by Kacey Ezell
“Betrayed! How?!” she demanded, causing Arilys to stiffen in rage and twist harder under Blade’s determined grip. Blade let the quintessence go, so she could see better where he ended and Arilys likely began, allowing her to grasp her clan member hard around his neck. “Betrayed how,” she said again, more growl than words.
“You and the dama know what you did. She’ll kill you as soon as you return.” Arilys dropped his own field, revealing his lightly-striped gray fur and the seething hate in his green eyes.
“Arilys, I’m bearing kits.” Ichys shoved her face into his, and despite everything he momentarily quailed in the face of an angry damita. “She named me Heir to Whispering Fear and gave me her own ship. Why would she do that if I betrayed our clan?”
Blade wondered at her attempt to reason with him. Fondness for an old friend? Disbelief that her dama would do such a thing? Or, best of all, tightening his hold on the other male’s legs, proof? Keep Arilys from scrambling and removing himself from the board, bring him back to tell his story to the clan.
“She gave you the ship so I could track you,” he said, thrashing more under Blade’s hold. His tone remained vicious, “She always knew you didn’t take the future of the clan seriously, but to lie that you were pregnant, knowing you’ve always been infertile—”
Between his last word and the breath it took to continue, his body went limp against Blade, and even his finely-honed Hunter instincts faltered in catching up to what had happened.
Ichys stood over them both, claws dripping, eyes wide and so wild Blade defensively crouched back away from the sudden corpse. Silence held the mossy cove for some stretch of minutes before Ichys shook herself and blinked her pupils back to normal size. Blade stood tall the moment after, tilting his head at her in a silent question, and she dropped her gaze to consider her bloody claws. He wondered if he would have acted with such finality, without thinking through a single consequence, if Dirrys rather than Reow had been his dama. He thought how much easier it would have been to bring Arilys back to Whispering Fear to make Dirrys’s failures and betrayals plain to all. He weighed a hundred thoughts, all of which brought him no answer, but served to distract him from crossing over to comfort her.
“I should not have done that.” The admission was impressive for a Hunter; for a damita, even such a newly confirmed Heir, it landed heavily enough Blade knew he would forgive her.
“Should we scramble his DNA and leave him behind?” he asked, choosing not to remark on her statement. They both knew it was true, and they both knew it changed nothing. “It would only tell your dama that he failed, and give her time to plan against our return, but transporting him makes it possible for her to say we have killed him without cause, and declare our lives forfeit.”
“Take him,” Ichys snapped out the word as she pivoted and moved toward the ship. “I’ll call for Arow before we get to Khatash. He’ll be an asset against the dama.”
Whether because she said ‘the’ instead of ‘my,’ or that her eyes had been cold, Blade hesitated before following. He knew something was off, and experience had long taught him to trust his instincts. But all his training and experience had never prepared him for a newly pregnant damita reacting to the complete and bone shockingly unexpected betrayal of her dama, so in this case perhaps he was wrong.
Flicking his ears to dismiss that trail of thinking, he lifted Arilys’s corpse and followed his mate into the ship.
* * *
As they maneuvered toward the stargate, putting Elgon’s space behind them, visible tension passed through Ichys’s frame, and she turned her gimbaled couch to face Blade’s, set just behind and to the left of hers.
He thought they would finally talk about what had happened with Arilys, and how they would approach Dirrys, but he was incredibly wrong.
“Were you going to tell me?” Ichys asked, claws embedding themselves in the thick hide cushioning the couch’s arms for just such a purpose.
Her words snapped him out of his reverie, and he blinked rapidly, focusing on her face, only to see her anger aimed squarely at him. His ears flattened in instinctive, immediate deference. His mind raced through her possible meanings—she couldn’t possibly know of Blade, or Night Wind clan, or what had truly brought him to her notice in a merchant’s tent some months ago.
Could she?
“What did you want to know?” he asked, his tone careful. He was only a temporary mate, not even part of the clan, and so he must speak with caution to the angry Heir.
“Tell me now Chirruch, or I will kill you before we get back to Khatash.” Ice in her voice and bearing, and for the first time, he saw her dama in her.
The emphasis on his name, his entirely false name, shot adrenaline and dread through him. His tail lashed once, his fur lifted all down his back, and he was perfectly balanced between fleeing and fighting. Neither was possible. Neither would help. How had she found him out? How—he cut off the useless string of thought, understanding that his life hung in the balance. If he wanted to figure anything out, he had to survive this moment, locked in a small spaceship with a pregnant Heir he wasn’t entirely sure he could best in battle.
Or if he would try.
“I would have told you,” he said, surprising himself how much he meant it, even while buying himself a little time, on the slim chance she was talking about something else. “How did you know?”
“You’re no deep jungle yokel,” she snarled, holding herself in place with her claws sunk deep into the arms of her chair. “You knew how to prepare for a contract, Arow said you notice too much to be new to clan politics, and your reaction during the attack…you’re good, but you’re not that good. You were expecting something.” The words pushed out of her in a rush. Had she been calmer, she never would have revealed so much.
“If my dama can betray all we are,” she continued, biting off the words in bitter, sarcastic satisfaction, “it shouldn’t be a shock that you did too. Why. Are. You. Here?”
He lowered himself in further deference, forcing himself not to cross the space between them and rub against her fur. He could see her teetering on the edge of control, breaths away from striking him. He should have had a story ready, some explanation, another layer away from the truth—his life would be just as forfeit once she knew who he was at it was in this moment.
“Your dama destroyed my clan,” he said, tail flattened and utterly still.
“Clans break all the time,” she said scornfully, anger shading into disgust for such a weak excuse. “Lack of offspring, bad trade deals, less successful Hunters.”
“Not mine,” he snapped, momentarily shocking them both into silence. He took a deep breath, and then another, trying to control his own anger and succeeding in at least calming his tone. “My dama raised all four kits she bore to maturity. My dama grew her clan into success, taking on so many successful contracts she came to the Peacemaker’s attention. My dama did not kill the Peacemaker she was nominated to replace, because she was not insane, and so she, and my clan, are not anathema.”
“Night Wind,” she said, her voice strangled and low.
“Someone did this to us,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken, his eyes fixed on the floor between their couches, the muscles in his limbs jumping with the release of the truth. “Someone with power and control, but who wants more, always more. Someone who imagines threats so she can destroy then. Someone who believes competition must be destroyed. Someone who finds unspeakable means acceptable. Someone who didn’t think twice about causing the death of a pregnant damita. Someone who would kill the Heir to a clan.”
Blade felt the tension jump between them, the frisson of recognition of what Dirrys had so recently done.
“My littermate was pregnant, and Dama had just confirmed her as Heir. I couldn’t believe one of us would do such a thing, but she’s just done it again…to her own kita.”
“And so, you came to destroy my clan, in revenge?” So many emotions twisted her tone, Blade knew his lif
e still balanced between them. Ichys’s rage at her dama’s depthless betrayal had to go somewhere. But at least she had delivered it as a question, leaving him some room to shift the scale.
“No. Her. Her, and any of your clan broken enough to have been a part of it, if they knew.” He slumped in his chair, then turned his head and bared his throat to her. She would take the invitation or she wouldn’t, but for the first time in his life, Blade decided not to fight.
The silence stretched through the confines of the bridge, and he was not so resigned to death that he didn’t sense each of the three times she tensed to launch herself at him. But he neither flinched nor changed his posture, and ultimately neither did she.
“When would you have told me?” She was not calm, but death had retreated enough that he turned his face back toward her, eyes still lower than hers.
“When I had proof. Before I killed her, but with enough distance that you couldn’t have stopped me.”
The truth of it resonated between them.
“I would have stopped you,” she said finally, retracting her claws.
“No. I needed enough proof to clear my clan’s name, in case…for any of my siblings who live. You wouldn’t have liked it, but it would have held you.”
“And do you have any idea where you’ll get that proof?” She didn’t argue; they both knew how the fight would have gone if she had attacked this day, and both were just as conscious of Arilys’s body in the hold.
“She tried to kill you, Ichys. Is it too hard to believe—?”
She snarled across his words, and he cut himself off, watching her closely as she leapt from the couch to pace across the bridge. Not toward him, though when she stopped she faced him fully, standing on two legs with her arms at her side, leaving her midsection open. Still angry, but not coiled to attack, nor tensed to protect against one.
“Not proof for me. I know she tried to kill me. What proof will you find to restore your clan?”
He dropped from his couch, crossing to her. If she cut him, still it was worth the risk. He bent to rub the top of his head under her chin, then straightened to rub his cheek against hers, ears swiveled toward her. A hand bristling with slightly extended claws pressed under his arm nearest her, but he held the side of his face to the side of hers, and breathed in her scent.
“She never deserved you,” he said, meaning only to think the words rather than whisper them aloud.
“Neither do you,” she replied, and the claws briefly pierced his skin.
She was worth the blood. He stayed close, and after a moment she withdrew her claws, and rubbed back against his face once before pacing away.
“Cunning Blade,” he said, cutting her pace short. “I greet you, Hunter.”
The pause stretched between them, the traditional greeting also a reminder of their first meeting in Fip’s stall. Finally, she nodded, accepting his name, and then stared until he returned to her question of proof.
“Before the last council, she put some trade agreements in place by implying she would be named either Peacemaker or Governor. Despite the collapse of the Malluma Songo and some disastrous contracts, the clan had a profit in the season before, one that grew out of proportion to the contracts and agreements over the same time period. If I can get access to the files to see where those credits came from—”
“As impressive as Night Wind was becoming, your clan was tiny compared to Whispering Fear. We have so many old investments and agreements she can justify anything in the accounts.”
“I don’t think so. It was careless to suggest she’d be offered either of the two biggest off world contracts, and I think she’s been unchallenged as Dama for so long she isn’t at her cleverest in hiding her tracks. I’ve also heard her with Arow, she doesn’t always consider what she says. And she’s panicking now—why else attack her own kita?”
Ichys spat, disgusted at the reminder, her pupils narrowing and widened as she struggled to leash her emotions. Blade put to words what he’d been weighing since they left Elgon IV’s atmosphere.
“Chirruch,” he said, flinching back slightly when she focused on him. He shook his head, lifting a hand in silent apology. “An inexperienced Hunter on his first off-world contract should have made our job take longer.”
“It would have given Arilys more time to set his trap.” Her tail lashed, and she glanced toward the hold where the other Hunter’s body remained.
“And at the least, I would have been a distraction to you.”
“You—Chirruch—wouldn’t have given us that moment before he shot. Chirruch had no reason to believe we were in danger.”
“He had some.” Blade’s ears flicked back, acknowledging how weird the sentence was. “Arow warned me, to get you off-world. He warned me Dirrys wouldn’t like this change.”
Ichys growled, low in her throat, and looked away again.
“He thought—I thought too, that you’d be safe out of her reach. It’s messy, involving another Hunter. Dirrys isn’t making good choices.” He sat back on his haunches, trying to still his twitching tail. Dirrys making terrible choices could mean either she would become more dangerous, or easier to shake off course. Or both, which, while not ideal, gave him something to work with.
“But she thinks I’m a threat to her.” She growled again, touched her abdomen as though to reassure the growing kits, and flexed her claws.
“I think she’s beyond wariness and good choices, Ichys. I think she’s mad.”
The words dropped into the silence between them, heavy stones sinking to the bottom of a river. Ichys stared at him, her angry eyes boring into his.
She blinked, then drew in a breath to snap the silence.
“It’s not enough. Maybe we can convince the other clan members that this attack on me was hers—”
“Of course we can!” Blade’s surge of excitement sent him racing back to his couch, just to move. She’d said ‘we,’ and she’d given him an idea. “She’s not panicking, she’s mad. I don’t know if it’s jealousy or age or if she’s always been crazy, but the clan were all so happy you are pregnant. More than celebration for the natural progression of a clan, for the joy of new life. The Hunters are losing patience with her, and now, with you, they see an end.”
Ichys snarled, but didn’t argue.
“We can use that, to push her. We can get all the proof we need.”
“Arow will meet us at the station. It won’t leave us much time before she knows of our return, but his traveling to the suborbital wouldn’t raise her attention as much as his leaving Khatash without a contract. It’s our best option, as long as she’s tracking our ship.”
“I’ve seen Dirrys push him—if Arow had any proof against her that would stick, he would have used it.”
“Arow has never been so motivated to take action as he is now,” Ichys replied dryly. “And what would he have done, after pushing the dama out? Let Whispering Fear wither like a cut vine, without leadership?”
“Arow is a deo, and could have held the clan on course until you or Sivand threw a litter.”
“And if we never did? What clans would take risks on partnering with us, with only an aging deo at the head and no breeding dama?” She scoffed at his naiveté, adding, “You really were raised by a Human, weren’t you?”
The sharpness in her tone made clear he was not yet entirely forgiven, and his hiss of protest could have been for either that or the slight against both Susa and his dama. She showed neither regret nor apology in the face of his evident anger, and so he ignored her last comment entirely.
“Then I’m sure he’ll know enough to make up a story for having Arilys’ dead body in our cargo bay,” Blade replied, the tip of his tail flicking in disapproval. Perhaps he hadn’t entirely forgiven her, either.
* * *
For a long time, it looked like Susa’s plan had worked. Though another Hunter could have (and probably did) track Death’s ship, they’d abandoned her in orbit above Skradchar before taking a passenger tr
ansport to Piquaw, and from there to Earth itself. For a plan conceived on the fly, it had yielded good results. Most of Death’s gravid season passed uneventfully and quietly in the bowels of the Golden Horde’s Houston complex.
“You look like you swallowed a football,” Tony Connor, one of the mercs, said one evening, as Death leapt gingerly down from her preferred daytime resting place. He and Conason were sitting nearby, inspecting pieces of their personal gear.
The inside of the CASPers that lined the walls were tight for a fully-grown Human mercenary, but they were just about the perfect size for a den. Intellectually, Death knew her constant drive to seek out small, tight places was the result of hormones and bearing instinct. That didn’t make it any less imperative. At first, the Human mercs had not been comfortable with her messing around in the CASPers, but she had demonstrated over time that she wasn’t hurting anything, and they eventually relaxed.
Or she wore them down. Whatever.
“I do not know ‘football,’” Death said, padding closer to the merc and his commander on all four feet. Despite their professional relationship, she had decided that she rather liked James Conason, and so she took the time to rub her head and the left side of her body along his calf in greeting. He reached down from the chair he occupied and scratched under her chin in a most delicious way.
“Football is a game we play here on Earth. It’s played with an inflated, oblong ball,” Conason said, still scratching. She pressed her head into his hand in a mute appeal for more. “It’s a lot of fun. I grew up playing it.”
“Ah. And you move this ball with your foot?”
“Sometimes. Mostly though you just pass—throw it—or run with it through the other team to try and score.”