A taboo used only by the skin-traders, he’d seen the horrific consequences of forcing Omegas to lay claim to an Anhur.
Their wretched pleas haunted his dreams. Mocked him with the way they’d tried to entice, begging to be mounted, desperate for the males who’d doomed them. Females who needed no season to produce slick at an alarming rate, for only a bonded Omega could produce on a whim.
And now he was no better than the lowest of the filth.
And Renegade…
Bile splashed against the back of Sinadim’s throat.
Acid laced with the scent of what he wanted so badly, but couldn’t stomach.
Tongue flicking out and back, he painted the roof of his mouth—and recoiled. Shocked.
All around him, the gloom ignited.
An impossible array of color, his vision was saturated with a detailed spectrum of things that couldn’t possibly be real. The dark came alive, held in a relief so stark, so painfully vivid he could almost see what he could taste. Each element held separate, illuminated with a distinct shimmering color best seen from the edge of his vision.
The killing fever. Flourishing out of control, it surged to the fore in an unstoppable wave.
Sinaidm swiped at a bead of sweat before it ran into his eye, trembling with the effort. The stink of sickness lingered on his every breath, staining the air with a dense cloud of sour bile.
“Orange,” he murmured, the sound a reedy hiss of agony over parched vocal cords. Lifting one shaking hand, claws hooked to grab, he tried to touch the tendril of color in the dark and sent ripples dancing across still air. Swirling in a cloud of scent that couldn’t possibly be real. “Hallucination,” he whispered as the ache of fever burrowed deep. Lancing through muscle and bone, twisting through too many injuries to bother counting. And there, at the back of his eyes, the pounding beat of a brain swollen by the virus.
Too often he’d seen this horror unfold.
Sending one curved claw into his ear, Sinadim’s mane grew stiff with the reek of terror. That he should succumb as Balkazar had. Stinking of death, brain leaking from his ears as the virus pillaged…
But his claw came away clean.
And on his next breath, he caught the scent of something sweet laced with a hint of rich grease.
Marrow. Savory and just a touch rancid, it held the promise of life in a stack of charred bone.
His tongue flicked back once more, gliding over subtle pits that lined the roof of his mouth in parallel strips. Obeying some bizarre new instinct that demanded he smear saliva against the pits—and for his obedience, a heady flavor exploded behind his sinuses. One he knew well, though he’d never seen it through the lens of fevered hallucination.
Slick.
A pool of liquid gold had spilled from that honeyed pot. Soaking Giaus’ lap with an ambrosia worthy of the Nine themselves, Renegade wept for them. Producing coveted nectar out of season, she beckoned to him even through her misery. Engineered to present for her master, just as he’d been born to mount a breeding Omega and stuff her full of his knot. His sperm sealed tight inside until that seed took root.
Danger utterly forgotten, Sinadim shifted toward his female. Toward the slit drooling for his knot.
Blind to the danger wrapped all around her, he licked at that shimmering, golden trail hanging thick in the air. Slipping and sliding toward his prize as the rut settled into his veins, he approached the sleeping giant who’d bade him drink…
A tiny sip couldn’t hurt…
6
Sprinting as fast as he was able, the war chief fled from certain death. Lumbering and crashing through the brush, passing trees that danced and shimmered with colors impossible to describe, he worked to out-pace the horde. Hounded by the thunder of a thousand footfalls, he ran with an uneven gait. His left foot heavier than the other, he moved with a distinctthump-patthat made stealth impossible.
Balkazar’s hunting days were over. An era at its end, for in place of a calm, steady mind, there was corruption. Rot. Decay that filled him with false confidence and lifted the burden of logic from his uneven shoulders.
His was a brain swollen by infection, riddled with abscess and pustules.
Vision off kilter where one ear was tipped toward the earth, Balkazar swiped at the goo streaming from his nostrils. Heaving for breath through gaping jaws.
Thump-pat, thump-pat.
A wet snarl burst from his lips, and without bothering to look, Balkazar lashed out at the trunk of a sapling, cutting it down with a single easy swipe even as he trudged forward.
