Page 103 of Feral Keep

Behind me, the Stained comes through the barracks wall. It picks a different section, twenty feet to the left, the wood blowing outward. The mottled body clears the debris in one convulsive leap and lands in the compound. The jittering eyes find me instantly.

The Stained runs.

I hear it. The footsteps come wrong-fast, a pace that shouldn’t be possible. That body can’t feel the broken sternum, the dislocated shoulder, the gash where the wood tore its face open. It’s gaining.

Red comes in from the side in a full lateral tackle. The impact carries both of them across the compound and into the supply building wall. The building collapses. The roof comes down in sections and crumples around the two bodies inside. Dust and splinters go up with the shriek of the Stained under them. Then Red roars, the first full one since the Unmade fight, a sound that shakes the standing buildings and sends birds screaming out of the canopy.

I reach the tree line and get my hands on a trunk. The bark smells green and wet under my palms, canopy sap and wet rotting leaves, ordinary smells with no business being this loud. I’m breathing hard. The twins are frantic in me, kicking without a break.

I can’t see him anymore. That’s the worst part, worse than the claws that almost reached me. My whole body wants to turn around. I hold the trunk instead, bark biting into my palms, because going back means getting in his way and getting him killed. So I stand here and wait. Waiting is the hardest thing I’ve done all morning.

The supply building stops shaking.

Silence comes down. In the barracks, no sound at all after violence meant somebody stopped moving. My chest goes hollow before I can stop the thought.

The dust settles. Something crimson shifts in the collapsed building. Red stands. He rises up through the broken roof, wood sliding off his shoulders, his wings shedding splinters. His silver hair is white with dust. Blood runs from cuts on his face, his chest, his arms. His breathing is ragged, lungs pulling too hard against ribs that haven’t finished healing.

He’s holding the Stained by the throat.

The Stained is still moving. Its eyes still jitter. Its claws still scrape weak lines into Red’s forearm that well up with blood. But it’s slower now. The cracked sternum, the wall, the collapsed building — all of it has finally piled up past what its body can ignore.

The whine comes again, quieter, the pitch dropping as the body runs down.

Red looks at me across the compound, his eyes finding mine through the dust and the wreckage. He isn’t asking should I. He already decided that. He’s asking are you watching.

I nod.

My whole body is shaking and I nod anyway. He needs someone to witness this, the way he needs the graves tended, and I’m the one he trusts to hold it. The girl who used to faint at the sight of a Eunuch’s switch is standing in a ruined compound watching a man kill something with his bare hands. I don’t recognize her. I don’t look away either.

He closes his fist.

The sound is wet and short and final. The Stained’s body goes limp. The jittering stops, the tremor in the pupils freezing mid-shake, the gold eyes fixed on nothing. The light in them dies like a lamp running out of fuel. The whine cuts off. The claws go slack against Red’s forearm.

Red holds the body for ten seconds. Fifteen. The Unmade taught him not to trust the first death. He watches the eyes for a flicker. He watches the chest for a rise. Nothing moves.

The Stained doesn’t get back up.

Red drops the body. It hits the rubble like something that used to be heavy and is only weight now. He steps over it. He walks through the wreckage of the supply building, across the compound, through the broken fence, to me.

He’s bleeding from a dozen places. The claws found his forearms over and over. His face is cut, the gash on his cheek torn open again, the lip split from the first strike. His ribs, the ones that were almost better, took another round of punishment.

Up close he smells like copper and sweat and building dust. Under all of it is the sweet rot of the Stained’s blood, which never washes off skin the first time. His breathing is ragged. His hands shake with the adrenaline burning off, the massive body coming down from the fight the way a fire comes down from its peak.

He reaches me and stops. His eyes go over all of me — is the mate safe, is the mate whole, are the twins safe. His hand goes to my belly and rests there, feeling the kicks, counting. He waits until his body believes what his eyes tell it.

“Okay?” His voice is rough and wrecked. The word barely makes it out.

“Okay.”

The word comes out steady. The rest of me isn’t. Now that it’s over, everything I didn’t let myself feel while it was happening arrives at once. My legs threaten to fold. My eyes sting hot and sudden.

I don’t cry. Four years of not crying in front of people who could use it against me, and the habit doesn’t care that he never would. I stand there shaking and blinking hard, my hand finding the solid wall of his chest like it’s the only fixed thing left.

He drops to his knees. All nine feet of him folds down until his face is level with my belly. He presses his forehead against the swell, both hands on my hips, holding on and breathing. His whole body shakes with the aftershocks of what it did to keep me standing here.

I put my hands in his silver hair. The strands are damp with sweat and dust and blood. I hold his head against my belly. His breath is warm on my skin and the twins kick at his forehead.

The compound behind us is rubble. The Stained is dead in the wreckage. Its curdled sweetness is already fading under dust and blood and the clean green of canopy air.