“Jarek!” Rachel cried. “We’ve got a situation over here!”
“Sit-rep, Al.” He couldn’t afford to drop his eyes from his opponents, not when they could cover dozens of yards at a leap.
“Five of eight Unity men down, sir,” Al said. “Enemy forces still unloading.”
Well that was the opposite of good. And things weren’t going much better in his own fight. As satisfying as removing Slender Face’s hand had been, the raknoth was hardly incapacitated. The scaly bastard was already pulling himself to his feet. And—
A sound like a pride of lions roaring in perfect synchrony rattled the air.
“And there appears to be a third raknoth here, sir.”
“Gee thanks, Al,” Jarek said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
This was beyond not good. If they didn’t do something to balance the odds—and do it quickly—things were going to go downhill fast once raknoth number three cut through Unity’s meager forces and moved in on him and the others. Unfortunately, the raknoth decided to skip step one completely.
“Six o’clock incoming, sir!” Al cried.
The thudding impacts of the raknoth’s footsteps had been warning enough.
Jarek reluctantly dropped his eyes from Mosen and Toady and whirled to strike at the new threat.
The rust-colored raknoth darted under the top-down diagonal cut with disturbing agility and delivered an open-palm strike to Jarek’s lowered shoulder as he flew by. Even in passing, the raknoth’s blow was substantial enough to send Jarek tumbling haphazardly toward Rachel and the others.
They managed to scatter before his armored bulk plowed into them. Alaric grunted in pain as a shot found him now outside of Rachel’s protective barrier. Jarek scrambled to his feet and shielded the old cowboy with his armored body while Rachel and Lea closed back in tight. Jarek handed Alaric off to Lea and spun around, expecting to find a raknoth flying down on them from above.
Toady and the rusty-hided newcomer were both gathering themselves to leap when they jolted as if they’d received a strong shock. Behind them, Mosen and Slender Face were looking around, likewise confused.
The three raknoth whipped around in unison to face the woods where they’d tumbled with Haldin and Alton earlier.
Jarek realized the quad had gone quiet, and now everyone seemed to be following the gazes of the three raknoth.
There was a low hum from the tree line, steadily growing closer. Jarek eyed the nearest of the three raknoth, Rusty, and wondered if he should strike while they were distracted.
Before he could, the hum intensified—not really in volume so much as in the way it rumbled through Jarek’s chest.
He glanced back just as a large, dark shape crested the tree line.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Jarek mumbled as the ship that was unmistakably the one they’d been looking for pulled into view.
It was fairly large, longer than it was wide, and its loosely cylindrical form rippled with fluid, bulbar shapes, as if the hull had been cast over top of an array of bubbles of varying sizes. What that hull was made of, he couldn’t say, but it shimmered oddly from dark black to light purple at different spots and shifted fluidly as the ship glided smoothly forward.
“I don’t believe that ship is of this planet, sir,” Al said as the craft came to a resting hover overhead.
“No kidding.”
The three raknoth ahead were statuesque, staring up at the ship with their fiery red orbs. Rachel, too, was looking in the general direction of the ship with a distant blank look, like she was otherwise engaged.
Silent tension hung in the air for several seconds, and then, without so much as a honk, the strange ship turned and shot off to the northwest with impressive speed.
Everyone seemed to snap back into their right minds as it went. Jarek tensed, waiting for the fighting to resume and cursing himself for not taking his shot when he’d had the opening.
Instead of charging them, though, Rusty turned toward his ships. He didn’t say a word, but enemy soldiers began funneling hurriedly back into the transports as if he’d roared the order.
Creepy.
“You too,” Rusty said to Mosen and the other two raknoth, who were apparently his underlings. Mosen opened his mouth to say something, but Rusty silenced him with a crimson power glare.
Mosen looked at Jarek and behind him to Alaric with a snarl, then he fell in line behind his retreating raknoth allies.
Rusty watched them go before turning that fiery glare on Jarek.
Jarek had seen some scary looks in his day, but this one had to take the cake. Where Toady and Slender Face were mid-shift—hided but still human-ish in appearance—Rusty was in full-on raknoth mode: his smooth skin completely replaced by scaly hide and his human features dramatically shifted toward something more beastly and reptilian. He stood with all the confidence and authority of a fearsome warrior. The rust red color, like old, dried blood on his hide, only added to the effect.
“Next time we meet,” he said, his voice low and strong, “I will take pleasure in ending you.”
Jarek swallowed, glad for the cover of his faceplate, as the raknoth turned and strode to the smallest of the three ships.
He half considered going after him for a moment, trying to end the raknoth now that his allies were all loaded up. No. Better not to press their luck.
Whatever the hell had just happened between the raknoth and that strange ship, it looked like Rusty and his forces were willing to forget about Unity to go after the thing, and he wasn’t about to give them reason to do otherwise.
Rusty hopped up to an open hatch, and all three of the ships promptly lifted up and rocketed off after the strange ship. Okay, hell, might as well just say it: after the alien ship.
They watched them go in silence, tension thick in the air as they waited to be sure the enemy forces wouldn’t decide to swoop back and resume the assault.
The ships finally disappeared over the far tree line, and they all let out a collective breath.
“Okay,” Lea said, eyes wide. “What the hell was that?”
“Well,” Jarek said, “I don’t know if it quite fit the giant flying dildo mold, but I’m pretty sure that was the ship we’re looking for.”
“Your friends from the woods?” Alaric asked, his voice strained.
“I have a feeling, yeah.” Jarek moved to check on Alaric’s wound, but the old fighter pushed him away and muttered something about it just being a graze.
Rachel was still staring after the long-gone ship with an utterly vacant expression.
“Hey.” Jarek laid a hand on her shoulder. “What’s up? We have wounded that need help.”
At his touch, she snapped back with a sharp breath and turned a disoriented look over toward Myers and his men.
They started for the Unity fighters side by side, Lea and Alaric trailing along behind them. More people were showing up at the quad now, some only poking their heads out of nearby buildings, others rushing to Myers and the others to offer them aid.
“So much for Alton and Haldin staying put,” Jarek said quietly to Rachel as they walked. “Guess we’re back at knocking on doors to ask awkward questions if we want to find them again.”
“Maybe not.” Rachel gave one last disheveled glance in the direction the ship had disappeared before meeting his eyes with a grave look. “I know where they’re going.”
Ten
As heavy as the fighting had been, only four of Unity’s people were dead.
It probably said something about Rachel’s current mental state that the word only appeared anywhere in the proximity of the thought that four of her fellow community members had been killed in a pointless attack.
Maybe too much fighting and bloodshed in the past week had left her raw to it. Maybe she was half-comforted by dark thoughts of how much worse it could have been. Maybe—and if she was being honest, this one was probably the winner—she was just too stunned to process much of anything after what she’d just lea
rned: the part that she’d left off when she’d told Jarek she knew where Haldin and Alton were going.
The part where Haldin had reached down telepathically from the hovering alien ship to tell her they knew what had happened to her mother and her family—and, more importantly, why it had happened.
It was a lot to process.
She looked around the quad in a daze, taking in the aftermath of their brief but furious battle. On top of Unity’s four dead, several enemy troops had fallen as well. Plenty more from both sides were wounded, either directly from the engagement or because they were caught in the crossfire by freak misses and ricochets as the conflict unfolded. She stared at the swirling mass of noise and rushing bodies, thinking that she should do something to help, but no matter how hard she thought it, nothing seemed to happen.
At some point, John found her. She recognized him by the bone-crushing hug he wrapped her in. He exchanged a few words with Jarek. She was pretty sure she pitched in a few words as well, but when John left to help their people a minute later, she couldn’t have said what they’d talked about.
She found her feet carrying her away from the chaos to a quiet corner. Jarek came to settle down next to her, followed shortly by Lea and Alaric, who was pressing a small cloth to the graze wound on his left arm. Lea was chock full of nervous energy in the wake of the battle. Thankfully, Jarek was willing to field her outpouring of questions. So Rachel sat there, only distantly listening as he recounted their meeting with Haldin the arcanist and Alton the raknoth.
The pair had been enough of an enigma on their own. Add in the stuff about the human-raknoth blood tie, Alton’s decidedly ominous reaction to the mention of the rakul, and, most importantly, the question of how the hell her mom was connected to any of this, and it was too much to process in the aftermath of the battle.
Sometime later, when the wounded had been triaged and carted away and most of Unity had shifted their attention to talking about what the hell had just happened, John and Myers came to find them.
At John’s suggestion, they left the quad and moved to one of the conference rooms in the town hall to talk. Shocked and/or tired and beaten as they were, no one saw fit to say much on the way over.
“Okay,” John finally said when they were all sitting in the rich conference room around the long, glossy table. “Who were they, and why were they here?”
“Pretty sure they belonged to the Overlord,” Jarek said. “Big scary raknoth who owns what’s left of New York Cit—”
“I’ve heard of him,” John said.
“Right. Well, I thought they were here for us at first, but it seems like they were looking for the same ship we were.”
“That ship they all flew after?” John asked. “That … oh hell, that alien ship?”
Jarek nodded. “That’s the one.”
They all considered that in silence. Rachel had been thinking the same thing. She wanted to think the idea of an alien ship was ludicrous, but given the scaly green blood-sucking monsters who could shirk off bullets like flies, was anything really ludicrous anymore? If the raknoth really were from out of town, they had to have gotten here somehow, right?
Everyone else seemed to be reaching similar conclusions.
John leaned heavily back in his chair and blew out a long breath toward the ceiling. “I shudder to think what that thing was doing around here.”
“They were looking for someone,” Rachel said. “I’m not sure who, but …”
Haldin’s last words rushed through her mind. “We can tell you what happened to your mom. Tomorrow. Her old lab. Stay safe, Rachel.”
And then they’d rocketed off without a backward glance.
Was it her they’d been looking for?
That idea sounded more deluded than alien ships and bulletproof space vampires. But why would they know about her mom?
John was watching her with deeply knitted brows. “They? You saw the ship’s owners? You talked to them?”
She gave a weary nod and shot Jarek a look. He took her silent meaning and launched into the story of their meeting with Haldin and Alton, this time glossing over the detail of the rakul. By the end, John was leaning in with his elbows on the able, mouth half open and face half buried between his steepled fingers. Myers looked highly skeptical, and Lea and Alaric simply tired.
“How did a raknoth get inside Unity without us noticing?” Myers asked.
“Shit,” Jarek said, “the raknoth masqueraded high enough up the totem pole to get access to nuclear launch codes before the Catastrophe, I don’t think you should take it too hard if they snuck past your checkpoint. And as nice as your perimeter fence is, it’d have to be about five times higher and a thousand times stronger to have a chance at keeping one of those red-eyed bastards out.”
Myers and John traded a disconcerted look. Rachel’s insides squirmed right along with theirs. She had some inkling of what the raknoth could do—enough to know how woefully screwed Unity would be if it came to repelling a full on raknoth invasion on their own. No matter what they did, how hard they tried, there were forces out there that could simply roll over them like bugs underfoot.
It wasn’t fair. But that was probably why Michael had run off to join the Resistance and fight the bastards in the first place, wasn’t it?
“I don’t know how this would have ended up if you all hadn’t been here,” Myers said. “Hell, I don’t even know if any of this would have happened at all. But I still feel like I owe you some thanks for having our backs today.”
“Ah, it’s no problem, guy.” Jarek extended a fist across the table. “Put it here.”
Myers eyed the fist dubiously then finally reached out to touch his own fist to it. Jarek retracted his fist and did a subdued victory pump.
“I guess there’s a reason they call you the Soldier of Charity,” John said.
Jarek made a face. “Ick.”
John studied his reaction curiously. “Will you go after that ship? Try to find this Haldin person again?”
“Dunno about that one,” Jarek said. “We’ve got some ominous warnings about our impending doom. We’ve got two guys running around out there who seem to know a whole hell of a lot more than we do, and apparently we know where they’re headed too.” He glanced uncertainly toward her and the others. “But I owe Alaric here a ride to Deadwood, and I can’t speak for Lea or Rachel.”
John turned questioning eyes on her. “What about Michael?”
Whether John meant them to or not, those three words cut like a hot knife. Because, as wholeheartedly as she’d set out on this expedition to help Michael, she couldn’t ignore the new voice whispering in the back of her head, the one that told her she needed to find Haldin and do whatever it took to find out what they knew about her mom.
It was selfish. She knew that. Her mom was long gone. Helping Michael was infinitely more important. But none of that silenced the void her mother’s disappearance had left. After fifteen years, the answers she’d been craving were suddenly dangling in front of her nose, and the void demanded she seize them, no matter the cost to her or anyone else.
But she couldn’t say these things to John, who was still watching, waiting for her to tell him how they were going to make his son better again. So she shook her head, at a loss for words.
“We should bring him here if he’s able to be moved,” John said. “We can go as soon as things are stable here.”
“I don’t know how to help him,” she said slowly.
The beginnings of a frown crinkled John’s forehead. “We’ll find a way. We’ll do whatever we have t—”
“They knew about my mom.”
John’s frown deepened for a brief moment before it was swept away by shock. Around the room, everyone else turned to her with confused expressions.
She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. Not really. Or maybe she had. Either way, it was out. She licked her lips and focused on John.
“I don’t how or why, or who they were looking for here, but bef
ore that ship flew off, Haldin reached out to me and said they could tell me about what happened to her. And to my family too.”
John watched her, one hand covering his mouth, his eyes wide with surprise and something else. Something she couldn’t quite place at first but was somehow sure was out of place here and now. Was it worry? Guilt?
She wasn’t sure, but her stomach turned when his features shifted to what was unmistakably his thoughtful face.
“Heaven have mercy,” he mumbled.
Never mind uneasy. He might as well have punched her in the gut.
This was her mom they were talking about. Her mom who’d simply left for work and not come home one day—the very same day a gang of thugs had broken into their house and ruthlessly ripped the rest of her family away from her.
She’d lost everything that made her who she was that day.
Seven days later, the bombs had fallen and shattered the rest of the world.
And now here she was, telling John that some total stranger and his alien pal claimed to know what had happened, and all he had was a concerned look and an appeal to his almighty?
“What the fuck, John?”
What did he know? Why wasn’t his jaw touching the floor right now?
He laid his hands palm-down on the table and took a deep breath.
A perverse torrent of emotions raged through her, murky streams of hope and dread viscously churning in her head and gut as she waited for him to speak. What was he keeping from her? Had been keeping from her all this time?
Finally, after the longest seconds of her life, he spoke.
“I’ve thought for a while now that your mother may have been involved in an early effort to stop the raknoth.”
She waited, mouth open, forgetting even to breathe.
“I never knew anything concrete, but after what happened to your family …”
“What are you saying?” Her voice sounded oddly distant in her own ears.
He took another long breath and met her eyes. “It wasn’t an accident I showed up so soon after those men attacked your house. I always told you I was coming to visit your mom when I found you, but … I was lying. She called me one day, a few weeks before she disappeared. Told me she’d done something with her colleagues, something that might draw the wrong kind of attention. I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. None of us had any idea about the raknoth back then. And she wouldn’t explain what she meant. She just told me things were getting dangerous and that she needed to let me know. She asked me to check in on your family and to find you if anything ever happened.”
Hell to Pay: Book Two of the Harvesters Series Page 9