Page 26 of Sheltered in the Storm (The Fortusian Mates # 1)

CHAPTER 25

CALLA

I woke naked and in agony, lying on my right side on a dirt floor. The air stank of body odor, chemical fire, and old fuel cells.

With a groan, I rolled to my back, looked up, and let out a strangled, pain-filled cry.

The creature looming over me was enormous, with a black segmented carapace, two bright blue multifaceted eyes on long stalks, two clawed hands on jointed arms, and four thick legs with wide, flipper-like feet planted on either side of my body. I didn’t recognize the species by sight, but the gods-damned thing must weigh nearly two thousand kilograms. If they sat or fell on me, I would die instantly.

My chest heaving, I reached for my left shoulder, the source of so much pain. My fingers found a lot of blood and some kind of thick, round, metal bolt about four centimeters wide protruding from my flesh.

Son of Valodian batkeeper, I’d been shot—and with something much nastier than a standard plasma gun. The back of my neck stung too, like maybe I’d been darted with something that knocked me out.

The last thing I recalled was sitting on the grass at the inlet waiting for Vos to return with more shells. I had no memory of actually being shot, or hearing or seeing my attackers, or how I got to wherever the hells I was, but clearly I’d been kidnapped. I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. Was I even still on Iosa?

My stomach churned and heaved with pain, fear, and anger. What about Vos? Where was my Vos?

I turned my head to look around what appeared to be some kind of small, filthy, poorly lit bunkhouse, but saw no one but this creature. A metal cuff on a thick chain bound my right ankle to a tipped-over double bunk bed. No sign of Vos anywhere. What did that mean? The possibilities terrified me more than the creature above me.

The creature bent their head and eyestalks until their blue eyeballs nearly touched my face. They studied me as if I were a test subject in a lab. I stared back, my jaw clenched to hold in my pain. I’d be gods-damned if I gave this being the satisfaction of hearing me whimper.

“Does it hurt?” my captor asked in Alliance Standard, each word accompanied by thick clicking sounds. Clearly the language was not natural for the shape and design of their mouth, but I understood the words well enough. And the tone was unmistakably vicious.

“Fuck you,” I said, my voice strained. “Where’s Vos?”

The creature made a strange grating sound I realized was a chortle or laugh. “I am sure he will find us soon,” they said, their eyeballs roving above my face, maybe enjoying my pain. “We left many tracks in many directions, but an assassin of his calibre will not be fooled for long. I must make the most of what time I have with you, little plaything. ”

My pain and fear became anger. “At least tell me who the hells you are.”

“Stalling, little one?” They made that grating sound again. “Buying time for Vos Turek to find you? I have told you he will come, but he will not like what he finds. I will leave him pieces of you. Perhaps he will try to put you back together.”

This must be someone from Vos’s past out for revenge. They looked at me as nothing more than a way to hurt him. I’d encountered this kind of cruelty before. It didn’t bode well for me.

If I was an object to this being, they wouldn’t see me as a person and would have no empathy for my suffering. That much was evident already in the utterly unnecessary bolt they’d shot through my shoulder. Maybe it kept me from running, or maybe it was a tracker. Or maybe an incendiary device. The creature had said they would leave me in pieces. A bomb would accomplish that.

A wash of cold and dizziness rolled through me, making me shiver uncontrollably. My ears rang, and my thoughts became fragmented in a growing fog. I’d experienced it enough to know this was shock and blood loss.

Every movement sent white-hot agony through my shoulder, even breathing, but I inhaled as deeply as I could and fought to stay awake. Passing out would doom me. If I was awake, I had a chance to find a way out of this. If I was awake, I could help fight when Vos came.

Because if this creature put one claw on my Vos, by all the gods above and below, I would rip their arms off or die trying.

Something nagged at me, fighting to rise to the surface in my muddled mind. Something about the possibility the bolt in my shoulder was explosive, but I couldn’t quite make sense of what seemed significant about that.

I blinked up at the creature, fighting to focus as another wave of lightheadedness made everything go hazy. Their eyes bobbed in a way that reminded me of Poe, but they lacked her gentleness to go along with the deadly claws and menacing bulk.

“Before you kill me, I’d at least like to know why,” I said. My voice didn’t shake, which was a wonder in itself because the pain in my shoulder had me on the verge of throwing up. “If this is about Vos, and not because of something I’ve done, I think I deserve that much.”

“If you know you are here because of Vos Turek, then you know enough,” they said, clacking their jaw. Maybe speaking Alliance Standard was uncomfortable for them. “You are not innocent in this if you find him worthy of your body and love. Your soul must be as rotten as his.”

Had they been watching us before they attacked? If so, for how long? Surely Vos or I would have noticed if we were under surveillance. Or had they seen something in my eyes when I asked about him that made them think I loved him? I didn’t know the answer to that, and I wasn’t likely to get an explanation.

I wished the past to be past , Vos had told me. But the lives we’d led before we’d come to Iosa were not the sort that made peace likely. Maybe it had only ever been a matter of time before our pasts caught up to us.

And with that thought, the word bomb and the physical characteristics of this creature finally found something in my memory to latch onto.

“N’Vors,” I whispered.

With a nauseating grinding noise like bone on bone, the creature reared up on its back legs, and then came crashing down with most of its enormous weight on its front feet only centimeters from pulverizing my head. Their jaws snapped so close to my nose that they damn near tore off my face.

“Silence, you worthless thing,” they ground out, the words so grating and full of clicking that I barely made them out. “If you insult my parent’s name again by speaking of them, I will kill you where you lie, and I will do so slowly, with my own hands.”

My breath caught. I was face-to-face with the full-grown offspring of the Kurutan Ambassador N’Vors.

“I know who you are,” I said, my voice tight with grief, pain, anger, and a dozen other emotions. “Vos told me about you. You’re the child he saved on Bordia.”

They clamped their claw onto the head of the bolt in my shoulder and twisted it.

Oh, all the fucking great gods above and below, the pain.

A rush of hot blood ran down my chest from the wound. I rolled to my side and vomited.

“Vos Turek is a murderer,” the Kurutan said, their face centimeters from my own, which was the only reason I could hear them over the ringing in my ears. “He did not save me. He spared me. There is a universe of difference.”

The agony was damn near unbearable. With a choked sob, I dug my fingernails into the dirt, as if by hanging on to something—anything—I could keep from passing out. Hot tears of anger ran down my face.

“I have dedicated two standard years to tracking him down,” they continued, “and I will avenge my parent’s death even if it means the end of my own life. Vos Turek will find you dead and know what it is like to lose the one most precious to him.”

Two years? I hurt so, so badly, but at least some of that pain came from the realization this Kurutan had spent two of their five years of life hunting Vos because they mistakenly thought he’d killed N’Vors.

They ran their claw over my bare right shoulder, leaving a bloody incision I barely felt over the rest of my pain.

“You fuck this murderer,” they said. “You love this murderer. Who are you, worthless thing, who would find him worthy of either? ”

“I’m not worthless,” I said roughly. “And I’m not a thing . I am Calla Wren, survivor of the arenas of Ganai.”

“Oh.” The Kurutan clacked their jaw and rose to stand over me again. “So, a scrap. I see. No one else will have you but Vos Turek. I pity you, then, Calla Wren.”

Every word hit me as hard as physical blows because some part of me believed the same. Still, I rolled to my back once more, holding in whimpers with sheer will alone.

“He did save you,” I rasped. “He was sent to kill your parent, but he wasn’t responsible for their death.”

The Kurutan rested the tip of their claw on the bolt.

I raised my chin and didn’t flinch at the clear threat. “He was hidden in an air duct with a dart gun loaded with poison gas. But when he saw you, he couldn’t pull the trigger, because the poison would have killed you too.”

“This is all lies.” They pushed on the bolt, sending agony through me. I choked back a scream. “Lies he has fed you.”

“Why would he lie?” My voice was ragged. “He would have no reason to lie to me. We had no idea you might come for him.”

“Does he brag to you of his kills?” Another push on the bolt, and another gush of blood from the wound. My vision grew hazy. “This is bed talk for you?”

“No.” I fought to keep unconsciousness at bay. “This is the only story of his past he’s told me. He wanted to tell me how he knew what love was.”

The Kurutan stilled. “What does this story have to do with love, Calla Wren?”

“When someone threw a bomb into the embassy, your parent covered your body with theirs,” I said, and if my voice was edged with a sob I couldn’t help it. “They loved you so much, they gave their life to ensure you lived. Vos saw that. And then as the building was collapsing around you, he carried you out and gave you to the Bordians. He even covered your eyes so you didn’t see your parent, because he knew seeing their body might cause you to die.”

I managed a deep, shaky breath. “You asked him ‘ La ka na? ’ and he said yes without knowing what the question meant. But he was your angel, you see. He was .”

“Lies,” they repeated.

“Not lies.” Gently, I put my hand on their claw where it rested on the bolt. “Not lies, I swear. He’d come to assassinate your parent with a dart gun. Why would he use a bomb, then, when it might have killed him? The Guard doesn’t use bombs that take out whole groups of people anyway. You must know that. That’s never been their practice. And it was his last mission for the Guard. He wouldn’t have wanted to die. He wanted to live. He wanted you to live. He made sure you did.”

“I survived,” they grated. “That is not the same.”

“I know that.” I nearly shouted it, and the effort of doing so made everything go hazy again. “Gods, do I know. I told you I survived the Ganai arenas, didn’t I? Vos survived a twenty-year service in the Guard. Do you think either of us signed up for that? How old were you when all you’d known was ripped away? They got him when he was two. I was three and a half. You must have been less than a year old.”

“Not yet eight lunar cycles,” they grated. And thank all the gods in the cosmos, they took their claw off the bolt. “You believe this story Vos Turek has told you, but I do not. You have every reason to lie, to save him and save yourself.”

And yet, maybe they had a doubt now. That was a million times more of a chance than I’d had minutes ago.

“I do have reason to lie, but I’m not.” Maybe it was the blood loss, or maybe I figured I didn’t have much to lose, or maybe I just wanted N’Vors’s child to believe the true version of events over the one they’d shaped their life around, so I added, “I don’t know how to prove it to you, but if you’re not in the business of killing people for no reason like whoever was responsible for the bombing on Bordia, maybe you should be sure before you blow me to pieces to punish Vos for a crime he didn’t commit.”

My captor said nothing. I couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or a bad one.

“Please, tell me your name,” I said. “I really want to know.”

“I am N’Mora,” they said as they rose to their full height.

I let out a breath. Gods, did I hurt. “And where are we, N’Mora?”

“What remains of a raider camp, a few kilometers from Vos Turek’s home.” They took a step back, so for the first time since I woke up I wasn’t staring straight up at their claws, which was a welcome change. “Whoever lived here must have abandoned it after fighting among themselves. Most of the camp was burned and we found corpses in the debris. Only this building and one other remain standing. There are no ships here now and no sign they intend to return.”

Neither Vos nor I had ventured anywhere close to the camp since the night I’d crashed. So maybe the surviving raiders, left without their leader, had squabbled, killed one another, and then packed up and left this moon. That was a shred of good news.

Belatedly, I realized N’Mora had said something unexpected. “Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. “Who’s here besides you?”

“My bodyguards.” N’Mora clacked their claws. “I did not come alone to face Vos Turek. I do not underestimate him. They await him outside.”

I struggled to lift my head. “N’Mora, don’t kill Vos until you’ve heard him tell you what happened on Bordia. Please.”

“I do not think Vos Turek will want to speak to me when he comes.” N’Mora moved between me and the door to the bunkhouse. “He found your blood where we took you. My people report he is enraged, gone bestial.”

My stomach twisted and my eyes filled with tears. My poor Vos. I pictured him emerging from the sea and finding nothing but my blood on the grass. He must have blamed himself, and been gutted.

“You hurt him.” I forced myself to sit up despite the pain and sickness it caused. “I understand why you did it, N’Mora, but it must have broken his heart when he found me gone.”

N’Mora clicked. “Why did he leave you alone in such a place?”

“He was gathering pretty shells for me.” I covered the bolt in my shoulder with my other hand, as if somehow it might hurt less and stop bleeding if I couldn’t see it. “Instead of meeting him at the door, let me talk to him when he gets here. He’ll listen.”

“I do not think so, Calla Wren.” N’Mora inclined their head. “My people say he is closing in and prepared for battle. He will try to kill me. Probably one or both of us will die. It is better this way.”

“No, it’s not.” Gasping, gagging, staggering, I got to my feet. “Give me a chance. Tell your people to let him come here. You deserve to hear the truth, and Vos deserves to know why this happened.”

“He smells your blood,” N’Mora countered. “He will go through you to kill me. The beasts of Fortusia, they do not know reason when their rage is too great.”

“Don’t call him a beast,” I snapped. “He’s hurt and he’s angry, but he’s a man, not a beast. I’m his true mate. He will listen to me .”

N’Mora made that grinding sound again. “He has taken a true mate?”

“Yes!”

From outside the bunkhouse, I heard a bellow nearby, and the sound of something like the smashing of a wall, followed by a much louder crash. The ground trembled. Probably the other building that had survived the raiders’ departure collapsing. Another bellow, this one only what sounded like meters away from the door to the bunkhouse .

I hobbled forward as far as the chain around my ankle would allow and reached for N’Mora’s clawed hand. “Get behind me, N’Mora!”

With a chittering sound, N’Mora did as I asked, leaving me facing the door?—

—Just as it, and the wall around it, exploded toward us.