Page 76 of Dark Mate

Riven’s already awake.

I feel him change before anything else—every muscle locking against my back, his arm tightening over my ribs, not holding me now. Pinning me. His wings snap open, the rush of air cold on my bare skin, the membranes filling the hollow and blocking the gray light from the entrance. His hand presses me flat to the furs in one motion.

Stay.

No word. A snarl, low, from the base of his throat. “Grrrhh.” It goes through me like a hand closing on my spine, no humansound in it, not even a Shade sound, the sound of a thing that is going to kill whatever made that smell or die in the passage trying.

He drops off the nest. The dark swallows him.

Silence.

I lie there, hand on my belly, my heartbeat so loud it fills the hollow, fills the space against the wood where his body just was. The baby pressing back against my palm—I’m here,the same flutter his hand finds every night.

I count my breaths. One. Two. Three.

Then, from the south passage, a sound I have no name for.

Clicking. Off-rhythm. Like bones tapped together underwater. Not footsteps—not the careful gait of the Eunuchs. Looser. Wronger. Too fast for walking, too ragged for running—the sound of limbs that don’t agree on a pace. And from the east passage, the same sound answers. Two directions.

I crawl to the nest edge, my belly dragging the furs, my knees shaking against the wood floor, and press my face to a gap in the lattice.

The gray pre-dawn comes through in pale shafts, and what it shows me empties my head out.

Shapes, moving through the passage below. Tall—near as tall as Riven. Butwrong.The word rings in me like a struck bell. Too thin through the body, too thick through the thighs and shoulders, the proportions all misplaced—like something took a body apart and built it back from bad instructions. Right pieces. The arrangement catastrophically off.

The first one passes under me and I see its back. A horn juts from between its shoulder blades, one horn, from the wrong place, curving up like a rib that got loose from the chest. The next drags a tail that hangs off the base of its ribs instead of its spine, scraping the floor. The third has shoulders too high, arms too long, hands nearly brushing its knees. Naked, all of them.Pale skin pulled tight over wrong angles. One passes through a shaft of light and where its sex should be there’s nothing—not shrunk like the Eunuchs.Gone.The body unmade in the deepest way there is.

My stomach heaves. I swallow it down.

Their mouths don’t close. The clicking comes from there—hissing, percussive, language stripped to bone. Crossbows lashed to their forearms, the bolt tips glinting wet. Six of them. And behind, one white shape—a Eunuch, hunched, pointing them on with small flat gestures, the way you’d aim a dog.

My knuckles ache on the lattice.

Riven hits the first two from above.

His full wingspan throws across the passage, the dark membrane blotting out the dawn—his dark, his ground, the whole space gone to shadow. The impact shakes the wood. I feel it through the floor, through my hands, through my belly, my teeth clacking together. The wet crack of a body into the wall. A thin high hiss from something that should be dead.

The one he threw gets up.

My breath stops. The torso’s caved on one side, an arm swinging loose from a shattered shoulder, the back-horn cracked—and itstands.The hissing climbs. With the arm that still works, it reaches for its crossbow.

The sound Riven makes isn’t a roar. “Hhrraaghh.” It’s deeper, from the same place the hum lives but turned inside out, revulsion and recognition. He knows what these are, or his body does, the way mine knew the smell was wrong before I did.

He kills it again. The claw takes the skull. Wet. Final. It stays down this time.

But killing twice takes time, and there are five more.

They spread through the passage, the clicking rising into something that sounds coordinated, too fast for any human mouth. A bolt flies out of the dark—Riven twists, wings foldingtight, and it buries in the wood wall three feet under my face, the wet tip sizzling, the wood darkening, the sour smell rising till I gag into my hand. He catches the next shooter with his tail, drags it into the shadow, breaks it twice.

My fingers go numb on the wood. Everything in me is screaming to run, to hide, to curl around the baby and vanish into the darkest corner of the nest. I don’t move. I watch. Looking away would mean not understanding what this is costing him.

The third gets close while he’s busy with the second kill. Faster than the others, low, belly almost on the floor, the long arms hauling it forward quicker than running. It fires from below, close.

The bolt punches into his shoulder—between the wing-joint and the spine, the one narrow place the muscle’s thin. The tip hisses going in. Steam comes off the wound. I see the steam. I see the dark blood.

Something in me breaks open.

Not a thought, a sound, a cry that tears out before I can stop it, high and raw, the sound of a woman watching the only thing between her and the dark take a bolt through the shoulder. I clamp my hand over my mouth. Too late.