She had to do something.
So she planted her staff in the snow with freezing numb hands and pulled. One leg up, then the other. Her head was clearing now, carrying in a fresh tide of feedback about just how fried she was.
Ahead, Jarek’s armored boot caught on something buried in the snow as he dodged a blow, and he tripped backward with a wordless cry.
Rachel’s breath caught right alongside Gada’s eager hiss.
Alton tensed as if caught between the options of attacking Gada or hauling Jarek clear.
Gada sprang forward.
No time.
It happened before she knew it, as if by its own accord.
A push. A small push. That’s all it was. She didn’t even have to give conscious thought to channeling the energy.
Alton stumbled straight into Gada’s path, red eyes wide, hands thrown up as if to brace himself against the thin air that had suddenly betrayed him—by Rachel’s bidding, of course.
Gada adjusted to the development seamlessly, the victory unmistakable even on his alien features as he raised his claws for the killing blow.
Rachel had one blink of an instant to wonder at what the hell she’d just done.
Then something dark and fast slammed into Alton and sent him flying, and it was Jarek there, desperately raising his sword overhead with hands on hilt and blade to block Gada’s powerful swipe head-on.
Gada’s chitinous blades caught the broad side of Jarek’s sword, cleaved it clean through with a sharp crack, and continued downward. Something wrenched inside of her as the claws ripped into Jarek’s armor at the shoulder.
The cry Jarek let out only twisted her insides further. She’d never expected to hear him make a sound like that—surprised, agonized. Afraid. She couldn’t see straight, couldn’t think.
Gada withdrew his hand to wind up for another swipe.
Steaming rivulets of blood fell to the snow.
“No!” Rachel cried, starting forward.
Somehow, Jarek managed to duck the next blow, but the kick Gada followed up with caught him square in the chest and sent him sailing through the air to tumble off the edge of the butte.
“No!” she screamed, hefting her staff as she picked up speed. “You son of a bitch!”
Gada turned to meet her, an eager flare in his eyes.
She shifted her grip to the end of her staff and spun, pivoting around into a baseball style swing. As she turned, she channeled everything her tired body could handle—and more.
Gada was openly reaching for her, unconcerned by the staff bound for his head. He’d regret that.
His blades were entirely too close to clamping down on her as she completed her turn, but she kept swinging and poured every ounce of the energy she’d channeled into a pinpoint telekinetic charge at the end of her staff.
The staff hit with a low boom. The jolt of the impact tore through her arms, and Gada staggered down to one knee with a startled shriek, covering one eye with the palm of his bladed hand. She caught a brief glimpse of clear, oozing fluid and realized she’d put out Kul’Gada’s eye. Then the rakul threw a backhand at her that probably could’ve flipped a car.
She thrust her staff out upright, throwing what energy she could into one of its shield glyphs. It was a hasty working, rooted not to the space between them but to the staff itself, which was in turn supported only by the strength of her own arms and body. When the blow fell, the strength of her flesh and bone gave well before that of her will.
Her arms buckled, her staff crashed into her torso, and she was flung backward. She couldn’t say how far. Only that it was too far.
The world spun and solid ground smacked at her from every side as she tumbled across the butte. At least there was snow, mercifully thick and fluffy. Without it, she might have broken every bone in her body.
As it was, she wasn’t sure she hadn’t.
For a second or two, she wasn’t quite sure of anything. She couldn’t seem to string a complete thought together aside from that her vision was swimming with darkness from whatever she’d just done, and that she was afraid, and that she hurt. And—she gasped—and that she had to move!
With a wordless cry, she threw herself to the side just as Gada’s large foot stomped down on the spot she’d just occupied with a brutal thud.
She rolled drunkenly to her knees, raising her hands toward the rakul, her staff lost to the snow. She gathered everything left inside of her and let it loose one last time. As much juice as she’d already channeled and as disoriented as she was, her efforts barely drew a twitch from Gada.
She slumped down, utterly exhausted. Gada stepped forward, his single eye pulsing scarlet.
This was it.
She thought of Jarek, lying in the cold snow, dead or dying, and she cursed herself for her idiocy. Not Alton’s. Not anyone’s. Just hers.
At least she didn’t have much longer to suffer the thought.
Kul’Gada raised his blades—and stumbled sideways as something plowed into his left side with a ferocious roar.
Rachel looked up, not believing it at first, and there was Al’Drogan.
He dipped back to avoid the sweep of Gada’s tail, and in charged Lietha with a scream of wordless fury that would have put a banshee to shame.
“No, Lietha!” Drogan cried.
Lietha didn’t bat an eye. He slammed into Gada’s chest in a full on tackle, and—despite the radical size discrepancy—somehow sent Gada toppling off his feet.
The rakul swung for Lietha as he fell. He would have hit the raknoth, possibly even killed him right there, had Lietha not been inexplicably yanked backward several yards to land unceremoniously on his minty green rump.
Rachel turned and saw Haldin approaching, hand raised. Behind him, Elise and Alton were holding off the furor horde side by side.
“Hey, Spike!” someone shouted from behind. Phineas had pulled the ship down over by the direction Jarek had fallen. Good. And that shouting someone turned out to be Johnny, fully loaded. Also good.
Gada ignored Johnny’s call until the redhead opened fire with some Enochian artillery that hummed softly and apparently packed a big punch.
Gada roared and faced Johnny, but Drogan, Lietha, Haldin, and Alton all stepped in to cut him off.
Elise appeared by Rachel’s side and helped her to her feet. Behind her, a dozen villagers were either lying unconscious or staring in fear at Gada, apparently coming back to their right minds now that they’d had some time in Haldin’s and Elise’s cloaking fields.
“Jarek,” Rachel croaked.
“The others have him,” Elise said. “Gather your strength, Rachel. Focus.”
Any other time, she probably would’ve told someone to fuck off if they’d said something like that to her. Now though, she just nodded and called her staff to her hand.
Elise went to join the others in harrying Gada from all directions at once. Gada spun at their center, taking swipes at his harassers here and there, finding little success and growing progressively wilder and more frustrated with each attack. Several times, his missing eye had him turning more than he otherwise would have to fix onto the next target. Slowly, the tide was shifting.
At least until Gada caught Lietha with a tail whip and broke the circle. Drogan lost focus for an instant looking after Lietha and paid for it with a gash across his chest. Alton, stepping in to help, didn’t see Gada’s reversal coming, and he paid for that with a hand. A bloody Drogan grabbed Gada’s tail and yanked him back before he could land a second blow on Alton. Alton roared a challenge and kept fighting.
Rachel telekinetically tripped Gada up long enough for the five of them to regroup in a semicircle.
They stared each other down across the trampled snow, tension building until it felt like the very air would burst with it. If it didn’t, Rachel might. She was an easy breeze away from collapse, and all she could think about was Jarek bleeding to death in the snow behind her. But he had Al and the others. And they had Gada.
> Gada shifted his weight, and their line responded in kind. She thought they were about to get back into it when a chorus of roars and howls rolled down the mountain.
She resisted the urge to look until Gada turned extra far to see the disturbance with his good eye, then she allowed herself a quick look.
What tatters of the wooden temple doors remained from the mob’s ongoing assault had been thrown wide open and eight raknoth were plowing through the crowd at hard runs, headed in their direction. Once they cleared the overhanging roof of the temple, each of the raknoth bounded forward, clearing the few dozen villagers still ahead of them. Each touched down only briefly before bounding forward again, leapfrogging down to the butte at a startling rate.
Whatever they’d been waiting for, Rachel hoped to Christ it was her and the others the raknoth were coming to stand alongside and not Gada. The rest of her allies seemed to be having the same thought. Haldin must’ve come to some decision, though, because he stepped past Rachel and started working his way around Gada so that he’d be boxing the rakul in toward the incoming raknoth.
Gada watched him for a long moment, then he sniffed audibly at the air a few times, shook his head, and turned away from them, rumbling out a low growl she could feel in her chest.
They all pressed forward at his turned back, but the rakul crouched and launched himself down the mountain, kicking up a big puff of snow in his wake. The leap carried him at least sixty or seventy yards away, and the thud of his landing traveled easily back to them on the crisp air.
Gada leapt again and again, retreating down the mountain in a fashion similar to the raknoth approaching from the mountain temple.
They stood in silence for a long moment watching him go, and then Rachel went to find Jarek.
To Rachel’s surprise, Drogan beat her to Jarek. She hadn’t even noticed the raknoth slip away as Kul’Gada had retreated and Al’Brandt and his merry band of leapfrogging raknoth had hopped to the far-too-late rescue, but by the time she crossed the butte, he was already down there, huddling over Jarek’s armored form alongside James and Johnny and—
“Drogan!” she cried down. “What the hell?”
The raknoth shot her an over-the-shoulder glance, licking the blood from his chops with disturbingly wet slurps she could hear even from up on the butte.
“Jarek Slater will survive,” he called. Then he bent back down and continued going to town on Jarek’s shoulder.
What the fuck was he doing? And why the hell weren’t Johnny and James stopping him?
She jumped from the edge of the butte and slowed her fall enough for her wobbly legs to manage.
James patted the air with his hands as she shuffled frantically over. “It’s okay. Drogan’s just stopping the bleeding.”
“By drinking his damn blood?”
“Al’s got …” Jarek slurred. “Right, buddy?”
She’d thought he was unconscious.
“Should I stop him, ma’am?” Al asked.
“Uh …” she said.
Jarek popped one eye open and squinted drunkenly up at her, pale as the snow he lay on and clearly less than lucid. “Goldilocks …”
“I’m here.” She dropped down beside him and found his hand. “You’re okay. You’re okay.”
His mouth worked soundlessly for a few seconds, and he seemed to be contemplating something of profound importance. “Is … Is Stumpy licking me?”
He passed out before she could answer.
Drogan glanced at her as if awaiting some rebuke, then he shrugged and kept slurping.
“Okay,” Rachel said. “What the hell is he doing?”
“Mostly cleaning and healing I think,” James said. “Raknoth can synthesize a host of different agents in their saliv—”
“You think?” Rachel asked.
“Well yeah, but—”
“Jarek Slater will live,” Drogan said between slurps, not looking up. “We have lost enough allies today.”
That set her back on her heels, so to speak. In more literal terms, she sat on her butt, not particularly minding the cool touch of the snowy ground after her exertions.
“Don’t go too soft on us there, big guy,” Johnny said.
“I assure you, I am as hard as the stone upon which we stand.”
Johnny’s face scrunched and his eye twitched as he clearly fought to contain laughter. Drogan didn’t seem to notice.
Rachel couldn’t remember a time she’d been further from a laughing mood. Not with Jarek lying unconscious in the blood-soaked snow, his armored hand cold in hers.
Not when it was her fault.
What the fuck had she been thinking?
Even if she couldn’t forgive Alton, even if she ended up deciding he had to pay, throwing an ally under the bus like that in the middle of a fight—and with a galaxy-class monster, no less …
She’d betrayed them. All of them.
Hot shame crept over the nausea in her stomach and threatened to ascend to her face. Chest-clenching apprehension wasn’t far behind as the full implications of her actions began to tease themselves out in her mind.
But she’d have to deal with it all later.
Right now, she needed to be present for Jarek.
“You’re hurt too,” she said, only then remembering the gash across Drogan’s chest as she caught sight of it.
“I will heal,” Drogan said. “It is not a problem. If one of you would go ascertain that Lietha is uninjured, though, I would be grateful.”
Johnny threw him a salute. “I was gonna go check on things up there anyway. Maybe find out how Brandt and his gang enjoyed the ringside seats. Be back soon.”
Rachel watched him go then turned back to the gruesome sight of Drogan laboring to access the depths of Jarek’s considerable wound. She didn’t really know what she was looking at through the mess of tissue, but the cut was damn deep. It seemed like a mild miracle the arm had even stayed attached, especially during his flight from the butte. Judging from the marks in the snow, he’d bounced and slid a good fifteen yards before settling where he now lay.
She never should’ve jumped from the stupid ship in the first place. Maybe if she’d waited for everyone to form up and move together …
But Michael had been in serious trouble. That much she was sure of. She needed to go check on him too, but for now …
She took Jarek’s hand in her lap and waited, ignoring the frosty numbness beginning to spread through her butt and legs.
“How’s he doing in there, Al?” she asked.
“Stable, ma’am. More or less.” Al’s tone was reserved, muted—more proof he wasn’t just some cold-hearted robot. “Believe it or not, I’ve seen him in worse shape.”
“Oh, I believe it.” She gave him a wan smile, felt weird about it, and then remembered that Al probably did indeed see the gesture.
“Franco says Michael appears to be all right as well, ma’am. He lost consciousness when the fighting started, but he’s sleeping peacefully now.”
“Thanks, Al.”
Sleeping or no, she needed to check on the Spongehead. So she laid Jarek’s hand by his side and pulled herself to her feet by her staff to go find her brother.
James bobbed halfway to his own feet, looking like he’d ask if she needed help, but then he thought better of it. Good man.
She looked down at Drogan. “Just don’t … do anything weird.”
He gave a grunt by way of reply.
She shook her head and turned for the ship, guilt and nausea rearing their heads and looking for viable purchase throughout her insides.
Don’t do anything weird? Who was she kidding?
They’d crossed that line a long time ago, and the way things were going, she didn’t expect they’d be going back anytime soon.
Thirteen
Jarek drifted through interminable cycles of darkness and semi-awareness. There were jostles. There were voices. At one point, there was the soft touch of a hand on his cheek. He smiled at that and fade
d into pleasant dreams of Rachel smiling and laughing in a wide open grassy field and wearing, of all thing, a freaking sundress.
Definitely a dream.
When he finally rose in full from his disoriented sleep, the first thing he saw was Rachel. She was standing at the foot of his bed and, little to his surprise, not in fact wearing a dress. Or smiling. She actually looked rather surly.
He’d done something.
What had he done?
Wait, why was he in a bed in HQ medical, and—Agh!
Fire lanced through his shoulder as he tried to shift and sit up. He closed his eyes against the unexpected pain and let out a soft groan. A hand settled on his good shoulder, and he opened his eyes to find Rachel looking down at him.
“Owie,” he whispered.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
He blinked the sleep from his eyes and took a closer look at his compassionate caregiver. Her eyes were blotchy, and her lips were drawn tight, as if to keep them from trembling.
She’d been crying? Over him?
He locked eyes with her. “But an idiot with a sexy lady waiting at his bedside.”
She took a deep breath, looking equally likely to laugh or cry. “What were you thinking?”
“Mostly that I could devour about eight pounds of bacon right now. But I’m guessing that’s not what you mean.”
Not even a little bit, judging from the look on her face.
“You can’t just throw yourself into danger every time someone needs help,” she snapped. “Every time I …” She broke off, lip quivering.
Jarek waited to see if she’d continue, but she seemed to be stuck for the moment.
“I’ll always throw myself into danger for you, Goldilocks. Every time.”
She swallowed, refusing to meet his eyes. “And for Alton too?”
“Eh.” He turned his good hand up in a mini shrug, moving cautiously enough that it caused only mild agony through his right side. “It seemed like the neighborly thing to do.”
“Jarek, I …”
Merciful Maker, were those fresh tears forming in her eyes?
Was she really this upset over him getting a bit—okay, maybe severely, judging by the fire in his shoulder—banged up?
Reaping Day: Book Three of the Harvesters Series Page 15
