Page 6 of Sheltered in the Storm

Like the crash, her fate would not be my concern if it were not for the probability it would draw attention to this quiet corner of Iosa.

The raiders shouted back and forth in Ymarian, debating how to get the badly injured pilot to one of the boats. Finally, the Atolani leader called out a command. Two of the Ymarians aboard the fighter tossed the pilot’s limp body across three meters of water and into the waiting arms of the Atolani—who promptly dropped her on the boat’s metal deck and shoved her out of his way with his foot.

Their casual cruelty and callousness toward a defenseless person set my sharp teeth on edge. My human hands clenched into fists and my eyes glowed. My tentacles trembled with their own anger. I had not felt such visceral fury in…years? Not in recent memory, for certain. Even the sight of the raiders’ sea mines spoiling the beautiful ocean depths had not generated this much rage.

After more shouting, the Ymarian raiders on the fighter unhooked the rope that tethered the Atolani’s boat to the wreck. The Atolani reeled up the line, shouted one last command to the other boat, and turned his vessel around, heading for the shoreand the camp with the pilot. The raiders left on the fighter set to work stripping what they could and tossing the salvaged parts to the three remaining raiders in the boat.

I should swim back to the inlet and return home. The fighter and its pilot were not my responsibility, and I preferred not to draw any notice to myself.

But by all the gods above and below, I hated these raiders. I did not want them to benefit from the crash. If I could sink the fighter—or even better, destroy it using one of the raiders’ own mines—they would end up with nothing. If I could do so without leaving clues as to who was responsible, I should take the pilot from them as well and bring her to the closest hospital. No one needed to know who her benefactor had been.

When the Atolani’s boat was well out of sight, I swam underwater to the wreck. I surfaced next to the fighter on the opposite side from the raiders’ boat and out of sight of the Ymarians working to extract usable items.

Just as I began formulating a plan to bring one of the raiders’ mines to the surface to dispatch the fighter, the wind changed direction. Through the rain, I caught a scent that blanked my mind and made me freeze in place.

The smell was unmistakably human blood, but it was a universe more than that.

The scent was of home, hearth, and safety. I had never had any of those things, but I knew this scent in my soul.

While my human brain struggled to grapple with this feeling, all four of my tentacles, moving instinctively and entirely of their own accord, tried to forcibly haul me up the side of the freighter toward the cockpit—the source of that entrancing scent. Each tentacle had its own small brain that controlled it without conscious commands from my central humanoid brain.

I roused myself enough to pull back into the sea before the Ymarian raiders spotted me, but my tentacles would not relinquish their grip on the fighter’s crumpled hull.

My body sang of comfort and belonging.

My mate was here.

No, I had no mate.Could nothave one. A member of the Silent Guard could not have distractions. Sex, yes. Pleasure, yes. But no mate…or so I had been told. So I had believed until this very moment. But with every cell in my body, Iknewmore surely than I had known anything in my life that my mate had been in this fighter.

A chill swept through me, and right behind it a rush of warmth that both terrified and thrilled me all the way to my core.

And behind it camerage—white-hot, all-consuming rage.

My mate was bleeding and terribly hurt. Possibly dying. And the raiders had yanked her unconscious and vulnerable from her pilot’s seat, flung her carelessly over a stormy sea, and tossed her onto the hard deck of a boat like trash while they carefully handled the parts they pulled from her fighter. My fury was so great my body trembled and my vision tunneled, turning dark red around the edges.

As long as the fighter remained afloat, the Ymarians would stay to fill their boat before heading for their camp with the first load of plunder. The other boat would be halfway to shore. Once my mate was within the camp itself, extracting her would be far more difficult.

Continue with my plan to sink the fighter and kill those left behind, or head straight for the Atolani’s boat?

The decision was so easy and instinctive it was not a decision at all.

Quivering in fury and anticipation of the fight to come, my tentacles relinquished their grip on the fighter’s hull. I plunged into the water and took off in pursuit of my mate and her captors.

CHAPTER 3

CALLA

My entire existence was pain.The sheer magnitude of its iron grip on every muscle and bone rendered me incoherent.

Rough voices ebbed and flowed through my delirium, the words indistinct. I tasted salt water and blood and smelled rusted metal.

My leaden body slid helplessly around on a smooth surface, hitting hard corners and what might be several pairs of legs and heavy boots. Sizzles of agony through the fog told me I had many broken bones.

My stomach roiled and lurched as if I were subject to violent yawing and up-and-down movement. Could I be in a boat? I dimly recalled aiming for a crash-landing in water, but had no memory of the actual impact or anything after.

Normally choppy water wouldn’t have affected me much, if at all; a fighter pilot’s training and years of flying tended to eliminate all forms of motion sickness. But these waves were enormous—to the point the boat repeatedly surged atop waves and then plunged meters through the air before hitting thewater’s surface. I might have vomited from the endless rise and fall if my body could have organized its inner workings well enough to regurgitate anything.

I slipped away into soft darkness again.

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