Hunted Warrior

by Lindsey Piper

  “More rumors.” His late aunt’s Pendray brother-in-law had been on the run nearly as long as Mal had been Giva. To believe that the shady killer known as the Heretic had joined with a peaceful Indranan priestess was beyond his ability to give credence.

  No way. Not Tallis.

  Avyi adjusted the microphone and spoke directly into it. “Fact. They’re going to meet us soon, but I don’t know why.”

  “Us again? We’re bound for so many adventures?”

  She was smiling again, but this time for him. Few of her features changed configuration. She simply looked at him with a different brightness to her eyes. Keener, more gold than green. More fiery. More inviting. She was a woman who could smile without moving her lips. “Am I such difficult company to keep? Or are the adventures the issue?”

  “I haven’t done anything for the last ten years but mitigate disputes, split my time between Greece and Tibet, and target the cartels with every resource at my disposal. Adventure has not been a high priority.”

  “Perhaps that’s why the Dragon has chosen us. Neither of us knows the world.”

  “Are you comparing my responsibilities to your years in Dr. Aster’s labs?”

  Her slight teasing fled from her expression. That speck of levity was replaced by revulsion so strong that had Mal been a telepath, he would’ve recoiled and done his best to turn his mind away from hers.

  “Nothing compares to the doctor’s labs.”

  They spent the rest of the flight in silence. No chance to open a window this time, as he had in the hostel. Perhaps he should apologize again, but her vacillation between accessible and impossibly cut off raised his hackles. And he thought he was the politician. Now he found himself on the receiving end of the most studied silent treatment he’d ever known.

  He didn’t want to acknowledge the haunted, stricken pain evident on her face when he’d spoken of Aster’s laboratory. He’d seen it. He’d helped blow it to the ground. The horrors contained within those cinder-block walls in the Canadian Yukon were unspeakable. Dragon Kings had been held against their wills in cells akin to slab cabinets at a morgue. Pulled free of their narrow, coffinlike prisons, they’d blinked against the fluorescent light and hadn’t known what to do with freedom.

  Avyi had lived there as the Pet for … how long? He didn’t even know. As with most Dragon King women, she was timeless. Her smooth features could’ve meant she was twenty or eighty. She was in the prime of their people’s youth. Had she been in the keeping of the doctor for decades and decades, how was she even functioning? So long spent in the captivity of another person must be crippling.

  His skin went cold. He sat up straighter in his seat and stared out to where the mainland of Greece was just coming into view. Although Mal hated giving credence to the idea, he needed to. She could still be in the Asters’ service.

  *

  Avyi was not used to being waited on.

  When she’d accepted a two-piece set of luggage from a woman on the helipad in Athens, she’d done so wearing what must’ve been a dumbfounded expression. That rankled compared to how easily Malnefoley slipped into his natural skin—that of the head of his clan, and the head of the Dragon Kings. She was reminded of his high-handed ways when he’d whisked her away from the ruined labs. So certain. Arrogantly certain. That same tone had followed her into the holding cells where the questions never ended regarding Aster’s next moves, and the details of his crossbreeding program.

  What she had offered—the truth about her role in conception—was disregarded as lies. She could lie. She’d been taught by a family adept at them, and she’d lived in the possession of a doctor who lied with every breath. That didn’t mean she was lying about being Aster’s secret link between the life and death of unborn Dragon Kings.

  There was no point to lying now. She had too much to do before the Grievance. She couldn’t pinpoint its exact dates until she took a few steps in an unknown direction. Then the future would flow through a vision of ideas into the facts of reality.

  That left a smile on her face. Mal thought he knew so much. He’d see.

  She always experienced a special moment when what she predicted came true. It was like a dream materializing before her eyes. But that didn’t mean it was always happy. On countless occasions, she’d seen the imminent death of a baby or the certainty that a father wouldn’t survive to see his child born. To know her gift was still active, true, and strong was reassuring—that she wasn’t crazy, and that she wasn’t deluding herself when she saw positive outcomes—but heartbreak always hit her twice: once when she saw it as a vision, and again when she saw it take real, immutable shape.

  She glanced at Mal as they navigated the corridors below deck on a six-hundred-person ferry called the Forza, which would take them from Patra to Venice. From Greece to Italy. At least that hadn’t been a trick. He hadn’t told his men to shackle her and drag her up the mountains to the Tigony fortress. Her trust was paying off. She wouldn’t have been detained long by the vaunted Giva’s men, but she didn’t have the luxury of time now. It was collapsing in on her.

  Mal stopped at a door at the end of a cruise vessel’s corridor. “This is it.”

  “It? Singular?”

  “I said you’d have your own bed.” After setting the cases on the floor, he retrieved one key. “That didn’t mean they’d be in two rooms.”

  “You’re trying very hard to make my prediction come true.”

  The key slipped across the face of the lock. He glared at her again. “This isn’t about sex,” he said. “This is about being able to get us on the same ship leaving today. As it is, we won’t be in Florence until day after tomorrow. I should’ve thought to have my people make you up a fake passport.”

  “You were too busy detaining me.”

  “Detaining. You meant something else by that.”

  “Interrogating? Getting nowhere with pointless questions?” She dropped her bags and snatched the key from his fingers. “Pick one.”

  Avyi opened the door and left her bags in the corridor. If she was going to be waited on hand and foot by a Tigony, she might as well start at the top. She hadn’t let go of her anger. He didn’t take her seriously, and she dearly wished her gift would align in a way that would prove she wasn’t a fraud.

  She glanced behind her as Mal rolled her suitcases into the narrow room. She couldn’t help but smile.

  “Not bad,” he said to himself. “For last-minute tickets.”

  He wasn’t wrong. The berth was wide enough for a center aisle with a single bed on either side. A miniature closet took up the space between the foot of one bed and the corridor wall, while the mirroring space was a very small bathroom. They wouldn’t have to share with other people, but they would have to share with each other.

  It’s just overnight.

  She sat heavily on the left of the two single beds. “At least I don’t snore.”

  Mal chuckled. “How would you know?”

  “I was rewarded when I stopped.”

  With the look of a man weighted by the whole of the ship, he locked the door and let the cases stay where they fell. He sat on the opposite bed and rested his elbows on his thighs. The glance he angled up from beneath his brows was poised between wanting to ask a question … and not wanting to hear the answer. That was the story of Avyi’s gift.

  “Rewarded?” he asked at last.

  “By the doctor. He used hypnosis and drugs. Eventually surgery.” She self-consciously rubbed the bridge of her nose. Her random comment had led to revealing just how subjugated she’d been. That wasn’t a pattern she wished to continue with. “When I healed, I didn’t snore anymore. He let me sleep on a mattress for the first time.”

  “He could hear you snoring in the first place?”

  Avyi’s hands had grown restless, touching the back of her neck. She’d worn a collar once, long ago, but not because she’d fought in the Cages. The doctor had liked how it looked. Mal’s scrutiny added to her unease. She didn’t l
ike being unable to control physical reactions, but this topic was hitting well below conscious thought. She could smell the old-fashioned shaving soap Dr. Aster whipped to a lather in a cup. She remembered kneeling at his feet, holding on to his leg and smiling at his associates and enemies alike. She even recalled the soft crease he kept in his trousers.

  The good pet.

  “I slept in his room. After a time. The first few years I was kept in a lab cell. He had to figure out how to control me.”

  “Brainwashing.”

  “Initially, yes.”

  “But you slept without a mattress.”

  “On the floor,” she said, grabbing the edges of the mattress to reassure herself of the present. Stay in the present. The past was a tangle of evil, and the future was unreliable. “Until the surgery cured my snoring. But he never slept without me in my cage at the foot of his bed.”

  “Cage?” His voice was shockingly loud in that small space. Avyi flinched, then noticed the flicker of lights and how they matched the electricity in Mal’s deep blue eyes and the sparks tingling from his fingertips. “He kept you in a cage?”

  “Maybe you’re more trusting than is wise. You volunteered to sleep in here with me.” She narrowed her eyes and pinned him with as much ferocity as the memories of Dr. Aster always left her feeling. “Good luck closing your eyes tonight, Giva.”

  He stood and paced the three steps to the door, then back. Again. He shoved his hands through the long, straight strands of blond hair that fell across his brow. “Why did you remain with me after the labs were destroyed, when he fled?”

  “I didn’t want to stay anymore.” She lay back on the mattress and pulled up a blanket. “And I haven’t been brainwashed for a long time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was in a lab room, where a Dragon King woman was being inseminated. I was ordered to talk to her and keep her calm. I didn’t say much. Didn’t have to. That’s what pets are for. Be seen, be touched, be talked to. But it didn’t matter. She was hopeful in a way I couldn’t understand.” She twisted the edge of the blanket around her fingers. “I hadn’t known much about hope.”

  “Did you … ?” He stopped and braced his weight against the narrow width between doors. “Did you see your own future?”

  “I know that I will kill Dr. Aster or he will kill me. Other than knowing about you and me, I’ve never seen another piece of my own future.”

  “I don’t know what to do with that.”

  “Be glad you’re the one I’ll sleep with rather than kill?”

  Mal smiled ruefully and let his head drop, face to the floor. She wanted to touch the place at his nape where the blond hair looked its softest, like corn silk beneath a heavier, thicker layer. “I’ll take that, yes. So this woman … ?”

  “She wasn’t just going to conceive a baby. She was going to bear one. I held her hand and saw a moment in the unborn child’s future when his father would hold him and hide his tears.” Avyi shivered and curled into herself on the narrow bed. “Dr. Aster couldn’t know what I’d seen. He couldn’t know what I knew. No random hope. It had been a prediction of joy. The doctor only wanted the facts. Other predictions followed. The good and the bad. Children who would be successful. Children who would die by accident. Children who would grow up orphans.”

  She remained silent for a long time, as did Mal. He took off his suit coat and rolled up his sleeves. That seemed more intimate than if he’d stood before her nude. Rolling up his sleeves was like a prelude to undressing. There was potential and anticipation. He sank onto his mattress and leaned his elbows against his thighs once more.

  “You should at least take off your boots,” he said. “I’ll be good.”

  “I know you will be.”

  He crooked a smile. “But these children. How did seeing their future break the spell of Dr. Aster’s hold over you?”

  “Can’t you guess? If they had a future, good or bad, then I might, too. I decided I wasn’t going to spend it with him.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  Mal lay awake for several hours, listening to Avyi sleep. She didn’t snore. Remembering their conversation, however, added a layer of anger and sympathy to what would’ve been a simple fact of physiology. That Dr. Aster had caged her, performed surgery on her, brainwashed her—likely through the use of torture—left Mal antsy and, more honestly, furious. The facts of Avyi’s existence made the comfort of his life seem ridiculous, even wasteful.

  He was the Giva, yet at heart, he didn’t feel he was the self-sacrificing leader the Dragon Kings needed in this time of crisis. He talked the part, he oversaw what needed to be done to keep the human cartels in check, but had he truly put his back into the task? Had he done enough?

  If the cartels were powerful—so powerful as to kidnap Dragon Kings such as his cousin, Nynn, from their home with impunity—what was the use of the gifts bestowed by the Dragon? Mal wasn’t the only complacent one among their kind. He was simply the one who couldn’t afford to be complacent. Ever.

  He’d made the mistake of assuming that his assured handling of the Council—only ten people—was the same as leading an entire race. It was time to stop delegating. It was time to take matters into his own hands. He could’ve used conventional means to follow Avyi, namely having his people take on the task and investigate her possible role in the assassination attempt. But he wanted to do it himself. He was finally, assuredly taking action, with reasons that had become thornier by the day.

  Beyond even his growing desire for Avyi, he was all the more curious about her purported gift. If he were to believe it, he would need to see proof for himself. Without that proof, they were done. He would never be able to trust such a practiced charlatan. Which cartel held the woman? To what ends? That these basic questions couldn’t be answered were a weight on his soul, if only because they layered suspicion over his growing regard for her.

  He stared up into the near darkness. Glimmers from the large ferry’s external lighting caught the panes of glass and refracted prisms of light into the double berth.

  Turning on his side, he used the slight glare to watch her sleep. The almost-light cast deep shadows over her delicate features. She could be Pendray, with women sometimes as hearty as Vikings and sometimes as delicate as fairies. She could be Tigony, having brought forth legends of sirens and water nymphs. But none of that truly mattered. She was a foundling without a clan, claiming a gift that no Dragon King had ever dared boast.

  She had only taken off her boots before groggily washing up and returning to her bed. In fact, washing up for bed included slipping on her brass knuckles and sliding a switchblade into her hip pocket. Had she learned that from life with Aster, or from her years as a migrant Garnis tagalong?

  His guess was the latter. He couldn’t imagine Dr. Aster forcing her to sleep in a cage while permitting her access to weapons. Despite Avyi’s sleep-armor, Mal wasn’t intimidated or fearful of her. His powers were vast, and he knew that Avyi believed their destinies intertwined. She wouldn’t have cause to turn against him until her mission was fulfilled.

  Was that before or after they became lovers?

  Mal jerked awake from his half-sleeping state. He could barely imagine her naked, let alone beneath him or above him or kneeling before him, both of them seeking the heady release of pleasure. He could readily admit that she was beautiful. But her defensive posture and obvious distrust was a barrier to his imagination. She flinched whenever he was too near, when she wasn’t the one to offer physical closeness.

  That meant she was more likely expecting to initiate their sexual encounter. Encounters? No, the idea of one time was hard enough to grapple with. But letting her take the lead wasn’t Mal’s intention. If they were going to spend days, perhaps longer, in one another’s company, and if she already expected a moment of supreme intimacy, he wasn’t going to wait for her to come to him. Their affair would be brief and, at the center of his being, he knew it would be intense. The prospect st
irred his blood.

  Across the narrow aisle between their beds, she made a quiet mewling sound in her sleep. Mal took in a deep breath. He wanted breathy, sweaty, excited sounds.

  He wanted her mindless.

  And if she had lived a conjugal life with Dr. Aster, he wanted to wipe that life away. He wanted to replace those memories with newer, brighter ones.

  Fool.

  As if such damage could be erased with a couple good fucks.

  That mewling sound became more intense. She thrashed under her blanket. She muttered in a language Mal didn’t understand. He only understood when, in the darkness, she screamed. It was a scream to open the skies.

  In a flash, Mal was out of bed and leaning across her mattress. Before touching her anywhere, he pinned the hand wearing the brass knuckles. She jumped to full awareness and fought him like a cat caught by its hind paws. Twisting at the waist, still screaming, she used the tight ball of her sleeping position as a coil to strike out. She reached for her switchblade, but Mal caught it from her hand and tossed it back toward his bed.

  “Avyi! Wake up.” He used the weight of his upper body to restrain her thrashing fury. Dragon damn, she was agile. “Stop! Wake up now.”

  He gave her a shake and caught the back of her head, where her hair was unbound and as slippery-clean as water.

  Continuing to fight, Avyi’s eyes flared opened. Even in those dimmed shadows, Mal recognized very little of the woman he’d come to know. She was feral. Blank. Absent of reason. Only intensity remained. She was the equivalent of a rabid animal fighting the captor who would put her down.

  “Pet,” he shouted with his most authoritative voice. “You will stop. You don’t deserve this mattress. You don’t deserve me.”

  She stilled. A sob hitched her chest. The fight dropped out of her body as if her bones were popped balloons. “Forgive me,” she said, weeping openly now.

  Mal had no choice but to offer what he could—invoking Dr. Aster—to bring her back into her true self. Did such a thing exist, he wondered, or would she always be so deeply, dangerously connected to the mad doctor of the Aster cartel?