Page 80 of Courting Mayhem

“Yes, my lord.”I held out my hand to Papi Sten.“Ready to teleport?”

He took my hand.“I am.”

Derek teleported away.

“Anything else Empress?” I inquired.

“Go,”Zosia urged.“We have much to do. Take good care of my children.”

A brilliant orange glow popped into existence in what was left of the west wall.

“The children are safe with us, and we will find the traitress,”I promised and teleported.

OceanofPDF.com

Chapter Sixteen

I brought the Warhammer to stop at the coordinates Qa’a had given me. The scanners didn’t show any ships or planets in the immediate area. Did Qa’a even own a spaceship? Should I expect him to open a vortex on our ship? Goddess, I hoped not, I wasn’t up for riding the vortex again.

Chirping madly, Defne zoomed from one end of my console to the other and back again. “Go play with Uncle Derek.” I smothered a laugh as she jumped on top of Derek’s head.

Derek gave me the stink eye. “I don’t have time to babysit. I’m tracking General Zan’s and Major Eyken’s movements for the last year.”

“She’s had the zoomies for the last hour. It’s your turn to deal with her.”

“When our children get rowdy do you plan on dumping them on me?” The speculative look in Derek’s eyes gave me pause.

Children? Me? I wasn’t ready to have a kid yet. “Probably.”

Defne stuffed a piece of his hair into her mouth and began to chew. I wondered how the War Commander felt about bald spots.

Exhaling a long breath, Derek plucked Defne off his head and held her in front of his face. “No. Eat. Uncle Derek. Bad. Very bad.”

Defne chirped gleefully, transformed into Kiri’s double, and wrapped her branches around Derek’s neck.

I gaped in astonishment. She wasn’t even a week old, and she was already transforming.

“What a smart baby,”Derek chuckled as he petted her. “You’re gonna drive your parents nuts.”

“Me smart,” Kiri chimed in.

I smiled up at her. “Yes, you are a very smart girl.”

Kiri hung from the ceiling. She had been watching my fathers go through all the data they had collected from Mallox’s lab. For some reason computers fascinated her. She pointed a feeder root at a sensor. “What do?”

Papi Sten answered,“That helps us track bad males.”

“What bad?”

“The male that hurt Zosia and made the monsters is bad.”

“Very bad. Me eat.”

Poppa Jacob laughed.“Works for me.”

I flipped over to my personal data file. I was trying to design a disguise for Derek, but turning a six foot five, muscle-bound warrior into a female was impossible. The last costume I created made him look like Marie Antoinette in drag.

Derek flatly refused to wear it. He downloaded the image of a pleasure house worker with ginormous breasts onto his illusion disk. “There’s my disguise,” he exclaimed.

---