Page 31 of The Garnet Daughter (The Viridian Priestess #3)

Chapter

Twenty-Three

I pace around the pod as if he will appear where I have already searched. I scream his name, but he has vanished, leaving behind enough blood to indicate a deep wound.

Why did he venture out if he was wounded? He knows how dangerous the birthlands are. If he hasn’t succumbed from blood loss, there are countless other things that could have harmed him in such an impaired state.

My vision becomes cloudy, and I desperately blink away the frenzied moisture and scan the surrounding area with a clear view.

I spot a few dots of blood on the rock outside the pod. When I follow them, I see a few more.

A trail.

I shift into a more logical mode and follow it a few paces. It’s inconsistent and unlike hunting animals on Frith. They bleed freely, running until their legs can no longer take them. This trail is from someone trying their best to walk and plug the bleeding wound.

I scan the area again for more signs of life.

Sav is standing next to a figure tucked against the rocks and lying on their back, lifeless.

I sprint the short distance, my heart pounding so intensely I can feel my pulse in my teeth.

“Is this the one you are looking for?” Sav asks, examining with a tilted head.

I can tell before I even see the man’s face that it is not August. The form is larger, the clothing the same as the strangers I saw on the ship. A First Son soldier.

“No.”

“He’s long gone,” Sav says, kicking his boot.

The pool of dark blood around him gives the sand a solid and clumpy appearance. His features are grey and blank, his hand still resting on his leaking abdomen.

For a brief moment, I bask in the relief that it is not August. This dead man breached the cockpit and somehow ended up in an escape pod. My heart sinks to the sandy ground as I realize August must have been on the ship when it fell from the sky. He’s still out here somewhere.

“August!” I stride down the ridge and scream, my voice coming out in watery despair. “Au?—”

A hand cuts me off, slapping against my lips with a sudden sting. Sav pulls me down with more force than I believed her small frame could wield.

“Quiet,” she shushes.

Confused, I whip my head out of her clutches, the taste of dirt and whatever is lingering on the cloth wrapping her palms gagging me. I struggle to get out of her grasp, my back scraping against the hot surface of a giant rock.

“You must stay silent.” Her voice is a mix of a whisper and scream. “There are others in the valley below.”

I freeze, staring at her over her strong grip across my mouth, and when she finally lets go, I push away from her.

“What did you see?” I ask, wondering if she means the others she mentioned that would come to scrap the pods like she intends to.

“Like that one.” Her eyes flick back to the dead man with disgust.

First Son soldiers. It shouldn’t give me hope but it does.

I twist away from her and tuck close against the rock, slowly lifting my head to peek out of our hiding place.

“Don’t,” she whispers and tugs on my clothes.

“The ship,” I say on a controlled gasp when I spot it before anything else. The smoke flume rises into the sky from broken pieces of wing. The rest of the vessel is intact but damaged from a crash landing.

“Voices carry. Caught attention with your screaming.” She sticks her head out next to me and points to a man pacing in a wide circle around the wreckage with his gun in hand, like he’s guarding the area. His concentration is on the ridge we are currently hiding on.

“I only see one.”

“Always more than one of that kind,” she informs me grimly.

There is movement by a large pile of debris. A man is cuffed and sitting on the ground, guarded by a second soldier staring in our direction.

“It’s August. Those are the soldiers that hijacked our ship,” I barely manage to say aloud, afraid he will vanish into the sand if I hold hope that I found him too tightly.

“Prisoner. Won’t last long.”

I grit my teeth. If the guards heard me screaming down in the valley below, then he did as well. I tuck down against the boulder, leaning my back to it and gesturing for Sav to join me.

“We have to go. Pod scrap isn’t worth dying over,” Sav whispers.

“No,” I spit and then steady my voice to convince her to help me. “That is a Viathan fleet ship. The cargo hull is full of supplies and scrap, more than anything a pod could offer.”

She ponders for a moment and nods.

“We need a plan.” I can’t just fold down there, unarmed. August is cuffed, and the soldiers have weapons with access to all the ones on board.

She peeks out again, then her eyes go wide.

“What?” I slowly lift my head, mustering all the control I have not to do so quickly and give away our location.

The scene is much different now. The First Son soldier guarding August has left his post to join the other, both pointing up the ridge seemingly right at my face. They know we are up here, and it’s only a matter of time before they investigate.

“Look,” Sav whispers.

August slinks in a low crouch toward his guard, his hands still cuffed but now in front of him and ready.

The blood surging in my eardrums is audible as I watch him get closer and closer, praying the guard does not notice.

If either of them take their attention off the ridge, they could easily shoot him and I would witness the whole thing.

Without thinking, I stand from my hiding spot and climb to the top of the rocks we hide behind.

Sav curses me from below, her voice fading as the sound of crunching rock follows. Likely fleeing. She agreed to help me, but we have no plan. I only have this, waving my arms in the air and capturing the attention of the soldiers so that it is not on August.

The guard in the front sees me first, looking through the scope of his weapon. I’m hundreds of paces away and higher than they are, but I have no idea if whatever violence comes out of the end of his gun can reach me.

“Here!” I close my eyes and bellow as loud as my lungs will allow. “Here . . . please,” I plead lower, and when I look again, my stomach flips.

August silently leaps on top of his guard, wrapping his cuffed hands over the top of him and pinning his torso. He pulls him backward, leveraging his body down into the sand and pointing his gun at the soldier watching me through his scope.

The weapon fires and the soldier drops to his knees and goes limp, falling to the ground forehead first.

“August!” I scream as he struggles to gain control with the guard he has in his grasp. He lies flat in the sand, pulling the gun farther back against the chest of the man on top of him. They are parallel, fighting for dominance over the angle of the long barrel.

Another sharp pop rips through the valley, bouncing off the rocks.

I can’t stop the yelp that escapes me, ducking on reflex.

The guard on top of August is lifeless as he rolls to the side. The weapon lodged up under his chin falls with him.

My body moves on its own, leaping down from my rock platform and into the sand. I slide and stumble over the terrain, desperate to descend the ridge to get to August.

He sees me, looking up briefly and then squatting over the corpse of his guard.

I scream his name again, tears blurring my vision but flushing out the grit I am kicking up in the messy path I take.

He holds his cuffed wrist over the man’s body and suddenly they fall away, unlocking with whatever method the guard had within his armor. He slings a large weapon to his back, the strap coming across his chest, and steals a smaller one from the guard’s hip.

Suddenly he is sprinting toward me. “Calliape!”

My teeth dry in the hot air, unable to keep myself from smiling. My normally strong legs, weakened from dehydration, slow me to an agonizing pace.

He pauses briefly to aim and fires a couple streaks of light behind him at a third soldier. Another is cut down as swiftly as he appears from the ship.

August sprints, jumping over boulders and glancing back to check for more assailants.

Another soldier, more cunning than the other, hides at the edge of the cargo hull and ducks below debris.

August misses him when he glances back, shooting with less precision the faster he runs.

He’s still so far, but I can see the whites of his teeth in an all-out grin, enjoying this far too much. The sand around him kicks up in scattering waves with each powerful pump of his long legs, driving him forward to get to me.

With my next step, I fold the distance across the valley toward him.

I crash into his chest, taking my breath away, and as my feet touch the ground, I pull backward, folding us back up the ridge to safety.

The messy fold is in such quick succession that his back slams into a wall of rock, taking the brunt of the impact.

“By the three worlds, Callia.” He groans a little and crumbles his face like the first time we folded and it made him sick.

“I had to. There was another First Son soldier. He was— He would have killed you! Are you alright?” I say so fast I don’t realize my hands roam over his chest and shoulders, as if he is not real and in front of me.

“I saw the blood in the escape pod. I thought it was yours and then—then I saw you down there and—” Not a single sentence comes out right.

I give in and take a gulping breath, winded as if I ran the distance to the valley and back.

He is silent, head tilted back on the rock wall behind him. His lids are hooded with what I assume is exhaustion. But still he regards me with such tenderness, searching my face and cupping it gently like something delicate, meant to be cherished.

Suddenly, I can’t breathe for an entirely different reason.

And then he leans down, pressing his lips to mine, holding me by my jaw and angling it upward to meet him.

He breaks away, his eyes flicking down to my lips where every nerve ending is firing and sending my whole body into a frenzy.

A cold spot blanches on my face where he held it so sweetly. I would protest if I could speak, but I’m so stunned I wait for him to say something, to say anything at all. But he watches me, waiting to see if that was alright for him to do.

When I remain silent, he clears his throat and tries to move around me, perhaps thinking he made a mistake and I am rejecting him again.

My hand snaps out, gripping his forearm, and First Mother save me, I tug him toward me.

He crashes into my body, responding to that small pull in a way my too loud mind will not let me linger on. My brain goes fuzzy and warm when his hands go around my waist and he kisses me again. This time deeper, faster, and all-consuming.

The moment I part my lips, his tongue invades, sweetly stroking against mine like he thought he would never see me again.

His hands are everywhere, gripping my waist, moving up my back and fisting my hair, somehow deepening the kiss even more. I whimper in his arms, pleasure mixed with relief that we found each other, that we are alive. And at this moment, I’ve never been as full of life as I am pressed against him.

I’m released from his clutch on one side as his arm leaves me and rises next to us. Our kiss slows slightly, no longer desperate and hungry.

The click and whirling sound of his gun engaging makes me open my eyes, startled to find his are already open and fixed on a target behind my back even as he still kisses and nips at my lips. Staring at the danger but not willing to break away from me.

I spin in his arms, pressing my back to his chest, anticipating the remaining First Son soldier.

Sav stands with her palms revealed but without panic on her face.

“August, it’s ok! She helped me.” I put my hand on his forearm. “She’s a friend.”

It’s a stretch, but explaining the complicated arrangement we struck up won’t help. And even though I thought I heard her running away when she said she would help me, I still do not want her to be harmed.

Sav unphased, flicks her chin toward the valley below. “There is a problem.”