Page 41 of Breed

It is at this moment that I realize Wrath has taken me deep into the primal forest with two heavily armed guards, both of whom are looking at me with a restrained violence, clawed hands on their weapons, tails swishing with excitement.

I am unable to protect both myself and Lettie. Neither one of us is armed with anything other than our own physical abilities. I have allowed us to be taken into one of the worst possible situations without so much as thinking about what I would do if it went wrong.

Wrath smiles at me, his mouth broad with humor. His eyes gleam the way they do when he is about to enjoy himself immensely. He is anticipating something, something I am sure I will not enjoy. Fortunately, I have the excuse of Lettie and her very poor behavior to draw her close and keep her close. My hand slides over her lower back and pulls her toward me.

“Don’t move more than two steps away from me,” I order. “If you do, I will whip you until you weep — I promise you that.”

“Do not worry,” Wrath laughs. “It is perfectly safe here. This may be the safest place on the planet. This is where our new lives begin.”

I am befuddled. We are in dense forest, and there is absolutely no sign of anything even remotely inhabitable.

“Come,” Wrath says. “We have to walk the last stretch, but it is worth it.”

“I hate hiking,” Lettie mumbles under her breath, sounding petulant and annoyed as we start moving. It is not easy for her to keep up with us. She needs to take two steps for every one of ours, and she is not in a state of fitness. I do not think that there’s much in the way of exercise happening on the ship of humans. They largely seem to be involved in making bad decisions with worse outcomes. There might be some cardiovascular benefit to that, but not nearly enough to ready my mate for a long walk through a trail cleared for saurians.

As we walk, her cursing and complaints start to become even more audible. Wrath is marching ahead of us. His guard is behind. I know their names, Rake and Flail, though I do not know them in terms of character. Their reputations precede them as vicious enforcers of Wrath’s will. Executioners, you could say. I feel distinctly uneasy knowing that at any moment the two of them could drop the both of us with a single shot. We could be buried out here and never found, or just left for the wild creatures who will gnaw the meat from our bones, which would then be scattered for miles potentially.

It is hard to try to stay calm while also realizing that if this is the set up I suspect it is, then we are almost certainly dead. Wrath enjoys pageantry. This is the kind of drama I know he would live for.

“You see, Shan, the loyal among us deserve their rewards,” he says, his rough voice floating back to me through the ever-thickening foliage. “The only way for those like us to maintain their freedom is to fight for it, and to be prepared to spill blood for it. Don’t you agree?”

“Of course,” I say, automatically. I must keep my cool. If I start panicking now and give my guilty conscience away, then I am dead, and Lettie will wish she was.

“You have truly done me a service, Shan. You have never shied away from any order or task. You have even mated with a human eagerly and given your own genetic material to the cause of learning if hybrids might easily be made. You deserve to be rewarded richly.”

I still don’t trust this situation. I glance down at Lettie, who returns my look with a wide-eyed stare. Of course, that’s more or less her default facial expression so who is to know whether she is afraid or merely confused.

I pull her against me again, but she trips a moment later and before she can hit the ground, I snatch her up by the back of her suit and swing her into my arms. I cradle her against my chest, relieving her of the burden of exercise and soothing her with closer contact. That is what I tell myself, anyway. The truth is, she is actually giving me comfort. Her snug, soft weight in my arms makes me feel as though I am doing something very good. I am protecting someone vulnerable and feeling protected somehow in turn.

I will not allow anything to happen to her. I will protect her with my very last breath. I keep my ears on alert for any click of a mechanism or trigger that might herald a final shot.

“I have never felt that you owed me any thanks,” I say. “You’ve given me more than I ever gave you. You showed me that life could be different. Less orderly and oppressive. More natural and free.”

“Oh, yes. There’s going to be a lot of nature in your future, Shan. There is also going to be a lot of freedom.”

Again, there is that note in his voice that makes me feel as though I have very little chance of surviving this encounter. On some level, I have always known that my treachery would be discovered. A spy can only be effective for so long once he or she becomes active. Every time I made contact with Avel or Thorn, I was putting my life at risk.

I wouldn’t mind this, if I wasn’t dragging Lettie into it, and if Lettie was not potentially carrying my baby. The stakes have never been higher, and the fact that I seem to now be caught has never been a more frightening proposition.

“Look at the feet,” Lettie says.

I glance down and see that both of my feet are placed squarely in an oversized footprint. It belongs to a creature that must be more than ten times my height. It’s not a primal. It’s just a feral dinosaur, and it could still be close somewhere.

No sooner do I have that thought, than…

Click. Bang!

The guards shoot into the forest, making me jump and hold Lettie closer than before. There’s a brief instant in which I brace myself to feel the heat of spreading blood that I know will be followed by the ripping ache of pain that comes with being shot.

Deep in the forest, trees snap and boughs break as whatever was stalking us runs from the loud sound from the guns.

“I thought we were shot!” Lettie pipes up in a high-pitched little gasp.

“We’re not shot. It was just a warning for whatever might be hunting us out there.”

“There’s something hunting us?”

“There’s always something hunting you,” Wrath says. “You should know that as a pirate. There’s always a bigger, meaner, hungrier creature scanning for prey. That is one of the very few immutable laws of the universe.”

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