Page 57 of Ruby
“What?”
“You fouled their shot. Thank you,” he responds.
Even after a repeat, I don’t quite catch on. I can’t stop staring at the hunter.
My captor. Dead at last.
His body is oozing slime out of the places his mouth and ears are supposed to be and his eyes are wide open. They are as haunting dead as they were alive and I’m incredibly uncomfortable. I take two shaky steps farther away and hug my hands around myself, needing my brain to properly process what is going on.
“Are you worried he’s still alive?” the furred alien asks and I realize how monotonous his voice is.
It is flat, almost dead, and I take a closer look at him. By the time my head is raised, his back is toward me. He is obviously sapient and dressed in a dark-brown shirt with no sleeves and matching pants. The material looks like leather and the color, though darker than his skin, matches it perfectly.
It makes me remember I am naked and I absently order the jumpsuit to cover me as I keep looking him over. He makes a startled sound, but doesn’t comment.
He is taller than me but not as tall as Szhe’ka; I would say seven or eight feet tall and the milky white part of his short fur crosses all over the exposed parts of him, which I can see in so many interesting patterns. Stripes, dots, zigzags—they’re all there.
I don’t bother making my brain focus beyond that. I’m just grateful to still be breathing.
I look at the deflated body of the alien, who was so sure he was going to be the last face I saw and I want to feel something. Joy, anger, victory, anything, but I cannot.
It has nothing to do with the fact that I didn’t do the killing with my claws and more to do with the fact that I’m just numb, maybe a little nauseous.
“T-thank you.” I let out, my voice shaky and low. Luckily, he hears and his fur shivers in some sort of response.
“I wanted to do it anyway. These things don’t deserve to be alive,” he says back and we are enveloped by silence.
I raise shaking hands to the collar around my neck, searching for the clasp. After a long moment of me fumbling, he darts out a hand and in another breath he has it off and launches it almost faster than I can see high into the canopy.
His lips are pulled back in a snarl as he does it and the breath I let out is somehow more cleansing than the one before.
He hates them as much as I do.
23
Szhe’ka
I know I’m close to the hunters’ camp when their stench thickens in the air.
It isn’t as sharp as I expect. That’s what unsettles me. Where there is a camp, the smell should be overwhelming—rot and oil and that sickly sweet decay that clings to their kind. Instead, it hangs thin and wrong.
Fear tightens in my chest.
My hands ache from dragging along the ground, small stones biting into my palms as I move carefully, wary of making too much noise. I force myself forward until I can finally see the camp through a veil of leaves.
I slow and press myself behind a tree, peering into the settlement. It’s smaller than I imagined. Contained. That means fewer hunters. It also looks too empty.
Ani’s scent lingers in the air, warm and unmistakable. There’s another scent too. Not a hunter. Not like her.
I’m edging closer when I hear her voice speaking in a different language. She’s with someone. I don’t pause to decide whether the creature is predator or prey. I launch myself into the clearing and head straight for her.
She stands with her back to me. In front of her stands a two-legged creature holding a weapon trained on the body of a dead hunter. So he is not the enemy. Not right now.
Where are Ree and Thivoll? They should have reached her before I did.
My gaze drifts to the corpse.
I have only seen hunters alive—moving, hurting, hunting. Seeing one sprawled and powerless is deeply unsettling. Its jelly-like body lies punctured with smoking holes. Gray, putrid blood stains the ground. Even in death, its beady eyes seem to glare with the same malice.
