Rachel made a face. “I wouldn’t expect many sympathy cards anytime soon. Especially not from the commanders.”
Great.
You really couldn’t win, could you?
But hey, maybe he deserved it. It wasn’t like any of his gallivanting—as Alaric had put it—actually ended up doing much good for anyone. Sure, they’d helped some raknoth escape the mountains, and hopefully secured them as allies, but that was something they should’ve been able to accomplish with a comm call or some messengers. Kole was still dead, Katashina was probably still burning, and Jarek had gone and damn near got himself amputated.
Which reminded him. “Fela?”
He caught sight of the exosuit’s collapsed form in the far corner at the same time Al said, “Right here, sir. Mostly in one piece, even.”
Jarek winced at the ugly opening Gada’s claws had shredded in Fela’s right shoulder. It must’ve been a single claw, actually, looking at it now. He couldn’t really say the suit had seen worse, but if Al wasn’t too worried, it must mean he thought the damage was something he and Pryce could handle.
“Glad to hear it, buddy.” Jarek looked back at Rachel. “And Gada? Do we know where he went?”
“Likely to recover and continue hunting less protected clans,” Drogan said. “Possibly even to recruit those of my kin who would yet hope to rejoin the masters.”
“The council’s debating whether we should focus on bolstering our defenses or going after Gada while he’s on the run,” Rachel said.
“There’s a slight difference between running and being ‘on the run’,” Jarek said.
Rachel nodded. “Plus we have no idea when the rest of his buddies are gonna show up. I voted we set an entire city of traps for the bastards.”
“I like the way the lady thinks,” came an amused voice from the doorway. Pryce.
He stepped into the room and hesitated only a moment at the sight of Drogan before heading to the foot of Jarek’s bed.
He took in Jarek’s condition with a grim expression. “You look like hell, son.”
“You should see the other guy,” Jarek said. Rachel arched a brow at him and he added, “I mean, like, out of professional curiosity and stuff. Galaxy-conquering dinosaurs, man.”
Rachel tilted her head in concession.
Pryce frowned, thinking about that. “I may need to see some footage of that one.” He went to inspect the damage to Fela’s shoulder and let out a low whistle. “Must’ve been one scary bastard, though. How are you holding up in there, Alfred?”
“Quite well, sir,” Al said. “Thank you for asking. As you know, most of my hardware is fortunately housed in Fela’s posterior portions.”
Jarek shot a wide grin at Rachel. “Al’s always on my ass one way or another.”
“Woe is me,” Al said in a somber tone.
Pryce chuckled and turned back to them. “I’ll patch the armor as best I can. Not so sure about the servos, but I’m sure Alfred and I can figure something out.”
“Much obliged, old man.” Jarek turned to Rachel. “Mind doing the honor of keeping her safe while I’m not inside of her?”
Rachel arched an eyebrow. “You want a phrasing check on that one?”
He made his best thoughtful face and finally shook his head. “Nah, I’m good with it.”
She smiled and stood. “Fine. I’m already supposed to be helping with the cloak generators over there anyways. I guess I can guard your mistress while I’m at it.”
“My deepest gratitude,” Al said. “I think.”
“Don’t mention it.” Rachel turned to Pryce. “I wanted to talk to you about something else too.”
“Mysterious,” Jarek said.
Rachel wiggled her fingers most mysteriously in the air, but her expression quickly sobered. “We need to figure out how to kill that thing if hacking it to pieces isn’t a valid option.”
“Hey, he bled when I cut him,” Jarek said. “And you said you took his eye out. He’s got soft spots.”
“Well yeah, but that’s an eye. That’s like the one guaranteed soft spot.”
“And it will regrow,” Drogan added. “Likely quite quickly.”
“Fire always works,” Pryce said. “A strong hide won’t keep blood or whatever else from boiling…” He wrinkled his nose. “Not to sound morbid or anything. Still, easier to turn up the heat than to figure out how to swing a bigger stick harder.”
“Or a bigger Whacker,” Jarek said. “Bastard sheared mine clean through.”
Pryce’s eyebrows reached for the ceiling. “With what?”
“I wanna say claws,” Jarek said, “but sword-fingers is probably a better description.”
“Galileo’s beard…” Pryce muttered. “Scary bastard indeed.”
“Space dinosaurs, man.” Jarek shook his head. “Not even once.”
“Right,” Pryce said. “Well I’ll see what I can do about that too.”
“That’s kinda what I wanted to talk to you about,” Rachel said.
“Most mysterious,” Jarek said.
Pryce perked up. “Why don’t we step on over to my office then?”
“You’re okay here?” Rachel asked Jarek, shooting an uncertain glance at Drogan.
“Oh, sure. Stumpy and I have big plans.”
Pryce started to say bye, then paused, glancing between Jarek and Drogan’s impressively full cup of miracle spit with a curious expression. “Wait, is that—is he…?”
“Raknoth spit. Magical healing properties.” Jarek waved his good hand. “You know, that old chestnut.”
“Sure, sure,” Pryce said, nodding. “Guess I’ll… see you soon then.” He turned and then did a double-take. “I’m gonna have to hear more about how the hell that works later. You know that, right?”
Jarek chuckled and waved him away. “Go on, you old scholar, you. I’m sure Stumpy will be happy to answer your questions later.”
Drogan let out a soft growl, still salivating into his cup.
“I’m sure Alton will be happy to answer your questions later,” Jarek amended.
“Okay, then.” Pryce frowned at the cup one more time. “Get…” He shook himself out of whatever mental tangent he’d wandered off on. “Get some rest. I’ll see you soon.”
They turned to leave, and Al dramatically cleared his throat through Fela’s speakers.
“Oh, shit,” Rachel said. “Sorry, Al.”
Jarek smiled at the AI’s leg-jerking shenanigans. “Go on, buddy. You can do it.”
“Very well, sir.” Fela rose smoothly to her feet under Al’s control and gave a neat little bow. “Do be careful while I’m gone.”
“Oh don’t you worry about little old me,” Jarek watched Drogan drip one last big globule of drool into the paper cup and wipe his mouth on his sleeve. “I’m clearly in fantastic hands.”
The three left in their bizarre little convoy, each one of them looking back at Jarek one last time as if it were a requirement to pass through the door. Rachel’s glance lingered longest, her gaze flicking uncertainly between him and Drogan, her posture still just a touch stiff, defensive.
“I’d ask you if that seemed kinda weird,” Jarek said to Drogan when they’d gone, “but something tells me you’re not the guy I should be asking about sporadic human behavior.”
“You refer to Rachel Cross’ defensive reaction to my presence?”
Jarek looked at the raknoth, mildly surprised. “So you did notice?” He frowned down at the blanketed bump of his feet. “Maybe she’s just shaken up. I mean, can you imagine saying goodbye to this face?”
Bad joke turned to sad joke as his fingers brushed the scar lines Golga had left him, starting on his forehead. First that, now his shoulder. There might not be much left to say goodbye to if he kept this up.
He didn’t mention that maybe she was just tired of sharing the same breathing air with any raknoth in general, or that, underneath the bad jokes, “shaken up” was about three sizes too small a phrase to describe how he him
self was feeling after having barely lived through that monster Gada bearing down on him with all of hell’s fury and more.
Jarek’s nightmares were about to enter a whole new dimension of terrifying after that battle. But, somehow, none of this seemed like stuff Drogan needed to know.
At least, not until the raknoth said, “I would wager it has more to do with the fact that she tried to kill Al’Braka before I arrived.”
It took Jarek a few seconds to remember Al’Braka was Alton Parker’s real name, or at least the one the raknoth had given him before he’d decided to change his ways and adopt a new one.
When he did remember, though…
The final moments he remembered from the fight flashed through his mind, and the uncomfortable feeling he realized now had been quietly percolating in the periphery shifted to a full-on sinking stomach.
Back on the mountain, Jarek had been sure his misstep and resultant trip had cost him the fight—right up until Alton had made an inexplicably awkward stumble into Gada’s path. Almost like the raknoth had his own accident.
“What do you mean, she tried to kill him?” he asked quietly.
“Al’Braka wouldn’t say much,” Drogan said. “And only through our telepathic link at that, but it was little more than an unfortunately-timed push from what I gathered.”
“But Rachel…”
What? Wouldn’t have done that? After everything she’d said about Alton and the raknoth, could he really be so sure?
Something—and it felt dangerously like naïve hope—told him she wouldn’t have gone so far as to deliberately try to take one of their allies out in the middle of such a dangerous fight. But a crucially-timed push, seemingly out of nowhere—who else would it have been but Rachel? If she’d seen it as simply putting a raknoth at risk to buy Jarek time to recover and find an opening…
“Shit,” he whispered.
After everything she’d said back on the Enochians’ ship, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine she might be okay with that kind of means to an end mentality right now.
Or maybe not.
Suddenly, the conversation they’d just had took on a whole new light. Her hesitation. The tears. It was as if she’d been trying to tell him something. And then there was her reaction to Drogan’s arrival.
And here he’d let himself fancy it all had something to do with him and his light butchery experience.
He met Drogan’s gaze. “If this is true, what are you planning to do about it?”
Drogan studied him for a stretch before answering. “I have neither proof nor any great love for the one who has eschewed his true name. At present, I am not compelled to do a thing. If she were to turn against me or my own clan, however…”
“Yeah.” Jarek shifted uncomfortably and did his best to keep a wince of pain from seizing his face. “Well, I think it goes without saying that anyone who tries to touch a golden hair on her head is gonna have to go through me first.”
Drogan pointedly shifted his gaze to the mass of bandages covering Jarek’s shoulder, looking slightly amused but saying nothing.
“Whatever,” Jarek said. “Just a flesh wound anyway. I’ll heal.”
“Perhaps.” Drogan stepped forward and almost gingerly began to peel Jarek’s bandages away. “If you say please.”
“Yeah?” Jarek said, suppressing the vulnerable shudder that tried to run its way down his back. “And how about if I say ‘lick me, you glib stumpy bastard’?”
Drogan showed him a particularly reptilian smile and bent to inspect the wound.
After a cursory glance at the ugly bloody line stitched across a disturbing length of his shoulder and upper chest, Jarek turned his thoughts back to Rachel in an active attempt to distract himself from Drogan’s poking, prodding, and occasional low rumbles.
If she’d really done what Drogan claimed, and if she was headed off to Pryce’s, where the Enochians would be holed up working on these cloaking fields of theirs…
Moving as carefully as he could, he reached with his good hand for the comm on the bedside table.
He needed to talk to Rachel before the shit irrevocably hit the fan.
14
“Something troubling you?”
Pryce’s question cut through the haze that had settled over Rachel’s mind. She’d allowed herself to sink so deeply into the rumbling purr of the old diesel engine and the mindless seeing-without-seeing of the dreary surroundings passing by in the passenger door window that she’d nearly forgotten Pryce was there at all. And now…
“Huh?”
It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard Pryce’s question so much as that the crucial bits of her brain didn’t seem to be getting around to consciously processing it. She wasn’t so sure she wanted them to.
Pryce offered an easy shrug, keeping his eyes on his driving. “Call me crazy, but I’m getting the feeling a few of your marbles might be heavier than average at the moment.”
That was one way of putting it. Another might be that she’d basically stabbed one of her own allies in the back without warning. And sure, maybe she’d done it out of blind fear for Jarek, or because she had serious concerns Alton or any other raknoth could themselves become turncoats in this fight—willing or otherwise. Maybe.
Or maybe she’d done it out of pure, unresolved rage, boiling underneath—or maybe not so underneath—the surface even after all these years.
Did a turncoat ever really have any grounds to say they’d only done it to keep the other guy from possibly, maybe doing the same?
She wasn’t sure. About any of it. But she especially wasn’t sure she wanted to spill this particular heavy marble to Pryce—or to anyone, really.
“I’m just upset,” she finally said. Not even a lie. Not at all. “This thing we’re up against”—she shook her head—“and what it did to Jarek…”
Her comm buzzed before she figured out where she was going with the thought.
Jarek. Speak of the handsome devil.
The message on the comm quickly dissolved any sense of comfort.
We need to talk, Goldilocks.
Shit. Had Drogan told him? Did Drogan even know?
She nearly jumped when Pryce cut into her paranoid rumination.
“I don’t imagine many people would go through what the two of you have and keep climbing back to their feet for more,” Pryce said slowly. “Whatever it’s doing to you, whatever you’re feeling… Well, for what it’s worth, just keep in mind that most of us would have soiled ourselves and ducked for cover by now.”
She might have smiled at that if she wasn’t too busy wondering if what she’d done was worse.
What would Jarek think? What was he thinking right now?
Pryce guided his big blue truck through a one-two turn, left and then right, and the dread that had taken up residence in Rachel’s gut wriggled in anticipation.
Had she realized before joining Pryce that the Enochians had already taken Alton to Pryce’s place to rest and recuperate as they got to work on the cloaking field generators…
She would’ve gotten in the truck anyway. Or so she told herself. Because, despite whatever other shit might currently be spattering down from the fan blades, they needed to get these cloak generators up and running if they wanted to keep their forces together long enough to even confront Gada. And on top of that, Rachel would be damned if she was going to turn away from what she’d done and try to avoid Alton and the Enochians like some frightened child.
“There was also a bit of a misunderstanding out there,” she said quietly.
So maybe she kind of did want to spill that confounded heavy marble.
The pissed-off Enochian standing out front of Pryce’s shop as they pulled up kind of put a damper on that, though.
Pryce stopped the truck and looked back and forth between Haldin’s crossed-arm sentinel stance ahead and what Rachel hoped was her neutral I’m fine, and everything’s totally cool face.
Pryce’s gaze settled on her as he slid
the truck into park and killed the engine. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with said misunderstanding, would it?”
Ahead, Haldin uncrossed his arms and started for the truck with a level, confident stride.
Rachel swallowed, and shot Pryce what she hoped was a convincing shrug. “It might. Maybe you should head inside while we talk. Thanks for the ride.”
Pryce’s wrestling brows indicated he wasn’t so convinced that was the best course of action, but he nodded and hopped out of the truck.
“You too, Al,” she added back at Fela’s form as she climbed out of the truck.
“But, ma’am, I’m perfectly capable of—”
“It’s between us,” Rachel said. “We’re all friends here, I’ll be fine.”
Judging by how slowly Fela disbanded from the truck bed, Al was about as thrilled as Pryce about the unexplained tension. For all she knew, Al had already pieced the puzzle together without anyone’s help. But, after a reluctant pause, they both headed into the shop through the front door.
Rachel turned to face Haldin as he covered the last ten yards between them. She tried to refrain from fidgeting with her staff, but couldn’t help pulling her mental defenses tight—just in case.
“An interesting choice of words,” he said quietly as he drew up by the front of Pryce’s truck. “We’re all friends here, huh?”
Rachel tried to keep her expression neutral. “What did he tell you?”
Haldin gave her a humorless grin. “He didn’t. Not until we were back here and you were safely off at HQ. But I knew something had happened. Alton’s never been the fastest or most adept fighter among his kin, but what happened back there, it just didn’t add up, and neither did his story. Not until he finally admitted that maybe, just maybe, someone had given him a little push.” He shook his head, staring razor daggers at her. “Just a harmless little push, right?”
It had been a mistake. She should be able to admit that. A mistake bred in a moment of thoughtless panic. Gada had been so fearsome, so powerful. They’d needed an opening. She hadn’t thought it through, had only been trying to help. And sure, it had been wrong to throw Alton under the bus, so to speak, but…
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 68