Regret showed at the corner of his mouth, a wry thing. “Ever wise, my atreya.”
“Rarely wise,” she retorted, sitting back on her heels to take stock. “Usually making things up along the way, and you know it.”
“My language sounds good on your tongue,” he observed. He leaned back against the rock, his legs crossed, shackled wrists resting on his knees.
She sent him a little glare. “We’ll talk about that later. After we get out of this place. I’m thinking no one’s come running in, so maybe they don’t know I’m here?”
“Our detection glyphs aren’t attuned to your energies.”
“But someone could still show up.” She looked around the cave—a generous thing the size of her entire first floor, patchily illuminated by lumps of light that just might have been breathing. “Even those little toad minions I saw earlier...where do they even come from?”
“There are passages. Nothing large enough to consider for our own use.”
She stopped her mad whirl of plotting long enough to cast a glance his way. “You use more words here.”
“I have more words to use,” he informed her. “Atreya, I cannot escape these shackles.” He held them up, revealing wrists raw and weeping. “I cannot draw on my own resources while wearing them.”
She wanted to hurt someone. Badly. “These people are monsters.”
“So you once might have said of me.”
She glared at him. “You want to go there now?”
He hesitated. The unfamiliar light gleamed in his eye, showing her a weariness she hadn’t seen before. “This is not your home, atreya. Have no illusions about us here. Any of us. Many in Ghehera are human, but they do not come from your world. They do not live by your assumptions.”
“Yada, yada,” Garrie snapped. “I get it, okay? Stranger in a strange land. At some point you’ll get to say I told you so, no doubt. Right now, let’s get you out of those damned chains and out of here.”
He only looked at her—a patient expression, but also faintly puzzled. Maybe she needed to kiss some sense into him.
On second thought, she did still need her own brain. She twisted out of the satchel strap, dropping it beside him, and rose to grab up the duster she’d dropped in her rush to greet him, displaying it with triumph. She particularly showed him the inside front flap where the sword’s hilt emerged.
“Lukhas!”
“Exactly.” She withdrew the sword, pulling it from the Tardis pocket and tossing the coat his way. She pretended not to notice the hint of alarm on his face or the way he drew back as she brandished the sword. “This thing cuts through just about everything, as far as I could see.”
“It has enhancements,” he said, his eyes never leaving the moving blade.
“Don’t be a baby,” she told him. “It’ll cut the chains, right? The shackles?”
His expression said yes. His body language said he wasn’t sure he wanted to try. Finally he allowed, “It should. But not these.” He indicated the shackles with a lift of his wrists.
“One thing at a time. So hold still.”
It was a starting point, and he knew it. Still, he hesitated.
Garrie turned serious. “I’ll be careful,” she said. “I’ll be really careful. But someone could come in at any moment, right? And I don’t want to have to kill them. Besides...” She took a deep breath. “I left my crew in trouble. And civilians. There’s a thing on the mountain called a kyrokha—are you familiar?”
He couldn’t have looked more startled—another first. As were the words he couldn’t quite seem to form.
She took his reaction as assent. “It’s hunkered in pretty hard, and it’s mad as a hatter.” That, she could see, hadn’t made sense to him. “It’s farking insane, Trevarr. It’s killing people. And it has Quinn and Lucia and a bunch of hikers trapped up there. Sklayne, too, but he can get out when he wants to, as long as he doesn’t manage to goad it into eating him.”
He didn’t quite meet her eyes. “Sklayne told you it was kyrokha.”
“Yes. And that it’s a big farking powerful thing. Not bad. At least not when it’s sane.”
“And you left your people.”
The statement wasn’t accusatory; it wasn’t even a question. But she wasn’t used to Trevarr feeling his way with her. And she was embarrassed.
“It hates me,” she said. “The kyrokha. I think it knows I was involved in the whole portal thing. Anyway, being there—I was just making things worse. Didn’t have anything to offer but dissolution, supposing I could even pull that off. But honestly...I think that would be bad for everyone. I’m hoping you have a better idea. You know, after I break these chains. And then the shackles. And then you can use the oskhila and—” The look on his face stopped her. “What?”
“Not the oskhila. Not from within this containment.” He searched her gaze as if he could instill understanding with the intensity of it. “Not from within Ghehera.”
She stared at him, too stupefied to respond—taking in his sincerity, the lack of challenge in his voice, the renewed weariness behind his eyes. “But...I got in...”
“A weakness on the part of the glyphs. I cannot take us out again. You cannot take me out. This place knows me.”
She stuttered a few words, managed to say, “But if I put you in silence...”
In response he shifted aside, drawing one chain tight across the face of the rock most recently at his back. Giving her room to swing the blade.
She understood well enough. No, not even with her silence. But they had to start somewhere.
She took a careful hold of Lukhas’ hilt, two hands wrapped around leather and wire, and lifted the sword. “I’ll be careful,” she promised him, and swung.
~~~~~
Anjhela strode into the Deeps, all languid and loose-hipped on the outside, shifting to high alert on the inside. Lumes flickered around her; skelpies scuttled away. They sensed her mood no matter how she tried to hide it. Alarm. Fury.
In Ghehera, one did not display alarm. Arrogance, yes. Cruelty, yes. In her day, Anjhela had worn such things like cloaks of status.
She was no longer so certain it was her day.
She stopped at Trevarr’s containment, damning herself for ignoring the recent shiver in the security glyphs in favor of her consolation session in progress. Because of that distraction, she’d come to the Deeps unaware, unconcerned—wearing her cloak of arrogance until the moment one of the squat, toadlike mudbloods saw her and instantly darted away with its eyes bulging, quacking in fear.
She could have caught it easily. But she cared more about why the thing was frightened in the first place—for only these caretaker ’bloods had unfettered access to Trevarr’s containment.
Grimly, she palmed the entry lock. The solid stone separated into door and wall; the door cracked open and pushed aside, revealing Trevarr’s containment.
And he wasn’t alone.
Anjhela lunged inside and commanded the door closed, stunned by the impossibility but no less swift to act on it what she’d seen. Trevarr, twisting away from the rock, one of his chains flailing through the air...broken. His face fierce, overwhelming for the moment the weakness she knew to lie beneath.
Not alone.
His petite companion wielded his sword without grace, staggering a step, then two, to catch her balance. And then she saw Anjhela, and instead of fear her precise features took on an unexpected grin, just as fierce as Trevarr’s and no less intense for the whimsical shimmer of her skin or the disarrayed nature of her short hair with its silvered sections, so much like k’thai. Not at all chagrined at her discovery, but greeting Anjhela like an old enemy well met.
She knows me. It wasn’t voluntary, that thought. It came with a startled fear—followed close on by annoyance. Anjhela feared no one.
And this small human creature would hardly survive Ghehera unscathed, if she should survive at all.
Trevarr’s familiar satchel and worn duster sat beside him; Anjhela knew
the sword to be Lukhas, a thing crafted by the finest of blade makers and enhanced by the most exacting set of glyphs. Protected by them.
She would not underestimate that blade.
The woman tossed Lukhas to Trevarr, confident he could snatch it from air—as he did, stretching the chain tight as the blade flashed through it. The chain parted, metal singing—but the shackles remained, as they would continue to remain. Layered in silvered glyphs that would resist even Lukhas, they were stalwart to outside assault.
Trevarr straightened, no longer fastened to rock, perfectly capable of using both the dangling chains and the shackles as physical weapons, and Anjhela took a step back. Not frightened, no. But wise. Ready to slip through the door and sound the alarm, shedding dignity for practical survival.
I can handle him.
He won’t truly harm me.
And she thought that might be true. But she didn’t know if she could say it of the two of them.
“Ohh, no,” said the woman, anticipating Anjhela’s movement—and speaking in Anjhela’s tongue. Not the off-world woman Trevarr had been protecting? But if not, how had she gotten past the glyphs? And who—”
The hesitation cost her. The woman shot forward more quickly than Anjhela anticipated, her wiry strength full of speed. She slammed against the end of the door, sliding it back into place—and then stood before it as if in a dare.
This time Anjhela offered her own fierce grin, a thing of faintly pointed teeth and a dark tongue. She didn’t reach for her blade, a petite but utterly efficient knife.
She unsheathed the mendihar.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 32
Silver and Wilderness
Anjhela. Of course she’d come. Her lush mouth hardened with distaste as she spotted Garrie, the upper lip lifting in a hint of sneer. Form-fitting leather—vest and pants—encased an hourglass waist, stunning hips, and breasts. And of course that creepy gauntlet oozed right out from beneath her deep brown skin—metal nails tipped in glimmering light and stained with old blood. Fine metal scales ran like skin on the underside of that wrist, plated like armor over top—covering hand and fingers, perfectly articulated. An extension of the flesh and bone beneath.
It was a thing to be feared, and Garrie recognized it immediately: the living instrument that had tortured Trevarr.
But she also recognized it as the thing she had once defeated.
Right. After it nearly ate you alive.
But if this woman escaped to warn others before Garrie and Trevarr sorted themselves out, there would be no returning to the mountain. No saving her friends, no saving all the others who would die. No saving herself, or Trevarr.
“Bring it on,” she told Anjhela. Golden eyes narrowed, cat-like, with annoyance.
“Beware her,” Trevarr said, shifting as though he might close the distance, his sword rising and regret already riding his features.
“Anjhela, right?” Garrie held the woman’s gaze. She hadn’t yet drawn her knife, the one with the blade that cut things whether she wanted it to or not. “Your lover.”
“Once,” Trevarr said, but his voice was not unaffected. He’d cared about this woman. Something in him still did.
Garrie flicked a glance at him—at Lukhas, and at Trevarr’s intent. “Don’t.”
“No?” Anjhela said, and even her low voice was a smoothly controlled instrument. “Because you’ll spare him the need to kill me?” She eyed Garrie with open disdain. “Such as you are?”
“Hey, I’m here, aren’t I?” Garrie said, and that was enough. Here inside the glyphs, here across worlds, here speaking a language that wasn’t her own and staring down that creepy metal glove. So what if her heart was back to pounding double-time? Because here, in fact, was exactly where Ghehera so fervently wanted her.
Anjhela’s metal-sheathed hand twitched. “So you are.” She glanced back at Trevarr. “You should have told her to stay hidden.”
“In fact,” Trevarr said, “I have learned it best not to tell her anything. Heed that, Anjhela.”
Anjhela lifted her chin, haughtiness personified. “You might remember the same about me.”
“No,” Trevarr said. “I remember a young half-blood doing her best to survive but not believing she would. I remember...promise.”
Those lush lips flattened in annoyance. “You didn’t used to talk so much.”
Garrie allowed her disdain to show. “Isn’t that why you grabbed him, why you’ve tortured him? Just exactly so he would talk?”
Anjhela looked at her as though she was a bug.
“You should have known I would come,” Garrie said, unaffected. Or at least, not much affected. She pretended to think. “Oh, wait, I guess you wouldn’t. It’s not something you’d do for anyone else. Or expect from them.”
She saw Anjhela’s reaction play out across her features—and saw the attack just before it launched. A swiftly graceful movement and metal flashed, unnaturally supple in the bruised light.
Garrie could have ducked—should have ducked—and yet there she was, blocking the door, meeting Anjhela with no defense but herself, no weapon but herself. Counting on herself to be those things. Knowing that she was.
Metal claws dug into her skin with a startlingly cold grip, finding purchase at her jaw and over her opposite brow. For a brief instant, Garrie met the close-up ferocity of Anjhela’s yellow-gold gaze, startled at the vertical slit of her pupil, the distinct double bar bell shape. So very not human.
And then she wasn’t thinking at all. Then she was.
She was pain. She was grief and fear and tumbling panic. She was raw-throated screaming and legs going out from under her and—
She was everything Trevarr had been, on that day she’d fought for him.
The same flavor of pain, the same startling purity of emotion. The same expertly chaotic assault.
Channel it. Pull it in, as she’d done before. Embrace it and gather it and—
But she was grief and fear and tumbling panic, raw-throated screaming and legs going out from under her and—
Sudden images bloomed into clarity. Trevarr’s face, his eyes open and looking straight at her. His mouth in a snarl of pleasure, the corded muscles of his neck standing out, his shoulders looming, his body moving. Trevarr, shouting in an unbearable pleasure, amazingly rich brown skin and finest scales on the fingers that dug into his shoulders and scraped welts down his chest, clutched at his hair...
Hair not quite as long, not quite as tangled with braids.
A memory.
A memory of Anjhela wrapping herself around Trevarr. A memory of Trevarr giving himself to this woman who now betrayed him. A taunt.
More than that. A mistake.
Because it didn’t devastate Garrie. It didn’t crush her soul to see Trevarr in that intimacy, that ecstasy, with someone else.
It only reminded her where she was and why she was there and what she intended to do about it. And she still screamed, but now it had an edge to it. She still tumbled in chaos, but now she saw through it.
Now she knew herself again, amidst the agony. And as she had done before, she opened herself to the impact of it, drawing upon it—letting it scrape and shred through her soul while she struggled to bind it.
And unlike before, gathering.
Acquiring.
Pulling the energy to herself and encapsulating it in a net of thickly woven breezes, making it her own.
Anjhela gasped and cried out, trying to wrench herself away, and Garrie clamped a hand over a metal-encased wrist to keep her there. Just long enough to reach for her own memories, her real memories.
That moment of pure unadulterated joy when Trevarr returned to her in San Jose. The moment of equally joyous relief when she woke to his survival in Sedona. The absolute contentment of sleeping beside him, feeling the weight of his arm and the unusual warmth of his body, his breath stirring her hair. Her awareness of his scent, of his strength...of his love.
All those things, she gather
ed up, holding them close as she squeezed the ethereal net of collected chaos and agony, pouring that energy back at Anjhela.
Even Anjhela’s scream was perfect, full throated and full of feeling. She fought to disengage, yanking the gauntlet away from Garrie’s face but not from her grip. When Anjhela fell backward, Garrie fell on top of her—grappling, strangely intimate, and not quite connected to the churning memories.
As the backflow of pain and emotional agony finally waned, Garrie released the sweetness of her own hoarded memories. Treasured moments, abiding moments—moments of intimate and vulnerably personal nature.
This is what we are. This is what you cannot break.
Anjhela gasped and went limp, trembling, her hand bereft of metal, her strength gone. Garrie rolling aside from her on the hard stone floor, blinking up at the faintly pulsing patches of light. Breathing hard, her face full of tears, her soul aching.
She wasn’t made to be a battleground.
She wiped her face and made herself remember that the fight wasn’t over. A deep breath and she rolled up to her knees, finding Trevarr not so far away—hunkered down to wait for her, his forearms resting over his knees, his expression patient but his eyes still wild.
Something stirred in those eyes, desperately seeking freedom. Something he struggled with, and fought, and then managed to blink away. “Atreya.”
Naturally, she threw herself at him. Naturally he caught her, pulling her into an encompassing embrace. He cradled her head between his hands and kissed her—not with the ferocity of a fugitive half-bred bounty hunter, but with the tender, thorough attention of a lover reunited.
But when he lifted his mouth to kiss the brow so recently pierced by Anjhela’s creepy metal fingers, Garrie took hold of herself, shaking off emotion—or at least returning to the practical. Including the very critical need to escape from this place. She pushed off of Trevarr’s thigh to stand; he rose beside her, towering over her as he ever did.
She wrapped her fingers around one of the heavy shackles. “We have to get you out of these things in order to leave, right?”
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