Hulia went to work stripping Sota down while I checked the windows overlooking the leafy street outside. Most houses looked like the one we were holed up in, all glass and brick boxes wrapped in trees of various shapes and sizes. Earth hadn’t always been this leafy. Humans had barely clawed their way back from an environmental catastrophe of their own making. Earth was now protected and home to the elite families. We were going to struggle to blend in here.
A sound buzzed at the back of the room, followed by an automated announcement. “Citizen Notice. Curfew in effect. Fugitives at large. Please remain inside and await patrol inspections.”
The net was closing and so was our window of escape.
“The way I see it, we have two choices,” I began. “Neither look great.”
Cradling Sota’s tek components in her hand, Hulia stood. “Some chance is better than none.”
“We take to the streets, steal a shuttle, stop off at a Sol shipping port near Jupiter, and steal something bigger that can jump us to Calicto, where we’ll retrieve Shinj.”
A whole lot could go wrong with that plan. I could fly almost any Earthen vessel, but there was a star system of Earthens between us and Halow space. They wouldn’t let us walk away without a fight.
“Or?” Talen asked, his dry tone suggesting he’d come to the same conclusion.
“We go straight for the jugular.”
The fae’s eyebrow twitched. “Captain Pierce.”
“If I can turn her to our cause, we’ll have a ship and her forces.”
“Forces we recently had on their knees.”
“You had them on their knees, not me. If I can get close to her, I can talk her ’round.”
Hulia exchanged a glance with Talen and asked, “Aren’t you an Earthen fairy tale monster?”
An ache throbbed across my forehead and down behind my eyes. I leaned back against the windowsill and rubbed the pain away. “Earthens and I have… history.”
“History? You slaughtered thousands of humans,” Talen added. “Not just the vakaru, but you personally, Drochfhoula.”
“Yes, I do remember.”
“After what she saw at the museum, she’ll kill you if you get near her,” he dismissed.
“Got a better plan?”
“No. I can barely think beyond the pain this place has me drowning in.”
I tossed the acorn at Talen. He caught it, admired the seed between his finger and thumb, then looked up. “This lessens the agony somewhat.” He rubbed at his chest, over his heart. “It soothes me, like being close to Kesh does.”
“Thought it might. Its magic is her magic. Her magic is Faerie’s magic.” I knew Talen, or I thought I did, but only the Talen I’d seen behind bars. And now I’d handed him a piece of the polestar. “Don’t make me regret giving you that.”
He closed his hand around the seed and nodded.
I turned to face the window again and braced an arm against the wall. Though I was watching the street, I saw Kesh and heard her voice. Before leaving her side on Hapters, I’d asked if there was room in her heart for the last vakaru. Her reply slayed me every time I thought of it. Sometime in all of this, I’d stopped guarding my heart against her and invited her in. Maybe that made me a fool like Eledan. There was no going back, no denying how I felt. I just hoped we survived long enough to see each other again.
Movement near the end of the street caught my attention. A patrol was knocking on doors, working its way closer.
“We’ve got company.”
Their weapons glowed with the same greenish hue as their tek-enhanced eyes. Without Sota’s firepower, and with Talen running on empty, this would take some lawman finesse.
“Talen, Hulia, go out the back. There must be a rear exit.”
“I can help …” Talen stood, and for a moment, I almost believed him. But his white-knuckled grip on the chair was the only thing holding him up.
“The last thing I need right now is more evidence that we’re monsters. They don’t have it in them to see your darkness and not fear it. Go with Hulia.”
Hulia tucked Sota’s scraps inside her pockets. “What are you going to do?”
“Take to the forest if you have to,” I answered, ignoring her question. “There’s less tek there.”
“And do what?” Talen asked. “Hide?”
What other option was there? The Earthens were on high alert and wouldn’t let the Nightshade go. Talen closed his eyes and shook his head, answering his own question.
“Can you fly a shuttle?” I asked Hulia.
“I used to… years ago.”
“Find one. Steal one. Whatever it takes. If I haven’t come for you in two days, get off Earth and get that acorn to Kesh.”
Hulia nodded.
“This is foolish.” Talen managed a few steps toward the back of the room before Hulia had to hold him up. If anything happened to him, to his bond with Kesh, I had no idea how it would impact her. Together, they were stronger. Torn apart, for all I knew, it could kill them both. I couldn’t allow the Earthens to capture him.
“You stopped Kesh from running headlong into similar scenarios.” Talen’s silvery eyes shone with frustration. “You know this only ends one way.”
I did. It ended with him and Hulia safe. “I might not like these humans, but they need to know what’s coming for them. The tek barriers they’re building won’t keep the fae at bay for long. I can help them fight back.”
“If they’ll listen…” His mouth twisted.
“They tried to convince me once that a human-vakaru alliance was our only hope against the fae.”
He laughed dryly. “And you killed their emissary for it.”
“Times have changed.”
“For you, but not for them.”
“Talen.” I left the window and stepped in front of the fae. His cheek twitched again, a fracture in his armor, and he tried to straighten to stand eye to eye with me. This was killing him, literally and figuratively. “It doesn’t matter whether I make it out, just that I tried to help them.” I sighed. “I made the wrong choice before and lost my vakaru. I won’t get this opportunity again. I have to do this.”
His eyes narrowed and then softened with feeling. “The Messenger needs you, Marshal Kellee.”
She really didn’t. She had him and the bond. I was just the jagged edge to her knife. “And I intend to see her again.”
The door intercom chimed. “Inspection crew. Open up.”
“Give me your word,” Talen said, making it sound like a threat.
“Two days. Go.”
“Your word.” He grabbed my shoulder, dug his fingers in, and peered into my eyes. “You are a good and true man. Good men die as easily as fools. Don’t make it easy for them over a past you can’t change.”
I nodded. “You have my word. I will see Kesh again. Go.”
Reluctantly, he let go, unconvinced this wasn’t goodbye.
A fist hammered on the door. I waited until they’d disappeared out the back and breathed out slowly.
Thump-thump. “Open up, or we’ll use sanctioned forced entry. You have thirty seconds to comply.”
I’d counted eight guards on the street. I could slaughter them before they prime their rifles. Killing them wouldn’t win me any Earthen friends, though the idea did sound delicious. The vakaru were dead. The past was buried. I was Marshal Kellee now, and this lawman did things differently.
I opened the door. “Hi there. Nice night for a strip search?”
They blinked, faces captured in a moment of utter surprise. It didn’t last.
“Down on your knees! Down now!”
I dropped, laced my fingers behind my head, and got a rifle stock slammed into my gut. That hadn’t been necessary, but I couldn’t blame them for their heavy-handed approach. The last time they’d seen me, I’d been all claws and teeth. That was going to leave an impression.
“Search the house!”
While they manhandled me aside by shoving their rifles agains
t my back, one of the patrols rattled off my description into his PI, probably reporting back to Pierce.
“Clear!” someone accounted from behind. “Looks like he put some kind of fairy spell on the household. No sign of the others…”
“Search the perimeter.”
Fairy spell? I might have had time to feel insulted if a gun hadn’t found its mark across the back of my head, plunging me into darkness.
Chapter 16
Marshal Kellee
* * *
The pain in my head throbbed in time with my heartbeat, not helped by the bright lights flooding into my eyes and stabbing the back of my skull. I blinked tears free, washing my focus clean. If I could get that damn light out of my face…
I tried to lift my hand and found it stuck. Metal clattered. Vision swimming, I squinted down at the clamps locking my forearms down. What by cyn…?
“He’s coming around,” a male voice said.
“Good.” Pierce.
The ache in my head subsided enough for me to read the scene, and I wished I’d stayed out cold. I’d been tied up a few times in the past and dealt my fair share of punishments as a vakaru kit, but not for a very, very long time. But being restrained to a chair in a human science lab was a new experience. And I had an audience. A couple of teknicians monitored their tek instruments while a swarm of monitors hovered above. A guard stood somewhere behind me. I could smell the warm metal and charged electrical state of his weapon, and I could hear his steady heart. Pierce, however, stood right where I couldn’t fail to see her.
“There are other ways to get a man’s shirt off,” I told her, disliking the way my voice sounded when it bounced back at me. The room was soundproofed. Science lab, torture chamber, same things.
“You’re not a man.” Her mouth ticked. “Begin.”
Begin what?
A teknician lingered closer. A small half-moon-shaped drone hovered down toward my left forearm and revealed its collection of sharp implements. It set to work carving into my skin and exposing a throbbing vein. Instincts and the sizzling pain had me pulling on the restraints.
“Hold still,” the teknician said. “It’ll make it easier for the both of us.”
I clamped my teeth together, forcing away the ache to stop my fangs from lengthening, and clenched my hand, letting the tek guy insert a needle and draw off my blood. Satisfied with his sample, the teknician let the drone clamp a drip feed under my skin and laser it in place. Skin sizzled.
“Fuck. Careful with that blood,” I warned. “Get any on you and you’ll be havin’ a real bad day.”
“Run it immediately,” Pierce ordered. “Let’s get confirmation so we can proceed.”
The teknician dropped my blood into a small glass slide. A machine sucked it in, and a few seconds later, a beep sounded.
I focused on Pierce.
“We have extensive record of vakaru DNA ID from the war,” she answered without my having to ask.
“You wanna know which one I am?”
“I want it confirmed, yes.”
“If you ask nicely, I’ll tell you and spare you all this trouble…” I pulled on my forearms, tightening the muscles and making the restraints groan. The clamps didn’t budge. I’d try again later, when they weren’t observing me so closely.
“It’s him,” Teknician Guy said. He avoided making eye contact, but I didn’t need to look into his eyes to sense his fear. I could already smell its sweetness. “Drochfhoula,” he added, because why the hell not give the name to the monster in the room.
I grinned for the rapt crowd. “I go by Kellee now.”
Pierce’s glare hardened some more, like she was granite and I didn’t stand a chance of moving her. “You think changing your name absolves you of your past sins?”
“No, Drochfhoula is a bitch to type into a PI.” My smile hid how I licked at my gums to stave off their ache. I couldn’t do much about the itch in my hands, unless I let the claws spring free. Not a good look for a friendly conversation.
“Do you know how many human deaths have been attributed to Drochfhoula?” Pierce asked.
They’d been keeping count. Great. The itch in my hands sizzled hotter. “No.”
“I suppose you wouldn’t. After the first few thousand, you’d stop caring.”
This human and I would have a severe falling-out if she continued along this line of questioning.
“That’s assuming I cared at all?”
“Officially, the infamous vakaru warlord killed 55,352 men, women, and children. Five thousand of those were in one day at the Battle of Two Bridges. It’s well documented how you, alone, were an unstoppable force. Under your command, your vakaru killed around nine hundred thousand human beings during that war. The exact number isn’t known. That’s nine hundred thousand human souls taken.”
I hadn’t known, but I wasn’t surprised. Nothing had surpassed the vakaru on the battlefields, not even the fae flights. “And how many did the fae kill?”
She tilted her head. “We’re not talking about the fae. We’re talking about you.”
“If it makes any difference, I was a soldier, like you—”
Rage flared quick and hot in her eyes. “You are nothing like me! You are a creature, a beast, in human skin!”
She nodded at the teknician. He flicked something on his console, and a bright blue substance crept along the drip line toward my wrist. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be good. I tugged against my restraints again, uselessly, as the inky liquid crawled ever closer.
“The last time the vakaru came, we were not prepared.” She moved to my side, close enough for me to see her pulse flutter in her neck and smell the rage radiating off her skin. “This time”—she leaned in, eyes of flint—“we’re ready.”
“There is no this time.” The blue liquid sank through the tube and disappeared into my vein. “There are no vakaru. It’s just me.” The heat came first, the recognizable burn of something alien slithering beneath my skin. It quickly fizzled hotter, the same as the rage in her eyes. “I surrendered to your patrol willingly.”
“Why are you here?”
Hotter, my flesh bubbled, or was something else setting my veins ablaze? Pain grabbed hold of the nerves in my arm, tensing muscle. Claws sprang free without my command.
“I didn’t hurt any of your people. I could have—” Agony twisted my muscles, arching my hand and arm inward against the clamps. Whatever that shit was, it was wreaking havoc on my muscles. “I didn’t come here to start a war.”
“Too late. The tek feeding into your veins will track down every molecule that makes you vakaru and neutralize it, destroying you from the inside out.”
Her words sunk in slowly. She was… killing off the vakaru in me? True fear clamped around my chest and squeezed. “You don’t need to do this.”
“What’s your mission on Earth?”
“There is no mission.”
“Drochfhoula and the Nightshade did not infiltrate Earth for nothing. You came to the heart of our solar system. What are you here for? Why were you at the museum? What did you take?”
They didn’t know about the acorn or the polestar. And they couldn’t know. Heat beat up my arm, crawling deeper and sinking into my bones. The thought of tek beneath my skin, worming its way through the fabric of what made me vakaru… I yanked on the clamps. They rattled. I yanked again. More of the poisonous heat beat through my veins. It would unravel me, kill me or, worse, leave me empty, numb and blind and deaf.
Karushit, I’d made a mistake in giving myself up.
I’d underestimated the impact of my past on these humans. Apparently, time didn’t heal everything.
My teeth grew, gums alight as my fangs forced their way out. I bared them as a warning, but my panting lessened the threat. Fuck, fuck, fuck. “Times have changed. I’ve changed. Don’t do this. We can be powerful allies.”
Pierce smiled cuttingly and leaned in. “The families of 55,352 men, women, and children have been waiting a long time f
or this moment. You can rest assured it will not be over quickly.”
“There have been some unforeseen reactions. As we haven’t been able to test it on living cells until now, we weren’t aware that the isolated vakaru element would defend itself against the invasion the way human cells fight off viruses.” I listened to the teknician coolly describe what was going on inside me while my skin was trying to peel itself off my bones. It wasn’t pain; it was a fucking acid bath and sandblast all in one.
“Increase the dose.”
“There’s a risk the procedure could kill him.”
Listen to the teknician!
I opened my eyes and found Pierce observing me. “It won’t,” she said. Her eyes shone. She clearly hoped it might.
“We don’t know—”
“Increase the dose or I’ll find someone else who will.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why are you here?” she asked me. She’d been asking the same question on and off for hours now. “What was in the museum?”
I closed my eyes and wallowed in the agony. I was wrapped in broken glass while drinking those same shards of glass. It felt as if the glass were alive.
“Where is the fae?”
The laughter bubbling up my throat hurt too, but I freed it anyway. “How did it feel… when he made you love him?”
Oh, that blow hit her hard. Her emotional guards shot up, but I’d seen the pain before she could hide it. She didn’t like to be undermined.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“He could have wrecked your mind, yours and all the minds of your crew. Could have made you all kill each other.”
Her lips twisted.
“Felt good, didn’t it?”
And twisted some more.
“You want it again—want him. That’s what the fae do. They get under your skin and take root there, like an addiction you can’t shake. He let you off lightly.”
“What he did was abhorrent.”
“What he did was a mercy. You lived, and you even liked it, for a short while.” Every word was glass on my lips. “He is not the enemy you’re looking for. Neither am I.”
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