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“You have only one opportunity to answer me truthfully. Be warned that I will know if you lie, and any lie you utter will be met with harsh punishment. Now tell me—where is our mate?” he demanded with a vicious snap of his teeth.
The huntsman giggled, the sound at odds with the bulk of a male in his prime. Although much smaller than a Ragoru, Kyx recalled that this male had rivaled the other humans in size. This was not the sort of reaction Kyx would have expected.
“Surely you must know by now. You are headed toward the Citadel, after all.” The huntsman laughed again.
“Why take her there?”
“Ahhh, now that is the mystery, isn’t it? Were it up to me, I would have killed her there in that little cave we found her holed up in with your brethren. Or I would have taken her back to the village to answer for her crimes and then killed her. But it seems the powers that be in the Citadel want her alive.”
Rager’s ears flattened, and his lips dropped over his teeth as he regarded the human with confusion. Warol glared impatiently from behind the human. They clearly were not getting anywhere with simply trying to frighten the human. As he still had a hold on him, Warol shook the male with a few careless snaps of his wrists.
“Who wants our Arie?” he snarled, his limited patience finally showing signs of cracking. Really, he’d lasted longer than Kyx would have given him credit for. The huntsman didn’t answer, but just let loose more of his shrill laughter as Warol shook him. The dull crack of bone as his head flopped violently forward finally silenced the horrible laughter as the light died out of the male’s eyes. Warol dropped him with a grunt of disgust.
Rager toed the corpse and sighed. “That wasn’t quite as we discussed, Warol.”
Warol lifted all four of his arms in an unrepentant shrug. “His laughter was annoying me. Besides, we weren’t going to get anything more from him.”
“Did you have to kill him so quickly though?” Kyx complained as he joined his brothers, his muzzle wrinkling in disdain as he glared down at the man who’d brought terror into their family. At that, a faint smile peeked out on Warol’s face, and he rubbed the back of his ear with one hand.
“Ah, yes. I do admit that was a bit… anticlimactic.”
With one foot, Kyx kicked with enough force to shove the body off the edge of a cliff just beyond the campsite. Wherever the male landed, his remains would never be found. He would sustain the living things of the forest as was fit. His eyes landed on a sturdy leather bag sitting beside the fire. Kyx’s ears perked toward it, and he lifted it up. The bag smelled of Arie, and he immediately pressed his face into its soft side. Hands shaking, he lowered the bag and pulled it open. Tucked inside were her medicines and treasured belongings. He sighed with relief when he noticed that nothing was missing.
Warol leaned into his side. “Do you suppose he was taking it back to her village?”
Kyx considered this. “Yes, I believe so. Arie suspected that the huntsman had come after her on the order of the village. Given what the male said, my guess is that he must have been returning with the bag as proof of her capture.”
“When we find her, our mate will be happy to have it returned to her,” Rager observed as he looked down into the fire before kicking dirt over the flames, extinguishing it.
Working together, they pulled apart the camp and sent all evidence of its presence down the mountain after the remains of the huntsman before solemnly leaving the area without looking back, their purpose focused entirely now on the Citadel alone.
It took them another two days to traverse the mountains before they set foot on the wide grassy stretch of land. Pale spring grass filled the landscape, and everywhere they looked delicate flowers added flashes of color. Beyond that, in the distance, Kyx could easily make out the towering buildings of the Citadel. With his peripheral vision, he didn’t miss the wariness descend over his brothers as they stared at it as well from where they stood at either side of him.
Warol’s ears pressed flat with noticeable agitation. “It is an entire hive of humans. I never imagined there would be so many that they would create such a vast colony. How will we ever find our mate in that?”
Kyx flicked a disinterested ear. While he was worried about locating their mate, he was less interested in their structures. All he saw upon looking at the high walls was the terrible prison that his mother had escaped, and the very same walls that had attempted to keep her confined were now holding their stolen female.
They would not relinquish her easily.
“Mother told me that she was taught that the citadels are the old cities left after the great wars tore apart their world long before the Ragoru came. There used to be countless humans all over the entire planet, but their species is dying out as much as ours. She says that is why Earth was chosen—so our species could save each other. The citadels cling to their human past, and remnants of the past that haven’t yet broken beyond use. All of these things will work against us in finding Arie,” Kyx said.
Rager stiffened beside him, his dark head coming up with focused attention. For a moment, Kyx could see why superstitious Ragoru considered their black kin as fearsome and ill luck. Right now, their lead appeared to him as if he were a wraith, a spirit of the dead. Unlike humans and their ghosts from his mother’s tales, his fathers explained that the Ragoru saw their dead as dark shades that moved within the shadows until they went to the halls of the fathers. Among the more superstitious of their kind, it was believed Ragoru born with black fur were those spirits re-entering the world to cause mischief and woes and looking at his brother, in that moment, Kyx could believe it. Everything in Rager’s posture declared his enmity toward the walls of the Citadel and the humans housed within. It promised death to any who stood in their way. He was a spirit of destruction and thanked the Great Father Guardians that he was.
Rager always considered himself a reasonable male, not bent toward any disposition of hatred or vengeance, but in that moment, looking at those tall gray walls, he hated them. They seemed to mock him even from that distance, taunting him with the knowledge that Arie had been swallowed within them and concealed from her triad. Warol’s words preyed on his mind as they vigilantly made their way into the plains, and he felt something harden within him as he watched the Citadel loom over them, growing steadily larger at their approach.
He didn’t care if he had to pull down every stone and run blood through the streets. He would find Arie.
Chapter
Thirty
Arie stood before the great hearth in the parlor, her hands tightening into fists at her side—the one sign of rebellion that Lady Vera seemed willing to ignore. So long as Arie didn’t do anything to overtly rebel or try to escape—like try to break free from the house as she attempted her first day outside her rooms—then she wasn’t left heavily drugged in her room. If it weren’t for the fact that the drugs kept her mind incapacitated and unable to clearly think, Arie would have preferred to be in her rooms than dressed up like a doll in the parlor. As much as she hated it, at least her mind was free here to plan.
Even in the parlor, there was no escaping the fact that she was a prisoner. Not even the merrily crackling fire in the hearth could make her forget that fact for even a moment. Guards and servants watched her from every quarter so that even a moment of inattention from Lady Vera offered no escape. Her eyes cut to the guards just a few feet away where they were stationed at their place at the door, their faces expressionless. They were her jailers, and they knew it as much as she did. She hoped that they were just as miserable in their duties as she was in her captivity, though she expected some of the servants didn’t understand her complaint. No doubt they looked upon her, with her snug lavender dress of the finest quality, and were incapable of understanding that no amount of physical comfort and luxury could make her forget her mates. She missed them terribly and every night still grieved privately for the loss of Kyx. She was surrounded by everything she once wanted back in the village, but now it was nothing but an ugly prison. It wasn’t the forest or the simple, cozy den with her males. It wasn’t home.
She couldn’t imagine that the manor was over boasted as being much of a home to anyone now that she observed it, though in many ways it was everything that Arie had always imagined as the epitome of elegance. But now she saw it for what it was. Though the room itself was elegant, with dark purple and blue velvet décor and deep varnished wooden furniture, there was an uninviting chill to its perfectly placed pieces. She couldn’t imagine a child’s laughter there, or any unwelcome or intrusive sound except for the “unfashionably” large grandfather clock that ticked loudly from where it sat as a giant sentinel in the corner of the room. Lady Vera had fussed about it so much with her staff about needing a more fashionable replacement that Arie had become quite fond of it. The clock was the one redeeming feature of a place that tarnished many of her childhood dreams that it otherwise resembled.
What hadn’t been part of her youthful fantasies was the way her scalp itched horribly under the wig. That morning, her grandmother had burst in and taken a pair of sheers to her hair, chopping ruthlessly at it until there was nothing but stubble. All the while, Lady Vera assured her with a cool voice that any lady of breeding born with a misfortune in her coloring was taught early on to correct it. For boys, it was easy; they merely kept their head shaved bare. Women who had the means had their wigs and were thankful for it while poor women were left as bald as the men.
