Chapter Seventeen
Zhor came around when something sharp stabbed into him, sitting up with a jerk. Something about the size of his forearm scurried into the shadows. Instinctively, Zhor made a grab for his sword. When he didn’t find it, he scrambled onto his hands and knees and felt around a little further.
He didn’t find the sword, but he did find an object that seemed to have enough weight to it to make it effective at chasing off whatever was trying to fucking eat him alive.
He threw it in the direction the thing had disappeared and had the satisfaction of hearing a squeak of pain or dismay and then the sound of the thing scrambling away.
He relaxed fractionally then, trying to figure out where he was and how he’d gotten there.
And why he felt half dead.
It flooded back on command, flickering images that only made his head throb harder, made his chest tight with fear and despair, made him feel like puking.
The zorphs had taken Ah-na—he did not have to wonder why. Nothing good would come of it.
Swallowing convulsively, he lay still until the wave of nausea passed and tried to get up.
His head swum more, pounded harder. The bile rose up his throat again.
He debated with himself and finally lay back again.
He was of no use to Ah-na in his current condition.
If he didn’t die, he would go after her as soon as he possibly could.
But he had no food and no water. After a time, he realized he was going to die if he didn’t find the strength to get up and hunt something to eat and water.
He was sorry he had not killed whatever was trying to eat him.
The temptation was strong to seek help in the village, but they had turned him away when he had asked for help ... because he was with Ah-na. He was not going to ask them for help now.
Instead, he fought his way up the stairs, mostly on hands and knees, until he finally reached the little bit of supplies he had left with Ah-na.
There was a little water and a handful of nuts and berries. He ate and drank half and settled down, rolling in his fur, waiting to see if his stomach would keep what he had put in it. At some point, he dosed off. When he woke it was daylight—bright enough he knew it was already well into the next day.
Refusing to think about what might be happening to Ah-na when he could do nothing about it, he finished the little bit of food and water.
The dizziness seemed to have—mostly—passed. He still felt faint and vaguely nauseous when he stood up, but he was able to maintain his balance. Moving cautiously to the opening he had used the first time to enter, he peered out, staring into the distance in every direction.
It took him a while to spot them and he could not be certain when he had that he was actually looking at the zorphs who had captured Ah-na, but he discerned three figures and one did not look zorph. In fact appeared to have the bright locks that Ah-na did.
He was puzzled that they were not headed in the direction of the alien machines he had seen, wondered if that was not them after all, but he saw no other party moving as if they had left the city.
He could not afford to ignore them, he decided. It would not take him nearly as long to catch them as it had taken them to get so far and then he would know for certain.
As soon as he stepped from the opening and spread his wings, however, he knew he was not going to make it. The strain of trying to fly nearly made him black out.
He was fortunate he managed to catch enough lift to glide to a safe perch.
Something to eat, to drink and a few more hours to regain his strength, he decided, and then he would catch up to those bastards and kill them!
If they had hurt Ah-na, he would kill them slowly!
* * * *
A hand the size of Annika’s entire face was clamped over her –well, her face!
“Shut mouth!” her captor snarled in her ear.
Oh hell no! Not if it meant she might be rescued from the ... dragon-man that had just grabbed her.
She tried to bite the hand over her face but only managed to scrape her teeth along the palm.
“Wat de fuck?”
He snatched his hand back when she managed to get enough skin between her teeth to pinch. She used her bound hands to swing at him. “Let me go! Put me down! Help, Tor! He’s got me!”
To her horror, it was Puz who managed to club Tor, who’d whipped his head around when she yelled, breaking off the fight and charging toward them as the dragon-man struggled to get a good grip on her and take off again.
He finally lifted her clean off her feet and draped her over one arm. Pulling his sword from a scabbard between his shoulder blades, he brought it down on Puz’s skull just as he reached them hard enough to cleave him in two all the way to his breast bone.
Annika gagged and puked as blood, brains, and other nasty, meaty chunks of demolished organs and splintered bone poured out of the gaping wound.
Not that she wasn’t fiercely glad the dragon-man had killed the cowardly bastard that had attacked Zhor from behind and probably killed him!
She was glad the son-of-a-bitch was dead and he’d died in a ghastly way!
She really was.
But it was horrible and disgusting.
Fortunately, she had almost nothing on her stomach and the gagging stopped when she’d emptied it—all down the dragon-man’s leg and over the twitching corpse of Puz. But she thought that was at least partly because the dragon-man took off with her the moment he finished dispatching Puz and she couldn’t see the awful mess anymore.
She stopped fighting to get loose the moment they were high enough from the ground she was pretty sure she would rupture like a ripe melon if she hit the ground from that height. As soon as that occurred to her, she tried to claw her way up the man and climb on his back.
He took the opportunity to hook her tied arms around his neck and then shift his grip on her.
Unfortunately, she had short fucking arms! She was almost nose to nose with him once he’d pushed his head between her arms, close enough she couldn’t make her eyes focus.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to, but it was as hard to ignore the fact that he was actually a handsome creature—in a totally terrifying way!—as it was to ignore the suggestion of ‘dragon’ about his features—neither of which mitigated the circumstances in any way!
Granted, he had, in a sense, rescued her from the zorph/centaurs, but not for an instant did she believe it was an actual rescue!
She was in the unenviable position of being fought over by scarier and scarier aliens for reasons unknown to her!
She considered the fact that she was in a good position to at least attempt to choke the life out of him, but that didn’t seem like a good idea when they were so high up.
Maybe later.
He stared back at her for a long moment and finally tossed her, twisting at the same time so that she landed between his wings.
It was an interesting maneuver.
Her heart stopped for all of half a minute, she was sure.
She thought she might have ruined her britches except it scared her so bad her sphincter muscles clamped so hard she got a belly cramp and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to have another bowel movement.
She almost did choke him to death then—completely without any evil designs.
He pulled at her tied arms until he loosened them from his throat enough to get in a decent breath of air. “You choke Ragnor to death, we fall,” he growled.
“Oh! I would never do anything like that,” Annika managed to get out between chattering teeth. Even she wasn’t certain, though, of whether she’d made the comment in the hope of convincing him she was harmless or out of sheer stupidity/sarcasm.
* * * *
Despite his injuries and the need to give himself a little recovery time, Zhor managed to get close enough to the party he had spotted in the distance by the following day to see that he had been right—it was the two bastards that had taken Ah-na. Thankfully, she seemed to be alright.
He still intended to kill the two bastards.
But he would have been hard put to take on two at one time with no handicap. He put his chances of success now—when he was still having problems with disorientation and headaches—at somewhere between zero and twenty five percent.
He did not particularly care for those odds. He meant to rescue Ah-na even if it ended up costing him his life, but he preferred living and he also had no desire to throw away his life unless he could be certain, at least, that Ah-na was safe.
Therefore, as little as he liked it, he settled to following them and waiting for a chance to pick off one of the zorphs. One on one would be enough of a challenge, but it would give him far better odds of success—and it was actually the only plan he managed to come up with.
It was workable—as long as the two he was following did not meet up with more of their kin.
Unfortunately, he had to keep enough distance between himself and the zorphs to prevent them from detecting his presence and that led to a failure to intercept and kill one of the zorphs the first time the bastard that had blindsided him gave him an opportunity.
He managed to position himself above the trail the zorph had taken away from the camp. However the zorph, instead of continuing as he had expected since he had thought the man left camp to hunt, began to circle around. That took him out of range of the ambush Zhor had set and before he could circle around in front of the bastard and prepare another ambush, all hell broke loose in the camp.