Alec felt the strangest sensation rioting around in her belly. It wasn’t painful; it actually left her feeling a little bit... giddy. Dare she say it, shy?

Kalix kept shooting her sideways glances she was absolutely ill equipped to identify, but it made her feel warm and tingly in all the best places.

It was a look that utterly transformed his face. The firm press of his lips softened ever so slightly, warmed the aloofness of his gaze, and made him smile just enough to cause the lines around those gorgeous eyes of his to crinkle.

The glances were brief, no more than a half a second or so, yet even when she tried not to meet them Alec could feel his stare all the way to her core.

He had just called her his One for the very first time, and not a single part of her had rebelled. He had fought—in more ways than one—to earn the right to call her that. To claim her as his One and only, and she was proud to be given the title. Relieved even.

They walked close enough to one another that every few steps or so their fingers brushed together, making Alec feel like one of the little girls who flirted with the Sarazen boys.

Even with six warriors in front and behind them, it was stupid of her to allow herself to be so unfocused with prisoners being herded back to their encampments. She should be paying attention to her surroundings, not making eyes at her mate.

Until they were safely aboard the transport and on their way back to the fortress, despite Kalix having just unequivocally claimed his territory, they were at risk.

Resolutely she looked away, forcing herself to let her eyes roam over every one of the prisoners close enough to pose a threat.

Alec hadn’t expected to see so many different species, reminded of the marketplace she had visited with Clary.

Hulking ash-colored brutes with four arms and the most beautiful faces, their hair rolled in long ropes lumbered by.

Reptilian males with iridescent scales and blade like ears in all colors of the rainbow appeared to glide effortlessly over the ground.

Males with rows of spikes along their shoulders and hideous gaping mouths filled with razor sharp teeth made her shudder.

No matter the species, they all wore the flat black collars which she had been told were intended to keep the prisoners within a certain boundary.

If they went beyond it, the collars would literally blow their heads off. Effective, she supposed, to keep them contained.

Trying to focus on the aliens closest to them, she almost missed it. In fact, for a moment she thought she imagined it.

Alec stopped dead in the center of the street, staring at the mass of moving prisoners, frantically looking for that one who had just caught her eye. 

She dimly heard Kalix call for her over the ringing in her ears, sound wavering in and out... it took her two tries to speak past the lump in her throat.

“T’chan, bring me that prisoner. The one with the yellow skin.”

Her hand shook when she pointed to the male, her belly churning with horror, holding her breath as one of the warriors at her back waded into the throng, praying for it to have simply been a trick of the light.

“What is it?” Kalix asked, coming up behind her, curving his hands around her waist.

“That prisoner, please tell me his people always look like that?” his sallow, piss-colored skin was stretched taut over his disproportionate body.

His arms and legs were almost awkwardly long in comparison to his squatty torso. He was utterly bald, with knob-like protrusions covering his bulbous skull like a cap.

The snout on him was more of a stunted trunk, his thick lips covered in greenish saliva around a pair of discolored tusks peeking from the corners of his mouth.

On a normal day, Alec would have described him as hideous. Today, he was terrifying.

His belly bulged outward in an unnatural looking hump, and radiating from where she assumed his navel was were jagged black lines. Lines that were in the process of spreading across his gangly body.

Kalix gave a thoughtful grunt. “Brivikans’ are usually a more vibrant orange.”

Alec shook her head, her mouth going dry with growing fear as she watched T’chan struggle to pull the creature from the crowd.

Alec could hear the prisoner as he struggled, demanding T’chan release him, demanding he be allowed to return to his cell. Demanding... demanding water.

*****

Kalix felt Alec tense beneath his hands, her entire body quivering with the horrified disbelief he could feel rocking through her.

“Not. Possible,” she gasped, giving him no warning other than the bunching of her muscles to telegraph her thoughts.

T’chan brought the prisoner forward, struggling to hold the yellow male steady while he fought, and had Kalix not decided to take a firmer grip on his mate, she would have used the blade she palmed to slice his throat.

Kalix could almost see the thoughts as they crossed her suddenly chaotic mind, shaking his head when T’chan looked to him for guidance at Alec’s aggression.

“What is it?” Kalix repeated.

“He’s infected!” Alec hissed, the muscles in her arm rippling from how tightly she gripped her blade.

At first, Kalix didn’t understand what she meant, then he began to take notice of the prisoner’s physical condition.

The sound of Alec’s voice as a cub, replaying in his memories as she described the different stages of infection once having been poisoned by a Scylla in her daily reports. The black color of the infected blood which darkened the veins.

The way the host begged for water as the larvae within began consuming all moisture from inside its victim.

His mate was correct. This was not possible.

Her anger mounted to overpower her shock when he reached down to shackle her wrist in his hand, preventing her from delivering the killing blow she so desperately wished to give.

~We have to kill him before the infection gets any worse. Let go so I—

~I feel your struggle, my One, but you cannot kill this male. Not yet. Not here in the open for all to see. We need to know how he came to be infected. How many Scylla are here, how they came to be on this planet.

Her throat worked audibly as she stilled, her fingers working on the grip of her knife.

~This isn’t possible, Kalix. It can’t be possible. We’re a million miles away from Moika... how? There was a ring of helplessness and fear in the words she spoke only to him.

~I don’t know, love. Let’s find out. Give me your blade.

~Kalix, we can’t let him live. The risk is too great.

She trembled with tension in his hold, fighting every instinct she had honed over years of struggling to survive. Fighting to call her beast to heel.

He rumbled softly to her, too softly for anyone else to hear, crooning to the little female he had claimed and tamed.

~Trust me, Alec. Give me your blade.

In spite of the situation, the severity of it, warmth permeated his entire being when Alec overcame her instinctual need to kill, and gave up her blade.

*****

Kalix asked for her trust, and Alec wanted to give it, but as she paced back and forth on the other side of the medical partition listening to Kalix and his armored warriors trying to question the infected male, she couldn’t help the mounting frustration.

They were asking the wrong questions, and the sallow creature was too far gone to do anything other than roar for water.

He had nothing to offer, yet for hours Kalix drilled the prisoner for answers. How had he come to be infected? Were there others? When did it happen?

Quoll approached with a data tab, giving a respectful dip of his head before offering her the slender tablet.

“Asha’na, this is the log you asked for. The Brivikan’s movements throughout the prison and mines since his arrival, twenty eight days ago.”

Alec took it with a final glance at the prisoner, dismissing the first twenty two days, giving a little bit of leeway for the exact day of infection, her fingertip tracing the recorded path the prisoner’s collar gave to say where he had been every moment of every day.

Except six days ago, for twelve hours, the pattern had been interrupted and there was no signal data to say where he had gone.

“Quoll, what does this mean?”

Alec pointed the data out to the frowning warrior, feeling her skin stretching and tingling almost painfully, her hackles rising as she struggled to contain her beast.

Alec could feel the cat stretching inside her, the press of her claws behind her fingernails as the animal inside reacted to the fear and fury churning in her guts.

Quoll’s brows were drawn so tightly together they fused together to create one long ridge of incredulous confusion.

“It is the absence of all data, Asha’na. As if the signal from the prisoner’s collar was turned off, which is not possible. I will investigate further, at once.”

“What is this area and where is it?”

Quoll shook his head, enlarging the display for her. “It is a section of the mine that has been closed for several revolutions, between two of the most ore producing rivers.”

“Closed? Why closed if it’s in such a productive area?”

The warrior’s answer made dread spread in a sickening coil up the back of her thighs.

“There was a cave in some time ago and the area declared unstable by the mine engineers.”

~Kalix, enough. Quoll has found something and I promise, you won’t get anything out of that creature except more demands for water.

She ground her teeth in frustration when Kalix acknowledged her, yet ordered the warriors in the room to continue questioning the prisoner.

Her powerful, commanding mate left the quarantine room and immediately demanded a report from Quoll.

“Sir, the Asha’na pointed out this dead zone in the caved in tunnels. The prisoner’s collar trace signal disappeared six days ago within this area, but it wasn’t deactivated or interrupted to trigger an alert within the security system.

“It reappeared this morning and by all accounts the Brivikan was moved directly from this dead zone to the arena,” Quoll’s throat worked audibly, his gaze shifting from Kalix, to her, and back before gravely finishing his sentence. “Well before your challenge was slated to take place.”

Kalix grunted, rubbing his hand across his whiskered jaw as a muscle above his brow began to throb.

“He was infected and returned to the population where he would go unnoticed, in hopes of starting a pandemic.”

“The larvae aren’t dangerous until they mature and reach water.” How many times, how many different ways did she have to tell them? They were wasting time!

Kalix gave her only the briefest of glances. “Until we know how many more are infected and who is responsible, we must proceed as though the Scylla’s poison spreads via touch. Discover if there are any other prisoners who have gone missing within this area, Quoll.”

Alec’s attention was drawn away as a scent drifted across her senses. At first she thought it was the Brivikan prisoner’s scent of sickness, the stink of the Scylla’s infection, but this was... stronger. Different.

Like stagnant water and soured linens left wet for too long. And something else, something familiar. Alec lifted her face to sniff the air, turning in a slow circle, her strides lengthening as she took off to track the invisible ribbon of stench, her mouth watering as the sickly sweet taste of fear joined the bouquet of smells. 

She was running after it now, aware to her toes of the pounding footsteps of the warriors who followed her, but just when she thought she was only a corner away from her prey, she skidded to a stop, confused and furious to find herself facing a solid wall. The scent was gone, just like that.

Dead end.

She growled her frustration and anger, her body vibrating with the bestial yowl as she slapped her hands on the solid wall.

“Damnit!”

“What is it?” Kalix demanded from behind her.

“You didn’t smell that?” she shot back incredulously, trying to describe the smell when Kalix shook his head. He closed his eyes briefly, nostrils flaring, his brow puckered in concentration.

“I smell a lingering trace of fear, but it is minimal. The stink of the prisoner has permeated the air.”

Alec snarled with impatience, “It wasn’t him I was smelling! Tell me there’s video surveillance in this area of the prison.”

“Of course there is.”

It took only handful of minutes to locate the security footage and with her mate at her side, Alec watched herself on Quoll’s datatab as she caught the first whiff of that familiar scent.

The surveillance showed every hallway within proximity, and as she had taken off after the elusive smell of the Scylla’s spoor, a male in pale green had darted from an unmarked door, glancing at something on his wrist as he juggled his armful of supplies, throwing terrified glances over his shoulder while he fled.

Alec watched the fair-haired male jerk his shoulder up to meet his ear, running full tilt for the wall they now stood next to, and shockingly passed right through it.

“What’s on the other side of this wall?” she demanded, hissing when Quoll had the gall to glance at Kalix before answering.

The warrior shuddered as she lost a frisson of control, her beast extending her invisible paw to slap at the male who hesitated to answer her.

Kalix settled his hand on her nape, somehow managing to soothe and irritate her at the same time.

“Isolation cells, my One. Who is that medic?”

Quoll shook his head, fingers flying over the scree of his datatab while he searched.

“He is an assistant medic, requested by Senior Medic Reykar last—”

“What?” she rasped.

Just as Kalix said— “Reykar? You’re certain?”

Quoll blinked once, confirming his information to be correct.

“Tor!” Kalix boomed, making the medic come running from somewhere. “Medical Officer Reykar, where is he?”

Tor came to attention sharply, half shouting his response. “He took leave to attend the Breeding Festival, sir! I have not seen him or received further orders and assumed he had called a mate, sir!”

“Asha, where am I needed?” A’tarey came striding into the hallway with another dozen warriors behind him in full armor, clearly anticipating a breach.

“Stand-by. Quoll, get me everything on Medical Officer Reykar from the time he served under me, to the present. I want him found and brought to me, immediately.”

“Wait.” She hadn’t spoken above a whisper, and yet while Alec stared at the blank surface of the wall in front of her, every one of the warriors crowded around them heard her and froze.

“Reykar can wait. Shut down all transports on and off planet. No one can leave until we know exactly how many people are infected.”

There could be only one explanation for how the Scylla had come to be here.

Meg.

Reykar had used Meg, brought some part of her here to S6, and now everything Alec had fought to free her people from, the sacrifices she had made, the ultimate sacrifice Meg had made... it was all for nothing.

The nightmare was beginning again.