They drifted over the forest, searching, searching, searching. Esania had quickly found out that Imril’s vision was much, much sharper than hers; he could spot tiny things on the ground from incredible heights.

Just like a damn eagle.

“Anything?” she asked hopefully as they circled the spot where Imril had abducted Sara, where the Naaga had fought against the Vradhu. It was as good a starting point as any. Esania squirmed in her bonds, trying to get used to the feeling of being thousands of feet above the surface of the planet while tethered to Imril’s hard, armor-encased body.

The so-called harness was a contraption of Imril’s making; a flat, ribbon-like black rope that felt like silk and was apparently incredibly strong. Rau had magicked it from somewhere deep within the ruins of the lake castle, and Imril had quickly and expertly trussed her up, making sure her back was pressed firmly against his torso, as if he’d done this a thousand times before.

It was crude, but it worked. Imril needed to have his hands free, just in case they were attacked, and Esania needed to be safely restrained.

The moment he’d taken off from the spire, jumping out of the crumbling window and getting them airborne with a few powerful strokes of his wings—that had been exhilarating… and terrifying.

And these bindings… she couldn’t help but feel that they were just a little bit naughty. Imril had assured her he’d tied it in a way that would enable him to release her in a flash just by pulling one of the ends, but to be bound to him in this way, all the while feeling the subtle flow of power from her body to his, feeling the hard planes of his body against her back.

This was a dream. A pleasurable nightmare. Her world had been turned upside down, and she was going crazy.

At least he wore full armor. The scaly barrier between them reduced the drift of vir quite significantly. It seemed she wasn’t going to end this day completely drained, unless he suddenly needed her power.

A strange thought occurred to her. If skin to skin contact caused him to suck the life right out of her each and every time, how were they ever going to be…

Close?

Her heart beat faster.

Intimate?

As they caught a swirling wind current, Imril wrapped his arms around her. He held her tightly as turbulence hit, swooping to a lower altitude. They shot through a bank of thick cloud, the fine mist turning into moisture as it hit Esania’s face, before quickly drying again.

Flying through clouds, held tightly in the arms of a winged alien, thinking about what he looks like underneath all that armor.

So much for her Primean values. She might as well be human.

“Down there,” Imril said suddenly, the wind stealing away part of his voice. “That’s the spot where I took the pregnant female.”

“Sara,” Esania corrected. “She has a name.”

“Yes. She was throwing stones at the Naaga from a distance.” Unexpectedly, he laughed. “They did not know how to deal with her.”

“Sara is a bit of a spitfire, in case you haven’t figured it out by now. Why did you choose her out of all the humans you saw?”

“I thought she would make a good alternative Source,” he said. “Her vir was extremely bright. Now I know why.”

“Let me guess. Pregnant women have a certain ‘glow’ about them?” She wondered if he understood irony.

“Two lives. I didn’t realize it at the time. My mistake.”

“Ah.” She shook her head. Well, at least this obstinate Drakhin admitted to his mistakes and faults.

“That’s the place there. We’re going down.”

“I can’t see anything.” Trees, trees, and more trees. That was all Esania could see.

Abruptly, Imril angled his wings and they dropped rapidly, causing Esania’s stomach to flip.

“I told you not to do that,” she grumbled, trying to slow her racing heart. No matter how long she stayed up in the air, she would never get used to the feeling of flying.

Imril didn’t say a word of apology, but he did slow down a little, easing Esania’s fear. “We are going to land and go on foot. I need to track their escape path from the ground.”

Phew. Solid ground sounded good right about now. Imril controlled their descent, pulling them into a feet-first position and spreading his wings.

They drifted downward, and the trees became bigger and bigger. Suddenly, she recognized the terrain. They were on the outskirts of their tiny makeshift village, a series of small, watertight huts that the Vradhu had built out of sekkhoi branches.

There was that small freshwater pond—the one they collected rainwater from, since the greater waterways were apparently full of poison. There was the small beaten path and the central fire pit. There was… a shoe. A harvest bag. A piece of torn cloth. A broken war-spear.

Signs of a struggle.

And the village… it was deserted.

They dropped through the canopy, and before Esania knew it, her feet were touching the rocky ground.

How surreal.

She didn’t even trip or overbalance. Imril had timed their descent perfectly, and she got the feeling he’d done this sort of thing a million times before.

But had he ever taken another passenger, besides her?

He was supposed to be thousands of years old. Of course he would have had other passengers, other… Sources.

He was the damned Overlord, whatever that meant.

A strange emotion rose up inside her, unlike anything she’d ever experienced in her life, and it took Esania a few moments to realize what it was.

Jealousy.

How very un-Primean. What was she turning into? Away from the neat hydro-gardens and atmosphere-controlled domes of Mars; away from the carefully controlled environment of the Serakhine, where emotions were diluted with medication and human behavior was frowned upon, every single thing she’d been taught in her life was being challenged.

And to think most other Primeans had labelled her a radical.

Ha.

She’d tried to introduce laws for better treatment of humans on Mars, but most Primeans detested their Earthborn relatives, and thought of them as grossly inferior. Even after all these centuries, humans on Earth were still violent and self-serving and destructive.

But they could also be capable of great kindness and courage and ingenuity.

Most Primeans didn’t see that.

No, Esania couldn’t treat her sapiens cousins as inferior. She just couldn’t. After all, her genome wasn’t entirely pure. She’d never understood how her mother, Fabra, had managed to keep the details of her conception a secret from the Serakhine authorities, but somehow, she’d been born on Mars and raised as a full Primean.

She never met her father. Primeans didn’t have fathers. They were conceived in labs, implanted in surrogates, and raised in the communal kinderhaus.

She only found out the truth when she was an adult, just before the incident with Sara.

Her mother had come to her and told her everything.

And her entire world had tilted on its axis.

Shwick.

Esania was jolted out of her thoughts as the silken rope fell away from her body. She spun around and came face-to-face with Imril—all glittering scales and intense golden eyes. He wrapped up the rope in a few swift movements that spoke of years—maybe centuries—of practice and stashed it in a small pouch at his waist.

“This way.” He removed his helm—a sleek thing of curved metal with small openings for his eyes. Esania half expected his glorious golden hair to tumble out, but then she remembered he’d cut it before they left, in a style that was distinctly military. It was a drastic change, but as she stared at it now, she decided she liked it.

This new style accentuated the elegant angles of his face and made him look even more regal, if such a thing were possible. Losing the hair had caused a subtle change in his demeanor, as if he had now decided to get serious.

It suited him.

Oblivious to her scrutiny, Imril pointed up a rocky slope, frowning. “Their retreat was absolute chaos.”

“You can tell?”

“I was there.” He walked across to a nearby tree and ran his fingers over a spot on its trunk, taking in some invisible detail. “There’s also the vir-trail. I can still see the traces, but they are already starting to fade. We must hurry.”

Esania strode after Imril as he turned and made his way up the rocky path, his bare feet making barely a sound. In contrast, she crunched whenever she took a step, even though she tried her best to be silent.

Her thick-soled traveling boots didn’t help.

Imril had returned them to her, and she wore them over her smooth thermoskin pants, along with the padded golden jacket, which Rau had returned to her freshly laundered and smelling faintly of something lemony. Although the forests here were humid during the day, they could turn chilly at the drop of a hat, especially if a sudden storm or gale blew in, and it was cold up there in the skies, so the jacket was a welcome addition, especially now as a gust of wind tugged at her braids. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The fresh scent of ozone and earth and leaves swirled around them, hinting at the storm that was to come.

Esania hurried after Imril, thankful that she’d stuck to her daily strength and conditioning program back on Mars. Keeping up with his rapid pace was no problem at all.

She took a deep breath. “Why don’t you trust the Vradhu?” It was as good a place as any to start. She had so many questions for him, but when picking Imril’s brains, she had to be careful. He tolerated her for now, but she wasn’t under any illusions that he was suddenly going to drop everything and give her absolute freedom.

They crested a small hill and navigated around a patch of dead bushes, and at one point, Imril actually had to raise his hand and use his power to burn through the dead thorny branches. The thicket shriveled into ash in a heartbeat, sending a plume of glowing embers up into the air. One by one, the floating embers blinked out.

Then they were on the move again, and for a while, Imril was silent.

“The Vradhu are the original inhabitants of this planet,” he said at last, his deep voice cutting through the stillness. Esania still couldn’t quite believe he was speaking Earthian; she’d never heard of technology that could seed a language directly into the recipient’s brain.

“And the Drakhin…?”

“We were created. A made race, just like the Naaga. Drakhin is a Vradhu word. It means treacherous blood.”

Made race.

Just like the Primeans. Half of Esania’s chromosomes came from a heavily edited, artificially enhanced pool.

“Treacherous?” A sliver of unease unwound in the pit of her stomach. “Why would they call you that?”

“Treacherous can refer to danger or betrayal. We are capable of both, and the Vradhu know better than any other species what it means to go to war with us.”

“War?”

“We fought, once. They lost.”

His words sent a chill through her. “So you’re mortal enemies?”

“It is… complicated.”

“And you don’t want them in your stronghold because of some war that was fought a long time ago.”

“Vradhu do not forget. It’s highly likely that any one of them could stab me with their cursed tail-barbs and kill me with deadly poison.” He guided her through the thorny thicket and into a small clearing carpeted with dead brown plants. Imril looked over his shoulder, his beautiful, inhuman face turning into an inscrutable mask. “Their ancestors died at my hands, as did many Drakhin. They fear me, and they detest me. Why would I trust any of them?”

“You make it sound as if killing people is a regular thing for you.”

A hollow laugh escaped him. “Now that my race has all but destroyed itself, perhaps that will change.”

They left the clearing and entered a stand of tall trees with slender silver trunks. Small yellow leaves fell from above, and as Esania glanced up, she realized the trees were shedding their leafy crowns.

Part of her wished she’d never asked Imril about the Vradhu.

Now she was left with more questions than answers, and a glimpse of Imril that she hadn’t wanted to see—ruthless killer, cynical ancient.

Something monstrous, perhaps.

“They ran,” he said, casting his eyes across the leaf-strewn forest floor. “The Vradhu were weakened by poison, and they couldn’t fight back. It was the humans who came and helped them escape as I took down the Naaga. Strong males and females with weapons.”

“Calexa and her crew,” Esania said absentmindedly as she looked down and saw a flash of silver. “Wait.” She crouched down and plucked a small silver object from the ground.

An earring. She recognized it as belonging to Odessa, one of her horticultural specialists. The tiny thing was shaped like a flower, with glittering pink gemstones in the center.

A distinctly feminine item worn by a woman who was definitely not all that feminine.

“They definitely fled,” she said, her anxiety growing. Odessa wasn’t the sort to just carelessly lose an earring. The woman had a reputation for being meticulous, with never a hair out of place. “What exactly happened here, Imril? You said the Naaga were here, that you blasted them and took off with Sara…” Her eyes narrowed. “Was anyone hurt?”

To her relief, they hadn’t seen any bodies.

“The Naaga,” Imril said, a chill entering his voice. “I thought I killed them all, but there is no trace of their ships, and no bodies. Someone has come and cleaned up the mess.”

“Other Naaga?”

“Perhaps.”

“They want us… humans… because of our vir?”

“Yes,” he hissed.

“They feed, just like you do?”

“No. They are Sources too, but their Master is Drakhin.” Imril’s expression darkened. “Let’s move.”

He turned away, his wings clasped firmly against his back.

Clearly, that was the end of this discussion.

They walked briskly up the gravelly slope, and Esania started to become short of breath as she kept pace with Imril. That was strange. Usually, this level of physical activity would not have been a problem for her, but she didn’t have much time to think about it, because the next thing she knew, a Vradhu war-spear flew past her face and somehow ended up in Imril’s clenched fist.

He spun around, his wings raised, his eyes blazing with vir, fury creasing his pale features. In a single powerful movement, he spun the spear in his hand and hurled it back in the direction it had come from.

Thunk.

Esania spun around in alarm, searching for their attacker. She saw a flash of violet in the shadows. Vradhu. The blade of the war-spear was firmly embedded in the mottled trunk of a tree, but the Vradhu was nowhere to be seen.

“Get behind me.” Imril commanded, putting his arm out protectively as he strode forward. He put on his helm, protecting his face. Golden energy crackled from his fingers, giving off a distinct smell of ozone as it dissipated into the air.

Esania started to move, but he made a warning gesture with his hand. “Don’t move,” he snapped.

He said something in Vradhu, and although Esania couldn’t understand the words, the cold fury in his voice was obvious, promising death to her Vradhu attacker.

“Don’t kill him,” she said, fearing Imril’s savage temper. “He probably thinks you’ve come back to abduct another one of them. He’s Vradhu. Of course he’s going to fight.”

But he ignored her, becoming a shimmering blur as he darted forward, an ominous hiss erupting from his throat.

It was eerily similar to the primal sound she’d heard the Vradhu make when threatened, and once again, she was struck by the likeness between the two species.

But there was no time to wonder about the uncanny resemblance, because Esania feared Imril was about to kill the Vradhu and ruin her plan to get her humans to safety.