“Pretty little thing isn’t she,” says Stu. He steps closer to me and I get a whiff of unwashed male and smoke. My throat closes. “You got any weapons, girl?”

“No.” I’m lying. My knife is in my boot, but I’m not telling him that.

“I told you we are unarmed.” Lir’s voice loosens my limbs slightly, his presence the only thing keeping me from losing it completely.

“You been stealing from us. How you gonna pay for all that?” asks the apparent leader of the bunch.

“I wasn’t aware this store belonged to anyone.” Lir pulls me closer until I’m pressed up against his side. He steps back. “We’ll just leave you to it and be going.”

“Nah.” He shakes his head. “I think that breeder camp north of here would pay pretty good for a pretty young thing like that. We’ll be keeping her. So you’ve got a decision to make, would you like to live or die today, Boy?”

Breeder camp? I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. Words and images bounce around my head. In. Out. I can’t breathe. The trembling starts at my toes and travels up my body until I have to clench my teeth to keep them from chattering.

Lir’s hand gently squeezes my arm. “She’s leaving with me.” He takes another step backwards, pulling me along with him. Another slow step back and I can open my eyes again.

The men still haven’t moved forward, but their guns are still pointed at us. Mostly at Lir actually. I’d left the lantern at the end of the aisle and each step takes us closer to its light. It can’t be this easy, of course not.

We’re so close the lantern is heating my back when there’s a sharp inhale from one of the men.

“Once the guns are off you, I want you to run,” says Lir. Off me? Where’s he going?

“Good Lord. It’s one of them.” The leader’s shout echoes through the store. The lantern just illuminated Lir.

Both men turn their guns to face Lir and he pushes me away from his side. “Go, Jax!”

Go? I can’t leave him behind and it’s not going to happen anyway. I’m frozen in place, my body too tense and on edge to take me anywhere. The leader darts forward and grabs my wrist, pulling me along with him. Once we’re halfway down the aisle, the other two men start backing away slowly, their guns still trained on Lir.

Now’s his chance, the men are distracted, he could make his escape. There’s no point in us both getting caught up in this. It won’t be so bad…I will just… just breathe in and out…block it out. Like before. I don’t have to be here. I can--

“Let go of her!” Lir’s words can only be described as a snarl. He ignores the guns pointed at him and moves forward, only to freeze when my captor caresses my cheek with a third gun he pulled from his waistband.

The cold metal glides through my tears. “One more step and her pretty little brains will be all over the floor.”

Take the step. I’d rather be dead. Eyes close.

“Take me,” says Lir. “I have to be worth more. Just leave her be. She’s been through enough.”

No. No. No. That’s not the way to do it. One of us has to get out of here.

“Oh, we’ll be taking you anyway. I was just getting the merchandise out of the way ‘cause Zach back there isn’t a very good shot.” Hot breath carries the words past my ear. Too close!

A rapid pant is the best my lungs can manage to squeeze past my constricted throat. In. Out. In. Out. In. In. No. That’s wrong.

A crackle. Lir cries out and my eyes fly open. He falls to his knees then slumps to the floor, a fourth man standing behind him with a gun.

“No!” My voice shatters the air. I pull away, fly forward, and fall to my knees beside him. He’s breathing. No blood.

My eyes latch on the man, the one that shot my friend with the jolt gun in his hands. Only a jolt gun.

Boot. Knife. Hand. I creep forward. Yelling behind me, nothing important. His hands shake. Mine do not. The first shot misses me entirely, but the second sends fire into my thigh. The fire flows up into my hands and down into my feet. I clench my fingers to keep my knife, but it’s too much. The jolt sends my fingers outward and me to the ground where I shake for a while before welcoming the darkness that overtakes me.

THIRTEEN

I have to blink my eyes a few times before I’m sure they’re actually open. The darkness around me is heavy and nearly suffocating. The ache in my leg radiates up through the rest of my body, steady but bearable. What the hell? I sit up, my hands out to either side. My left hand hits a cold, metal wall while my right hand stretches out into nothing.

“You’re awake.”

I jerk. “Lir?”

“Yes.” Another hand connects with my blindly reaching right one and his fingers wrap around mine. “Right here.”

Despite the dark, I’m not consumed with terror, no longer frozen in panic. But I have to know. “Where…”

“They’re not here.” He squeezes my hand. “It’s been quiet out there for a while.”

I swallow and take a deep breath. “They are coming back though, aren’t they?”

“I believe so, yes.” I feel him move over until his leg is touching mine and I gratefully lean into his side, a small sense of comfort settling into my chest. “We’ll figure something out.”

If only that were true. Those men didn’t seem like the type to make careless mistakes and allow valuable prisoners to escape.

“Why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?” I ask. “Now that they know what you are… it might be even worse for you.”

Lir’s hair brushes against my temple as he turns his head toward me. “I was not going to leave you with them. I’ve been cruel lately, but that is…not who I am. I—”

“I don’t want to talk about that.” I straighten, pulling away from him.

Lir’s arm circles my shoulders and he nudges me back down until I’m leaning against him again. “We won’t talk about it then,” he says.

Silence stretches out between us, different from before though. Our future is bleak and our circumstances are certainly less than ideal, but… I’m relaxed, a warm feeling of reassurance washing over me. As if maybe we can figure this out.

“Do you know where we are?” I ask.

“I’m not entirely certain. It looks like we’re in a large metal room of some sort. Almost like the place I was held while in your town.”

I glance around at the darkness around me. “How can you tell? It’s pitch black in here.”

“Superior vision, remember?”

“Oh.” A store wouldn’t have lab rooms, but it would have… “A refrigerator, or a freezer of some type. Lucky for us it’s empty otherwise the smell wouldn’t be pleasant.”

“They must have set this store up as some sort of supply depot,” he says. “Picking through for things to sell as they needed them.”

I shake my head. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice. There’s no way this store wouldn’t have been looted a long time ago and everything was still so neat… I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

“You were upset. Because of me.”

I nod.

“I let you suffer because I didn’t know how to reassure you about the rescue of my enemy or even if I could continue helping you in that quest. I let my anger at the situation get the best of me and I didn’t even explain…” He sighs. “Once the kitu has been used to establish a link, it allows us to mentally send messages, words, images, commands…”

Mental communication? Did humans ever have something like that? Probably nothing nearly as advanced, at least nothing that could communicate mind to mind. Send images mind to mind…Oh no.

My hand comes up over my mouth. “That’s how you know. About Jace I mean. Your friend…he sent you an image.”

“Yes. Through the link I was able to view Kov’s final moments.” He pauses and inhales. I can feel his jaw clench above me. “Your brother looks much like you.”

Another silence follows, but he doesn’t move away and neither do I. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for him, to watch his friend die. Did he experience it as well? Was he looking out through his friend’s eyes as it happened? A shudder works its way down my body. How very awful. He must hate us… humans, Jace, even me. I’d probably hate him if the situation were reversed, and I don’t really have any friends to lose.