Of all the items on the long list of things Rachel Cross had never expected to see in her life, it had never even occurred to her to add a raknoth drinking—or, technically, preparing to drink—tea, and especially not one doing it with all the poise and delicacy of a Victorian monarch at that. Yet here she was, and there sat the blood-sucking aristocrat in all his pompous glory.
In the interest of not looking at him one second longer, Rachel instead glanced around the spacious room for the thousandth time, seeing but not really observing the collection of fine ceramics and luxuriously dark, shiny wood furniture that graced the space with its oh-so-eloquent presence. She suppressed an exasperated huff (only for the hundredth time) and settled for squeezing her staff and clenching her toes until her feet cramped.
The collection probably would have gone for an arm and both legs back when people had cared about such things, back before they’d had to shift their focus to more pressing concerns like whether they’d be able to grow enough food for the winter and whether they’d be able to escape the notice of marauders while they did it.
But fancy, gaudy, stupid, unnecessary trinkets weren’t the reason she was about to blow a gasket.
The impetus of that impending calamity was the imperious little brat who sat in front of them, taking his sweet, deliberate time in fixing his tea—the making of which was apparently of life-and-death necessity before he could be bothered to properly hear them out. Or maybe he was just fucking with them. Who drank tea these days anyway?
The raknoth, apparently. Or at least this one.
She never would have expected to use either of the phrases, “little brat” or “fixing his tea,” in reference to a raknoth, and yet here she was, about to burst a blood vessel, and there he was, stirring that steaming cup ever so gingerly with his ridiculous little spoon.
Last time she’d ever agree to play nice.
She glanced over at Lea and decided that if the beautiful Resistance fighter could keep her composure through this nonsense, she could at least give Nan’Ashida one more minute before she put him through one of his rustic adobe walls.
Whether he knew it or not, the little prick spoke up just in time.
“Tell me, Krogoth,” Ashida said to the raknoth sitting across the table from him. God, even his voice was annoying. “Have you ever been on a safari?”
“Never,” Krogoth said.
“A shame.” Ashida raised the tea cup to his lips with three fingers and took a delicate sip, then he let out a contented sigh.
And now she’d seen everything.
“I’ve always found them to be invigorating,” Ashida continued. “The perfect glimpse into the true way of the world—predator and prey, hunter and hunted. Survival”—he pointedly shifted his gaze to her and Lea before looking back at Krogoth—“of the fittest.”
Rachel rolled her eyes so hard the muscles at the tops of her eyeballs threatened to cramp. “Cool story, dude.” Lea tensed at the sound of her words, but Rachel pressed on. “It’s a shame some scaly green assholes had to go and blow the world to shit. Probably wasn’t so invigorating out there during the dark days. Probably still isn’t.”
A crimson glow awakened in Ashida’s eyes, and a look of distaste warped his features as he regarded her.
Given his clear raknoth superiority complex, she was kind of surprised she could read Ashida’s expression at all. Many of the raknoth, like Zar’Krogoth with his rust-red hide, elected to retain their reptilian appearances—what Jarek referred to as “going full raknoth”—around the clock. Having dealt with more than enough raknoth in just the past couple of weeks to keep her sated for life, she was getting a bit better at reading the expressions of their scaly snouts and smooth, angled eyebrows, but there was still a lot of guesswork involved.
With Ashida opting to maintain the appearance of the human host whose driver’s seat he’d laid permanent claim to, though, his disgust was clear. He had the dark skin of a native Kenyan, which only made the creepy crimson glow of his eyes stand out that much more. He could have hidden the ominous luminance, she knew. That was how the raknoth had managed to take their planet and pull the strings that had ended up wiping out nearly ninety percent of the world’s population fifteen years ago. They hadn’t needed to break a sweat or raise a finger—save for the one that had pressed the nuke button.
She kept that thought firmly in mind as she held Nan’Ashida’s gaze, hoping he’d choke on his stupid tea.
“How can you think to work with these pathetic creatures, brother?” Ashida asked Krogoth. “The lion would not think for a moment to lower itself to the company of the hare. It is unnatural. And unnecessary. This lot”—he flicked a hand toward Rachel and Lea, somehow conveying disgust with the motion—“will be centuries in their graves before we’d ever have any reason to expect the harvesters would come here. And if that should ever come to pass”—he gave a haughty laugh—“I don’t see how our food could hope to stand beside us on the battlefield.”
He went to take another sip of tea and froze, which seemed a little ironic, because that was exactly what his cup of tea had done: frozen solid. At Rachel’s will, of course.
She harmlessly dispersed the heat she’d drawn from the tea and met Ashida’s confused look with a wide grin. “Not bad for a pathetic little hare, huh, asshole?”
Krogoth looked between the frosty cup and Rachel and said nothing. But was that amusement on his features?
“How dare you?” Ashida said once he’d gotten over his indignant rage enough to speak.
Rachel focused on the cup and channeled the smidgen of energy it took to send the tea cup and its solid contents sailing across the room. It smashed against the wall with one big satisfying crash and fell to the floor with a series of smaller ones.
Ashida was on his feet in an instant. Rachel tapped into the batteries she kept clipped on her belt as a soldier might keep spare magazines. It took considerably more telekinetic horsepower to drive the raknoth back into his seat than it had to hurl a little teacup, but it was worth it.
And they’d been worried she wouldn’t be a good diplomat.
The dark wooden chair under Ashida gave an indignant groan as he slammed into it. Ashida gave his own threatening growl. Then, after a moment of struggling, he bellowed, “Release me!”
Rachel looked at Lea, trying to keep the considerable exertion off of her face. “You think a lion’s ever said something like that to a hare?”
Ashida might have been a pompous bastard, but he was also a raknoth, and they weren’t so easily matched for physical strength, even by an arcanist like herself. She doubted she could have kept him contained for more than a minute if he really cut loose.
Luckily, Krogoth helped her maintain the integrity of her little show, whether deliberately or not. “The point is well made,” he said, raising a hand for her to stop. “Enough.”
She gladly released her telekinetic hold on Ashida. Channeling fatigue swept in. She leaned casually against the wall to keep her knees from shaking and kept her eyes on Ashida. Raknoth weren’t exactly legendary for their self-restraint and levelheadedness.
In testament to the fact, Ashida bounded to his feet and batted his chair aside, toppling the rich wood violently enough that it cracked when it hit the ground.
Krogoth had risen to his feet as well, keeping easy pace with Ashida.
Rachel probably would have considered a bath in battery acid before she’d trust Krogoth with her life, but she wasn’t going to complain about him throwing in a hand to protect it either.
Fortunately, his aid wasn’t necessary. Ashida only stood there, shoulders heaving in the aftermath of his sudden outburst.
Finally, after a long silence, he looked at the cracked chair on the floor. “Look what you have made me do,” he said quietly.
Rachel managed to keep her voice level. “We have more important things to worry about than nice furniture and tea time, Ashida. The rakul are coming, whether you wanna believe it or not.”
“Bah,” Ashida said.
“You and your men could be what turns the tide when the fighting starts,” Lea said, probably trying to appeal to his obviously considerable ego. “The army you command is formidable. If you’d be willing to glyph your men against telepathic influence—”
Ashida gave a harsh bark of laughter. “If I did that, my men would no longer be my men, little girl.” He looked at Krogoth, his face showing the first signs of hesitation Rachel had seen. “You truly believe this madness, brother?”
Krogoth gave a slow nod. “I saw the messengers flee for the Masters myself. Harvest will fall.”
“Bah.” Ashida considered Rachel. “If that is truly the case, why not simply offer up the humans when they arrive, as we were always intended to do?”
Rachel held her tongue so Krogoth could explain it without all of the expletives and insults she’d be compelled to include.
“You know why,” Krogoth said. “The day we decided to cut off contact with the Masters was the day we signed our inevitable death warrants. It was always a question of when. Even if they would forgive us, they certainly wouldn’t think to spare the humans just because we’ve grown to require their lifeblood. There is no moving on to the next planet. If the humans perish, so too will we.”
“Perhaps the Masters could—”
“The Masters will gladly cut us to ribbons and display our true corpses for all to see. We have already undermined their authority. They will have already returned to Rakzaied to replace our numbers.”
“But—”
“As far as the Kul are concerned,” Krogoth said, “we are already dead. They simply come to complete the formality.”
Rachel thought she could see the moment the weight of Krogoth’s words shimmied past Ashida’s denial and settled firmly down on his chest.
“I will have to consider,” Ashida began, but Krogoth was already turning for the door, beckoning Rachel and Lea to join him.
“Do as you wish, Nan,” Krogoth said. He spoke quietly, not pausing or turning back. Ashida would hear nonetheless. “But do not make the mistake of believing that you will be any less doomed than us for your hesitance to raise arms against the Masters.”
If Ashida had a comeback, he didn’t manage to spit it out before they left.
Outside, they tromped silently through the complex. It was decadent to the max, all rustic, cream-colored walls and impractical red-tiled roofs. The courtyard sported a running fountain, and on the balcony above it, two girls were sunbathing, of all things. Like Rachel, they looked to be in their mid-twenties. Unlike Rachel, their skin glowed bronze, and their curves were voluptuous beneath the skimpy bikinis that left so little to the imagination.
Bikinis. Sunbathing.
Now she really had seen everything.
She exchanged a look with Lea. Unlike Rachel’s fair skin, Lea’s was a lovely chestnut brown, but it certainly hadn’t gotten that way from tanning, and Rachel was reasonably sure neither one of them had ever thought to wear a bikini in the past fifteen years, if ever. The thought of walking around so exposed made her skin crawl.
Maybe no one had explained to the girls on the balcony what manner of monsters roamed the lands these days.
There were the raknoth, of course. But then there were the marauders too, those wayward souls who’d fled their humanity when the bombs had fallen fifteen years ago and had yet to return to it. People wanted to hate the raknoth, but it was hard to ignore just how many humans had taken a leaf out of their book when the shit had hit and treated their fellow humans as resources to be taken advantage of.
Hell, maybe it had always been that way. Maybe people had just gotten a little bolder once there were no real organized governments to make them pay for it.
God, she was starting to think like Jarek.
She wondered if they should try to get the girls out of there, but they looked happy enough. She didn’t see any obvious bite marks on them, and they even waved down to her and Lea as they passed the fountain.
Hell, maybe they had better lives than she did.
Or maybe Nan’Ashida had telepathically raped their minds into dumb servitude and ordered them onto the balcony just to complete the decor he’d so obviously imagined in fine detail.
The thought made her want to hit something.
She still couldn’t quite believe she or anyone else in the Resistance had agreed to the tenuous (and tenuous was probably even too sturdy a word) alliance with the raknoth—the very same assholes who’d destroyed their planet. The same wretched bastards who’d been responsible for the deaths of her family.
She’d be lying if she said it hadn’t been keeping her up at night, but so had the visions Haldin had shown her of the rakul. It wasn’t quite fair to say it was any fault of Haldin and his friends, but it sure would have been nice if the Enochians had brought anything other than disastrously bad news with them on their galactic trip to Earth.
For now, shirking imminent death had taken the reins, no matter how deplorable the thought of working with the raknoth was.
That said, she’d be damned if she wasn’t going to stick Alton Parker in a corner and get some answers the first chance she got. As far as she knew, Alton was the only surviving raknoth who knew the details of what had happened to her mom and her family, and he’d been a little too conveniently indisposed and removed on their world-wide alliance recruitment tour these past weeks. Soon, though, she’d get him alone. One way or another.
They reached the front gate and waited under the guards’ stares as it slowly crept open for them.
“What an asshole,” she said when they were on the other side and the gate was groaning shut behind them.
“Your behavior toward our host in there was most undiplomatic, Rachel Cross,” Krogoth said.
“Our host was a prick,” she pointed out.
She diplomatically withheld the point that Krogoth, by general virtue of association, among other things, was a prick in her eyes as well.
Krogoth shot her an even stare, and then he emitted a chuffing growl of laughter. “You speak truth. Were we not on a diplomatic mission, I would have extracted the respect he failed to show me.”
“Hey, we could go back. No arguments here.”
By “extracted respect,” she was pretty sure Krogoth meant, “removed Ashida’s insolent head.” She wasn’t a scholar of raknoth sociology, but he probably would have been in his rights to kill the Nan for his lack of respectful address, especially now that he’d ascended from the title of Al to Zar—coincidentally after he’d removed Zar’Golga’s head a couple of weeks earlier. She could think of a lot worse ways to spend the rest of her morning than watching Krogoth repeat the act on Ashida.
“Rachel…” The look Lea shot her was decidedly disapproving.
Krogoth gave another guttural chuckle. “The lady warrior is fierce,” he said to Lea. “Perhaps there is yet hope for us in the coming war.” He glanced at Rachel. “Even if it is her kind we have to thank for our current predicament.”
Rachel only just managed to hold back the gasp at the words that hit like a sudden gout of icy water down her back. Krogoth and Lea paused, and she realized with an internal curse that she’d frozen in shock.
Krogoth couldn’t know… Could he?
Alton might have been the only one left who’d been around for the business that had left Rachel without a family, but she had no idea how many of his kin had known that the virus that’d left them mortally dependent on human blood had been born of an arcanist’s enchantment, and that said arcanist had in fact been Rachel’s mom.
Something told her it was better if no one who didn’t already know—least of all one of the three most powerful raknoth left on the planet—ever found out.
“See?” she said, weakly trying to force a wink at Lea. “You say undiplomatic, he says fierce. Krogoth gets it.”
“He said undiplomatic,” Lea said, not missing a stride though Rachel was pretty sure the younger Resistance fighter had guessed roughly what was going through her head.
Aside from Jarek and the Enochians, Lea and Alaric Weston were the only ones who knew about her mom’s role in all of this, and neither one had seemed hasty to spill the beans and add yet another source of tension to an alliance that was already more a teetering tower of dry kindling next to a bonfire than a secure fortress.
“Whatever.” Rachel waved a hand, hoping Krogoth would chalk up any oddness to the fact that she was a human and an arcanist rather than anything more sinister. Hell, the raknoth probably didn’t care enough to even notice odd behaviors to begin with. “Let’s just go home.”
Krogoth was already turning to continue on, clearly having lost interest in their petty human chit chat. Rachel exchanged a relieved look with Lea, and they followed after the Zar without a word.
Yeah. She was definitely going to be having that talk with Alton the first chance she got.
Thinking of the Enochians on the way to Krogoth’s ship, she checked her comm and realized she’d missed a call from Haldin.
She dropped back just outside the ship to return the call. Lea joined her as the comm holo sprang to life with an idling icon and a chirping tone.
There was a small crackle of static, then the holo enlarged and shifted into a pixelated, stuttering image of Haldin Raish’s pretty boy eyes and thinly bearded jawline. The odd purplish hue of the wall behind him confirmed he was aboard the borrowed raknoth ship that had brought the Enochians to Earth.
“Hey… achel,” came Elise’s choppy voice from somewhere off screen.
They must’ve still been somewhere in the mountains. Not that Rachel’s connection was all that much better right now.
Haldin turned with his comm and, frame by choppy frame, Elise came into view on the couch next to him, beautiful and raven-haired, as did Johnny and his flaming red hair, sprawled out and resting his legs over both of them.
“Hey. You guys look cozy over there.”
Elise frowned at Johnny. “Certain parties may… -main unclear on the… -er points… couch etiquette.” The connection seemed to stabilize, and Elise continued. “I’d like to say it’s a culture shock thing, but we did bring these couches from Enochia.”
Johnny raised a helpless hand. “Sometimes a guy’s gotta sprawl! It can’t be helped.” His gaze shifted from Rachel to Lea, and he waggled his eyebrows. “Hey, Lea.”
“Hi, Johnny.” Lea’s tone was level, but she didn’t quite manage to keep the smile from tugging at her features.
Rachel resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Not that Johnny couldn’t hold his own in a fight, but half the time it seemed like he’d flown here for no other reason than to bring them bad jokes and cheesy pickup lines from across the galaxy.
When the video connection sputtered out and died, leaving them with only audio, Rachel decided it might actually be a mercy.
“How did it go?” Haldin asked, his voice a bit clearer now that they weren’t wasting precious bandwidth.
Straight back to business. That seemed like Haldin’s style, all right.
“Iffy,” Rachel said. “We definitely left Ashida with a lot to think about. I’d say it’s fifty-fifty whether the little prick comes around, though.”
“How about you guys?” Lea asked.
When Haldin spoke, Rachel pictured him with a sour frown.
“Worse,” he said. “We didn’t even get a maybe. Those idiots wouldn’t even—”
He paused, distracted by something on their end.
“They didn’t believe us,” Elise finished for him.
“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” Rachel said. “If only we could just up and leave the stubborn bastards behind.”
“Damn those pesky hundreds of millions of helpless innocents,” Johnny agreed in a tone that made her picture him hunching over and waving his fist like a bitter old man.
Yeah. That was the kicker, wasn’t it?
“Have you guys heard any word from Jarek?” Rachel asked.
“No,” Haldin said. “I was just about to try him.”
“Stay on. I’ll add him.”
Rachel swiped through the holo menus and threw Jarek Slater onto the call from her contact list. They waited for nearly half a minute, their comms chirping in unison.
She was about to give up and drop Jarek from the call when the chirping halted in a soft click.
“I’m sorry to say that now is an exceptionally bad time, ma’am,” Jarek’s AI companion, Alfred, said in his smooth English tone. “Jarek wishes me to inform you that he’ll call you once the, uh… negotiations are complete.”
She stymied the river of questions that poured through her head. “Exceptionally bad time” sounded an awful lot like “active warzone” to her ears where Jarek and Al were concerned, but he was too far away for her to do anything in a timely manner.
“Keep him safe, Al.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
Al cut Jarek’s line from the call with a soft click.
“That didn’t sound great,” Haldin said.
Rachel shook her head, too busy trying to ignore the gnawing feeling in her gut to remember the Enochians couldn’t see her.
What the hell had they been thinking, sending a cowboy and a freakin’ Jarek to Japan?
