39. Maeve #2
“A Shade.” His fingers press harder into my arms, urgent but controlled.
“If she—if the Ordained gave her—or if she caught—” He’s building the sentence fast now, the halting speech accelerating when the need is real.
“A Stained can smell venom from miles. A Stained will follow fresh venom the way—” He stops. Looks at me. “The way I followed you.”
My stomach drops.
It drops the way it used to drop at the barracks door when Shayla’s boots came down the row and I didn’t yet know whose name she’d call.
I press my hand harder against my belly, not thinking about it, just needing to feel the twins move, needing proof they’re still there before my head can even finish the thought.
A Stained is heading toward the camp, drawn by venom that shouldn’t be there, and twenty-five women are locked in a barracks with whatever Shayla has built in the five days since we left.
“How dangerous?” I ask. Because the Unmade was dangerous and Red killed it. Twice.
His face does something I haven’t seen before, a tightening that isn’t anger, isn’t the rut, isn’t the grief he showed at the grave.
It’s closer to what I saw in the mirror of the stream two days after the camps: the face of someone remembering something they survived and knowing the surviving was luck.
“Fast,” he says. Slow. Each word deliberate.
“Faster than me. The venom—it burns their nerves. Overcharges. They move like—” He searches for the word.
“Like lightning. There, then gone, before the thunder even catches up.” His tail curls tight against his thigh.
“And they don’t feel pain. Not because they’re broken.
Because the venom ate the nerves that carry it.
You hit them and they get up. You hit them harder and they get up faster. ”
The Unmade got up after Red caved its chest in.
I watched it rise on broken bones like the breaking was nothing.
Red is telling me the Stained is worse. That the Unmade was a crude failure—a body that couldn’t feel because it was too damaged to know it was breaking—and the Stained is something refined, something that can’t feel because the venom scoured the pathways clean, driven by a hunger it can never satisfy.
“We go now,” I say.
“Maeve, your condition—”
“We go now.“
His jaw sets. He doesn’t argue. He knows the voice. The same voice that said take me back. The same voice that said I go first. The voice of a woman who has twenty-five people behind a door and something worse than an Unmade heading toward them.
“Lisa!” I shout from the warren entrance. My voice carrying across the clearing, cutting through the evening routine. “Lisa, we’re going!”
She looks up. Reads my face from fifty feet away. Doesn’t ask questions.
“Gretchen can run the schedule,” Lisa says. Already moving. Already packing. “I’m coming with you.”
Red drops from the warren to the clearing. Nine feet, landing on his feet, the impact absorbed by the massive legs. No hitch. The cracked rib either healed or overridden. He reaches up for me. I climb into his arms. He sets me on the ground.
Three of us: a nine-foot Shade with healed ribs, a pregnant mate, and a camp-survivor who keeps lists of the dead.
We move south. Fast. Red sets the pace, the predator’s ground-eating stride that covers miles without rest. I walk. Lisa walks. We don’t talk. The canopy darkens around us. The smell of camp grows.
Red’s head turns south every few minutes.
Scenting. Tracking. His tail rigid behind him, the white tip still, none of the idle sway that usually marks his movement through the territory.
He’s locked in. The predator fully online, the teacher shelved, every sense pointed at the thing moving in the same direction we are.
“How far ahead of us?” I ask. Once. The only question that matters.
“An hour,” he says. “Maybe less. It’s moving faster than we are.”
Faster than a nine-foot Shade’s ground-eating stride. Faster than a predator who has covered this territory for years. The Stained is outpacing us toward the camp where twenty-five women are locked in a barracks with Shayla and whatever she’s done with the five days we gave her.
I walk faster. My body protests, the belly, the weight, the twins pressing down on my hips.
I walk faster anyway. Lisa matches my pace.
She doesn’t ask why. She heard the word.
Stained. She doesn’t know what it means any more than I did ten minutes ago.
But she saw Red’s face when he said it, and Lisa has survived this long by reading faces.
The canopy swallows the last of the light. We move in darkness. Only Red’s gold eyes show ahead of me, twin points of amber in the black, the predator’s eyes that don’t need light the way mine do.
His hand finds mine in the dark. Holds. His grip is harder than usual. The pressure of a male whose mate is walking toward something he can smell and she can’t. Every cell in his body is telling him to pick her up and fly the opposite direction.
He holds my hand and walks toward it anyway.
I let him. I let myself hold on back, my fingers laced through his, and it takes everything camp-brain taught me not to.
Don’t reach for anyone in the dark, the old rule says.
Don’t let your hand be the thing that gives you away.
Don’t need something you might lose. I reach anyway.
His palm is huge and warm and it doesn’t stop my legs from shaking. It just means I’m not shaking alone.
Underneath it all, moving in the same direction, closing the gap between us and the camp with every minute: the sour-wrong scent of something Red can smell and I can’t. Something that hunts venom. Something heading toward whatever Shayla built in the five days she had to rebuild her power.