AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He stared with breathless horror at the cratered skull where moments ago had been Maxwell’s—Maxwell’s—face. It couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t be true. He’d been right there, he’d been right there, he’d grabbed the gun, he was still fighting, he wasn’t—
But the qesh rose off Maxwell’s lifeless body and turned to Garrett with a manic sneer on his blood-spattered face.
Garrett’s lungs finally seized, and he gasped in a breath of air. Of sickly-sweet air, of fear, pure fear. That’s all this was. It wasn’t true; none of it was true. Maxwell wasn’t dead, Maxwell wasn’t gone, Maxwell hadn’t just been killed right in front of him.
But the image before his eyes didn’t change.
Maxwell didn’t get up.
The qesh didn’t disappear.
Instead, the qesh, with Maxwell’s blood all over his face, took aim at Garrett again.
Caught on the ground with nowhere to run and horror still paralyzing his muscles, Garrett stared down the gun’s sights back into the eyes of the person who’d just put a bullet into the skull of the man he loved.
Into Maxwell.
The thought had sat in Garrett’s mind for a half second when the qesh’s face transformed from gloating to terrified.
He dropped his gun and spun around, grabbing at his legs and then his torso, screaming and swearing.
Garrett watched in confusion and then shock and then a bone-deep terror as a huge white worm scrabbled up the qesh’s chest. The qesh screamed and batted at it, but it was too quick it and scrambled up and over the qesh’s shoulder.
“Torvar!”
Garrett didn’t see who screamed it first, but soon the word echoed around the warehouse in a chorus of screeches muffled only by the thick yellow gas filling the space.
“Torvar!”
“Torvar!”
The chaotic fighting dissolved into people fleeing the warehouse without a thought to each other—guards running for the ship and the pirates running past it for theirs or simply throwing themselves to the ground and sobbing.
But Garrett couldn’t take his eyes off the qesh. The qesh tore at his hair and his head and the back of the neck, then threw back his head and screamed, and then—
He stopped. His mouth shut. His arms dropped to his side. He stood still, hunched and staring at the ground, his only motion his unsteady swaying. When he looked up, Garrett saw that his face was both the same—high cheekbones, a pointed chin, skin crisscrossing with colors—and utterly transformed.
The qesh looked uncertain, frightened, unbalanced…familiar.
Garrett stumbled forward and up to his feet, and when he locked eyes with the qesh, the qesh’s knees collapsed out from under him, and he spoke.
“Garrett.”
Garrett felt his own name like a punch to the gut. His feet took him farther, tripping and stumbling forward against the flow of people running past him. He hadn’t…heard right. Surely. How would the qesh know…
The qesh hunched his shoulders and pressed his fingers into the ground.
Garrett was almost on him when Kira suddenly appeared before him and grabbed both his arms.
“We need to go!” She tried to spin him, and Garrett wrested himself away.
“You go!” He threw himself back toward the qesh and picked up his pace. “I’ll be right behind you!”
He couldn’t leave him behind. Neither Maxwell’s body nor…whoever had just burrowed inside of his killer.
When he skidded to a stop in front of the qesh, the qesh looked up at him with wide eyes, and his mouth dropped open silently. Garrett gritted his teeth, grabbed the qesh’s upper arm, and hauled him to his feet. “Get running if you want to make it out of this.”
Then he swept Maxwell’s lifeless body into his arms—forcing himself not to look at the remains of his face, he couldn’t take that—and turned back to the ship. The qesh hadn’t moved, still wide-eyed and—Garrett could see now—trembling from head to foot.
