Page 25 of The Naga Wanderer’s Wounded Mate

Chapter 19

Jasmine

The mood was grim as we set out that morning, and I understood why. It had taken us three long days to get as far as we had; three days since the earthquake had devastated this mountainside. It still looked like a fresh wound up here. The passage we were traveling through was narrow and tricky, made more so by the loose rocks that made our footing unsteady. Well, mine. The naga had fewer issues spreading their weight out with their tail, but it still slipped and slid beneath them.

We were making good progress, but I could see how this would have been absolutely impossible to try in the dark, no matter how good naga eyes were with next to no light. The rockslide had destroyed the original layout of the pass, and the scouts at the front of the party had to map out the safest path for the rest of us. Sometimes I could see them up ahead, signaling directly. Other times, they were just marks carved into the rock or a tree.

“It is not far now,” Ekkire said to me, his eyes pensive as he focused on the mountain peak slightly to our right. It rose tall above us, then broke into a ridge that swung west for what had to be several miles, until it rose even taller there. We’d entered a very impressive mountain range, taller, cooler, and rockier than the one Haven was located in.

“What do we expect to find? Will it be rescue or recovery?” I murmured quietly. Three days, that was a long time. Humans couldn’t survive long without water; three days was the absolute limit for most. If this was Earth and we were here to rescue humans, I’d consider this a recovery mission by now. But it wasn’t Earth, and these were naga, not humans. There was a very big difference.

“Both,” Ekkire responded, his mouth set in a grim line. “There were younglings and females at this outpost. Small as the outpost was, Sun Fang is a big clan, and this was still home to at least ten families.” Ten families? That meant children, and a quiet sort of horror began to fill my belly. No wonder he’d been so dead-set on coming here to render aid. Families probably also meant a group of males that was unmated, so we were possibly talking forty to sixty people. For a primitive settlement in an inhospitable place like this? That was huge.

It wasn’t until he shrugged casually and then moved further up the hill that I realized he’d responded to what I said, but we hadn’t been touching. To be certain, I scanned his body all the way down to the very tip of his tail, but no, he really wasn’t touching me anywhere. I wetted my dry lips with my tongue, horror for the fate of this settlement replaced by a different kind of shock. Not touching, but he still understood me, that could only mean one thing.

I cursed out loud when the realization sank in, then hurriedly waved off Ekkire’s concerned look. How could I have been so stupid? Twice, that’s how often I’d attended Vera’s newcomers lecture on the ins and outs of naga biology and Haven. She had explicitly told us how the mating bond worked, what it looked like, and how it was finalized. Except that last bit had completely slipped my mind in the heat of passion last night. I was such an idiot! I had remembered plenty of other important bits, but not that.

It wasn’t even that I felt trapped, or scared it was the wrong thing for me. That part actually caught me a little off guard, but I was willing to roll with it. No, it was the thought that our actions—thoughtless and passion-inspired—had now taken Ekkire’s choice from him. I had vague hopes we could make this work; we were too much alike for it not to. But we hadn’t discussed it! What if he felt trapped when he realized? What if he hated that he’d now bound himself to me biologically? That wasn’t what I wanted… I wanted him to want me without feeling pressured. Ugh, why did they have these stupid mate bonds in the first place? It was all so complicated!

Dove tried to cheer me up, attempting to pull me from my progressively darker thoughts throughout the next two hours. The hard travel required my focus, though, so I could only stew mildly. I was so reckless… We should have talked last night, not screwed each other’s brains out. What was it with me and men? Why did I always make it so complicated?

Dove chirped from my shoulder, where she’d been clinging for the past fifteen minutes, rubbing against my cheek. She was so sweet, and I just couldn’t stop feeling like I’d doomed our budding relationship. Ekkire… Damn it. I should just ask him, but when was the right time? We were about to walk into a nightmare. He said it was still a rescue, but he hadn’t denied there would be recovery, too. Bodies. Death. Sadness. This wasn’t the place to talk about our future, not even a little.

“It’s okay,” I whispered to the small sleara riding on my shoulder. I reached up to pat her small back and was rewarded with the softest little purr. She was a total sweetheart, picking up on my mood like this and trying to make it better. “We’ll get through this too,” I added. “Where did you leave Hunter?” I cast my gaze around to search for the other sleara and discovered he was flying high above us, darting through the sky in what was clearly a hunting pattern, keen eyes scanning the ground for prey. Why was I not surprised?

My search had made my eyes land on Ekkire, though, and once my gaze had slipped over him, it was drawn back as if by magnets. Gah, I was so into him now. How had that happened? I’d never liked a guy as much as I liked him, and he was so grumpy half the time. It made the moments he sounded sweet feel all the more intense. I knew I wasn’t Miss Sunshine lately, either, but he took that in stride, took it without taking offense.

His scales shimmered a beautiful, jewel green in the afternoon sunlight, hints of purple catching on the edges from the violet rays. Other scales held a darker edge of black, or a hint of gold. I loved how his mossy green hair had been braided to be practical, yet still hung loose nearly all the way down to the middle of his back. It fanned over the closure of the massive backpack of supplies he carried like it weighed nothing. The gleam of his metal trident made him stand out from the Sun Fang hunters even more. Only Zeidon had one of those at Haven, and he was a Water Weaver just like Ekkire.

There was something sleek and confident about the way he moved through the treacherous terrain. The movements of a predator—an athlete—used to pushing himself to the very edge of endurance. As if he sensed my eyes on him, he tilted his head and glanced over his shoulder toward me. His brows lowered into a scowl that almost immediately smoothed out when he saw me. That was almost a smile, wasn’t it? Had he realized yet? The commitment he’d made to me without discussing it?

“We are almost there,” he said, echoing the earlier assurance that it wasn’t far. His “it’s not far” and mine seemed to differ a little in definition, but at least I was up to the task of climbing through this sleet. With my leg healed, I hadn’t struggled to keep up with the rest. My fingers tightened around the new bow I was carrying, a gift from one of the Sun Fang hunters, and I wondered if I was going to need it when we arrived. By all accounts, naga females were really the ones who could not stand us humans. Now I was coming to the aid of several…

I caught the scent of smoke before I saw any sign of fire, but an excited mood took hold of our party then. Fire—cooking fire, to be precise, as it was mixed with the scent of meat—meant there were survivors. We rounded a rock outcropping that had obscured much of what lay ahead from sight. I saw it then: the remains of the outpost. We had arrived.

It was built on a natural plateau on the mountain flank. At least three hundred feet wide, the strip of land was more or less level. Or had been before the rockslide had brought stone and mud down on it. Rubble lay in rough piles that were probably the remains of homes, and much of the mud and larger stones had piled closer to the mountain itself, doing the worst damage there.

Shouts went up from the survivors when they saw us, at least two dozen, both male and female, plus a handful of younglings. They looked ragged, worn, and some did not get up from the fire they had gathered around, too injured to move. Makeshift cots, or “nests,” as the naga called them, had been laid out in neat rows on the flattest stretch of ground. The wounded were being tended here. Further away, several mounds had to be the bodies of those who had not made it. There were only three, which surprised me; it was a very small number of dead for what had been a terrible catastrophe. The damage to the outpost was incredible.

The healer who had worked on me, Ish, rushed ahead of us now, his massive backpack bouncing wildly on his back as he moved. “Tell me who is worst!” he demanded, and many hands pointed. After that, chaos reigned, and I found myself so busy I had no time to think about my future with Ekkire, and whether we’d made a mistake or not.

Nobody even commented on my presence, not even the females, though there were six of them. I received some hostile glares, but that was pretty much it. Ilesekh spoke with what had to be the outpost’s leader, and then we were off to search the rubble in precise grids. I was assigned my own without fuss, but I knew that had to be out of necessity more than anything. They needed every hand they could find to help them find the rest of their people.

I learned, just from quietly listening, that they’d already managed to search the most likely spots—the places where homes had stood. A small group of less-wounded survivors, too injured to assist in clearing rubble but capable of traveling, had been dispatched to the Sun Fang’s main settlement several days away, on the other side of the mountain. They had not believed any help was forthcoming.

It was a grim task, mostly because each grid that was cleared yielded nothing. I’d been shown the list of missing, scrawled on the back of a fur with charcoal, and there were at least a dozen still gone. Among them were three children and a female, the rest all male. Ilesekh had called it lucky, but I wasn’t sure what he’d meant by that, and I’d been afraid to ask. Lucky it wasn’t more? By my count, there were fewer than ten mated pairs; seven wasn’t ten, and that’s how many females there were, the missing one included. Perhaps three had been in the party traveling to the heart of Sun Fang?

I’d just started on my third grid square of about twenty by twenty feet. Using a stick to carefully test the piles of rubble, I listened closely for any sign of life and called out the names from the list at intervals. The naga who were searching had an advantage over me: they had the ability to scent their kin. I couldn’t use a superior sense of smell to do that, and even my hearing was not as good as theirs. It did not surprise me that it was one of them who found the first naga buried deep beneath stone and debris.

They flocked in a hurry to the site to try to free the young male, who, much to my surprise, was still alive. I guess that proved they really could go longer without water. He’d been buried close to the edge of a building, partially sheltered by a wooden beam that had created a pocket around him.

“See, Dove?” I said to the small sleara observing the chaos with me. “That’s what we’re trying to do: find more naga beneath the rock. I don’t suppose I can borrow your nose, can I?” A sleara probably had an even better sense of smell than the naga did, and one thing was now clear to me: this wasn’t going fast enough. Not only was speed an issue if anyone was still alive, but the boy they’d found was practically in an area that had already been searched by the survivors. They should have found him, but they hadn’t.

Dove did her chirp kee kee noise, but softly, like she was contemplating what I’d just said. Ever since we’d entered the site of the former settlement and encountered all these new, unknown naga, she’d stuck close to my side. I’d seen Hunter overhead, watching. He’d once dive-bombed and caught some critter he devoured with great satisfaction—and a lot of mess. I couldn’t see him now, but I heard him answer her call. He was nearby. A moment later, he came winging my way from the direction Ekkire had previously been in, after abandoning his grid to help free the young naga male.

I wriggled my stick into a gap between some rocks, shifted them enough to peer under, and sighed when it appeared there was only more rubble. “This is useless. This is a job for trained search dogs…” Except there weren’t any. Though I had a feeling I could probably train sleara to do the task, that wasn’t going to help much now. Hunter landed next to my stick, sniffing at the rock I had lifted with his tiny snout, his round ears twitching back. Then he growled, which was a tiny, very cute sound coming from such a small creature.

Dove chirped back at him, then fluttered from my shoulder, light as a feather. A silvery shimmer of peach-fuzz fur and bat-like wings, she caught the Serant sun and briefly glowed violet. Then she landed next to Hunter on the rock I’d shifted, and both of them sniffed. As one, they lifted their little snouts and stared with their bright eyes at the ruckus the naga hunters and Ekkire were making, getting the boy they’d found out. Ish was there too, doing first aid even as the young male was trapped.

“That’s what we’re after, more naga survivors. Or bodies, I guess… I don’t suppose you’re smelling any?” I thought I had to be talking to the air here. They cocked their heads cutely, clearly listening, but they couldn’t understand. Dove had been clingy so far, unwilling to go far, while Hunter had been observing from a distance or near Ekkire. Now the pair tucked close and started clambering over the rocks, their little noses to the ground. My heart leaped in my chest at the sight, no way! Did they actually get it? They couldn’t be that smart, could they?

I knew I should not abandon my grid, but when they scuttled across the line into the next one, I followed. Everyone was still busy, very focused on the boy they’d found. They needed all hands on deck to get him out, it seemed. Nobody paid attention to me, not even the wounded or the females and young at the fire, though some had been watching me with suspicion not long ago.

When both Hunter and Dove pounced on a spot marked by two fallen trees, they began excitedly doing their call: “Chirp kee kee!” Dove’s was higher-pitched than Hunter’s, but they were so excited their little voices blended together. I rushed over, ignoring Ekkire calling my name with what might have been a serious note of concern. I didn’t know yet what they’d found, but it was clear they’d found something.

“Hush, babies!” I urged as I dropped to my knees beside them and tried to peer beneath the tangled, bare branches. I gathered both of them in my arms, patting their wriggling bodies until they calmed and fell silent. “Let me see, let me listen,” I said. Behind me, I could hear someone approaching quickly, stones and pebbles rolling, a tail whipping up a dust cloud the wind threw at my back. There was only one person it could be.

Lowering myself, I pressed my ear to the ground and listened more closely. My eyes struggled to penetrate the chaos of debris and darkness. Shadows were faintly purple at their edges, black deep at the back. I thought I heard a moan, a faint murmur. Was that the faintest flash of something orange deep in that tangle of roots? I turned, full of excitement, just as Ekkire reached me, and all I needed to do was point.

He lowered onto his coils, growing slinky against the uneven ground, and partially pressed himself into the opening the little sleara had been so excited about. “Yes!” he crowed. “There are naga here. Three, I scent three!” He rose, caught me around the middle, and eagerly crushed his mouth against mine. The jubilant celebration lasted only a second before he cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted for help. “Jasmine’s found three more! They’re alive too!”

We both reached for the biggest tree first, though it was nearly all Ekkire who managed to lift it and roll it away. Everything happened fast after that, a crowd of naga males descending on the site and digging with careful precision to make sure the debris would not collapse on top of the people buried beneath. I held my breath when the first body was revealed and was relieved when he lifted his head very slowly. Beneath his tightly coiled body, two smaller figures had been carefully protected. This devoted father had protected his younglings at a cost to himself, and now all three were going to make it.