Chapter 14 Kojo #2
My cackle hits him at full frequency from close range, and the effect is complete and immediate.
Every muscle in his body locks at once, his face freezing mid-expression, his fingers going rigid where they were reaching.
His eyes fix and go glassy. Breathing, sensation — those stay.
Movement and speech are gone. He stares at Zaki’s face and has no power to look away.
Good. That is where we need him.
She studies him. The silver rings in her eyes hold the orange glow from the burning helicopter. The look on her face is not rage. She has been waiting three years for this.
What she does to him is thorough. She does not hurry and she does not flinch. When it is finished she straightens up and raises the trophy in both hands.
“Now we have a trophy,” she says.
I bow my head.
Pride and grief move through me at the same time, running together until I cannot separate them, and then it is the village.
The fire-lit ceremonies, the calls that carried across the highlands, the Matriarch speaking our names like they were worth something.
Three years of that gone, and here, on a frozen American road with helicopter wreckage still burning, we have taken one piece of it back.
I am glad she did not see this. The angle from the passenger seat, with smoke from the crash rolling across the street, would not have given her a clear view. My Bouda says nothing about my relief, which means he agrees with me.
Alemayehu. My Bouda sounds annoyed. We are standing in a righteous victory on a battlefield we just cleared with our sister, for the first time in three years, and your primary concern is what our very westernized human mate witnessed.
“She is not ready for that.” Your fantasies about cooking her food and rubbing her feet did not embarrass you, my Bouda says. But this does. Figure out what that means, Alemayehu.
Zaki is already walking, stepping past the frozen and the fallen, her bare feet leaving steam prints on the concrete. She stops beside me, eyes on her shape through the driver’s side window.
Our mate is reckless, my Bouda says. We will need to do something about that.
“She is brave,” I say.
“If your Bouda told you she is reckless,” Zaki says, without looking away from the truck, “believe him. My Bouda says the same. So do I.”
The driver’s side door of the truck swings open.
Kendra hits the ground running.
She comes around the front of the truck and heads straight toward us, cutting wide to clear the burning wreckage, her coat pulled up over her mouth against the heat and the smoke. She is wincing, one arm raised against the glow of the flames, pushing forward anyway.
Reckless, my Bouda says flatly.
“Do not make me fucking teleport you.” Kade is already out of the truck and moving, calling after her. She is running too, which says something about how fast my mate is covering the ground.
I look at Zaki. She looks back.
I groan and run.
I reach her before she makes it past the worst of the heat, her face scrunched against it, still trying to push through.
I get my arms under her and pick her up and she makes a sound of protest that I ignore, turning and carrying her back to where my sister is standing, setting her down on the ground a safe distance from the fire.
Kade reaches us a few seconds later, without slowing she turns toward the burning wreckage and raises one hand, palm flat, pushing it forward.
Her blue eyes flare bright, the blue bleeding into the smoke around her.
The flames lean away from her fingers, thin and pull back, and then go out, leaving nothing but the shell of the helicopter and a low gray smoke rolling.
She drops her hand and glares at my mate.
“Well,” Kade says. “You are stubborn as shit.” She glances at me. “Oh, Kojo, you have your work cut out for you.”
“Alemayehu,” Zaki says.
She raises both hands. “Alright, Zaki.”
She turns and surveys the freeway, the bodies, the scattered hardware, the burning wreckage of the helicopter still lit against the snow. Her gaze lands on the trophy in Zaki’s hand and she smiles.
She straightens up, still catching her breath, and looks at me. Her eyes move over my face, my arms, checking. “Are you alright?”
“I am fine.”
She nods. Then her eyes drift to Zaki and drop to what she is holding, and her mouth opens, and then closes again very carefully. She takes one step to the side, then another, until she is behind me. Her fingers find the back of my shirt and close around it.
She trusts us to protect her, Alemayehu. My Bouda’s satisfaction is thorough. We are making progress.
“Let’s get these vehicles moved so we can go home,” Kade tells us.
“My queen.” Zaki does not raise her voice. “Do not do that again.”
Kendra looks at my sister. Her mouth stays shut. Then her grip on my shirt tightens.
Zaki sets the trophy on the ground and walks to the nearest SUV.
She gets her grip under the frame, lifts it off the concrete like it weighs nothing, pivots, and heaves it.
The vehicle clears the guardrail and comes down on the far side of the freeway with an impact that shakes the road surface beneath our feet.
She is already moving to the next one before the sound finishes rolling back to us.
Kendra jumps at the crash. She watches the second SUV go over the rail and squeaks at the impact, her hand still bunched in my shirt. By the third she has stopped jumping but has not let go.
“Well,” she says, when the last one lands, “one thing I know for sure. The Bouda have absolutely no appreciation for human transportation.”
“They throw cars around like Legos,” Kade calls back, already heading for the truck.
I look at Kade. “What is a Lego?”
Kendra’s grip on my shirt loosens. She tilts her head back and looks up at me, and for a moment the smoke and the cold and all of it fall away and it is just her face.
Then she shakes her head and starts walking, and I fall into step behind her, which is exactly where I am supposed to be.