I shriveled into the wall and pawed at the pocket of my sweatshirt, grasping for iron. I had this ghost magnet thing down. I’d passed ghosts through me before, but even so, experience didn’t make it any less frightening as the Saelis stomped toward me.

“Come in,” I whispered as softly as I could.

The bar blurred behind a black cloud of incoming smoke. It funneled into my mouth, clawing at my throat and tongue.

Images flashed through my head of random events in this Saelis’s life, but mostly I felt what it felt—a desperate, raw hunger for the parasite inside me. It pinched my organs out of its way and tore at them with ghostly claws for a taste. I clenched my teeth against the ripping pain.

My fingers still poked around my pockets for an iron cube, but it felt like they stabbed into nothing but darkness. I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from screaming so I wouldn't give us away. I couldn’t give us away. Fogged, black fingers wafted over the inside of my eyes and crowded everything else out, except the pain, ripping and shredding and shifting.

Hidden in the corner of my pocket, my fingertips finally touched iron. Somehow I curled them around the cube while the rest of my body jerked and twisted. The albino alien tightened her fist around my sweatshirt, keeping me invisible, but I knew I was making a racket even though I couldn’t help it.

I brought the iron to my mouth, but before the metal touched my tongue, the ghost scraped at the back of my throat. Scrambling wildly. Climbing out.

The dark cloud over my vision cleared some. Black smoke roiled in front of me, clinging to my mouth, half in, half out. With a violent rush, it burst out all the way. Then, standing in front of me, was the Saelis ghost who couldn’t, or didn’t want to, come in. Even though I had invited it. What had changed?

Solid and not at the same time, it thrust out a hand. With a frustrated roar, it ripped me away from the albino alien, from the safety of her touch.

My body soared. And then I landed. One of the unconscious bodies that littered the bar softened half of my fall. My head smashed against something sharp, like an elbow. Grit billowed up around me from the force like broken angel wings splintered with glass shards and fallen furniture pieces. Pain cracked through my hip one nerve at a time.

Claws clicked toward me at top speed. I didn’t have time for pain. I posted my hands underneath me and scrambled away from the fury of the oncoming ghost in a crabwalk. Toward Parker and his men.

Behind me, guns slid from sheaths and safeties clicked.

Click, click, click.

I unfurled my clenched fist while pieces of glass dripped from my hand and touched the iron to my tongue.

The ghost stopped. Now the iron’s magnetic pull drew energy from other things, un-magnetizing me from ghosts, making me invisible, at least to it. I’d just traded one enemy’s visual awareness for another’s.

“Get up and turn around,” Parker ordered behind me. “Slowly.”

The back of my neck prickled under the weight of his gaze. I ticked my gaze to the corner of the bar where the albino alien and Mase should’ve been. I didn’t see them. A good thing. Lightning still buzzed across the doorway to block Mase’s exit. I willed them to stay put, though I had no plans on how to get out of this myself.

With my back teeth clenched tight against the pain, I pushed to my feet on shaky legs. My sweatshirt hood had come off somewhere between the wall and here, so my hair and chains were bared. The real me for all to see.

For the first time since I’d accepted who and what I was, I turned away from the ghost, confident that the iron repelled it but unsettled that it hadn’t come in after I’d invited it. Its arctic cold presence beat against my back as I faced Parker and his crew.

Four guns aimed at my head. Parker held a long sword that hung at his side, gripped so he could easily lop off any body part he could see through his eerie, cracked gaze.

Slowly, the Saelis ghost retreated, its footsteps thunderous as it left the building, though the men in front of me didn’t react. Some sensed ghosts, some didn’t.

I rolled the iron cube into the pocket of my cheek, racking my brain for a way out of this but coming up empty. After a slow, rickety breath, I said, “Throw down your weapons,” because it didn’t hurt to try.

Parker’s bald alabaster head tilted to the side, studying me like prey, and the effect was as unsettling as his eyes. “Where did you come from so suddenly?” He spit the words out like ground up bones.

A shudder ripped up my back, and I tried not to wince at the ache in my shoulder. “Not suddenly. I’ve been here for a while.”

“You know where Mason is.”

“I don’t know who Mason is,” I said without hesitation.

“Liar.” He stepped closer and sniffed the air around me, his pointed gaze an accusation.

I planted my feet firmly, though every instinct screamed to back away.

“Are you his whore?”

“I’m no one’s whore,” I bit out.

“Wrong. All girls are someone’s whore. Eventually. Sometimes with a little…persuasion.” He lifted the blade of his sword and touched it to my cheek, the cool metal like a soft caress rather than his implied threat. Though if I bled the parasites out of my veins, the ghost would likely come back, along with any Saelis/human hybrids that might be lurking around. It drove the male Saelis and hybrids insane with hunger, and while that might be a good distraction, it could also get me killed. Along with almost every other Feozva-damned thing that had gone wrong today.

Something shifted behind me near the door, barely audible, seemingly undetectable to everyone but me since I knew Mase’s location. I hoped that wasn’t Mase getting any funny ideas about defending my honor or other such nonsense.

“I bet your mother appreciates those misogynistic viewpoints of yours,” I blurted to redirect Parker in case he’d heard. “How proud she must be.”

His cracked gaze searched my face, his black hole pupils shifting behind the broken white flecks that reminded me of dying suns. “My mother is dead.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” I hiked a thumb over my shoulder, past ready to move away from him. “That’s a cool lightning trick by the door. What is it?”

He dropped his sword to his side. “She.”

“She?”

“A drug. A highly addictive one.” He stepped back and gestured forward with his sword. “Go. Get up next to it and see what you think.”

I turned and limped toward it, snaking my hand in my sweatshirt pocket for my ice pick and hoping it could help carve us a way out. The last thing I needed was another drug, but I crept toward it anyway, searching for an opportunity. A hiss like a low warning sounded from the wall where Mase and the albino alien hid. We needed some sort of distraction to get us out of here, though, and so far this was the only thing allowing me closer to the door.

Footsteps came up behind me as the lightning pulsed a vibrant white that reflected back in the chains flowing over my shoulders. It strobed across the doorway for a reason—to keep Mase in. Maybe he couldn’t jump over it, but I could. Still, did I want to take that risk? Leave him here with his own version of a ghost from his past until I found another way out? It almost seemed like a living, breathing creature, and I had no idea what it might do if I tried to escape. Plus, I couldn’t take any chances, not where Mase was concerned.

Better to stay and fight. With an ice pick against a sword and four guns. My best plans came to me after smacking my head on an unconscious man’s elbow.

I knelt a safe distance away from the lightning. With Parker and his men at my back, I gripped my ice pick and darted my gaze to the right wall. Hopefully either Mase or the albino alien could read my intent. Hopefully they were still there.

Footsteps came closer, almost right behind me. “Grab her and make her yours.”

I reached out a tentative hand while my other gripped the ice pick tighter. Something shifted to the right, a blur of messy blond hair, fury inside mismatched eyes, and then vanished once again. Mase, likely struggling to break free and stop me. Or to take it himself.

I crept my fingers closer, so close an electrical energy tingled up my arm. I brought the ice pick in front of me and held it to my chest, one finger raised as if for a countdown. “I can’t seem to get a handle on it.”

“You’re not even touching it,” Parker said from behind me.

I held up a second finger and hovered my other hand over the lightning until my fingertips went numb. And that was when I realized no one hugging the wall knew what a finger countdown was.

The albino alien lunged toward the nearest man and pistol whipped him on the back of the head.

“Don’t, Absidy!” Mase barreled over fallen furniture toward me, but another of Parker’s guys intercepted him and knocked him to the floor with a fist.

I shot to my feet and spun, ice pick at the ready. I shoved it into another man’s leg and then plucked it out again for another blow. He howled as loudly as the Saelis ghost had, then fell in a heap on the ground while clutching his thigh.

Parker and I locked gazes over the fallen man as blood from the ice pick dripped down my fist.

“Mase is mine,” I warned.

He chuckled, a broken sound that chased a shiver across my back, and turned to Mase, who had pinned the man who’d hit him to the ground. The albino alien ducked a punch from the fourth man, and then buried her knee between his legs. He dropped like a bag of heavy metals. She pointed her gun at Parker and cocked it.

“Mason Ryan, breaker of promises. It seems like karma delivered you to me herself.” He shook his head and tsked, completely ignoring the gun aimed at him. “What a bitch.”

Mase climbed off the man he’d rendered unconscious and faced Parker, his whole body quaking with rage. “That was hardly a fucking promise I made to you. I was strung out on both She and He and barely functioning.”

I zipped my gaze toward him, replaying his words so they’d make sense, but they still didn’t.

Parker’s cracked eyes narrowed. “Your state of mind when you promise me something isn’t my concern. It’s the carrying through that matters, and you didn’t.”

“I have a currency card,” I blurted. “I’ll pay you to leave and forget about him.”

“Absidy, he called you.” Parker stepped toward me, a dangerous smile frozen to his face. “Is that your name?”

Mase charged at him with a growl. “Leave her out of this.”

Parker whirled to face him, and as he did, the white lightning blocking the door ripped along the ground toward Mase and the albino alien. It zapped the gun from her hands with a loud pop and circled their boots, effectively trapping them with a heat that singed the wood floor black. A thread of it stretched toward Mase’s fingertips as if sensing the level of his need, testing him, taunting him. He fisted his hands, the muscles in his jaw leaping with tension, his haunted gaze aimed at the space between him and Parker.

My heart broke for him. I hated seeing him wrestling with the ghosts from his past that were now uncomfortably real.

Cold fingertips wrapped around my chin and yanked my gaze away from Mase to Parker. “Now I recognize you. You murdered those two men on Mayvel. Tell me, you plan on murdering all of us, too?”

“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “Just you.”

He winged up an eyebrow. “Protective. I like that in a whore.”

I couldn’t imagine Mase’s hate for this man who’d ruined his life with drugs, but mine carved into my palm with the force I used to grip my ice pick, still tucked in my bloody fist. Would he still call me a whore after I’d castrated him? Time to find out.

At the slightest movement of my arm to gouge him, Parker dove back.

“She, go home,” he ordered.

Mase turned slightly as if to run, but the white lightning still ringed him and the albino alien even as it leaped toward him. It crawled up his back and slowed, pulsing up his spine as if winding around each vertebra. He threw his head back and screamed. The inside of his forearm, scarred with track marks, lit up from within. Lightning crackled across his blue eye, then his clouded half blind one, and zipped a beaming white glow behind the scar down his face in wild pulses, as if the light was sawing his skull open. He screamed again, agonizing, soul-wrenching.

I hurled myself at Parker, my teeth on edge at Mase’s yells. “Stop!”

A loud thud sounded from behind me. And a gunshot. Parker lifted into the air, a blurred corkscrew of white and black energy, and vanished. A rumpled black cloak lay where he’d been moments before.

My ears rang. I turned in slow motion, mentally taking stock of all my pains to see if it had been me who’d been shot. What had just happened?

The blinding light inside Mase had blinked out. He’d stopped writhing though he’d sunk to the floor, and the white lightning no longer circled him and the albino alien.

All the air inside me rushed out in one slow, painful punch to the lungs when I saw the blood. I stumbled toward him, my mouth moving over his name even though no sound came out, even though my mind screamed it over the echo of the gun. He’d been shot. My Mase. Blood gushed from a hole in his shoulder. So did a lazy stream of winking light that fizzled out once it hit the floor.

“Enough sleeping on the job,” a rough, familiar voice said behind me. Captain Glenn whisked toward Mase, his black clothes and skin making him appear as a living shadow. “Time to go.”

“Captain…” I started, unable to draw in enough air. “You shot him?”

“It’s not the first time. Probably won’t be the last.” He knelt at Mase’s side, gripped his jaw in his large hand, and shook him.

His eyes fluttered open, and when he stared up at the captain, he groaned.

At that beautiful sight, I rushed toward him and covered his wound, scouring the rest of his body for signs of damage. Blood speckled his face from underneath the bullet hole in his white thermal shirt. The right knee of his pants bloomed red, but otherwise he was alive.

“Mase.” I swallowed, trying to sound out my relief, but held to his wound even harder instead.

“Fine,” he said, but his gaze didn’t connect with mine for more than a second. “Really.”

I wished I could’ve believed him.

“Let’s get you up.” Captain Glenn holstered his gun and hefted him into a sitting position, careful of his wounds.

Mase winced then turned a glare on the captain. “You shot me.”

“You needed it to get that She shit out of you.” He slung Mase’s arm around his neck and did a double-take at my chains and hair. “Absidy, get his other side, would you?”

Mase put his other arm around my shoulder, and with Captain Glenn helping, he stood while a grimace rolled across his face. We needed to get him patched up, and fast.

“Captain, where’s Ellison?” I asked.

“On the ship. Said she wasn’t feeling well. Probably for the best though. One less face to see.” He pinned me with a meaningful look that I pretended I didn’t understand. “We need to move before Parker comes back.”

As we lugged Mase toward the doorway, Captain Glenn noticed the albino alien. “Who are you?”

Her large yellow eyes flicked away from me and zeroed in on him. “Poh. Engineer.”

“Well, Poh Engineer, it appears you don’t frighten easily. I just hope you take direction better than these two.” He glanced at Mase then at me, the question in his dark eyes clear—Saelis?

I shook my head. Probably distantly related, but the Saelis we’d met up close and personal hadn’t battled on our side and helped us. Not the living ones, anyway. I wasn’t all that excited about trusting anyone with scales, but if she had our backs, then we might actually survive deep space a little longer. If we couldn’t trust her…well, it wasn’t as if we had a ton of time to search for another engineer. Not with Mase’s gunshot wound. Not with Parker still out there.

“She’s legit,” Mase said and winced. “I checked her credentials.”

“Was that before or after the bar fight?” I asked. “The first one, I mean.”

“Before…” Mase slid his gaze toward Poh, but her yellow eyes stayed locked with mine.

I tipped my chin at the wall we’d been pressed against by her invisible touch. “Can you...do whatever it is you did on the way to our ship?”

She nodded once, her pale blonde ponytail falling over the shoulder of her duster.

“We need to move fast,” Captain Glenn said. “We don’t want to be here after dark. This part of Orin only has four hours of day.”

We stepped outside, where the sun sat lower in the sky and was tinged in red, casting the buildings of the same color in a deeper, richer hue. The sweltering heat leaked down Mase’s face in rivers. He swallowed thickly, and my chest ached for him, for his gunshot wound, for the track marks along his arms that had come alive with need. Light still winked faintly from inside them, his eyes, and his scar.

Poh walked behind us, touching our huddled backs and protecting us from sight. Her eyes dug into the back of my head with her earlier question—what are you?—as if to pinpoint the truth in my mind.

I had the same question for her. I shrugged out from underneath Mase’s arm while the captain hauled him the rest of the way. Before the alien crested the top of the ramp into the ship, I sliced my arm open with my ice pick. I waited for her eyes to glow a brighter, deadlier shade at the sight of my welling blood.

It was a reckless thing to do on a strange planet where Saelis hybrids might be lurking within the crowds. The smell of the parasite swimming through my blood would drive them mad and bring them out in droves to slurp my insides through my nostrils. Same for this engineer, who shared an alarming number of traits with the Saelis.

But nothing happened.

“Good,” I said, my voice too breathy with relief. “You’re hired.”