Reaping Day: Book Three of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  “Whatever,” Jarek said. “Just a flesh wound anyway. I’ll heal.”

  “Perhaps.” Drogan stepped forward and almost gingerly began to peel Jarek’s bandages away. “If you say please.”

  “Yeah?” Jarek said, suppressing the vulnerable shudder that tried to run its way down his back. “And how about if I say ‘lick me, you glib stumpy bastard’?”

  Drogan showed him a particularly reptilian smile and bent to inspect the wound.

  After a cursory glance at the ugly bloody line stitched across a disturbing length of his shoulder and upper chest, Jarek turned his thoughts back to Rachel in an active attempt to distract himself from Drogan’s poking, prodding, and occasional low rumbles.

  If she’d really done what Drogan claimed, and if she was headed off to Pryce’s, where the Enochians would be holed up working on these cloaking fields of theirs …

  Moving as carefully as he could, he reached with his good hand for the comm on the bedside table.

  He needed to talk to Rachel before the shit irrevocably hit the fan.

  Fourteen

  “Something troubling you?”

  Pryce’s question cut through the haze that had settled over Rachel’s mind. She’d allowed herself to sink so deeply into the rumbling purr of the old diesel engine and the mindless seeing-without-seeing of the dreary surroundings passing by in the passenger door window that she’d nearly forgotten Pryce was there at all. And now …

  “Huh?”

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard Pryce’s question so much as that the crucial bits of her brain didn’t seem to be getting around to consciously processing it. She wasn’t so sure she wanted them to.

  Pryce offered an easy shrug, keeping his eyes on his driving. “Call me crazy, but I’m getting the feeling a few of your marbles might be heavier than average at the moment.”

  That was one way of putting it. Another might be that she’d basically stabbed one of her own allies in the back without warning. And sure, maybe she’d done it out of blind fear for Jarek, or because she had serious concerns Alton or any other raknoth could themselves become turncoats in this fight—willing or otherwise. Maybe.

  Or maybe she’d done it out of pure, unresolved rage, boiling underneath—or maybe not so underneath—the surface even after all these years.

  Did a turncoat ever really have any grounds to say they’d only done it to keep the other guy from possibly, maybe doing the same?

  She wasn’t sure. About any of it. But she especially wasn’t sure she wanted to spill this particular heavy marble to Pryce—or to anyone, really.

  “I’m just upset,” she finally said. Not even a lie. Not at all. “This thing we’re up against”—she shook her head—“and what it did to Jarek …”

  Her comm buzzed before she figured out where she was going with the thought.

  Jarek. Speak of the handsome devil.

  The message on the comm quickly dissolved any sense of comfort.

  We need to talk, Goldilocks.

  Shit. Had Drogan told him? Did Drogan even know?

  She nearly jumped when Pryce cut into her paranoid rumination.

  “I don’t imagine many people would go through what the two of you have and keep climbing back to their feet for more,” Pryce said slowly. “Whatever it’s doing to you, whatever you’re feeling … Well, for what it’s worth, just keep in mind that most of us would have soiled ourselves and ducked for cover by now.”

  She might have smiled at that if she wasn’t too busy wondering if what she’d done was worse.

  What would Jarek think? What was he thinking right now?

  Pryce guided his big blue truck through a one-two turn, left and then right, and the dread that had taken up residence in Rachel’s gut wriggled in anticipation.

  Had she realized before joining Pryce that the Enochians had already taken Alton to Pryce’s place to rest and recuperate as they got to work on the cloaking field generators …

  She would’ve gotten in the truck anyway. Or so she told herself. Because, despite whatever other shit might currently be spattering down from the fan blades, they needed to get these cloak generators up and running if they wanted to keep their forces together long enough to even confront Gada. And on top of that, Rachel would be damned if she was going to turn away from what she’d done and try to avoid Alton and the Enochians like some frightened child.

  “There was also a bit of a misunderstanding out there,” she said quietly.

  So maybe she kind of did want to spill that confounded heavy marble.

  The pissed-off Enochian standing out front of Pryce’s shop as they pulled up kind of put a damper on that, though.

  Pryce stopped the truck and looked back and forth between Haldin’s crossed-arm sentinel stance ahead and what Rachel hoped was her neutral I’m fine, and everything’s totally cool face.

  Pryce’s gaze settled on her as he slid the truck into park and killed the engine. “This wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with said misunderstanding, would it?”

  Ahead, Haldin uncrossed his arms and started for the truck with a level, confident stride.

  Rachel swallowed, and shot Pryce what she hoped was a convincing shrug. “It might. Maybe you should head inside while we talk. Thanks for the ride.”

  Pryce’s wrestling brows indicated he wasn’t so convinced that was the best course of action, but he nodded and hopped out of the truck.

  “You too, Al,” she added back at Fela’s form as she climbed out of the truck.

  “But, ma’am, I’m perfectly capable of—”

  “It’s between us,” Rachel said. “We’re all friends here, I’ll be fine.”

  Judging by how slowly Fela disbanded from the truck bed, Al was about as thrilled as Pryce about the unexplained tension. For all she knew, Al had already pieced the puzzle together without anyone’s help. But, after a reluctant pause, they both headed into the shop through the front door.

  Rachel turned to face Haldin as he covered the last ten yards between them. She tried to refrain from fidgeting with her staff, but couldn’t help pulling her mental defenses tight—just in case.

  “An interesting choice of words,” he said quietly as he drew up by the front of Pryce’s truck. “We’re all friends here, huh?”

  Rachel tried to keep her expression neutral. “What did he tell you?”

  Haldin gave her a humorless grin. “He didn’t. Not until we were back here and you were safely off at HQ. But I knew something had happened. Alton’s never been the fastest or most adept fighter among his kin, but what happened back there, it just didn’t add up, and neither did his story. Not until he finally admitted that maybe, just maybe, someone had given him a little push.” He shook his head, staring razor daggers at her. “Just a harmless little push, right?”

  It had been a mistake. She should be able to admit that. A mistake bred in a moment of thoughtless panic. Gada had been so fearsome, so powerful. They’d needed an opening. She hadn’t thought it through, had only been trying to help. And sure, it had been wrong to throw Alton under the bus, so to speak, but …

  No. It had definitely been a mistake.

  So why couldn’t she get her mouth to cooperate and say the words?

  “Nothing to say for yourself?” Haldin asked, his voice dangerously quiet.

  The clear, windless air around them began to softly swirl and crackle with power, and with it came the stirring of Rachel’s own anger.

  “What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry?”

  So maybe it had been a mistake. But did Alton really deserve to hear that she thought so? That she was wrong? Could she really bring herself to apologize, even indirectly, to one of the bastards who’d been a part of the murder of her family?

  No.

  Haldin didn’t back down at the tone of her voice, nor did he look anything but maybe more angry as she began to gather her own power.

  Within seconds, the air was whipping around them, buffeting hair and clothes
and everything else. Haldin stood poised and unafraid, looking like he had no doubt he could take anything she threw at him and still have enough left to bury her under Pryce’s truck.

  Let the son of a bitch try.

  “I saw an opening,” she growled. “I took it. Everyone’s still alive, aren’t they?”

  “That’s your excuse?” He took a step forward, and a heavy pressure settled over Rachel like a lead blanket. “An opening? That’s what you call trying to sacrifice an ally?”

  Rachel channeled the energy, pushed out enough to counter his telekinetic dick-showing, and was just about to push further when one of the windows of Pryce’s living quarters jerked upward and Elise’s raven locks and fair skin appeared in the open window.

  “Hal …”

  She called the name with only a hint of chiding, but enough to be heard.

  Rachel braced herself, half expecting it to simply push Haldin over the edge that much more, but Haldin took a great deep breath, let out a long sigh, and relaxed. Wordlessly, he threw Elise a thumbs-up over his shoulder, his eyes never leaving Rachel.

  “Shall we talk, then?” he asked, the hints of a wry smile creeping onto his face.

  Rachel let out a long breath of her own and cautiously released the energy she’d gathered back to her surroundings in one last gout of heat and swirling air.

  Jesus. That had been close. And as much as she wanted to think she could hold her own in a fight with Haldin or any other arcanist, she sure as hell wasn’t going to lament not finding out for sure right now.

  “All right,” she said. “I’m listening.”

  He considered her for a stretch, looking like he was debating where to begin. “You wanna know how I first found out about the raknoth?”

  She watched him closely, still not quite trusting the sudden change of direction. Finally, she gave a stiff nod. “Sure.”

  He rested his elbows against the hood of Pryce’s truck and made a point of studying his fidgeting fingers for a long handful of seconds. Finally, he sighed.

  “The first raknoth I ever encountered was parading as the High General of the Sanctum. That’s our military on Enochia.”

  “Shit,” Rachel said.

  The raknoth had pulled similar tactics on Earth, but that didn’t really make the charade any less terrifying—especially not after how things had turned out for Earth.

  Haldin gave a slow nod of agreement, his eyes focused somewhere in distant memory. “Shit’s right.”

  “So when you say you encountered him …”

  “We had the good general over for dinner one night. I grew up in a Sanctum family myself, I should add. My dad was a lieutenant, and I was a tyro, a trainee, at the time.”

  Rachel looked down at her feet, suddenly sure she knew where the story was going.

  “It wasn’t so unusual, the general dining in with an old friend and a loyal Sanctum family. But what I didn’t know was that my dad had been privately investigating Kublich—the general, I mean—for months. My mom and I didn’t know what he was up to, only that he was spending a lot of time away from home for what he insisted was work stuff.”

  Haldin laced his fingers over the truck hood and shook his head. “Johnny tried to tell me my dad was having an affair, for the love of Alpha.”

  “But your dad knew?” Rachel asked. “About the raknoth, I mean.”

  He shook his head. “He knew the general had been behaving erratically and was possibly involved in some shady activity. I don’t think my dad had any idea just how right he was until that night.”

  Haldin straightened and speared Rachel with a painfully somber gaze. “He killed my parents. Ripped them apart with his bare hands in our living room that night, right in front of me.”

  “Jesus,” Rachel whispered. Then, feeling she had to fill the empty silence, “How’d you, uh …”

  “Escape? Survive?”

  She nodded dumbly.

  “A man named Carlisle burst in and saved my life. He’d been investigating the general for months. Lucky he chose that night to sneak on base and have a closer look. He was a Shaper, or, you know”—he waved a hand—“like us. Gifted. Incredibly gifted. I had no idea I was too at the time, but …” He cocked his head. “Well, there’s nothing like losing your family and being blamed and hunted by an entire world order to kick your ass into gear, I guess.”

  The rest of the tension bled out of Rachel’s shoulders and back. “I’m sorry, Hal.”

  It wasn’t enough, but she wasn’t sure what else to say. “I … Well, you know my story. You know I mean it when I say I can sympathize.”

  He nodded. “I know you do. Which is why I’m telling you.”

  And just like that, tension began to creep back in.

  Here it was—the part where he pointed out that he managed to put his own shit in order, let go of the hate, and do the right thing for the good of everyone, and shame on her for not doing the same.

  But this was different, she wanted to insist. This was her family. Her family that’d been destroyed on the whim of Alton’s clan leader. Her mom who’d died afraid and alone to save her, in part because Alton had gone along with it all.

  Her mom who’d also tried to wipe the raknoth off the face of the Earth, a small, irritating voice pointed out. Because she couldn’t just forget that part, could she?

  As terrible as it was, as unforgivable, she couldn’t completely delude herself into denying that the raknoth coming after her mom had been, in some way, a matter of self-defense—or self-preservation, at least.

  If Haldin’s parents had been killed just for his dad poking around too much, could she really say she had any more right to be pissed at the raknoth than he did?

  Probably not. And yet here he stood, defending one of them.

  What did that say about her? Or him?

  He was watching her patiently, awaiting some conclusion.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  He shook his head, looking his true younger age for once. “I really don’t know either. I just know that your world is in serious trouble, and that if we don’t stop them here, mine probably will be too.”

  “But …” She looked toward the window Elise had disappeared from, wondering if Alton could hear them right now.

  “How do you do it?” she silently sent, careful to make sure it only made it to Haldin and no one else. “How can you look at Alton or any other raknoth and not see your parents dying in front of your eyes again?”

  Haldin made something like a flinch and closed his eyes. “I still do, sometimes. And then I remind myself how many more children will lose everything if we’re not strong enough to stop it. I …”

  “I didn’t want to work with Alton when he gave himself up back on Enochia,” Haldin said out loud, apparently feeling no need to hide the information from prying ears. “He was a part of some truly heinous shit on my planet. Enslaving humans to be used as comatose blood bags, or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “They were building an army of human-raknoth hybrids.”

  Half-formed images of what such creatures might look like passed through her mind, each one more horrifying than the last. And what had become of the human half of the equation?

  “Jesus,” she muttered.

  “It wasn’t pretty,” Haldin agreed. “For a long time, I thought Alton and his clan were just trying to take over the planet and rebirth a race that had been all but demolished on another planet—a planet called Earth that somehow, impossibly, was halfway across the galaxy and yet home to humans just like us. That was hard enough to wrap my head around to start with. When Carlisle and I finally succeeded in exposing the raknoth to the rest of Enochia, though, Alton came out of hiding and turned himself over to explain what they’d really been trying to build an army for.”

  “To take on the rakul,” Rachel said.

  “I didn’t believe him, of course. Not at first. Even after he showed me”—Haldin touched the side of his head in ref
erence to the memories of the rakul Alton had shown him and he in turn had shown her—“I still had more than a little doubt. It was all too convenient. And, while it by no means justified what he and his clan did to thousands of innocent Enochians, it painted their actions in a new light—one that was desperate and hopeless rather than pure, baseless evil.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe it.”

  She knew a thing or two about how that one felt. “But here we are?”

  He nodded. “But here we are. And, barring some miraculous intervention by Alpha, God, or any other deity we happened to miss on our way across the galaxy, we’ve got twelve seriously powerful assholes to deal with, and no one but each other to count on. I, uh …” He scratched his head, looking away. “I didn’t mean to go all spirit of vengeance on your ass just then.”

  When he lowered his hand, he was wearing a guilty grin. “I promised Elise I’d keep it together. We just need to know we can trust the people at our backs if we’re going to throw down for this planet. And, all things considered, I really hope we can.”

  Rachel swallowed a big gulp of dry nothing, warm shame creeping up her neck and onto her face.

  He was right, dammit.

  “I’ll do my best,” was all she could manage to say.

  He nodded as if he understood and hadn’t truly expected anything else and started to turn for Pryce’s shop. “Right, then. Let’s go build some cloaks.”

  Fifteen

  The second time Jarek woke in his sad little medical bed, it wasn’t to Rachel’s caring gaze, but to cold darkness. And he wasn’t alone. He wasn’t sure how he knew it, as his sleep-logged conscious mind struggled to catch up to whatever its sleeping counterpart had detected, but something was wrong.

  He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and listened.

  Hushed voices, barely perceptible from out in the hallway. Two men arguing.

  Over what?

  Jarek opened his eyes and forced himself to let the tension out of his aching muscles and fiery shoulder.

  It was almost certainly nothing to do with him. The low disgruntled voices had probably just set off some overly sensitive danger alarm of his sleeping brain. That was it.