Page 64 of I Married Amreth

We hurried to the deployable lab and grabbed everything we needed. As we hopped into the shuttle, a million different thoughts fired off in my mind. As soon as we settled down in the passenger seat and Amreth got us airborne, I shared the theories taking root in my head.

“I think I finally got it,” I said pensively. “Puricis—the red stone bomb the Raitheans produce—would effectively serve to repeat Kalmia. Anyone who enters in contact with it doesn’t just get sick. The acid will also liquify them from within. By the time it has run its course, the person is completely unrecognizable and has turned into a puddle of gore.”

“So all the pilgrims would be wiped out?” Aku asked angrily.

“It would be worse than that,” I said apologetically. “Puricis is highly contagious, once the symptoms appear. Death is atrocious but comes quickly. The bacteria transfer through mere contact, but especially through the patient’s sweat. It lasts for about twenty-four hours. But as soon as the fever breaks, the patient dies within the hour.”

“What is this Kalmia you keep mentioning?” Aku asked, looking distraught.

“It was a massacre that took place between two rival cartels,” Amreth explained. “One of the cartels poisoned the water source of their enemies’ compound. It wiped out everyone. What troubles me is that if the assassins are targeting your temples now, they know that this is the season during which a majority of your people will go into that water. Who would have that kind of information about your customs?”

“No one should,” Aku said with helpless frustration. “Even our friends know very little about us. They do not pry the same way we do not pry about them. So clearly, off-worlders are spying on us. Which brings me to your own friends. Who warned you about the assassins?”

“The same friend who told me to come here and rescue my mate,” Amreth replied in a factual manner.

“You trust them?” Aku insisted.

“Yes. Without this message, tomorrow or in a couple of days from now, we would be waking up to an irreversible tragedy,” Amreth said. “The question is why? Who hates you so much they would attempt to wipe you out when you seemingly just want to go about your lives?”

“The answer is obviously the powerful people our friends told us would come after us with vicious wrath if we went public,” Aku replied.

“Tharmok’s blood!” Amreth suddenly exclaimed, his eyes widening. “Didn’t you say that Elias claimed that the creature at the origin of SS12 decomposed too quickly for them to have anything to show for? That it all but liquified?”

My jaw dropped. “Yes. That’s the explanation he gave when people asked about it. This cannot be a coincidence. He used Puricis as a reference to justify everything. But why would he go to such extremes over that initial incident? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Whatever the reason, they clearly want to wipe out the Kreelars and erase all traces of their existence,” Amreth said in a harsh tone, his silver-white eyes gleaming with unyielding determination. “Let’s go catch those fiends. Theywilltalk.”

The five-minute flight to Amreth’s ship felt like an eternity. As soon as we landed, Aku rushed out of the shuttle. I understood his impatience. His people had already suffered so much, this new threat would be the final blow.

“You be careful and come back to me in one piece, you hear?” I told Amreth as we stood by the shuttle’s ramp.

“I promise, my mate. You also be careful out there. I didn’t just find you to already lose you,” he replied.

“Not a chance. You’re stuck with me,” I said with a smile despite the apprehension twisting my insides.

We exchanged a kiss, far too brief, but we couldn’t linger any longer. Aku would probably lose his shit anyway, with good reason.

As soon as Amreth exited, I went back to my seat while Mehreen piloted the shuttle out of the hangar to the temple. Barely a minute after our departure, Amreth’s ship took off. I clamped down on the dreadful images wanting to worm their way into my mind about all the ways things could go wrong. Reminding myself that Amreth was an elite Warrior and a Warden on Molvi helped alleviate some of my fears.

I really cared about him. The prospect of a life without him was unbearable.

But as we closed in on the temple, I refocused on the task at hand. We quickly donned our hazmat suits. To Enre’s dismay, they weren’t suitable for him or the other two Kreelars who came with us, in no small part due to their tails.

Further scans of the area thankfully didn’t reveal the presence of any other person, cameras, or drones that the would-be assassins might have left behind. It either testifiedto an excess of confidence or a high degree of carelessness. Whatever the reason, it served us just fine.

As we waded into the water, a wave of anger surged within me. This was such a cowardly and underhanded way of eliminating people who had done absolutely nothing but tried to live their lives in peace. Had we not seen the Raithean get inside the water, the chances of anyone discovering what had happened would have been slim to none.

Due to their relatively small size, detecting the Puricis stones would be nearly impossible if you didn’t know of their presence beforehand. And even then, we had to use our scanners as we kept walking right past some of them, which too conveniently blended with the riverbed. We picked up twenty-two pebbles and stored them inside a biohazard container.

“How bad is it?” Enre asked, his voice tense as I sealed the container.

“For the water?” I asked.

He nodded, his back stiff.

I gave him a reassuring smile. “Ernst is taking some water samples for further analysis back at the lab, but all our initial scans show that it is safe. The stones themselves have a pretty thick coating. I’m confident that nothing leaked. We caught everything early enough, and there’s no strong current that could have dragged them away. The water is also relatively cold. It slows down the breakdown of the fibrous shell. Had the water been warm, it would have been more problematic. All should be well.”

“Thank you,” Enre said, his voice thick with emotion. “Our people cannot handle another large-scale tragedy.”

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