Page 11 of Taken to Heimo
On the C-class, I thought I heard her whisper it…and then when I surged towards the sound, I found her under Nondah.
There’s a thump and a scream and, for a moment, time is a lost thing.
Svera screams a second time and this fresh sound is a fist that reaches down my throat, grabs my insides and rips them all out through my shattered teeth.
The time it takes for my feet to carry me to her door feels like a lifetime. The door sliding open takes another eternity. I lurch inside her room where her scent touches everything — a fragrant smoke, a deep wood, a crimson spice — only to find that violent perfection ruined by foreign scents.
Males. Three of them.
One of them has his hand around her outstretched wrist. Her fists are balled — was she attempting to fight? The thought makes me wild.
One stands back watching.
One holds a knife.
“Svera,” I say and my voice is cool, calm. Even. Nothing that I feel.
The males in the room tense and turn and see me and spread out, like they aren’t sure if I’m here to reprimand them or to join them. I’m not here for either, though.
I’m here to eviscerate them. To make it so that they never even were.
Svera wrenches out of the male’s grip, momentum sending her tumbling back onto the nest. She quickly pushes the end of her shift down to cover her feet. Her gaze locks with mine and is glossy and wet. Her chin is trembling. Rage rises and crests.
I cock my chin at her, directing her towards the far wall and she understands my meaning easily.
She crawls to the far edge of the nest and rolls over it, ducking in the narrow space between it and the wall so that she’s safe from the blood that’s about to rain.
“Krisxox,” a male whose name I do not know or care to, says to me.
I nod at him, giving him permission to speak. His ridges flare white and black and red and I sense that he does not fear me. He thinks me an ally. Horror strikes my stomach at that dangerous realization. If this is what he thinks, is this whatshethinks of me?
In a moment of weakness, I recognize that if this is the case, I will need to change her mind.Everyone’s. Perhaps, even mine…
“We wanted to do you a service by getting this disgusting female out of your home,” one of them says.
The third male adds, “Her kind is an abomination and she is the one making the rules that dictate how we interact with them.”
“She wants us to breed with them on equal terms. To try to make pairs and mates. It’s disgusting. We were going to remind her that she is nothing more than an animal by feeding her to the cavras.” This one who seems to be their leader, he will die the slowest. He laughs.
He laughs.
He laughs and I grin to show all of my teeth. At whatever expression this grinning translates to, the males share a glance. The one on the right edges back. He will die second then, the most cowardly.
“You mean to tell me that you three broke into the home of your Krisxox to butcher the female in my charge?” I sound like my sire, right before he whipped me. To make me stronger, he said. It worked. And now I will show these males what strength looks like.
They share another glance. The one on the right wears his cowardice in his ridges now. A taupe color. He is uncertain.
The leader speaks. “We wanted it to be a surprise for you. We know that the only reason you keep her is because Raku ordered you to, but he’sweak.It’s disgusting the way he’s allowed himself to be manipulated by the hybridoud.”
Oud. It’s a term so foul I cannot recall the last time that I heard it. It fills me with a sickening sense of anticipation. It’s the scent that floods the plain of battle right before an assault, that metallic perfume.
I nod. “And you believe this is the only reason I keep watch over the female? Because the Raku ordered me to?”
They all nod, but they don’t speak. Not when I take a step closer to them and all three of them seem to shrink. I release the hold on my ridges and let the Xanaxana’s power fill them with a color I spend the better part of my solars trying to deny.
“Xok,” the leader curses.
Pink ridges flare all around. Fear. Nox, not fear.Terror. I want them as terrified as they made Svera.
