It might still have been a terrible choice, but I didn’t think it would take much to point him at the Krektar. He would probably gladly wring a few of their necks. Feeling like I was possibly doing something dumb, but needing to act rather than do nothing, I started to move—leaping off the pod and forfeiting my vantage point so I could circle around the hold. I carefully tried to keep track of everyone and tried even harder to spot any sign of Khawla. A blur there, a falling Krektar the result, then a human stumbling out of the chaos for Jasmine’s safety with a shove of a tail. He wasn’t just fighting; he was trying to extract anyone still caught in the middle.
I also caught a flash of black and red every now and then, but never enough to really make out what was going on. Thor was moving fast, or trying to move with subterfuge. He was pretty good at staying hidden, just like my Khawla was.
Reaching the pod with the Dragnell wasn’t hard. The fight was concentrated a little further away; enough distance to be safe. Nobody seemed to take note of one human rushing around the fight, ducking low to make a smaller target. Then I was up against the side of the pod, peering in through the plexiglass cover to make sure it was the right one. His snout was pressed to the glass, all that fur covering him making him fill the pod to the brim. Yeah, it was the right pod.
My fingers felt clumsy and stiff as I tucked away my sling and touched the controls. I checked the fight once more to see how it was going and discovered that one Naga had gone down, sprawled on the ground in limp, unconscious loops. It wasn’t Khawla, but it could have been. The rhinoceros dude was standing over that body as if he meant to crush the poor guy with his hammer—except a flying arrow made him turn. It bounced off his skin, but his attention was focused on Jasmine now. Not good.
“You better be a good guy, beast,” I muttered as I pressed the wake sequence. It had never seemed as slow as it did now, precious seconds slipping by. I pressed my back to the pod and readied my sling, the pouch of rocks collected by Nisha and Daois open at my hip. Maybe I could distract that monster again, the way Jasmine had.
“What is going on, human?” a voice growled abruptly from behind me. My spine tingled, fear shooting up it as I jerked away in reflex. A large, furred hand caught me by the arm and halted me in my tracks. “You’re the bold one, but those little pebbles won’t work on me.” The Dragnell had risen to a seated position in his pod, alert and up far more quickly than my girls had been. All that thick black fur covered a frame packed with muscle, and I felt every bit of his strength in the way he held me.
Fangs gleamed ivory in his pointed wolf’s snout, his eyes glowing golden. He was glaring at me with fury, as if he thought I was up to no good. It made me feel positively tinyin the weirdest way. It was like being called into the headmaster’s office or having my boss reprimand me for spending too much time with my patients—not like he was about to snap me in two or bite my head off, but like he’d give me a serious tongue-lashing and that was it.
My voice trembled as I rushed to explain the situation, and his eyes shifted from furious to contemplative, flicking toward the fight to assess it. We didn’t have time for this, damn it! That rhino was about to squash Jasmine with his hammer. “I’m helping you! Rescue is here, but there was a surprise attack! If you don’t help out, they might kill us yet.”
“Ah,” the Dragnell drawled. “That’s not helpingme; you want me to helpyou.” He still hadn’t let go of my arm, but he was climbing out of the pod, his long, bushy tail shaking out behind him in broad sweeps. He hunched forward, still towering over me but sticking his snout in my face. “You want me to kill the big gray one so he doesn’t hammer your little pink-haired friend into the ground, is that it?”
I nodded furiously, seeing no point in denying that. He was almost at Jasmine now and had swatted away several of her arrows. She didn’t have long, and I saw no sign of the green Naga, and Khawla was caught up with three Krektar—his eye on me rather than the rhinoceros about to flyswat my friend.
“Okay,” the Dragnell said, “that’s all I needed to know.” And just like that, he let go of my arm and leaped into the fray. I saw only a black blur and gleaming teeth, and then he was on top of the rhino. He’d moved so fast it shouldn’t be possible, and yet, Khawla whipped his tail around in a fatal blow to a Krektar at much the same speed. Ireallyhoped the Dragnell wasn’t going to make me regret waking him. He’d definitely saved Jasmine’s bacon, though, I heard her cheering over the fighting sounds, cheering on the Dragnell.
They were clashing hard and fast, but seemed matched in size. I hadn’t counted on the Dragnell suffering from stasis illness, but I should have. I’d been weak and a little nauseousright after waking, and he was no different. When the rhino struck him in the chest with the hammer, he stumbled back into the stacks of stasis pods with a crash. I did not see him get up.
Then the giant bastard turned on me, as if he knew exactly who’d sicced that beast on him. The Dragnell’s claws had dug deep scratches into his thick gray skin, possibly blinding one beady black eye—and it absolutely infuriated this monster of an alien. He came charging toward me just as the sounds of the fight began to die down. Eyes wide, I felt like time slowed down, everything shifting into slow motion.
The smoke was gone, just curling in the last little wisps around ankles and feet. The purple Naga was still on the floor, possibly dead. He was surrounded by Krektar bodies. Behind him, I saw the tip of something green, but not enough of it to know if it was the other guy. Khawla was rising over the bodies of two more dead Krektar, and a third was just slipping off the knife that tipped Thor’s tail. My brain helpfully crowed about that, so Thorwason our side. None of that was good enough to save me from the charging giant. Even without the hammer, he could crush me like a bug.
I swung my sling, a stone striking his face, but it did not even make him blink. He was going to grab me in a few seconds, and then all would be over. At least I felt certain that he wouldn’t come out of this alive. Khawla would avenge me. Poor Khawla, I never told him I loved him, and now he was about to lose another mate.
And then there was a noise—a whimper, a moan—something. It was too loud in the sudden silence after the violence. The charging rhinoceros swiveled his head, and then he changed course, yanking Eva from behind a stasis pod and holding her against him, as if her small body could shield him. Then he roared, but I understood not a single thing of what he spewed out next.
Chapter 22
Khawla
The smoke was not the obstacle the Krektar thought it was—not for my well-honed senses. I had not counted on the fear I felt, which almost translated into panic, not for myself, but for Jolene and her wards. She was in this smoke, and so small that anyone of us could easily trample her. We were also badly outnumbered and did not have the home advantage. The hold of the ship—with its cold metal floors and strange boxes—was unfamiliar, and we were only three warriors against a dozen.
Then I caught sight of the red-and-black hunter: he slipped around the edges of the fake fog and cut like a blade in the night. Wherever he went, Krektar were hamstrung or killed, and that made all the difference—until the monster joined the fight: a beast with gray skin hard as stone and fists like boulders. He swatted my tail with a hammer strike, and the tip went numb and useless beyond the hit. Broken, but Icould not let in the pain when my mate and her human wards were in danger.
Then Felish went down, followed by Akrash, and all seemed doomed. Where was Jolene? I could not take my eye off the Krektar, or I’d share the same fate as the two Haven hunters. Then I saw her—just as she unleashed some kind of hairy beast from a crate. It charged at the big, thick-skinned one, narrowly saving Jolene’s friend. I fought to take down the last Krektar then, fearing it wouldn’t be enough. The hairy beast was providing just enough of a distraction to allow me to gain the upper hand. It wasn’t fast enough.
The hairy predator was no match for skin like rock and a hammer the size of a boulder. He disappeared between stacks of boxes, and then—to my horror—nothing stood in the path of the monster and my mate. He was charging her, and in that brief moment, so many things flashed through my mind: that I had not told her how much she meant to me, how much she’d changed my life—but I didn’t regret a single thing. How brave I found her, while being kind at the same time. The feelings in my chest were so big and encompassing, I had no word for them, no word at all. Yet I wanted to tell her anyway.
I wrenched the last Krektar out of my path and leaped forward, knowing all the while that I wouldn’t reach her before he did. When he suddenly halted in his path and turned, my relief was fierce and instant. It shamed me to admit that, for a heartbeat, I didn’t even care that he’d grabbed another human female. It wasn’t Jolene, which meant she was safe, for now. Then I knew that she’d want to save this girl at any cost, and I forced myself to focus on that.
The huge gray, horned creature had his big paw around the female’s throat, and she was crying heavily, her eyes leaking so badly that I worried something was wrong with them. When my younglings cried, it was never like that. She dangled in his grip, her feet in the air, and blood was dripping along the side of her face. That was all I needed tosee to know that helping her was the right thing to do. She was weak, injured; she needed my protection as much as—more so than—Jolene did. So I circled around, knowing I’d need to get the bastard in the back, catch him by surprise. What would a weak spot be? He seemed like a huge boulder, his thick skin making him impervious to our weapons. Except… the hairy beasthadclawed him in the face.
I clenched my fist around one of my knives, but with my lack of depth perception, I knew I could not risk throwing it. Not with a human in the way, I could just as easily hit her. No, I had to circle around and attack him as I… No! Jolene had drawn the male’s attention, demanding he release “Eva” in exchange for her. “I’m the one you want. I set that Dragnell loose on you! Don’t you want payback, you ugly rhino?”
She was walking toward him while I circled around, my tail flicking to touch Felish’s throat as I passed him to make sure he was alive. Breathing, but out; no obvious wounds. I couldn’t reach Akrash to check and hoped for the best, the focus had to be on my mate. She’d gotten close enough, and now the big beast dropped his injured hostage and yanked my Jolene into his arms. He was talking—lots and lots of loud words, but ones I could not understand.
“Let her go!” Jasmine was shouting, and she was not the only one firing at the bastard. The females who had been woken from stasis were all gathered around her, slings like the one Jolene used in hand. They were lobbing rocks at the gray guy’s back, and when so many did it, it became a rainfall. Dozens fell in rapid succession. Suddenly, I could see how effective that might be as crowd control. Unfortunately, this guy’s thick skin just made him twitch and growl in anger.
I slipped into the darkness between the tall stacks of boxes still filled with sleeping humans. My scales did the rest, blending me into the dark backdrop. I was as good as invisible. Now, I just needed to get close enough to rescuemy mate. And then I was going to tell her she never, ever got to do that again, sacrifice herself for another? No. I was not losing her.
The tight feeling in my chest did not ease; it only grew stronger. I could not see her now, but the bastard was still talking in his strange, rumbling tongue. When an answer came, it was in an even deeper voice, one layered as if it were two voices talking at the same time. The red-and-black hunter, with his horns and knife-tipped tail, had risen from the wreckage of Krektar bodies. I’d seen him fight, and he’d been killing his supposed allies. Now, he had his hands out wide in an obviously placating gesture. He was trying to talk sense into the gray-horned beast.
Good, keep him distracted; I was almost there. Sliding a little closer, I could hear Jolene’s rapid breathing and see the edge of her hair just beneath the blunt snout of the sky-creature’s face. He wasn’t talking, just listening to the red-and-black hunter, but if his tightly clenched jaw was any indication, he wasn’t happy. That was not good; he was tightening his fist around my mate’s throat, slowly but surely cutting off her air.
