Blinking, his eyes gritty behind the lid, Sinadim jolted at the sound of that gruff voice. His one-eyed gaze snapping to the other male who’d saved them just so they might suffer another day.
Giaus.
The mutant king he’d agreed to serve in this new kingdom in the beyond. Second in command, a general of the feral army, for it wouldn’t be long now. Not long at all before Sinadim succumbed to the virus and became a mutant himself. No longer a prince, he was among the doomed. Already he could feel it, the ache of deep, fundamental change as the virus worked to unmake him.
Infected.
Brows knit by a frown, Sinadim swallowed and tasted rot. Fingers flexing around the tiny feet cradled in his palms, his claws dimpled that delicate, female skin. She was a precious creature that made his cock ache only half as much as he ached to reject her, to take it all back and reclaim his rightful place in the Silver City.
But Giaus had saved them—provided food from nothing but a few meager table scraps. Bone marrow and running, liquid water with a bit of clever work, and an intellect the king had no right to possess.
Sinadim snorted, mane bristling, his every inhale thick with a sticky, cloying aroma that clogged his sinuses all the way to the back. Each stinking breath a dense, nauseating cloud that stuck when he swallowed.
Something rancid had died in his mouth, surely. Something that left a putrid flavor coating his tongue with a rancid film of mossy growth.
It was tacky.
Wet and…gooey.
“Drink,” Giaus said again, and pressed a cup made from bone into Sinadim’s hand.
“It’ll help, will it?” Sinadim asked through a sneer. But in spite of himself, he released those dainty little feet and obeyed. Head tipped back, he opened his throat and choked down a few meager swallows that would buy him time.
Time to rot, forgotten down here in the dark. Waiting for his brains to leak from his ears, for his bones to shift and break beneath the weight of grotesque growths wrought by the Trax.
He’s seen it all before. Too many times to count.
“I’m dying, then?” he slurred through lips both swollen and cracked.
But to this, Giaus merely shrugged. Coy as he pulled the girl closer. The tint of feral gold caught what little light there was, only to throw the darkest shadows across their prison. And with a twitch of his lips, Giaus pressed Renegade to his chest and robbed Sinadim of her touch, all in one slick motion.
“Keep your secrets, miner,” Sinadim said, and swiped at the greasy sweat beaded on his brow. Eyes falling shut on the heels of a violent shiver that sent his mane into a full, accidental flare. “But grant no mercy to the infected unworthy…”
Oblivion claimed him, then. Flinging him back into a time he hadn’t remembered to mourn as he shivered and quaked. Miserable with the onset of the end.
“It’s the killing fever, boy. Burns like ice, doesn’t it? Like coals under the skin.”
It did. Sinadim shivered again, back twisting to ease a pain too deep to touch.
“It’s a poison,”his father had said.“A punishment for those who dare to defy the Nine and their gift of pure, Anhur blood. And for the insult, the infected will be left to rot from the inside out. Look,”his father crooned, and made Sinadim obey with the tip of one hooked claw.“See her there? Your precious renegade Omega? It’s only been hours, but already she succumbs. Pathetic creature.”
She was there in the dark… the only female who’d laid a claim on his royal skin…the only other one to survive the attack of the hoard, though she’d been… savaged by the wave. Her tiny body battered by mindless greed and ravenous hunger.
“No,” Sinadim rasped, sightless, staring off into the gloom as fat, burning tears slid down grimy cheeks.
A callous blow struck the back of his head. “Stop your sniveling, and look! See what you’ve allowed to happen? This is the price, boy. You wear her mark with such pride,” Hadim spat, sneering through clenched teeth. “Now watch her succumb, and know you might have saved her this final agony.”
Frozen in place, Sinadim could do nothing but obey. Watching her skin grow lumpy and distorted, festering as if coals had been tucked beneath her skin and left to bubble and boil. One arm hung limp where the bone had been mangled and broken. A veritable club, it dangled heavy and grotesque from her delicate frame. Fingers swollen, ruined and standing stiff from a palm that was little more than a balloon of flesh.
She was ruined. Utterly. Completely.
A sob splintered over his lips as he watched the limb mutate and grow.
Lost, pitiful and abandoned, she ambled back and forth at the gates of the Silver City. Pacing a ragged line, wordlessly crying for help, until her eyes ticked up. Brown, laced with green. Her gaze was deep, hazy with confusion.
But when she found Sinadim’s teary gaze, she wailed low and long. Reaching with the hand not mangled by the Trax.
The one she could lift.
