Chapter 8 #2
He was on his feet and moving before the pirate could recover the weapon, closing the distance with a speed he shouldn't have had left in him.
His left arm was deadweight, his head rang, and he had blood running down over his right eye.
None of it mattered. He hit the pirate like a battering ram and slammed him into the console hard enough to crack the display.
The fight was bloody and brutal.
There was nothing clean about it. It was ugly, close-quarters work. The kind you didn't walk away from looking pretty.
The pirate got behind him and he couldn't turn fast enough, his left arm refusing to cooperate. The blade came down toward his shoulder. He braced for the bite of it—
Then a fire suppressor slammed into the side of the pirate's head with a crack that echoed off the bulkheads.
"Get back," Thyaar snarled at Amelia, as he pivoted to finish what she'd started.
"Make me," she snarled right back, and swung the suppressor again.
She shouldn't be here. She was barefoot and small and wearing his shirt and she had no business being in the middle of a draanthing boarding action. She shouldn't be here, but he couldn't stop watching her.
His heart was in his throat every time he caught a flash of her in his peripheral vision… all wild dark hair, her jaw set and her gray eyes blazing as she wielded that suppressor like a bat and refused to stay down.
A pirate lunged for her and Thyaar put himself between them without thinking, taking the hit meant for her on his damaged shoulder.
The pain was white-hot, lightning streaking down his arm and across his body into his spine.
He used it, let it become fuel for the rage as he drove his fist into the pirate's throat.
He followed the stumbling body down and didn't stop until the male wasn't getting up again.
Behind him, Barnaby screamed again.
Thyaar looked up, his forearm shoved into his opponent’s throat as he took his last, struggling breath. For one disorienting second, his brain couldn't make sense of what he saw.
Barnaby was on a pirate's shoulders, but the cat looked wrong.
He was bigger than he had been before, his claws rending flesh with a power and depth that a twelve-pound house cat shouldn't be capable of.
The pirate flailed and bled, trying to throw the cat off but Barnaby rode him like a warrior on a panicking mount, raking down the side of his face and taking an eye out with a flick of his paw.
What the draanth—
A blade came at his head and Thyaar had to stop watching. He blocked, twisted the weapon away, used the pirate's momentum to throw him into the navigator's station. The console sparked and died. The pirate didn't get up.
When he looked again, Barnaby was sitting on the pirate’s still chest, cleaning blood off his paw.
His ginger fur was streaked with red. His eyes, when they flicked up to meet Thyaar's, were flat and predatory and absolutely not the eyes of a house pet who'd spent his life knocking mugs off tables.
He yawned, showing teeth that seemed sharper than Thyaar remembered, and began grooming his chest.
There was something very, very wrong with that cat.
Later. He'd deal with it later.
The pirate he’d head-butted had regained consciousness and was trying to crawl toward the door. Thyaar caught up to him in three strides, grabbed him by the back of his collar, and introduced his face to the bulkhead until he stopped moving.
Then it was quiet.
Well, not really quiet. The systems were still failing around them, alerts screaming from the consoles that worked, and there was something venting aft with a hiss. But no one was trying to kill them anymore.
Thyaar stood in the wreck of the bridge, breathing hard, and took stock.
His left arm hung heavy at his side, the shoulder throbbing. Blood still ran down the right side of his face and the grind when he breathed too deep warned him that he had at least two cracked ribs. His hands were slick and red, some of it his, most of it not.
Amelia stood two meters away, fire suppressor still clutched in both hands, knuckles white on the cylinder. She was shaking and wild-eyed as she looked around for her next target. Her chest heaved and her bare feet were splattered with foam and blood.
The breath punched out of him. She was alive.
There were three pirates on the deck and two more in the corridor behind Amelia, visible through the doorway, both of them with the kind of wounds that came from claws, not blades.
Barnaby had taken down three of them. On his own.
"What," Thyaar said roughly, "is wrong with your cat?"
Amelia laughed. It was high and cracked with the edge of hysteria, and she couldn't seem to stop, the sound hitching out of her as she finally lowered the suppressor.
"I have no idea," she managed between gasps. "Emily found him in an alley. He’s just a cat."
Barnaby looked up at both of them, slow-blinked smugly, and went back to washing himself.
Thyaar stared at the animal.
"The Emperor," Thyaar said, "is never going to believe any of this."
Then his knees buckled.
He caught himself on the navigator's console before he went down, his good hand slamming into the cracked display, and held on while his vision grayed at the edges.
Draanth. He'd pushed too hard, run too long on nothing, and his body was done waiting for permission to fall apart.
"Thyaar—"
Amelia was there in a heartbeat, her hands on his good arm as she propped him up. Her face was tight with concern.
"I'm fine," he lied, reaching up to push her hair away from her beautiful face.
She batted his hand away, frowning as she used surprisingly gentle fingers to push his head to the side and look at the wound in his hair.
"Shut up. You're bloody well bleeding, and you about passed out. What part of that is ‘fine’, you idiot?"