Chapter 25
SANTIAGO
‘Let me fokkin’ go.’
Santi fought his hermano with viciousness.
He twisted and broke free from Kaal’s grasp with a primal surge, his body blazing with a halo of spectral fire.
Kaal retreated with a wolfish grin. ‘Fokk, now have at it. I don’t need to lose a limb because you’re all het up.’
‘I have to go after her. Best thing you can do, if you call me brother, is to return to the Bruto and have my six.’
Violet and gold energy shimmered around him as the wolf in him pulsed to life.
Santi shot upward, his massive lycan force shattering through the Crimson Shrike’s upper ceiling and bursting into open space.
Ahead, the Vermilion Claw veered hard star-ward, already burning through its thrusters. Its grotesque, scarred hull glinted red against the black, its jagged flaps and wing-sails shuddering as it picked up speed.
Santi’s eyes locked onto it, rage narrowing his focus to a single point in the void: her.
Without hesitation, he banked into a pursuit arc, claws dragging light behind him like comet tails.
A flash bloomed from the Claw.
Missiles, two of them.
Slick, curved, and nasty, with beam-threaded spines and targeting codes screaming for his spectral form.
‘Miral,’ he barked through the neural link, ‘do not fire on the Claw. Soleil’s on board.’
‘Understood,’ came the tight, crisp reply. ‘Engaging long-range support only.’
The torpedoes raced in his direction.
He twisted hard, curving beneath a debris cluster and leading the projectiles toward a nearby asteroid belt.
His breath heaved, muscles straining, every fight instinct on alert, focused only on the Claw’s trajectory.
He couldn’t afford to lose it and her, now.
The enemy ship kept pace behind him like a bloodthirsty predator.
‘Come on, mongrel,’ Varnok’s voice crackled over open comms, distorted with static and malice. ‘Show me that famous Signet fire. Or are you only brave when your bitch is on your lap?’
Santi didn’t answer. He grit his teeth and pushed harder, leading the warheads closer to the rock cluster.
Timing it to perfection, he banked around a jagged, rotating asteroid, then shot vertical.
The missiles clipped a series of rock faces before detonating.
The shockwave kicked through the void, an inferno cascading over the asteroid’s surface like oil-fed flame.
Santi burst free, shielded by his spectral bloom, vision searing with light.
Behind him, the enemy vessel let out another round of fire. Plasma beams sliced the black, licking at his heels.
‘Santi, I’m inbound!’ Miral’s voice pulsed through the comms. ‘The Bruto is clearing the meteoroid field now. Thirty seconds.’
‘I don’t have that time!’ he barked, dodging a barrage that would have melted a lesser shifter in mid-space.
The Claw dipped, swooped, and cut beneath him, Varnok giving chase with sick glee, launching potshots like a cat toying with its prey, each strike a taunt.
From the corner of his eye, Santi spotted the Bruto break through the debris belt.
The Signet corvette moved like a war-forged god, its black and violet hull gleaming with etched markings, its prow lit by engine fire, twin drive cores rumbling like thunder in the void.
Along its sides, the mounted cannons rotated and tracked but never fired, Miral holding them steady, respecting Santi’s command.
‘Kaal,’ Santi called out, breath ragged, ‘I’m pushing him your way. Box him in. Take out its engines, and stop that fokkin’ ship, so I can glimmer in and end this with Varnok.’
Also, so that he might face a reckoning with his woman.
‘Copy,’ Kaal replied. ‘I’m ready.’
Santi grinned through the pain.
His spectral form shuddered and surged again, claws bristling with starlight.
Hold on, mi sol, he thought. I’m coming.
SOLEIL
Soleil braced herself against the trembling walls of the Vermilion Claw, her heart jack-hammering.
Her eyes were on the view outside as it pulsed with the violet-gold streak of Santi’s ethereal figure weaving through space.
Her breath caught, anguish and longing for her lover twisting in her gut.
He was still alive. Still fighting and still chasing their ship.
Even though her father was trying to murder him.
She twisted and lunged toward the weapons console, where Varnok stood, eyes blazing, fingers poised over the manual cannon release.
‘Stop this fokkin’ cat and mouse game now,’ she snarled at him.
Varnok didn’t bother to glance at her. The mad glint in his crimson-gold irises was beyond reason, beyond redemption.
‘He’s nothing but fodder,’ Varnok growled. ‘Handsome, maybe, but never worth your rage.’
She grabbed his arm, yanking it back with all her strength. ‘You’ll kill him!’
Varnok roared and turned, shoving her so hard she flew backward.
Her body hit the floor with a sickening thud, air forced from her lungs.
The breath fled from her chest as her ribs screamed, and her vision faltered.
The metallic tinge of blood pooled at the corner of her mouth.
She stayed down for a second, eyes locked on the monster before her; her father.
A twisted titan of searing red energy cloaked him now, his body pulsing with malformed wolfish rage, horn-like bone ridges over his brow, fur patchy and scorched, his snout elongated and cracked with glowing fissures.
He was no longer a man. Nor a wolf. He was an unholy revenant carved in fire and lunacy.
In that moment, Soleil knew.
There was no bringing him back, no soft corner of her father’s spirit left to beseech.
Her tormentor’s sanity was receding into a deranged, vengeance-laced beast.
Her hand slipped beneath her coat, fingers curling around the bomb in her pocket.
For a beat, her mind raced through all the ways she might still escape.
Then her breath slowed. A stillness took her.
For there were no more chances, no more running.
She stood on shaking legs, blood seeping down her temple.
Varnok was snarling at he viewscreen, laughing manically as he flung another missile at her lover.
She’d had enough.
Soleil inched to a console and tapped in a series of commands, overriding security protocols with her Red Queen designation.
She also sent out a subliminal message aimed at Miral, the Signet’s Synth AI.
With a deep inhale, she eased away from the controls as her hand palmed the modulated explosive device from her inner jacket pocket.
Her finger brushed the activation glyph.
‘I’m sorry, Santi,’ she whispered. ‘There’s no other way.’
With an intake of breath, she hurled the bomb at the ferrous grating on the floor between her and Varnok.
A mere second later, she snapped her fingers.
A flicker of spectral potency wrapped around her, a last-second shield of crimson energy shaped like wings, closing tight.
Panels buckled, walls cracked. The hull ruptured.
It’s a new season, a new dawn, fly little bird, you’re free.
The melody drifted from a corner of her memory, from a time she scarcely remembered.
A lullaby once hummed by a woman with lemon and cocoa-scented hair and hands soft as velvet.
The song was all Soleil heard, even as a scream of light and combustion burst from the incendiary.
The Claw’s belly ripped apart in a blast of searing white-gold fire, detonation cracking the floor apart like dry ice beneath boiling metal.
Varnok was engulfed, his spectral fur in flames as the blast wave, tinged with giant tendrils of radiant energy, curled and shredded through his frame.
Even as bulkheads and steel guarders were vaporized into atomized glitter as The Claw’s last luminescence painted the heavens in wild hues.
Her world fell to black.
SANTIAGO
Santi, I’ve received an urgent message from Soleil. She says to stay back and keep a safe distance from the enemy ship.
Miral’s communique was clipped and urgent in Santi’s neural node.
‘The fokk?’ he growled, trying to make sense of it, eyes on the attacking vessel.
Without warning, the Vermilion Claw erupted before his eyes.
One moment, the crimson-threaded beast of a ship twisted through the abyss, her retro-thrusters flaring as she tried to gun him down.
The next, the void filled with a shrieking, sun-splitting scream of light.
The explosion punched outward in an expanding corona of molten debris and spectral energy.
The resultant shockwave burst from the epicenter like a god’s fist, beautiful, ruinous, and catastrophic, as if a dying star turned inside out.
Santi hovered mid-space, frozen in a split second of agonizing clarity, as the ship Soleil was on board, reduced to flaming shards and vaporized fragments.
Scarlet fire bloomed through the cosmos, flaring in brilliant curls of gold and carmine that seemed to singe the very fabric of the heavens.
He howled into the stars. ‘Nada.’
He got no response from the vast void, only a cold emptiness that mirrored his core.
His vision fractured when a second wave of light hit, illuminating debris as shards of hull plating spiraled toward him, dancing like jagged angels of death.
Still, he didn’t move; he simply couldn’t.
‘Soleil -.’
Her name left his lips as a broken whisper, his voice cracking in the comms, followed by a desperate refrain of ‘Nada, nada, nada.’
Agony tore through his chest as he lunged forward, wild and reckless, as though his grief alone possessed the power to snatch back the fragments of her from the fire and oblivion that claimed The Claw.
‘FOKKKKKKKK!’ His roar ripped through the neural comms like a thunderclap, piercing the emptiness.
‘Santi! Get into the Bruto, now!’
Kaal’s voice, raw, distant, and panicked, broke through the channel, but the XO didn’t hear him.
Nor did he sense the heat peeling past his skin, or the radiation gnawing at the edges of his aetheric bloom, nor the shrapnel slicing through him.
All that existed for him was the place she last stood, the flare of light that swallowed her whole.
His woman. Gone.
All because he chose to come after her.
All because he believed, just for one stupid, star-crossed moment, that they might still have a second chance.
A massive, spectral force slammed into him, dragging him away from the heart of the blast.
Kaal wrapped around him mid-flight like a protective comet, shifting them both in an explosive teleport toward the Bruto.
The airlock clanged shut just as a sheet of shrapnel screeched across the hull, denting the steel and blackening the outer plating.
Miral, waiting on the med deck, scanned Santi and barked orders to Kaal: ‘Get him stabilized! Core vitals.’
Kaal waved a med kit over him. ‘Hermano, you’ve a death wish, every time you wade into a fray you go hard, fokk.’
Santi was already too far gone to register any activity or conversation.
He pushed his friends with great force and stumbled from the med bed, all the way back to the bridge.
He reached his arms out, his claws still extended, palms on the plexiglass.
His spectral form flickered between human and wolf, shuddering with the raw grief.
He didn’t speak, he didn’t blink, and he scarcely breathed.
His eyes were open but glazed over, and his mouth slack as he stared through the forward viewport.
Where the remains of the Claw burned like the funeral pyre of a goddess.
Miral’s hand hovered over his shoulder, then she dropped it.
‘Stay by him, grieve with him,’ she murmured to Kaal. ‘He’s in soul-shock.’
So they did, keeping an eye on him, feeding and watering him, sitting beside him, lending them their strength as he keened into his silent grief.
For three days, the Bruto made its long trek back to The Sombra, slinking through broken asteroid belts and plasma storms.
In that time, Santi didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, and didn’t speak; he just stared out into the void of space, ghost-eyed, as if he had buried his heart in the ashes of the burning Claw.