The thing, some giant troll-like creature, growled and shook its head wildly, and tried to pluck him loose. He hung, then swung, off its back using his arm about its two-foot-wide neck as his saving hold. If he jammed his feet into its back just so? A crack sounded as he rammed his heels into the middle of its spine. His men had ceased to shoot, no doubt worried they’d hit him. The giant stomped one foot in front of the open garage door and now a turret opened up, instantly severing the foot before the gun shut down again.
He was circled by warriors, dancing, shifting, looking for an opening, no doubt all of them waiting for a chance to help.
Gore was redecorating this street. Only one warrior down. They could win this. He rammed his feet in again, ignoring the creature’s bellows. Another small crack sounded. When its hand came near him he jackknifed, kicked at the wrist, and fractured something in its hand. From his blind side it grabbed onto his arm and wrenched him from its neck. Having to hop about on one foot and a stump was slowing it very little.
Trouble, he was in severe trouble.
It flung him high. That was a mistake, for he kicked back into flight, zooming higher, eight or nine stories, then he plummeted back down, feet first again, the wind whipping past.
Then he saw what he’d missed. Talia was below. With her sword out and held up in readiness, the female ran in, sprinting straight up the troll’s leg, body, and spine in two strides. The sword whipped back behind her head, fast as a snake strike, as she hung in midair with only one foot on its neck.
Before she could complete the strike...
It swatted her away, with one casual hand. He heard the thump of its giant hand on her body, then the air cracked in a sonic boom.
She rolled and spun across the road, over debris, her hair whipping, her sword skittering away. The thing stomped after her, leaving a bloody stump print.
Dassenze screamed as he descended. The warriors opened up with their weapons. Brask foolishly threw himself before the creature’s path.
Then he hit, feet first again, coming down like a train on the top of its head. The pavement cracked, bowed, and spat concrete dust from under its bloody feet. This time, the snap of its neck was loud and it rocked sideways and crumpled, dead.
Lightly, he leaped off the quivering body and ran to Talia. She was rising, though scraped raw in places. Brittany had appeared too, except she wasn’t running to Talia. He followed her flight and saw where it ended. Brask lay among the leftover, rusted crisscross of some of the steel mesh humans used to reinforce concrete.
Pieces of blood-dampened steel projected from one leg and beneath him a lake of red was widening. Despite his speed, when he reached Brask, Brittany, with her hands gripping above and below the mess, had already stemmed the blood loss to a trickle. He took another step closer, nauseated at the sight yet stunned at how the healing and knitting of flesh progressed, second by second. His leg had looked mostly ripped away. Now it wasn’t. Jadd had run in also and had placed his hands on Brittany’s shoulders. This was how her power worked best, with Jadd supporting her.
He looked down on Brask, but kept his face stark and still. So close. A few more seconds and he’d have been dead. The sickening feeling in his stomach lessened. The Igrakk would live.
Breathing? Check. Shaky smile, check. Tough warrior façade. Of course.
“I...” Brask lost his composure, choking on the word. “Thank you. Frack.” He coughed again, fists clenched and white on the wire bed on which he rested. His voice came out in a squeak. “That hurt.”
“Were you trying to save Talia?” As he said that, he glanced over, his heart almost ceasing to work until he spotted her limping their way. “She’s okay.”
“Good. Can I get up now?” Brask struggled, then subsided back onto the mesh. “I think I’m caught on something.”
“Wait, you stupid Igrakk.” Brittany looked paler than Brask did and she put her hand up for Jadd to squeeze. “You almost died. Besides, I think they’ll have to cut you out. I had to heal you with the steel inside you. I’m sorry.”
From his outer thigh, coming out straight through his black tights, three thick pieces of steel projected.
“As long as he lives. Now he’s just prettier. The wounds aren’t bleeding?”
“No,” Brittany shook her head, laughing weakly. “Prettier? I healed him, inside and out. I better go check the others.”
“There’s only me,” Talia broke in with. “God. You saved him? I can wait. I can damn well wait.” She wiped her glistening eyes. “The warrior died instantly. You rest, Brit. That was amazing. Can’t tell you how much I want to hug you.”
Someone ran up with bolt cutters and began freeing Brask. The man would definitely live; he was cursing his helper.
“Cut it fracking closer to my skin. I need to be able to run without slicing up those next to me with jagged steel. I need to be able to get my armor on!”
He did a quick environment risk assessment. The troll creature was definitely dead. All was clear. No new enemies were arriving.
“Let’s all get inside. Keep the truck where it is, ready to leave if Bak-lal turn up.” There was nothing though. No one seemed to have noticed this extremely loud gunfight cross swordfight cross troll rodeo. It was eerie.
Talia, though. He drew her attention to him with a hand at her waist. “Are you really okay?”
“Yes.”
She frowned as, with finger and thumb on her chin, he turned her head this way and that, looking for bruises. Any blemish, really. He watched as her pretty pink lips curled into a pout.
“I am fine.”
“I saw it throw you yards.”
“I rolled. I curled up and was lucky. I’m fine.”
Brask grunted as yet another piece of steel snapped under the jaws of the bolt cutters. “Let him look.”
Her long, disgruntled sigh had him bristling. He couldn’t stop himself from retorting but he leaned in closer so most wouldn’t hear.
“I’d strip you here and now in the street to do this properly if I thought it warranted. Be careful.”
Her silently mouthed fuck was clear as day.
“Go, Dassenze,” Brask muttered, amused.
His glower had Brask backtracking, fast.
“Sorry, Lord. I was rude. She is a handful though, isn’t she?”
He’d gone too far, again. “Then you should handle her.”
When he let her go, Brittany came forward again.
“It’s okay, Lord. I’ll make sure she’s well. They’re the only ones who were wounded. I want to be able to rest without worrying. Let me see...” The look of concentration on Brittany’s face segued into blankness as she wrapped her hands about Talia’s forearms. “Yes. Not much really. You’re good. Bruising. Nothing serious. God knows how you escaped that without breaking bones. I guess you’re tough. Just these.” The many skin abrasions shrank and vanished. She stepped back.
“Huh. Guess it comes with the territory. Thank you, Brittany, from me as well as Brask.”
“Not a problem.”
Those were the last words he heard of the conversation. He needed to get away. Touching Talia had been a huge mistake.
Going elsewhere this late in the day was probably unnecessary if no enemy was coming. After checking the streets from a high point, he went down to see Ally. The glass and fascia of the building couldn’t be shored up. Those left from his expedition to find and destroy the queen had hunkered down at the very back offices and were cleaning weapons and talking in quiet voices. A few looked utterly exhausted. Brittany was sleeping in Jadd’s lap.
But Ally, how had she fared? To get into their room, he must pass Willow, for she’d installed herself a yard in front of the door, cross-legged on the carpet. The ceiling above was blackened and ashes had stuck up there. Her own private piece of nightmare.
She grumbled at him, low and menacing, like a watchdog guarding her master’s house, until she seemed to recognize him and went back to feeding. He wondered if she w
as aware of who was in the room. An awareness of her humanity might be all that held her back from becoming something feral.
He circled her, raising a brow at Stom but he only shrugged. She was eating something small, crunching it up and swallowing.
“What is it?”
“She ran here when the attack happened, growled at something, lots of small things, caught them. Now she’s eating them.” His mouth screwed up in distaste. Misery was evident in the blotchiness about his eyes and new lines on his face. “Ally came out and said they were nerve chewers. If nothing else, she saved us from that.”
“I see.”
A mixture of some pink organic fluid, bits of raw flesh, and crushed metal dribbled down her chin. Her eyes flared silver gray and she swung to look as he passed her. The skin on her arms seemed to be taking on a strange texture, shifting in appearance like her wings, bumpy, darker, and not human. Whether it was from eating the roaches or was inevitable from whatever possessed her being in contact with her body for so long, he couldn’t say.
So Willow was a roach and rat catcher. As he edged by her, a dark frond or feather or scale from her strange wing brushed him and, for a particle of time, he tasted something he’d not encountered for centuries.
How had he not known?
Dark matter? It seemed so. He paused to regard her. To what diabolical place had Ally sent her? She harbored a parasite from the depths of space. One that, it was rumored, had swallowed or corrupted whole crews of ships, leaving them drifting in space and lifeless.
Well, as the humans said, now the icing was on the cake.
As if they didn’t have enough surprise ways to die.
Ally and Rimmil were unharmed, so he set off for somewhere high so he could meditate on what was to come. At the very top story of this building he found a gutted office ready for renovations. Wires dangled from the ceiling. Bare beams and unclad walls set a scene of rawness. He liked that. So he removed a glass window and sat half in, half out of the office, his back against the frame of the large window. Birds flew past and eyed him. The streets below remained quiet. Wind gusts pushed at his face and he came to understand that he’d messed up everything badly.
The women were mostly disabled. The powers he imagined they would be given were weak and could barely help in most battles. Brittany was the only one who functioned. The rest, he had no justification for taking them into battle. So now he was left with a meager force of warriors with hand weapons to kill off a factory queen that could create giants and invisible girls with invisible knives that could carve through armor.
He’d not checked the probe data for ages, thinking it only worth looking at if the females used their powers, and now he had. The drain on the sun’s mass had increased a hundredfold over the past few days and most of it did not coincide with anything the women had done. Either his theory was wrong or something else was doing this. It was her of course, the queen, she was using earth magic and what else could she be doing except making soldiers? Special ones.
He’d thought that with the witches he’d been given the jigsaw pieces to the solution but his enemy seemed to have the complete set of interchangeable parts. She was using fantastical stories from this planet’s history as the blueprints for an army of strange and powerful creatures.
His hands were shaking. He stared at them, palm up, willing them to be still.
What was he doing? Talia and Brask had almost died. What. Was. He. Doing?
He’d never doubted himself until today.
When he felt the two of them coming up the stairway, he was tempted to drop over the side and fly away – to not be here when they arrived. That would be cowardice. He might lack for ideas, but he didn’t lack for courage.
Brask came through the double entryway first. Fifteen yards away. No armor, just the tight-fitting black military garb the warriors wore beneath it. OD20 rifle slung at his back. Limping though. The metal in his thigh was limiting his movement.
Talia wore those breathtakingly small denim shorts and her tank top, with the katana sheathed and its scabbard jammed into her wide leather belt. Deadly but scantily clad. Perhaps it was lucky he was not taking the women this afternoon. There was no way to provide them with armor.
“Why are you here?”
Brask scrunched his shoulders back then flexed his leg, very carefully, and sighed. “To fix the elevator?”
“Humor.” He grunted. “You could have asked me to meet you somewhere lower down.”
Talia took a slow step forward. “We didn’t want to disturb you.”
“You mean you didn’t want to forewarn me.”
She shrugged and smiled wryly. “You could’ve run away. We both knew you’d sense us coming. Besides, you are a smidgeon scary. Even Brask would admit to being awed.”
Though Brask shot her a disapproving glance, she ignored him except for a small tilt of her eyebrow and then her hip, as if to say, it’s true.
Little signals. Intimate signals even.
The two of them had some rapport now. Better than before. And that made him feel...left out, envious, a little crappy, the humans might say.
“Say to me what you wish.” He didn’t budge from the windowsill. “Say it then leave.”
“Grumpy.” Then she smirked at him.
His temper rose. She could smirk at Brask but not him. “Your disrespect is noted.”
That she paled satisfied him. Good. That he wanted to bend her over his knee...annoyed him some more.
Chapter 21
The factory queen fumed, still below ground, still in her brain pod. Such great things she’d achieved, but the big one, he’d grown past her capacity to keep. Released, he’d headed for the best smells and that’d been the Preyfinders. Almost. Almost, he’d wrecked her plans.
Injecting the spicy earth magic into the humans was like fireworks and cooking, birthday parties with serial killers. Fun and magic and death. They mixed but oh the things that rose from the oven sometimes made her lenses crack.
No more trolls. The boys grew too big, too crazy. She’d had to dig a big enormous hasty tunnel to let him out. She’d stick to converting girls. So many of those lay waiting for her drills and nerve chewers.
She flicked hungrily through her video feeds studying her captives, one after the other.
Next. Next. Next. Next. Next.
Another day for the next batch. March them out for her Bak-lal brethren and sisters to see. They would be impressed. She clacked her relays and sent messages sizzling down the hard wires and the soft frequency channels.
Tomorrow she would climb upward, shedding dirt and trees and grass and emerge into the sunlight.
This Earth was ripe for harvesting.
Soon...she eyed the distant towers showing in video feed nineteen, they would come to her. More toys, only this time she would catch an Ascend, a bunch of Igrakks, if they lived, and a whole troupe of little witches.
She’d swallow them and see what she could cook from them.
*****
Talia managed to shut her mouth. Disrespect noted?
Fuck. The man god had a deft way of making her both fear and want him. Considering their aim in coming here, it was difficult not to picture him in bed with her, commanding her like he did. How was she supposed to argue logically with her head metaphorically in her pants?
“Let’s get closer.” Brask indicated she should move forward. “I’m not yelling across this room.”
The room was big and echoey. She’d never seen Dassenze so moody. The Ascend had picked a good room for it, all wrecked and up high, with wires and crap dangling from the beams, and crushed plasterboard underfoot. He was like an eagle with ruffled feathers in his aerie.
Tread carefully or get pecked but she couldn’t help putting a teasing sway into her hips.
She stopped alongside Brask, three yards from Dassenze’s window perch, rested her palm on the hilt of her katana and waited, watching Brask out the corner of her eye. No one would ever believe her if she t
ook him home on her arm. Man, he was a big, tall hunk of blond-haired sexy alien, though he’d scare the neighbor’s dog, and the neighbor. The cops would run away too.
She blinked when he spotted her scrutiny and sent her a rough smile. It’d made her recall the last time he’d had her naked and over his knee. Taking him home might be a mistake, if home still existed.
Even knowing what Brask was about to say, for they’d discussed this at length, she cringed inside as he opened his mouth to speak. This was going to embarrass the hell out of her.
“What happened earlier, Lord, we can all see that something is wrong. Talia was almost killed in what must be a minor encounter compared to what we’ll find inside the factory queen’s nest. Brittany is fully bond mated with Jadd and her powers of healing are enormous. Talia’s abilities are hobbled.” He gestured toward her. “She still has no true marks. There can only be one reason for that. All three of us know this. You have to bond mate with Talia. You have to. I’ll step away; we can alternate when we have her if that makes you happier, Lord. But you have to do this. I won’t have her any more at risk than she has to be. We cannot afford to fail.”
“Are you done?” Dassenze swiveled on the windowsill, setting his feet on the floor and looking squarely at them.
“Yes, Lord.” Brask straightened. “I apologize if any of that seemed badly worded. I’m not a wordsmith.”
“Quiet. You said you were done. First of all, none of the females are going down into the queen. They’re staying here, locked into the bank vault.”
“What?” Brask looked confused.
“As are you.” He nodded toward Brask’s injured leg. “With that injury, with the metal inside you, your muscles are going to tear if you run. Second...” He forestalled Brask’s spluttering reply. “You assume I know that I have to bond mate with her. I don’t know this at all. There are reasons why it would be immensely bad for me to ever do this and I do not need to justify myself. In any case, there is no need now. Your problem is nonexistent. We are done. Leave.”
“Lord. You...”
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