“Oh, shit.” Aiden looks up and his face drains of color. He releases my mate’s arm and his hands immediately go to hisears. “That’s a female Bouda.” He cringes, jamming his fingers deeper into his ear canals. “Not even ear plugs can save me from that cackle.”
The convoy rounds the corner. Three trucks, black, moving in tight formation through the snow. They pull into the parking lot and doors open and men climb out, drawing weapons, spreading into positions. I count twelve, all wearing the same helmets that blocked my cackle in the motel. Rifles with blue-glowing barrels. The same weapons that killed my Matriarch.
My sister’s cackle hits before the first man can raise his rifle.
It comes from above, pouring off the rooftop, and it is nothing like mine. My cackle is a hunter’s tool, built to paralyze prey. Hers is a royal command, something bred into the women of our bloodline, a frequency that forces submission from every living creature within range. The sound tears through the parking lot and I feel, my ridge vibrating in response, my knees threatening to buckle beneath me. Even Kade flinches, her immortal body recognizing power older than her own.
When I look over my shoulder, Aiden is face down in the snow, his body rigid, his eyes open and fixed on nothing. Kendra drops to her knees beside him and shakes his shoulders, calling his name, but it does not matter. His nervous system has shut down completely. He will regain control within an hour, maybe two, and until then he is frozen where he fell.
The poachers stagger. Some of them clutch at their helmets, adjusting the devices, but every single one of them stays on their feet. The helmets hold against her sovereign frequency the same way they held against mine in the motel. These men came prepared. They were prepared at the massacre too, when our women unleashed the sovereign call and it did nothing. Whoever built this technology knew what Bouda females could do long before they burned our village.
Zaki sees it. Her cackle cuts off and she reads the result in half a second, and nothing in her changes. She is going to do this with her hands.
She jumps.
Three stories straight down. She drops from the rooftop and her bare feet hit the parking lot concrete with an impact that cracks the pavement beneath the snow, fractures spreading outward from the landing point. Her ridge is fully spiked, the blades longer than mine and catching the flicker of the motel’s neon sign in flashes of red and blue. She straightens from the crouch and scans the parking lot the way I have seen her scan a battlefield, like she already knows how it ends.
Finally,my Bouda breathes.Real help has arrived.
She wears the coverings of our village. A wrapped garment of woven cotton dyed with red ochre and indigo, draped across her shoulders and cinched at the waist with a leather cord strung with carved ivory and amber pieces that I recognize instantly. The Matriarch placed them around her neck during the naming ceremony when we were children, marking her as a potential successor. Her hair falls in a single thick braid down her back, woolly and dark, threaded with ornaments that click softly against each other when she moves.
The snow melts the moment it touches her bare arms. Her body burns with the same furnace that keeps me alive in this cold. Nothing about her belongs here, and she could not care less. The silver rings around her eyes catch the neon light and hold it, and even the armed men hesitate when she turns her gaze on them.
I want to throw my arms around her. But my mate is behind me, kneeling in the snow beside Aiden’s frozen body, and she is my priority now. Zaki would not expect me to leave the queen unguarded, even for her.
The poachers have not moved. Twelve men with rifles and helmets and training, and not one of them fires. They watched my sister fall three stories and crack the ground on impact, and now they stand in their semicircle with their weapons half raised and their formation loosening at the edges. The commander barks something at the man beside him, but the man does not respond. He is staring at Zaki, trying to calculate whether running will trigger the chase.
My sister does not look at them. She walks past the nearest two like they are parked cars, her braid swinging against her back, her ridge humming low enough that I feel it through the ground and into the soles of my bare feet. She stops in front of me and says my name.
“Alemayehu.” She says it like she saw me yesterday, and my Bouda whines with longing. “You have found your mate.”
Our sister just ignored twelve armed men to lecture you about your mate. This is why I love her.
She looks past me to where my mate kneels in the snow, studying her with those silver-ringed eyes that miss nothing. Her mouth softens for half a second before the assessment takes over. She takes in the puffy coat, the wet hair, the panic on my mate’s face, and her lip curls with subtle disapproval.
“She is lovely.” The words come out clipped. “But very westernized.”
I knew it,my Bouda announces, sounding vindicated.I said she was westernized. Your sister sees it too. The queen does not even know how to receive a bow. She told us to stop kneeling. What kind of Bouda queen refuses the submission of her guardian?
“Shut up.” I say it out loud and Zaki smirks. She knows exactly who I am talking to. The commentary never stops.
I reach for her arm and she reaches for mine. Our grips lock at the forearms, claws dimpling skin. The way our people greet each other. I bow my head. “You are alive.”
“I have been watching you, brother.” She holds the grip a moment longer before releasing. “Even when you found her. I have been in the shadows since you arrived in this country. It is easy to mask my scent in this.” She wrinkles her nose, glancing at the snow piling on the hoods of the parked cars with contempt. “Frozen human waste. The air here tastes like metal and exhaustion.”
“Great, Zaki.” Kade steps forward, her smirk wide and genuine. “Looks like you’ll be joining us in Wintermoon.”
Behind me, my mate rises to her feet, brushing snow from her knees. Zaki’s gaze locks onto her and my sister drops to one knee, her ridge flattening instantly, her head bowing low enough that the braid slides over her shoulder and pools on the snow.
“My queen.”
“Oh, hell no.” My mate throws both hands up, palms out in rejection. “I am not your queen. Get up.”
Zaki rises and looks to me, then back to my mate, and her look hardens into something I recognize from childhood, the look she would get before correcting a cub who had spoken out of turn.
“You see, Alemayehu? Your mate is too westernized.” She does not raise her voice, but disappointment runs through every word. “This is dangerous for our future clan. We will lose all traditions, all structure, everything the Matriarch built. The queen must learn to receive her people, or the people will have nothing to follow.”
“Stop it.” The moment the words leave my mouth, I realize my mistake.
