He did know how to make her laugh. “Now you will tell me what it is your Empire really wants. If I dislike the answer I will feed you to my least favorite pet.”

  Adjusting the line of his tunic, the Herald sighed. “There is a feral human colony the Tessan Authority ignores, thus offering our enemies shelter. The byways in our power do not have access to that sector.”

  “Crossing the Authority so thoroughly would cause a war.”

  Arden shook a finger. “Never underestimate the art of tyranny and negotiation. The Authority will not risk outright war with our empire. Not over one planet of violent refugees.”

  The glint in her black eyes was anything but playful. “What if I were to take her side, Herald? What if I were to cease maintenance and open the byway?”

  Games were over. “What do you want, pretty Drinta? What can the empire offer you to keep that portal closed until she is in custody?”

  “I enjoy seeing you shaken, which is good, as I have grown tired of your conversation.” Arching her back, Drinta tapped a talon to her lips. “To be honest—and I rarely am—I believe the female.”

  Gone was the beautiful male, in his place was a creature that exuded menace. “Then you are already playing into her schemes. A pity.”

  “But I will help you catch her… on one condition.” Gleeful, her glittering tail swished as she cooed. “I want to give Sovereign and his reluctant consort a gift, something only the bitch-queen of Pax could offer in continuing friendship between us.”

  Gunfire, more than the usual scattered burst broke out a level below them, the shouts of the brawl loud enough to hear even through the force field separating Drinta’s balcony from the madness.

  “That would be Sigil—the terrorist you would invite to sit before you.” Arden chuckled, stroking his chin. “I will admit, I am eager to see just what she will do.”

  Drinta did not spare the club a glance; she couldn’t when it was far more important to watch the devious Herald’s every move. “Do you know her well?”

  The man smiled. How beautiful and how deadly he could look at once. “She is my sister, naughty thing that she is.”

  “And you gave her to Sovereign.”

  “When she was still a little girl, yes. But she ran away… and Sovereign is denied by no one. He wants her to prove a point. When she is returned, forced conversion will show our people that all can be united, that defectors will not be tolerated.”

  How cold the humans could be—it made Drinta all warm and fuzzy. “Does Sovereign love her?”

  “He hates her almost as much as she hates him.”

  “Interesting…”

  “The sooner this issue is handled, the sooner you will receive just reward.” Tapping his finger to his knee, Arden hesitated. “Out of curiosity, what are you going to demand in payment?”

  “Nothing. All I really want is to watch you dance on my stage like every other whore in this pit.” She waved him off, bored. “May our alliance continue, friendships persevere, and whatever other shit you nobles like to hear.”

  There was one way to put fear in the horrid creature preening before him. “I suggest you place greater guard around you. Sigil will go straight for the throat.”

  ***

  Quinn woke hungry, her body having exhausted its stores repairing itself. Unsure how long she’d slept, she could only wonder if Sovereign had acted in her absence. It was difficult to tell, holed up as she was in a broken drainage line. But the station did not shake; there was no persistent vibration of the byway.

  Groaning, pressing up from the ground, she held her hand to her belly and found she still bled sluggishly. Worse, her left shoulder had not fully reformed.

  She needed nourishment for her body to mend.

  The armor was gone, pieces of it torn off her in the battle, the remainder cast aside once she’d found the strength to flee the scene. Naked, she scuttled with the vermin, hissing when they took little bites where torn skin parted.

  They’d probably been chewing on her the whole time she’d slept.

  Smashing furry bodies with her fist, snapping at the sharp toothed animals like a rabid dog, Sigil tore into their flesh and fed on foulness. There would be no survival if her arm didn’t function. Crunching bones in her teeth, trying not to vomit, she consumed another scampering bastard.

  Breath came easier, the susurrating noise of fleeing vermin faded, and drawing out a cry, her shoulder re-engaged, cartilage forming.

  Blinking in the dark, filthy and alone, Quinn had to acknowledge that she’d survived worse. Much worse.

  Condor…

  And she hadn’t been the only one. If her mother had eyes, Quinn was certain she would have looked upon her child’s form with relief. But her mother had no eyes, just as her mother had no limbs—appendages had been removed, considered unnecessary for a living womb. Retrieving that torso had torn out Quinn’s heart; unplugging the mutilated Kilactarin from the machines that sustained her assured the only creature who had ever loved her would die.

  But Quinn didn’t let that ruined creature expire on Condor. She took her mother away. She’d saved her, stole the nearest shuttle, placed her mother in cryo where she did not have to suffer another day. Instead her bearer died beside a river, neck painlessly broken by her child on a planet Quinn never knew the name of.

  Death beside a river might be nice. Feeling the breeze, the sun... Que there beside her.

  Sigil began to cry, scrubbing the tears and grime from her cheeks until sorrow turned to fury. Sovereign was responsible for all her miseries. She’d been made and tortured because of him. She’d been hounded, forced to live like a renegade simply because she’d been merciful and stupid in her youth.

  There should never have been mercy; that had been her first mistake. On Pax she could kill him, slip right into his shadow and strike from the dark before he knew what monster slithered in his wake. Then Karhl, with his soft tone and placid expression—she could find ways to make him scream, to twist up that calm façade into torment.

  They all had to die.

  Excitement began, she cracked her neck in the pleasure of the hunt… then paused, jamming her fingers in the closing hole beside her bellybutton. Twisting them about her intestines, Quinn screamed. She couldn’t heal yet—she had to stay wounded to stay sane.

  She could not engage the enemy.

  ***

  “Her trail led into the subsections, through the water supply. We lost her on division 5.”

  “It’s not that you lost her, Karhl. It is that you failed by not searching every inch of her quarters for her escape hatch. You failed by not assuming her desperate scampering exit from Swelter would be so treacherous.” Sovereign stood still, he spoke quietly, continuing the castigation he piled on the giant Lord Commander. “She has no care for her wellbeing. Pain is nothing to a creature that spent her youngest years tortured daily.”

  “Brother.” The chimes in his hair sang as Karhl lowered his head in supplication. “Sigil knows the station. Giving chase might be what she wants. After your threat against the Axirlan, I fully believe she would kill you if given the chance, impulse or no. Her feelings on the matter will not change.”

  Sovereign looked over the rumpled bed. “She is afraid of me.”

  “Very.” Karhl agreed. “But she is more afraid of what you might do to her companion.”

  Arms folded behind his back, Sovereign measured the large warrior. “Her fear for you is less acute.”

  “Arden, had you seen how she smirked at his approach in Swelter, she fears not at all.” Glacial eyes followed the movement of his leader. “Invite her to sit with him. Let him woo her. You are too tempting to her indoctrination and I lack the skill to inspire her love.”

  Pausing, Sovereign disagreed. “Arden lacks the strength to subdue her. His chance of survival should she attack is miniscule. Should she kill him, she would regret it later. Such an action would cause her pain.”

  “Whatever she is doing to fight the impulse puts her at risk. Her wounds from the fight, even the fall, would have caused great damage. She may be weak.” Karhl looked at his brother, his leader, his superior. “She may not run from the Herald as she would from us.”

  A brief ripple of emotion passed over the emperor’s stone-cold eyes. “In order to have avoided the impulse for such a time, she must be utilizing pain. I can practically hear the muffled screams. Sigil thinks to wait for the byway to open, where she will stumble to it, bleeding and drained.”

  “Then we open the byway and draw her out.”

  “No!” The answer came sharp, inflection emphasizing orders. “Sigil has the ability and training to get what she wants, and will push to the point of suicide. She won’t go back to Swelter or think to sway Drinta again, but she will try to force Pax’s mistress to act.” Sovereign motioned to the door, warning, “In her desperation, she will place herself at great risk. There is no room for failure again. When Sigil is found only Arden may approach. And you will tighten the net around her.”

  Chapter 9

  Sovereign had called her perfect, but to think so was foolish. Nothing, no creature that had ever lived or would ever live, was flawless. Quinn’s greatest defect was in the single-minded way she could behave. She wanted food, she took it. She found something pretty, it became hers. Life never mattered to her, only the false ideal of survival.

  Que had taught her better, though it had not been easy for him.

  After Condor, she hibernated in cryo for years, her ship drifting through space. It was brought down, the child waking in her shell to pound on a flight console she hardly understood. Crashing in the jungle had been painful, tending to her mother before what was coming for her arrived, soul crushing.

  Human males had found her. Sigil’s foot faced the wrong direction, an arm broken, the remaining damage extensive. They had put a leash on her as if she were a dog, dragging her through the mud as she refused to limp, refused to feel anything outside of grief for what she’d buried in the damp earth by the river.

  What came next was nothing. Penetration had hurt; the laughing she had not liked. But so long as they fed her, she hardly noticed. It was three days before her bones mended and she could began the slaughter. Something clicked, and while a heavy body rutted her, Sigil ripped out her assailant’s throat with her teeth. She’d laughed, as they had laughed at her when they’d taken their turns.

  A few tried to escape on their ship. Flaring her psionics, she ripped the fleeing vessel from the clouds, pulling it closer as if she’d lassoed the moon. It crashed into the bandit’s only shelter, both objects rendered useless.

  The order of her murder was an art; they suffered in sequence of who touched her first. Her last kill—months later, as she had to portion her food and fun—was a boy on the cusp of manhood, hardly old enough to warrant attention.

  But the teen had touched her, even if it was under pressure from his peers.

  He’d tasted the best.

  He was also the most terrified when the monster crawled from the jungle in the night, when she came for him when he was alone, weaponless, and stupid.

  But then she was alone, with no human boy to taunt for weeks as she ate his petrified friends.

  On Condor her greatest wish was to be left alone, but true solitude on that unknown planet, it took from her.

  She ran wild, she screamed at storms, she challenged animals large as mountains for sport. She cried… often.

  Mostly she missed the way her mother used to whisper almost constant sweet music into her mind.

  By the time Que discovered the emergency signal the bastards had set up in hopes someone might save them from her, Sigil had been reduced to a mindless nothing.

  The Axirlan had shot her on sight, no hesitation. Later she learned he’d carried her bullet ridden body onboard after seeing her filthy cheeks were grimy, marked, by old and new tear stains. Even he knew wild children do not weep for no reason.

  Sigil learned the word mercy.

  There was food when she woke. He didn’t try to touch her. The huge white being let her scramble about his ship, hiding where she would, for years. All that time Sigil never spoke, but as cycles passed, she did begin to watch.

  In his dealings with others he was steady. He allowed none who laid eyes on his pet to disrespect her, or mock.

  The creature just was.

  Her first word to him was, “hungry,” the Axirlan holding a sweet treat above her head where she could not reach it without either climbing him, which would require touching, or attacking to take it.

  “Ask properly, child.”

  “GIVE!”

  In response, Que ate the treat right in front of her. She’d cried as if the world was going to end, kicking her legs as she rolled on the floor.

  “You must bathe, and you will wear clothes from now on.” Another sweet was dropped to land on the screaming girl. “Food you take at the table, sitting while you eat. Most importantly,” knees bent, Que crouching over her, “you will not kill another guest who steps aboard this ship unless it is in self-defense. Do you understand, Quinn?”

  Sigil ignored most things, she cared not about where they were in the universe, but she always listened to that steady voice. But listening and obeying were two different things. Her cheeks stuffed full of the pastry, everything in her mouth so the alien could not take it, she scampered back.

  It was another full month before he got her clean. A year before she would consider clothing. Words slowly appeared, eventually she let him touch her. A pat was earned for good behavior, her ratted hair groomed when she sat still. In time she could hardly bear to have him out of her sight, almost always leaving some part of her skin in contact with his mass, so that if he moved she’d know.

  His sleeping mat became hers, Sigil—or Quinn as the man liked to call her— tucked against him to share warmth.

  In all those difficult years he never hurt her. Never.

  Even sex was something long forgotten until she saw the act between two Tessans. They were visiting an outpost on a desert world to meet a supplier. At the table beside them lovers played. Quinn could not look away, hardly understanding why the female seemed so involved, and felt… something… just by watching.

  Over a decade she’d been with Que. Her body was no longer that of a child’s, and she wanted to experience this strange thing she watch. She climbed on him there, hissing at the gaping contact who sought to interrupt her explorations. Mimicking what the other female had done, she rolled her hips, she nipped and bit at her companion, and felt the organ between his legs grow hard.

  “I want.” Two words out of less than a hundred she’d spoken in a year.

  Large hands grasped her hips, Que stilling her. “Tell me what you want, Quinn.”

  She hated when he tried to drag out speech. “That.”

  “They are mating, Quinn. Joining their bodies for pleasure.”

  She rubbed against him, determined to get her way. “I want.”

  The gaping contact was forgotten, Que initiating the first stages of sex. There, on a table in the middle of a second-rate bar he showed her his member, a studded thing she had never seen erect. Eager, she scratched at him until he pulled aside the fabric over her mound and spread her wide in mimic of the Tessans.

  The first thrust, the taste of Que’s skin on her tongue, and an addict was born. All she wanted from that moment forward was to fuck him, to be fucked by him, to fight, to yield, to share. Others she found pretty were acquired, Que watching or joining.

  Nothing was taboo.

  Que encouraged it, as it was the first time he’d seen her play. The wild thing started to smile, but only for him. Full sentences, used mostly to describe things she wanted to feel, touch or do, demonstrated her healing was progressing. But the first disaster was not far off. With her sexual awakening came a gripping need that drove her to the point of madness. Not even a year later, she ran off after a stranger in a crowd—acting strangely—only for Que to follow and find what his renegade pet had done.

  The man, torn to pieces under her boots, was an Imperial Soldier far from home… as were the fifty other corpses on the ship she’d stolen. Shaking, pounding on the console in search of coordinates, Quinn growled. Que standing by, watching the girl raging at a machine she demanded take her to Sovereign.

  When he approached, it was if she could not recognize him. When he spoke, she did not listen.

  What he saw was a much stronger version of the monster he’d found scampering in a ruined settlement, so he reacted as he had that first day. Que shot her until she was too damaged to move.

  Then she went into cryo so he might assess what had gone wrong. The answer was in the misfiring of her brain, the agitated chemistry. He kept her under until Quinn normalized, and when he woke her she clung to him.

  She confessed what she was.

  He took her as far from the Empire as he could.

  ***

  Sometimes when things went so wrong, it was good to know that they were actually going so very right. Lingering in the dark cell where her Kilactarin sat folded into the posture of meditation, Drinta cooed a sweet, “So, the human female sensed you. My little secret is out.” She took a step closer, looking over the wasted thing that had long since ceased to amuse her. “Before you speak I want you to understand the outcome of this chat will not change that you are going to die. But... it will affect how you are going to die.”

  If that human woman had any talent for digging around in psychic brains, she might glimpse fragile intel Drinta would rather not share. One, simple acknowledgment that the human felt Drinta’s Kilactarin, made the slave an absolute liability in the game the Mistress of Pax was very cunningly crafting.

  The loose end would have to be ripped off.

  The cross-legged Kilactarin waved his long neck, moving to stand. “You must kill her, Mistress.”

  It was the first time her prisoner had ever been forward, had ever offered a warning she had not painstakingly dug out of him. Smiling, she rubbed against her slave as she paced. “Why?”

  The Kilactarin, he was agitated, making the wrong arguments. “She is unstable. It did not think like a human.”