"You're not accustomed to others attending to you." The rhythmic calm of Alex's voice hummed against me while he carried me to his car.

I leaned into it, hung my weariness upon it, after having given up on trying to persuade him to let me down. But that still didn't mean I had to like the idea of being so dysfunctional that I needed to be carried. "I'm not one for being coddled, no."

His gaze slid sideways to me. "There is a difference in allowing oneself to be helped when the need is genuine."

"Sure." I relented to the generality of the statement, though in my opinion it didn't apply to me. The look Alex gave me in response to my obstinacy was gentle, askance. "It's just..." I inhaled shallowly and pressed my lips, then exhaled a moment later. "It's just I'm not used to being—helped," I finished lamely.

Although it's proving to not be the worst thing in the world, I decided with my face beginning to warm, focusing on the smooth, sure gait with which he carried me. My thoughts then turned to Micah's arm going around me to help me off the mall bench. Okay, so maybe I could try to accept help when it was needed.

A brief smile touched my lips. Despite the injured side and swollen ankle, it was good being this close to him. His arms around me felt...right.

Shifting to place a hand on his shoulder in a more conversational position, I reminded him, "You said you would tell me what the danger was."

"I did," he answered shortly.

"Your wind devvis—they called what they were fighting a 'him'. So it wasn't one of those umbra creatures. It was a person."

"That is correct."

"Were they fighting another wind devvi?"

"Sun devvi, actually," Alex replied, adding, "judging from the flash."

"Oh?" Sun was another devvi type. The brilliant flash had nothing to do with lightning then. "But it's the middle of the night. Isn't it unusual for a person whose nature is the sun to be out and about after dark in a threatening manner?"

"Yes, in fact, it is very unusual. We don't know for certain if you were in any specific danger, but when Bettihemae alerted our guard that she detected a presence nearby who wasn't cooperating when asked to identify themselves, I went for you. I wasn't going to take the risk."

"Your cousin alerted the guard?" Surprised, my attention shifted from Alex to watch the fog that was beginning to roll back in, making it difficult to see ten feet beyond us. I hadn't seen the tall girl with the chestnut colored hair at the theater, but speaking of the devil...

Our conversation immediately cut off as the fog parted to reveal a sleek car—a silver corvette of the early sixties persuasion— and I shrank against his chest to let the blanket overshadow me at the unsettling sight of a lean silhouette spread across the trunk.

Head tilted back to spill chestnut hair over glass, she sumptuously lounged, her slim figure motionless against the back windshield in a fog-induced bask. I gulped as I took in the lanky, six- foot-plus female. His cousin, Bettihemae. If Alex was a water devvi, I would probably be right to assume she was one as well.

Spread out like a goddess in all her glory, her body was sparsely adorned in a charcoal, gossamer maxi dress, her skin glowing alabaster in the wet night. An air of predator wafted about her while she leaned back on bent elbows. Her provocative pose reminded me that Alex had said his mother was a siren, and I wondered if this was what she had been like.

Gaze returning to Alex, I glimpsed unease in his expression before it emptied. He came to a halt by the passenger side. Opening the door, he adjusted his careful hold to ease me onto the front seat. Our heads jerked up in unison when his cousin let out an animalistic hiss.

He straightened to give her a hard look. A wordless forewarning rumbled through him, threatening. No, his mom hadn't been anything like Bettihemae.

"Oh A-l-e-xxx." Her voice rose and fell in its sing-songy fashion.

Feline, aquamarine eyes took us in as a wave of uneven, chestnut bangs fell forward to cover the expanse of her wide forehead. Jeepers, what had she been doing to her hair? It looked as though a toddler had gotten hold of the beautician's sheers and hacked away at it, even more so now than the first day I'd met her.

"Oh Alex," she crooned again. "Did you give her too hard of a push when she hesitated at the top or does she always descend stairs in such a graceful manner?"

"Ignore her," he said while she continued to mock-warble her cousin's name. "Will you be okay here while I mix something for the pain? I need to get it from my kit in the trunk."

"Um, okay?" I nodded, the motion slight, not wanting to draw attention to myself.

As it was, this was the first female devvi I met outside of my own group, and she was quite intimidating. Mind you, Indy herself was no picnic, but at least her intentions were to tend to my well-being. This one however...

Giving me a last reassuring touch on my arm through the blanket, Alex turned to head for the back of the car, addressing his cousin as he approached, "You can stop calling out the shortened version of my name any time now. As you know, you do not have the right to be doing so. You never will have the right." He paused by the rear tire, giving me a wistful look. "Especially now that I have found her."

"Ah-h yes, your Eos!" The she-devvi burst out in ceremonious grandeur as she pushed up from the Corvette's trunk to leap to the ground with a deadly grace. "The impossible made flesh,'" she shrilled, opening her arms wide. "An unholy paradox of 'us' and 'them.' Oh yes! Let us invite the abomination into our household!"

She then dropped her over-exaggerated gestures and rounded the front of the car. Her eyes taunted me as her predatory stalk brought her closer, her swaying gait bumping long hair against her thighs.

"I wonder if the embers of three thousand years' worth of selective breeding will be hot enough to roast those little white confectionaries the humans seem to be so fond of, paired with graham crackers and chocolate. What are they called? Aurora?"

I jumped in the seat, ribs throbbing, cowering backward when she leaned in. She smelled of instability and salt. She's a salt water devvi.

"You've spent enough time pretending to be human. I'm sure you know," Bettihemae murmured, lips parted and aqua eyes imploring as she traced a hand along the doorway. "They're powdery and turn black the longer they stay over an open flame?"

Like you, I could see her mentally finish. "Marshmallows," I supplied quietly, hoping she would go away if I played along.

"Marsh-mallooows!" Lips spreading wide to frame startlingly white teeth, a low giggle rumbled from her. "Did you hear that, Alex? Marshmallows. I want them put on the grocery list." She let her hand slip from the car's roof, reaching toward me. "What a pretty and smart female," his cousin crooned, letting her fingers drift closer. "I'm sure you'll give my Alex pretty, smart half-breeds."

I blinked from my withdrawn position when a glass of clear liquid materialized in my hands. Bettihemae was suddenly gone. The force of Alex spinning her away with an angry growl to pin her against the car had it rocking on its springs.

A slow snicker slid through her as he forced her shoulders against the car, pressing his weight and strength against her. Bettihemae then exhaled, long and slow, her breath coming out in a billow of fog that overtook them both. The dull white drifted past the opened door, and I stiffened—it tasted like bittersweet tang. The same undefined taste that had arisen in my own saliva, frequently with Micah, and one time with Alex.

She giggled again, and my attention was drawn to the motion of a long, bare leg picking up from the ground to curve around Alex's waist, pinning him to her front. His expression went from pissed to curiously flustered, and I inhaled sharply as I watched him struggle against some primordial urge she triggered in him.

"You know, dear Alex-ander, you really shouldn't be starting things you have no intention of finishing," Bettihemae taunted as a flash of annoyance passed over Alex's face and he let go of her. "Gods you're b-o-rrrring," she rolled the word across her tongue. She then turned her head to transfix me with her gaze while ignoring Alex, who gripped her ankle, still on his hip, to twist it off. "Your Eos abomination appears bored as well."

Oh I don't know. I would probably describe myself as more petrified than bored.

"Hopefully you'll finally man up when the time comes to keep her entertained."

Um, and rude much were we?

"So bored. What to do, what to do... A road trip!" Bettihemae suddenly announced. "Oh how I love traveling on the human's interstate system. It's so neolithically solid." She grinned in my direction. "We can take your Eos up to Lake Erie's shore and tie her to a rock. That way, the Fires will have something to play with when they come back to slaughter the rest of your mother's people."

She eyed Alex, smiling when her cousin's eyes closed at her cruel words. Tilting her head, she watched him ball his hands into fists. But he did nothing more.

"Aww, too soon?" She blinked innocently.

"Bettihemae," Alex said, "would you just—go."

She pushed away from the car and started walking. "Your wish is always my command," she called out over her shoulder, disappearing into a wall of fog.

"Well, isn't she a fuzzy ball of sunshine," I offered in the silence that overtook us.

Er, I hoped she'd left. It was kind of hard to tell, what with the fog. Maybe she could turn into water vapor? Yeah, that would be a real treat. I eased up from my huddle against the center console, taking care not to send a pulse of pain through my re-injured side.

The blanket slipped from my shoulders as I straightened and readjusted my grip on the water glass. Alex finally opened his eyes, a long-established weariness about him. Coming back to the passenger side, he stooped and settled himself along the bottom of the doorframe. He examined my swollen ankle through the blanket. A pained sound slipped from me despite his gentleness.

"Yeah, there's nothing—broken," he mumbled disjointedly what he'd already diagnosed, as if struggling to separate himself from the last few minutes. "It won't take much to mend it."

Disquieted at his solemn state, with hesitant fingers I touched the top of his head, wanting to somehow console him. His cousin's cruel parting taunt had really gotten to him. His mother had recently passed, and her homeland had been under attack from an outside group? I wonder if the two were connected?

As my fingers moved through his damp hair to rest on his forehead, the direct contact sent shivers through us both. Looking up, his once tight features were now soothed. Alex touched the glass still in my grasp, forgotten in my concern. "Drink," he insisted.

"It is just water?" I brought the glass up to carefully sip.

Mmm, I marveled. Really wet water.

"A restorative mix," he said. "Hydrogen-enriched water that heals injury. It will stop any internal hemorrhaging, so the bruising won't be as bad. Hold some in your mouth before swallowing. It will heal your bitten tongue."

I took a generous mouthful. My hair, pushed behind one ear, fell forward when a strong gust of wind funneled in through the open door.

He smoothed it back. "I will apologize for my cousin's erratic behavior. Although I suppose you would never hear her apologize, even on a normal day."

"She's always like...like that?" I wanted to say a "psychopathic loony who needed to be fitted with a straitjacket instead of a prom dress," but I kept the unofficial diagnosis to myself.

To be honest, there might a physical reason behind an emotional instability. Sometimes other things—like unbalanced hormones—came into play, something I wouldn't sense.

"Bettimae has...gone through a lot the past few years," he offered.

Betti-mae? I wondered at the shortened version. I watched as a troubling thought stirred the surface of his calmed exterior, like a pebble leaving ripples.

"To compound the situation, she has come into heat for the first time. It's typical for devvi females approaching twenty, but she's having an extra hard time dealing."

Wait a minute. Female devvis came into heat? Thoughts pinged through me as I processed this new information. So then, the bittersweet tang Bettihemae experienced when Alex pressed her against the car had been her instinct being triggered to mate? Oh holy cheese, no way!

He shifted to grasp something tangled in my hair. He removed a leaf, its green color pale, with a little bit of red edging. That's right, this far northeast, the leaves changed color and fell. My first real autumn—and female devvis came into heat! Oh crap!

"She wasn't trying to hurt her. She was reaching for this," he was saying to himself, spinning the leaf's stem between two fingers.

"Well, I best be getting you back," he announced, dropping the leaf.

I watched the leaf drift to the parking lot. As Alex stood to close the door and walk to the other side of the car, I thought of my period: my non-existent period.

While all the other girls had started theirs in their early teens, mine had never really amounted to anything significant until the past few months. But if devvi females didn't come into heat until much later, I didn't know what to think.

I wasn't old enough to be coming into heat, and too old to just be starting menstruation. Yet here I was, seventeen, my body finally settling on a regular cycle. Maybe my mixture of human and devvi genetics had settled on a median age?

With a rustle of jeans against leather, Alex slid into the driver's seat, and the door banged shut.

-------------------------

Okay, readers!  At this point, I would like to point out we have reached a "semi-reveal" for the reasoning behind the book's title: SUN CATCH HER.  We had a "terminology reveal" in the previous chapter: "devvis" is the term for the elementals in our story.  In this chapter we hear further about the various types: wind, water, and the being that was just chased away by the wind devvis was SUN.  Hmmm, a sun being is skulking about in a threatening manner, and everyone is scrambling to keep Aurora out of reach. Perhaps we will see more of this sun person later on? Could it be that he/she/they are after Aurora... the SUN is trying to CATCH HER?

VOTE if you'd roast marshmallows with Bettihemae! She seems to want some campfire side company ;)