Found Family of Monsters

Chapter 1

Inkiri

Before

There is a saying on Aer: love lives in the mind as much as it lives in the skin and under your tongue. Two years ago—almost three years now—I didn’t understand what that meant, but I remember the day the seeds of understanding were planted.

It was stormy, the kind of weather that makes your horns throb when it comes and when it goes, sometimes even while it lasts.

A constant drizzle saturated the air, overpowering the moors’ normal scent of peat and moss.

We were huddled in a shelter we’d erected to keep us hidden from sight.

This was the Kankarraz side of the border, Koa Esher territory, and we didn’t want them to know we were here.

Vergis was sitting on a rock, the hood of his Earth-made cloak drawn low over his face. Nokim was barely managing not to pace, and Fellisse kept guard opposite me, watching the Lugarran side of the border. We were waiting for Lissir. He was late.

Nokim looked my way. “He will be fine, won’t he?”

“I could always hop into town.” Vergis sounded unconcerned, as he so often did, and he straightened to let us know he was ready to go.

I growled, an automatic reaction, but I pulled myself together. “No. You would stand out too much, Vergis. With your clothes.”

Those would give him away as someone from far away, and if anyone knew the fashion, they would know it was human-made stuff.

What I didn’t say was that Vergis was likely to turn heads with his looks alone, never mind his clothes.

None of us were willing to risk him being taken by guards and brought before the Koa Esher, not when he was not a trained Raikenga.

Not when he was hangu and a mage, and too attractive to easily blend in on top of that.

Vergis sighed and gave that odd human shoulder jerk. “Whatever. I wasn’t going to parade around town, but suit yourself.”

And so we waited, time stretching out like a lure made to catch our worries. The wind changed a few times, but it beat the rain into my face for most of the waiting. That was unpleasant, but I was Raikenga, and my place was here, in the rain, to wait for our spy to return to us.

When it happened, it interrupted the waiting altogether.

I felt the change even as the rain picked up, the relentless wind forcing me to squint.

It was like vertigo but not, a tingling feeling, an urgent need that came from deep inside of me.

I didn’t know what the feeling was, couldn’t say if it was pain or pleasure or something else entirely. I gasped.

For a moment, the confusion was all-encompassing, and the world around me grew distant.

I had never felt anything like this. What crystallized from the many conflicting things I was feeling was a blood-deep need.

After a while, it settled into a throbbing, pulsing sensation, and I was once more able to see the world and make sense of it.

I looked around, not knowing then what I was looking for, and then I realized what this had to be: a mate call.

A mate call. Stories had made them sound like this felt, yet the reality was different. Feeling it was different.

I took a step to the side, swaying back against the tarp of our shelter even as next to me, Vergis hissed and stood.

“What the—something is happening.” He switched to his oddly accented English. Something was happening to him as well, something maybe similar to what I was feeling, but in the moment, I was too overwhelmed to properly examine it, to make sense of it.

The new need that filled me burned brightly, and I looked around, desperate for something, and in my desperation, I very nearly missed Lissir, who was drawing his own hood back to let us know it was him approaching and not someone from the Kankarraz side.

“He… Lissir.” I pointed.

“Vergis?” Nokim was torn between taking care of Vergis and going out to Lissir, and Fellisse was clicking to soothe Vergis, who looked like someone had hit him too hard, his eyes wide and his hands balled into fists.

He shook as if with cold, but he had assured us that his cloak was “waterproof” and “windproof” on top of that.

Fellisse put a hand on my shoulder. “Inki?”

I nodded, clicking back. “It’s… I will go out to him. Do you have Vergis?”

Fellisse and Nokim nodded, and I walked into the rain and wind, my feet light, although I knew I needed to be going elsewhere.

I needed…the one who wasn’t here. My mate.

I knew he lived out there, knew it by the absence, by the way my skin ached to touch him and my tongue to taste him.

By how my mind wanted to learn everything about him, starting with his name.

Lissir pulled his hood back down, but his clothes, more a trader’s finery than sensible clothing for the moors, were soaked.

“Sorry. I met a merchant from Rowazza, and he was enamored by the sound of his own voice,” Lissir said when he reached me. He tilted his head. “Inkiri?”

“You… Did you meet with your informant?” That was why we were here. So Lissir could meet the informant. It felt unimportant all of a sudden.

Lissir nodded. “Yes, and he has given me outpost locations all along the border. What is wrong? You don’t look well. Will you be able to head back across the moors?”

I grinned at Lissir, then hugged him. “I feel him. My mate,” I whispered in his ear. “He’s…on Earth.” How exactly I knew this, I wasn’t sure, but as soon as I said it, I felt the truth of the words. My mate was on Earth, and I needed to go to him. I needed to meet him.

“Huh.” Lissir pushed me back. “Then best not hug other hangua. How do you know he’s on Earth? Is he a mage like Vergis? Are you saying you are feeling a mate call pulling you to Earth? That makes no sense.”

“I…don’t know, but I feel him. I know it’s Earth. Where I need to go.” I looked back at the shelter. If my mate was on Earth, I’d need to get Vergis to take me. It was the fastest way.

“Well, if you’re going to Earth, we’re coming, but we need to get the information to Esaka before we leave.” Lissir pulled me along at a brisk pace, his merchant’s disguise getting even more waterlogged.

“Yes. We have to inform the Raiken about this,” I said when Lissir ducked under the shelter. His blue-gray hair was dripping wet, and heavy drops fell from the tips of his gray horns. He tried to get out of his cloak, but the strings that drew it shut had taken on too much water.

“Inform the Raiken?” Vergis rubbed his eyes. “Did you pick up something bad in town, Lissir?”

Nokim swooped in to help Lissir by cutting through the knots and pulling the wet cloak off while Lissir wiggled out of it. Nokim had done his best to keep Lissir’s Raiken cloak dry, but in this weather, that wouldn’t make much of a difference.

“Well, as bad as any outpost with Koa Esher stationed there ever is, I suppose.” With a huff, Lissir freed himself of the merchant’s cloak and pulled on his Raiken cloak. “Inkiri feels a mate call.”

Nokim stopped his soothing clicking at Vergis. “Mate call?”

Vergis’s pupils were still too wide, and his hands trembled in the overlong sleeves of his cloak. Where I felt steady now, he seemed shaken. “Wait… You felt that just now?”

“Fellisse, the shelter.” I began pulling it apart. “And yes. It—I’m not sure I can explain, but I know it’s a mate call.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Vergis’s expression was haunted, not scared. I didn’t think he ever got scared, but something was clearly amiss. “We should leave here. I felt magic, a lot of it, and if it was the Koa Esher, I don’t want to stick around to find out what they’ve been up to.”

Lissir grabbed one edge of the tarp to help fold it back up. “And I want out of the rain.”

From that point, we fell back into the practiced routine we always stuck to, especially in hostile territory. We watched the moors while we worked, and we worked fast, with practiced movements that needed little discussion.

Once our shelter was put away, we began the trek back to Esaka. The rain got worse before long, and our progress was slow as a result, seeing as we had to mind where we stepped. The moors could be treacherous on a clear day, but soggy as they were then, they became even more so.

Lissir brought up the rear, and Fellisse and Nokim were in the front while I walked behind Vergis so I could grab him if he stepped wrong. Vergis did not know these moors as well as we did.

The arrow hit a handsbreadth away from Vergis’s leg, sinking deep into the ground. The feathers of the fletching might have been green once, but they too were wet and looked a muddy brown now.

“Fuck.” Vergis cursed in English and pulled his gun. He moved fast and without hesitation.

I whipped my head toward our attackers just as the painfully loud sound of Vergis shooting rang in my ears. One of the Koa Esher went down, Vergis’s single shot hitting its target.

Lissir hissed. “I cannot see them clearly. Five or six?”

There was another shot.

“Four or five,” Vergis said.

Nokim got his own bow ready and loosed. Fellisse picked up Nokim’s bag.

Nokim didn’t even look. He shouted “Green vial!” then his arrow hit, not one of the Koa Esher, but the moor, where the incendiary tip exploded.

The force of the explosion was weak because of the weather, but it was enough to make the Koa Esher break out in shouts. Their scholars were not like any from the Raiken, and Koa Esher soldiers knew to fear our makers in the field, even if they did not wear the protector black.

While they panicked, Vergis managed to hit another one of the attackers before he looked at me. “We need to get going!”

Fellisse pulled a green vial from Nokim’s bag and struck the seal. He tossed it, aiming for the middle distance between our attackers and us. It was a smoke bomb, just something to give us time. Like the explosive, it was weak in this weather, but it afforded us some protection.

“Yes, move!” I waved for Lissir to move up ahead on our line so I could stay at the rear. Better they hit me than Vergis or Lissir.

For the next few minutes, we did nothing but put distance between us and the Koa Esher.

We started out at a run, but it was impossible to keep that pace up for long.

I kept looking back over my shoulder. I would spot the shapes of our pursuers through the rain; all we had to do was keep ahead of them, keep out of range.

With visibility poor and the moors hungry for them to take a wrong step, that had to be enough.

After about a quarter of an hour, I could no longer see them, but it didn’t mean they were gone. We continued to put one foot in front of the other, sometimes sinking in to the knee. Progress was slow, and every step was hard work. The rain was noisy.

We kept looking over our shoulders to see if they had caught up to us, but with luck, it had just been one of the border patrols, and with more luck, they wouldn’t want to risk getting close enough for Vergis to shoot the rest of them down.

Some of the Koa Esher foot soldiers preferred living to dying a zealot.

“At least they didn’t do magic,” Vergis said as he peered into the rain that was closing like a curtain behind us. “I thought they would whammy us with something.”

He spoke in English again. Perhaps getting attacked like that had scared him more than it had us. There was no way he was used to this kind of thing, not on Earth. He’d not grown up with the Koa Esher, not the same way we had.

“What did you feel?” I asked, following his line of sight. I did not see them, but I felt eyes upon us, although I could have been imagining it. There was so much turmoil in my mind, the aching of wanting my mate strong even with such an imminent threat at our heels.

“I’m not sure.” Vergis turned, hiding his face under his hood. He was not one to admit uncertainty, or indeed anything he perceived as weakness, so the admission now unsettled me.

It made me ache for my mate even more, for a face I didn’t know yet, a voice I’d never heard, hands that had never touched me.

It was then that I understood: Love lives in the mind.