Chapter Twelve
Zawara
Late spring rain, again. I looked up at the sky at the midnight rain and the storm that crackled down behind it. I’d been wandering the shipyard, looking for Kidd. She’d been gone for hours now, and after being attacked by Nevir and submitted into his ridiculous Kilari test, it was only a matter of time before he told her.
I sighed.
When women leave… follow them.
That’s what Axen told me, far too late for it to do any good. Though how he’d come to know it was still news to me.
He followed next to me as we went from shipping container to shipping container, peering in the windows and knocking on doors. We had to leave soon. Had to get these people on board.
“We’ll find her,” Axen said, tense.
I licked my lips and looked over at him, water pouring down my scalp and dripping from each of my broken horns, one after the other.
“I hate the rain,” I complained, and Axen smirked.
The last hive, it was big. Axen told me. We would need all the help we could get—which was probably none at all.
“You still good with this?” I said to my friend, turning to face him and stopping in the midst of the downpour.
Axen looked up at me, green eyes barely visible in the darkness. He wiped back his sopping, thick hair and I could see his cool breath leave his mouth in a plume.
“Yes,” he said, loud enough to cut through the water.
I blinked and stared down at the puddles on the uneven ground before staring off at the faux neighborhoods and how the lanes of shipping containers slowly lead into a cul-de-sac of shanty wooden houses. A new normal.
“They’ll be coming after me,” Axen said of a topic we never discussed out loud.
I nodded and put my hand on his shoulder. “I know.”
“Then they’ll know,” he said again, sounding uncharacteristically weak.
I gathered the spit in my mouth and sucked it back before swallowing. A nervous habit. I heard my own voice like it didn’t belong to me as I said, “They already know.”
He blinked and looked over at me, a weak smile. “D’uskaan’a,” he whispered, shaking his head.
“That’s why we need to find Kidd and get out of here,” I said with haste, and we both hurried to the far end of the city—toward the water and Nevir’s ship. I knew she liked going there, as much as it pained me. I knew I would find her near.
“I’m sorry,” Axen said as we trudged down the pebbled road.
Looking ahead, I saw Kidd, her dark hair wet and long, her body curving side to side as she strode toward us—with him. Axen saw them as well, off in the distance. Making their way to us at a crawl.
“I said I’m sorry,” my friend repeated, and I drew my brows together, furious, yet my heart lilted at the sound of him. I knew what was coming.
I put my hand up to silence him, but he didn’t listen. Suddenly, everything I knew of the strong warrior Axen crumbled away, his tone, his silent stoicism. Now he was just… resigned.
“If it weren’t for me… I know how much humans mean to the Vithohn. To the real Vithohn.”
He’d always made that distinction. The real Vithohn. And he’d always pushed me to find a human female and pursue her. I always thought he was messing with me, but now I realized… Axen had never been taken in by the madness of the Vithohn, because he wasn’t a Vithohn.
I’d always known that. But I’d never realized that killing wasn’t in him. Not like it was in me. He wanted me to find a female so that the madness would fall aside so that we could communicate for real.
We met when I was young; he’d looked just like that bounding blob of pink we’d seen so many weeks ago now. Bouncing with energy, big bright eyes. I’d found him in the vertical valley, one of my favorite parts of Udrenahine.
We’d played together off and on for years, until he grew up. And when the massacre of the Vithohn happened, I realized that Axen had been my enemy the whole time.
“I swore to you I would never betray you,” I said to Axen.
He nodded. “I know that…”
But I liked him. And he had never hurt me—not on purpose. So I told him to shapeshift. Turn into someone like me. I would take him home, take him in. Never tell a soul who he was. And so, he did.
Axen never killed a Vithohn. He didn’t like the massacre his people were a part of. He became one of us.
So much like one of us that the council had decided he was fit to rule once we went to the Earth. It had been a long road since then, but we’d made a deal.
I would live up to my end of the bargain if he would live up to his.
“You’re one of us,” I reaffirmed, and Axen seemed fuller then, standing up straight again.
And I wasn’t about to give it up for anyone. Not for Kidd, and not for that asshole Nevir.
The two approached, the rain cascading down on us like a waterfall.
“You lied to me,” Kidd said, pointing at me.
“I never lied to you, Kidd,” I said, already defensive.
“You led me to believe he was a Vithohn,” she spat back, rain creating a mist around her silhouette.
“He is,” I said.
“Yeah, well, we’ll see in about two seconds,” Nevir said with his usual, playful, callous tone.
I swallowed and looked at Kidd, our eyes meeting across the gravel as though we were standing on opposite sides of a precipice.
“Don’t let him turn you against me,” I said evenly.
“You lied!” she fumed, her eyes going wide. “I don’t care how you did it. If you had just told me the truth, I never would have brought you here.”
“You are my chosen,” I spat, shaking her. “You never would have brought me here?”
“Well why don’t we just settle down and get this over with, shall we?” Nevir said, whipping his spire from side to side, anxiously awaiting out fight.
I looked at Axen, to Kidd, and then back to Nevir. There was no way he was getting his spire on Axen.
He lunged toward Axen, wrestling against him and I jumped in, bashing the red-maned Vithohn in the temple until he let up, his spire nearly whipping around and grabbing hold of Axen’s spire.
I ran behind Nevir, putting him in a headlock and dragging him backward as Axen smashed into him. We continued like this for some time, throwing punches and dodging each other’s shots.
I threw Nevir to the ground, but he was strong. Stronger than I had anticipated He came hurtling toward me, knowing me over and sending sharp teeth whirling into my arm, blood spurting from the bite marks.
As I doubled back in pain, gripping my arm, I looked up in horror as I saw their spires connected and Nevir pressed his lids shut, his body glowing with the hum of Axen’s foreign blood.
I backed away, kneeling, pulling my hands over my head and scraping my fingers down my brows.
I had worked… so hard… to keep him hidden.
“Axen,” I said, but when I looked up, the black-haired Vithohn had sprung back to life, glowing with a vile pink aura, dripping and oozing green from his cuts. I saw the real Axen then, a tubular creature with hundreds of eyes and black teeth as they clamped down onto Nevir’s spire.
With a loud bellow, Nevir went screaming backward, falling face-up on the stone ground. I thought for sure when I looked at him his spire would be bitten clean off, but it was still attached.
It was just a warning—but the result was the same.
Kidd’s eyes went wide with recognition, and she looked up at my spire, the same jagged scars circling the nub of it.
I had been an Exerott once. And when I was ordered to do a sweep of our camp when we’d come to the Earth, I had asked Axen to rip off my spire so I wouldn’t have to identify him. I told everyone back at Bolmore that I’d been attacked by a Kilari—true—and I was hailed a hero. Then I’d openly sworn my revenge on the Kilari hives.
Another note that had turned me into a legend in Bolmore.
Kidd looked at me, pain and confusion on her contorted face. I knelt on both knees, staring off into the distance, not even looking at her. Exhaling rigid breaths into the night.
“Did they follow him in here?” she demanded, her body shaking. “The Kilari. Did they follow him here? Put our lives at risk?” Kidd swallowed then, pushing me backward. “Did I do this?”
“Yes!” I shouted, and her whole body seemed to sink inwards.
She blinked, hating to be wrong.
“Yes, they followed us in. But, what did you think we were trying to do, Kidd?” I whispered through gritted teeth, standing and pulling her close to me.
She put a hand on my chest. “I thought you were trying to save your people. But…” she drew her brows together. “Either that means you were lying about that, or that you’re about to betray Axen after he helps you find the hive. And I don’t think either of those answers works for me.”
“Don’t leave,” I cautioned, gripping her wrist in my arm.
“I never would have put you in this position if you had just told me,” she finally finished her sentence. “Or Axen.” Her shoulders sloped, and she looked down at Nevir, unconscious and bleeding. “Now you have to go, before you bring more of those… those things back.”
We all stood deathly still as the thunder boomed off in the distance. I could see lightning crack against the ocean. It looked like it bounced off the water and right back up to the sky.
Kidd looked between us like we were a strange shape with too many sides. One she was about to remove herself from.
She didn’t say goodbye. She didn’t let out a loud exhale or cry. She just spun on her heel, the gravel prickling up against the bottom of her boot. The sound it made was like squeezing a handful of wet sand.
And then she walked.
“I love you!” I yelled, furious, my words cutting through the rain.
She turned back, her hair matted to her face and water racing down her eyes. She looked hardened, like a stranger, and without emotion said: “Don’t.”