Page 95 of Feral Keep

We move south. Fast. Red sets the pace, the predator’s ground-eating stride that covers miles without rest. I walk. Lisa walks. We don’t talk. The canopy darkens around us. The smell of camp grows.

Red’s head turns south every few minutes. Scenting. Tracking. His tail rigid behind him, the white tip still, none of the idle sway that usually marks his movement through the territory. He’s locked in. The predator fully online, the teacher shelved, every sense pointed at the thing moving in the same direction we are.

“How far ahead of us?” I ask. Once. The only question that matters.

“An hour,” he says. “Maybe less. It’s moving faster than we are.”

Faster than a nine-foot Shade’s ground-eating stride. Faster than a predator who has covered this territory for years. The Stained is outpacing us toward the camp where twenty-five women are locked in a barracks with Shayla and whatever she’s done with the five days we gave her.

I walk faster. My body protests, the belly, the weight, the twins pressing down on my hips. I walk faster anyway. Lisa matches my pace. She doesn’t ask why. She heard the word. Stained. She doesn’t know what it means any more than I did ten minutes ago. But she saw Red’s face when he said it, and Lisa has survived this long by reading faces.

The canopy swallows the last of the light. We move in darkness. Only Red’s gold eyes show ahead of me, twin points of amber in the black, the predator’s eyes that don’t need light the way mine do.

His hand finds mine in the dark. Holds. His grip is harder than usual. The pressure of a male whose mate is walking toward something he can smell and she can’t. Every cell in his body is telling him to pick her up and fly the opposite direction.

He holds my hand and walks toward it anyway.

I let him. I let myself hold on back, my fingers laced through his, and it takes everything camp-brain taught me not to. Don’t reach for anyone in the dark, the old rule says. Don’t let your hand be the thing that gives you away. Don’t need something you might lose. I reach anyway. His palm is huge and warm and it doesn’t stop my legs from shaking. It just means I’m not shaking alone.

Underneath it all, moving in the same direction, closing the gap between us and the camp with every minute: the sour-wrong scent of something Red can smell and I can’t. Something that hunts venom. Something heading toward whatever Shayla built in the five days she had to rebuild her power.

40

MAEVE

The camp has changed.

We arrive at dawn. The tree line, the same spot where I stood six days ago and looked at fences that were smaller than I remembered. The fences are still torn, Red’s gaps, the wire curled and useless. But someone has built new barriers—wooden stakes, sharpened, driven into the earth in a rough line across the gaps, flimsy, unelectrified, the desperate engineering of someone working with whatever’s left.

My legs stop working for a second at the tree line, the old kind of stopping, the body remembering this ground better than my head wants it to. Four years of my life happened past that line. I make myself breathe. I make myself walk. Camp-brain wants to call this nothing, just a place, wood and dirt, but my pulse is going too hard for nothing.

The generator is still dead. I killed it. The Eunuchs haven’t come back. The compound has the feel of a place that’s been sealed shut—barracks doors closed, clearing lines abandoned, canopy already creeping back in over six days of neglect.

Red stops at the tree line, his nostrils flaring, his head tilting, reading the camp the way he reads everything, slowly, thoroughly.

“Shade,” he says. Low. “There’s a Shade in there.”

My gut twists. “You’re sure?”

“Male. Feral. The scent is—” He pauses. “Wrong. Feral. Caged.” His lip curls. The involuntary snarl of a male who can smell captivity on one of his own.

Lisa is beside me. Her face tight, her sharp eyes scanning the compound. “What the hell has she done?”

We find out.

The compound looks like something that’s been dying for six days and doesn’t know it yet. The cookfire pit is cold, ash scattered. The water barrels sit at the far end of the compound with their lids off, rainwater collecting in the one closest to the barracks.

Six days. Six days of Shayla alone with twenty-five women behind a barracks door, the fences torn, the Eunuchs gone, the generator dead, of whatever she told herself was necessary.

Six days I spent tending Red by a fire, feeling something close to happy. The thought lands like a slap. While I was pressing warm cloths to his ribs and letting him hold me through an orgasm that didn’t hurt, twenty-five women were behind that door with her. Guilt climbs up my throat, thick and sour, even though I know, I know, we needed those days to heal, we couldn’t have come sooner without leaving Red too broken to fight. Knowing doesn’t make the guilt let go of my throat.

Lisa’s hand finds my arm. Squeezes once. The camp-touch that means I’m here, I see it, keep moving.

The sound reaches us before the sight. A low, constant growling, sub-vocal, the kind of sound that vibrates in the ground before it reaches your ears. The sound of something large, contained, and enraged.

I go in through the gap. Red behind me, Lisa beside me. The wooden stakes crunch under Red’s foot. He steps through them like they’re kindling. The compound is empty. No women on the lines. No women in the clearing. The barracks doors shut.

The growling comes from the supply building.