Chapter 9
I lifted my pack higher on my shoulder and sped up as Jessa’s spa came into view. I’d told her the other females would visit tomorrow, but I couldn’t resist seeing her one more time on my own.
Once she met the others, I knew her attention would be divided. The females tended to flock together, and I wanted a little more of her time just to myself. Dust puffed up every time my hooves hit the sunbaked dirt, and I grinned as I reached the back door.
My smile fell when I saw that it was open.
“Jessa?” I called. Silence answered me and I dropped my pack and sprinted into the building. The tidy, clean space had been destroyed. Shelves and boxes were strewn over the floor, dirty boot prints covered the floor, the tread marks all too familiar.
Sytos.
I hurried through the quiet spa, hoping against all odds that my female would pop out of some hiding place as I called for her. The tracks led to the strange, open area near the big glass doors at the front of the spa.
Two chairs lay upended in the middle of the room, a smear of blood on the floor had been stepped on, the dried red tracked through and clotted with dirt. I sucked in a breath, the scent of syto blood, urine and fear still lingered in the warm air.
My stomach twisted. They’d taken my female.
I turned in a slow circle, reading the signs of a struggle.
It was a small party, probably out looking for supplies.
Jessa had fought back, the chairs and the blood told me that much.
She’d injured at least one of them. But even one syto would have been enough to overpower a human female, and there had been at least six here, probably more.
My chest was tight with rage and fear as I followed the tracks through the building.
They’d taken all her food, not that she needed it now.
It took mere minutes for me to search the building for clues, and I came back to the blood smear.
It was dry now, but there wasn’t much of it.
The color told me it was only a few hours old.
Our hunting parties hadn’t come across the syto camp yet, but we’d seen enough signs of them to have an idea of where they weren’t. Adak was keeping a log of every report of their movements, every familiar boot mark we’d come across.
I’d never bothered to guess where their main camp was, but I’d reported back to him enough times to see the map he’d been building. They were somewhere in the human city, north was Adak’s best guess.
Sytos weren’t used to living on a planet, they were born in cruisers and lived their entire lives within the sterile, tech filled shells. But turochs were born on Oska, we spent our childhoods learning to track and hunt, spent our days running rough terrain.
I was stronger and faster than any syto, I could track them down, hopefully before they reached their camp.
I debated the wisdom of returning to camp to ask for help. I’d lose hours, maybe their trail. But I risked not being able to take on an entire armed patrol of sytos on my own.
My nostrils flared as I wrestled with the odds. In the end, I couldn’t risk the chance I lost the trail. If I caught up to them, I had a chance of freeing Jessa. If I lost the trail, no amount of help would save my female.
When I caught up to them, I was claiming her, even if the only witnesses were the sytos I killed.
***
The sun glared down at me, the heat rippling off the horizon as I followed the scent of fear and stress on the breeze.
The dry ground was too hard packed to make tracking easy, but Jessa’s scent was strong enough that I didn’t need it.
I was thankful for it even as my stomach twisted at the knowledge that her fear was strong enough to linger after hours had passed.
My hooves beat the ground in a steady lope, and I lifted my face to the weak breeze, nostrils flaring as I caught a hint of smoke in the wind. It didn’t smell of wood or meat, but the familiar singe of ozone and tech that had been burned into my brain after years of slavery.
Syto shock sticks. I drove myself harder, sprinting toward the scent. Surely a patrol of sytos wouldn’t need to shock an already captured human female. She was barely a threat to them. Something else was happening.
I got my answer as I crested a low hill and panicked shouts and roars greeted me.
A few hundred yards away a group of sytos was holding off an enraged percer boar.
They’d assembled into a square formation, the front line bristling with crackling shock sticks as they retreated from a fresh nesting site.
Shallow divots had been scratched into the dirt in a semi circle and a single boar was standing guard over the empty nests.
The patrol must have walked right into the nest. They were lucky there weren’t any eggs yet, or there’d have been half a dozen more boars waiting for them.
“Pull back!” A syto at the back of the group yelled. Even from a distance I could see the tense shoulders and darting looks of the sytos. They could handle a single human, but even an armed patrol of sytos couldn’t take on a percer boar.
A sow would have slaughtered them all already.
In the middle of the formation, I spotted a flash of red against the drab grey of their uniforms. Jessa.
My mind went blank as I watched her thrash against the male holding her over his shoulder. All sense of strategy disappeared, my female was surrounded by enemies, inept enemies facing off with a dangerous and riled predator.
I charged down the hill, a bellow of rage escaping me as I reached for my ax. Blue heads whipped to face me as I barreled into the side of their formation. Bodies went flying and I distantly heard the boars own enraged bugle, not so dissimilar than my own.
Chaos reigned as I gored and kicked and hacked at the sytos, catching glimpses of the armored hide of the percer between their fleeing forms. Shock sticks jabbed into my exposed skin, the agonizing streaks of electricity jolting through my blood rage, seizing muscles as I fought through the pain.
Hot blood spattered my face as I charged a syto, my horns catching his shoulder, his scream joining the din as I flung him away.
Jessa screamed and the haze retreated for a split second as I blinked the blood from my eyes and searched for her in the melee. The split second of clarity cost me, and a massive weight rammed into my back, throwing me forward.
I crashed into the dirt, nose crunching as the boar trampled me under his weight. His heavy gallop faded away and an instant later another shock stick made contact with the back of my head and blinding pain wiped every thought from my jumbled brain.