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CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Visla

“You should come away from the water, lady. The tides are getting high,” Huvos said.

I pointed toward a glint of light shining behind a row of rocks forming a cliff on the far side shore. “Do you see that?”

“I do. It’s probably just wreckage from ship. I’ll use a boat and go check it out, but you should get back inside and get some rest,” Huvos said. “There’s lots of food too. Zedrekian food. Shellfish and things that live at the bottom of the sea.”

I wrapped the long shawl tightly around my arms and mid-section and turned. “I’m not hungry,” I mumbled.

Huvos was right. There was no sense in standing at the shore. It wouldn’t lead me back to Khol any time soon. He had specifically told me to go to Xtarra where I would wait for him. I hadn’t even gotten there yet and I was already thinking about rebelling.

To appease Huvos, I started off in the direction of the camp and sleeping quarters that were lent to us by the Zedreks. They’d been hospitable thus far but warned us that going any deeper into their forest would cause everyone but me, of course, to be weakened without the sun. I guess that’s why they called this side of the borders—the grey colony. Still, what lay beyond the grey colony was even more mind-boggling. I’d heard stories of monsters that lived in nothing but blackness that were blind and used only their sense of smell to see. They were even worse than the vuli canadensi when it came to violence.

As I walked barefooted across the sand, I nearly stepped on a slimy sea worm. The thing had a wide nose and one big eye. It reared up, hissing like a snake, and looked at me then shrieked. Huvos came up with his sword and sliced the worm in half. It fell limply to the ground and turned into a small puddle of black tar.

“Did you have to kill it, Huvos?” I asked.

He looked at me with an innocent gleam in his eyes and shrugged. “I thought it was good meat. Looked like that sausage thing they served us for breakfast.”

That was the thing about being on another colony with a race different from the human race or the Aurrakian race for that matter. We had no idea what was good or bad. But of course, it was said that the Tirizar would eat anything they could kill if they had to.

We hadn’t taken three steps before we heard the hissing sound again. And there wasn’t just one. There were more. Coming straight for us. Huvos hacked at the ground, killing what he could catch. Then he stopped when he realized, that the strange worm-like creatures posed no threat. They fled right past us. They were fleeing from something else.

Out of the middle of nowhere, we heard an engine roar and a ground cruiser charged out of nowhere. The occupant was wearing all black, except for his belt, which gleam like silver.

Huvos shoved me out of the way and went into action quickly. Any sane person wouldn’t jumped out of the path of the cruiser, but he barreled right to it. He propelled himself forward and collided with the occupant on the bike. They tumbled into the sand and the bike skidded across the ground coming to a halt near the shore where the engines continued to run for quite some time after it crashed.

Everything happened so quickly, I hardly had time to catch my breath.

If I hadn’t learned already, I had proof that night confirming the reason why no one messed with a Tirizar Hordesman. Huvos sat on the biker’s back and held his face down into the dirt. As I stood by and watched in horror, I wondered if the man might choke on the sand and die.

The biker wasn’t a full blood Aurrakian. His hair was a golden blond and his skin gave off a grayish tint. He possessed no scales or visible reptilian traits on his skin. He had to have been mixed with another race, but I couldn’t tell what. Nonetheless, he was here.

Huvos lifted the biker’s long hair and ripped a metal wire from his nape. “Bounty hunter. Margud,” he growled. “Who sent you?”

The biker had a mouth full of sand and he coughed and fought to break loose.

I had never known anyone who would try and strangle someone by wrapping their own hair around their neck, but that’s exactly what Huvos was doing to the biker.

The biker held his hands up over his head. “Please…I’ll tell you…”

“Speak!”

The biker panted. “I hunt for the girl. That one. The human.” He pointed at me.

I gasped.

“Who sent you?”

“The rogue queen,” he rasped.

Instantly I knew who he was talking about. My hunch was correct all along. Something had happened in Dretis.

“My bag there, by my bike, is full of coins. Treasure. Hordesman, you can be a rich man. Turn her over and no one will ever find out. Take the coins and you have your freedom from your horde-pack. Buy your way onto any land.”

“Nyet yin, Margud mateyari. Si thela pro sis.”

‘No coins, Margud hunter. I’ll take your head,’ Huvos told him.

“Then perhaps you desire something else…” the Margud hunter stuttered.

Huvos must’ve let his guard done. The biker extracted a small blade from his boots and slashed it across Huvos’s neck. The deep bloody gash to his throat didn’t stop Huvos. He dragged the biker all the way down to the shore and buried his face in the water. When the guy stopped moving, I knew he was dead. True to Huvos’s word, he then extracted his axe and beheaded the Margud hunter.

Then Huvos came marching toward me, huffing and puffing. “We must leave this place at once, lady.”

I couldn’t agree more.