Page 104 of Feral Keep

Lisa’s voice comes from the trees behind us. She watched all of it — the speed, the desperation, the whine, the final sound. She watched a nine-foot male kill something faster than him, something that came for his pregnant mate twice.

“Clear?” she calls.

“Clear,” I call back.

The women come out of the trees, thirty-seven of them. I know some of the faces from before the first raid. Others are new since. All of them blink against daylight they haven’t stood in for weeks.

They stop at the edge of the destroyed compound. They look at a nine-foot Shade on his knees in front of his pregnant mate, his face against her belly, his hands on her hips. There’s blood on both of us. The dead Stained lies in the rubble behind us.

The women don’t run.

Gretchen is at the front of them. I didn’t know she’d come. She was supposed to stay. Her hands are burned from the first raid and healing badly. She steps forward and crosses the compound. She crouches beside Red and puts her hand on his shoulder.

He flinches. A human hand that isn’t mine is touching him. His head lifts from my belly and he finds Gretchen’s face, his eyes wary and gold in the light. She’s a woman in her fifties who braids hair and hums. She just put her scarred hand on the shoulder of a monster because he was shaking.

“You’re bleeding,” Gretchen says. It’s the camp voice, flat and matter-of-fact, the one that sees what needs tending and tends it.

Red stares at her.

“Come on,” she says. “Let me see.”

He looks at me. His gold eyes shine wet. A woman who watched him kill something with his bare hands thirty seconds ago is treating him like a person.

I nod.

He lets Gretchen look at his cuts.

44

MAEVE

The soft-bonded girl’s name is Cora.

Lisa grabs my arm before I’ve got my breath back from the fight, already pulling me across the wreckage of the compound. “Come on. There’s a girl you need to see.”

“Who—”

“Cora.” Lisa doesn’t slow down. Her eyes sweep the compound, counting heads without looking like she’s counting. “Seventeen. Came in about two months back. Cage transfer.”

I know the shape of the rest before she says it. Every camp woman does. “Failed bond.”

“Failed bond.” Lisa’s jaw works. We step over a collapsed beam from the barracks wall. “Shade rejected her, or the bond just didn’t take, however that works. She came back with a leg wound nobody looked at on the walk in. Shayla took one look and figured she’d lose her inside a week.”

“So Shayla fixed it.”

“Shayla fixed it.” The words come out flat, disgusted. “You know the Shade she had chained in the supply building?”

I don’t, not until this second, but I nod. I can already feel where this is going.

“She had him knot the girl. No bond, no breeding. Just the venom.” Lisa’s hand tightens on my arm. “Kept the leg from rotting off. Kept her alive. That’s Shayla’s whole answer to everything—find the thing that works and don’t ask what it costs.”

I think about warmth flooding a body that isn’t ready for it, no bond to catch what falls out the other side. “She’s hooked.”

“She’s hooked.” Lisa stops walking. We’re close enough now that I can see the girl on the ground, Marta’s arms locked around her. “I need you for this part. I don’t know what it looks like from the inside. You do.”

I kneel in the dirt beside Marta, the older woman with the limp. My knees complain. The fight is still shaking in my hands. Cora smells wrong before I reach her, sweat gone sour and something sweeter underneath it, venom soaked so deep into her skin it’s started to smell like sickness instead of a Shade.

Cora’s eyes are half open, the whites showing crescents at the bottom. Her pupils are blown wide, black nearly swallowing the brown, and they drift without catching on anything. Marta holds her through it, the bad leg stretched at an angle that has to hurt, and doesn’t shift it, doesn’t complain.