39. Rhaek
RHAEK
T he crack of it echoed off the walls.
Her head snapped sideways.
She went limp.
All of her, all at once, the way a light goes out. Not gradually. Just gone. Her body twitched once against his arms and then was still. The sound that had caused it was already embedding itself somewhere permanent in me, somewhere I was going to be finding it for years.
The blue-grey male didn't move.
Neither did I.
He looked down at her. Then up at me. Something moved across his face that wasn't grief or understanding. But pure outrage.
"Your kind," he said. Low. Almost quiet. Lower than he'd said anything. "You cross galaxies for them. You pledge yourselves to them. You call it sacred." His lip pulled back from his teeth. "And then you do this."
I held his gaze.
"You watch over them their whole lives," he said. The quiet was gone now, something harder underneath it. "You call that love. You call yourself different from us." He looked down at her again. Then back up. "But you are not different."
I let him finish.
And he came.
Fast. Faster than the flatlands, all that mass finding its velocity, the corridor too narrow to work with. His hands were already coming up. His eyes had nothing in them but the end of this.
I stood there and let him come.
The mist arrived first.
Green, coming through the rock itself, through every crack and joint in the stone, rising from the floor up and filling the corridor fast and total and silent. The smell of it absolute.
His hands were six inches from my throat.
His eyes, in the last half-second, were pure rage.
Then the mist took them.
Then it took everything.
She was going to wake up in a pod.
She was going to be furious with me.
But she was going to be alive and unclaimed to be furious with me.
And the mist took me.