“Innocent ain’t exactly how I’d describe me,” he finally said, his tone thoughtful with what might have been a hint of humor.
Sukeza turned her head to look at him, but his face held no expression, dark eyes watching her with the steady, fearless gaze of a predator. She felt herself flush. “I-I didn’t mean—what I meant was that you were innocent of this crime,” she said lamely. “You don’t deserve what they’ve got planned for you.”
He tilted his head, eyes narrowing on her. “Maybe I deserve it for other things. Maybe they’re thinking to save the Collectors some time and trouble.”
She pressed her lips together, turning her face away from his burning regard. Her gut clenched with uncertainty and confusion. What the hell was she doing, trying to free this man? He was right—innocent was a galaxy away from his true nature. “Even if that’s true,” she muttered, fingertips tracing a faint crack in the wall, “nobody deserves such a barbaric death. If the Collectors didn’t execute you, who are they to impose that sentence?”
“Trust me, death is better than what those bastards have waiting for me.”
Despite the heat building in the room, she felt a chill race down her spine. She wrapped her arms around her middle, keeping her face averted. “I know mental containment is hard—”
His humorless bark of laughter cut her off. “You don’t know shit about hard. When they stick that band on your head and your body goes zombie, there’s part of you that still knows, that watches you take orders and do their dirty work, watches you bend over and take it up the ass.”
She sent him a sharp look. “A different set of chains,” she said. “You’re still caged.”
He jerked at his restraints, eyes glittering at her. “I’m still myself here. I got options. With the Collector’s brain band, there’s no hope.”
Sukeza shuddered, thinking of her panther again. No hope. She returned to pacing, measuring the room with her agitated stride as she chewed on her lips and searched her mind frantically for another way to free him. Her convictions had brought her to this place, knowing they’d imprisoned the wrong man. The stunning force of him, his beauty and his desperation, kept her there.
“So, if you’ve got no way to turn me loose, why are you here?” he asked flatly.
Her pace slowed and then stopped. She sighed, sliding back down the wall and staring at him over her bent knees. His face was still and hard as granite, but she thought she saw anger in his eyes. His hands were slowly curling into fists and releasing. He didn’t look very receptive. Sukeza clasped her hands in her lap, pulled her elbows in tight to her sides, and forged ahead anyway. “I need your help,” she said in a hesitant voice. “If-if there was any other way to set you free, I’d do it, but—”
“What do you want?” he growled.
Nope. Not receptive at all. She took a deep breath. “You didn’t kill those boys, but somebody did. If I can figure out who and prove it, they’d have to set you free.”
He shook his head at her. She thought she saw his mouth twitch with contempt. “Shitty logic, farm girl. They’re more like to keep me for the Collectors.”
“Still,” she said stubbornly, feeling her face heat with humiliation, “they might change their minds. What do you have to lose by helping me?”
His gaze left her, moving around the room and settling on the high window where sunlight streamed in. He shifted restlessly, arms twisting in the shackles. “What do you want?” he asked again, sounding a shade less menacing.
She swallowed, her throat giving a dry click. “I was hoping you could tell me about last night, about what you saw, what you remember. If you noticed anything out of place—”
He snorted, eyes swinging back to her with the twitch of his mouth that could have been contempt. “Lady, everything here is out of place. It’s like something out of the Earth Era. You don’t even have a weather net and you use animals to cart you around.”
“Right, sorry,” she muttered, grimacing to hide a sudden, horrible urge to smile. She remembered having the same reaction when she’d first come here, stunned and disoriented by the simplicity of their lives, the primitive, low-tech nature of their community. “Just—what did you see? Maybe you can remember something that I could use.”
He studied her for a long moment, his steady regard making her skin feel a size too small for her bones. It was all she could do to return that forceful gaze and not huddle into herself like a mouse in front of a cat.
“Night’s easier,” he said abruptly, tilting his head up toward the window again. “Not so…exposed. I’m used to stations, bases, spacecraft—not all this wide open air. So I’ve been walking at night, looking around while you all were tucked away in your houses. Kessu, you people are so—” He paused, shaking his head. His stoic expression didn’t finish the sentence for him, but she could guess. Vulnerable. Weak. Trusting. Yes, they were all of that. “That animal stockade—”
“Barn,” she murmured and got a sharp look for her correction.
“It didn’t look any different from the night before. Sounded different, though. The animals were making more noise. That’s what drew me there.”
Sukeza straightened. “Can you describe what you heard?”
He gave her that mouth twitch again. “What, you think I heard the murder? Lady, I can tell the difference between kids dying and a bunch of cragged out farm animals.”
“No, of course I don’t think that,” she responded with a shake of her head, hands knotting around one another in her lap. “They were dead a while before they were found, which was when you were spotted at the scene. I just know the chukra in that barn very well, and anything you can tell me might help. Even—even animal noises,” she finished, dropping her eyes from his regard and studying the tops of her knees instead. What the hell was she doing playing detective? This was insane. But she couldn’t think of any alternative.
There was a moment of silence before he spoke again in a musing tone, “I heard lots of banging, like they were kicking at the walls, and snorting noises. One of them made a trumpeting sound.”
“High pitched or low?” she asked, raising her gaze to see him studying the window again.
“Shit, how the hell would I know?”
So Sukeza demonstrated, mimicking the two chukra who would have sounded the call of alarm. He raised his eyebrows, mouth twitching again as he met her gaze. She felt a flush rise up her throat, but she fought down the surge of embarrassment and waited for his response.
“That second one was more like what I heard,” he said in a neutral tone.
She nodded, picturing the creature and where it was in the barn. “That’s strange. It should have been Baka sounding the alarm, not Suni. She was the furthest away from where the boys were found.”
“They your animals, then?”
“No, that’s Stockton’s barn and livestock. I just…work with them a lot,” she said with an uncomfortable shrug. “Do you remember anything else?”
“Just the screaming, shouting, and people chasing me down,” he answered dryly. Then he tossed his head, trying to get a lock of sweaty hair out of his eyes.
Sukeza shifted, struck again by his suffering and his stark beauty. “Have they given you any water?” she asked suddenly, realizing the answer even as she spoke.
“Every couple hours the fat guy comes in and spits on me. Other than that, no.”
Burning shame and anger roiled in her gut, and she looked away from the furious irony in his gaze. “I’ll bring back some water and food. Can—can I look at your wrists? I’d like to tend those wounds if I could.”
There was silence while she plucked at the hem of her shirt and felt her heart thump hard in her chest. “Sure, have at it,” he said with low sarcasm. “Should be in stellar shape for my burning, right?”
Without looking him in the eye, she stood and took a hesitant step toward him. Focusing on his right wrist, she saw that his fist was clenched and felt a spurt of adrenaline. If he could get out of those
chains and hurt me he already would have, she reasoned to get her feet moving again. The sight of the welts on his wrist drew her the rest of the way.
Catching her lower lip in her teeth with a frown, she leaned close and studied the area. Some contact spots were merely red and bruised looking, but a few had blistered and two areas were bleeding. Without conscious thought, she touched his fist, easing his grip so she could shift his wrist further out of the shackle and more into view. “Bandages,” she muttered to herself. “Antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, analgesic. You need to stop rubbing at—”
“Are you petting me?” he interrupted in an incredulous tone.
Sukeza flamed with embarrassment and jerked away when she realized that she had indeed been stroking his arm soothingly as she would one of her animal charges. With belated alarm, she tucked both hands behind her back and stepped away, fingers tingling at the sensation of hair-roughened, sweat-dampened skin. “I-I’m sorry. I just—I’m used to working with—” She stopped short, nearly biting off the words wild animals before she uttered them. She strongly suspected that he wouldn’t appreciate her equating the domestication of chukra to her tending his chained self.
The opening door would have been a welcome diversion if it hadn’t been Stryker’s callous, massive jailor. A thundercloud pulled Clavis’s brows into a severe frown as he lumbered into the small room, his voice a rolling boom. “What in the three humps of Keesis are you doin’ in here, Suki?”
She stiffened her spine, facing him with chin lifted. Never mind that her knees were trembling and her heart was beating at killing speed. “Tending to your prisoner, something you’ve obviously neglected.”
“He don’t need tendin’,” the big man snarled, his face red and brown eyes fixed on Stryker with wary malice. “Bastard should thank his lucky star if he up and dies of dehydration ‘fore we get to him.”
Anger curdled her fear and Sukeza stepped in front of the chained man, catching Clavis’s eyes. In as even a tone as she could manage, she said, “Even a rogue animal deserves humane treatment before it’s put down, and you’re not planning on getting to him for a while. Let me do my job, Clavis.”
Clavis stared at her, his expression slowly turning sullen when she didn’t back away. “Just so you know you’re tendin’ a dead man.”
“I’ll be bringing him food and water, so you’ll need to find a way to get him to the facilities.” She held up a hand when he opened his mouth with a vicious look in his eyes. “Before you tell me he can go where he is, may I direct your attention to the fine bench he’s currently sitting on? You will never get the stains or the smell out of that wood. Meeting day will never be the same.”
He closed his mouth with an impotent glare and spun his bulk around, slamming the door on his way out. Sukeza felt her knees quiver and slowly sank to the floor before her legs gave out. Bending over her shaking limbs, she closed her eyes and took deep breaths, trying to recover her equilibrium.
“You’re a nervous little thing,” Stryker rumbled, reminding her of the other danger in the room. She managed to suppress the urge to scuttle to her previous place against the opposite wall and merely looked at him over her shoulder.
“He has the power to lock me in here with you. And they haven’t been happy with me taking your side. I’m—another outsider to them.”
He didn’t answer, just looked at her with those steady dark eyes. Unable to hold his gaze, she looked away and pushed to her feet, willing herself not to shake so much. Pretending not to flee, she strode to the door and tried it, breathing a sigh of relief when it opened. She’d had a momentary fear that Clavis had locked her in anyway.
“I’ll be back soon,” she said over her shoulder, not quite meeting his eyes.
“When’s the bonfire?”
She flinched, a sudden horrible image of him in flames searing her mind’s eye. “They—they’ve started building a—a pyre on the edge of town. Clavis thinks they’ll be ready tomorrow night.”
He said nothing and she slipped out the door with an icy knot in her stomach.
Chapter 2
Sukeza stood outside Suni’s stall and studied the creature with a frown. Suni rested her block head on the top of the stall door and studied her in return. Her soft brown eyes with their ridiculously long eyelashes moved over Sukeza with gentle interest as she stood quietly and waited to see what the human had in mind. Her long neck and sleek, six-legged body showed no sign of the stress from the night before—the sweat lines and quivering muscles were gone. She’d been a spotted chuling when Sukeza had first found her, barely past her birthing and trusting as her older, wild herd mates had not been. She had flourished under Sukeza’s attention and had become a dominant in their domestic herd. She’d called the alarm the night of the murder. But why?
Sukeza turned, her stomach clenching when her eyes found the spot where the boys had lain. The blood was gone as was most of the wood floor. Just a ragged dirt patch gave evidence of the crime site. Baka, the other dominant in this barn, was halfway between Suni and that spot. It should have been his call that carried on the night to Stryker. Granted, they both could have been calling and Stryker only heard the one alarm before he was set upon by the grief-stricken community. Still…
Sukeza looked into the stall but could see nothing out of place. Then she tilted her head back, looking up into the rafters. There was a shadowed area above Suni’s stall even in the bright light of day. At night, a person could have hidden there without much fear of detection through the search of the barn. Especially when they’d called off the search on account of having caught “the murderer.”
“Suki? Is something wrong with Suni?”
Sukeza jumped and turned to smile ruefully at Stockton, a short, stout gentleman of middling years. His usual open-faced cheer was knotted into a worried frown.
“No, she’s doing well. Better than I expected. They all are. After the night they’ve had…after the night we’ve all had.” She shrugged and looked away, blinking back the sudden sting of tears.
He patted her on the shoulder with a calloused hand, his movement clumsy but well-meaning. “Well, yes. We’ve all had a rough night of it. When I saw you with your bag, I thought we were going to have a bad day, too.”
Sukeza remembered the medicine bag in her hand and winced. “I’m just glad I didn’t need it,” she said with breezy nonchalance. “I’d best be off now. I’ll come back later and check on them again.”
“You’re always such a dedicated handler. We were lucky to lure you to our little backwater community.” He smiled, his lined face warm.
“Thanks, I always felt lucky to be here.” The standard answer. He was a good man and hadn’t seemed as caught up in the previous night’s madness as the others, but his vaguely patronizing compliments had often grated on her nerves. “I’ll see you later.”
With a pat on Suni’s soft nose she strode toward the exit, careful to keep her movements easy and casual. The sun struck her the moment she stepped from the cool, ventilated shade of the barn, heat and light dousing her like a wave. Pausing to let her eyes adjust, she put up a hand to shade them and glanced down the main thorough-way. Only part of it had been cobbled near the business sections of the community, the parts of town that were most traveled by pedestrians. Other than that it was dirt, dirt, and more dirt, broken only by individual gardens next to houses. Beyond the town lay cultivated fields, patches of forest, and rolling lands, meeting forested hills that led to a line of mountains in the distance, covered by a brilliant blue sky and blazing sun. Not a metallic structure or vessel in sight.
Pressing her lips together and avoiding the pinched gazes of a pair of matrons walking on the opposite side of the main way, Sukeza quickened her step. The day was becoming a scorcher. Stryker would bake in that airless little room. She felt a squeeze of distress when she pictured his sweat-dampened form and grim gaze. Whatever he had done, he didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. Even the Collectors wouldn’t be so inhumane.
Furnace heat struck her like a blow. She sucked in a breath and slipped into the room, alarm racing through her at the sight of Stryker slumped on the bench, his head down and hair dripping with sweat. He tossed his head back and stared at her in silent fury, blinking fiercely when sweat ran into his eyes.
“Sorry,” she blurted, fumbling her bag open while she moved toward him. “I’m sorry, I had to go back to my place for my bag and stopped for a minute at the barn. Here, drink this.” She pulled a jug from her bag and uncorked it, tilting it to his mouth.
His eyes narrowed as they fixed on hers, but he accepted her offering after a fractional hesitation. Then his eyes slid closed while he gulped the fluid with desperate greed. In fascinated wonder, Sukeza watched the strong column of his throat moved with long swallows, the fan of his eyelashes a strange vulnerability in that hard face. Even through the heat of the room, she could feel the warmth his big body generated, heating the air around her until she felt flushed with it. She could smell the sweat on his skin, a musky, male animal scent that reminded her of long nights spent soothing newly captured animals. Her guilt surged.
Light of Kaska Page 2