Enemy Games (32 page)

H
E luxuriated in the warmth, the softness, the absence of pain, and in feeling his body becoming whole, or at least as whole as it could be with pieces missing. His brain wouldn’t quite answer his every command yet. Nursery attendants hummed outside his cocoon, lulling him, urging him to sink into healing sleep.

Want kept him conscious, aware. He wanted. Wanted his mate. She was part of him. He couldn’t heal, wasn’t whole without her.

Even through the layers of wyrl-web, he scented her somewhere above him. That alone relaxed him.

Then Jayleia spoke, the words but not the wonder in her tone, got lost in the layers of sound-muffling web. It didn’t matter. He knew that voice—had heard it whispering to him in tenderness and desire.

Above his nest, she said something more, confusion climbing to alarm.

He struggled against lethargy.

She needed help. Needed him. She was his. His to protect, to claim.

Then, as if the web realigned to amplify the sound, he heard something tear, a wet, ripping sound that stopped the heart in his chest in terror. The harsh, acrid scent of her blood bit the back of his throat. Her shriek, filled with horror and agony, broke off mid-cry.

He bellowed in rage and protest, fighting the confining wyrl-web, until the queen herself entered the nursery and forced a curtain of unconsciousness over his tortured heart and mind.

Damen woke, aware that he once more controlled his body and his brain. He’d thought he’d understood the price of being someone else’s puppet. He’d been wrong.

While entombed within his own skull by whatever illness the Chekydran had given him, he’d betrayed and murdered his mate. The smell of her blood on the web above him was old. The intermittent rain that swept through on the cloud bands of the Chekydran home world hadn’t yet arrived to wash away the stinking stain.

Damen’s heart shriveled and he squeezed his eye shut. He’d believed he’d known exactly how brutal the Chekydran could be, but until now, he hadn’t glimpsed the depths of their cruelty.

They’d infected him, taken over his body and his mind, and used him to find Jayleia. Why allow him to remember the feel of her lips against his when they’d obviously intended to rip her open all along? What more did they want of him?

Did the creatures realize or care that they’d cut out his heart when they’d murdered her?

Damn it. He could still taste her kiss, still smell her all around him.

Above his nest chamber, a Chekydran hummed.

“Queen. Alive,” resounded in his head.

Damen frowned and opened his eye. How had the nursery attendants known he’d awakened? He hadn’t struggled since Jayleia’s scream.

Alive? Which queen? Theirs? Or his?

Thinning his lips, Damen fought his way to the top of the nest chamber, turned, and kicked. The shell fractured. Another kick, powered by rage and despair, shattered the shell. Pieces rained around him.

The towering, glittering Chekydran queen stood above him. Indigo rainbows played over her carapace and oversized wings. Her trill brushed him, washing over his awareness like a mother’s reassuring caress.

It loosed the knot of self-loathing roiling around in his stomach, but couldn’t soothe the knife-sharp pain in his heart or silence the buzz of rage in his head.

She extended a foreleg.

Damen ignored it and climbed out of the cocoon under his own power. He drew breath to demand Jayleia’s location only to find he didn’t need guidance.

He followed her scent trail to the nest next to his. Dropping to his knees atop Jay’s sealed nest chamber, he glanced at the Chekydran queen.

“Is it safe to open it?”

“Sleeping.”

He resisted the urge to swear. He didn’t know how the Chekydran queen had managed to implant a translator in his head, but she had. Meaning that no matter how well intentioned the manipulations, he’d been modified by the Chekydran.

Once upon a time, he’d been unable to think of anything worse. Then he’d listened, captive audience, while the Chekydran had killed his mate.

He dropped to his knees beside the nest chamber. Jayleia’s grave? No. He caught no sickly, sweet odor of decay. Not her grave. Hope swelled in his chest, crowding his pounding heart, searing the backs of his eyes. He entertained the sudden ache along with the glimmer of belief that she might have somehow survived.

Unable to draw a full breath, Damen began digging.

He needed to see her, to touch her, to feel her warm and breathing. Needed to know he hadn’t destroyed her. Yet.

Nursery attendants approached, whether to help him or hinder him in opening Jayleia’s chamber, Damen didn’t know.

The Chekydran queen warbled, and the attendants stopped, throat pouches quivering in appeasement.

He cleared away the loose wyrl-web. The shell had formed on top of the chamber.

Good.

She’d have emerged on her own within the next several hours.

He glanced at the horrifying stain of her blood on the webbing only a few paces away. Her wound should have been mortal. How long had they been cocooned?

She’d healed quickly. Apparently, her healing trance worked in conjunction with Chekydran medical technique.

Shaking away hesitation, Damen punched the shell. It cracked. Two more careful strikes allowed him to grab pieces and wrest them from the top of the chamber.

Her scent, still tainted by a hint of blood, reached him. He closed his eye and breathed her in. One tiny piece of his heart unclenched.

Opening his eye, he noted that the nursery attendants had set her into a cramped nest chamber and packed healing gel around her. It hadn’t been fully absorbed yet, and Jayleia’s bowed head gleamed with a coating of the substance.

Damen didn’t care. Hooking his hands under her arms, he eased her to the surface and sat back, drawing her into his lap, her back against his chest. Her head tucked beneath his chin, and he folded his arms around her.

She sighed and snuggled closer.

Every nerve in his body lit in response. His heartbeat eased. He smoothed long strands of damp, black hair that had escaped her braid from her face, before subsiding, content to hold her until she woke.

A tendril of sound soothed the ruffle of anxiety at his core. The Chekydran queen sang, urging him to let go of thought, of worry.

Damen resisted for a split second. Then the tension ran out of him and he rocked Jayleia gently in time with the thrum of the queen’s wings. His own chest vibrated as he hummed in unison with her. Another voice joined in, off pitch, toneless. Jayleia.

Jay woke humming, surrounded by the scent of sweet, spring rain and new growth. Peace settled deep inside of her. She sighed and opened her eyes.

And stared straight into the huge, iridescent gaze of the biggest Chekydran she’d ever seen. She remembered a tentacle wrapped around her throat. Shock. Pain. Blood.

Her heart jumped. Panic grabbed her in a tight fist. She struggled to back away.

A solid, warm chest and two arms wrapped around her prevented escape.

“They won’t hurt you again,” Damen rumbled. “Jayleia. They won’t hurt you. Not now.”

Damen.

Held against him as she was, she felt the words vibrate from his chest into hers.

They wouldn’t hurt her, now? Why not? What the Three Hells had happened? Why had it happened at all?

Fear beat at her but she had to look down, to see what ruin remained of her body. Such a vicious abdominal wound should have been fatal.

Nothing.

Jayleia blinked and sat up, pulling out of Damen’s embrace. Had she dreamed the attack? No. He’d known. Somehow, he had known what had happened.

The owner of the iridescent eyes trilled.

“Strong.” The trill resolved into a whisper in Jay’s head.

Frowning, she put a hand on her belly. No wound. No blood. Even her clothes were clean. Only a neat, precise slice remained in her shirt to prove she hadn’t imagined the attack.

She shook her head. Smooth, unmarred skin. Something as ferocious as that attack should have left a mark. Her quaking fingers found it then, three narrow scars. She brushed the cut shirt aside and peered at her belly. The wound looked old and long healed, the raised flesh only a shade lighter than the surrounding tissue.

Another trill and burble.

She felt the sound as the brush of a reassuring hand on her cheek.

“Daughters. Strong.”

Jay looked back into those crystalline eyes.

The creature straightened slowly as if aware of her fragile grip on the terror still beating against the inside of her skin.

It had to be Chekydran. Huge, glittering wings rustled, fragmenting rainbows across their surfaces. This one had no tentacles. An extra set of wings seemed to have taken the place of the appendages, though it still stood on six legs. The dark sheen of its carapace defied color description. It encompassed every color she could identify as well as far more she couldn’t.

It was beautiful and graceful for something so large.

“Daughters,” it repeated.

Jayleia cocked her head, waiting for the word to make sense beyond the definition. Why were the creature’s vocalizations resolving to words inside her head at all?

“She is the Chekydran-ki queen,” Damen said.

“Chekydran-ki?” Her voice sounded rusty and raw.

“It’s what they call themselves,” he replied. “They’re a different race than the Chekyrdan-hiin. The Hiin are the ones attacking us.”

Jayleia noted and filed the distinction.

“Nothing will hurt you,” he assured her. “Go. She wants to show you.”

Jayleia blinked.
Go where?
After the last show-and-tell, did she really want to see anything these creatures had to present?

Her damnable curiosity won out over fear. Before her brain could veto the move, she’d climbed to her feet.

The queen led her several meters to a cluster of fresh nest chambers. The fluffy, still-sticky web beneath her feet exuded a faintly sweet, musky odor. Attendants backed out of the queen’s path, their throat pouches and tentacles quivering, their chorus of hums soothing.

Adoration? Or fear?

The queen stopped and gently parted the web before turning a burst of barely audible sound at Jayleia.

“Come. See. Daughters.”

Awful suspicion rolled through Jay. Eyeing the huge, glittering creature beside her, she sidled closer and looked.

A single pallid egg had been attached to the wall of the nest chamber. Barely perceptible within, the embryo curled in a recognizably fetal position, despite the lack of humanoid form.

“Daughters,” the queen had said. Hers? Weren’t they all hers? Or did she honestly mean Jayleia’s?

Six years of studying Chekydran plagues, six years of asking how the Chekydran had managed to master the humanoid genome to the extent that they routinely modified humanoids for one purpose or another, all the questions, all the bits of data coalesced in her brain.

Jayleia fell to her knees, head spinning. Her daughters.

Slicing her open hadn’t been an attack, not intentionally, anyway. It had been the Chekydran harvesting genetic material—eggs—from her.

They’d spliced her DNA into the developing young. The new generation of Chekydran had three parents.

Why?

“Strong,” the queen had said.

Diversity. It had to be. If Chekydran biology followed other insectoid hive models then far too few of the adults bred young. The Chekydran suffered from inbreeding.

Jayleia shook her head, staggered. One of the bells still braided into her hair chimed. She shuddered.

Her own mother had woven the trinkets into her hair. They were a request for grandchildren.

Bells for granddaughters.

Gems for grandsons.

What would her mother say to these granddaughters?

Jay grappled with the fact that she was a parent. Like it or not.

The Chekydran had attempted to ensure the survival of their species with a cold-blooded harvest of her genetic material without so much as a by-your-leave?

Her breath came in shallow gasps as she remembered the hatching Chekydran with eyes that had focused on her. Twelve Gods. She hadn’t been their first bloody harvest.

“How many women have died out here while you robbed them of such an intimate part of themselves?” she shrilled, climbing to her feet. “How many survived physically only to be driven insane by the shock? Did it never even occur to you to ask? For the love of the Gods! I could have given you half a dozen different ways to retrieve eggs without drawing so much as a drop of blood!”