Blood Warrior

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Bhuntar was even smaller than he’d pictured. Tallis decided that was a very, very good thing. The snowstorm struck with speed more akin to lightning than a blizzard. Then again, he had no experience with the ferocity of a blizzard in the foothills of the Himalayas. He was a man of the Highlands and a man of the sea—even a man of the world. He was not born to storms that sounded like planes crashing into tarmac.

Great analogy.

The shuttle had only just crested a hill overlooking Bhuntar when the storm obscured everything in a blast of white. The driver pumped what sounded like brakes forged during Clan Sath’s reign as lords of the Egyptian Bronze Age. Ice beneath the wheels, or perhaps snow in the treads, made the bus fishtail. A car climbing the steep road swerved to avoid the collision. Several on the shuttle gasped. One woman screamed, and a baby started to cry. For the most part, the occupants were silent.

“This happens to them all the time,” he muttered. His knuckles were white as he gripped an armrest. “Tell me that.”

“Not all the time.” Kavya’s voice held the intention of humor, but taut skin across her cheekbones gave her away. “Sometimes we close down the highway and ski down the ice. Much more efficient.”

“I nearly believed you. Your sarcasm is getting pretty good.”

“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

The bus didn’t move. The driver pumped the accelerator as the engine turned over and over. It was the sound of helplessness: a vehicle that wouldn’t start, when a half mile separated them from the nearest shelter.

Tallis wanted to smack himself in the face. What in the name of the Dragon and the Chasm am I doing here?

He was sitting next to the Sun, who was a flesh-and-blood woman unlike any he’d ever known. He was enjoying her company. He remained suspicious as hell as to her motives—and suspicious as to why he felt such an attraction. He couldn’t trust whether his reaction to Kavya was of his own making, or some wiggling, undetectable nudge of an idea that wasn’t his at all.

But . . .

The beast inside him had not lied and could not be deceived. Rather than spend the next twenty seconds listening to the driver try to resuscitate a dead engine, he closed his eyes. He let his mind reopen the memories he’d accumulated during his berserker fury—the feel of teeth sinking deep, the foul taste of Pashkah’s blood. Spitting out the piece of flesh would be an insult too disgraceful and revolting for Pashkah to forgive.

Tallis wasn’t in the mood to forgive him either.

Past that, through that, he remembered kissing Kavya. Yes, there had been lust and need. But his soul, if he still had one, had experienced a soothing rightness he’d never thought possible. It was as right as coming home. Maybe that’s why he couldn’t even depend on his deepest instincts. Tallis had no idea what it was to go home, or to be accepted with open arms. Why would he equate that fantasy with a woman he couldn’t trust?

Fanciful, ridiculous bollocks.

“How much time before we’re snowed in and can’t leave this bus?” he asked.

Kavya searched the sky. Eerie pewter clouds lightened her amber irises. Flecks of gold glowed like burning flames. Her lush lips parted.

No matter the reason, no matter the insanity of bedding the woman against whom he’d sought revenge, he did want her.

So he would have her.

“This isn’t good,” she said. “The snow’s collecting too fast. We stay or we go. Your decision, Pendray. You seem to think you and the earth are on friendly terms. Figure out her intentions, and make a choice.”

“You’re no fun when you’re being condescending.”

“Just returning the favor.”

He frowned and took a deep breath. “Advantages of staying?”

“Warm for now. Lots of bodies. Guaranteed shelter.”

“Disadvantages?”

Kavya glanced around the bus. “Lots of panicked minds if things get worse and stay that way.”

“Is that the likely way of things? Get worse and stay that way?”

“October storms are freakish. No gauging if they’ll stay for a few minutes or a few weeks.”

“Then we go.”

“Agreed.”

He grabbed her hands—then hesitated. She was dressed in a patchwork of silk and cotton padding. Slippers. No gloves. Skin exposed to the elements.

As a species, the Dragon Kings feared the inability to continue procreating. Extinction by slow measures. No more babies. No powerful future generations. They certainly didn’t fear a bit of cold. But pain was still pain, even if their bodies quickly healed.

“You keep your mind trained on the town,” he said. “Find us minds. Guide the way.”

“And you?”

“Wind block.” She laughed with a mocking tone he didn’t understand. “What?”

“You’ll see,” she said, still smiling, but the tautness across her cheekbones had claimed the corners of her eyes. On the inside, she wasn’t laughing at all.

Tallis hefted his pack, checked his weapons, and headed toward the front of the bus. Other passengers started talking in that low buzz noise of gathering panic. The hairs along the back of his neck lifted. He’d heard that same buzz when Pashkah had stepped onto the altar. Worry, building on worry, building on worry . . .

The snow was going to be ball-bustlingly cold, but he didn’t want to be stuck in a group of freaked-out innocents when his sense of claustrophobia kicked in. The Pendray loved open spaces and sweeping Highlands. Tight little shuttles crammed with panicking humans was enough to spark a flare of red across his vision.

The bus driver said something he didn’t understand. Tallis glanced back at Kavya for explanation. “He says he’ll have it started any minute now.”

“Does that change your decision?”

She shook her head. “Out.”

He yanked on the lever to open the bus door and jogged down three steps. Wind smacked his face like a punch. Unlike any Tallis had ever known, this wind held nothing back. If he hadn’t been gripping Kavya’s hand, he’d have thought himself alone in a swirling maelstrom of pure ice.

She pressed her mouth against his ear. “Block that wind, Pendray. Dare you.”

Tallis grinned into the worst of the snow. “I’m doing a piss-poor job at it. I admit it. Lead on, goddess.”

Her fingers became five small vises. She wasn’t letting go, and neither was he.

“You find our direction,” he shouted. “I’ll guide against the worst of the here and now.” He caught his foot on a rock that poked out of what was already a half inch of snow.

Kavya rolled her eyes. “Like that?”

“Shut up.”

The next thirty minutes were longer than they should have been. Tallis was certain they’d walked for at least six days. The hairs in his nostrils were frozen. He knew he should breathe through his nose, to better protect his lungs, but he was panting. Pain gathered in his chest. The cold pounded a beat meant to rip him open from the inside out. He focused on keeping Kavya from harm as she focused her gift on the tiny speck that was Bhuntar. Sometimes the fool woman closed her eyes. Sometimes she talked to herself in the strangely singsong language of the Indranan.

He was equally strange in thinking he’d like to hear her talk to him with those melodic syllables. Warm and safe and close.

Frostbite must be reaching his brain.

She swayed. Tallis reached out to find soft skin caught in a deathlike chill. “Dragon damn, Kavya. You think not saying anything will keep it from happening?”

“Hmm?” Her eyes were glassy, although he couldn’t tell whether it was from concentration or the hazy sleepiness that preceded losing consciousness. “Damn you? What?”

Tallis wasted no time in opening his coat. The cold shocked his body like machine-gun fire. He hadn’t realized that being cold and being cold while wearing a big leather coat would be so different. He swept her into his arms and tucked as much of the wool lining around her limbs as he could. Too much of her skin remained exposed.

“Go,” he said near her ear. “Tell me the way. Pound it into my brain with a hammer if you can. Just show me the way and I’ll get you there.”

—

Kavya focused on two things: the collective warmth of hundreds of active minds in Bhuntar, and the very personal warmth of being held by Tallis. She couldn’t decide which was more seductive. She only knew that to have more of his warmth, she needed to get them to safety.

Passing images into his mind would’ve been simpler. Half out of reflex, she tried twice before giving it up as a lost cause. She didn’t want to risk losing the way. Instead she had to make her numb lips and stiff cheeks form words.

“Close,” she said, teeth chattering so badly that her temples hurt. Her eyes stung, and a headache burrowed into her skull, using her ears as convenient entrances. “Another two hundred meters. First building.”

“Dragon-damned, lonayíp sonofabitch.” Rather than stop, he picked up the pace and held her even closer.

Winding her arms around his middle, where the coat retained the heat of his body as it worked to its maximum potential, Kavya nestled close. She offered words to guide him. When was the last time she’d spoken so much to one person? To groups, sure. They needed a clear, sure tone to rise above the din of other voices. Otherwise she spoke with her mind. Another mind would speak back. Here it was the intimacy of how his chest rumbled when he replied, and how his breath was a welcome flash of damp heat against her temple. This was the intimacy of speaking with bodies—tongues and lips and the thousand other things that went into verbal communication.

A different sort of gift.

Tallis followed the long line of what appeared to be a warehouse. At least for those moments, they were both protected from one direction the wind used to attack. Kavya rubbed her ears. The blizzard lived there in a perpetual cacophony. She would scrape it out if she could—grab one of Tallis’s seaxes and hand it to him with the command that he dig out the mind-numbing sound.

“Cross to that building with the high gable,” she said past numb lips. “People eating and drinking. There’s a fire. A couple is . . .”

Another chuckle rumbled out of his chest, where she pressed tighter with every step. Only his embrace kept her from shattering into chunks of ice. “A couple is what, goddess?”

“Naked together. Upstairs. There must be rooms.”

“Is that all? Naked?”

Even as he teased her, he crossed the wind-whipped street toward an inviting orange glow. A few more strides and she could make out windows lit from within. A tavern? A bed-and-breakfast? Dragon be, just anything.

“Not just naked.” Her relief was so close and potent that she said aloud what she’d only ever thought. “They’re fucking.”

“Very nice.” Surprising admiration shone through Tallis’s wind-scoured voice. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“I have a lot in me. Your thick Pendray brain can’t hear much of it.”

He gave her bottom a quick pinch. “Then you’ll just have to show me instead. The Dragon Kings play charades. The world’s worst potential game show.”

Kavya giggled, made half hysterical by their intimate, dangerous trek. “The Tigony would refuse to play because it would be too debasing.”

“If they did, they’d charm the audience and win hands down.”

“Garnis, of course, wouldn’t show up.”

She could become addicted to the way he laughed, with the whole of his body, yet centered where her ear pressed against his sternum. She didn’t like admitting such vulnerable thoughts, but they remained front and center.

He laughed that way now.

“The producers wouldn’t even put out a chair for them,” he said. “The Sath would know everything because they’d have found out the questions in advance.”

“Thieves,” Kavya said without malice. Yet she knew their kind. A Sath would trade just about anything for a secret. “The Indranan would either learn the answers telepathically or kill each other trying.”

“I like that you can laugh at your own people, no matter how grim.” Tallis kissed the top of her head. “And the Pendray would tear the place apart in a child’s tantrum when they didn’t get their way.”

He put her down as they reached the building. The snow was cold against her feet, which remained barely covered by her shredded slippers. Her knees were unsteady after having been carried. She righted herself using the solid steel of Tallis’s upper arm. “And thus ends our attempt to cast the Five Clans in a game show.”

“We didn’t do very well.” He smoothed hair back from her temples. The wind took it, scattered it, and he smoothed it again.

“No, but everybody needs a hobby,” she said, returning to their first shared jest. “And we saved ourselves the embarrassment of looking like fools in front of potential investors.”

“We’ll save our skills at persuasion for getting a room at this inn. I’m not sleeping in a manger.”

“You’re going to be picky in this storm? I’d trade your seaxes for a chair next to the fire.”

“And then I’d trade you and the chair back for my weapons.”

They pushed in from the storm. What had been frigid and noisy became fireplace-warm and relatively quiet, filled with the soft chatter of two dozen voices. Kavya felt as if she’d been sucked into a vacuum. No screaming wind. No biting ice. She was standing on her own, but she didn’t let go of Tallis’s arm.

“Witchcraft,” he whispered. “Have at it.”

His expression was unexpectedly bright and teasing, with a dark pink flush across his features. He was half-sweating, half-covered in melting snow. His dark, silver-tipped hair was sprinkled with ice crystals that were quickly turning to gleaming droplets.

“On a small scale, maybe. Unless one of your hobbies means you’ve learned to pilot a Cessna off a short, slick runway that leads right over the Beas—you take off, or you drown—then I suggest we stay friendly with the locals. That means as little obvious manipulation as possible. I can’t force them to behave out of character, or someone will notice. The more they notice, the more foreign and threatening we’ll appear.”

“Wait, how do you know it’s not one of my hobbies?”

“This isn’t the time for sarcasm. We need a pilot. That means being fair to the innkeeper and getting recommendations.”

Tallis made a face that was complete slapstick. Scowling mouth. Deep frown. He looked like a child on the verge of a fit . . . until he grinned. “Very well. Play by the rules. You’ll be the first Indranan in the history of our race to do so.”

“Pig.” She slugged him on the shoulder, but his heavy coat protected him. So did his strength. Dragon be, his strength. He’d already recovered from carrying her down half of a very steep slope. “But that’s not to say persuasion isn’t in order.”

“How are you going to manage then?”

“I . . . I have a favor to ask.”

Wariness crept over his features. As well it should, she thought.

“What’s that?”

“We know I can’t read your mind. Maybe because you’ve been able to resist. I don’t know how. All I know is that an unwilling mind is harder to read. Can you try? Try to give me something from your thoughts?”

Tallis’s brow was furrowed again, with no playfulness this time. “Give you what?”

She inhaled. “Anything . . . interesting. Anything to distract the innkeeper and make him curious enough about what goes on between us to let us stay.”

She knew how she must look. Ruggedly used. Wind-whipped. Exhausted. Some blood still splattered her sari in gory, dark brown constellations. She was desperate, and she’d do what she needed to find them shelter, but part of her knew this was important. Had she spent two days with another Indranan, she would’ve known what to believe . . . to trust. Until they fulfilled their respective ambitions, she and Tallis were bound. She couldn’t decide whether to take comfort from that fact, or to steal a knife from the inn’s kitchen and keep her eyes open all night. Knowing what kind of man had carried her through a blizzard was as important as food and a soft, warm place to sleep.

“Show me what you see when you look at me,” she said. “Let me give him that.”

“Right now? I see a freeze-dried rat.”

“I mean, how you think of me in my best light. How you think of me when you imagine us upstairs.”

“Upstairs like that couple? Fucking? You want me to imagine you that way and just hand it over to you?”

Swallowing her embarrassment and anticipation, she swallowed tightly. “Yes.”

“I’ll try,” he said with a dark smile. “But I won’t be doing it to buy a little goodwill from a horny innkeeper. I’ll be doing it to seduce you.”