The crowd began to disperse with a fair share of vaguely concerned looks from some of the Resistance troops and not-so-vaguely disgusted looks from some of the more loyal Mosenites.
“Seize the carp?” Chambers asked quietly.
Jarek frowned then only half-succeeded at suppressing a delirious giggle. “Is that what I said? Not… carpe…? Fuck, my head hurts.”
He didn’t resist this time when Michael and Chambers guided him to the chair.
“You make it hard sometimes, you know,” Michael said easing him down.
“Hear, hear,” Al added through Fela’s speakers.
Jarek grinned at Chambers. “What, you’re not gonna call them out on the phrasing issues?”
Chambers masked her own grin beneath a semi-stern frown. “Not when they’re making a good point, I won’t. You could’ve died. I kind of thought you might’ve for a second after that punch.”
Jarek tested the cheek with a fingertip and groaned at the fresh pain that flared up from the already considerable aching. “Necessary evil, I think.”
“And all that stuff you said to him…” Michael added.
Jarek looked down, all the satisfied amusement bleeding out of him as he reflected on what he’d done—relying on psychological warfare to break Mosen’s good reason.
Just like Jarek had done to Alaric back when they’d first met.
Something told him he wasn’t getting invited to any Weston family picnics in the future.
“You did what you had to,” Chambers said, not a trace of judgment in her voice.
“Yeah,” Michael said. “Heck, maybe it’s a good thing. Probably all needed to be said.”
Jarek didn’t look up. “Maybe so.”
Michael laid a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you, Jarek.”
“Yeah, well”—he forced himself to look up at Michael and grin—“I wouldn’t thank me yet. Not before we take care of the important stuff. Like picking a team name, for instance.”
“Oh my god,” Chambers said, looking as if she’d just come to a sudden realization. “Mosen was right. We’re all gonna die.”
15
Rachel gaped at the striking man in the doorway, trying to wrap her brain around it.
The Mayor of the reigning anti-raknoth capital of the USA was, in fact, a raknoth.
The irony might have made her laugh. If she’d had the time.
The attack was swift and ruthless, his mind crashing into hers without the slightest warning. Not even a facial tick, outside of the poised frown he’d fixed them with.
As much practice as she’d had with telepathic clashes in the past months, he nearly took her from the start thanks to sheer startlement. But her reflexes bought her a second, and she built on it.
He wasn’t weak. None of the raknoth were. But as far as his kind went, he wasn’t exceptional either.
Once she managed to pull her defenses into tighter order, the attack quickly shifted to more of a deadlock.
“Mayor Dillard?” Zach said, somewhere far away.
The mental pressure vanished like the flipping of a switch, and Rachel was left staring dumbly at the Mayor. He stared right back, looking as if he’d like nothing more than to lunge forward and tear her head straight from her shoulders.
Beside her, Drogan had gone still. Maybe he’d smelled the arrival of his kind. She could practically feel his hand itching to rip off his cloaking pendant and confirm it for certain.
Luckily, Mayor Dillard seemed a little too preoccupied with her to notice the telepathically disguised raknoth sitting next to her.
“Is everything okay, sir?” Zach asked, looking between her and Dillard in clear confusion.
That probably answered the question of whether or not Dillard’s loyal subjects knew what he actually was.
“Apologies,” Dillard finally said. He gathered himself and strode around the table to take Zach’s offered chair. “It’s just been one of those—”
“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” his voice hissed in her mind, cutting through whatever it was he was saying out loud to the rest of the room.
“—don’t you fill me in, Zachary?” he finished out loud.
“I might ask you the same questions,” Rachel sent as Zach began his report, “right along with why the fuck you have one of your dead kin hanging over your front door.”
Dillard was still and controlled, but Rachel again had the distinct impression that, in his mind, he was dreaming of committing the most intense of violences to her.
Zach continued on with his assessment, pointedly letting them know just how utterly they’d been in his scopes the entire way in, utterly unaware himself of how laughable his intimidation tactics were while she sat here silently facing down their wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Across from her, Dillard took a long but discreet inhale. “What are you? You smell—”
“Human? I am. Now your turn. What is this place, why’s there a dead raknoth outside, and why the hell are you playing house with—”
“I will ask the questions here,” Dillard sent, his mental tone growing irritated. “Do not test me, human.”
“Something tells me you’re not gonna go all red-eyes in front of your frothing vamp-a-phobes here.”
Dillard showed her a hint of a cold, predatory smile. “I have no qualms with killing you all in a most bloody fashion and wiping these men’s minds after the fact. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Rachel refrained from pointing out he’d be hard-pressed to take both her and Drogan. Might as well keep their telepathically-cloaked Ace up the sleeve until there was reason to reveal it.
Dillard had other plans.
“—was a… malfunction with the guns,” Zach was saying, “but once we’d—”
“Malfunction?” Dillard interjected, his eyes flicking suspiciously to Rachel. “Please explain.”
Zach nodded diligently, eager to please. “Yes, Mayor.” He was eyeing Rachel dubiously again himself. “We’re still not entirely sure what happened, but it seems…”
Rachel lost track of what Zach was saying when Dillard lightly sniffed again, frowned, and looked straight at Drogan with renewed suspicion.
“What is this?” Dillard’s lip twitched in a narrowly-contained snarl. “What is he doing here, and why can’t I feel him?”
Shit.
So much for the element of surprise.
“We’re not looking for trouble…” she started, glancing at Drogan.
He seemed to have caught onto the slight shift in Dillard’s behavior. He looked questioningly at Rachel, fingering the cloaking pendant at his breast.
No point in hiding it now. Two against one was easier anyway.
So Rachel gave Drogan the faintest of nods, and the raknoth reached to flick the cloak off.
“—and then Commander Nelken here,” Zach was saying, “started trying to tell us that it’s the vamps’ bosses we need to be worried about. The rakul, was it, Commander? Right, and—Mayor?”
At the mention of the rakul, Dillard’s composure had slipped, concern and alarm rippling across his expression, his focus on her and Drogan momentarily forgotten.
Rachel wasn’t watching Drogan, but the bright flare of his mind winking into existence beside her indicated he’d chosen that distracted moment to uncloak.
Dillard, meanwhile, looked like he was debating whether he could play the reaction off as something casual.
But Zach pushed on. “Do you know something about this, Mayor? Are they really…?”
“Is this true?” Dillard sent as Zach trailed off, watching his Mayor expectantly. “The rakul…”
“They have come, brother,” came Drogan’s mental reply. “We fled two but yesterday.”
Dillard let out a heavy sigh, gave an equally heavy nod, and leaned forward on the table. Given the news, Rachel doubted the reaction was disingenuous, but, to the non-telepaths, it probably looked like quite the dramatic show in response to Zach’s question.
For a second, Rachel thought Dillard might lose it right there—go berserk or, at the very least, telepathically compel his men to leave the room and forget what they’d heard.
Finally, though, he spoke.
“When we’d discovered Rollins’ secret, before we…” He stroked the thin stubble on his jaw, either genuinely haunted by whatever distant memory he was seeing or putting on a phenomenal act. “Before we took care of the problem, I went to see him one last time. I wanted to see if there was anything left of our friend beneath the demon’s influence.”
The demon’s influence? Was that Complex speak for saying this Rollins guy had been a raknoth?
Dillard shook his head, lost in the memory. “He cursed my name and told me that his masters would one day come to have their vengeance on us.”
“We will have words about this, brother,” Drogan sent, his mental tone akin to a warning growl.
It only strengthened Rachel’s suspicion that Rollins must’ve been the barbequed raknoth hanging at the north entrance.
Zach and his men looked stunned for completely different reasons.
“God almighty,” Zach muttered. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
The bitterness in Dillard’s face looked real. “Because I’d hoped it was nothing more than the desperate last words of a demon preparing to return to his maker.”
Drogan’s presence grew, a threatening mental pressure Rachel had a feeling Dillard felt much more profoundly than her.
Zach’s men were shifting uncomfortably and shooting one another worried looks now. Zach himself looked like he’d just noticed a cold, slimy worm wriggling its way down his fatigues.
“You’re saying…” He seemed to remember himself, then, and turned a hard look on Rachel, Nelken, and Drogan. “What should we do with these ones, then?”
Dillard studied them, thinking.
“We can help, Mayor,” said Nelken, who seemed to have picked up on some of Rachel’s tension but no doubt remained unclear on the exact source. “Our people know how to fight. We just need solid walls around us.”
“I already explained we can’t well take in an extra hundred-plus hungry mouths,” Zach said to Dillard.
“Have you led the rakul to my doorstep?” Dillard sent to Rachel and Drogan, still silently debating.
“We detected no sign of pursuit,” Drogan sent, “but, sooner or later, they will find us.”
“Mayor?” Zach asked, watching Dillard with a worried expression.
Dillard pursed his lips, on the cusp of some decision.
“Convince them,” he sent. Then he spoke out loud.
“All I ever wanted for us here was to be able to live on peacefully in a world that had gone insane.” He raised a hand to Nelken. “If what you say is true, then tell me why I should allow your people in and risk bringing the fury of these… rakul creatures down on my own?”
“If I may, sir?” Drogan asked, again in that timid voice that sounded so bizarre coming from him.
Nelken frowned over at him, looking certain now that some funny business was going on behind the scenes of his perception, but he nodded to Drogan’s request without a word.
Drogan turned to Dillard and Zach. “I know it sounds crazy, but to answer your question, Mayor Dillard, I think it’d be more of a risk to turn us away. We’ve… Well, we’ve seen some shit out there, sir. Entire cities going mad with rage. Red-eyed monsters straight out of…” He shook his head. “I don’t think those rakul will stop until this whole planet’s dust and ashes.” He fixed Zach with a grave stare. “At the end of the day, whether we like it or not, I think we’re all in this together.”
“Damn, Drogan,” Rachel sent to Drogan only. “I didn’t know you were capable of sounding like a real person.”
“Bah,” Drogan replied. “My tongue requires cleansing. How you and yours speak such gibberish routinely is beyond comprehension.”
Dillard made the appearance of turning Drogan’s words over, though a hint of glib amusement tugged at his expression.
“Make light of this charade,” Drogan sent to him, “and I will break you.”
Rachel expected the threat would either only deepen Dillard’s amusement or spark an aggressive, territorial response, but Drogan’s fire actually seemed to rattle him.
Dillard sat quietly after that. His mind already looked to be made up, but his eyes flicked toward Zach a few times as if he were waiting to make sure his men would absorb the new information without their heads exploding.
“Very well,” Dillard finally said.
The words startled the men out of their silent reveries.
Zach gaped down at him. “But Mayor, we can’t—We’ve never… Where are we going to—”
“We’ll find a way to manage.” Dillard stood and gave Zach a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Just as we always do.”
Zach stared at him like he’d just proposed they all go skydiving without parachutes, but Dillard paid him no mind.
The Mayor moved for the door, waving for them all to join him. “Come. I won’t promise anything more than temporary shelter while we discuss this development, but for now, let’s find workable quarters for our new guests.”
16
When Jarek awoke the next morning, he was surprised roughly in equal parts by three things. First, that he’d managed to sleep at all. Second, that, according to Al’s report from the ship scanners, the Mosenites’ vehicles were all still there outside. And third, that, despite the first two things, his throat was still miraculously knife-free.
It was shaping up to be an okay day. At least until he sat up from the floor and basked in the landscape of pain last night’s brawl with Mosen had painted across his body.
“Ouchie,” he groaned.
“How are we feeling this morning, sir?” Al asked.
It was a terrible question.
His back hurt. His elbows and his heel hurt.
His everything hurt.
But the worst of the pains was the warm, sickly ache radiating through his left cheek. Maker help him if it was fractured. Complications aside, his beautiful man-face could only take so much abuse, and he already had three strikes—or raknoth claw scars, rather—going against him.
“It fucking hurts, buddy.” He worked his jaw experimentally and winced at the pain in his cheek. “Agh. Whatever happened to not the face?”
“I can’t say you didn’t bring it on yourself, sir, picking a bare-knuckle fight with a raknoth hybrid superhuman.”
Despite Al’s decided lack of verbal coddling, the inner membrane of Jarek’s helmet, already comfortably cool, grew several degrees cooler on the left side. Jarek sighed in relief.
He’d slept with the faceplate closed. Judging by how soothing its presence felt on the aching mess of his face, he had a feeling it was going to be a faceplate-closed kind of day, too.
The pain wasn’t anything he wasn’t used to dealing with. The bigger concern was whether there’d be any lasting cognitive effects from having his bell so thoroughly rung. His thoughts felt coherent enough. But then again, there was no guarantee he wasn’t just too impaired to recognize his own impairment.
“Any chance I can count on you to let me know if I do anything unreasonable, Mr. Robot?”
He started at the sound of Chambers’ voice from the bed behind him. “You mean past the usual amount of unreasonable? That’s kind of a tricky order, coming from you.”
“Agent Chambers raises a valid point, sir,” Al said, speaking through Fela’s speakers now so Chambers could hear as well.
It was only by the time Jarek had turned to shoot his affronted glare at Chambers that he remembered his faceplate was closed. She seemed to get the gist anyway.
A thin smile pulled at her mouth as she touched two fingers to her forehead in salute and mouthed, “Sir.”
Beside her, Michael slept on through it all with the unshakeable resolve of a praying monk.
“I have faith, Mr. Robot,” Jarek said. “You’ll know it
when you see it.”
“Right, then,” Al said. “Seize the carp, sir.”
Chambers laughed, and Michael gave a few sleep snorts but rolled over and continued his slumber.
“Everyone’s a critic,” Jarek muttered, pulling himself painstakingly to his feet. “Jesus, whose idea was it to get myself beaten to a pulp when we have a bunch of intergalactic conquerors on our tails?” He held up a hand and shook his head. “Don’t answer that.”
Chambers just gave another salute instead.
“That’s gonna have to stop.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” she replied.
“Can we un-invite her to the team, Al?”
“Al and I are starting our own team anyway,” Chambers said before Al could respond. “Team Think Before You Punch.”
“Oh, that does sound enticing, sir.”
Jarek shook his head. “Et tu, Mr. Robot?”
Michael chose that moment to snap awake and look at them with bleary eyes.
The suddenness of it put a twinge of rakul-related worry in Jarek’s gut, but then Michael started shaking the sleep off like a normal disheveled twenty-year-old.
“What’s up, guys?” He seemed to remember something, and he looked to Jarek with a grin. “We ready to seize the carp?”
“Oh, har har!” Jarek said. “Let’s all make fun of the concussed guy!” He waved a dismissive hand at Michael and, in a tone that suggested it negated the validity of Michael’s words, added, “You sleep tied up.”
Michael and Chambers just watched him with amused expressions.
Jarek sighed. “We’re not letting this go, are we?”
Michael and Chambers traded a look, then turned back to him.
“The carp has been seized,” Chambers said.
Michael nodded with a mock-apologetic expression. “You can’t just unseize the carp, man.”
“You really can’t, sir,” Al added.
“That’s it”—Jarek turned for the door, shaking his head all the way—“I’m gonna go see if anyone wants to put me out of my misery.”
Outside, the sunlight hit harshly, snuffing out the light-hearted amusement they’d shared behind the safety of the closed door and replacing it with worry, weight, and the reminder of just how far he might be from finding Rachel, despite how far they’d already come.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 97
