Page 183 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

I exhaled. This wasn’t twelve years ago. I hadn’t watched my family be tortured, killed, kidnapped, and forced to commit suicide to avoid their fate.

This was now.

“Are you okay?” Gedeon repeated.

Feeling his warmth seep into me was enough for me to answer him honestly, not hiding under humor or lust. “I don’t know.”

My fists curled at my sides, not daring to touch him. Not daring to see if he was actually real, standing in front of me, holding me close, his breath raining on my nose and jaw.

Not daring to see if historyhadn’trepeated itself.

When his lips brushed against mine, I responded, relishing the scent of iron wafting off him. My shoulders and fists relaxed, and his smirk gradually spread. Nothing could deflate his smugness. Only his tight grip on me contradicted his nonchalance.

But if he was here… “Where is Kali?”

“I thought she was with you,” he said.

“I told her to wait a few streets over.” Savoring the sensation of his arms around me, I searched for Kali’s familiar figure between our people dealing with the last soldiers the city had left behind or the unlucky ones from the military trucks we’d seized. “I wasn’t leaving you alone in this mess.”

Lights came up in the windows and yellow streaks spilled on the road, illuminating the mutilated bodies, puddles of drying blood, and the sidewalks covered in crimson footprints. Thestench of raw flesh permeated the air so strongly that some gagged and retched, not used to the odor of death. But it didn’t bother me. Its cloying aroma was familiar, something I enjoyed, not feared.

“Malaya!” Kali’s hair wild, her fair skin shining silver, she jumped over a teenage boy sprawled out on the curb of the sidewalk, his young face slack and his yellow jumper marred with dark crimson splotches. She dashed to the other end of the street, toward the heavily pregnant girl she’d rescued months ago, now in the grasp of a soldier hauling her away.

58

GEDEON

We hurried down the road, ignoring the last fights breaking out in the dimly lit street. Deep-seated trust whispered to me that our people would deal with the surviving enemy swiftly and ruthlessly, because the fundamental truth was simple: us or them. Eat or be eaten. Hunt or be hunted. Kill or be killed.

Mercy had no place in our vocabularies.

Stopping thirty feet away from Kali, I plucked a handgun’s magazine from the front pocket of an Ilasall’s soldier sprawled on the ground, his black helmet still clasped under his chin.

A loaded gun was faster than your fists. Had a longer reach. I checked the magazine to find it half full and reloaded the gun I had snatched off a corpse an hour before.

Zion surpassed me, fixated on Kali failing to peel a soldier off Malaya, and I hauled him back behind me. “No.”

Creases appeared on his forehead, stretching the splatters of blood dotting his skin, but he dipped his chin in agreement and fell back in line.

I could not let him run in front of me, face first into danger, not after the last months. The last few days. So much had changed that there was no going back. Not that I would even begin to consider such an option.

Arrows with tips dipped in acid pounded my chest any time a thought of not having them both close, protected, and happy, had decided to latch onto me, conjuring images of their bodies lying on a battlefield as a result of the war they craved.

“Should we…” Eli trailed off, lingering nearby, beside Ava throwing questioning looks our way.

Mute, I shook my head as we slowed our approach to the trio. Kali should have a few seconds to grapple with the soldier. She would appreciate it. And it could potentially drain the adrenaline spiking in her blood. Because that was another thing about battles: staying clear-headed. Emotions were capricious and could influence your decisions by clouding your logic and luring you into the trap of a fatal mistake.

“Let. Her. Go!” Malaya screamed, barely standing on her legs, her belly swollen, about to burst any day now, yet she kicked the backs of the soldier’s knees with one of Zion’s favorite moves.

The man twisted out of her foot and shoved Kali into a building. Her cheek struck the brick wall as he backhanded her and then clamped down on her neck. Malaya’s yelling pierced the night as she sought to claw him away from her.

A tide of wrath carried me to them, and I hit the man’s temple with the handle of my gun from behind. He sagged to the filthy ground, his head slightly swaying as he dizzily stared into nothing. A trickle of scarlet flowed along his ear and down his jaw.

Zion lifted Kali’s chin to examine her nose. “It’s not broken.”

“I’m fine. I’ll just have a bruise.” She pushed him away and frowned at the blood painting him, her fingers feather-light in their inspection of the wounds marking his bare torso. “Is it bad? Will you need stitches? Do I need to get Eislyn?”

“A few. But he will be fine,” I assured her before Zion could state that he was good when he was not. No one could be thatwhen you had found them practically collapsed at the corner of a street, lost in a haze of rage, covered in grime, clotted and fresh blood, their front cut up and painted in crimson, their chest heaving erratically, their back sticky under your palms, and no recognition of their surroundings in their wild eyes.