Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 130991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 437(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 130991 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 655(@200wpm)___ 524(@250wpm)___ 437(@300wpm)
Karat touched the House Krahr crest embedded in her breastplate. Her syn-armor came apart at the seams. She lowered it to the floor. Oh. It was worse than I thought.
Normally, getting a vampire out of their armor was an impossible task. They took it off only in the privacy of their quarters, for rest and intimacy. For them, the armor was a second skin that kept them safe, and sometimes they fought to keep it on even when severely injured. Karat dropped hers without any hesitation.
It was an unprecedented show of trust. Of course. She was Maud’s best friend and I was Maud’s sister. Karat trusted me to keep her safe.
The vampire woman winced as the last of her armor slid free. The dark gray suit Karat wore underneath was thankfully blood-free.
“If I fall asleep, wake me up,” she said. “I can’t miss the Sovereign’s dates.”
“We will,” I promised.
She climbed into the unit, and it sprang into action. The scan flashed on the holographic screen above the bed. She had a broken rib, and there were early signs of sepsis.
Sean stepped in front of me, his face harsh. “Dina. Decontamination shower.”
I touched the nasty goo drying on my skin, looked at my stained fingers for a second, and went to clean up.
Ten minutes later, I emerged with clean hair and skin and wearing another robe over my shorts and T-shirt. The runoff from the shower drained into a tank under the floor. The fetid slime I washed off my body felt inert, but I heated the tank until the dirty water evaporated and then flushed the reservoir with acid just to be on the safe side.
Karat was napping in her med unit with a dreamy smile on her face. Sean was staring at the werewolf woman, Gorvar sitting by his side.
I came to stand next to them. “How is she?”
“She’ll live.”
“Karat will be happy. She’d carried her most of the way.”
“Tell me,” he said. “All of it.”
I did.
He looked up at the ceiling, his face unreadable.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
“For what?”
“I had no idea she would jump from the roof and start a fight.”
It had been a priceless opportunity to communicate with Wilmos’ kidnapper. I didn’t even know if the corrupted ad-hal could speak or understand me, but I would’ve tried my hardest. Every crumb of information was precious. It killed me that I didn’t get anything more out of the corrupted ad-hal.
Sean exhaled. “Nothing it could tell us would be worth you getting hurt.”
“I wasn’t hurt.”
“I smelled your blood when you came in, and I can feel the way the inn is hovering around you. How much magic did it cost you?”
“More than I thought I had,” I said quietly.
Sean looked at the werewolf woman, his face grim. “She shouldn’t have started that fight.”
“Have you met her before she showed up at the inn for the first time? Maybe on one of the trips with Wilmos?”
“If I did, I don’t remember.”
It didn’t surprise me. When werewolves encountered Sean, they either stared at him with worshipful eyes, hit on him, or tried to fight him. He made it a point to interact with his people as little as possible.
“She really cares about Wilmos. She risked her life for him,” I said.
“That doesn’t make her special. Every werewolf I know cares about Wilmos,” Sean said. “If you’re a werewolf and you have a problem, you come to see Wilmos. He will either fix it or know someone who will.”
“The way he fixed your problem by sending you to Nexus?” I shouldn’t have said that.
Sean faced me. “Back then I wanted three things: to learn about werewolves, to learn about the galaxy, and to learn about myself. I wanted to know how far I could go, so I’d asked him for the most dangerous job he had. He thought it was a bad idea. Tried his best to talk me out of it. Told me that he hadn’t brought my parents up from babies just so I could get myself killed because I thought my father saw a bigger moon.”
I hadn’t heard that werewolf idiom, but the meaning wasn’t hard to figure out. Nothing Earth could throw at Sean could compare to the kind of combat his parents endured. He’d wanted to know if he could measure up. I would have to apologize to Wilmos.
“Is that what his projects are about? Helping random werewolves?”
“It’s either removing a threat or getting money. He never keeps any of it. It all goes out as soon as it comes in.”
“I had no idea Wilmos was the werewolf fairy godfather,” I murmured.
Sean barked a short laugh. “You should call him that when we rescue him.”
“And you sure she isn’t Wilmos’ family?”
He shook his head. “He doesn’t have any. Unless you count the alpha strain. A chunk of his DNA is in all of us.”