Chapter 9
Vessa
Even with the warming blanket wrapped around her, Vessa shivered uncontrollably in front of the fire.
The storm had worsened, and the temperature dropped drastically overnight.
Even Kedar had been forced to put his cloak on for extra warmth, and every once in a while, she caught a tremor going through him.
If it was cold for a Xaal…
They sat in a misery-filled silence, the wind too harsh to hear each other anyway. All Vessa could really do was stare into the flames and hope she survived this. Even daydreaming about being buns-out on a planet with four suns didn’t help.
Frost collected on the exposed stone, creating starbursts of freeze across the obsidian. Were they going to die here?
Vessa lifted her head to search for Kedar but found him directly across from her at the fire. Staring at her.
“What?”
“You are losing body heat rapidly, and the temperature in here is still dropping.”
“Thank you for pointing out the obvious,” she managed between her clacking teeth. “I really don’t know what I would do without your infinite wisdom.”
He tilted his head. “Your heart rate is already decreasing. Your breathing is slowing. Soon, you’ll stop shivering.”
“For fuck’s sake,” she declared, though it didn’t carry nearly the same bite when stuttered out.
It wasn’t like she could do anything about the fucking weather and how her body reacted to it.
She was as close as she could get to the fire, and unless she wanted to wrestle Kedar for his cloak, there weren't any other layers for her to put on.
“I could help. For survival.” His tone was carefully neutral.
Her eyes snapped to his mask. “Absolutely not. I’ll survive just fine on my own.”
Kedar muttered something under his breath that sounded like “doubtful.”
She huddled further in on herself. The tremors slowed, and it was out of pure spite she didn’t say anything to him about it.
In fact, it would be hilarious if she ended up dying from the cold when he so badly wanted to kill her.
He looked at her every few minutes, though, monitoring her vitals like a damn mother den bird.
The storm grew louder and more tumultuous. It buffeted the outer walls with a vengeance, roaring and raging.
Then it shifted entirely.
Wind blew directly into the cave, sweeping into the space so violently that even the fire-hold gel couldn’t withstand its force. The flames flattened. Died. Their only source of heat on this gods forsaken planet.
If Vessa were superstitious, she might think this was all happening as some form of punishment for a past misdeed.
“Nevskol,” Kedar cursed over the rush of sound. He stood up, his cloak whipping around him like he was a damn villain in Between Dimensions. “We should—”
It was so sudden. One second, it was just wind, and the next, it sounded like artillery from the gods themselves raining down.
Hail the size of her palm barreled into the cave, ricocheted off the walls.
They became violent projectiles. One caught her in the lower back; another smashed into her knee, and even through the blanket, it would leave a welt.
Gods curse it all. She jumped up, throwing the blanket off herself. The cold had made her muscles rigid, made her lethargic. Yet she still managed to dodge the icy missiles and extend her raze sword to bat several more away. “The tunnels! If we sprint, we can make it.”
“No,” Kedar yelled. “Here.” He pulled her toward him and pressed her back against the wall on the other side of the entrance tunnel.
Standing in front of her, he planted his forearm next to her face and lifted his shoulder.
Hail still pummeled him. His back, his side, and the arm shielding her face.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she snapped over the chaos.
“I know you don’t.” There was something in his tone that sounded almost sad. “But if one hits you in the head, it’s likely to do permanent damage. Or kill you. It’ll pass.”
Vessa wasn’t convinced. When she shifted to look under his arm, though, she realized it was too late.
The hail had only worsened. There was so much of it collecting on the ground that, knowing her cursed luck on this planet, she was likely to slip and fall.
Resigning herself to being stuck with Kedar as her shield, she settled back into her place.
A particularly large piece hit the side of Kedar’s mask so hard that he growled out a string of curses before pressing in closer to her. Heat radiated from him, and without thought, she put her hands on his abs.
He stiffened. Inhaled deeply. “Put them here,” he said, covering one of her hands with his own. Bringing it up his side, he placed it near his armpit. It was like putting her hands and forearms into a personal heater. The bastard might as well be a thermal band with all the heat he produced.
The position left them even closer than before. Her nose could brush against his upper abs if she wasn’t careful.
He chuckled, shaking them both. “I would take this over what happened on Pelk. Do you remember?”
“Those evil beetles!” she exclaimed. She hadn’t thought of that hunt in years.
It had been a disaster. They’d made it deep into the complex desert environment, hunting for some giant snake Kedar wanted a fang from.
The sun had been relentless, not a single cloud in the sky—until the swarm of bright red beetles blocked it out.
There was nowhere to take shelter. They tried to outrun them, and when that failed, tried cutting through them, but there were just too many.
“I found them for weeks after,” he said. “They somehow got inside my gear. In my armor.”
“I know.” Vessa shook with laughter. “I found them in places they had no right to be in. And they bit! I had more bites on my ass than anywhere else. It haunted me.”
“All because,” he mused, “we happened to arrive during their mating migration… which happens once every seven hundred cycles.”
She rested her forehead against his warm diaphragm as tears leaked out of her eyes. “Remember Solar Nine?”
“The Kroids,” they said simultaneously.
“I mean,” she wheezed, “we found ourselves in the worst predicaments often.”
Kedar’s uncontainable laughter was so genuine and familiar that longing ripped through her at the sound of it. “None of it was that bad, though. Not with you,” he said through his mirth.
Realization struck them at the same time.
Vessa lifted her head from his chest, tried to pull her hands away from him.
Except Kedar’s body tensed, his biceps flexing and trapping her forearms against him.
He grunted and let her free, but she had already been pulling her arms out with force.
Her elbows slammed into the wall behind her.
Pain radiated up to her shoulders in agonizing waves.
Fuck, fuck, fuck. She hated this shitty planet and this weirdly honorable Xaal protecting her from hail. As if she was something precious. Who did that?
When the hail finally stopped, they pulled away from each other with matching urgency.
Flames danced in her vision. Kedar had rebuilt the fire the moment the wind shifted again and then moved to the farthest corner of the cave. He was currently driving her mad by throwing balls of hail into one of the tunnels, his back to her.
Vessa resolutely ignored him, too. She was too busy contemplating her life choices to care anyway. Her entire life would be different if she had never met Kedar. She’d be life-tied to Nikel. Be the mother of his children. Would she be happy—would she have grown to love him?
She snorted softly. No. But she also wouldn’t be stuck shivering in this death cavern with her former comrade turned greatest enemy. She would be home.
When she’d been banished, she didn’t get to say goodbye to her parents. They had been on the eastern border, dealing with a territory dispute. One moment, she had a faction. Family. A best friend. And the next, she had nothing.
But most of her favorite moments in her thirty-four years of existence were with Kedar.
Five years of deep friendship and camaraderie.
A single moment of destruction. Then seven years trying to forget him.
Beneath her anger, beneath the pain of betrayal, there was something else.
A depthless ocean she had refused to cross.
She had never truly let him go, never dealt with the aftermath.
Never grieved. No wonder this was such a mindfuck for her.
A ghastly howl echoed in the distance, pulling her from her thoughts. It was a sound that didn’t belong to the storm.
Tilting her head to listen, she flicked her eyes to Kedar. He was preternaturally still. Was it Orcru? Some other nasty beast that lived on this dreadful planet?
When nothing followed, Vessa set the warming blanket aside and rose to her feet slowly.
She crept toward the front of the cave with her raze sword, carefully stepping around the few remaining hail pieces.
Kedar was beside her before she even took two steps.
He signaled for her to hold using gestures they had come up with together long ago.
“What?” she signed back and the bastard only motioned for her to hold again. “Fuck. Off.” Vessa purposely took another step forward.
She only paused when she thought she heard something else. Whatever it was, it seemed like it was coming from above them. She glanced upward.
“Move!” Kedar barked at the same moment an arrow shot through the snowy curtain.
Vessa shifted enough that it missed her by just a sliver. Then it detonated. The explosion caused a few icicles to fall from overhead. Qo arrows, then. They weren’t made for surface detonation; they were made to explode near or inside someone.
Two more bolts whizzed through in quick succession. She cut one in half, defusing it before it could detonate above her head.