"Are you two done flirting?" Selene spits, wiping dark green predator blood from her cheek with the back of her hand. She glares at Pol, who is looking thoroughly pleased with himself. "We need to move. These things hunt in waves."
"Selene, wait,” I take a step toward her. "We want to form a partnership. My friend Lucy’s signal went dark on the comms tablet. We want to make sure she’s okay, then find the rest. We need to pool our assets and?—"
A cheerful electronic chime cuts me off from the sky.
Fuck me.
"Plot twist time," Ken’s synthetic voice booms from a hovering drone overhead. "We love a crossover episode, but the network executives, that’s me, by the way, feel that grouping all your Alpha Draegons together ruins the dramatic tension. Let's keep the intergalactic ratings in mind, shall we?"
Before Vael can leap in front of me, a deafeningCRACKechoes through the clearing.
A wall of thick glass shoots up directly from the ground, slamming into the place with the force of a small bomb. A shockwave sprays dirt and rock fragments into the air.
Vael curls into me, shielding me from the debris. When the dust finally settles, I nudge my way past him and press my palms flat against the smooth glass.
On the other side, Selene and Pol stare back at us. Pol snarls, his fist slamming uselessly against the thick material, while Selene mouths a string of words I don't need a translator to decode.
There’s enough fuck glitter in there to power a small kindergarten class.
I like her style.
The path behind them begins to shifts, the ground grinding together to force them down an entirely different path.
"Poppy!" Vael’s hooks his arm securely around my waist, pulling me away from the barrier.
The jungle around us begins to groan, the path beneath our feet illuminating with a neon-red glow that points well away from the barrier, and from Lucy. Ken is driving us apart, and we have no choice but to turn away from Pol and Selene.
Damn it.
CHAPTER 21
VAEL-TORIN
The mechanical redtrack eventually bleeds into a quiet grotto. The neon path dims, humming low against the dirt, signaling a temporary ceasefire from the foul entity watching our every move.
A narrow freshwater stream trickles over smooth rocks, the water crystalline and reflecting the faint light of the stars high above.
I drop our survival pack onto a patch of soft moss.
My body aches, the gash the beasts left on my left wing throbbing with a dull heat. But as I look at Poppy, the exhaustion vanishes. She leans against a boulder, her boots caked in dried mud, her face streaked with grime and the remnants of her tears.
"Wash," I tell her softly, gesturing to the clear water. “I will watch over you.”
She lets out a weary sigh that makes her small shoulders drop. "Oh, thank god. If I have to smell like alien hyena-badger and onions for one more minute, I'm going to file a formal complaint with the galaxy writ large."
“I do not think the galaxy writ large takes formal complaints,” I inform her calmly.
“That was a—” she cuts herself off as she sees me smiling at her.
“A joke,” I finish. “I can make them too.”
“I like that,” she tells me, her smile growing. “Keep the jokes coming.”
She strips off the top half of her ruined tech suit, tying the sleeves around her waist, and steps into the shallow stream. She splashes the cool water over her face, her neck, and her arms, scrubbing away the grime of the battlefield. The water sheets down her pale skin, slicking her auburn hair back into a dark, heavy mass.
I step into the pool beside her. I use my hands to rinse the foul blood from my red scales, the cold current soothing the fire in my veins.
When I turn back to her, the breath catches in my throat.
