Page 9 of Alien Devil’s Crown

The second pair came in behind us, and one of them was Dallis.

Poor Dallis. A year of watching him roll his shoulder against a rig two sizes wrong, and I’d never once thought it would matter.

He went for his sidearm and the draw hung on the rig, the way it hung every time. In the half second that bought me I closed, drove my elbow into his throat, and took the pulse pistol on the way down. His partner got a hand in my hair; I put the grip into his temple twice and he went down.

I came up armed and breathing hard, hair wrecked, one stocking torn to the knee. Rylos stood over his two, watching me across the bodies with a look I couldn’t read.

“The checkpoint heard that,” was all he said.

It had. Two more came through bay eleven’s access. This time I had the pistol up and firing before the thought finished, two rounds into the lead guard’s chest plate that sat him down hard. Rylos met the second man before he cleared the access and put him down.

My hands were steady. The shaking came later. I hoped I would be somewhere private when it did.

His shuttle sat where the packet said, a gray blade pretending to be a trade tender. The ramp was already dropping before I saw him touch a control, and the berth board above it showed Vessik’s departure cleared. Whoever had built his cover had built the exit too.

The Virelle could have hard-sealed every occupied bay, but that would have announced a security breach to two hundred neutral-space dignitaries. For the first ninety seconds the Conclave tried to contain us politely. Ninety seconds was enough.

Alarms sounded across the docking level, and the bay doors began to grind shut. He launched before they could close.

“Strap in,” he said, and the ship threw itself out of the bay before the harness clicked. The jump seat sat beside and half a position behind his pilot couch, close enough that a hard roll turned the console, him, and me into the same small piece of cockpit.

The Virelle put up two patrol skiffs, more insulted than dangerous. He flew the way he fought. The lead skiff called a heave-to in a bored voice that expected obedience; he cut thrust and let the shuttle drop like something dead, and the skiff overshot us by half a kilometer before its pilot understood.

Then the engines came back. We rolled under the cruiser’s belly, close enough that her hull lights washed the cockpit amber, and burned for open dark through the gap the overshoot had made.

The turns pressed me into the jump seat and the jump seat into him, my palm flat against his chest because the alternative was the console. Under my hand, his heartbeat. Slow. Even. Too slow for a body flying combat turns. I counted twice to make sure.

Heat came off him through the borrowed jacket, more than a human runs, and my hand sat there over that unhurried heart and did not come back when I told it to.

His jaw tightened. In the amber wash from the cruiser, I saw the tips of his fangs lengthen against his lower lip, then retract by force. His free hand came off the controls one centimeter, as though it meant to cover mine, and stopped there. He was also listening to my pulse and pretending he wasn’t.

“Injuries?” he said, eyes on the dark.

“No.”

“Good.”

That was the whole conversation. He’d noticed the hand; there was no chance he had missed five fingers on his sternum. I had noticed the fangs. Neither of us mentioned it. I took my hand back and put it in my lap.

The stars stretched and snapped as we jumped. With nothing left to run from, my body caught up. Six years undercover had ended in four minutes of corridor.

By midday I’d exist in Conclave records as one red flag and an open warrant. I closed my fist around my mother’s pin.

About an hour after the fighting, my hands started. A fine tremor, deep in the tendons. I flattened them on my thighs and breathed the way I’d taught myself at seventeen, four counts in, six out, and by the time the reversion warning chimed my hands were steady again.

We dropped back into normal space. He kept flying. I was nearly certain he’d felt every second of it anyway.

The ship that came out of the dark to meet us was long, black, and running silent. Its bay opened ahead of us, and Rylos flew straight in.

The ramp lowered onto a landing bay full of armed people who did not point anything at me, which in my experience made them the politest room I’d entered in years. A pale-haired giant stood nearest, arms folded.

Beside him a woman beamed at me with an open delight that read wrong for the hour, one hand resting on the head of a boar the size of a cargo sled. Behind them the others stood in pairs, each close enough to touch.

I would learn their names when I could trust myself to remember them.

“She’s got blood on her,” the woman with the boar announced to the bay at large, delighted. “I like her already.”

At the foot of the ramp, Rylos stopped and turned to me.