Reaping Day: Book Three of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Mostly, he just wished Rachel would come talk to him.

  Maybe he should just message her that before he up and died of pure, unadulterated boredom and its insidious cousin, worthlessness.

  In the past three days, Jarek had had visits from Pryce, Alaric, Lea, and assorted Enochians. Michael, being mostly laid up himself, though he seemed to be looking a bit better since their run-in with Gada, stopped in fairly often to commiserate as well.

  And, of course, he had Al’s sassy robot butt with him via comm at all hours as well.

  None of it really made being an invalid any more bearable, but at least he didn’t have to resort to talking to himself.

  The one other constant in his days, aside from the doctor who’d mostly written him off since he’d hopped on the Vitamin R, was Drogan, who, aside from stepping out for a few hours here and there, continued hanging around to lay low from Krogoth and provide said miracle spit.

  As disturbing as the idea had initially been, Drogan’s spit therapy turned out to be well worth the cringes. After day one, Jarek had gone from nearly amputated to capable of light shifting without the fear of an arm falling off. The pain was bad, but he cared a lot more about the progress.

  And progress he made. Now, just days after Gada had torn into him, he was able to gingerly move the arm under its own power through a painful but passable range of motion.

  Without the treatments, he quite possibly would have ended up losing the arm. Keeping it at all was a mild miracle. But at the rate he was going, he might even be ready to fight in days or weeks instead of the months or years it might have otherwise taken.

  The only downside was the appetite. No matter how much he shoveled in, he couldn’t seem to satisfy his body’s rampant requirements. Not that scarfing unlimited food was so bad, aside from the fact that his excessive consumption wasn’t winning him any extra love from the Resistance folks.

  Still, to say he was sold on raknoth spit would be an understatement—provided he remained scale free and didn’t start sprouting claws and glowing red eyes, at least. When Drogan returned from wherever he’d stepped out to that afternoon, Jarek was excited enough that he couldn’t help but wonder if the ol’ Vitamin R wasn’t packing some manner of addictive hook.

  Would it even matter if it did? Probably not. It wasn’t like this was recreational. He needed to be ready to fight.

  “Stumpy! My favorite drug pusher. Scaliest, too.”

  Drogan gave a noncommittal grunt, grabbed his customary paper cup, and set a syringe and a hypodermic needle down on the table.

  “And the comparison grows more adept,” Jarek said. “Am I about to get secondhand hepatitis, or did you convince the good doctor to cough up the goods?”

  “She retrieved the needles from hiding when I admitted the injections would at this point do more harm than good without proper delivery.”

  “Ah. Well go team, huh?”

  Drogan didn’t answer as he came to Jarek’s bedside to get his drool on. First, though, he peeled Jarek’s bandage aside and sniffed at the wound. “Much better.”

  Jarek glanced down and had to agree. The long dark gash on his shoulder appeared to have mostly closed up between the line of staples. He probably barely needed the bandage anymore. Or the staples, even.

  All hail the spit.

  “You’re a miracle worker,” Jarek said. “I’ll be swinging a sword again in no time. You know, once I find one that’s not cut in two.”

  “Haste would be ideal,” Drogan said. “I do not trust this silence. Whatever it is Kul’Gada waits for, best we be ready to meet it with the full might of our finest warriors when the time comes.”

  “Shucks, buddy. You saying I’m a fine warrior?”

  “You may not be a raknoth, but you have proven yourself more than once, most notably against Zar’Golga.”

  Jarek tipped his head. “Not to mention against you and Krogoth.”

  Drogan gave a low growl. “The point is that you have survived opponents few would have. Even Krogoth acknowledges as much. Now would you like your treatment or not?”

  Jarek bit back a grin. He shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds—or the mouth that spits, as it were—but ruffling Drogan’s feathers could be just a little too fun sometimes.

  “That would be lovely, Drogan. Thank you.”

  Drogan recoiled a bit at the sound of his name.

  “Yeah.” Jarek frowned. “Feels weird, right? We’ll stick with Stumpy.”

  Drogan muttered something about giving Jarek a stump to talk about, but Jarek couldn’t help but notice he didn’t explicitly say no.

  “So how are preparations over at casa de Krogoth?” Jarek asked when Drogan paused from spitting to wet his whistle.

  “They go as planned,” Drogan said. “We will be able to hold against a sizable army should Gada work one into a furor. If he were to wait for the rest of the twelve, though … that would be another matter.”

  It was a horrifying thought, twelve Gada’s rampaging around on the battlefield. Though apparently the rakul came in all shapes and sizes, from what Drogan and Alton had explained to them, each occupying the form of whatever species they’d been invading when they’d been granted ascension to the rank of Kul.

  More terrifying was the fact that Gada was the youngest. If the remaining eleven were older and more powerful than the monster they’d barely survived together in the Himalayas … Well, hopefully the rakul had the good manners to keep coming one at a time.

  “Where do you put the odds on the other rakul showing up before we deal with Gada?” Jarek asked.

  “Impossible to say without knowing when we will confront Gada, but I do not dare hope we will see many days pass without the appearance of at least one or two more Kuls. Lietha shares my feeling in this, as do Krogoth and many others.”

  “Lovely,” Jarek muttered. Then, “And what is it with you and Lietha, anyway?”

  “I do not understand what you ask.”

  “I don’t know. He seemed like kind of a minty green pain in the ass when Kole dished him off on us. Hell, you were the one who knocked the guy’s face off. But now you guys are like super best friends. What gives?”

  Instead of answering, Drogan turned and busied himself with filling the syringe from the saliva cup. Jarek was about to ask again when the raknoth spoke.

  “Lietha’s disposition is quite understandable, given the circumstances in which she has found herself.”

  “Well yeah, I get that—Wait. She? Did you say she?”

  Drogan gave a small shrug. “It is not a perfectly accurate word, but it seems the best choice in this language.”

  “Lietha’s a … But he’s—she’s …” Jarek’s mouth worked, seeking to ask a dozen questions at once and at first producing none. “You hit a girl?”

  Drogan chuckled. “I hit an opponent on the field of battle. No child of Rakzaied would ever begrudge such a thing.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. I thought the raknoth on this planet were all dudes.”

  Drogan nodded and began fixing the needle to the filled syringe. “If you wish to think of our subspecies as analogous to your sexes then yes, all raknoth are ‘dudes,’ as you say. But Shieth’Lietha is no raknoth. She is one of the rakzeed, the mothers of our species.”

  “Ah, right. Guess I missed that one on orientation day.”

  Jarek had never really stopped to even think about the sex of the raknoth. That they were all male had just been a default assumption given that every one he’d seen had been wearing a male body.

  “Are there many of these, uh, rakzeed here on Earth?”

  “There is but one.”

  “Wow. One chick and eighty dudes? How’s that working out?”

  Drogan gave an exasperated sigh. “My kind do not copulate and mindlessly fondle like yours. There is no romance, no petty shows of jealousy and possession. The Shieth rarely leave Rakzaied, and the Maieth never. When our numbers dwindle, the raknoth return to the homeworld, provide our lifeseeds—
what you would call genetic material—for incubation, and the imbalance is rectified shortly. It is as simple as that.”

  “Jesus, man. Do they make you sandwiches while they’re at it, too?”

  Drogan offered him the filled syringe with a frown. “You imply this arrangement is guilty of what you would call sexism?”

  Jarek took the needled syringe and shrugged. “Hey, you tell me. You’ve been here for the whole revolution, right? You probably remember women being told to be good baby-makers and stay in the kitchen like it was yesterday.”

  “Yes, but it is not so with the rakzeed. They hold a position of great honor in our species, one of critical importance to our survival. It stands to reason that they should be kept out of harm’s way, much as your own bodies have evolved to keep your gonads protected. It is the way of nature.”

  “Huh.”

  Something told Jarek his gonads would’ve been anything but safe if he’d tried to explain that kind of reasoning to Rachel or Lea, but he didn’t see the point in getting into a debate with Drogan’s archaic bias right now.

  “So how did Lietha get here then if the, uh, Shieth rarely venture out?”

  “She …”—Drogan frowned—“was unsatisfied with her role on Rakzaied. An unusual disposition.”

  Surprise, surprise. Position of great honor his gonads.

  “On a trip home some centuries ago,” Drogan continued, “Zar’Kole took notice of her distress and offered her another path. Or so she tells me.”

  “Uh-huh. So, what, the rakul or whoever don’t come chop off hands or … appendages for running away with the planet’s baby-makers?”

  “It is not unheard of for a Shieth to abandon her post. I have heard it said that it is in fact often times the Kul themselves who take them for their own purposes. In any case, their numbers are replenished easily enough, just as with the raknoth.”

  “Shit, man.” Jarek sank the needle into his shoulder and began the first injection with a grimace. “At the risk of stating the obvious, the rakul sound like enormous cock-hats.” He glanced at his shoulder. “For several reasons.”

  Drogan inclined his head. “I have not heard this phrase, but I believe I agree with the underlying sentiment. It is time the rakul pay for the millennia of their tyranny.”

  “Right on. Fight the power.” Jarek finished his injection and handed the syringe back. “So why did Lietha choose to take a male for a host? Trying to keep her head down in a sea of bros?”

  Drogan carefully filled the syringe a second time. “I think you are misunderstanding the subtleties of the differences between our subspecies and your sexes. But, in essence, yes—Lietha wished to remain inconspicuous to those who might have showed unwanted interest.”

  Jarek wagged his eyebrows. “So does that mean your interest was wanted?”

  Drogan handed him the second shot with a scowl. “I simply know enough to recognize a rakzeed when I smell one, unlike many of my younger and less-traveled kin.”

  “Yeah you do, Stumpy, you horn-dog, you! So, what, are you guys like …”

  Drogan crossed his arms and nodded impatiently toward the full syringe in Jarek’s hand. “This planet is hardly in need of defenseless raknoth young right now.”

  Jarek pointedly got on with the second injection. “Yeah, I get that, but you know … Last girl on the planet. Big badass like yourself. End of the world fast approaching … None of that’s doing anything for you two?”

  “I think you confuse our relationship with the pathetic mush you share with Rachel Cross. Living among the humans for centuries may have left its mark on us in the short term—submerging in another culture always does to some extent—but I assure you, neither one of us is entertaining thoughts of holding bodies into the night and smashing faces together like a pair of filthy … humans.”

  Jarek held Drogan’s now faintly glowing gaze.

  This was getting him worked up, wasn’t it?

  A slow grin crept over Jarek’s mouth. “Is this your way of telling me you’re scared to kiss a girl, Stumpy?”

  By way of reply, Drogan took the spit cup and slapped it heavily down on Jarek’s bedside table. “Stick this where you will. I am leaving.”

  “Again? Hey, we can talk about it, buddy! It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, you kn—”

  Drogan growled and started for the door.

  “Wait!” Jarek cried, shaking with barely-contained giggles.

  Drogan stalked out of the room without a backward glance.

  “Okay! Good talk, buddy!” Jarek called after him. “Same time tomorrow? I’ll be right—Yep, he’s gone. Damn … Eh, he’ll be back. You catch all of that, Mr. Robot?”

  “Quite fascinating, sir,” came Al’s voice in his earpiece. “And masterfully handled, as always.”

  “Ahh, to be five-thousand years old and in love …”

  “Perhaps I’ll know the feeling someday,” Al said. “Provided I ever find a better alternative than the ship. She’s so slow, sir. And no personality to speak of. Never wants to talk about anything but pressures and velocities and altitudes.”

  “Hey, if we’ve got galaxy-conquering space dinosaurs floating around, there’s gotta be a nice lady AI out there somewhere in the universe.”

  “I was merely joking, sir. But you know you could have been more compassionate to Stump—Drogan just now.”

  “What is this, raknoth therapy hour now?” Jarek asked.

  But, in truth, he did feel slightly bad about having laughed Drogan away like that. Sure, the raknoth was a dangerous predator and had left a lot of bodies in his wake, but the more glimpses Jarek took behind the curtain of the raknoth/rakul relationship, the more he felt like the raknoth weren’t so clearly the evil bastards he and pretty much everyone else had always wanted to believe they were.

  Drogan had feelings too. Probably.

  He’d try to do better next time. However irritated Drogan might have been, Jarek had a feeling the raknoth wouldn’t be gone for long.

  So, after he’d fumbled his awkward way through drawing up and administering the last of the miracle spit, he laid back with a heavy sigh and closed his eyes, thinking healing thoughts and vowing to be less of an unsupportive wise-ass—by a little bit, at least.

  Then, when the weight of his old friends, Boredom and Worthlessness, began to grow too much, he sighed a curse, threw back his blankets, and slid out of bed to see how his legs were faring after days of bedrest.

  Twenty

  Rachel removed her hands from the boxy device in front of her, crossed her arms on the table, and laid her head on top of them. She took slow, deliberate breaths and did her best to hold off the shudder as the channeling fatigue exacted its vengeance for her latest working.

  “Enchanting fuel for the lady and the sir,” came Pryce’s voice.

  With conscious effort, she opened her eyes and looked up, and there was Pryce with his sympathetic gaze and his—Oh holy mother of god.

  She lunged for the tray of brownies like a wild animal who hadn’t seen food for weeks. Beside her, Haldin was only slightly more dignified in his approach.

  Pryce grinned, set the tray on the table, and sat down across from them.

  It wasn’t that they’d been wanting for food. It was simply that enchanting—or Expression, as Haldin the Shaper called it—took its toll. Especially when one was at it all morning long.

  Plus, Pryce’s brownies were goddamn delicious.

  She didn’t ask him how he’d made them or whether that was a spritz of mint in there, she just woofed brownies until her soft-spoken manners managed to quell the beast inside of her long enough for her to spout, “These are amazing!” around a mouthful of sweet chocolaty goodness.

  Haldin gave an affirmative grunt. He looked pale from his exertions, and she couldn’t imagine she looked any better. Probably worse, actually.

  “How goes it?” Pryce asked.

  “Not so bad,” Haldin said. “Last time I did something like this, I was figuring it a
ll out from scratch.” He shook his head as if chiding himself. “Tried to cloak an entire army in a single night once I did. Didn’t exactly work out so smoothly, but I guess it’s safe to say I’ve had worse than this.”

  Rachel waved her hands in the air to show him just how impressed she was by his epic, manly awesomeness. “Well those of us who aren’t used to singlehandedly saving the world are exhausted.” She snagged another brownie. “And hungry.”

  Sarcasm aside, she actually was pretty damn impressed with Haldin’s capacity for punishment, both in channeling and in a more conventional sense. He was a warrior, as was Elise. Everything else aside, Rachel was glad they had the Enochians with them. Especially since they needed to protect a serious number of heads from getting lost in Kul’Gada’s furor, and assembly-line enchanting wasn’t exactly her strong suit.

  “I don’t know when enough’s gonna be enough, all things considered,” Haldin said, nodding toward the two cloaking generators they’d just finished, “but I think these put us up to enough cloaks to cover HQ and the main bulk of Krogoth’s line.” He glanced at Rachel. “Assuming they don’t mind the cold.”

  “Better cold than stark raving mad, I suppose,” Pryce said.

  It was hard to argue with that.

  The challenge of powering the gigantic cloaking field generators they’d enchanted into each small box was a problem without an easy solution—or a readily available one, at least. Sure, good batteries, solar panels, or even old generators were all fine options for deploying the devices, but none of those were exactly in overflowing surplus.

  So they’d kept things simple, at least for now. She just hoped they didn’t find themselves fighting next to the devices on a cold, rainy day. She’d been there before, on the night the nest had burst, when the bullets had been pouring on her catcher as thickly as the rain itself. Back when the only ones trying to kill them had been Drogan and his men.

  God, how had being hunted by only a raknoth warlord and his army become a fond memory?

  Her comm buzzed, and she looked down to a message from Alaric: Bringing cloaks? Meeting will be too long if it lasts a minute.