“He’s your husband,” the doctor said with an uncertain glance at Rainer. “Crèche doesn’t marry off anyone with homicidal tendencies.”
She groaned and banged her forehead on her upraised knees. The doctor left with a shrug.
Rainer shifted to human form himself. After a moment, he said, “I generally try to avoid the brig from this perspective.”
He unhooked the small comlink from behind his ear and tossed it aside.
She glared at him. “I have nothing to say. I’m not an idiot. I know these cells are wired.”
“Just making conversation.”
“I especially have nothing to say to you.” She huddled into a tighter ball. “I’ve said everything I want to say.”
Rainer rested his head against the wall. “I did not try to kill you.”
“Save it for our court-martial,” she said.
“Where did you get the insane idea I want to—”
“Do you not understand I don’t want to talk to you?” She was exhausted and just wanted to sleep, but she needed to keep one eye on him.
Rainer rested his bruised wrist on one upraised knee, careless of his nudity. “I am the one who is going to have to repair the shuttle. If I was going to murder my wife in a fit of pique, I’d have found a way to do it without making work for myself. Give me some credit for being a more clever predator than that.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I tracked you down. Unless you’re saying you’re easy prey.”
A flush of rage baked her entire body. This asshole! Rainer didn’t even have the good manners to smirk at her.
She stared out the magnetic bars and into the small lobby. There were three other cells, but they were empty. This was just short-term holding. They’d probably get seen as soon as the executive staff could be pulled together so that Rainer could go back to his life. Maybe they’d ship her back to Ark and everyone could forget this happened. She pawed at the stubborn tears that kept falling. As long as she didn’t start sniffling or sobbing again, she could deal with her eyes leaking.
“Tell me why you thought I was going to kill you,” Rainer prodded again.
“Listen to me closely.” She glared at him. “You started this, but I’ll finish it. Maybe Crèche shouldn’t have been so desperate to preserve your DNA. Sometimes a bloodline dies for a reason. If our lives are a warning, fine. I can live with that. At least it won’t be some worthless death at your conniving, selfish claws. And no pup will be condemned to have you as their father, and I’d have to watch my child grow up to be another you. Wolves like you are probably the reason we’re not on Earth anymore. Arrogant, selfish, cock-sure pieces of shit who viewed wives and children as trinkets and pawns to exploit like everything else around them. I’m not your tool, toy, pawn, trinket, ornament, or jewel for your glorious crown. I’m Lachesis, and I’ll make good on my name.”
Rainer’s lips twitched slightly with a suppressed smile. “You are my type.”
She was wrong about the cells being bugged. They were married: NightPiercer law didn’t allow recording of conversation between spouses.
She was right about arrogant. He preferred territorial to selfish.
He glanced at his injured forearm. Nothing serious. She’d meant to hurt him, but hadn’t had a good angle. He’d been right about those sharp, shiny fangs of hers. And she’d sunk them right into him and bitten down without hesitation.
She tucked herself against the wall, arranging her legs and long hair to shield as much of her body from him as possible, and her scent said she intended to ignore him. She’d said what she had to say, and that was that. She smelled of anger, but under that, grief and tears.
She was also exhausted and fighting off the usual post-crisis crash everyone experienced. He resisted pointing out she might as well doze off. If he did, she wouldn’t, and she’d need all her mental sharpness for what happened next.
He started to count his heartbeat. There were other things to turn his mind to, but any of those would trigger his scent to change, and she was sharp to reading his emotions through his scent. Better to focus on his heartbeat until she got bored and fell asleep.
By 3,391, she dozed in a little ball.
He had not expected this would go easily, but this had gone quite worse than he’d been prepared for.
Why had she thought he was going to kill her? Stubborn, willful female trained to be Crèche, but also willing to jump onto oncoming lifts, crawl through the ventilation system, and fight him in public. She’d trotted around the belly of the ship for half an hour, nobody realizing she wasn’t supposed to be there until he’d showed up. Her scent was everywhere by then, because she’d been in the air ducts, but once he’d figured out how she’d crawled in, it hadn’t been difficult to figure out where she was going. Algae, of course.
Clever, clever, clever she-wolf.
Now she needed to be willing to play along. Aside from the spectacle, no damage had been done that he couldn’t contain. NightPiercer needed this to work. He needed this to work. She’d been paid for, she was here, and there was no sending her back. Everyone, from his allies to his enemies, would want to salvage this for their own agendas.
Her being Crèche was not… optimal. The sterility and analysis that went into marriages unnerved him. The goal wasn’t love, but some grotesque compromise that could, at best, be called fondness. The goal being harmony. Any other romantic relationship frowned upon and stymied for how disruptive and toxic it would be to the ship’s population when it soured.
Prior to Exodus, it was estimated almost half of marriages ended with some degree of anguish and acrimony that caused collateral damage. Humanity had had their stories of betrayal. Werewolves had their stories of fake matings engineered by corrupt leadership, or mates trapped in twisted, toxic relationships bound together by a force neither could overcome. Out here among the stars everyone who believed Gaia had ever chosen mates also believed Gaia had left them to fend for themselves in every possible way.
Things were this way for the sake of survival. They were temporary. He personally would have rather gotten bloody and dirty earning his eventual wife’s respect and love, nursing the failures and wounds, not have it all be sterile and neatly packed for maximum efficiency.
And if it was true that without Gaia’s Grace the werewolves were turning into humans, how fortunate his own wife still had her fangs, even if she did have some inappropriately sharp inclination to use them. Her file hadn’t included she could still achieve her war-form.
How superb. How beautifully, wonderfully superb.
The deep, coiled aggression that wrapped around his spine unnerved him—he’d have to watch that. And mind the instinct that urged him to go to her, smooth her tangled hair, soothe her injuries, shield her from everyone and everything at any cost, reasonable or not. That she needed to be safe, warm, fed, protected. That it was wrong that she was afraid, injured, grieving, and that him being the cause made it beyond intolerable.
There was also a deeper desire—to have her naked body against his, and to put a pup into her belly.
He crushed those urges away in some dark box in the back of his mind. He would never curse his offspring to this metal sky-boat.
The urge sat, sinister and dark, a banked coal, strumming every other instinct.
She shifted, as if she felt or smelled his sudden anger/desire/instinct/whatever he felt.
He resumed counting his heartbeat.
Judge Not...
A few hours later Gribbons re-appeared. He demanded both of shift to wolf form to cover their nudity for the escort through NightPiercer. The ship didn’t waste clothing on werewolf prisoners. They could wear fur.
“Medical told her to stay in human form,” Rainer said.
“Medical didn’t tell me that. Wolf form. Both of you. Now.”
Lachesis shrank away from the leather collar they wanted to clasp around her throat.
Rainer growled when presented with it.
“You know the drill, Rainer.” Gribbons hefted the larger collar they’d brought for him. “Shackles for humans, collars for wolves.”
“It is not the same. It is an insult,” Rainer growled, even though there was no way for the human to understand him. The lupine language wasn’t just growls or barks, but intonations below the human range of hearing, scent, body language. Humans could pick up general meaning if they worked at it, but conversation wasn’t possible.
Lachesis flicked an ear at Rainer, then sucked up (or squashed down) her own pride and stepped forward for the collar. With a shudder of defeat, she lowered her head and tucked her tail.
Rainer’s growl chided her for giving up so easily.
“Blame yourself, scavenger.” She flung one of the worst lupine insults she knew at him. She still shuddered in mortification as two control sticks were latched onto the collar, and two Security staff led her out of the cell.
Rainer refused to bow his head and instead stood still as a statue while Gribbons clasped it around his ruff. Within a second he flung his head up and backed, shaking his head frantically. He scrambled and his hind claws dug at the collar.
The scent of burning skin and hair, then of death. Silver. His collar had silver on the underside.
Rainer stopped struggling and braced himself, legs splayed, and panting. He raised his gaze to Gribbons, eyes more yellow than green.
“Murder is a serious charge, Rainer,” Gribbons said. “Silver is required.”
Rainer looked at her, panting hard around the agony of the silver rotting the tender skin of his neck. His ruff had offered only a few seconds of protection. Now the collar sank closer against his skin. The collar had four silver bars along the inside. Not enough to kill him or even sicken him, but enough to burn.
Lachesis’ heart twinged with pity and doubt.
Control sticks were attached to his collar, and he kept his lips curled back over his fangs, even as his head bowed under the pain.
Security led them into a main, broad corridor. The scent of Rainer’s pain and defiance gnawed on her. Handled like dangerous animals. She was a proven flight risk, but did Rainer have to be tortured and humiliated with silver?
The corridors opened up onto a wide central avenue lined with trees as old as the ship, an arched ceiling high above them with a false night sky dotted with the constellations she would have seen from Earth’s northern hemisphere, and a false crescent moon. She stared up at it for a second. Ark had nothing like it outside of the Biomes. An artificial breeze rustled the leaves.
The avenue opened up onto two wide doors emblazoned with the crest of NightPiercer. The doors slid back and light streamed out onto the avenue.
The chamber was smaller than she expected, before she realized the front walls could slide all the way back to encompass the entire courtyard. A crescent-shaped dais placed the executive staff several feet higher than them, as they sat behind a single smooth piece of polished metal that comprised the table. The front had been etched with a beautiful scene from Earth: a mural showing the transition of the seasons and biomes and phases of the moon.
Ten people, all human, sat above them, although she saw a few weren’t wearing dress uniform. Hastily convened, then. At the center was a man in his fifties, balding, stern, four bars on his shoulders. Captain Tsu, she guessed. To his right was a woman, to his left a man, both Commanders, and the seat directly next to the woman was empty. Rainer’s spot.
Gribbons unbuckled her collar and ordered her to shift into human form. Rainer’s was next, and he was given the same order. He obeyed, but dropped to one knee panting and coughing for several moments.
She stared down at him, conflicted.
He gathered himself and stood, his neck burned raw in four spots from the thin silver bars on the inside of the collar. He faced the Council unashamed.
She clutched her right wrist with her left hand and looked down. She really wished someone had given her a blanket or a handkerchief or a napkin or something. Rotten old dish towel. Anything, really.
Rainer stepped close to her. She hissed softly at him, not wanting to feel the brush of his skin against hers, and hating how her skin responded to it, the slight thrill it gave her.
“Stop thinking about my ass,” she hissed at him, catching the unmistakable flicker in his scent, which caused her to glance down sort of instinctively in a perverse way to verify he was still a marble sculpture and not suddenly possessed of blood and lust.
“Takes my mind off the silver burns,” he whispered back. “Stop thinking about my cock, Lachesis. I know you’ve already had a good look. In sub-optimal conditions of course.”
“Could you be more inappropriate?” She blushed.
“Just pointing out you should not have judged prematurely.”
She rolled her eyes and looked at the ceiling while he chuckled very quietly. “We’re about to be condemned to the brig for the next twenty years, and you’re making dick jokes.”
He whispered, “We were about to become space debris and you were making dick jokes.”
She sighed. Closed her eyes. “Do you feel better now?”
“The silver does not matter,” he murmured by her ear, “your claws are sharper.”
She blushed hotter, and the soft breath of his chuckle sent a shutter along her raw breasts.
“If you two are done comparing defense notes?” someone on the council asked.
Captain Tsu laced his fingers together and leaned forward. He noted their nudity with a disinterested glance, although Rainer seemed to get more of a sigh than she did. Perhaps this was a regular occurrence. “Commander, Lachesis was supposed to arrive two days from now. Yet I hear you used your command codes to enter Ark and make off with her. Excuse me if I’m blunt, but what the hell were you thinking?”
“That it seemed inappropriate for my wife to be ferried along with mail,” Rainer replied with disdain. “I went in full dress and did things properly.”
“If this is your idea of properly, we’re in for a hell of a marriage,” Lachesis muttered.
“She seems to think it’s because you wanted to kill her,” the woman commander said. “Which resulted in her causing a high degree of chaos in sensitive areas of the ship.”
That was a total exaggeration. She’d crawled through some ducts and just caused some general chaos, it wasn’t like she’d splashed around in the algae vats, or let the crickets out of their containment, or set fire to something.
“Why did you think he wanted to kill you?” Captain Tsu asked.
“She was frightened, Captain,” Rainer said.
“I wasn’t asking you, Commander.”
Rainer raised his chin a degree. “It is my fault, Captain, so I will answer, and I will speak for us.”
She hissed, “The hell you will! I can speak for myself!”
Rainer lowered his lips to her ear. She jerked away, he snaked after her, but was careful to not grab her. “Listen to me for a second.”
She glared at him. “One second.”
“We’re married. Anything said between us is privileged, and one of us can speak for the other.”
“Why would I want to let you speak for me?” she whispered back.
“Because if we present ourselves as a single entity they won’t be able to go after either of us individually.”
“So you can finish the job? How stupid do you think I am?”
“I have no motive to kill you.”
“That’s what you want me to believe.”
Rainer pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes for an exasperated moment. Blood wept out of the open, shallow sores on his neck. “Let me put this another way. You can take your chances with me, or you can take your chances with them. Did you hear what you’re being accused of?”
“I heard,” she said sourly.
He lowered his whisper even further. “Even if I wanted you dead, now I couldn’t kill you. I’d never get away with it.”
“How
extremely comforting.”
“You’re Crèche. You know that they want us together, and they’re going to make it happen.”
Was Crèche. But Rainer did have a point. Her choices appeared to be a united front with him, or taking her chances. Crèche didn’t like to admit when a marriage had soured. Sometimes everyone was forced to move on, but not before a lot of therapy and counseling and analysis.
Rainer was trying to get her to play a specific card because he knew what’d make all this go away. Everyone on that dais wanted him to play that card, and they were brandishing big sticks. If she got out of line, she’d get hit hard.
“I want to go home,” she muttered.
“You know that’s impossible.”
Another bruising, bitter blow. Ark would never give up its hive of bees for her. They already had her eggs, a little sister, and after this, she’d get flagged as “a problem”. She’d never re-enter the Pool, her position in Crèche gone, her bunk and uniforms probably already re-assigned, a few other people maintained her Dying Art and could train a replacement. Ark had already calculated a future that didn’t include her.
He whispered, “Or haven’t you noticed they’re all human?”
She eyed him, then whispered, “I noticed.”
It was the same as on Ark. Not many werewolves in positions at the top of the ship-pack. Ark made the excuse that there were considerably more humans than wolves, but everyone knew it was because werewolves with authority made everyone nervous. That werewolves with strong leadership skills might have Alpha tendencies. Even other werewolves got jittery if one of their own started barking too loud.
“I know how to get us out of this unscathed,” Rainer said. “I can soothe the frightened humans.”
She grit her teeth, and stepped back one step, and then over a half-step, symbolically placing herself behind Rainer’s dubious protection.
Rainer raised his voice to address the whole council. “Lachesis was only told my name and when she’d leave. No explanation offered. I was focused on the task at hand, and not ready for her lack of preparation. Then there was the incident in the shuttle. All of these small details led her to the conclusion that I wanted to kill her, and she needed to protect herself.”
NightPiercer Page 7
