30. Clair
CLAIR
By the time Clair and Kaelus emerged from the Blood Archive, she was beginning to think that perhaps walking out under their own power had been overly ambitious.
Kaelus had insisted on dragging Sendar with one hand while allowing Clair to help support him with the other, which would have been ridiculous under ordinary circumstances considering he was nearly twice her height and probably three times her weight.
Unfortunately, ordinary circumstances had apparently left Titus Four sometime around the moment Sendar injected the big Hybrid with a murderous alien virus.
By the time the massive crystalline doors slid open and the lavender sunlight spilled over them, Kaelus was leaning more heavily on her than he seemed willing to admit, his face had gone gray beneath his naturally warm complexion, and blood had soaked the entire left side of his shirt.
Clair wasn’t doing much better. Her legs trembled every few steps, every muscle between her thighs ached in ways she intended to complain about extensively later, and her neck was sore where his fangs had pierced her.
She also had the deeply unsettling sensation that a second presence was lurking somewhere just beyond the edge of her thoughts, which was probably something she ought to be considerably more concerned about than she currently had the energy to manage.
“Oh, thank the stars!” Maera’s voice rang across the landing area.
Clair looked up and saw her racing toward them from a silver transport vehicle with Varell close behind her, along with four uniformed males carrying weapons.
Maera’s normally composed face was pale with worry, and Varell looked equally grim. Apparently when Clair had failed to return and neither she nor Kaelus answered their coms, somebody had finally decided there might be trouble.
“Maera,” Clair said with immense relief. “I am so glad to see you—we have had one hell of an afternoon.”
Maera’s eyes went first to Clair, then to Kaelus’s bleeding shoulder, and finally to Sendar hanging unconscious from Kaelus’s enormous hand.
“What happened?” she asked, her eyes wide and anxious.
“That is an extremely long story,” Clair said.
“The short version is that Sendar created the Savage Syndrome outbreak on Glenvarren, murdered Galandra when she found out, infected Kaelus with the virus, tried to get him to kill me, admitted the whole thing while his own recorder-bee was filming him, and then tried to shoot us when his plan fell apart.”
Maera and Varell stared at her. Even the armed guards stared at her.
Clair sighed.
“I know, I know—it’s crazy but it’s all true. It just sounds worse when I say it all at once.”
Kaelus muttered something and swayed beside her—that immediately ended the questions.
“Physicians!” Varell barked, turning toward the transport. “Now!”
“I do not require—” Kaelus began.
“Yes, you do,” Clair snapped. “You’ve lost a lot of blood! And if you say you’re fine one more time, I’m going to let you fall over.”
“I was merely going to say that I do not require emergency transport.”
“You have a hole burned through your shoulder,” she pointed out. “Let them transport you!”
At last Kaelus nodded.
Clair nodded back, feeling justified but suddenly a wave of dizziness swept over her.
Maera hurried to her side and slipped an arm around her waist.
“And you, my dear, look as though you are about to collapse.”
“I’m all right,” Clair protested.
Kaelus made a low sound of disagreement and Clair glared up at him.
“You do not get to comment.”
Before he could argue, two medical attendants rushed from the transport carrying a hovering stretcher. They took one look at Kaelus’s shoulder and immediately began issuing orders.
Kaelus resisted being placed on the stretcher until Clair threatened to sit on him, at which point he gave her a dark look but finally submitted.
Meanwhile, Varell directed the guards to restrain Sendar, who was beginning to groan and stir. The instant Maera saw his face clearly, something changed in hers.
“Sendar?” she whispered.
The unconscious scientist was hauled upright between two guards and Clair felt Maera’s hand tighten around her waist.
“He killed Galandra,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.” She hated having to say it, but there was no kinder version of the truth.
“Kaelus found the records,” she went on. “Galandra discovered what Sendar was doing with the ancient viral strains and realized he was responsible for what happened on Glenvarren. Sendar admitted that she confronted him and he drowned her because she was going to expose him.”
Maera made a soft, broken sound.
“She was my friend,” she whispered. “How could he?”
“Don’t worry, my dear—he will be punished,” Varell snarled.
His face hardened with such cold fury that for the first time Clair understood how Titus Four had survived its violent past. These males might worship their wives, but there was nothing weak about them.
“Take him,” Varell ordered the guards. “Full restraint protocols. He is to have no access to communication, medical laboratories, biological samples, or data systems of any kind. Inform the Council that Doctor Sendar Rax is accused of murder, biological terrorism, unlawful experimentation, attempted murder, and deliberate contamination of an off-world population.”
One of the guards bowed his head.
“At once, Doctor-Magistrate.”
“And preserve everything recorded by the surveillance device,” Varell added.
“We already downloaded it,” Clair said. She lifted Kaelus’s battered data tablet. “Twice.”
Kaelus, now lying on the hovering stretcher, looked over at her.
“I want that back when you’re finished with it,” he rumbled. “It has all my data.”
Even Maera managed the faintest smile at that, though tears had gathered in her luminous eyes. Then the guards took Sendar away, and Clair watched Maera follow him with her gaze until he disappeared into another vehicle.
For all that Sendar had said about women enslaving the males of Titus Four, the grief on Maera’s face had nothing to do with power or control. She was grieving a woman she had known, perhaps loved as a friend, murdered by the very man who was supposed to cherish her above everything else.
“Galandra was such a beautiful woman,” Maera said softly once Sendar was gone. “She was brilliant.” She shook her head, smiling a little. “She came to one of my lectures years ago and argued with me through half of it.”
Clair gave a sad little smile.
“Sounds like my kind of woman.”
“She was.” Maera wiped quickly beneath one eye. “And we believed she died in an accident because the alternative was unthinkable.”
Clair looked toward the vehicle carrying Sendar.
“Maybe that was part of how he got away with it.”
Maera nodded slowly.
“Perhaps. The idea of a man who doesn’t love his wife is unknown here on Titus Four.
I don’t understand how Sendar could grow to hate his goddess enough to kill her.
” Then her physician’s instincts seemed to reassert themselves.
She turned abruptly toward Clair and Kaelus.
“Enough. Both of you require medical attention immediately.”
They were taken directly to a medical facility built into one of the neighboring structures, and within minutes Clair found herself seated on a floating diagnostic bed while a scanner passed slowly from her head to her feet.
Kaelus was on another bed only a few yards away, shirtless now while Varell and two physicians treated his shoulder.
The blaster burn looked horrific to Clair—a charred groove carved across the heavy muscle near his collarbone, though apparently it had missed the major vessels and nerves.
One of the physicians sealed the damaged tissue with a shimmering gel and some kind of regenerative light, but Clair couldn’t stop watching Kaelus’s face.
He remained stoic through the entire procedure, jaw clenched, though every so often she felt a distant pulse of pain that didn’t seem to belong to her.
That was becoming extremely difficult to ignore.
“You felt that, didn’t you?” Clair asked suddenly.
Kaelus looked at her.
“Felt what?”
“When they treated your shoulder with the gel—it burned, didn’t it?”
His expression became carefully blank.
“I’m fine—my pain is not unbearable.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” Clair said.
He nodded.
“I know.”
“Then answer me,” she insisted.
He shook his head.
“We have more immediate concerns.”
Clair narrowed her eyes.
“You are absolutely hiding something from me!”
Kaelus looked away, refusing to meet her eyes. To Clair, that alone was practically a confession. Something had definitely changed between them since they’d had sex—but what?
Before she could press him more, Maera came over carrying a crystal display filled with biological readings.
“Clair, your scans show no serious injury,” she said gently.
“You do have some, ah, internal bruising and minor tissue irritation…” Her eyes flickered to Kaelus and back again.
“But that should heal naturally within a few days. Other than that, your blood pressure is lower than I would like, probably from exhaustion, and you are mildly dehydrated.”
Clair nodded.
“I can live with that. Is there anything else?”
“As a matter of fact, there is.” Maera brought up another set of readings. “What interests me more is the biochemical analysis I ran on both of you.”
That got Clair’s attention immediately.
“What? What do you mean?”
“Let me show you.”
Maera expanded the display. Varell joined them, as did Kaelus, despite the healer ordering him to remain still.
“Doctor Kaelus,” the physician protested.
“I am capable of viewing data while injured,” Kaelus growled and the other male backed off. Even injured, the big Hybrid was intimidating, Clair thought.
Then Maera enlarged the blood work and she focused on that.
“The virus remains present in Kaelus’s system,” Maera said. “In fact, his viral load is extraordinarily high.”
Clair’s stomach tightened.
“Then…he isn’t cured?”
“He is—despite his viral load, Doctor Kaelus is completely cured,” Maera assured her.