“The horde hasn’t moved,” Thor says. He went straight to the edge of the outcropping and ensured that the sleeping mass of carnivorous beasts remained in their slumber. I feel a pang of existential dread at the thought of them waking.
“We should put more distance between ourselves and them,” Drako says. “Head further up toward the mountains. If we gather firewood and skin a few beasts, we should be able to fashion winter clothes that will protect us from the elements.”
He’s thinking long term. He’s not planning on being rescued.
All Thor and I care about is staying visible. Our goals are absolutely not aligned past a certain point.
“What would happen to Drako if we were rescued, and he were with us?”
“He’d be charged for the deaths of our crew, as he deserves to be,” Thor says.
“Oh, right. So we’re still doing that justice thing,” I say.
Thor lifts a brow at me. “Yes, Selene. We are still doing that justice thing. So many people lost their lives because of his orders.”
“Sure. Yes. Absolutely. But he’s sort of saving our lives now, so…”
“You can fuck him,” Thor says bluntly. “I don’t know that you really have much choice. But don’t fall in love with him. That man is going to hang.”
I keep thinking Thor is soft because he’s more overtly civilized than Drako. The veneer of nice guy just sits on him so well. But every now and then, I get a glimpse into a heart that is just as dark and feral as Drako’s, if not more.
I nod quietly and avert my eyes. I don’t know how long I can safely look into that particular abyss.
I hadn’t even thought about falling in love. It’s not really something you think about, is it. It’s just something that happens to you. It’s illogical chemistry that sweeps through your synapses and fucks your whole life up. That’s the only way I can explain my sisters’ choice in husbands, anyway.
I never really thought it would happen to me. It still hasn’t, I suppose. Unless it has?
I don’t know what love is. But I know that when Thor talks about Drako being hung, it feels like a pit of endless despair opens up inside my belly, one that would absolutely never be filled.
So that’s interesting.
I pray for Drako to be unpleasant again, to make my knowledge of what awaits him less awful to bear. But he insists on being handsome and sexy, and exposing his tattooed biceps covered in thick yet intricate tattoos depicting works of the gods. Loki steals Thor’s hammer over and over with every rippling motion of Drako’s arm.
I am still curious about the Vikar. I wasn’t nearly as interested in them when they had me captive and were going to make me watch the bodies of my crew burn, but there’s something about fresh air and the knowledge that almost all of them are now also dead that puts me in a more forgiving mood. Or maybe all the stress is turning me insane. Could be that. Hard to say.
Thor is going to let Drako call the shots. He is not going to bother arguing because he hopes our ships will scan the planet, find three human life signs, and sweep us all up before Drako can do anything about it.
We start walking again, heading away from comfortable temperate terrain and toward the rockier, icier heights. I follow because I have no choice. I don’t know if I really agree. It’s not even worth thinking about because nobody is going to listen to me anyway.
I stay a little nearer Thor than Drako, because interacting with Drako makes me feel like I have to contend with self-examination I don’t want to do.
“We don’t have cold weather gear,” I say as we leave the tree line behind and start heading into a rocky area that seems to have quite a few caves at various elevations.
“Arghghglblrag!”
It’s not the response I expected to get from Drako, and that’s because it doesn’t come from him at all. We all swing around to see something that I, for one, do not get a very good look at because I am too busy already running the other way. We are talking tall, shaggy, toothy.
The sound of a creature charging us echoes off the rocky surrounding walls. It is making the sorts of sounds a semi-verbal humanoid might make if it had never heard anybody say anything.
I have a vague sense of something two-legged rushing toward us faster than any man could ever run. The three of us race away from it, following sheer, stupid instinct. You can train people to react to dangerous situations all you want, but when you’re really caught off guard, the animal brain takes over.
“I’ll hold him off!” Drako says, turning around as if he has a death wish.
“No!” I scream. It doesn’t matter. Thor has grabbed me by the back of the shirt and he is dragging me with him, hauling me into his arms and maintaining pace. We are heading toward the edge of the mountain, which has decided to stop being a mountain, we discover as we scramble over large rocks that reveal a suddenedge. There isn’t time to stop. The ground beneath our feet crumbles as we run and before we know it, we are falling.
The predator leaps, overshoots us, and goes arcing out into thin air. The drop below has to be well over a mile. There is no surviving that kind of fall.
Thor grabs the side of the cliff just in time to stop us from falling. I don’t know if I am screaming or not. I grip onto Thor with all the primate instinct my brain can gather. In this moment, I have not evolved a bit from an ancient monkey clinging to its mother in a tall tree.
