Page 102 of Feral Keep

“Time to go,” I tell her, and pull her toward the trees.

43

MAEVE

The Stained is faster than Red.

It isn’t bigger than him, or stronger. The venom sickness has done something to its reflexes. The body twitches from one position to the next and my eyes never catch the space between. Red hits it full force. The Stained twists out of the impact like smoke, one shoulder taking the blow, the body spinning with it. The spin becomes a strike that catches Red across the jaw.

Red’s head snaps back. Blood sprays from his split lower lip, bright, and the copper of it reaches me ten feet away. I taste it on my tongue. He recovers in a breath. The massive body absorbs what would have dropped a smaller male. He swings. The Stained ducks. The crimson fist whistles over the mottled grey-green skull. Then the Stained darts inside his guard, the asymmetrical horns driving toward his chest.

Red catches the horns with both hands. The muscles in his arms stand up like cables. He holds. The Stained thrashes, its jittering eyes wild, the whine climbing into a shriek. Its strength shouldn’t be possible in something this damaged. Its claws rake his forearms. The thin veined wing membranes beat against his face and slap wetly.

The shriek rises into something worse than rage. The Stained is desperate, the way a starving person is desperate, the way a drowning person claws at whoever is closest. The venom in the air is driving it — my venom, Red’s venom run through my blood. Every cell in its corroded body strains toward what it needs. Red is standing in between.

Red wrenches the Stained sideways and throws it. The body flies ten feet into the barracks wall. The wood cracks. A support beam splinters and dust comes down, dry, gritty in my throat. The Stained slides to the ground and leaves a smear behind it, darker than blood and thicker, the wrong color. That’s what years of its own venom made of its insides. The smell hits me a second later. It smells sour and spoiled, like something that went bad days ago and kept on going.

The Stained gets up immediately. It springs back to its feet like nothing in it can feel what’s broken. The Unmade couldn’t feel pain because it was too far gone. This one can’t because the venom ate the nerves. Its cracked sternum grinds when it moves. Its shoulder hangs wrong from the throw. The damage is real. The body just doesn’t know it.

The Stained lunges at Red again, darting and skipping, changing direction twice in the time it takes him to shift his weight. Left, then right, under his reaching arm and inside his guard. Its claws find his ribs, the ones cracked five days ago and barely healed. Red grunts. I’ve heard that sound twice — once in the Unmade fight, once when the green-brown Shade’s claws caught him. It means damage he can’t ignore.

He brings his elbow down on its spine. The impact drives it into the ground and craters the earth. For one breath, the compound is still.

Then it moves under him, that too-fast twitch, rolling sideways. The jittering eyes find me over Red’s shoulder. The whine comes again, louder, the pitch climbing. It sharpens into something almost like language. I hear a ruined voice in it, one that could once have said please.

The sound goes through me like a blade.

Because this was a man once. Before the asteroid, before the mutation went sideways and the venom turned sour in him. This was someone’s son. Maybe someone’s husband. Maybe a teacher, like Red. Maybe a father. The thing underneath is still whining and reaching. It was human. It’s still trying to be.

Red doesn’t hesitate.

He catches the Stained by the back of the neck. He lifts it and slams it down. The earth cracks. He lifts it and slams it again. The body goes limp for a fraction of a second, the closest thing to stun its burned-out nerves can make, and Red takes the opening. He pins it with his knee, nine feet of muscle driving it into the dirt.

“Maeve. Move.”

I’m backing toward the tree line with my hand on my belly. The twins are kicking now, sharp and urgent, the panic going through all three of us at once. My legs shake. Everything in me is screaming at me to run. But my mate is on the ground pinning something that wants the venom out of my body. If I run and it gets loose⁠—

I can’t make my feet choose. If I run, I leave him. If I stay, I’m the thing it’s hunting. My body tries for both at once and freezes halfway, my breath coming in short pulls that don’t fill anything. I want to scream. Screaming never helped in a barracks and it won’t help here. I swallow it and it sits in my throat like a stone.

The Stained writhes under Red’s knee. It can’t feel its own broken bones and it strains against him anyway. Red leans harder. His jaw is set and the veins in his arms stand dark. His wings spread for balance, the red membranes taut.

The Stained twists and gets one arm free. Its claws swing up and go for the knee pinning it. The points find the gap behind his kneecap and dig in. Red’s leg buckles.

He doesn’t go down. He shifts his weight into a controlled fall, his hand catching the earth, turning the buckle into a pivot. But the Stained is already free. It’s already past him.

It’s coming for me.

The jittering eyes lock onto me. Whatever’s left in them has come down to one word: venom, venom, venom. The Stained covers the ground between us in three strides that blur. The whine is a scream now. Its arms reach. Its claws come out.

There’s no time to think. My body just knows, in one white flash, that I can’t outrun it and neither can the twins. My arms come up in front of my belly on their own, useless against claws. Somewhere far off in me I’m already screaming his name with no breath to say it.

Red’s tail lashes out. The white tip catches the Stained’s ankle, a perfect strike from a body that has fought in this territory for years. The Stained trips. Its momentum carries it face-first into the dirt and it slides to a stop six feet from me. I can see the dark veins under its transparent wing membranes. I can smell it, the curdled venom, the sweet rot of dissolving flesh.

Red is on it before it can rise. He gets both hands on its shoulders, lifts, and throws. The Stained hits the barracks wall and goes through it, through the planks and the interior supports, into a shower of broken wood. The wall collapses behind it. Dust mushrooms up. Inside the ruined barracks something scrapes and shifts. It’s getting up.

“Run. Tree line. Now.”

I run. Or I try. My body doesn’t run the way it used to, not with the belly and all the weight pitched forward. I’m fast. I’m not fast enough. The tree line is thirty yards off. My legs pump. My arms swing. The twins ride heavy in me. My breath comes in short hard gasps.