Chapter 22
Khawla
The smoke was not the obstacle the Krektar thought it was—not for my well-honed senses.
I had not counted on the fear I felt, which almost translated into panic, not for myself, but for Jolene and her wards.
She was in this smoke, and so small that anyone of us could easily trample her.
We were also badly outnumbered and did not have the home advantage.
The hold of the ship—with its cold metal floors and strange boxes—was unfamiliar, and we were only three warriors against a dozen.
Then I caught sight of the red-and-black hunter: he slipped around the edges of the fake fog and cut like a blade in the night.
Wherever he went, Krektar were hamstrung or killed, and that made all the difference—until the monster joined the fight: a beast with gray skin hard as stone and fists like boulders.
He swatted my tail with a hammer strike, and the tip went numb and useless beyond the hit.
Broken, but I could not let in the pain when my mate and her human wards were in danger.
Then Felish went down, followed by Akrash, and all seemed doomed.
Where was Jolene? I could not take my eye off the Krektar, or I’d share the same fate as the two Haven hunters.
Then I saw her—just as she unleashed some kind of hairy beast from a crate.
It charged at the big, thick-skinned one, narrowly saving Jolene’s friend.
I fought to take down the last Krektar then, fearing it wouldn’t be enough.
The hairy beast was providing just enough of a distraction to allow me to gain the upper hand. It wasn’t fast enough.
The hairy predator was no match for skin like rock and a hammer the size of a boulder.
He disappeared between stacks of boxes, and then—to my horror—nothing stood in the path of the monster and my mate.
He was charging her, and in that brief moment, so many things flashed through my mind: that I had not told her how much she meant to me, how much she’d changed my life—but I didn’t regret a single thing.
How brave I found her, while being kind at the same time.
The feelings in my chest were so big and encompassing, I had no word for them, no word at all. Yet I wanted to tell her anyway.
I wrenched the last Krektar out of my path and leaped forward, knowing all the while that I wouldn’t reach her before he did.
When he suddenly halted in his path and turned, my relief was fierce and instant.
It shamed me to admit that, for a heartbeat, I didn’t even care that he’d grabbed another human female.
It wasn’t Jolene, which meant she was safe, for now.
Then I knew that she’d want to save this girl at any cost, and I forced myself to focus on that.
The huge gray, horned creature had his big paw around the female’s throat, and she was crying heavily, her eyes leaking so badly that I worried something was wrong with them.
When my younglings cried, it was never like that.
She dangled in his grip, her feet in the air, and blood was dripping along the side of her face.
That was all I needed to see to know that helping her was the right thing to do.
She was weak, injured; she needed my protection as much as—more so than—Jolene did.
So I circled around, knowing I’d need to get the bastard in the back, catch him by surprise.
What would a weak spot be? He seemed like a huge boulder, his thick skin making him impervious to our weapons.
Except… the hairy beast had clawed him in the face.
I clenched my fist around one of my knives, but with my lack of depth perception, I knew I could not risk throwing it.
Not with a human in the way, I could just as easily hit her.
No, I had to circle around and attack him as I…
No! Jolene had drawn the male’s attention, demanding he release “Eva” in exchange for her.
“I’m the one you want. I set that Dragnell loose on you!
Don’t you want payback, you ugly rhino?”
She was walking toward him while I circled around, my tail flicking to touch Felish’s throat as I passed him to make sure he was alive.
Breathing, but out; no obvious wounds. I couldn’t reach Akrash to check and hoped for the best, the focus had to be on my mate.
She’d gotten close enough, and now the big beast dropped his injured hostage and yanked my Jolene into his arms. He was talking—lots and lots of loud words, but ones I could not understand.
“Let her go!” Jasmine was shouting, and she was not the only one firing at the bastard.
The females who had been woken from stasis were all gathered around her, slings like the one Jolene used in hand.
They were lobbing rocks at the gray guy’s back, and when so many did it, it became a rainfall.
Dozens fell in rapid succession. Suddenly, I could see how effective that might be as crowd control.
Unfortunately, this guy’s thick skin just made him twitch and growl in anger.
I slipped into the darkness between the tall stacks of boxes still filled with sleeping humans.
My scales did the rest, blending me into the dark backdrop.
I was as good as invisible. Now, I just needed to get close enough to rescue my mate.
And then I was going to tell her she never, ever got to do that again, sacrifice herself for another? No. I was not losing her.
The tight feeling in my chest did not ease; it only grew stronger.
I could not see her now, but the bastard was still talking in his strange, rumbling tongue.
When an answer came, it was in an even deeper voice, one layered as if it were two voices talking at the same time.
The red-and-black hunter, with his horns and knife-tipped tail, had risen from the wreckage of Krektar bodies.
I’d seen him fight, and he’d been killing his supposed allies.
Now, he had his hands out wide in an obviously placating gesture.
He was trying to talk sense into the gray-horned beast.
Good, keep him distracted; I was almost there.
Sliding a little closer, I could hear Jolene’s rapid breathing and see the edge of her hair just beneath the blunt snout of the sky-creature’s face.
He wasn’t talking, just listening to the red-and-black hunter, but if his tightly clenched jaw was any indication, he wasn’t happy.
That was not good; he was tightening his fist around my mate’s throat, slowly but surely cutting off her air.
I preferred to time my ambush perfectly to minimize risks, but this time I leaped before I knew all the facts.
It didn’t matter, he was about to squeeze the life out of Jolene.
I had to act now. Coiling my tail, I jumped, knife at the ready.
With my arm catching him by the neck, I hauled myself up and then sank my blade deep into his tiny, beady black eye.
He twitched, his hands releasing Jolene so she tumbled to the floor.
I drew in a relieved breath and started to pull back, certain that was a fatal blow.
Maybe it was, eventually. Unless his brain wasn’t where I expected it to be, but he wasn’t immediately out, like I expected.
There was no slide to the floor, no thudding to his knees.
He remained upright, even as Jolene scrambled away and I twisted my knife free and began to back off.
His hammer had already disappeared in the fight with the hairy beast, but, as it turned out, that did not mean he was unarmed.
Lowering his bleeding head, he roared at me, and I raised my knife just as he ducked his head and charged.
I would have dodged him had I had both eyes—I knew it—but my depth perception was skewed, and I was just a fraction too late.
His horns raked me across the side, leaving a fiery pain in their wake.
As he passed, he began to tumble, crashing with a thud to the ground, a deep knife wound visible along his flank, and the red-and-black hunter’s tail dripping with blood as it withdrew.
Gasping for breath, having had it knocked clear out of me, I reached for Jolene and hauled her into my arms. I might be injured, but I knew it wasn’t badly; it was more important to know how she was.
“Are you hurt?” I demanded, my sigils glowing bright gold all over my body as I curled myself protectively around her.
Blood was getting on her fur outer clothing now, but she didn’t care, throwing her arms around my neck and clinging.
“That was terrifying, Khawla! Are you hurt? Oh, shit, that’s a lot of blood,” she said.
Her hands fussed over me, pushing against my shoulders, trying to slide along my side to press against the gouge in my scales.
I wasn’t helping, my arms locking tight around her to hug her close.
My whole body was trembling, and I didn’t understand why.
I’d never had that kind of reaction after a fight before. I was always the cool, levelheaded one.
“I almost lost you,” I said to Jolene. “I can’t lose you.
” The fear that she’d slip from my grasp and die was never going to leave me.
My mind could conjure up far too many scenarios in which that happened, including a dozen situations that might have occurred seconds ago, minutes ago, when we entered this hold and risked our lives.
No, never again. I wasn’t letting her go.
“But you didn’t,” Jolene soothed, her tone distracted as she pressed harder with her small hands against my wound.
“Now let me take care of this before you bleed out and I’m the one losing you.
I can’t let that happen, Khawla. I love you.
” She wriggled in my grip, but I still couldn’t manage to untangle my arms from around her.
Even my tail had begun to coil and wind around her legs.
Then her words began to sink in, and I struggled to wrap my head around them.
She said love. Like that was something meaningful she was supposed to say, to declare it as if she were saying she was my mate.
I’d never heard any mated pair say they loved one another, and yet…
It felt right. That big feeling in my chest, it wasn’t entirely unlike how I’d felt when I’d first held tiny baby Rasho in my arms, or when Kusha had birthed Daois or Nisha and I’d first laid eyes on them.
Huge, encompassing, devastating, and perfect.
Yeah, maybe that was the feeling males had for their mate too, but it was always so complicated…
Not with Jolene, though. Even the complicated parts were amazing.
“Let her go, Naga,” a male voice rumbled, deep, layered.
The words were perfectly recognizable, though the voice was not.
“You are bleeding profusely. That needs a bandage or two,” he said in the dry tone of a warrior used to seeing the gorier side of things—not alarmed, just matter-of-fact.
Still reeling from the emotional revelations, I was barely aware of my wound.
A strange male voice was enough to put me on the alert.
I flicked my eyes from Jolene’s worried face to look over her shoulder at the red-and-black hunter standing behind her.
He had wiped the blade on his tail clean and was sheathing another knife in a holster strapped around his upper leg, his tail flicking back and forth calmly and his eyes on my face.
He’d spoken the same language Jolene spoke, and since we were mated, that meant I understood him.
“Listen to Thor, okay?” my mate said. “Let me look at the wound. And then we need to check on your friends.” She did not appear harmed, I could finally see that, take in that information.
There was redness about her pale throat, but nothing that indicated serious harm.
So I slowly released her, just a little, though not all the way.
She was quickly pulling bandages from the bag at her hip, then pressing them tightly onto the scratch along my side.
The bleeding was already slowing, and it was the bruised ribs, rather than the wound, that ached. It was barely a scratch at all.
“Go back to what you said,” I muttered. My eye flicked around the room to take in the situation at a glance.
Jasmine and the rescued humans were in a huddle together, watching avidly what was going on.
The hairy beast crouched in front of them, in what was clearly a protective posture, blood streaking from his fanged mouth.
Felish was still out cold on the floor, but Akrash had risen from wherever he’d been, blood dribbling from several gashes along his chest. He was next to the downed former Copper Tooth male, checking his pulse just like I’d done not long ago.
All was calm, but it didn’t feel calm yet.
“Tell me what you mean when you say you love me, Jolene. Naga don’t say this,” I added, focused on her now.
Her hands were fast as she wound fabric about my waist, tight enough to support my aching ribs.
That was clever, she’d already figured out what really ailed me.
I wanted her to repeat it, say it again so I could analyze what those words evoked in me.
I craved it the way I craved kissing her.
“I love you, Khawla. I thought I wouldn’t get a chance to say that to you once that big lunkhead got his meaty paws on me…
I love you. I’m really glad you’re my mate.
” Ah, my chest filled with all those big, intense things I felt for her, warmth, caring, lust, and pride.
Yeah, love was a good word for all that.
I loved my younglings. I loved my mate, my Jolene.
Ducking just a little, even though it made my chest ache, I pressed our foreheads together tightly. Then I flicked my tongue against her lips and kissed her deeply. When I drew back, I made sure she was gazing into my one good eye before I said, “I love you, Jolene.”