Oh hell no! Not if it meant she might be rescued from the ... dragon-man that had just grabbed her.
She tried to bite the hand over her face but only managed to scrape her teeth along the palm.
“Wat de fuck?”
He snatched his hand back when she managed to get enough skin between her teeth to pinch. She used her bound hands to swing at him. “Let me go! Put me down! Help, Tor! He’s got me!”
To her horror, it was Puz who managed to club Tor, who’d whipped his head around when she yelled, breaking off the fight and charging toward them as the dragon-man struggled to get a good grip on her and take off again.
He finally lifted her clean off her feet and draped her over one arm. Pulling his sword from a scabbard between his shoulder blades, he brought it down on Puz’s skull just as he reached them hard enough to cleave him in two all the way to his breast bone.
Annika gagged and puked as blood, brains, and other nasty, meaty chunks of demolished organs and splintered bone poured out of the gaping wound.
Notthat she wasn’t fiercely glad the dragon-man had killed the cowardly bastard that had attacked Zhor from behind and probably killed him!
She was glad the son-of-a-bitch was dead and he’d died in a ghastly way!
She really was.
But it was horrible and disgusting.
Fortunately, she had almost nothing on her stomach and the gagging stopped when she’d emptied it—all down the dragon-man’s leg and over the twitching corpse of Puz. But she thought that was at least partly because the dragon-man took off with her the moment he finished dispatching Puz and she couldn’t see the awful mess anymore.
She stopped fighting to get loose the moment they were high enough from the ground she was pretty sure she would rupture like a ripe melon if she hit the ground from that height. As soon as that occurred to her, she tried to claw her way up the man and climb on his back.
He took the opportunity to hook her tied arms around his neck and then shift his grip on her.
Unfortunately, she had short fucking arms! She was almost nose to nose with him once he’d pushed his head between her arms, close enough she couldn’t make her eyes focus.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to, but it was as hard to ignore the fact that he was actually a handsome creature—in a totally terrifying way!—as it was to ignore the suggestion of ‘dragon’ about his features—neitherof which mitigated the circumstances in any way!
Granted, he had, in a sense, rescued her from thezorph/centaurs, but not for an instant did she believe it was anactualrescue!
She was in the unenviable position of being fought over by scarier and scarier aliens for reasons unknown to her!
She considered the fact that she was in a good position to at least attempt to choke the life out of him, but that didn’t seem like a good idea when they were so high up.
Maybe later.
He stared back at her for a long moment and finally tossed her, twisting at the same time so that she landed between his wings.
It was an interesting maneuver.
Her heart stopped for all of half a minute, she was sure.
She thought she might have ruined her britches except it scared her so bad her sphincter muscles clamped so hard she got a belly cramp and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to have another bowel movement.
She almostdidchoke him to death then—completely without any evil designs.
He pulled at her tied arms until he loosened them from his throat enough to get in a decent breath of air. “You choke Ragnor to death, we fall,” he growled.
“Oh! I would never do anything like that,” Annika managed to get out between chattering teeth. Even she wasn’t certain, though, of whether she’d made the comment in the hope of convincing him she was harmless or out of sheer stupidity/sarcasm.
* * * *
Despite his injuries and the need to give himself a little recovery time, Zhor managed to get close enough to the party he had spotted in the distance by the following day to see that he had been right—itwasthe two bastards that had taken Ah-na. Thankfully, she seemed to be alright.
He still intended to kill the two bastards.
But he would have been hard put to take on two at one time with no handicap. He put his chances of success now—when he was still having problems with disorientation and headaches—at somewhere between zero and twenty five percent.
He did not particularly care for those odds. He meant to rescue Ah-na even if it ended up costing him his life, but he preferred living and he also had no desire to throw away his life unless he could be certain, at least, that Ah-na was safe.
Therefore, as little as he liked it, he settled to following them and waiting for a chance to pick off one of thezorphs. One on one would be enough of a challenge, but it would give him far better odds of success—and it was actually the only plan he managed to come up with.
It was workable—as long as the two he was following did not meet up with more of their kin.
Unfortunately, he had to keep enough distance between himself and thezorphsto prevent them from detecting his presence and that led to a failure to intercept and kill one of thezorphsthe first time the bastard that had blindsided him gave him an opportunity.
He managed to position himself above the trail the zorph had taken away from the camp. However the zorph, instead of continuing as he had expected since he had thought the man left camp to hunt, began to circle around. That took him out of range of the ambush Zhor had set and before he could circle around in front of the bastard and prepare another ambush, all hell broke loose in the camp.
