Hell to Pay: Book Two of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Haldin nudged him with an elbow.

  “What?” Johnny said. “Sometimes you just gotta get the lead out.” He glanced around the room. “Am I using that one right?”

  Jarek grinned and gave Johnny a thumbs-up. “A for effort.”

  If anyone else understood the reference, they weren’t amused enough to show it.

  Once they’d satisfied their curiosities, the commanders returned to their seats, their expressions a few degrees more unsettled than they had been a few minutes ago. Everyone else sat as well, aside from Pryce, who remained at the cart, inspecting every nook and cranny of every weapon with machinelike precision.

  “This obviously doesn’t represent hard proof of anything,” Nelken said, “but it is … odd. I think you should tell us what you came to say.”

  Haldin launched into a rundown of his rather extensive knowledge of the raknoth. A lot of it was rehashing what Lea had already explained: the roll the raknoth served under the rakul, the origin and aftermath of the manmade infection that had rendered the raknoth dependent on human blood for survival. Rachel perked up beside Jarek during that part, but Haldin elected to leave any mention of her mom out of the story.

  The commanders took it all in silently, their expressions shifting slowly from skepticism—or outright disbelief in Sloan’s case—to slack-jawed awe as more and more pieces of the puzzle fell neatly into place.

  Jarek knew how they felt. As outlandish as the story sounded, it was hard to completely ignore the way it aligned what little they knew of the raknoth into a cohesive whole. It might not all make “sense”, but it didn’t not fit.

  As Haldin talked, Jarek picked up several tidbits that he hadn’t known.

  For one thing, there were somewhere around eighty raknoth feasibly still on Earth, which was at once a terrifying thought and a hopeful one if they were truly going to count on their strength to survive the rakul.

  For another—and this one was a freaking doozy—they learned what the raknoth actually were.

  The epiphany came when Daniels held up a hand to pause Haldin and asked, “But why do they look like us when they’re not walking around as green monsters? If they’ve really moved from planet to planet and infiltrated all these different alien species … Are they”—she wrinkled her brows, clearly struggling to believe she was seriously asking this—“shapeshifters or something of the like?”

  It was a good question, now that Jarek thought about it. After witnessing the Red King and Alton Parker going full-raknoth mode, he’d kind of just accepted that it happened, but he hadn’t paused to think about the endless possibilities of the other species they’d encountered in the past if Alton’s stories were to be trusted (which, according to Rachel, they were).

  Haldin scrunched his face. “Sort of. The raknoth are, for lack of a better word—”

  “Parasites,” Pryce said, finally looking up from Johnny’s hardware. “They must be small enough to integrate with or replace our brains. Or at least small enough to exert telepathic influence from within one of your cloaking fields.” He tapped at his chest where Haldin and Rachel wore their pendants.

  Jarek didn’t need to wait for Haldin to nod in agreement. Of course Pryce had figured it out, the clever old bastard.

  “The real raknoth are fleshy, tentacled things about the size of a human brain,” Haldin said. “But they don’t walk around like that by choice. Mostly, they find a host of their target species and, uh, well, invade.” He glanced at Pryce. “That’s an impressive deduction.”

  Pryce shot Jarek a discreet wink as he returned to his seat. Jarek was less surprised by Pryce’s intuition than the others, but only because he expected Pryce to be brilliant by default and because he knew the hypothesis was merely one of a couple dozen Pryce had already constructed about the raknoth. He must’ve eliminated the others based on what he’d heard today.

  Daniels’ eyes were wide. “You mean the raknoth we’ve seen … used to be people?”

  Haldin nodded. “But as far as I’ve seen, the host ceases to be anything more than a vessel once a raknoth moves in. Usually, at least.”

  There was a thought to make your skin crawl. Judging from their looks and uncomfortable shifting, the others were having similar thoughts—aside from Johnny, who waggled his eyebrows at Lea and generally seemed to enjoy watching their reactions.

  “And the rakul?” Nelken asked once they’d all taken a sufficiently long moment to ponder the horror of tiny alien octopuses crawling into their heads. “What can you tell us of them?”

  “Not as much,” Haldin said. “They were like the raknoth once, a long, long time ago.”

  “In a galaxy far away?” Jarek mumbled under his breath.

  Rachel gave the world’s smallest snort next to him.

  “How long ago?” Nelken asked. “You said the raknoth had been serving the rakul for millennia. How old are they?”

  “Sorry, guess I forgot to mention that part.” Haldin swept his gaze around the room. “The raknoth are immortal.”

  Eighteen

  In hindsight, Rachel was pretty sure she should have picked up on this one already. Haldin had outright told her the memory they’d re-experienced together had been both Alton’s and 2,000 years old. Clearly, the raknoth was old. That didn’t make him an immortal, necessarily, but she probably should have seen it coming. Then again, she had been a bit distracted by the mountain-sized World Ender, Kul’Naga, and the maelstrom of his psychic fury.

  “Immortal,” Jarek said. “As in, those who don’t die? Like ever?”

  “Not until you poke them with pointy objects, at least,” Johnny said.

  Christ. They really were freaking space vampires, weren’t they?

  How had she missed this? Somehow, she’d thought the talk of the raknoth serving the rakul for millennia had been historical, a recounting of generational heritage, but … “Alton didn’t mean they’d served for hundreds of generations, did he?”

  “I think new raknoth trickle in as needed,” Haldin said, “but no, most of the raknoth are thousands of years old.”

  “Alton?” Sloan asked.

  Rachel immediately realized her misstep. The commanders would have to learn about Haldin’s raknoth buddy at some point, but right now probably wasn’t the ideal time—not when they were still trying to convince them there was even a rakul threat to begin with.

  “One of my crew,” Haldin said. “The one who helped us find Earth.”

  Sloan leaned forward like a jackal sensing vulnerable prey, stark green eyes narrowed. “And how exactly did he know how to do that, I can’t help but wonder?”

  Everyone who knew the answer tensed. Everyone but Haldin, who calmly held Sloan’s stare. “Because he was among the seven raknoth who came to my planet from Earth fifteen years ago.”

  Sloan was halfway to his feet before Haldin finished his sentence. He slapped a long-fingered hand to the tabletop. “You see?” he cried, turning to Nelken and Daniels. “Who else would propose an alliance with those monsters except their own agents? The raknoth sent them here with this ridiculous story.” His glare shifted to Lea then to Rachel and Jarek. “And you fools fell for it. We need to lock these—these ‘Enochians’ up. We need to—”

  “Calm yourself, Commander,” Nelken said, his expression stern.

  “And watch your tongue while you’re at it,” Daniels said, cold fire in her eyes.

  Sloan sneered. “Just because your daughter believes this idiocy doesn’t mean—”

  “Richard.” Nelken’s voice fell like a gavel, and Sloan jerked back, green eyes smoldering with indignant fury. “We’ll hear the full story before we determine what is to be done with our guests.”

  “Fine.” Sloan waved a hand at Haldin and crossed his arms. “What in god’s name is your excuse?”

  “Believe me,” Haldin said, “I didn’t take to working with one of them lightly. The raknoth took everything from me. They killed my parents, my mentor. They came within an inch of enslaving my ent
ire world. There was a time I wanted to wipe the entire raknoth race from the universe.”

  “And yet you joined them,” Sloan said.

  “And yet I decided to work with the guy who showed me how and why it had come to that, and how he planned to redress their wrongs.”

  “And you trusted this Alton?” Daniels asked.

  Haldin shook his head. “It’s not a question of trust. I don’t think I ever could have decided to trust Alton Parker after the things he did on my planet. But I’ve been inside his mind. I’ve seen beyond his words and straight into a place where he wasn’t capable of lying to me. I know what he wants as well as he does.”

  “And what is that?” Nelken asked.

  “To save his people, from the rakul and from their dependence on our blood.”

  “And why should we trust any of this?” Sloan asked. “Even if we did trust you—which I don’t, by the way—how can you be so sure this raknoth isn’t playing you?”

  “I told you: I’ve been in his mind. He belonged to me. I scoured every corner of his being for a scrap of dishonesty, and I found nothing that didn’t support what I just told you. Rachel can tell you how powerful that evidence is.”

  Heads turned toward her.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Once a telepath’s in your head like that, there’s no hiding anything, no lying. You belong to them until they choose to release you. And despite all that danger”—she looked at Haldin—“he opened his mind to me today to show me the rakul.”

  She weighed her next words carefully. If she’d pushed deeper into Haldin’s head, she could have told them with certainty whether or not he was to be trusted. Instead, she’d decided to respect his openness and leave most of his stones unturned. Maybe her impulse to do that was all the answer she needed.

  Or maybe Michael’s naivety had finally rubbed off on her.

  “We can trust Haldin,” she finally said. Maybe she didn’t mean it at the deepest level—Christ, she didn’t even trust the Resistance that much, and especially not Sloan, the slimy bastard—but it was what the commanders needed to hear right now.

  Haldin gave her a small nod, and she returned it, feeling a sense of warm camaraderie with the Enochian.

  Then Sloan mumbled, “And who’s to say we can trust you?” just softly enough to paint the illusion he hadn’t meant it to be plainly heard, and her warm feelings evaporated in an instant.

  “Look, Dick,” Jarek said, “I know your Commandership is super valuable to the Resistance and everything, but maybe, in your infinite wisdom, you could find it in your shriveled old heart to stop being an insufferable little bitch to the people who are doing your work for you. Or you could get off your ass and do the fighting yourself if you’re not happy with what we’re doing out there.”

  “Oh, but I thought it wasn’t fighting that you’re suggesting,” Sloan said. “I thought it was laying down in bed with the monsters who destroyed us. Do you people hear yourselves?” He was on his feet now, voice rising. “We’re sitting here talking about humans from other planets. About teaming up with the fucking raknoth so that we can stop an enemy we have no actual proof even exists, much less is coming here to—”

  Pryce shot to his feet, drawing their collective attention. At first, Rachel thought he was about to lay the verbal smackdown on Sloan, but he was looking at his comm like something was wrong.

  Her heart picked up.

  Could it be Michael? She’d basically left Pryce as his caretaker and barely had a chance to poke her head in the door before being swept into the council chamber on their return. Would Pryce be the one they contacted if something had changed with her brother?

  She realized she was already halfway to her feet.

  Pryce’s gaze shot from the comm straight to her, confirming her fear before he said a word.

  “What is it?” she whispered. “What happened?”

  “He’s awake,” Pryce said.

  They should have been good words—great words—but the way Pryce said them … And why did he look so tense?

  “We need to get over there,” he said. “Now. Something’s not right.”

  She turned without a word and made for the door, ignoring the voices behind her. She broke into a jog. Terrible scenarios played out in her head, a garbled reel of worst-case scenarios, complete with gut-wrenching sensations that narrowed her vision down to a hazy tunnel directed toward Michael and nothing else.

  She threw the door open and took the hallway at a run, vaguely aware that Jarek and Pryce were following her, heart pounding in her throat now, shoving past the two oblivious Resistance agents she encountered.

  Was this it? After everything they’d been through, everything she’d done to protect him, was this how it would end?

  She ran on, trying her best to shut the insidious whispers out of her head.

  The shouts and wordless growls told her something was seriously wrong before she’d even made it to the first of the two medical rooms. When she burst into the second room, it was to the sight of Michael violently convulsing on the bed, eyes wild and limbs flailing. A stream of incoherent gibberish poured out of his mouth, punctuated by a few audible words.

  “Traitors!… Treachery … punished … forgotten … void.”

  The attending doctor and her assistant were at work on both sides of the bed, muscling Michael’s free arm and leg into leather restraints like the ones they’d already bound his other limbs with.

  Rachel watched in a stupor, feeling ill.

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. Michael was supposed to emerge peacefully from his coma. She was going to find him lying in his bed, groggy and disoriented, but awake. She’d run her fingers through his spongy hair and ask the lazy-bones how his nap had been.

  The tortured scream that erupted from Michael’s throat ripped that delusion asunder.

  Rachel shook herself out of her frozen horror and rushed to the bedside to help. Before she could, Jarek stepped up beside her, calmly caught onto Michael’s free limbs, and pressed them firmly to the bed. The doctor and her assistant jumped on the opening, securing the bindings without a word. That done, the doctor scrambled to the cabinets in the corner of the room to grab something.

  “What’s happening to him?” Rachel cried over Michael’s persistent ramblings.

  Across from her, the assistant only clenched his jaw and shook his head, apparently unsure how to answer.

  The doctor returned a few seconds later with a battered injector, which she promptly placed to the side of Michael’s neck and triggered with a sharp click-hiss sound. She withdrew the injector, and Michael’s struggles slowly grew less insistent until he gave one final, full-body jerk and collapsed back to the bed, slack and subdued.

  He looked weakly around the room and finally locked eyes with Rachel.

  “They’re coming,” he whispered.

  Then he slumped back to the bed, completely limp.

  After a stunned moment of silence, the doctor’s fingers shot to Michael’s throat.

  Rachel leaned in, thundering heart threatening to escape her chest with each beat. “Is he …?”

  “Stable.” The doctor glanced at the bedside displays. “I just gave him a sedative to keep him from hurting himself. Or us.”

  “Okay,” Rachel heard herself say. Her heart took a few steps away from the ledge. “Okay.”

  “So what the hell was that?” Jarek asked.

  The doctor glanced between them. “I don’t know.”

  “I think,” came Haldin’s voice from the doorway, “that was a telepathic broadcast.”

  The others were there with him: Pryce, Johnny, Lea—even the commanders.

  Haldin’s eyes found hers. “Did you feel it?”

  She was about to point out that she’d been cloaked, but now that she thought about it, maybe she had felt something—a whisper of a whisper at the edges of her senses. Or had she? She’d been too distracted to be sure.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I don�
�t know.” She looked back to the doctor. “Is he gonna be all right?”

  The doctor pursed her lips and glanced down at Michael’s now peaceful form. “I can’t say with any real certainty, but his waking up is a promising sign, at least. He should be down for at least a few hours with the sedative, probably more, but with any luck, he’ll wake up under control after that. For now, we just have to wait and see.”

  Rachel swallowed against a dry mouth and nodded her thanks. After another minute of monitoring, the doctor moved to the front room to give them some privacy. Rachel stared numbly at Michael as the others filed in closer.

  What was happening to her brother?

  Slowly, the adrenaline bled out of her system, leaving behind little but the heavy reminder of just how damn exhausted she was. She turned at a movement to find Haldin telekinetically lowering a chair into place behind her. She gave him a tired nod and sank gratefully into the chair.

  “So if it was a broadcast,” Nelken said, “who was it from?”

  “Three guesses,” Jarek muttered.

  “Not many other possibilities,” Haldin agreed. “Even world-class telepaths can’t range more than a mile unless—”

  “The messengers,” Rachel said. “That’s what the raknoth and rakul use them for, right?”

  “Among other things, yeah.”

  “Wait,” Lea said. “Like the same messengers from the nest?”

  “Maybe not those exact same ones,” Haldin said, “but yeah.”

  They watched Michael’s gentle breathing in silence as they considered the implications.

  They’re coming, Michael had said. They’d all heard it. And no matter what anyone wanted to say, they all had a pretty good idea who the “they” was.

  She looked at Haldin. “You’re sure you felt something?”

  “You’re not?”

  She settled her chin onto the bridge of her hands and said nothing. She wasn’t sure what she’d felt. There’d been too much going on. But if Haldin was sure …

  Alton and the Red King were both pretty convinced the rakul were coming. And Alton had said Michael’s exposure to the bursting nest might have opened him up to see things he’d rather not.