The creature let out a terrible screech of deadly fury when a man stepped out of the trees. With lightning speed, he darted forward brandishing a long spear with a crude pointed head of beaten metal tied to its end with a leather thong.
With no hesitation, he ran up to the creature and stabbed it right behind the ear. The spearhead buried its point in the creature's neck. The creature reared back with another ground-shaking bellow. It twisted its head away from the pain, and the shaft snapped off in the man's hand, but the damage was done.
The creature rose on its hind legs, but it never got a chance to bring down its crushing hooves on the ground. In mid-air, its body gave a spasm and wrenched sideways. Then the creature collapsed on its side on the ground.
The man leapt out of the way to escape that falling bulk, and the animal hit the ground with all its weight. Its head bounced and came to rest with the broken-off spear shaft still protruding from its neck.
Chapter 4
Everyone stood still and stared at the dead creature. Even lying on its side it stood taller at the shoulder than all their heads. Sheena breathed a sigh of relief. “Everybody all right?”
Ron Simons called from between the trees. “All but Sophia.”
The whole group hurried to the spot where Ron knelt at Sophia's side. She lay on her back under a tree with a pool of blood staining the ground all around her lower body. Blood stained one thigh, but her face shone deathly white in the mid-afternoon sunshine.
Sheena knelt at Ron's side. “How bad is it?”
“About as bad as it can be. Give me my bag, will you, Dana? Thank you.” He rummaged in his bag and brought out an old-fashioned set of needle pliers. “If any of you is squeamish, I suggest you turn your backs now.”
Abigail herded the girls away, but Sheena touched Ron's arm. “Let me help you.”
He glanced up and smiled. “Thanks. Hold this for me.”
He shoved the pliers into the open puncture in Sophia's thigh. He wrestled it around in circles and probed with his fingers. He gritted his teeth and sweated with the effort until he anchored the pliers somewhere inside her thigh. He locked the handle closed and handed the circular grips to Sheena.
She held them still in the same position in which he handed them to her and waited for his instructions. He got out a needle and thread from his bag and threaded the needle with nimble fingers.
Sheena observed his movements. He didn't miss a beat. Quick as a wink, he started stitching as fast as he could. He prodded the wound with his fingers until he found what he was looking for, hooked the needle through some blood-saturated piece of flesh, and pulled it out again.
Blood welled up all around the wound and covered up his work, but he smeared it out of the way with a swipe of his thumb and kept working. After a few minutes of intensive effort, the blood slowed to an ooze and finally stopped.
He took the clamps back from Sheena and unlocked the handle. No more blood came out of the wound, and he sank back with a sigh. “That's all we can do for now. We can only hope she still has some blood left to keep her alive.”
Sheena looked around at the blood all over the place. “It doesn't look good.”
Ron checked Sophia's pulse. “She's in deep shock. I'll be surprised if she survives.”
“Can we give her a transfusion?”
“I don't have the equipment for it. If she makes it, she makes it, and if she doesn't, she doesn't. There's nothing more we can do.”
Sheena stood up and turned around to face her friends. She scowled when she noticed Jasmine and Rex holding hands. Jasmine let go of Rex's hand right away. Sheena pretended not to notice and confronted Rex. “What are you doing with that gun? The Allies gave the Krataks their word we wouldn't bring any technology or weapons. If we hadn't made that promise, we could have brought something to save Sophia's life, and here you are with a gun.”
Rex locked his eyes on her. “We would all be dead now if I hadn't brought it.”
“Not necessarily. Jasmine and I would have distracted it from the rest of the group. You could be driven out of the service for this. You realize that, don't you?”
“Neither of you distracted it for more than a minute. We all saw that.”
“And your gun didn't distract it for even that, so don't give me that nonsense about saving all our lives. You should...” She stopped, and turned back the other way.
The man who actually killed the creature stood in the same place he jumped to get out of the falling animal's way. He observed the team from a distance, but made no move to join their interaction.
Sheena walked over to him. For the first time, she marked his curious appearance. He stood several inches taller than anyone on the team. His white-blonde hair hung around his shoulders, and white-blue eyes burned out of his pale face. His skin glowed translucent-white in the sunshine, but no one could mistake him for being frail or wan.
His shoulders rounded in two hills of solid muscle on either side of his sleeveless shirt, and his hands flexed at the end of two thick cylinders of muscled forearms. His thighs bulged under pants that ended just below the knee, and chiseled calves ran down to his bare feet.
A sash of some handwoven material crossed his chest with an intricate metal ornament fixed in the center. Other than that, he wore no jewelry or decoration at all. He evaluated Sheena with the same frank expression.
Sheena's eyes traveled up to his face again. That's when she noticed something moving under his skin, but she couldn't make it out. The moment she detected it, it vanished under his clear white skin. “Who are you?”
“My name is Fawks. Fawks Ulasso.”
“Ulasso. Is that one of the Clans of Kratak?”
“We are the largest and most powerful of the Clans. If I judge rightly by your reaction, the other Clans told your Allies nothing about us.”
“I've never heard of Clan Ulasso, but I'm not really part of this mission. I only know about Clan Harkniss and Clan Assan, where the two research teams plan to stay for the rest of the year.”
He nodded. “I expected as much. The other Clans would never tell the Allies about us if they could avoid it.”
“Why wouldn't they want the Allies to know about you?”
Before he could answer, Jasmine walked over. She extended her hand to Fawks. “Thank you. I can't express my gratitude enough to you for killing that thing and saving us all.”
“Think nothing of it. The morlock is the most difficult animal in these forests to kill. You have to know exactly where to hit it. If you don't do that, you have no hope of killing it and can only make it mad. It almost got the better of you.”
“I can see we have a lot to learn about this planet. We'll take better care in the future. I haven't had the pleasure. I'm Jasmine Forsythe. I'm Commanding Officer of this team, and this is our pilot, Sheena Lamb.”
Fawks shook Jasmine's hand and turned back to Sheena. “I'm delighted to meet you.”
Jasmine kept talking, but the stranger kept his sparkling eyes fixed on Sheena. “We're on our way to Assan Keep, but our shuttle crashed in the forest. Do you know how to get to the Keep? We're on a research mission for a year to study this planet and its people. We thought we could head straight toward that mountain and find the Keep, but if this is the kind of danger we'll encounter in these woods, maybe it's not such a good idea.”
He directed his answer to Sheena. “You'll never find Assan Keep wandering out here on your own. For a start, that mountain isn't Assan Keep.”
"It isn't? But I checked the shuttle's direction monitor before we crashed and it said the Keep was that way.”
“The Keep is that way, but it's in another mountain behind that one. You have miles to go before you get there. It will take you several days of walking, and the morlock is only one of a dozen large animals you could bump into on the way. I could travel ahead of you to alert the Assans where you are. They would send out their men to bring you in.”
Jasmine grabbed his wrist to stop him walking awa
y. “Don't go. Stay. We don't know what we'll encounter in these woods, and we don't have enough food and water.” She looked at Sheena.
“Then I'll have to show you the way.”
Sheena narrowed her eyes at the stranger. A thousand questions plagued her mind. Where did he come from? How did he just happen to be walking in that part of the forest to leap out and save them just in time?
Something about him didn't make sense. Her instincts told her to hold him at a distance, even as his unusual appearance caught her in a hypnotic web. She couldn't take her eyes off him, and his ice-blue eyes danced with electric fire.
Jasmine didn't notice anything unusual about him. She burst out, “Would you? Oh, thank you! I only wish we could find some way to repay you for your kindness. First you save us from that...that morlock, and now this. I can't tell you how grateful we are.”
He smiled at her for the first time, but that smile gave Sheena no comfort. “You don't have to thank me. I just happened to be walking near you in the woods when I heard the morlock roaring. When I came upon you, I could see you didn't have any effective way to fight it. Killing it is easy when you know how, but if we're going to travel through these woods for any length of time, I better butcher it up to eat on the way.”
Jasmine studied the morlock. “Isn't it too big for that?”
“We never waste anything, especially this much food. You better tend to your friends while I do it.” He glanced up at the sky. “It's getting late. Maybe we should spend the night here and leave in the morning.”
“That would be wonderful. Thank you so much.” At a glance from the stranger, Jasmine laughed. “Sorry. I'll stop now.”
Jasmine left to inform the rest of the group of the new arrangement. Fawks gave Sheena an innocent smile and went over to the morlock. He pulled a long-curved knife out of his belt and started skinning the thing.
Sheena watched him for a minute. He smiled contentedly at his work, but he paid no further attention to her. She couldn't make out whether to like him or hate him. A big question mark hung over him in her mind. What was he? A man as strange-looking as he was could only be a native Kratak, and he said he belonged to one of the Clans.
Still, she didn't want to believe a word he said. Her innate senses told her he was lying about something. Why would he save their lives? The whole scenario was too convenient to be real.
She couldn't stand there with her mouth hanging open all day, though. She turned her back on him and followed Jasmine back to the group. Ron Simons still worked on Sophia, but his countenance didn't clear. He still worried over her and checked her pulse every few minutes.
Abigail comforted her girls. They didn't wander away anymore, but huddled close to their mother. Dana murmured something to Jasmine. Only Rex settled into his new role as protector and defender with his gun slung open on his hip for all the world to see.
He disgusted Sheena now more than ever. Maybe he thought he had to impress the stranger. Fawks obviously fought these enormous creatures on a regular basis with nothing more than a crude spear. Rex's gun didn't bother the morlock at all.
Sheena went over to Jasmine and Dana. “Are you sure it's a good idea to trust our lives to this stranger? He could be dangerous.”
“He just saved our lives. Why would he do that if he was dangerous?”
“Don't you at least want to question him? We don't know anything about him or why he was here at just the right time.”
“He already told us who he was. He's from that Clan...what did he call it?”
“The Ulasso. That doesn't tell us anything. I don't like this. Something fishy's going on.”
Jasmine laughed. “I'm sure he's harmless. I mean, look at him. He's butchering that thing to feed us all on our trip to the Keep. He's a helpful person. I'm sure that's his only motive for saving us.”
Sheena shook her head, but she could see it was useless to argue. She would just have to keep an eye on the stranger and make sure he didn't stop being helpful and harmless.
She strode over to Abigail and the girls. “Are you all okay? What happened to make that thing chase you?”
Charlotte spoke up. “We weren't doing anything. We were just walking around. Jane and I were picking those mushrooms we showed you. We turned a corner, and there it was. It was grazing on the grass, and I guess we must have surprised it. It jerked its head up fast and started roaring. We turned and ran, and it ran after us. That's when we found you again. That's all that happened.”
“You girls stay close to the group from now on. We don't know what's in these woods, and Fawks says there are dozens of other large animals around that could threaten us.”
“We will. Don't worry. We will.”
Chapter 5
Sheena sat on the grass by herself and watched the tableau playing out before her eyes. Fawks Ulasso worked tirelessly skinning and cutting up the morlock. He wrapped the meat up in the skin along with some leaves he picked from the trees. He made the whole thing into a giant bundle except a large hunk of meat he cut from the animal's ribs.
The day sloped away toward afternoon. Fawks built a fire and cooked the rib meat on it while he finished cleaning up his butchering operation. No one came near him. The Simons girls stayed near Abigail. Ron stayed near Sophia, and Jasmine and Dana stayed near Rex, their new savior.
Sheena stayed by herself, but the longer she sat there watching, the more she knew she couldn't let this situation continue. Everyone could be as grateful as they liked to Fawks for plucking them from the jaws of death, but none of them would say a word to him.
In the end, her conscience got the better of her. She got to her feet and forced herself to approach him. He gave her his benign smile, but he didn't stop working. “How are you now, Sheena?”
“I'm fine. How are you, Fawks?”
“I'm very well.”
“I've been meaning to ask you about your Clan. This is supposed to be the Assan's territory, but you said you don't belong to that Clan. So, what are you doing around here?”
He shrugged. “I was just traveling around on my own. I was in the woods, and I came to see what all the noise was about. That's what I'm doing here.”
“Do the Assans know you're here?”
The innocent smile touching his lips changed. For the first time, Sheena recognized a genuine smile, and it wasn't innocent or benign. “No, they don't know I'm here.”
“Would they be happy to know you were this close to their Keep?”
He straightened up and faced her. “You're a smart woman, Sheena. I can see why they put you in charge.”
“I'm not in charge. Jasmine is Commanding Officer of this team. I'm just a shuttle pilot. I'm only here because our craft was knocked out of the sky by a....” She stopped.
He studied her, but when she didn't say anything else, he wiped his knife on the grass. “You're far from home, too. Tell me about the country you come from.”
She looked all around at the deep woods. “It's nothing like this. Our country is a series of space stations covering the whole galaxy. We have stations as big as cities, on planets, in orbit around stars—all over the place, really. We use high technology for everything. I don't think there is a forest like this on any of the Allies' worlds.”
“That's too bad. Good planets are hard to find.”
“You don't know the half of it.”
“My country is nothing like this, either.”
“It isn't? What's it like? I thought the whole planet was like this.”
“I come from the giant deserts to the south, near the equator. It's too hot to live on the surface, so we have enormous cities built underground. In fact, we have dozens of interconnected cities covering vast areas of thousands of miles.”
“That sounds amazing. Do many Clans live there?”
“The Ulasso is the only Clan that lives in that part of the planet, and we don't mix with the other Clans. We keep to ourselves. The other Clans gather so their young people can find mates from other Cl
ans, but the Ulasso don't have to do that. We're so big we can marry within our own Clan without interbreeding. That way, we avoid gatherings with other Clans.”
“Is that why the Assans wouldn't be happy to know you're here? Are they hostile toward you?”
He laughed a deep rumbling laugh that boiled up from the center of his barrel chest. “The Assans can't touch me. No one can touch the Ulasso.”
“Just the same, maybe it's not such a good idea for you to take us to their Keep. It could cause trouble.”
He poked up the fire with a stick. He picked up the spearhead he cut out of the morlock's neck and washed the blood off it. He cut a new shaft and tied the head into a notch he carved in the end of it. “It could cause trouble for them, not for me.”
The sun slanted behind the trees, and the others migrated closer to the fire to get warm. Rex helped Ron carry Sophia closer, too. Sheena let her conversation with Fawks die, but her questions about him and his motives still nagged at her mind.
She watched him cut off pieces of meat and serve everyone with enough to satisfy their hunger. He brought them water from a nearby stream. When the meal ended, he sat down near the fire in the contented glow of evening.
Now that she knew something more about him, his appearance made more sense. The burning desert sun and heat must have created that white-blonde hair and clear white skin. Fawks radiated solar energy. He shone like the sun itself, white and hot.
His blue eyes skated around the circle. He examined every face in turn until he found Sheena staring at him. Sheena turned her eyes away. She couldn't look at him anymore. She couldn't hate him the way she wanted to, but she couldn't like him, either. He contradicted everything she knew and understood about people.
His words came back to her. The Assans can't touch me. No one can touch the Ulasso. What did that mean? She could believe it, looking at him. No one could touch him. He dwelt in an inviolate world where danger did not exist. What mere mortals considered dangerous never bothered him or his people. He came from a society of immortals.
Fawks (Dragons of Kratak Book 4) Page 3
