Chapter 23
By the fifth morning, the jungle felt like home.
Serafina moved through the green darkness with a fluidity that would have terrified her a week ago.
Her body knew this place now, the way light filtered through the canopy, the texture of undergrowth beneath her boots, the humid air that filled her lungs with each breath.
She didn't have to think about where to step. Her feet found the paths on their own.
She had stopped thinking about Los Angeles. About the apartment that had burned. About the badge sitting in her go-bag back at the compound. About Aria's medical bills or Angelo's heart medication or the fourteen years she had spent chasing justice through a system that ground people into dust.
There was only the jungle. The Hunt. And him.
His trail was easy to find now. He wasn't hiding anymore. Broken fronds. Displaced soil. Faint heat signatures her visor picked up and translated into ghostly outlines. He left them deliberately. An invitation. A challenge.
They were circling each other. Predator and predator.
She could feel him out there, just beyond the edge of her awareness, matching her movements through the green.
Sometimes she caught a glimpse of motion in the trees.
Sometimes she heard the distant crack of a branch. He was close. Getting closer.
She wasn't afraid.
The realization should have disturbed her.
Five days ago, she had been a homicide detective with a gun and a badge and a desperate need for money.
Now she was a different creature entirely.
One that wanted to find him not because of the contract or the payment or the life waiting for her back in the real world.
She wanted to find him because he was hers to hunt.
The thought sent heat through her belly, and she didn't push it away.
She crested a ridge and paused, scanning the valley below. Dense vegetation, a narrow stream cutting through the undergrowth, good sightlines from her position. She could set up here, wait for him to…
The jungle went quiet.
The silence came all at once. Absolute. Wrong. Every bird, every insect, every rustling creature in the canopy fell silent at once, and the hair on the back of Serafina's neck stood up.
She dropped into a crouch before she consciously decided to move. Weapon up, finger alongside the trigger guard, eyes sweeping the terrain. Fourteen years of police work and eight years before that in the Corps took over, and she became very still.
She knew Makrath's presence by now: the way he moved, the weight of his attention when he watched her. This felt alien in a different way. This felt like…
Threat.
It came out of the foliage like death wearing skin.
Grey skin stretched tight over angular bones. Webbed hands ending in claws that looked like surgical instruments. Eyes that held nothing but hatred: black and gleaming and fixed on her with predatory focus.
Alien, but the wrong kind. A species beyond her briefings, beyond her preparation.
Alarm spiked through her, sharp and cold.
They hadn't said anything about other aliens.
Four weeks of training, hours of briefings, and no one had mentioned this possibility.
Had Morgan lied to her? Had this been a risk all along, a danger they'd glossed over in the fine print?
Or was this an attack, an enemy that had slipped past whatever resources and guards the program had in place?
Either way, she was alone with it.
The creature moved with a liquid grace that made her stomach clench with instinctive revulsion. Every nerve in her body screamed danger. Predator. Threat. She could feel its hostility radiating off it like heat, a killing intent so pure it needed no translation.
Nearly seven feet tall and fast—she could see it in the coiled tension of its body, the way it shifted its weight. Built for killing.
"You're the human." The voice made her flinch.
The translator—the smooth, stone-like silver disc she wore on a cord around her neck, small enough to fit in her palm—hummed warm against her chest as it rendered the words flat and affectless, stripping them of whatever inflection the original speech had carried. "The one he chose."
Serafina's finger moved to the trigger.
"Who the fuck are you?"
It smiled. At least, she thought it was a smile. The mouth stretched too wide, showing rows of teeth like broken glass.
"The one who will make him suffer."
It attacked.
Fast. Faster than anything that size should move. She threw herself sideways, and claws raked across the space where her chest had been a heartbeat before. Air displacement. The whisper of death passing inches from her throat.
She hit the ground rolling, came up with her weapon tracking, and fired.
The beam caught it in the shoulder. It screamed—a sound that scraped against her eardrums like metal on metal—but it didn't stop. Didn't even slow. It kept coming, and she understood with sudden clarity that this wasn't a fight she could win by playing defensive.
She met its charge.
The bio-armor absorbed the first blow, hardening on impact, but the force still drove her backward.
Her boots carved furrows in the soft earth.
Her teeth rattled in her skull. She felt a rib shift—strained, close to breaking—and she twisted away from the follow-up strike that would have opened her throat.
Her fist connected with its face. The armor amplified the blow, and she felt cartilage give beneath her knuckles. A spray of dark fluid: blood, maybe, or worse. It staggered, and she pressed the advantage, driving a knee into its midsection and bringing her elbow down on the back of its skull.
It caught her arm.
Twisted.
Pain exploded through her shoulder, white-hot and blinding, and she felt the claws punch through the armor at her bicep. Not a slash, a stab. Deep. She felt the points scrape against bone.
Blood. Hot and immediate. Running down to her elbow, dripping from her fingers, spattering the jungle floor.
She didn't scream. She headbutted it instead.
The impact rattled her teeth and sent starbursts across her vision. But it released her arm, reeling back, and she spun away, putting distance between them. Three meters. She needed more. She fired again.
The beam took it in the thigh. It went down to one knee.
Yes. Stay down. Stay…
It threw a blade.
A blade. Small and wickedly sharp, spinning through the humid air faster than she could track. She got her arm up, barely, and the armor caught most of it.
Not all.
The edge sliced across her side, just below her ribs. A line of fire. More blood, soaking into the bio-suit, and she felt the armor struggling to seal the wound, to staunch the flow, to keep her functioning.
Too much damage. Too fast.
It was back on its feet. Coming at her again. And she was slower now, her movements sluggish, her vision starting to blur at the edges.
She fought anyway.
Every trick she had learned in fourteen years of police work.
Every instinct honed in back alleys and interrogation rooms and firefights that never made the official reports.
She fought dirty, because this wasn't a sparring match.
She fought smart, because she couldn't match its speed or its reach.
She fought mean, because she was Serafina Montecristo and she didn't fucking break.
She put another beam through its shoulder. The same shoulder, widening the wound. It screamed again, and there was frustration in the sound now, rage that she hadn't already fallen.
But she was falling.
Her legs were going numb. Blood loss or shock or both. The armor was doing what it could, pumping her full of whatever combat drugs the Majarin had built into it, but it wasn't enough. She could feel herself fading, could feel the darkness creeping in at the edges of her vision.
She went down to one knee.
The alien stopped. Watched her struggle to rise. That too-wide smile stretched across its face again.
"He will find you here," it said. "What's left of you. And he will know that he failed to protect what was his."
Serafina raised her weapon. Her arm was shaking. The veth'kai felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
She fired.
Missed.
The beam scorched past the alien's head, close enough to singe the grey skin but nothing more. Her aim was gone. Her strength was gone. Everything was going dark and distant and far away.
She tried to stand. Her legs wouldn't cooperate.
The alien walked toward her. Slow now. Savoring it. Claws flexing at its sides, dripping with her blood.
"He chose poorly," it said. "Humans are so fragile."
Serafina's hand found a rock. Fist-sized. Solid. She clutched it like a lifeline, because she didn't have anything else left.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
She couldn't get up.
The alien loomed over her. Raised one clawed hand. The killing blow, aimed at her throat.
Aria. Angelo. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
She thought of Makrath. His name, surfacing unbidden. The sound of her own name in his voice. The weight of him against her, the heat, the promise of a bond she would never get to understand.
Makrath.
She closed her eyes.
The blow didn't come.
The jungle, already silent, seemed to hold its breath. A pressure change in the air. A shift in the quality of the darkness behind her eyelids.
And then a sound.
Low. Rumbling. Building from somewhere deep in the earth, or deep in a chest, or deep in the primal part of her brain that remembered what it meant to be prey.
A growl.
Aimed past her. At the thing that had tried to kill her.
Serafina opened her eyes.
The alien had frozen. Its clawed hand still raised, its killing strike arrested mid-swing. And its face—that grey, angular, hate-filled face—had changed.
It was afraid.
A shape moved in the shadows behind it. Massive. It made the alien look small.
Makrath.
He had come.