Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Njkall’s hand closed around the bar a hand’s breadth from Polly’s skull. The rusted metal bit into his palm and the shock of the blow traveled up his arm. Another growl, deep and grinding, emerged from his throat before he could stop it. His mate had almost been broken in front of him.
The other human female froze. She stared up at him, and every drop of color that the cold had left in her face drained out of it. Her fingers went slack on the bar, and she scrambled back into a crevice, crouching down with her arms over her head.
Restraint, he told himself, and he unclenched his jaw. He unclenched his hand and let the bar drop. The growl died in his throat, although it cost him. He had come within a breath of watching that bar cave in Polly’s skull. His hands were still shaking with it.
“Njkall,” Polly said sharply. She was on her feet between them, looking at the cowering female in the corner. “Stop. You’re scaring her.”
“She nearly—” He made himself stop and breathe. “You put yourself in front of it.”
“I know.”
“You put yourself between her and the bar.”
“I know, Njkall.” She said it without turning around, and there was a steel in her voice he rarely heard from her.
Her voice softened as she sank back down on the cold floor, making herself small and safe again.
“Tess, look at me. It’s all right. He wasn’t going to hurt you.
He thought you were going to hurt me, that’s all.
He was protecting me. He would never touch you. Never. I promise.”
Tess didn’t lift her head, but she didn’t lunge, either.
Her breath came in ragged, whistling gasps behind the shield of her arms. He stood very still.
He knew that fear. He had spent a year learning to make himself smaller so it would ease from Polly’s eyes.
He took one slow step back, into the passage, until the shadows took most of him and only his outline remained.
“I’ll back away, little one,” he said, his voice as soothing as he could make it. “But perhaps it would be best to continue making friends outside. Before the branch collapses.” Another groan from the rock underlined his words.
Polly looked over her shoulder at him, her grey eyes wide and her lips pressed into a thin line, but she nodded.
“Tess,” she said. “We need to go.”
The female stayed curled into a ball, shaking.
He leaned his shoulders against the cold rock and closed his eyes and let his mate do the thing he could not do.
It was not in his nature to stand aside.
Every instinct he owned wanted to gather up his mate and this other fragile creature and carry them somewhere warm and safe and defended, whether they liked it or not.
He held himself still against the stone and did not.
“Please.” Polly’s voice cracked, but she held her ground. “Tess. You’re freezing, and you’re still scared, I know, but I can’t leave you here. Please come with me.”
A long moment passed. Another trickle of stones fell from the ceiling, and Tess finally raised her head, slowly.
“Can I have my weapon?”
“Of course,” Polly said.
He waited until Tess had picked up the bar, keeping his entire body perfectly still. He didn’t move towards her. He backed slowly out of the cave, giving them the whole width of the passage, and he let Polly lead her out.
The other warriors had backed away, not gone but hidden in the snow, and only Cera remained.
He’d brought a small sled with him, piled high with furs, and after both females were tucked under them, he picked up the guide rope and began the trek back to the caves.
As he walked, the female began, haltingly, to talk.
Tess hadn’t been intentionally dumped on Hothrest. She had escaped when the ship she was on put down on Hothrest for supplies.
A fight had erupted at the cargo hold and in the confusion, she’d managed to grab the bar, knock out her guard, and run.
She’d run into the snow with nothing but the thin clothes on her back and that metal bar.
She had run until she couldn’t run anymore, and then she had crawled into a hole to die.
That was the shape of it. He had heard enough stories like it to fill in the rest, and he knew Polly had no intention of making her say the parts she couldn’t.
Someone had brought a captive human to his world, and he intended to find out who. When they reached the caves, Polly helped Tess into the healer’s cave while he waited outside and pulled out his communicator.
“You have terrible timing,” Baralt said when he answered. “Izzie has just handed me a list of things I am forbidden to say at the resort inspection. It is a long list.”
“A ship put down here in the last two or three days,” he said. “Sounds like some kind of private vessel. It carried at least one human captive. She escaped. We have her.”
The humor left Baralt’s voice at once. “Alive?”
“Barely. She’s half-frozen, but she’ll live.” He glanced towards the cave, hearing the murmur of soft voices within. “I need to know whose ship it was and where it went.”
“I’ll call you back.” Baralt ended the call, already giving orders.
He remained outside the healer’s cave, listening to the soft within and the wind moaning outside the caves.
When Baralt called back, his voice had gone flat and cold.
“There are a couple of possibilities but I think we’ve identified the most likely one.
Private registry, put down at the northern end of the field, filed a stop for provisioning, and departed nineteen hours ago. That’s the good news.”
“And the bad?”
“The bad is that the registry is false. The identification the ship filed traces to a scrapped freighter that was broken down for parts eleven years ago in an entirely different system. Whoever these people are, they built themselves a clean-looking skin and wore it through my port, and I let them, because it looked clean.” Something crashed to the ground on Baralt’s end.
“They’re gone, Njkall. Nineteen hours ahead, into open space, under a name that never existed.
I can put out a flag on the profile, and I’ll let the Imperial Fleet know.
But I’ll be honest with you—I don’t expect to find them.
Unless they’re extraordinarily stupid, they’ll already have switched identities. ”
He stared at the stone walls around him.
This was the cost of the doors they’d opened.
Legitimate traffic, and beneath it, slipping through in the same current, the carrion.
A universe that took what it wanted and left the bones behind.
That could take a female from her home, use her as though she was an object, then discard her and leave someone else to piece back together what remained.
“Flag it,” he said. “Talk to whoever will listen. And let’s look at increasing our security checks. If they came once because it looked easy, others will come.”
“Already done.” A pause. “Njkall. This female. Where is she now?”
“With Polly.”
The silence on the line said everything Baralt was too diplomatic to say aloud.
“I know,” he said, before his friend could. “I know exactly what it is.”
He put the communicator away. Inside the healer’s cave, the voices had gone quiet, and after a moment Polly came to join him, her small face pale and set.
“Cera is tending to her injuries. Her feet are pretty bad.” Her chin came up. He knew that particular angle of her chin. It meant she had already decided something, and was daring the world to argue. “She’s going to stay here with us.”
“Polly.”
“She stays.”
He looked down at her, then gently tucked a strand of hair back from her cheek.
“Little one,” he said. “I want you to hear me. Not because I’m telling you no.
Because I love you too much to lie to you.
” He watched the word love land in her eyes, watched her breath catch, and set it aside for later, because now was not the time.
“This female carries what you carry. You know this. When you sit with her, when she tells you the things she’ll tell you, they will not stay in her mouth.
They’ll get into you. They’ll get into your nights, and you’ve fought so hard for them.
I’ve held you through enough of them to know what this could cost you. ”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t look away. A year ago she could not have held his gaze through a hard truth. Now she did.
“I know what it’ll cost me,” she said. “I’ve thought about it.
I thought about it the whole walk out there.
” Her voice shook and steadied. “When Cera came to me, I almost said no. I always say no. It’s the easiest word I own.
” She swallowed. “But she needs someone who understands, and that’s me.
So I have to. Don’t you see? I have to.”
He had spent his whole life learning patience.
He had learned it hunting in the frozen wastes, and in the long council sessions of his clan, and across a year of nights spent lying still while a broken human female learned that a monster could be safe.
He had believed patience was always the answer.
But now, looking down at the small, brave, unyielding female in front of him, he felt a rush of pride so intense it was nearly painful. His mate was so much stronger than she knew. He carefully put his arms around her, and she leaned into him as she always did.
“All right,” he said, the words rough in his throat.
“She stays. You sit with her. You help her.” He stroked her back gently.
“But listen to the rest, and give me this in return. You can stop. Any hour, any day, if it takes too much from you, you can stop, and Cera or Yasmin or I will carry it from there. You don’t have to save her alone, and you don’t have to save her at the cost of yourself. Promise me that, little one.”
She looked up at him for a long moment. Then she nodded.
“I promise,” she whispered. “I can stop whenever I want.”
“Whenever you want,” he agreed, and the knot in his chest loosened a little.