Chapter 10 Kojo
KOJO
Aiden has my mate by the arm, pulling her through the exit door into the snow, and my Bouda radiates smugness through our shared consciousness.
Good work, Alemayehu. Five poachers dead, not a scratch on our queen, and you used your ridge as a weapon.
The Matriarch would have approved of that last kill.
I do not respond. The blood is cooling on my forearms, thickening in the frigid air, and I can feel it cracking along the lines of my tattoos as I flex my hands.
The sensation is familiar, not from battle, but from the hunts of my youth, when I would return to the village with the blood of prey drying on my skin.
This is different. The blood of enemies carries a heavier weight than the blood of food.
Kade steps over the last body on the stairwell landing and surveys the carnage with her head tilted, her bright blue eyes moving from corpse to corpse. She nudges one of the fallen men with the toe of her boot, then looks at me, caught between admiration and revulsion.
“Nasty kills.” She crouches beside the man I impaled on my ridge, studying the puncture wounds in his tactical vest. The holes are clean, four entry points grouped tight where the calcified spikes penetrated.
She glances at the bent railing where I drove the last man’s head into the steel, then at the red smear on the wall that was once a face.
Her nose wrinkles and she rises, wiping her hands on her uniform pants despite not touching anything. “But justified.”
“I have not caught their leader.” I scan the stairwell one more time, nostrils flaring as I filter through the complex layers of scent.
Blood and gunpowder and tear gas residue, the cold sweat of fear, the acrid smell of discharged weapons.
The two whose scents I recognized from the massacre lie dead on the landing below, but there were six men in the motel and I only killed five.
Somewhere, the sixth escaped through a side exit or a window. “I am not satisfied.”
You should not be satisfied, my Bouda agrees, his voice tight with frustration.
The one who escaped smelled like the man giving orders.
The others deferred to him when they entered the building.
He directed the assault from the corridor while his soldiers engaged us, letting them die in his place, and now he carries our scent back to whoever sent him.
Kade straightens and gestures toward the exit.
“Andrew should have been here twenty minutes ago with the truck.” She pulls out her phone, checks the screen with a frown, and stuffs it back into her pocket with a curse.
“No signal. The poachers must have jammed cell coverage before they cut the power.”
“Where is he?” I move toward the exit, my bare feet leaving bloody prints on the floor, each step marking a path I cannot erase.
“He’s coming.” She falls into step beside me, her stride casual and unbothered. “He knows the route. He’ll find us.”
“He should have been here already.” I push through the broken exit door and the blizzard hits my face.
The parking lot spreads out before me, buried under fresh white that glows faintly in the darkness.
My mate stands near the building’s entrance with Aiden still gripping her arm, both of them hunched against the wind.
She looks at me, and my Bouda surges forward, desperate to be near her.
Go to her, he urges. She needs our warmth.
“Would you rather I teleport all of you to Wintermoon?” Kade asks, her tone suggesting she’s already regretting the offer.
I step toward my mate, reaching for her without conscious thought, and she yelps. My hands freeze inches from her, fingers still extended, and she stares at them with wide eyes that hold more horror than wonder.
That is when I look down at myself and understand.
Blood covers me from the elbows to the fingertips, dark and thick, streaked across the tattoos on my forearms like macabre warpaint. My ridge is partially extended, the spikes still hard from the fight, visible through the slit in my ruined shirt. I look like I crawled out of a slaughter.
You are scaring our mate, you fool, my Bouda snaps with unusual harshness. Look at yourself. You are covered in death and you tried to grab her. She is human and does not understand that the blood on your hands is proof of devotion. To her, you look like a monster.
I bow my head and step back, shame washing over me in a wave that burns hotter than my furnace.
The snow lands on my shoulders and melts on contact, the flakes dissolving against my skin and carrying thin streams of red down my arms and off my fingertips.
I stand in it and let it happen. I cannot go near her looking like this.
My ridge spikes upright again before the shame can take hold, every blade calcifying at once.
Engines. Multiple vehicles, approaching fast from the east, tires fighting for traction on the icy road.
The sound is wrong, too coordinated for civilian traffic in a blizzard.
My nostrils flare and I catch the scents buried under the exhaust and gasoline: gun oil, sweat, that same chemical compound the helmets are made from.
My Bouda has them counted and sorted before I do.
More poachers, Alemayehu. At least three vehicles.
They are driving in formation, tight convoy, headlights staggered.
This is a second wave. The ones in the motel were advance scouts, and now the main force is coming to finish the job.
You need to get her to safety. Protect our mate. Nothing else matters.
I cannot lose her. My queen died once already.
Focus, Alemayehu, my Bouda commands, his voice cutting through the rising tide of memory. Grief later. Combat now. Get her behind the building. Find cover. Prepare for engagement.
I stiffen. A scent reaches me through the storm, threading past the exhaust and gun oil and chemical stench of the approaching convoy, and I know it the way I know my own breath.
Petrichor, rain on red highland soil. And beneath it, juniper and cold mineral air and the dust of mountains I have not breathed in three years and never expected to encounter again.
Zaki, my Bouda’s voice breaks on the name. That is Zaki. She is here, she is alive, that is our sister standing on that roof.
Kade grins, her fangs extending as she catches the scent a half-second after I do. She looks up at the rooftop of the motel, and I follow her gaze, heart suddenly pounding against my ribs.
“What is it?” My mate’s voice comes from behind me, tight with confusion and fear.
I stare at the roofline. A silhouette stands at the edge, bare feet planted in the snow that covers the ledge, a ridge taller and sharper than mine raised against the gray sky like a crown.
The spikes hum with power. I feel it in my molars from three stories down, a resonance only Bouda can produce.
“Oh, shit.” Aiden looks up and his face drains of color. He releases my mate’s arm and his hands immediately go to his ears. “That’s a female Bouda.” He cringes, jamming his fingers deeper into his ear canals. “Not even ear plugs can save me from that cackle.”
The convoy rounds the corner. Three trucks, black, moving in tight formation through the snow.
They pull into the parking lot and doors open and men climb out, drawing weapons, spreading into positions.
I count twelve, all wearing the same helmets that blocked my cackle in the motel.
Rifles with blue-glowing barrels. The same weapons that killed my Matriarch.
My sister’s cackle hits before the first man can raise his rifle.
It comes from above, pouring off the rooftop, and it is nothing like mine.
My cackle is a hunter’s tool, built to paralyze prey.
Hers is a royal command, something bred into the women of our bloodline, a frequency that forces submission from every living creature within range.
The sound tears through the parking lot and I feel, my ridge vibrating in response, my knees threatening to buckle beneath me.
Even Kade flinches, her immortal body recognizing power older than her own.
When I look over my shoulder, Aiden is face down in the snow, his body rigid, his eyes open and fixed on nothing.
Kendra drops to her knees beside him and shakes his shoulders, calling his name, but it does not matter.
His nervous system has shut down completely.
He will regain control within an hour, maybe two, and until then he is frozen where he fell.
The poachers stagger. Some of them clutch at their helmets, adjusting the devices, but every single one of them stays on their feet.
The helmets hold against her sovereign frequency the same way they held against mine in the motel.
These men came prepared. They were prepared at the massacre too, when our women unleashed the sovereign call and it did nothing.
Whoever built this technology knew what Bouda females could do long before they burned our village.
Zaki sees it. Her cackle cuts off and she reads the result in half a second, and nothing in her changes. She is going to do this with her hands.
She jumps.
Three stories straight down. She drops from the rooftop and her bare feet hit the parking lot concrete with an impact that cracks the pavement beneath the snow, fractures spreading outward from the landing point.
Her ridge is fully spiked, the blades longer than mine and catching the flicker of the motel’s neon sign in flashes of red and blue.
She straightens from the crouch and scans the parking lot the way I have seen her scan a battlefield, like she already knows how it ends.
Finally, my Bouda breathes. Real help has arrived.