Page 18 of The Naga Scavenger’s Precious Mate

“Please, you must help Farah. You have to save her!” I struggled again to rise and Corin hissed and leaned forward to pin me in place with one hand. He narrowly avoided a nip from Srazz as my friend tried to defend me. The Ayala bared his long but straight orange front teeth and raised all the spikes on his rump, growling and posturing at what had to be the Shaman, though I’d never met him and I was certain I knew them all. Srazz might be a prey animal, a forager of nuts and berries, but he was a big male for his species, ready to defend what he considered his territory.

The pale blue male dared to keep his hand in place on my shoulder, still forcing me to stay on the nest, but he coiled his body out of the way. The way he moved proved to me that he was more than just a Shaman, he had training as a warrior too, and the instincts on top of that. He bared his fangs in warning at Srazz and anger surged in his mercury eyes. I snatched Srazz up and pressed him to my chest, heedless of his raised spines and their ability to stab me along the vulnerable wounds slashing through my protective scales.

I bared my own fangs back at the male, warning him to back off from threatening my pet. Warning him that I’d fight him if he kept that damn hand on my shoulder, he’d lose it, and I didn’t care one bit that he’d been the one that healed me. He was standing in my way, telling me I could not save my mate.

“Easy,” Zathar warned, sliding his body between his Clansmale and the medical nest. He kept a more cautious distance from Srazz, who was struggling in my arms to get to Corin, still rumbling with a mean growl. At least their Shaman had let go of me and was backing up, arms crossed over his chest and a deep frown furrowing his silvery blue brow.

“Calm the Ayala, please. He’s been a menace since Ekkire left with the tracking party,” Zathar sounded amused, rather than bothered by Srazz’s interfering. I latched on to the more important information, the tracking party. That meant they had sent people after the revenant and my mate. Except, I hadn’t told them about the remnant from the past that had stolen my female. I had lost consciousness before I could warn them of the danger.

“I have to go; I have to warn them!” I didn’t try to rise from the nest this time. Instead, I shifted my gaze to glance at the human female still hovering at the end of the nest. She was so different in appearance from Farah, and yet, she looked so much the same too. I pleaded with her with my eyes, although I knew I could not understand her words.

“Warn them of what?” Zathar demanded, his body swayed over me, just enough for him to block my line of sight to the female. She was his mate, and he did not like it when another male looked too long. I understood that; I had not liked the thought of bringing Farah here much, for exactly that reason. I would take all the stares now, if only that meant I had her safely in my arms.

“The revenant,” I said, my voice growing hoarse as I remembered what it had looked like. The abomination had been shaped just like a Naga, with a tail, torso, and even a face though his appearance had been severely damaged. He was a horror, a monster, and he’d snatched my mate from the shadows. I did not know why he took her, and I did want to not contemplate what he could be doing to her right now.

My body trembled as I fought the urge to leap from the nest to chase after her. They would not let me go, not yet, because they thought I was not healed enough. I did not care, but I would let them think I was agreeing and then slip away when their backs were turned. “A revenant stole her from my den, it looked like one of us. It is dangerous, with weapons you cannot imagine.”

I recalled the cool slice of a hundred blades colliding with my flesh, the burning pain, and the weakness that followed. I should be dead, those blows should have killed me on the spot. The journey here, the laborious night of pain and fear, that should not have happened. I did not know how I’d found the willpower to crawl and swim around Ahoshaga Peak to locate the camp.

“Your mate is in good hands,” Zathar assured me, his voice sounding like it came from far away as it pierced my pain-filled memories. “Nearly all aspirants volunteered for the job, and they are led by Krashe and Iave. Krashe was once the Warlord for Bitter Storm, there is no male more suited to tracking and fighting a revenant than him.”

I did not think that anything they said could ease my mind, but those words did help, a little. All Bitter Storm warriors were adept at underground tracking and fighting, as the Clan lived deep in caves inside their mountains. They were also the only ones that ranged beyond the mountains to the west where revenants came and went like the changing of the seasons. And a former Warlord? He would be a fighter of incomparable skill.

“How many?” I asked. My hands eased up their grip on Srazz now that he had calmed, he’d turned his body around to lay himself down across my torso, his snout pressed to my throat. He was pressing on my wounds but I did not care, I deserved that pain for failing Farah. For not leaving her in a den that was safe, for abandoning her the way I had, and failing to rescue her from the revenant.

“Thirty,” Zathar answered. “They left almost immediately. Your trail was easy to follow.” It was not, they would run into the sections where I’d gone into the water to speed up my passage, but if Ekkire was with them, he would know which way I’d traveled. The female spoke then, first something sharp and full of warning towards the silvery Corin, and then she directed words at her mate.

“Ah, Vera wants to know where you found Farah, and if there were more humans,” Zathar translated easily. He offered me a friendly, encouraging smile but that expression hardened when I leaned to the side to look at his female.

“At the bottom of a lake,” I said hoarsely, recalling the ice-cold dive into water so deep and dark that it had looked like a black mirror. She had been so beautiful, asleep inside that strange egg, a protective shell that had failed her, and slowly started taking her strength and her life. I knew that if I had not taken her from that pod when I had, she would have died. “No others,” I added darkly.

The female, Vera, said more words, excitement making them grow higher in pitch and far more rapid. Zathar cocked his head, “I should have known that a Water Weaver would be capable of fishing that stasis pod out of those depths. How long ago?” He had not translated her words, I was certain, and she was not pleased if the frown and glare were any indication.

“Two months,” I said truthfully. “I was going to bring her here. After I discovered your camp yesterday.” Farah would have been so happy to be with others of her kind, I knew that much. It would be hard for me to live here, I needed my solitude, and I would have to fight my natural inclination to travel, but it would be worth it to make her happy. Now I didn’t know if I would ever see her again.

This damn weakness was maddening, I needed to recover, I needed to be stronger. But what I really needed was for them to leave so I could get out of there and do what I should have been doing all along. Hunt the monster that stole her.

“Vera wants to know why you have not mated her yet if you had her for two months,” Zathar asked, amusement tinging his voice. The human made a very rude noise, which made me think that wasn’t at all what she wanted to know, this was his curiosity.

I bared my teeth at him, more tired than I wanted to admit after all this talking. “She was sick, she did not wake for weeks.” It was none of his business, but the words tumbled from my mouth as I recalled those first days when she woke. I had never been happier than when I was learning all I could of my mate, and when I could finally court her. “She has not told me she accepted my courtship yet.”

The female laughed and rolled her eyes, rapidly speaking to her male. Zathar turned his head to me after listening intently and regaled me with a very serious stare. “You must tell her you ‘dig’ her, my mate says. Humans don’t have mates, so you must take the lead.” He glanced back at Vera when she spoke some more but he rolled a shoulder and again did not translate. “I know you Water Weavers are very polite when it comes to females, forget about that. Forget it all. Show her.”

He turned away, ducked, and flung his female up in his arms and the two left the room under the sound of bright, female laughter and the husky growls of a male in heat. Pain that had nothing to do with my wounds stabbed my chest, I wanted what they had. They acted like they believed they would find Farah for me, but I could not share their faith. The tunnels beneath Ahoshaga ran deep and they were convoluted, strange, and noisy. Wherever the revenant had taken her, it would be hard to find them.

Chapter 13

Farah

I must have fallen asleep at some point beneath the buzzing of the machine. When I woke, everything was silent. I could not hear the robot, or Buzz, but I could rotate my head again. The room was still the same, but the lights had been dimmed. Most of the light now came from the colorful bubbling pipes and vats. Green and purple glowed to my right, a brighter blue from a strange glass container on my left.

Buzz wasn’t on the table where I’d seen the robot place him, and my heart leaped in my throat at the discovery. Where was he? Had he died? Been used in some kind of experiment? The thought of experiments brought my focus back to my own body and despite my rising worry, I took a moment to take stock of how I felt.

Not tired, and I could wriggle all my toes and fingers like normal. My limbs did not feel the same kind of exhausted heaviness that had dragged me down every day since I’d woken on this planet. Physically, I might be feeling the best I had since I woke. Whatever that machine had done to me, it might actually have been some kind of healing.

It gave me the first niggle of hope, faint, too good to be true, but there regardless. I tilted my head, testing how far I could lift it, and glanced down my body. I fully expected my shirt to be a torn, bloody mess and my skin covered with all kinds of horrible Frankenstein stitchwork. But both my shirt and my chest were whole and bloodstain-free. Whatever had been done to me, it wasn’t visible from the outside.

Then my eye caught a glimmer of something shiny along the back of my hand. I shifted my fingers, lifting my hand as much as the restraint around my wrist allowed. A gasp flew from my mouth, the first sound that broke the silence inside this freaky evil lab. A shimmer of scales, opalescent white, dotted the skin of my hand like tiny little freckles. What the heck had that machine done to me?