Chapter 7 Rainer
RAINER
Almost every day, Mama told me to only trust what you see, not what you’re told. Your eyes don’t lie, but every living thing does.
As we walk, the tension is very loud. I can feel it as much as hear it crackle between us. No one has spoken in the last hour.
I try not to look at Drystan behind me since it seems to anger Keary even more. Keary, who can control the goddamn sun’s rays! What the actual fuck is that?
Yes, he said that he could do as much, but I could say that I’m a bird. It doesn’t make it true. Maybe even more badass is the way Notto single-handedly took down a thing like eighty-times bigger than him.
With. His. Bare. Hands.
This is shit. This is the fucking shit nightmares are made of.
The sun begins to sink into the horizon, making the shadows long. My hip begins to ache in a way it never has before while walking. Uncoincidentally, it’s the same hip that had poison running through it. I really hope this isn’t a thing.
“Are we going to stop for the night somewhere?” Drystan asks.
“No,” Keary answers.
“The human needs to sleep,” Notto says.
Keary looks at me as if he forgot I was there. “Right.”
“We passed a house that looked like it was in reasonable shape ten minutes ago,” Drystan offers.
Keary doesn’t speak as he turns us around. We don’t take the lead this time but follow Notto and Drystan. With them in front of me, I can study them without Keary getting… angry.
I’d half-expected either Keary or Drystan to climb into my bed back at the shelter. The way they flirted and hinted and practically outright said they wanted to fuck just led me to believing it would happen.
I’m going to pretend I wasn’t at all disappointed when I woke up hard every morning with no sign of help getting off.
So I was definitely taken off guard when Drystan suddenly kissed me. I’d barely had time to comprehend what he was doing before Keary practically threw him off me. Now, I’m left wondering if I’d have responded if my brain had caught up with the events of the past few seconds.
My dick was on board. I’m either so horny that any touch is going to do it for me or I find Drystan far more attractive than I realized. Maybe it’s a combination of the two.
The house that Drystan points out is in far better shape than the vast majority of buildings I’ve been around. Houses weren’t meant to last a hundred years without upkeep. Nature takes the land back, and houses become collateral.
After checking out the building, Notto determines that it’s less structurally sound than it appears. The garage is safest, so we set up camp there. Using the last rays of the sun, Keary gets a fire going using debris we gather from around the yard.
I help him since he seems rather put out by the idea of me remaining close to Drystan. I’m primarily amused by the situation. He’s not exactly treating me like a possession, which I’m definitely being mindful of. That’s not a future I’m willing to allow myself to get caught up in.
I think it’s… jealousy I’m seeing. That’s confirmed when Notto sits beside me, far closer than he’s been over the last week, and asks Keary, “Am I allowed to sit beside your human pet?”
Almost visibly, Keary’s hackles rise. “Keep your hands to yourself, and I won’t care.”
Notto does keep his hands to himself… for a while. Then there are little touches—I’d call them innocent—as he passes me a canteen of freshly gathered water or some jerky from his bag. Our fingers brush. He leans in close, right in my space.
Keary’s hackles rise again, and he’s practically growling.
I think it’s about to come to a head when I hear it—the sound I’ve been waiting for. A low hum-clicking sound. I’m not the only one who takes notice of it, though. The entire group falls silent, so the only sounds are the crackling of the fire and the beast.
Grinning, I shift to my knees and turn in the direction I think it’s coming from.
Her head pokes around the side of the house. Notto is on his feet a second before anyone else, something gleaming in his hands. Threatening.
“Don’t touch her,” I say as I get to my feet and pass them. Kaida’s ears drop as she leaps toward me. It’s elegant, exciting, and even almost magical as she hovers a beat too long with each bounce.
She barrels into me, sending me backward, and lies across my chest and stomach to lick my face with her crazy long tongue. I laugh, trying to avoid said tongue getting in my mouth, and wrap her tightly in my arms.
“What took you so long?” I ask, not expecting an answer. Beasts don’t talk, after all.
A shadow stands over us, and Kaida’s wiggly excitement stops as she glares up at the three monsters hovering over us. I feel the way her body tenses, ready for an attack. Recognizing the threat that they are, she’s prepared for retaliation.
“None of you are allowed to hurt each other,” I say. “But she will hurt you if you become a threat to me.” I hope they take that warning to heart.
I’m not going to pretend to know how to recognize different species of monsters and what they can do. I’ve definitely seen some spectacular shit in my lifetime, maybe the most impressive being Notto and Keary a few hours ago.
But I’ve also seen what Kaida can do, and her small size shouldn’t be discounted.
“You’re acquainted with the lut?” Keary asks.
“Her name is Kaida,” I answer. “Yes. She found me shortly after my parents died and hasn’t left my side since.”
“Except for the past week,” Drystan muses.
“She was luring the quill-beast away. She’d have found me when we escaped. She always has.”
“And you were teasing when you called him a pet,” Drystan says to Notto, laughing.
“Was I?” Notto answers.
I ignore them and press my face into Kaida’s chest. She’s mostly fur here, but the back of her neck is all feathers.
My heart gives a little leap. Fuck, I’ve missed you, I think.
There’s a chance that she hears me. Kaida nuzzles the side of my head, and her tail thumps on my legs a couple times in response.
We get up from the ground, and Kaida plants herself at my side as we retake our seats around the fire. Her nose immediately goes to my ankle that had the quill through it. She roots around the injury for a while, pressing her cold nose against my skin.
Keary seems distracted by Kaida’s presence, his smile now back as he watches her. Since I’m not looking to get choked up, and I think talking about her will bring me there right now, I decide to ask a question to get them talking.
“You keep referring to the group of monsters I’m looking for as pods as opposed to Houses. What’s the difference?”
“A House is a family,” Keary says. “Way back when the world was… densely populated, it was a single family—be that your parental family or your romantic family, depending on what stage in life you were in. I belonged to the House of Ra, which consisted of my parents and me. Notto belonged to the House of Ioa, which was his parents and him.”
I look at Drystan.
He gives me a demure smile. “I belonged to a lab.”
I flinch. “Sorry.”
Drystan shrugs.
“What makes up a House is different now,” Keary continues. “My family was absorbed into another as we worked to redefine our lives in the new normalcy of a world after Silence. Now we’re a group of close families, generally under a common classification. In our case, we’re divine monsters.”
“Two gods and a teko,” I note. Two of them make sense, at least.
“Teko is my species,” Drystan says, then makes a face.
“In a way. Teko genetics are all over the place. Some will say that we’re all new, individual species, which is our common denominator, giving us the collective name teko.
But from there, we can still be broken down into classes of monsters.
There are shifters and healers and demonic affinities.
” He waves his hand in an etcetera motion.
“That kind of thing. Which actually makes us more closely, uh, suitable for some families. When I was rescued from the experiment camp, I was given a name instead of a number by a really nice lady. We talked about what I could do and took the label ‘experiment’ off me in an attempt to get rid of the negative connotation associated with it. Now, I’m considered a ‘soul’ by her parameters.
Because souls are associated with deities and gods, life and death, souls have been classified as divine monsters. ”
“That’s… I have more questions than I started with,” I admit.
“Let’s finish the first question,” Keary says.
“Houses are families. Houses tend to live in what you call compounds, where there are tons of Houses forming a city. We share resources and live in communities. That’s the most common way that monsters live—within the compounds—because survival is easier and it allows us to retain some sense of normalcy from the life we had before Silence got their claws on the world around us.
Obviously, as you know, some don’t live within compounds for whatever reasons they choose.
The pods aren’t families. They’re not even necessarily made up of the same classes of creatures.
They’re survivors of the Division of Silence who are attempting to finish what they started. ”
My blood turns cold as I stare at them. “Killing off humans?”
“Eh,” Keary says, wiggling his hand back and forth. “Believe it or not, you’re a byproduct of their actual goal. You’re a… tool.”
“You’re a womb to grow experiments,” Drystan says, giving me an apologetic smile.
I frown. “I don’t have a womb.”
“No. Weirdly enough, they’d always gathered males as well. I think they were trying to find a way to use them as wombs. Males were just as much of an experiment as I am, but in a different way. You’re the specimen they’re trying to manipulate. I’m the completed project.”
“I’m disturbed by the way you talk about this as if it’s… just another random birth.”