With Thom missing, Wu claimed his right as my partner. Santiago and Portia kept their duo intact. As much as it pained Miller to let Maggie out of his sight, he paired with Cole.
The fatigue, the sarcasm, the flirtations. All of it had been wiped away as if it had never existed.
We opted for a three-pronged attack. Our heavy-hitters would waltz through the front door and provide the distraction. While the Drosera rushed to mend the breach, the other teams would enter from the sides and start clearing stores. And searching for Thom.
“Focus,” Wu murmured too low for his voice to carry. “You’re no good to any of us dead.”
We crouched in a small courtyard overgrown with vines and waited for the party to get started.
“I’m good.” And I was. No cold place required. They had taken Thom, and I was getting him back. End of story.
The look he turned on me was grim, and I wondered at the regret pinching the corners of his eyes.
He wanted me to access my inner charun. He wanted me to step up to the plate. Well, this was me. I had a bat in my hands—okay, a falchion—and I was ready to take a swing. This time, I wouldn’t miss.
Inhuman screams erupted on the other side of the wall in front of us.
“Keep your head clear. Your head, not hers.” He tapped my temple with his index finger. “Don’t let her off the chain.”
Wu shot to his feet and angled his body perpendicular with a low window. A metal pipe filled his hands, one he must have scavenged, and he swung. Glass shattered, a loud crack of noise, and he used the pipe to knock out the jagged teeth. He hopped through without drawing blood, and I followed his example. By the time he glanced back, I was at his side. We entered the building together, and the smell almost knocked me on my ass.
Urine and feces smeared the tiled halls, and the drag marks from scaly bellies reminded me of how gators slid down muddy inclines to splash in the swamp. The bulk of the nest must be keeping it au naturel on the home front. The ones wearing skin suits had to maintain those or lose them, but the pungent stench I learned well during my time on the streets convinced me they weren’t playing human while safe behind these walls. Every corner was a toilet, and they were overflowing.
The room we entered might have been a clothing store in another life. Wads of dirty fabric mounded together to form nests on the floor, but we were alone. Wu had managed to give us the advantage of not dumping us out into the main hall. That must be what he and Santiago had bent their heads together over—floorplans.
Careful of his footing on the slick tiles, Wu led the way to the security door, which had been ripped from its hinges. He peered around the corner in both directions, flared his nostrils, and gave me a nod. I flowed out behind him, keeping the falchion down at my side and one hand on my gun. Bullets might not stop charun, but the familiar weight of the weapon grounded me in my skin.
Once out in the hall, I cast a quick glance over my shoulder. The mall dead-ended behind us. We didn’t have to watch our backs.
Yep. Wu had definitely done his homework.
The first clot of Drosera, all wearing skin suits, guarded a door leading into a massive space that must have once belonged to one of the anchor stores. Wu sliced through the first charun before the others tore their rapt attention from the commotion down the hall to defend themselves. Clearly, they had been counting on the dead end to protect them too. A good reminder for me that there were no guarantees while inside the nest.
I swung the falchion and hacked through the neck of the second charun, and its head spun across the floor. Wu had moved on to his next target when a fourth rammed its shoulder into mine and sent me spinning into the wall.
Impact knocked the breath out of me, but I recovered and drove my blade through its heart. The organ’s placement should have mirrored a human’s while they were fused, but that wasn’t enough to stop it. It hauled itself further onto the blade and closer to me, until the man it used to be could have kissed me.
“Butterflies can’t . . . fly . . . without wings.”
“Keep spouting crazy.” I brought my knee up, smashing his groin, and the charun howled. At least that bit of anatomy remained the same. “Get out all the last words you want, I’ll listen.”
Surrendering my grip on the blade, I brought my gun up and blasted four rounds through his forehead.
The charun slumped forward, his weight crushing me against the wall, grinding the falchion’s hilt into my gut.
“That was sloppy.” Wu gripped the charun by the back of the neck, held him aloft while he retrieved the blade, then tossed him aside like he was nothing. “If you’re close enough to chat, then you’re close enough to die.”
“Thanks for that gem.” I accepted the falchion when he passed it to me. “It’s not like I pulled up a chair and invited him to join my quilting circle. I was trying to kill him. He just wouldn’t die.”
“You need a bigger sword.”
“Men always think bigger is better.”
“Women do too.”
I choked on a laugh before I remembered where we were, what we were doing.
The adrenaline dump flipped all kinds of interesting switches in charun. Gallows humor was nothing new to a cop, but this newly awakened side of me kept whispering there was a third option. Fight or flight was for humans. Fight or flight or fuck was for us. And we all seemed to skate the edge when our blood got pumping.
We dispatched four more stores full of charun. Three of which held more skin suits. The fourth, that was the nasty one. Half of those lounged like gators on a riverbank. We had to team up, and we still almost lost the fight. Wu did lose a chunk of his thigh, and I got a nasty gash to my upper arm that was slow to clot.
After that, we took a breather in the hall. Wu refused to go down, but he was weak, and I was determined. I forced him to sit. As disgusting as it was, I had to get him off his leg. I knelt beside him, unfastened his belt and yanked it from around his waist. It made a decent tourniquet, but it wasn’t a miracle cure.
Once I had him patched up, he ripped off his shirt and tore it into ribbons he used to bind my wound. The pressure numbed me until I couldn’t feel the pain. That was nice. But it also meant I couldn’t use the arm. My dominant one. Of course.
“We’re done. You can’t walk. I can’t swing a blade. We’re dripping like wet paint, and soon the Drosera will scent us and home in on our location. Our part in this mission is over, and there’s no hope of extraction.” Down here, the smell was so much worse. That had to be why my eyes were burning, hot tears rolling down my cheeks. Wu’s thigh would get infected if he didn’t seek immediate medical treatment, and our medic was . . . Damn it. I was supposed to be leading the charge to find Thom, not sidelined in this cesspit waiting on a status report once the dust cleared. “There’s no one to answer an SOS even if I could send one.”
“Go,” Wu panted. “Find one of the other teams and join them.”
“I’m not leaving you.” I let a growl enter my voice. “Partners don’t leave each other behind.”
“Thom needs you,” he reasoned. “I don’t.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I let him watch my slow perusal of his battered form. “How do you figure?”
“We’ve cleared the hall up to this point.” He swept his arm out to encompass our swath of destruction. “I can fly out.”
“Your wingspan is too large.” I wasn’t buying that for a minute. “You can’t just soar down the hall and out that window. You’ll get caught, and those pretty feathers will get ripped from your back.”
The offhand comment set a distant alarm bell clanging in the back of my head, but I was too focused on Wu to tune in to its warning.
“I’m not going through the window.” He pointed ahead to where a weak shaft of moonlight glistened on the tiles. “I’m going through the skylight.” He lifted his hand and brandished the same length of pipe he’d used to clear the window. I recognized the neon paint splashed down one side. He must have traded out one of his elegant blades for a blunt-force weapon. “Get me there, and I can handle the rest. I’ll do recon outside and take out any runners.”
“I still don’t like this plan, but I can’t think of a better one.” That bell hadn’t quieted yet, and its implications got harder to ignore. “What that Drosera said before he died . . . He was taunting me. About Thom.” I got to my feet and helped him to his. He slung an arm across my shoulders, and I wrapped one around his waist. “We need to find him.”
“They’ll use him as bait.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“There’s a town in the Atacama Desert in Chile called Calama that has never recorded rainfall.”
Shaking my head, I set out toward the skylight beneath the defunct food court and hauled him along with me. “I forgot you’re a trivia wiz.”
He grinned, but it was strained. “It’s amazing what factoids you accumulate over a lifetime.”
“A lifetime like yours maybe.” I cut him a look. “I get a headache when I try to imagine how old you are, all you must have seen and done.”
“You’re not much younger than I am,” he pointed out. “Punching through the terrenes takes its toll. The differences in planetary rotations ages you more than living on one your whole life.”
Talking kept his mind off the raw meat frontage on his thigh, so I kept going. “You’re going to make my head explode.”
“You’ve beheld more wonders than I ever will. It’s all locked away in that clever mind of yours.”
“Flattery? Really?” Heady relief swirled through me, though I hid it from him. “Your leg’s hanging on by a thread, and you’re stroking my ego?” I dug my thumb into his ribs. “Do not make any comments about what else you might like to stroke.”
Gold washed over his eyes. “I would never.”
“Liar, liar, wings on fire.”
A dozen steps, and we would reach our goal. Ten, nine, eight . . .
A low reptilian growl reverberated through the space, and I whipped my head toward the sound. What might qualify as the world’s largest American Alligator lifted its blocky head from the sludgy water in a shattered fountain I had dismissed as debris. Our eyes locked, and its nictitating lids blinked once.
“Wu.” I stepped away from him, angling my body between him and the gator. “Get out of here.”
“No.” He panted with the effort of standing alone, but I needed both hands free. “I won’t leave you.”
“Then we’ll both die.” I mashed my lips into a flat line. No point arguing my own logic with him.
The Drosera climbed out, its weight cracking the fragile tiles underfoot. Jaws snapping, it roared a challenge then charged. The furious beast moved impossibly fast for such a large creature. I was trapped unless I abandoned Wu, and that wasn’t happening. I raised my falchion, the blade the length of one of its arms, and braced for impact.
It never came.
An enormous snake—its wedge-shaped head longer than the gator’s entire body—whipped in from one of the connecting hallways. Vibrant crimson and burnt orange scales provided camouflage for a foreign world. The snake pierced the gator’s body with fangs longer than my legs, and the Drosera screamed while the beast kept pumping it full of venom in green, fragrant drops that slid down the creature’s side to melt the tiles beneath.
“Miller,” I breathed, and the snake cut its citrine eyes toward me.
“Don’t move.” Wu gripped my upper arm. “He might not remember you when he’s like this.”
“He knows me.” I pried free of him with gentle hands so as not to hurt him worse. Then I made a gesture to indicate he needed to make with the wings. “Otherwise, me seeing him like this wouldn’t humiliate him so much. If he wasn’t in there, if he didn’t remember, it wouldn’t matter, but it does.” On high alert, I waited for the cataclysmic explosions, lava flows and solar flares to start, but nothing happened. “I thought the world would end and spare me the headache if he shifted.”
“This is a partial shift. He’s in his natural form, but his size . . . ” Wu couldn’t peel his eyes off Miller. “It ought to be impossible to fold himself into such a compact skin without it bursting.”
“So should bird-men, and yet there you stand.” I snapped my fingers. “Wings, Wu. Wings.”
“He’ll snatch me out of the air,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m prey to him.”
Of all the mythical combinations, why did Wu have to be considered a delicacy among my coterie?
“I’ll distract him, but you’re going to have to work fast.” I couldn’t help sounding oddly proud, like I had anything to do with Miller’s prowess. “He moves like lightning.”
“Buy me five minutes.” He hefted the pipe in his hand. “That’s enough to break the glass and get out.”
“I’ll do my best.” Inhaling deep, I exhaled slow. “Here I go.”
The enormous snake angled its head toward me as I approached. Eyes the size of my head put on a good show of not being able to look at me, which was confirmation enough. Miller was in there, and he was ashamed.
“You saved our lives.” I walked right up to him, projecting confidence. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t stepped in when you did.” Upon closer inspection, I noticed each delicate scale was about the size of my hand. “Thank you.”
Miller’s head drooped on his muscular neck.
A memory surfaced of the night we located Angel Claremont, the kidnap victim who started it all. The naked longing in Miller’s gaze when Thom revealed himself to me had made me ache then, and I hurt for him now. He wasn’t majestic like Cole or adorable like Thom, nor was he beautiful like Wu. But he wasn’t the grotesque he imagined himself to be, and it was time he accepted that.
Behind me, air stirred as Wu thrust his wings. Miller’s tongue struck the air, tasting, debating.
“I’m going to pet you now.” I reached out, careful not to let my hand be a conduit for my nerves. “And you’re going to suck it up and deal.” I smoothed a palm down his side, uncertain what to expect and delighted by his velvety texture. “How are you this soft? It’s ridiculous.”
A rhythmic pulse started under my palm, and I caught Miller studying me.
“You can purr?” Nice to know Conquest stayed on brand with her coterie. “We’re going to talk about this later, mister.”
No. Damn it. He was watching Wu over my shoulder, and his eyes were dilating in a not-very-comforting manner.
Shit, shit, shit.
I played a low card. “Even Maggie said you were magnificent.”
That got his attention, but it didn’t stick to me for long.
Time to lay the full deck on the table. “You can’t eat Wu.”
A ribbon of tongue lashed between Miller’s lips.
“Seriously, he’s my partner, and the best resource we’ve got.”
Muscles flexed under my palm, and he started this side-to-side wiggle like a cat readying to pounce.
All that tension uncoiled in a strike that would do any death adder proud.
“Wu!” I screamed a warning, whirling away from Miller so he didn’t crush me when he landed. Glass shattered overhead and rained down on me. All I could do was cover my head and face until the shower ended. The ground vibrated under my feet when Miller smacked the tiles, and I fell on my butt. “Goddamn it, Miller.”
The snake looked smug.
I searched his mouth for feathers but found none.
“Luce.” Wu’s voice echoed through the food court. “Go.”
That’s when I put it all together. Wu must have struggled to break out, and Miller had fixed the problem.
“Okay, fine.” I held out my hands. “You got me.” With Wu safely out of the picture, we had no more time to spare. “Where are the others?” Miller angled his head in the direction of his tail, which was nowhere in sight. “Are you done clearing your quadrant? We’ve secured the mall from our entry point forward.”
A shiver rippled beneath Miller’s skin, and he made a rasping sound that came out pained. It seemed Cole wasn’t the only one with an upset stomach.
“It’s almost over,” I promised him. “Let’s go get Thom.”
Retracing the length of Miller’s body was surreal. His massive head filled the hall behind me as he doubled back on himself, but to the left was yards and yards of snake belly, and it grew more distended the farther we traveled. I didn’t want to count the lumps that might have been heads or knees or elbows pressing against his skin, but I couldn’t stop myself from noticing each blemish marring his sleek lines.
“Luce?” Portia marched over to me, scimitar in hand. “Where’s Wu?”
“He’s wounded.” I scratched beneath Miller’s lower jaw. “Miller saved our asses, and Wu retreated through the skylight in the food court. He can’t walk, so he’s going to hunt down stragglers from the air.” I searched the other shop entryways for signs of the others. “Where are Santiago and Cole?”
“Cole is hunting for Thom.” She glanced over her shoulder. “There’s Santiago now.”
Drenched in blood and grinning about it, he swaggered out to join us. He took one look at my hand where it rested on Miller and snorted. “Guess the snake’s out of the bag.” He thumped Miller on the tip of his nose. “Idiot. I told you she wouldn’t care. You’re the vainest damn charun I’ve ever met. Maybe this will finally let you get over yourself.”
Stepping between them—like a giant snake needed my protection—I cocked an eyebrow at him. “I haven’t seen your true form yet.”
Santiago smiled, and it was ugly. “I’m shy.”
Portia bit her lip so hard against a retort I worried it might bleed.
“Status,” I snapped at him before he noticed, and they started bickering.
“The mall is shaped like an uppercase E. You and Wu cleared the lower leg and the hall leading up to this point. We’ve done the same for the middle. That means the upper leg is all they’ve got left.”
“That’s where they’re keeping Thom.” It must also be where Cole had gone. “Move out.”
Santiago took point, and Portia fell in behind him. They moved like two halves of the same whole, their partnership a well-oiled machine.
I kept pace behind them, and Miller brought up the rear. That much of the building had already been cleared, but even if there were survivors, they couldn’t very well get between Miller’s coils to reach us. His body, doubled over as it was, clogged the hall until nothing could get past him.
The remaining Drosera had cleared out, falling back to defend the last unclaimed wing.
“Stop,” a man barked. “Or I will pluck each of his feathers then use them to make you a hat.”
We froze on the spot, Santiago and Portia shifting aside to give me a clear line of sight to where the speaker held Thom’s small body aloft by a ragged wing. The other was broken, jutting out in front of him at a wrong angle, glistening bone punching through his fur. Blood slicked his fur and dripped onto the floor in a viscous puddle, and pain glazed his eyes until they failed to track our arrival.
“Release him,” Santiago snarled, “and we’ll make it quick.”
“Retreat,” the man countered, “and we’ll let him live.” He lifted Thom to eye level then sniffed him. “He doesn’t have long. An hour. Maybe less. I’d make a quick decision if I were you.”
Shouldering to the frontline, I growled, “What do you want?”
“You.” His eyes gleamed. “What else?”
“Kill her,” the woman beside him snarled. “Dead or alive, the reward is the same.”
“Hush,” he told her. “This one is special. The reward will be greater if she’s still breathing.”
“Release Thom,” I said, cutting short their squabbling, “and you can have me.”
“No offense meant, my lady, but no.” He inclined his head. “I’m well aware of your prowess, even in this diminished form. Have one of yours walk you over to claim his body, and I’ll have one of mine meet you halfway to escort you to my side.”
Behind me, Miller shifted his weight, the rasp of his scales on tile rustling like corpse laughter.
“Luce,” Mags begged on a ragged whisper. “Please, don’t do this.”
“That was low, Portia.” I didn’t look back, I couldn’t if I wanted to finish this. “Santiago, you’re with me.”
“I hope you know what you’re doing.” He scowled down at me. “Cole will murder me if you die.”
“Then you better not let that happen.” I set out for the middle ground, Santiago at my side. “Take Thom and fall back.”
“I’m not leaving you unprotected.” He kept his face neutral. “Forget it.”
“I won’t be.”
Cole was out there. Somewhere. I could sense him. Closing in on the Drosera from behind.
The ambassador for the Drosera passed Thom off to the woman beside him. Lip curled, she dangled Thom by the scruff of his neck. Once she reached us, she thrust out her arm toward Santiago. Unable to risk sheathing his sword in the presence of so many enemies, he reached for Thom the same way. The woman smiled, a cruel slash of her mouth, and yanked her arm back.
It happened so fast, I didn’t get it at first. Not until Santiago wobbled like his knees might buckle.
Thom hung limp from his hand, but his broken wing was . . . gone. Ripped clean from his body.
The Drosera standing before Santiago used the wing to fan her flushed cheeks, and laughter rang out behind her. The man who had bargained with us winced, backing away from the cheering crowd. He must have been older. His actions proved him smarter. Too bad that still didn’t make him intelligent enough not to pick a total moron to handle the exchange for him.
Ice spread through my body like a cancer, freezing me on the spot, and when I spoke, a white plume shaped the words. “You will regret ever being hatched.”