Page 51 of C is for Captive

“And the Grorn could walk right past them.”

This time Ishala smiled.

“Yes.”

The hall went quiet, and he felt something change in the silence around him. These were a people who had spent generations hiding from an enemy that hunted them by blood, convinced that sooner or later the Grorn would find every lineage they needed.

But blood had refused to behave as neatly as the Grorn expected. It had wandered. Mixed. Hidden itself inside children who looked like their fathers instead of their mothers, inside descendants who might not even know what they carried.

Inside males like him.

Two Keys were already in Grorn hands. The Golden Key had escaped them. The others were still somewhere in the galaxy. And the Grorn might not be as close to finding them as they believed. For a single breath, the ancient story tilted the other way.

The hunters didn’t know exactly what they were hunting.

His mother reached across the table and gripped his free hand, and looked at him with shining eyes, and started to say something⁠—

The stone under his feet shivered.

It was almost nothing—a faint, low pulse he felt in the soles of his boots and the roots of his horns before he heard it, a deep note humming up out of the mountain itself. Then it became a sound, a rising tone that filled the hall, cold and clear and utterly without mercy. Every Aurelian in the room rose to their feet at once, and the unfamiliar hope drained out of all their faces in a single heartbeat and left them white as bone.

His mother’s hand tightened around his.

“No,” she whispered. “No, not again, not again⁠—”

He was already up and moving, already dragging Amy behind the wall of his own body, his mind gone clean and cold and fast the way it went when the thinking stopped and the warrior woke. He knew that sound. He’d never heard it before in his life but he knew what fear looked like and it was written in every stricken face around him.

“The perimeter sensors,” Ishala said, and his old voice had gone flat as a blade. “A ship has entered the atmosphere.”

Serei made a small broken sound, and Ishala’s silver gaze met his.

“Grorn.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The tone climbed higher, and every Aurelian in the hall moved at once, and Amy did the thing she had spent four years training herself never to do. She pushed forward instead of back.

“It’s him.” She said it before she’d even finished thinking it, and knew as the words came out that they were true. “Brannik. It’s the priest. The one from Krebb’s. It has to be.”

Serei’s white face turned to her. “You cannot know that⁠—”

“The information that Krebb collected for him led us here.” Her mind was racing now, fast and cold, the way it moved when a drunk cornered her at the counter and she had two seconds to read whether it was going to be words or fists. “Krebb said he hadn’t investigated it yet.” Her stomach dropped through the stone floor. “We didn’t lose him. And if he shows up now, we’ll have shown him the door.”

Brannik had gone very still, and that stillness was worse than any growl. She’d learned to read that too. It was the stillness of a male doing arithmetic he already hated the answer to.

“How many?” he asked Ishala.

The old Aurelian’s fingers flew over a pale panel set into the table, light blooming under his hands. “The perimeter monitors indicate a single vessel. One life sign strong enough to trip the sensors.” His jaw worked. “One. It matches what you say. A priest who travels alone. They are arrogant enough.”

“For now it’s one,” Brannik said. “A scout. If he sends a signal they’ll know he found something and they’ll come in force.” He turned, and she read his intention before he said a single word, in the way his body angled itself between her and the door and the way his hand came out to close around her upper arm.

“Is there somewhere safe, Ishala? Somewhere sealed. Somewhere his sensors can’t read her.” His grip tightened. “I’ll take you there and you’ll stay until I come for you.”

“No.”

The word came out of her flat and clear, and it surprised her almost as much as it surprised him. His head turned, and those metallic silver eyes fixed on her with an intensity that a few weeks ago would have made her drop her gaze and go small and vanish.

This time she held it.