This is what it was to be alone. To be a Hathorian and live free.
Feet braced, Sickle snarled, for there was nothing at all left to lose and no reason to cower from the end.
The males scattered before his wrath. Reforming as a group, they stood between their intended meal and their unblooded queen. Protective, lightning fast, yet silent as they waited without blinking. Attuned to her every breath.
Sultana yipped and ordered her army forward.
Swinging and dodging, Sickle did his best to evade and ignored the lancing slice of pain when he was too slow. And when one of the males landed a strike at his forearm and won a bloody mouthful, Sickle issued a yelp of his own.
“Fuck!” he snarled, and staggered back. Too slow to retaliate, he pressed his back against the wall and cornered himself. Hiding his blind spot in jagged stone.
Sharpstone.
Reaching without daring to take his eyes off the surging reptiles, Sickle scrambled to claim a weapon. Cutting his fingers, his knuckles and palm, before a shard broke free.
It was then, as he panted for breath and bled freely from a dozen wounds, that Sickle knew an instant of hope. A glimmer dangerous enough to make him reckless when he said, “Alright, Sultana. A fight to the end,” he hissed, and made eye contact with the little lady commanding her army. “Let the winner eat until their belly is full.”
Jaws gaping, Sultana took a breath that expanded her chest and throat. Displaying a minuscule flash of color that spoke of what she might look like as an adult, she prepared to issue another of those deadly, impossible howls.
He saw the air shimmer all around her, and before her next exhale, Sickle launched into action and charged the wall of males at a full sprint. Ignoring the slicing, snipping pain of hungry mouths, he went straight for the would-be matriarch and caught her by the throat, forcing her silence with the palm of his hand.
“I don’t think so,” he whispered, and noticed when the males froze in place. Utterly still, five sets of gleaming reptilian eyes remained fixed not to Sickle, but to their queen and the stone blade he held against her thick hide.
Dancing back on the balls of his feet—nimble and evasive as only a Hathorian could be—Sickle held his prize aloft and flashed his teeth at the other five…
… and stabbed Sultana where her belly was soft.
The blade crumbled against her scales. Useless. A thing sharp enough to make him bleed meant nothing at all to that young queen.
An eerie, dense silence settled in the dank air.
An impasse.
But they didn’t attack. None but Sultana herself dared to move.
Frowning at their lack of action, Sickle dropped his useless blade and caught Sultana’s tail in his free hand when she tried to twist and whip. Instead, he tested the attention of her clutch-mates and moved her wriggling body to the left.
Five necks twisted in perfect sync.
Clutched in sweating palms, he moved Sultana to the right in a gentle, swaying arc.
Five chins tracked every millimeter of her movement.
And then he knew—when not a single one of the males blinked or flinched or moved—what the difference was between Sultana and her male counterparts. And, flexing his wrist to inspect those vertically slitted pupils, he met Sultana’s eyes and crooned, “They’re your thralls, aren’t they? Can’t sing like you do, hmm little queen?”
Seething hatred was her only response, but there was something… beautiful to be found in her alien glare. In the gentle slope of an angular brow and the neat point of her toothy muzzle.
He thought about breaking her neck, then. Impenetrable scales or not, Sickle wondered what might happen if he were to shatter the thrall she held over the males with a single sharp wrench of fragile bone. Would they attack or scatter? Unify without a queen to lead them, or strike out on their own to thrive or perish as they searched for a new queen to rule them.
Blood dripped from his elbow. Flowing free from some unseen wound to spatter on the dusty stone.
A tiny tail coiled about his thumb, weaving between his fingers.
“Back!” he barked, and thrust her before him. A threat that might ruin them all, he brandished her body as if it were a torch. Moving with purpose, he limped to the shallow crack responsible for his twisted ankle and forced the lizard queen inside. Keeping her pinned with one hand, he dragged a loose plate of shale over with the other and moved to trap her in a make-shift prison. A mirror of the one where Renegade moldered. Contained, yet breathing.
And yet… her spine was left unbent, his grip on her airway loose. Absent anything more sinister than a vague threat of harm.
It was a distant thing, the recognition that he was hesitating. That he shouldn’t have named the tiny queen or spent so long staring into her gleaming yellow eyes. That perhaps, just maybe, she’d enthralled him too.
