Page 40 of Venomous Lust
“Where is Knut?” Zaxis spoke low, but his tone was stone cold.
“Let me out, take me with you.” Celaith tossed her head, her expression one of challenge. “Then I’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
“She doesn’t know anything useful.” Zaxis shook his head, his pupils shrinking and dilating in his purple eyes as he spoke. “She’s just trying to trick us.”
“I’m not tricking you. I know why you’re going beyond the Frontier. Your mission was given to you by Prime Councilor Aav herself. She wants you to get back the negative particle bomb, and kill Knut.” Celaith’s skin covered in bright pink spots as she spoke.
“How do you know that?” Khal took a step closer and was rewarded by Celaith’s eyes filling with fear.
“You need me if you want to complete this mission. You think Knut is on Declan, but he’s not. You’ve been misled, all of you, Prime Councilor Aav included. I won’t say anything more than that until I’m free.”
“You’d better tell me, and now.” Khal turned to Celaith. Her face had lost all color and she stared, her dark pink eyes full of fear. “Because you can be sure that Gerkin won’t ask nearly as nicely as I am.”
The Arvak female swallowed convulsively, all defiance gone from her expression. She looked so different just then; female and scared. Defenseless.
“I know where Knut is.” Celaith lifted her gaze to Khal. “And I know why. I know everything.”
Khal stared at her as she stared back. There were no traces of deception on her face, in her wide, scared eyes. He glanced at Zaxis, who nodded, once.
“If you lie to us, I will personally deliver you to the Midnight God.”
* * *
Hazel
Too many things were happening all at once.
Gerkin is a monster. Celaith is in jail.
I’m not going back to Sally.
Hazel’s mind tried to get hold of one thought and it slipped between her fingers like a wet fish into a river. She couldn’t focus, couldn’t decide what she needed to think about first.
Just in front of her, Khal and Zaxis spoke low and fast, too low for her to understand.
Her eyes slid to one side, where a creature was huddled in the back of a dirt-floor cell, its back covered in a foul-looking rag. She couldn’t see much of the poor soul imprisoned in Gerkin’s hell, only what looked like long clawed hands covered in brown scales, and maybe a tail, flicking back and forth in a slow, bored rhythm.
“Can you understand me?” Hazel spoke low to the creature at the back of the cell so as not to startle it. Two bright yellow eyes stared up at her with naked, raw despair.
“Don’t speak to it.” Khal snapped at her, his voice harsh and his expression remote, detached. Like she was some unruly child, poking around mindlessly at a dangerous animal behind bars.
Anger flared inside Hazel at the tone in Khal’s voice, giving her some semblance of grip on the horrors happening around her.
“I will not hurt you.” A voice came from the back of the cell in tones of broken glass and gurgling water. As though whatever the creature was, it hadn’t spoken in a long time. “I seek only freedom.”
Hazel locked gazes with the golden eyes again and something snapped deep inside her. Something that had always been there, but had always been too afraid to wake up. She took a step closer to the bars.
“We can’t leave them here.” Hazel spoke as she still locked gazes with the creature. “Not Celaith, not any of them. This isn’t right.”
The creature moved, fast as lightning, reaching through the bars. A long-fingered hand covered in fine, raspy brown scales closed around Hazel’s wrist. The stench of an unwashed body, rotting linen and disease assailed her nostrils and those yellow eyes sparkled bright and clear in the middle of a reptilian, noseless and lipless face.
“Freedom is all I seek.” That word again. Like a mirage far away in a merciless desert, something to hold on to with a despair born of long suffering.
A despair that echoed the very fabric of Hazel’s life up to the day when an Eok warrior and his human mate came to Aveyn to free them from Knut’s hold. But even that freedom had been a lie, because soon after, Facility Twenty-One, where Hazel had been, had rebelled against the new human government and things had gone downhill from there. There had been violence and death, then Bobbie. Bobbie, with his cutting words and his fists.
A hiss of fury sliced the air and Khal moved, his talons ready to slice flesh, but the creature had already retreated to the back of its cell, hunched and so defeated that Hazel wasn’t sure whether she had dreamed of those yellow eyes asking for freedom.
“You could have been hurt!” Khal’s voice brimmed with fury, but also with worry. “This creature is nothing but a savage, an animal. He would have cut off your arm and eaten it while you watched.”
