Chapter 11 Kojo
KOJO
The commander does not wait for Zaki to finish turning. “Tranquilize the two.” He points at me, then at my sister. “Kill the others. I want the Bouda alive.”
He wants us for study, my Bouda snarls. For experimentation. For the marrow in our bones and the blood in our veins. The same fate our clan suffered.
“Alright, that’s fucking enough.” Kade rolls her neck the vertebrae cracking audibly. Her fangs extend to their full length, and her blue eyes brighten until they cast their own light across the snow.
Zaki and I lock gazes across the parking lot.
We do not need words. We grew up fighting together, trained in the same compounds, hunted the same prey.
The language we share has not changed. She tilts her chin toward Kendra, a gesture so small a human would miss it, but to me it speaks volumes. I understand immediately.
“Guard the queen.” Her voice carries the command frequency, a subtle harmonic that bypasses conscious thought, and my body moves to obey before my mind can process it.
I am in front of my mate in two strides, my ridge fully extended, my claws out, my body positioned between her and every weapon in the lot.
The instinct to protect overwhelms everything else.
Do not be stupid, Alemayehu, my Bouda warns as I tense to intercept the first attacker.
Your sister gave you an order. Guard the queen.
That means stay with her. Let Zaki handle the soldiers.
The cackle did not work, so she will strip those helmets off by hand and finish them with her voice.
She does not need your help. She needs you to keep your mate alive.
Kade appears at my side, positioning herself between the formation and Kendra’s back.
“I’ll guard her front. You guard her back,” she says, jerking her head toward the kneeling figure behind me where my mate is struggling to drag Aiden’s paralyzed body out of the snow.
His eyes are wide open and his face is locked in shock, but his limbs are dead weight and she cannot move him.
“I will take all bullets for my queen.” I plant my stance wider, my ridge vibrating with a low hum that sends small vibrations through the ground beneath my bare feet.
Do not be stupid, Alemayehu, my Bouda repeats with greater urgency. Taking a bullet for her is noble. Taking twelve bullets is mathematics. Let the women handle this.
He is right, though it pains me to admit it.
My Bouda does not compliment Kade and he certainly does not defer to anyone.
But even he recognizes what I already know.
Zaki is ten times the fighter I am. She always has been.
The women of the Bouda Matriarchy trained differently than the men, learning combat not as a skill but as an art form, a sacred dance of violence passed from mother to daughter.
My sister mastered it before she reached her twentieth year, earning praise from King Amir himself for the way she embodied the Matriarchal system’s warrior tradition.
“You know what I love about the Bouda?” Kade folds her arms across her chest and leans back on her heels, watching my sister advance on the formation with a grin that shows too many teeth.
“The females are stronger than the males. Every other shifter species treats their women like glass, but the Bouda?” She clicks her tongue appreciatively.
“Your women could break their men in half and the men would thank them for the honor.”
She glances at me sideways, gauging my reaction, and her grin stretches wider when she sees the tension in my jaw.
“Zaki can shift the frequency of her cackle to force any male in the clan into submission. All Bouda females can do it. That sovereign call she hit you with back there? She could have dropped you flat on your face if she wanted. Your cackle is a weapon, Kojo, but it operates on a single frequency. Hers is an instrument she can tune to whatever she needs. Paralyze humans, command males, shatter glass if the mood strikes her.” She pauses, letting that land.
“Must be hard, walking around knowing your sister could put you on your knees anytime she felt like it.”
I want to tell her to shut her mouth. The words form behind my teeth and press against the backs of my lips, and my Bouda is right there with me, seething.
He despises everything about this vampire and the casual way she dissects our culture for her own entertainment.
But Kade is not wrong, and telling the truth is not a crime even when the truth makes me grind my molars until my jaw aches.
So I stay silent, my eyes fixed on my sister as she closes the distance to the twelve men who have no idea what is about to happen to them.
Zaki walks toward them with her arms at her sides, her braid swinging against her back in a hypnotic rhythm. She does not run. Running would imply urgency. Urgency would imply that she considers them a threat. She does not.
The first two fire simultaneously. Blue pulses streak across the parking lot like lightning, and Zaki drops beneath them, her body folding at the waist. She comes up inside the nearest man’s guard before his finger can find the trigger a second time, moving so fast she seems to blur, and grabs his rifle by the barrel and twists with all her strength, snapping the stock off the receiver with a crack that echoes across the lot.
Then she hooks her claws under the rim of his helmet and tears it off his head.
The chin strap snaps and the device goes spinning across the concrete.
Without pausing, she drives the broken rifle piece into his partner’s visor hard enough to crack it, and when he staggers backward she rips that helmet free too.
She seizes his tactical vest with her free hand, pivots her weight to generate maximum force, and hurls him into a parked sedan.
The car’s driver-side door crumples inward on impact and the alarm starts shrieking, adding to the chaos.
Beautiful, my Bouda murmurs with genuine admiration. She has not lost a single step.
The third man draws a blade, a long serrated combat knife.
Zaki catches his wrist mid-swing, twists until the joint pops with a sound that carries across the parking lot, and wrenches his helmet off with her free hand before burying the knife in his exposed throat.
He drops to the ground, twitching. She is already moving to the next one, her bare feet leaving steaming prints on the snow-covered concrete.
Two more fire at once. She leaps, clearing the pulses by a foot, and lands on the hood of a pickup truck with such force that the metal buckles beneath her.
She grabs the side mirror, wrenches it free with a screech of tearing steel, and throws it like a discus.
It catches the nearest man across the face, shattering his visor and tearing the helmet clean off his head on the rebound.
She drops from the hood into the cluster of men, and I recognize what she is doing.
She taught me this drill when we were young, in the training compounds behind the Matriarch’s hall.
She is not killing yet, only stripping them of protection.
Her claws hook under chin straps and rip, her hands seize the back of helmets and wrench them sideways until the fasteners give.
In three seconds she tears the protection off two more men, sending the devices skittering across the icy pavement.
Then she lets her cackle loose.
The frequency erupts from her at close range, a wall of sound that carries visible distortion in the air.
The men she stripped go rigid the instant it hits, their bodies locking mid-step before they topple where they stand like statues pushed off their pedestals.
The ones still wearing helmets stagger and clutch at the devices, rattled but still upright, and Zaki does not give them time to recover.
She is among them before the sound fades, her ridge spikes carving through tactical vests and body armor, finding every seam and gap where the blades can reach vulnerable skin.
She finishes the remaining three. I track the impacts the way I used to during training exercises in the village, cataloging each movement for later study.
Watching my sister fight has always been an education.
She does not waste motion. Every pivot leads to a blow, every blow sets up her positioning for whatever comes after, and by the time the last soldier realizes he is alone, she is already behind him with her claws at his throat.
Kade watches from beside me with her arms crossed, a grin spreading across her face, making no move to assist. She looks proud, and I understand why.
Watching a Bouda female dismantle a squad of poachers with her bare hands and her birthright is exactly what she has spent centuries fighting to prove is possible.
My mate is staring at Zaki from behind me, her mouth open in astonishment, her hand still gripping Aiden’s collar.
She has stopped trying to pull him from the snow.
She is watching my sister with a mixture of fear and awe, and I can see it on her face, the understanding landing that the woman in the woven cotton fighting barefoot in a blizzard is the most dangerous thing she has ever witnessed.
The leader breaks for his truck. He steps over the dead men, yanks the driver door open, and throws himself behind the wheel.
The engine roars to life and the tires spin, biting into the snow with a traction that surprises me.
I have never seen a human vehicle grip ice that well.
The truck fishtails across the lot, straightening out as it reaches the exit.
“This isn’t over!” He leans out the window long enough to shout it, his voice carrying over the wind and the dying car alarm. “You’ll see me again!”
The truck disappears into the blizzard, taillights swallowed by the white curtain until they’re nothing but a memory.