He reaches for a weapon inside the cab and points it at the windshield.
The driver door tears off its hinges.
She reaches through the gap and closes her hand around his throat and lifts him out of the seat, his feet leaving the floor of the vehicle, the weapon falling somewhere inside. She steps back from the SUV and holds him at arm’s length, her silver-ringed eyes level and entirely without hurry. She takes the weapon from his belt with her free hand, breaks it open, and drops the pieces on the road.
Then she puts him down.
He hits the pavement face-first and I step onto his back before he can move, my full weight settling onto his back, and the sound he makes is more air than voice. His fingers claw at the road surface and find nothing worth holding.
She crouches in front of him. She seizes his helmet and wrenches it free, the chin strap snapping under her grip, and sets it aside. She looks up at me.
“For our Matriarch,” she says. “For every Bouda they burned and sold and mounted on a wall.”
I step back.
My cackle hits him at full frequency from close range, and the effect is complete and immediate. Every muscle in his body locks at once, his face freezing mid-expression, his fingers going rigid where they were reaching. His eyes fix and go glassy. Breathing, sensation — those stay. Movement and speech are gone. He stares at Zaki’s face and has no power to look away.
Good. That is where we need him.
She studies him. The silver rings in her eyes hold the orange glow from the burning helicopter. The look on her face is not rage. She has been waiting three years for this.
What she does to him is thorough. She does not hurry and she does not flinch. When it is finished she straightens up and raises the trophy in both hands.
“Now we have a trophy,” she says.
I bow my head.
Pride and grief move through me at the same time, running together until I cannot separate them, and then it is the village. The fire-lit ceremonies, the calls that carried across the highlands, the Matriarch speaking our names like they were worth something. Three years of that gone, and here, on a frozen American road with helicopter wreckage still burning, we have taken one piece of it back.
I am glad she did not see this. The angle from the passenger seat, with smoke from the crash rolling across the street, would not have given her a clear view. My Bouda says nothing about my relief, which means he agrees with me.
Alemayehu.My Bouda sounds annoyed.We are standing in a righteous victory on a battlefield we just cleared with our sister, for the first time in three years, and your primary concern is what our very westernized human mate witnessed.
“She is not ready for that.”Your fantasies about cooking her food and rubbing her feet did not embarrass you,my Bouda says.But this does. Figure out what that means, Alemayehu.
Zaki is already walking, stepping past the frozen and the fallen, her bare feet leaving steam prints on the concrete. She stops beside me, eyes on her shape through the driver’s side window.
Our mate is reckless,my Bouda says.We will need to do something about that.
“She is brave,” I say.
“If your Bouda told you she is reckless,” Zaki says, without looking away from the truck, “believe him. My Bouda says the same. So do I.”
The driver’s side door of the truck swings open.
Kendra hits the ground running.
She comes around the front of the truck and heads straight toward us, cutting wide to clear the burning wreckage, her coatpulled up over her mouth against the heat and the smoke. She is wincing, one arm raised against the glow of the flames, pushing forward anyway.
Reckless,my Bouda says flatly.
“Do not make me fucking teleport you.” Kade is already out of the truck and moving, calling after her. She is running too, which says something about how fast my mate is covering the ground.
I look at Zaki. She looks back.
I groan and run.
I reach her before she makes it past the worst of the heat, her face scrunched against it, still trying to push through. I get my arms under her and pick her up and she makes a sound of protest that I ignore, turning and carrying her back to where my sister is standing, setting her down on the ground a safe distance from the fire.
