Page 49 of Tracked and Taken

I do not have a word for what changes. The professional is gone. The sound that comes out of his chest is not a purr; it is lower and longer, a frequency my sternum reads as a warning, and the Threshari’s head whips toward it half a beat before Tael moves.

Half a beat is not enough.

I do not see the cross. I see the results. The Threshari’s wrist coming apart, the second blade dropping, Tael’s claws to the knuckle in places not built to hold against claws, and the chest opening sternum to hip in one strike that is not surgical and not professional. It is predatory, in a category I do not currently want to name.

The Threshari is dead. Tael’s claws are wet to the knuckle and he is breathing like he has been holding something at the back of his throat all evening and has just let it out.

The other two are fifteen meters down the spur and closing.

Tael steps in front of me.

The Crex first. Chitin over an olive-brown exoskeleton, two primary arms on a rifle, two secondary arms folded to the thorax that snap open when he registers Tael. Tael does not engage cleanly. Claws through both primary wrists, the rifle clatters, and then the secondary arms come up, and he takes them too. Not breaking. Taking. Off at the joints. Claws to the throat seam and the Crex is down and Tael is already moving, because the Grolic is behind him with a blade the length of my forearm.

Slate-gray, no neck, tusks curving up from the lower jaw, two hundred pounds heavier than Tael and carrying it low. Tael takes the blade across the ribs.

I see it open. The dark line spreading through the dark fabric. He does not break stride. He goes inside the reach, claws through the wrist, the blade drops, and the Grolic’s other hand comes up with a short knife I did not see and lays it across the top of Tael’s shoulder.

Two wounds. Both taken in the four seconds he is between me and the Grolic.

His tail goes around the Grolic’s knee. The coil is tight and a Grolic leg does not bend at the angle it has just been asked to, and the Grolic drops, and Tael takes the throat, and the tusks come up, and he takes them off at the root with the dry crack of ivory giving.

The corridor is quiet. Three on the deck. The worst one somewhere I cannot see. Tael bleeding from two places.

He turns to me. His eyes run my face the way my scanner runs a baseline, eyes, jaw, scar, throat, and then down to my forearm and the blood at my knuckles, and his pupils, only just coming back from the kill, blow wide again.

Two strides. His hand comes up slowly, and one fingertip traces the length of the cut, once, making sure it is what he thinks it is and not something deeper I am downplaying because I am the kind of woman who downplays.

It is what he thinks it is. He breathes.

“Walk. We move.”

“Your ribs.”

“Ship.”

“Your shoulder.”

“Ship, Torres.”

He tries to take my weight on his good shoulder, which is backward, the male bleeding from two places carrying the graze-cut female, and I push him off hard enough to get his attention.

“I take the weight, Vosk. Shut up and walk.”

He walks. I support him. Six-foot-five of lean predator on five-foot-nine of spite and procedure, and we are getting to his ship if I have to drag him.

The concourse is empty.

No keeper. No freighter crew, no Xenari, no hauler with pinpoint pupils. One fewer ship on the docking board: the berth the Draelith independent was in when we arrived.

“His ship is out.”

“That doesn’t mean he is.”

I stop. Of course it doesn’t. Of course, a male whose presence in a doorway rearranged Tael’s whole body does not finish a job by getting on the ship he is supposed to be on. He sends the team and stays. The empty bar is not abandonment; it is dispersal. Every civilian moved out of his line for whatever he decides next.

“Walk, Torres.” His arm tightens across my shoulders. “Don’t look around. Don’t slow down. He’s watching, and the second we look is the second we tell him we know.”

“He’s letting us go.”