43. Maeve
MAEVE
The Stained is faster than Red.
It isn’t bigger than him, or stronger. The venom sickness has done something to its reflexes.
The body twitches from one position to the next and my eyes never catch the space between.
Red hits it full force. The Stained twists out of the impact like smoke, one shoulder taking the blow, the body spinning with it.
The spin becomes a strike that catches Red across the jaw.
Red’s head snaps back. Blood sprays from his split lower lip, bright, and the copper of it reaches me ten feet away.
I taste it on my tongue. He recovers in a breath.
The massive body absorbs what would have dropped a smaller male.
He swings. The Stained ducks. The crimson fist whistles over the mottled grey-green skull.
Then the Stained darts inside his guard, the asymmetrical horns driving toward his chest.
Red catches the horns with both hands. The muscles in his arms stand up like cables.
He holds. The Stained thrashes, its jittering eyes wild, the whine climbing into a shriek.
Its strength shouldn’t be possible in something this damaged.
Its claws rake his forearms. The thin veined wing membranes beat against his face and slap wetly.
The shriek rises into something worse than rage.
The Stained is desperate, the way a starving person is desperate, the way a drowning person claws at whoever is closest. The venom in the air is driving it — my venom, Red’s venom run through my blood.
Every cell in its corroded body strains toward what it needs. Red is standing in between.
Red wrenches the Stained sideways and throws it.
The body flies ten feet into the barracks wall.
The wood cracks. A support beam splinters and dust comes down, dry, gritty in my throat.
The Stained slides to the ground and leaves a smear behind it, darker than blood and thicker, the wrong color.
That’s what years of its own venom made of its insides.
The smell hits me a second later. It smells sour and spoiled, like something that went bad days ago and kept on going.
The Stained gets up immediately. It springs back to its feet like nothing in it can feel what’s broken.
The Unmade couldn’t feel pain because it was too far gone.
This one can’t because the venom ate the nerves.
Its cracked sternum grinds when it moves.
Its shoulder hangs wrong from the throw.
The damage is real. The body just doesn’t know it.
The Stained lunges at Red again, darting and skipping, changing direction twice in the time it takes him to shift his weight.
Left, then right, under his reaching arm and inside his guard.
Its claws find his ribs, the ones cracked five days ago and barely healed.
Red grunts. I’ve heard that sound twice — once in the Unmade fight, once when the green-brown Shade’s claws caught him. It means damage he can’t ignore.
He brings his elbow down on its spine. The impact drives it into the ground and craters the earth. For one breath, the compound is still.
Then it moves under him, that too-fast twitch, rolling sideways. The jittering eyes find me over Red’s shoulder. The whine comes again, louder, the pitch climbing. It sharpens into something almost like language. I hear a ruined voice in it, one that could once have said please.
The sound goes through me like a blade.
Because this was a man once. Before the asteroid, before the mutation went sideways and the venom turned sour in him.
This was someone’s son. Maybe someone’s husband.
Maybe a teacher, like Red. Maybe a father.
The thing underneath is still whining and reaching. It was human. It’s still trying to be.
Red doesn’t hesitate.
He catches the Stained by the back of the neck.
He lifts it and slams it down. The earth cracks.
He lifts it and slams it again. The body goes limp for a fraction of a second, the closest thing to stun its burned-out nerves can make, and Red takes the opening.
He pins it with his knee, nine feet of muscle driving it into the dirt.
“Maeve. Move.”
I’m backing toward the tree line with my hand on my belly.
The twins are kicking now, sharp and urgent, the panic going through all three of us at once.
My legs shake. Everything in me is screaming at me to run.
But my mate is on the ground pinning something that wants the venom out of my body. If I run and it gets loose—
I can’t make my feet choose. If I run, I leave him.
If I stay, I’m the thing it’s hunting. My body tries for both at once and freezes halfway, my breath coming in short pulls that don’t fill anything.
I want to scream. Screaming never helped in a barracks and it won’t help here.
I swallow it and it sits in my throat like a stone.
The Stained writhes under Red’s knee. It can’t feel its own broken bones and it strains against him anyway. Red leans harder. His jaw is set and the veins in his arms stand dark. His wings spread for balance, the red membranes taut.
The Stained twists and gets one arm free. Its claws swing up and go for the knee pinning it. The points find the gap behind his kneecap and dig in. Red’s leg buckles.
He doesn’t go down. He shifts his weight into a controlled fall, his hand catching the earth, turning the buckle into a pivot. But the Stained is already free. It’s already past him.
It’s coming for me.
The jittering eyes lock onto me. Whatever’s left in them has come down to one word: venom, venom, venom. The Stained covers the ground between us in three strides that blur. The whine is a scream now. Its arms reach. Its claws come out.
There’s no time to think. My body just knows, in one white flash, that I can’t outrun it and neither can the twins. My arms come up in front of my belly on their own, useless against claws. Somewhere far off in me I’m already screaming his name with no breath to say it.
Red’s tail lashes out. The white tip catches the Stained’s ankle, a perfect strike from a body that has fought in this territory for years.
The Stained trips. Its momentum carries it face-first into the dirt and it slides to a stop six feet from me.
I can see the dark veins under its transparent wing membranes.
I can smell it, the curdled venom, the sweet rot of dissolving flesh.
Red is on it before it can rise. He gets both hands on its shoulders, lifts, and throws.
The Stained hits the barracks wall and goes through it, through the planks and the interior supports, into a shower of broken wood.
The wall collapses behind it. Dust mushrooms up.
Inside the ruined barracks something scrapes and shifts. It’s getting up.
“Run. Tree line. Now.”
I run. Or I try. My body doesn’t run the way it used to, not with the belly and all the weight pitched forward. I’m fast. I’m not fast enough. The tree line is thirty yards off. My legs pump. My arms swing. The twins ride heavy in me. My breath comes in short hard gasps.
Behind me, the Stained comes through the barracks wall. It picks a different section, twenty feet to the left, the wood blowing outward. The mottled body clears the debris in one convulsive leap and lands in the compound. The jittering eyes find me instantly.
The Stained runs.
I hear it. The footsteps come wrong-fast, a pace that shouldn’t be possible. That body can’t feel the broken sternum, the dislocated shoulder, the gash where the wood tore its face open. It’s gaining.
Red comes in from the side in a full lateral tackle.
The impact carries both of them across the compound and into the supply building wall.
The building collapses. The roof comes down in sections and crumples around the two bodies inside.
Dust and splinters go up with the shriek of the Stained under them.
Then Red roars, the first full one since the Unmade fight, a sound that shakes the standing buildings and sends birds screaming out of the canopy.
I reach the tree line and get my hands on a trunk. The bark smells green and wet under my palms, canopy sap and wet rotting leaves, ordinary smells with no business being this loud. I’m breathing hard. The twins are frantic in me, kicking without a break.
I can’t see him anymore. That’s the worst part, worse than the claws that almost reached me.
My whole body wants to turn around. I hold the trunk instead, bark biting into my palms, because going back means getting in his way and getting him killed.
So I stand here and wait. Waiting is the hardest thing I’ve done all morning.
The supply building stops shaking.
Silence comes down. In the barracks, no sound at all after violence meant somebody stopped moving. My chest goes hollow before I can stop the thought.
The dust settles. Something crimson shifts in the collapsed building.
Red stands. He rises up through the broken roof, wood sliding off his shoulders, his wings shedding splinters.
His silver hair is white with dust. Blood runs from cuts on his face, his chest, his arms. His breathing is ragged, lungs pulling too hard against ribs that haven’t finished healing.
He’s holding the Stained by the throat.
The Stained is still moving. Its eyes still jitter. Its claws still scrape weak lines into Red’s forearm that well up with blood. But it’s slower now. The cracked sternum, the wall, the collapsed building — all of it has finally piled up past what its body can ignore.
The whine comes again, quieter, the pitch dropping as the body runs down.
Red looks at me across the compound, his eyes finding mine through the dust and the wreckage. He isn’t asking should I. He already decided that. He’s asking are you watching.
I nod.
My whole body is shaking and I nod anyway.
He needs someone to witness this, the way he needs the graves tended, and I’m the one he trusts to hold it.
The girl who used to faint at the sight of a Eunuch’s switch is standing in a ruined compound watching a man kill something with his bare hands.
I don’t recognize her. I don’t look away either.
He closes his fist.
The sound is wet and short and final. The Stained’s body goes limp. The jittering stops, the tremor in the pupils freezing mid-shake, the gold eyes fixed on nothing. The light in them dies like a lamp running out of fuel. The whine cuts off. The claws go slack against Red’s forearm.
Red holds the body for ten seconds. Fifteen. The Unmade taught him not to trust the first death. He watches the eyes for a flicker. He watches the chest for a rise. Nothing moves.
The Stained doesn’t get back up.
Red drops the body. It hits the rubble like something that used to be heavy and is only weight now. He steps over it. He walks through the wreckage of the supply building, across the compound, through the broken fence, to me.
He’s bleeding from a dozen places. The claws found his forearms over and over. His face is cut, the gash on his cheek torn open again, the lip split from the first strike. His ribs, the ones that were almost better, took another round of punishment.
Up close he smells like copper and sweat and building dust. Under all of it is the sweet rot of the Stained’s blood, which never washes off skin the first time.
His breathing is ragged. His hands shake with the adrenaline burning off, the massive body coming down from the fight the way a fire comes down from its peak.
He reaches me and stops. His eyes go over all of me — is the mate safe, is the mate whole, are the twins safe. His hand goes to my belly and rests there, feeling the kicks, counting. He waits until his body believes what his eyes tell it.
“Okay?” His voice is rough and wrecked. The word barely makes it out.
“Okay.”
The word comes out steady. The rest of me isn’t. Now that it’s over, everything I didn’t let myself feel while it was happening arrives at once. My legs threaten to fold. My eyes sting hot and sudden.
I don’t cry. Four years of not crying in front of people who could use it against me, and the habit doesn’t care that he never would. I stand there shaking and blinking hard, my hand finding the solid wall of his chest like it’s the only fixed thing left.
He drops to his knees. All nine feet of him folds down until his face is level with my belly. He presses his forehead against the swell, both hands on my hips, holding on and breathing. His whole body shakes with the aftershocks of what it did to keep me standing here.
I put my hands in his silver hair. The strands are damp with sweat and dust and blood. I hold his head against my belly. His breath is warm on my skin and the twins kick at his forehead.
The compound behind us is rubble. The Stained is dead in the wreckage. Its curdled sweetness is already fading under dust and blood and the clean green of canopy air.
Lisa’s voice comes from the trees behind us. She watched all of it — the speed, the desperation, the whine, the final sound. She watched a nine-foot male kill something faster than him, something that came for his pregnant mate twice.
“Clear?” she calls.
“Clear,” I call back.
The women come out of the trees, thirty-seven of them. I know some of the faces from before the first raid. Others are new since. All of them blink against daylight they haven’t stood in for weeks.
They stop at the edge of the destroyed compound. They look at a nine-foot Shade on his knees in front of his pregnant mate, his face against her belly, his hands on her hips. There’s blood on both of us. The dead Stained lies in the rubble behind us.
The women don’t run.
Gretchen is at the front of them. I didn’t know she’d come. She was supposed to stay. Her hands are burned from the first raid and healing badly. She steps forward and crosses the compound. She crouches beside Red and puts her hand on his shoulder.
He flinches. A human hand that isn’t mine is touching him. His head lifts from my belly and he finds Gretchen’s face, his eyes wary and gold in the light. She’s a woman in her fifties who braids hair and hums. She just put her scarred hand on the shoulder of a monster because he was shaking.
“You’re bleeding,” Gretchen says. It’s the camp voice, flat and matter-of-fact, the one that sees what needs tending and tends it.
Red stares at her.
“Come on,” she says. “Let me see.”
He looks at me. His gold eyes shine wet. A woman who watched him kill something with his bare hands thirty seconds ago is treating him like a person.
I nod.
He lets Gretchen look at his cuts.