

  “I am S’bren of Shadow Cat clan,” he says. “You are D’vi, yes?”

  “Yes.” I glance down at my specimen that he’s currently dripping over. “Er, can you move please?”

  He kicks it into the water, and I bite back a yelp. “You should not eat things that wash up on the beach, female. They will make your stomach angry. If you are hungry, I will feed you.”

  “I wasn’t eating it! I was examining it!”

  S’bren frowns at me, clearly not understanding. “To…eat?”

  “To study! To determine where the egg sac emerges from the body!”

  He blinks at me, and then back at the dead creature that’s even now being carried into the icy waves, soon to be gone. “Because…you wish to eat eggs?”

  “I don’t want to eat anything. I’m trying to determine its physiology so I can establish what evolutionary features it shares with its cousins. There are three different types of those creatures, did you know that? The tentacle placement is different, and some have a beak, and some…” I break off, sighing at how pointless it is to explain this. He’s just giving me a narrow-eyed look as if I’m the one not making sense around here.

  “It is what we call a ‘Little Sting,’” he says to me. “They are all the same.”

  “They sting you?” Oh my god, maybe they are like jellyfish. This is terribly exciting. “From the tentacles or from contact? Do they secrete something that irritates the skin?”

  S’bren just frowns at me. “You say much nonsense, D’vi. I do not understand you.”

  Story of my life. I try to smile. “I’m just saying that there are different kinds of those creatures, that’s all. They’re all ‘Little Sting’ like you call them, but there are different types of ‘Little Sting.’ Just like your island clans. You are related to Strong Arm but are very different in appearance—”

  He scowls. “No.”

  I go silent. I guess that’s not a good comparison to make? When he continues to glare down at me, I offer, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to insult.”

  “You did not know,” S’bren says, and flashes his fangs at me. “Come, let us go to camp and I will feed you so you do not scavenge on the beach.”

  I bite back a sigh, because this man is trying to be nice but he’s also not listening to a thing I’ve said. “I’m really fine,” I say, glancing at the waves in the hopes of finding my corpse with the egg sac before it washes away entirely. It’s gone, though, and I fight back my disappointment. “I’m going to keep walking,” I tell him, eyeing his net with curiosity. It’s got a few fish in it, and I really want to examine them but it’s been made clear to me that food is not to be messed with, so I stick to the stuff that washes up on the beach. “Thank you, though, S’bren.”

  He nods at me, and then looks over my shoulder, curious.

  I turn, too.

  There’s an entire group of people coming down to the beach. I see Tia, and Raven, Steph, Flor and Sam walking with R’jaal, Raahosh, and a few of the Tall Horn clan. All of the women are carrying baskets and the men have large rocks and the biggest pieces of driftwood that we’ve been using as seating.

  “What is all this?” I ask, bewildered, as they set up a short distance away and start unpacking their baskets.

  “Games,” S’bren says, slinging his net over his other shoulder. “The hunter games. We will be mixing them with human games and all will happen on the beach. It will make many exciting days.” He grins, all teeth, and I can tell he’s excited.

  I am…not.

  They’re going to be trudging all over my beach, ruining any chance I have for scrounging up new specimens, and they’ll be so loud and noisy that I won’t be able to think straight. “But why games? Why here?”

  “Everyone at camp is at each other’s throats,” S’bren says, shifting on his feet. “B’shit and C’lie have made all the males on edge so we must find new ways to impress them so they will listen to reason.”

  I frown up at him. “I’m not sure how this is their fault…” When he snorts and gives me a disbelieving look, I decide I’m not going to win that conversation and bail out. “Thanks for the heads up, but I think I’ll go back to camp.” Since I won’t be able to do anything here anyhow. Even now, Tia’s looking over at me with a curious expression, and I know in a few moments I’m either going to be roped in to helping out with the set-up or I’m going to be teased mercilessly because S’bren’s talking to me. “Thanks for your, er, help,” I say to him, even though he didn’t help me with a thing.

  S’bren just nods at me. “I will feed you if you need it, female. Just ask for S’bren.”

  That won’t be happening. I cast one last longing look at my beach o’ specimens and then head back toward camp. I gravitate toward the main fire, just because I see Liz there with her baby in her arms.

  I’m not normally much of a baby person, but there’s something about that tiny infant that I love. Maybe it’s that she’s such an obvious hybrid of two distinctly unrelated species that my brain is trying to figure her out. Whatever it is, I adore the sight of Liz’s Ahsoka or Harlow’s tiny Daya. Fat, plump little Glory is interesting too, but I get to see her less because both Vordis and Angie tend to monopolize her.

  Liz is all too happy to pass her daughter off when I move to her side, arms extended. She offers me little Ahsoka and then moves to the fire, dipping her cup into the simmering bag of tea over the flames. I beam down at Ahsoka, admiring her smooth blue brow, small horn nubs, and tiny human nose. Her dominant features remind me quite a bit of the islanders, actually. They have blue skin and dark hair like the sa-khui, but they lack the body plating and large horns, so those must be recessive traits when paired with another species. Harlow’s little girl has black hair, but it’s soft and curling instead of thick and bone-straight like her mate’s. When I don’t have time to poke around on the beach, I should really get one of my skins out and start marking all the traits that the babies have from each parent. Maybe I can even get Veronica to take me to the other tribe for a while, since there’s a ton of children there, and I’ve even heard rumor that a few of the babies were blonde, which must be an extremely recessive trait, unless the khui adjusts that as well.

  So fascinating. Everything about this planet is just so fascinating.

  Ahsoka stares up at me, drool running down the side of her little mouth, and then she gives me a gummy smile. I offer her a finger and she clamps down on it. Three fingers and a thumb instead of four fingers. Another dominant trait.

  “So what’s the story?” Liz asks, moving back to my side. She absently reaches over and swipes the drool off of Ahsoka’s apple cheeks and then goes back to drinking her tea.

  “Story?” I ask, cuddling Ahsoka close.

  She gestures at the beach. “Is this the game shit or is it some new crisis that my mate’s going to jump into head first?”

  Oh. I glance over at the crowd on the beach. Sure enough, Raahosh is heading over there with an authoritative step…and one daughter in his arms, another holding his hand. He heads over to R’jaal and the men begin to talk even as others pause to chitchat. I see smiles on all the faces except for Raahosh, but even he seems less stern than usual. “It’s the games.”

  She looks over at me, eyes narrowed. “You sound disgusted.”

  “I wish it wasn’t on the beach,” I admit. My reasons are selfish, of course. The changes in the weather—likely spurred on by the volcanic activity from the island—are sure to taper off, and once they do, fewer specimens
will wash up on the beach. I have a limited window in which to do uninterrupted studying, and with that many people clustered around? That’s a definite interruption.

  “I wish all of this wasn’t on the beach,” Liz says cheerfully. “But wish in one hand, shit in the other, blah blah blah.” She grimaces at her drink. “The tea here is terrible, too. There’s better leaves back at Croatoan. I need to tell Veronica to meet up with Kemli when she goes back and to raid her pantry. That woman knows her tea.”

  “Mmm.” I reply, because I’m not a fan of the tea here at all. It tastes like boiled pine needles. I watch as the men move around on the beach, pointing at the sand, and one of Liz’s daughters bounds away, only to have Raahosh chase after her. “Can I ask you something, Liz?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why is everyone acting like the tension around camp is Bridget’s fault? Or Callie?” I’d add Hannah’s name to the list, but she conveniently ran off to the fruit caves with Brooke and Taushen, a trip that I’m terribly jealous of. My focus is animal life, of course, but I still wouldn’t miss out on a chance to see something like that.

  “Because men are big babies and can’t think when their dicks are hard.” She nods out at the beach. “This is to distract them.”

  “But…why is it Bridget and Callie’s fault?”

  “I didn’t say it was. In fact, I said it wasn’t so very hard that now my mate has retreated to the beach to avoid me.” Liz smirks and takes another sip of her tea. “These men are good guys but they don’t know how to deal with women. They think that because they have penises we should be grateful to slobber on them and it’s clearly our fault when someone doesn’t want to. I can argue until I’m blue in the face—no pun intended—and it won’t get through to someone like A’tam. I’ve talked to Callie and Bridget both, though, and they know they don’t have to do jack shit because some guy’s pressuring them. I’ve also made it clear to Raahosh that if the girls complain about how the guys are acting, we’re sending their asses on a hunt just to get them out of camp. I won’t let anyone be harassed on my watch.”