Chapter 15
AN INCONVENIENT TIME FOR A GROWTH SPURT
KOL
When the first of Lucek’s warriors slams into my chest, the dead-weight force of the impact travels straight through my legs and cracks the stone beneath my feet.
It is a sickening, wet crunch of colliding bone and muscle.
The vibration travels up my arm, through the pain already serrating my shoulders, and settles deep in my spine.
I do not step back. I do not yield a single fraction of an inch of the tunnel.
I simply twist my shoulders, and snap the warrior’s arm at the joint.
He drops. I am already moving to meet the next two.
My body is a contradiction of agony and power.
The transformation is tearing me apart from the inside out.
A flood of raw energy that makes every strike hit harder and every nerve scream louder.
The starfield is blazing across my ribs, the points of light burning so bright they cast erratic shadows across the blood-soaked stone of the cavern.
It feels as though fires have been lit beneath my skin.
My bones are thickening, reforming, settling into something broader, denser, deadlier.
The pain is splintering. The power is staggering.
And yet, in the center of the slaughter, surrounded by a handful of Lucek’s warriors and the swarm of shadowmaws they drove into my home, my dra-kir is distracted.
Eh-ree-kah.
Her terrified presence above me is a screaming weight at my back. She is flattened into the shadows of the high tunnel. She still has not moved.
I force my attention back to the slaughter. I must hold this floor until the mountain is safe for her.
I tear one of Lucek’s males off Rith, throwing his sprawling body into the cavern wall with a wet thud.
The air reeks of spilled lifeblood. A dead shadowmaw lies to my right. A broken and limping rival to the left.
Another warrior lunges for my throat. I raise my arm to parry the strike, my muscles coiled and ready to deliver a devastating counter-blow.
And then, a shadowmaw breaks through the front line to my left, its serrated jaws snapping at the air.
My execution falters.
Not out of fear of the beast. But because in that single, fragmented second, my mind superimposes the image of those jaws closing around her.
It is a fraction of a second. A sliver of hesitation.
The shadowmaw’s claws slip past my guard. They rake across my left shoulder, tearing through the thick hide and scoring deep into the muscle beneath.
The sharp sting of pain instantly shatters the panic.
I snarl, a low, guttural sound of pure rage. My right hand shoots out with terrifying speed, closing around the shadowmaw’s throat. I lift it off the ground with one arm, my claws digging deep under its scales, and hurl it backward to crush the advancing rival warrior beneath its weight.
In the mindspace, a sharp spike of urgency hits my consciousness.
“We cannot hold all the passages,” Rok projects, his mental voice tight with strain as he holds the left flank ten feet away. “The beasts are too fast.”
“HOLD THE UNEVEN GROUND,” I roar back, throwing another shadowmaw back into the fray. “PROTECT THE TUNNEL DESCENT.”
I turn back to the fray, unleashing a wave of violence that clears a ten-foot radius around my position. My claws are fully extended, my teeth bared. The starfield burns blindingly bright.
And then, the chaotic current of the battle shifts.
A towering rival warrior called Ryden breaks through the secondary line. He slips along the far edge, diving into the deep shadows near the offshoot to the bathing chambers.
My eyes track his movement, but I am pinned down by three more attackers. I cannot reach him.
In the shadows, a shape moves and time stills.
A female.
Eh-ree-kah?
No. Tre-sha.
What is she doing here? She is smaller, lighter, unsuited for the reality of the front lines.
To Ryden, moving fast and blinded by the erratic strobe of my glow, the shape in the darkness is a threat. A smaller male attempting to flank him.
He does not know that these are females. He does not know he is in the presence of a Daughter.
He sets his stance and he charges.
Tre-sha realizes he is coming. She does not try to fight. She does not cower.
Instead, she lets out a loud, high-pitched scream.
It is piercing. In the cavern, the pitch of it hits our hyper-sensitive ears, enough that it affects even my warriors who have been conditioned to listen to the female’s various sounds for so many cycles.
Ryden flinches. He breaks stride, his head snapping back as he recoils from the sharp burst of pain.
It is just enough.
Tre-sha turns and sprints for the deepest shadows. The sleeping area. I want to roar at her to run the other way, but maybe I have forgotten who these females are. Who they come from. The Daughters were the makers of the Drakav. They were not fools.
I see where she is heading a moment before she scrambles into the dense bone cage I constructed over Eh-ree-kah’s sleeping furs. The bones catch her thin skin, drawing lifeblood, but she doesn’t stop the mad scatter until she is inside.
She pulls her legs in just as Ryden recovers.
He attacks through the thick bone bars, his arm reaching into the cage. His claws find purchase.
Another high-pitched screech tears through the cavern. This one is different. It is not a battle cry. It is a high, thin sound of tearing.
Ryden’s claws rake across the side of her face and down her shoulder before she scrambles out of reach against the far back wall of the cage.
And then, he freezes.
I can tell when her scent hits him.
Even across the cavern, over the overwhelming stench of lifeblood and shadowmaw, the shift in the atmosphere is instantaneous. Ryden’s shoulders hitch. His glow blasts in the dim light.
Pure, profound confusion explodes in his mind, bleeding out into the mindspace. He scrambles backward from the bone cage, staring down at his claws. The scent of her lifeblood is entirely wrong. It is alien. It is softer than anything that belongs in the deep rock.
But before he has the chance to process exactly what he just struck, the mindspace explodes.
The scent of her spilled lifeblood hits the mindspace. Time stills. I feel all my warriors pause a moment before horror erupts through all of us simultaneously. The psychic roar hits my brain so hard the cavern actually tilts around me.
My vision edges with absolute, blinding black.
I drive the nearest rival back against the stone wall, my claws hammering down into his skull.
Ryden doesn’t even have time to raise his blade. Two of my warriors hit him simultaneously, driving his back into the rock wall with enough force to crack his ribs. He drops into the dust, motionless.
Without a fraction of hesitation, both warriors throw themselves in front of the bone cage. The same calloused hands that tore enemies apart moments ago now grip the thick bars, shielding Tre-sha from the battle with their bulk.
“The wound is survivable,” one reports. “The damage can be healed.”
But the scream in the mindspace repeats and repeats and repeats...
I knock a shadowmaw back, my chest heaving, the starfield burning so hot I can smell my own scorching skin.
I take another down, but then one comes through the narrow offshoot by the bathing chamber.
I smell it before I see it. The blood-wet reek of it, low and fast, black plating vanishing against the cave floor. It is not hunting with strategy. It is hunting with the pure, mindless confusion of an animal that has been driven from its territory and is striking at anything that has a pulse.
It takes one of Lucek’s men down at the knee. He hits the stone face-first. He does not get up.
It is a fraction of a second before the same creature pivots and hits one of mine.
In the mindspace, the whole clan registers it simultaneously. Lucek did not bring them here to fight for him. He drove them here to make the ground uncertain. To make us spend attention downward, to our flanks, everywhere at once.
Lucek is a tactician. And he is ruthless.
I find him at the far edge of the chaos where I knew he would be. He has not spent a single fighting cycle in the thick of it. He is watching. Counting.
I come through his outer line like a wall collapsing. The two warriors between us go down fast. Lucek turns, and his expression does not change.
He does not run. He does not signal to his men. He simply sets his weight, rolls the bone blade to a reverse grip, and comes at me.
He is fast. Faster than a male this depleted has any right to be.
The blade finds the gap under my left arm and opens a line across my ribs before I can rotate.
I get a handful of his shoulder and hurl him sideways.
He uses the momentum, catching himself off the cave wall and rebounding into me from an angle I don’t have time to track.
His elbow drives into the side of my throat. Dark sparks across my vision.
I grab him by his mane and slam his face into the rock. Once.
He spits lifeblood and drives his knee up. I twist enough that it finds my thigh instead of my gut. It still feels like a boulder.
I drive him backward into the stone so hard the cave wall vibrates. His feet leave the ground. My hand closes around his throat.
In the mindspace, he is silent. There is no panic. Only certainty.
“You harbor a sickness in this mountain,” he projects. His mental voice is flat, completely unaffected by my grip cutting off his air. “I have tracked the strange happenings in the dust. You burn with a corruption.”
“We burn because we are finally waking up,” I project back.
His claws dig straight into the thick muscle of my forearm, drawing lifeblood, but I do not lessen the crushing pressure on his throat.
His amber eyes drag from my face down to my ribs, watching the starfield flare erratic and white-hot against my skin.
“Whatever diseased creatures you are hiding in your deep rock are a plague, Kol. They have ruined the water sources for three boundaries.”