Chapter 12 #2
Rising was much harder than I thought was possible, it made my head spin, and the room danced around me.
Srazz’s familiar chortle came from my left, and then I felt the warmth from his head as he nudged my elbow.
I pulled him into my arms and held him, soaking in his familiar presence, and taking comfort from that.
“Thank you, my friend. I would not have made it without your help,” I told him, and I was rewarded for my affection with a nip on my scales.
The room was white, as any healing room I’d visited had been.
This one had three nests lined up against a wall with medical devices around them.
I was occupying one such nest, but there was no one else present.
Through transparent panels, another room was visible, set up with more ancient machines that blinked with lights.
Still functioning after all this time. There was no sign of the Shaman that ran this room, but this definitely looked like the place of such a learned Naga.
Getting over the edge of the nest took effort, my scales rattled along my spine as I forced my aching body to move. I felt heavy and exhausted, but I had no time for rest when my mate was in danger.
“Hey, stop that!” a voice warned as a stranger rushed into the room with his arms outstretched.
He caught me by the shoulders and started pushing me back into the nest with embarrassing ease.
He was a Thunder Rock male, recognizable by his blue scales, though his were a particularly pale shade of silvery blue.
“I have to go,” I warned him. “My mate needs me.” He growled low with exasperation and continued pushing me back against the soft pillows in the nest. I did not want to be comfortable and cared for when Farah was in danger. I could not sit here and do nothing.
“You mated males are all the same,” the Naga huffed, his eyes narrowing in warning when he started to lift his hands from my shoulders.
“But I did not just spend eight hours working on putting you back together just so you can undo it all.” He shifted slightly when I remained lying down, struggling to get my body to muster another surge of strength to get up. “Tell him, Zathar.”
“I will, Corin,” another male said with a hint of amusement tinging his voice.
The paler of the two former Thunder Rock males moved aside with a warning glare, and now I could see who else had joined us.
Zathar, the azure leader of this place, Outcast Haven, but more interestingly, next to him stood his human mate.
She was about the same size as my Farah, but she had pale hair and pale eyes.
Even her skin was much paler than my mate’s was.
Her eyes were kind and sympathetic when she approached the foot of the nest and placed her small hands on the edge.
Her belly was big and round, clearly showing she was carrying a youngling.
When she spoke, the same melodic waterfall of words came from her that I was used to hearing from Farah when she and I did not touch.
A frown furrowed her forehead when I did not respond to whatever she had just said, and she twisted her head to look at her mate. “You cannot understand my Vera?” Zathar asked immediately, a hint of curiosity and suspicion coloring his voice.
I shrugged, then masked a wince when sharp pain shot through my chest at several of the places I’d been lacerated by that nasty weapon the revenant had used.
“Should I? Farah and I can only understand one another when we touch…” I knew that was supposed to happen for mates, but I could not recall if there was anything else about that touch and the mating bond between us.
Zathar and Vera seemed to think so, and it made a pit open in my belly. Had I messed that up too?
“Once you’ve seeded your mate,” Zathar confirmed. “If she is human. We assumed so, but you were out cold so we could not ask…” He frowned as if the idea of a Naga female as my mate troubled him. Would he not have sent aid if that was the case? They had sent males to rescue her, hadn’t they?
“Please, you must help Farah. You have to save her!” I struggled again to rise and Corin hissed and leaned forward to pin me in place with one hand.
He narrowly avoided a nip from Srazz as my friend tried to defend me.
The Ayala bared his long but straight orange front teeth and raised all the spikes on his rump, growling and posturing at what had to be the Shaman, though I’d never met him and I was certain I knew them all.
Srazz might be a prey animal, a forager of nuts and berries, but he was a big male for his species, ready to defend what he considered his territory.
The pale blue male dared to keep his hand in place on my shoulder, still forcing me to stay on the nest, but he coiled his body out of the way.
The way he moved proved to me that he was more than just a Shaman, he had training as a warrior too, and the instincts on top of that.
He bared his fangs in warning at Srazz and anger surged in his mercury eyes.
I snatched Srazz up and pressed him to my chest, heedless of his raised spines and their ability to stab me along the vulnerable wounds slashing through my protective scales.
I bared my own fangs back at the male, warning him to back off from threatening my pet.
Warning him that I’d fight him if he kept that damn hand on my shoulder, he’d lose it, and I didn’t care one bit that he’d been the one that healed me.
He was standing in my way, telling me I could not save my mate.
“Easy,” Zathar warned, sliding his body between his Clansmale and the medical nest. He kept a more cautious distance from Srazz, who was struggling in my arms to get to Corin, still rumbling with a mean growl.
At least their Shaman had let go of me and was backing up, arms crossed over his chest and a deep frown furrowing his silvery blue brow.
“Calm the Ayala, please. He’s been a menace since Ekkire left with the tracking party,” Zathar sounded amused, rather than bothered by Srazz’s interfering.
I latched on to the more important information, the tracking party.
That meant they had sent people after the revenant and my mate.
Except, I hadn’t told them about the remnant from the past that had stolen my female.
I had lost consciousness before I could warn them of the danger.
“I have to go; I have to warn them!” I didn’t try to rise from the nest this time.
Instead, I shifted my gaze to glance at the human female still hovering at the end of the nest. She was so different in appearance from Farah, and yet, she looked so much the same too.
I pleaded with her with my eyes, although I knew I could not understand her words.
“Warn them of what?” Zathar demanded, his body swayed over me, just enough for him to block my line of sight to the female.
She was his mate, and he did not like it when another male looked too long.
I understood that; I had not liked the thought of bringing Farah here much, for exactly that reason.
I would take all the stares now, if only that meant I had her safely in my arms.
“The revenant,” I said, my voice growing hoarse as I remembered what it had looked like.
The abomination had been shaped just like a Naga, with a tail, torso, and even a face though his appearance had been severely damaged.
He was a horror, a monster, and he’d snatched my mate from the shadows.
I did not know why he took her, and I did want to not contemplate what he could be doing to her right now.
My body trembled as I fought the urge to leap from the nest to chase after her.
They would not let me go, not yet, because they thought I was not healed enough.
I did not care, but I would let them think I was agreeing and then slip away when their backs were turned.
“A revenant stole her from my den, it looked like one of us. It is dangerous, with weapons you cannot imagine.”
I recalled the cool slice of a hundred blades colliding with my flesh, the burning pain, and the weakness that followed.
I should be dead, those blows should have killed me on the spot.
The journey here, the laborious night of pain and fear, that should not have happened.
I did not know how I’d found the willpower to crawl and swim around Ahoshaga Peak to locate the camp.
“Your mate is in good hands,” Zathar assured me, his voice sounding like it came from far away as it pierced my pain-filled memories.
“Nearly all aspirants volunteered for the job, and they are led by Krashe and Iave. Krashe was once the Warlord for Bitter Storm, there is no male more suited to tracking and fighting a revenant than him.”
I did not think that anything they said could ease my mind, but those words did help, a little.
All Bitter Storm warriors were adept at underground tracking and fighting, as the Clan lived deep in caves inside their mountains.
They were also the only ones that ranged beyond the mountains to the west where revenants came and went like the changing of the seasons.
And a former Warlord? He would be a fighter of incomparable skill.
“How many?” I asked. My hands eased up their grip on Srazz now that he had calmed, he’d turned his body around to lay himself down across my torso, his snout pressed to my throat.
He was pressing on my wounds but I did not care, I deserved that pain for failing Farah.
For not leaving her in a den that was safe, for abandoning her the way I had, and failing to rescue her from the revenant.
“Thirty,” Zathar answered. “They left almost immediately. Your trail was easy to follow.” It was not, they would run into the sections where I’d gone into the water to speed up my passage, but if Ekkire was with them, he would know which way I’d traveled.
The female spoke then, first something sharp and full of warning towards the silvery Corin, and then she directed words at her mate.
“Ah, Vera wants to know where you found Farah, and if there were more humans,” Zathar translated easily. He offered me a friendly, encouraging smile but that expression hardened when I leaned to the side to look at his female.
“At the bottom of a lake,” I said hoarsely, recalling the ice-cold dive into water so deep and dark that it had looked like a black mirror.
She had been so beautiful, asleep inside that strange egg, a protective shell that had failed her, and slowly started taking her strength and her life.
I knew that if I had not taken her from that pod when I had, she would have died. “No others,” I added darkly.
The female, Vera, said more words, excitement making them grow higher in pitch and far more rapid.
Zathar cocked his head, “I should have known that a Water Weaver would be capable of fishing that stasis pod out of those depths. How long ago?” He had not translated her words, I was certain, and she was not pleased if the frown and glare were any indication.
“Two months,” I said truthfully. “I was going to bring her here. After I discovered your camp yesterday.” Farah would have been so happy to be with others of her kind, I knew that much.
It would be hard for me to live here, I needed my solitude, and I would have to fight my natural inclination to travel, but it would be worth it to make her happy.
Now I didn’t know if I would ever see her again.
This damn weakness was maddening, I needed to recover, I needed to be stronger. But what I really needed was for them to leave so I could get out of there and do what I should have been doing all along. Hunt the monster that stole her.
“Vera wants to know why you have not mated her yet if you had her for two months,” Zathar asked, amusement tinging his voice. The human made a very rude noise, which made me think that wasn’t at all what she wanted to know, this was his curiosity.
I bared my teeth at him, more tired than I wanted to admit after all this talking.
“She was sick, she did not wake for weeks.” It was none of his business, but the words tumbled from my mouth as I recalled those first days when she woke.
I had never been happier than when I was learning all I could of my mate, and when I could finally court her.
“She has not told me she accepted my courtship yet.”
The female laughed and rolled her eyes, rapidly speaking to her male.
Zathar turned his head to me after listening intently and regaled me with a very serious stare.
“You must tell her you ‘dig’ her, my mate says. Humans don’t have mates, so you must take the lead.
” He glanced back at Vera when she spoke some more but he rolled a shoulder and again did not translate.
“I know you Water Weavers are very polite when it comes to females, forget about that. Forget it all. Show her.”
He turned away, ducked, and flung his female up in his arms and the two left the room under the sound of bright, female laughter and the husky growls of a male in heat.
Pain that had nothing to do with my wounds stabbed my chest, I wanted what they had.
They acted like they believed they would find Farah for me, but I could not share their faith.
The tunnels beneath Ahoshaga ran deep and they were convoluted, strange, and noisy.
Wherever the revenant had taken her, it would be hard to find them.