Page 100 of Feral Keep

The smaller Shade’s nostrils flare. He catches something else on the wind.

His head snaps south. The whole body pivots, the wings spread wider, everything in him redirecting from me to something far away that only he can smell. His pupils snap wide all at once and hold there, steady. Recognition.

The scent of a mate reaches him from somewhere south, miles off. In one breath it overrides territory, challenge, hunger. It says mine, go, now.

He roars.

It’s the rut-roar. The sound that shook the supply building is nothing next to this, the full-throated, bone-deep bellow of a male whose body has found the thing it was built to find. It carries across the compound and into the canopy, south, toward whatever woman is out there.

He launches.

The wings catch air, stiff and awkward, the first strokes uneven from the weeks of binding. But they work. The massive downstroke lifts him ten feet, twenty. The second carries him above the canopy. He clears the trees. The green-brown body silhouettes against the dawn sky for one breath, two. Then he’s gone, south, toward the scent.

The compound vibrates with the ghost of the roar. In the tree line I can hear women crying, and it isn’t only the roar doing it. Everything they were ever told is coming apart in front of them.

My knees go loose the second he’s gone. The ice in me turns shaky and hot as it thaws, and my breath comes out in a rush I didn’t know I was holding. I press a hand to the barracks wall to stay upright. It passes. There’s no time for it not to.

Red turns to me, the gold eyes checking — safe, safe, the mate is safe. I nod. He nods back.

Then his head turns south again, reading the air under the roar’s echo.

“The Stained,” I say.

“Close.” His voice comes out flat, stripped of everything but information. “The rut-roar—it doesn’t matter to a Stained. A Stained doesn’t care about territory or mates or challenge. It cares about venom.” His gaze cuts to the southern tree line. “The compound reeks of it now. The freed Shade’s scent. The girl’s skin. Three weeks of—what Shayla did. This place is a beacon.”

And I’m standing in the middle of it.

I’m pregnant and mated, my blood running with Red’s venom. The warmth in my belly where the twins live is the same warmth a Stained’s corroded body craves, because its own venom is poison and mine is the closest thing to medicine it will ever smell.

So it isn’t the compound. It’s me. My body did this just by existing here. The guilt of it sits cold under my ribs and I don’t have room to carry it, and I carry it anyway.

“Get behind me,” Red says.

“The women⁠—”

“Lisa has the women. They’re in the trees. Get behind me.”

I don’t argue. I move behind him, my back against the barracks wall, my hands on my belly. The twins are still. They’ve been still since the rut-roar, some deep part of their half-formed bodies answering a male’s call that isn’t their father’s.

Every nerve in me pulls toward the tree line. I stay anyway. Red’s back is the wall between me and whatever’s coming, and running would only force him to choose — chase me, or face it down.

Red stands in the center of the compound facing south. His wings spread full, the red membranes catching the dawn light, the span of them filling the space between the barracks and the ruined supply building. His tail uncurls behind him, the white tip sweeping. His hands open at his sides with the claws extended. Every line of him is a declaration: this territory. My mate. Come and die.

I put my back against splintered wood and wait. The waiting is worse than the fight will be. The fear builds with nowhere to send it. My mouth has gone bone dry. I can hear my pulse in my ears, too fast and too loud, drowning out the birds that went silent sometime in the last minute without my noticing.

The canopy shifts.

The smell hits me first.

Sweet, and wrong with it. It’s the cloying chemical scent of venom curdled in a body that was never built to hold it. It crawls up my sinuses and sits there, thick and rotting, like fruit left in the sun past ripeness. Under the sweetness there’s something sour and acidic, like metal dissolving. The Eunuchs never smelled like this. Neither did the pale Unmade.

My stomach turns. The twins shift for the first time since the roar. They aren’t kicking. They’re turning away. My body knows the wrongness before my brain finds a word for it. The Unmade smelled like nothing. This smells like almost right, and that’s worse.

The Stained comes out of the canopy at the south edge of the compound.

Red told me. Last night in the warren he said it — almost right, almost Shade, twisted — and I thought I understood. I didn’t. Understanding is a word. What I’m looking at is a body.

He’s almost Red’s height, taller than the freed Shade, with a frame that should carry the breadth of a territorial male. It doesn’t hold right. The shoulders sit a fraction too narrow. The arms hang at a length that seems almost correct until he moves. His skin is dark mottled rust, blotched with patches of yellow-grey where the pigment failed — a body that started producing the right color and lost its way.