From my advantageous position perched as I am, I empty my quiver before drawing my sword once more. I leap the short distance from the tree, slashing through the back of the Warue I fall upon. Blinking through the grime on my face, I narrow my field of vision onto the structure that I’m certain is holding my mate. Without mercy, I plow forward, sword in one hand and dagger in the other, eviscerating one male, my nose wrinkling at the scent of his warm guts dropping from his body. Another chokes on his own blood as I cut a gash into his neck.
I don’t stop to finish the job or to give him a quick, merciful death. I don’t stop in my onward push. My mate is a beacon calling to me, and I am pulled unfailingly toward her.
KATE
The loud noises from outside reverberate through the room, and I swear something huge crashes into the walls. Packed dirt from the mud walls shakes loose, baring roots in a manner that seems more than a little dangerous. Cavekji and the kits all start howling with a mixture of fear and displeasure. I clutch my son closer to my chest, curling my body over him.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” I hiss as a bit of dirt gets in my eyes, making them water terribly.
“Ogres came today,” Fahuri says. All the females shudder collectively.
“Is that a bad thing?” I’m not ashamed to admit when I’m clueless. Trolls and orcs didn’t seem as bad as fiction paints them. Maybe ogres are just lovely too... even if that comes with terrifying earth tremors.
Ahoa nods, her face pinched tight. “Whenever the ogres come, many females are taken. We don’t know why, but every time the holding den is nearly emptied.”
A shiver wracks my body, as icy dread crawls up my back.
“There are always problems when the ogres come. They are stupid and quick to anger. It is not unusual for there to be fights,” a Warue female, Wavi, observes in a hushed voice as she cuddles her kit closer.
“What if it’s the Evarue come to free us?” one of the newer females, Ethala, shouts excitedly. An enthusiastic buzz ripples among the Evarue females, but the Warue females seem to sink into themselves at the prospect.
“I hope so for your sake, but there is nothing to save us,” Wavi sighs.
Fahuri narrows her eyes. “Ethala, do not encourage false hope. That can destroy us quicker than they can.” She sets a comforting hand on Wavi and looks at the miserable Warue females. “As far as I am concerned, every female in this room is now Evarue. My brother is the alpha. I will see to it that you come with us if we manage to be freed.”
Something changes among the females. A new kinship is formed with those few words. The Warue females merge among the Evarue, who warmly receive them among their numbers. They lean into each other’s flanks in common sisterhood, taking comfort as the world rocks around us in a terrible clamor.
A shadow falls upon us from the opening and all the females stiffen. It’s the guard. Krue is despicable. Although the alpha, Mercol, keeps him from touching any of us, he finds other ways to torment us. Masturbating in front of us and flinging his spunk at us is the worst of it when he isn’t taunting us with detailed descriptions of what he’d like to do to us. For whatever reason, he enjoys torturing me with descriptions of the things that he did to Cavek during his time in captivity.
Never have I hated any living being the way I hate him.
He comes into the torch light and to my surprise he’s wearing scaled armor. The scales wink in the light. I’ve never seen a werewolf wear any kind of armor in my time here, and I can’t imagine why he’d choose to wear it now.
Krue ignores the other females. He’s intent on me. He pushes his way into our cell, and the females who might have once attacked him when they were in good health scatter. A few bitches attempt to rush him, but he throws them to the side without breaking stride. Tears spring to my eyes when Ethala hits the wall with enough force that the crack of her neck breaking is audible.
A clawed hand jerks me forward out of the cell. I nearly drop Cavekji, but Fahuri comes to my aid and pulls him up into her arms, her expression filled with worry as Krue drags me to the other side of the cell. Both of my wrists are in one of his massive hands and he holds me far enough from his body to evade my kicks while he locks the cell behind us. Once he’s certain the other females are secure, he draws my struggling body up close to him.
He leans his face into mine and his fetid breath hits me. I want to gag but settle for turning my head to the side. He chuckles and runs his nose along my neck.
“Sweet little female. It is interesting that I can still smell your mate on you. Even all these days apart, his scent has not weakened even a little. I like that. I will rut you with his scent clinging to you and know that I am vanquishing something that is his. I lost my right testicle to your mate, but now I will take something from him.”
He turns me in his grip and shoves me against the wall, tilting my hips out. I scream as I feel his claws tearing at my clothes. I kick back and he laughs in my ear, his teeth nipping at my neck.
“Struggle all you like, female. If Cavek were here at this moment, he would tell you that I like it when my prey struggles.”
Panic flares within my breast and I renew my fight. He curses when I throw my head back and by chance strike him square in the nose. A hand closes around my throat, applying just enough pressure for me to gasp for each breath. Cool air hits my bottom when he finally tears the lower half of my dress away. The females in the cell snarl and rage, but then a shocked silence settles into the room before a howl cuts through the air. Just as I feel his length slide against my ass, someone rips him away from me. A hot splatter of blood hits my back as I slide to my knees.
I slowly turn my head and the figure behind me panting over the body of Krue comes into focus. His emerald skin is painted over with crimson, and his eyes glow with a violent fire. That fire slowly dies away in his eyes and the return to the soft amethyst that I love so well. The familiar muscles of his arms sweep around me, pulling me against his rock hard chest.
“Cavek...” I whisper around broken sobs. “You’re here.”
“I will always come,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. I wrap my arms around him and allow the horror of the last several days to melt away under his touch.
Chapter 20
Cavek
I run my hands all over my mate, reassuring myself that she’s okay. The foul odor of Krue is like a film over her skin. Never had I suspected he would survived my escape. I had hoped that he bled out and saved the world a lot of misery. If I had arrived even minutes later... I shudder at the thought of what almost happened. I allow my eyes to roam the length of her body, worry settling with a nauseating weight in my gut.
“Did he—?”
She shakes her head.
“He would have if you’d been any later, but this was the first time he tried,” Kate says quietly. “The alpha kept him on a tight leash until now. He obeyed but he liked to cum on us, since that was the worst he could do.”
I turn my face into her hair and breathe her in. The relief that fills me is staggering.
A lusty wail draws my attention. I turn my head and see a decimated female Evarue on the other side of the cell. The dyed tribal markings decorating her face are starting to fade with her time in captivity, but her tribe is unmistakable. Warue don’t bother bestowing markings on their females. In her arms, Cavekji cries and struggles to break free from her grip. She offers my son to me with a shy smile.
I release Kate and open the cell, taking my son and pulling his tiny body close to me. Cavekji’s cries die down to whimpers as he clings to my arm, several of my braids painfully tight in his grip.
I shudder with the realization of just how close I came to losing everything. It’s likely that Kate would have been packed up with all the other females and given to the ogres if we hadn’t arrived in time to stop to transfer.
My eyes flicker down to the male dead on the floor. His bowels hang all around him from the violence with which I’d gutted him. I f
eel nothing but satisfaction in his death. I hand my son over to Kate and lean down to remove my armor from his corpse. I’ll be damned if his remains leave this world in possession of my favorite armor.
I unlash my breastplate and the simple leather armor from my body and let them fall to the floor. With the heel of my boot, I kick Krue over so that I can loot my dragon-scale armor from his body. Once it’s free of his body, I slip it on and lash it over my frame. It stinks of the wolf, but I can ignore that for now until it can be cleaned.
The females slowly file out of the cell. Few still appear healthy, and I assume that these are the recent lost females, but the others are severally malnourished. What surprises me is that over half of the females—and those in the worst condition—are Warue females. They’re so weak that they lean on each other. When a kit begins to cry, I see the tiny bodies for the first time, and I am sickened at the cruelty of the Warue. The female soothes the infant until it falls back to sleep.
The sounds of battle have died outside, and I can hear the celebratory cheers and howls rising. I smile at the females looking around with confusion. Some wear a glimmer of hope on their faces. The Warue females look worried. I smile comfortingly at them.
“Come on. Let’s leave this place. Warue, I swear no one will hurt you.”
The female who’d held Cavekji straightens and looks at me sternly.
“There are no Warue in this room—only Evarue. This is so declared by Fahuri, first sister of the alpha and keeper of Evarue lore.”
I incline my head with respect. “As you say then, Fahuri.”
The females follow me without hesitation out of the holding den. The moment she breathes free air, Fahuri tilts her head back and lets out a delighted howl. The other females add their voices as it rises in a chain of harmony. Wolves from the battleground slowly add their voices to it. One by one, they arrive to greet the females.
First among them are Eral and Shava. Both come to a stunned halt in front of the den.
“Fahuri?” Eral whispers, his ears flattening as his eyes widen with shock.
“Fahuri!” Shava cries out happily, embracing the smaller female. Kate swallows back a happy sob as the females cling to each other. I pull my mate against my side, knowing well the happiness of reunion.
“Eral, Shava, let me introduce the new females of our tribe,” Fahuri says with proud authority as she steps back to join the unmarked females. “Shava, I know it is ultimately by your grace that females are Evarue, but I ask that you not turn them aside. They have suffered enough already.”
Shava blinks slowly as her eyes trail over them. Several of the females lower themselves to the ground, ears and tail low in submission. She suddenly smiles, and all the females visibly brighten.
“Stand, sisters. You are Evarue now, and we are one. You need not lower yourself to the dirt in front of me outside of ceding to a lost challenge. And from the state of you, none of you are going to be doing that any time soon,” she says gently.
One of the unmarked females holding a kit laughs. She flinches as if the sound is foreign to her, but she returns the alpha female’s smile.
“I do not think any of us will be challenging. We are all omegas, expendables among the Warue. We are happy enough just being a part of the tribe. We thank you,” she says with a small bow.
The Evarue surround the females and I draw my mate and son away, my eyes scanning over the foliage that drips with blood. When I see the hulking frame of Orgath, I sweep my female up in my arms and rush over to deposit her right in front of her blood-bathed friend.
Sammi squeals with happiness, running forward to wrap her wet arms around Kate, holding her close. I step back beside Orgath to give the females space for the jubilant reunion. Even Orgath cracks a smile, his yellow eyes gleaming fondly at the embracing females.
Both Orgath and Sammi seem more mussed than I would have expected. They weren’t just splattered heavily with blood, but in many places it is liberally smeared as if in the grip of some sort of frenzy. Recalling Sammi’s liberation over a year earlier, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what the orcs were doing while I was retrieving my mate. The fact that the other trolls are studiously not looking at any of the orcs confirms my suspicions.
“Orgath, after the battle—did you—?”
He merely bares his tusks in a wicked grin. I promptly decide to ‘shut the fuck up,’ as my mate puts it. I really don’t want to know any details of their post-battle activities, anyway. I lean against a tree, prepared to wait out the reunion of our mates.
A furious shriek rises alarmingly close when Vandra appears out of nowhere. She is disheveled from her escape from prison, her dress filthy and now stained from the battlefield. She raises a knife and leaps down at my mate with her dagger drawn. I stiffen and turn toward the females, knowing that I’m no longer close enough to intercept her.
My blood turns cold. Kate still has our son in her arms. She turns to look behind her, her face paling.
Energy crackles around us and tree roots spring from the ground, the sharp tips shooting out until they impale Vandra just inches away from my mate. Her eyes widen in a mixture of shock and pain, her knife falling from her fingers to the forest floor. Only one among us has that sort of magic. I look around until I see Mother standing nearby, her face a mask of sorrow, unmistakable even when wearing the signs of battle’s labors. She approaches us, her mawu prowling behind her.
Vandra looks at her with hatred as she struggles to pull herself off the roots. It takes a lot to kill a troll. Even hitting a vital organ doesn’t necessarily mean the end if one can hold on long enough to heal. It hurts like hell though; I can tell by the painful way she draws in air.
She summons enough within her to spit at Mother’s feet.
“Ancestors curse you for harming your own blood,” Vandra says weakly.
Mother shakes her head. “It is you who must now answer to the ancestors. Your father and I tried to be lenient and imprison you. We hoped that you would someday learn your error and make amends to the gods and ancestors who keep the Middling Way safe. You should have stayed in your tower. You left me no choice.”
At Kate’s side, my heart lurches as Mother turns her face away and closes her eyes. I pull Kate and Cavekji into my chest. I do not want them to witness it, though there is little I can do to muffle what they will hear.
At Mother’s sharp command, the mawu leap onto Vandra. Her body struggles as the first one bites down on her, and her painful gasps turn to screams that continue on and on until the last of her breath leaves her body and little remains but a mauled and bloody mess.
Mother blinks back hot tears but speaks for the benefit of the trolls who gather around us, having witnessed the attack.
“May the ancestors be satisfied. Vandra will not be buried or given respect by the living. We will forget her and her stain upon our family.” Looking infinitely older, Mother hobbles away to rejoin Father at the edge of the battlegrounds. They turn amid their troops and mount their mawu to begin the journey home.
“She was responsible for all this, you know. For all of our pain,” Kate says as she stares unflinchingly at what was once my sister.
I pull her back into my embrace, diverting her eyes, and rest my chin on her head. We stand there together, our son pressed between our bodies as he coos and gurgles without a care in the world.
“She was, but now she’s nothing. Now, we forget her and take the best form of vengeance. We move on and live long happy lives.”
Chapter 21
Kate
Stitch is going to be the most spoiled mawu in all of Middling Way. I decide this as I hold Boukie close to me. I hadn’t imagined that Vandra would have gone after my daughter too until Cavek and Serus filled me on the events that occurred during my absence. Stitch saved my baby.
I’ll never complain about that little beast again. Even when he shreds my favorite underwear.
“You shoulda seen it, Mommy. Stitch was scary! He got all big and
made a scary noise. He bit the bad person, Mommy. He bit them and they ran away.”
“Stitch is a very good mawu,” I say, rubbing the scaly creature behind his large pointed ears. Stitch smiles up at me revealing all of his needle-sharp teeth in a typical doggy smile, his forked tongue lolling out with ecstasy as I hit a good spot.
I frown at the dry skin coming off his scales. It reminds me a bit of the shedding from a snake I had in my youth. I hope he’s not sick. The last thing I need is Boukie’s savior falling ill. She’s already telling everyone that he’s her hero. She’d be devastated.
I hold up my hand with bits of his skin clinging to my fingertips.
“Cavek, is this normal?”
My mate comes over with Cavekji on one arm and peers down at my hand. He lets out a loud sigh.
“Yes, it’s perfectly normal. Stitch is reaching his first growth.”
“What does that mean?”
There’s something ominous about the way he said that.
“He will experience a rapid period of growth, eat everything in sight, and smell bad from constantly shedding—which will also make a huge mess everywhere. This is why I didn’t want a mawu.”
“They sound like a teenage boy,” I shrug nonchalantly. I remember Luke and Jake as teenagers. It was disgusting, but everyone survived just fine. “I doubt you’ll love Cavekji any less when he gets to be a smelly adolescent.”
Cavek grins toothily at me. “Perhaps, but by that age he will be going through exercise drills or beginning his apprenticeship under another troll when not studying with palace tutors, and I won’t have to smell him all the time. I will just place warnings of high toxicity around his bedroom.”
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