Reaping Day: Book Three of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Jarek watched her, trying to wrangle up some snarky comment—anything to ruffle her feathers and break this odd funk that seemed to have settled its way snuggly between them.

  Nothing came.

  So, instead, he resorted to sweeping his gaze around the room as if taking it in for the first time.

  “A whole year in here, huh? What do you suppose they’ve been doing for fun all this time?”

  Rachel looked from the staves in the corner to the bed and finally back to Jarek with the faintest of head shrugs.

  A grin tugged at his mouth as he traced her likely conclusion but died as the traces of amusement faded from Rachel’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, spreading her hands in a there, I said it gesture.

  “I’m not sure why.” He shrugged. “I mean, I’m sure we could keep it up for a good year or two if we put our backs into it.”

  She wasn’t buying the diversion. Not today.

  “It wasn’t your fault. None of this was, or is, or …” She sighed and came to plop down beside him.

  He met her hazel eyes, so full of pain and frustration and raw emotion that he thought they might simply burst with it at any moment. And there, buried beneath all that negative energy, that tiny, glimmering flicker of want and need that peeked out through everything else and called to its bonfire-sized counterpart somewhere between his head and his free-falling stomach, well outside the bounds of reason and control.

  That fire roared inside him, turning all other thoughts to dull background buzz, imploring him to reach across the single foot of emptiness between them and pull her mouth to his, to brush away all the stupid bullshit and—

  Rachel turned away from him and directed her gaze down to her empty hands, and the fire dimmed, choked out by the expulsion of oxygen from his rattled lungs.

  “You asked what happened between me and Alton,” she said, still looking down.

  Jarek willed his befuddled brain to catch up with the sudden redirection. “Yeah?”

  She plucked one of the rune-etched pendants from the nearby drawers and studied it, bobbing her head as if preparing herself to say something distasteful.

  “He told me how my mom died.”

  “Oh.”

  It was probably the least useful syllable he could have uttered, but it fell out all the same.

  “I, uh …” He swallowed his search for helpful words at the look she gave him and settled for rubbing at the back of his head. “It wasn’t Alton, was it?” he finally asked, when he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

  She tossed the pendant back on the dresser, her expression darkening. “Does it really matter?”

  He opened his mouth and promptly closed it, deciding that maybe was almost certainly not the answer she wanted to hear right now.

  “Do you wanna tell me?”

  Rachel was staring at the not-quite-corner where wall bent and floor rose to meet one another in a smooth curve, looking like she wasn’t quite sure she knew the answer to that question.

  “She saved me,” she finally said after what felt like minutes of silence. “Stopped her own heart so she could reach out far enough to help me. That’s why I don’t remember stopping them, the … men who attacked us.” She shook her head. “It was never me. It was her.”

  She looked up then, and the tortured look in her eyes put a dull ache in Jarek’s chest.

  “She died to save me. Because of them.”

  Shit. What did he say to that?

  He took her hand. “I’m sorry, Rache.”

  The words sounded horribly inadequate in his ears, but what else was there?

  In a way, Jarek’s dad had died to save him too. And sure, the raknoth had been involved, but they hadn’t played any more of a direct role there than they had in any other of the billions of deaths they’d caused in the Catastrophe. Somehow, swapping notes with Rachel didn’t seem like the thing to do right now.

  “I thought …” She pulled her hand free, stood, and looked uncertainly toward the room’s closed entry hatch. When she looked back at Jarek, she spoke quietly. “I don’t know. I thought I could live with it. That working with them was the only way. But …”

  “It’s hard to forgive something like that.” He searched for something more but came up short.

  Rachel nodded her agreement, not seeming to mind.

  Suddenly, her recent snappiness, particularly where Alton was concerned, was much less mystifying. Knowing the raknoth had been involved in her mom’s death at all had been bad enough, Jarek was sure, but this … This was just a kick in the nuts that could easily morph to a nail in their collective coffin.

  Not that many people on either side gave two shits about what Jarek and Rachel thought, but human-raknoth relations were already bad enough, and they’d just gotten a sneak peek at what a single rakul was capable of. If they went into battle with Rachel riding the fence about their raknoth pals …

  “I know this isn’t what you wanna hear right now, but—”

  “Don’t say it then.” Rachel’s eyes were half-defiant, half-imploring. “Don’t tell me we need to all suck it up and play nice for the good of the world. They’re monsters, Jarek. And you saw what happened back at HQ when their master called.”

  “Come on, Rache, that’s not fair. That was like mind control for Christ sake.”

  “That’s exactly what it was,” she snapped. “And if it happened once, it’ll happen again. Have you forgotten what your pal Drogan did to Michael? To Pryce? How can you just forget about all that?”

  Jarek bit back his immediate retort and forced himself to take a breath as Rachel paced stiffly around the room.

  Clearly, this had been ruminating in her mind for a while now. Hot words wouldn’t end up doing either of them any favors.

  He held up his hands in a gesture of peace. “I’m not forgetting. No one’s forgetting. Have you missed the Resistance boys walking around with their torches and their death to the raknoth stares? They might as well be printing it on t-shirts over there.”

  Rachel paused her pacing to meet his gaze. “Maybe they should be.”

  “Jesus, Goldilocks.”

  “What? You want me to show sympathy for the devil? They’re not our friends, Jarek. Not Alton, not Drogan. Not even Kole.”

  He tensed. Two controlled breaths.

  Why did that piss him off so much? It wasn’t like she was being wholly—or even partly—unreasonable. Hell, maybe she was right. Maybe his “pragmatic” attitude in making the best of a bad but necessary situation had in fact been a delusional one. But still …

  “You never even met Kole.”

  She let out an exasperated huff. “Does it really matter? Do you really think he was any different? That any of them could be? They’ve spent thousands of years snuffing out more sentient species than the two of us could count on our fingers and toes. Does that sound like the kind of creature that could ever be trusted?”

  “Look, I get—”

  “Don’t.” She jabbed a finger his way. “Don’t pretend like you understand just to cozy up and try to convince me otherwise. They killed my family. And, in case you forgot, they killed yours too, so don’t—”

  Something snapped, and Jarek was on his feet before he knew it.

  Rachel watched him, tense and ready.

  She couldn’t have known. Couldn’t have known about the drunk driver who’d beaten the raknoth to the punch in stealing his mother away. Couldn’t have known because he hadn’t told her or anyone else. Because his pre-Catastrophe life was gone. It belonged to someone else.

  But as the memories flashed through his mind—the crumpled blue and gray heap that had barely been recognizable as a car, the look on his dad’s face when he’d sat down to tell Jarek the news …

  “Fine,” Jarek growled. “Fine then. Let’s just sit here and watch the fucking world burn together, shall we? What’s the point anyway, right?”

  The twisted glare contorting Rachel’s face faltered, a
s if she’d glimpsed something of the old pain her words had stirred in his chest. Tense silence strangled the space between them, both wanting to drop the angry stares, neither wanting to make the first move.

  Footsteps in the corridor drew his attention before either of them could—fast, heavy. Someone running.

  That was never a good sign.

  “Someone’s coming,” he said.

  Apparently Rachel had already sensed as much. “It’s Elise.”

  True to her word, when the hatch peeled open a few seconds later, they both looked to find the raven-haired Enochian breathing hard and looking a bit flushed.

  “It’s Michael,” Elise said without preamble. “He’s having an episode.”

  Jarek traded a concerned look with Rachel, their squabble forgotten for the moment, and they trailed Elise wordlessly out of the room and up the corridor to the cockpit.

  At their entrance, the ring of Enochians in the center of the cockpit stepped back to reveal Michael’s seizing form on the ground. From what Jarek had witnessed of his other attacks, this one looked to be on the tail end. Michael’s convulsions were sporadic, subdued, his muttering infrequent.

  Rachel was at his side in an instant, though she knew as well as the rest of them there wasn’t much to be done other than to wait it out. After an unsettling minute of dwindling jerks, twitches, and semi-violent flopping, Michael went still. Rachel gathered up his head and stroked his hair, whispering comforting words.

  “Mountains,” Michael groaned. “I saw mountains. Flying by below.”

  Haldin exchanged a dark look with Alton and Franco before turning his gaze to Jarek.

  “The Himalayan clan?” Jarek asked.

  “Could be,” Haldin said. “I assumed he was busy stirring up the furor back home, but if Gada’s back on the prowl, Al’Brandt’s temple is the next closest to Kole’s.”

  That didn’t bode well for their Himalayan allies. Unless …

  “You happen to notice where the sun was, Mikey?”

  “Ahead,” Michael said. He winced as Rachel helped him sit up. “It was ahead.”

  Shit.

  “That sure sounds like west to me,” Jarek said.

  Unless Gada had happened to somehow jump to the other side of the planet, of course.

  Johnny traded a worried look with Haldin. “We’d better let them kno—oh shit.” He looked up from his comm. “No net coverage here.”

  That wasn’t much of a surprise, out here over the Pacific.

  “Probably still not much coverage there, either,” Jarek said, “but don’t you guys have some of those little messenger fellas on this rig?”

  “We do,” Haldin said slowly, his eyes flicking to Alton, whose eyes had drifted shut, “but …”

  Elise was watching Alton now too.

  Alton opened his eyes with the look of someone returning from a faraway daydream. “But we’re running preciously low, and sending warning that way may be risky.”

  “Gada might intercept it?” Haldin asked.

  Alton nodded. “If he’s headed that way, it’s entirely possible. And in that case, we’d be blowing any element of surprise to send a message that wouldn’t arrive for Brandt to hear it. In any event, we wouldn’t be able to tell what had happened, as Brandt likely won’t be able to respond without a nest of his own, and I doubt Gada would kindly inform us he’d intercepted our warning.”

  “Well that is a pickle,” Jarek said.

  Freaking telepaths.

  Haldin looked around at all of them. “Do we go?”

  There was a short silence, during which Jarek felt the subtle tilting pressure of the ship’s deceleration through his legs.

  “HQ is still in trouble, as far as we know,” Michael said after a short silence. “We heard it straight from them. We know it’s true. This …” He touched lightly at the side of his head. “I don’t know what I saw. Not for sure. And I definitely don’t know if it’s true.”

  “So we send the warning to the Himalayan clan,” Rachel said, “and then we get our asses back to HQ before it’s too late.”

  That made a certain amount of sense, aside from the minor problem that they might be leaving eight of their dwindling number of potential raknoth allies to die while flying off to help a base that might already be in the clear if the duration of the last furor was any reliable indication.

  There was too much they didn’t know, and no way to find anything out but to pick a direction and go.

  “I don’t think we can do much for HQ at this point,” Haldin said. “The furor will probably be over before we get there, they’re tough enough to handle it without us, and it’s starting to sound like a diversion, anyway. If Gada somehow sniffed us on his trail, he might’ve started a furor on the other side of the globe to chase us off in the other direction. Or maybe he had no idea and was just trying to keep everyone looking the wrong way to start with.”

  “Or maybe it’s happening because he’s flying there right now to end the fight before it begins,” Rachel said. “Maybe he deliberately tricked Michael hoping he’d tell everyone to be looking in the wrong direction.”

  Michael lowered his eyes to the deck as everyone turned his way, his face tight as if he were fighting some internal battle to decide whether or not he should be trusted.

  “Should we put it to a vote?” Elise asked.

  No one seemed particularly excited about the idea.

  “I’ve lived under the rakul for over three thousand years,” Alton said, “and I feel it’s safe to say that, if Gada knows of the Himalayan clan’s location—and he would after looking into the minds of the raknoth he slew—he’ll pursue his retribution on my kin before sparing much worry about humankind.”

  “And we’re just supposed to trust your intuition on that one?” Rachel asked, gathering her staff from the deck and standing from Michael’s side.

  “I trust it,” Haldin said.

  “Of course you do,” Rachel said.

  Haldin showed his hands in a peaceful gesture. “The only horse I have in this race is stopping the rakul.”

  Rachel looked around at the group, her expression darkening. “Vote, my ass.” She shook her head. “Did we all already forget what happened last time we went chasing after this thing?”

  “That’s a good point,” Franco said, chiming in for the first time. “And it begs another question. Are we sure we’re even ready to catch him?”

  That gave everyone pause, and their collective hesitation in turn lengthened the uncertain silence.

  It was a fair question. Aside from the fact that this Gada creature had apparently had little trouble taking on a Zar and four of his raknoth, Jarek had no real way to gauge what it was they were dealing with.

  Haldin’s eyes found his.

  “What do you think, Jarek?”

  What he thought, possibly for the first time in his life, was that he didn’t want to touch this decision with a ten foot Whacker.

  Never mind that he might be casting a vote for them to all fly to their deaths. Never mind that Rachel might take a vote against her, and with Alton, as a knife straight to the back.

  He’d already let too many people down today, and now, no matter what they decided, people were going to get hurt—were already getting hurt. And every moment they lingered here was another moment they were letting it happen.

  “How much longer will it take to swing by Brandt’s and see for ourselves?” he asked.

  Alton appeared to be consulting a map in his head. “Less than three hours, probably.”

  That wasn’t exactly comforting. A hell of a lot could happen in three hours.

  Still—and maybe it was the fresh memory of Kole’s savaged corpse talking—Jarek couldn’t quite turn away from the gut feeling that, unless that furor back home lasted far longer than the other one had, and unless Rachel was right and Gada had thought to trick them using Michael, Brandt’s mountain temple was where they could do the most good right now.

  Eight more r
aknoth on their side, not to mention the support of Brandt’s human forces …

  They could still score a win today.

  Jarek looked around at the faces waiting for his input.

  Electric trills laced through his chest, the words lingering on his lips.

  Because it was crazy, wasn’t it? Racing off after the thing that could cut down raknoth like mere squishy humans—and while HQ may or may not be burning under the furor, no less.

  But it was already too late to do much about HQ, and if they could get Brandt and his people out, get them back to home base …

  They could get it right this time. For Kole. For Katashina.

  He could get it right this time.

  They just had to move.

  “What do you say, team?” Jarek looked around at the assembled crew. “Are we crazy bastards or aren’t we?”

  They all exchanged glances, weighing and assessing as if seeking some unspoken permission.

  Finally, Johnny bobbed his head. “Crazy bastards.”

  “Crazy bastards,” Haldin agreed.

  Others echoed the sentiment.

  Michael speared Jarek with a stern look. “And what about the Resistance you claimed to be a part of?”

  “I think Haldin’s right. They can handle the furor. They were preparing to do just that when we left. Keeping eight more raknoth alive today is the most valuable thing we can do for Earth’s chances.”

  Michael and Rachel traded a look, Michael hesitant, Rachel clearly less than convinced.

  “Fine,” Michael finally said. “Crazy bastards, then.”

  “Crazy assholes is more like it,” Rachel muttered.

  Jarek was considering the wisdom of clarifying whether that meant she was in when Rachel shot an impatient look around the room and added, “So what are we all waiting for?”

  Jarek clapped his hands together, not keen to waste the small grace. “The lady raises a fair point. Whose tummy do we have to tickle to get this crazy party on the road?”

  “No tickling required,” Alton said. “But you might all want to take your seats.”

  They hurried to comply, plopping down in the chairs that had clearly been retrofitted in the raknoth vessel and strapping into harnesses.