Page 94 of Feral Keep

“They hunt venom,” he says. His thumb presses into my shoulder—not hurting, anchoring. Keeping himself here while the predator behind his eyes tries to find where the danger is. “Fresh venom. They can smell it from—miles. Their own is killing them and they—they need what they can’t make. So they follow the scent.”

“Follow it to what?”

His jaw works. The gold eyes drop to my belly. Back to my face.

“Mates,” he says. “Bonded females. The venom in your blood—my venom, processed through you—it’s what they’re looking for. The thing that could slow the poison eating them alive.”

The air in the warren goes cold, and it isn’t the temperature. The understanding settles into my body the way camp-knowledge used to settle, not as a thought but as a fact of the ground under my feet.

I’m a target. The venom in my blood makes me a target.

For one second the ground of me tips sideways, the whole shelter of the last weeks—the fire, the tending, the slow rebuilding of a body that used to flinch at everything—feels like it was borrowed, not earned. Like the camps were right all along and this was always going to catch up to me. My hands have started shaking. I press them flat against my thighs until they stop.

“How close?” I ask. Camp-voice. The voice that doesn’t shake, even though under it, everything else is.

He goes back to the entrance. Draws air again, the deep, chest-expanding breath that reads the wind the way my eyes read bark-strips. He holds it. Reads it.

“Hours,” he says. “Moving south. Toward the camp.” He turns to me. “There shouldn’t be fresh venom at a camp. Eunuchs don’t produce it. Unmade don’t carry it. There is no reason⁠—”

He stops, the frown deepening, the pieces fitting together behind his eyes, the intelligence of a man who used to teach, who used to solve problems, who is solving one now and doesn’t like the answer.

“Unless she has one,” he says.

“Has one what?”

“A Shade.” His fingers press harder into my arms, urgent but controlled. “If she—if the Ordained gave her—or if she caught—” He’s building the sentence fast now, the halting speech accelerating when the need is real. “A Stained can smell venom from miles. A Stained will follow fresh venom the way—” He stops. Looks at me. “The way I followed you.”

My stomach drops.

It drops the way it used to drop at the barracks door when Shayla’s boots came down the row and I didn’t yet know whose name she’d call. I press my hand harder against my belly, not thinking about it, just needing to feel the twins move, needing proof they’re still there before my head can even finish the thought.

A Stained is heading toward the camp, drawn by venom that shouldn’t be there, and twenty-five women are locked in a barracks with whatever Shayla has built in the five days since we left.

“How dangerous?” I ask. Because the Unmade was dangerous and Red killed it. Twice.

His face does something I haven’t seen before, a tightening that isn’t anger, isn’t the rut, isn’t the grief he showed at the grave. It’s closer to what I saw in the mirror of the stream two days after the camps: the face of someone remembering something they survived and knowing the surviving was luck.

“Fast,” he says. Slow. Each word deliberate. “Faster than me. The venom—it burns their nerves. Overcharges. They move like—” He searches for the word. “Like lightning. There, then gone, before the thunder even catches up.” His tail curls tight against his thigh. “And they don’t feel pain. Not because they’re broken. Because the venom ate the nerves that carry it. You hit them and they get up. You hit them harder and they get up faster.”

The Unmade got up after Red caved its chest in. I watched it rise on broken bones like the breaking was nothing. Red is telling me the Stained is worse. That the Unmade was a crude failure—a body that couldn’t feel because it was too damaged to know it was breaking—and the Stained is something refined, something that can’t feel because the venom scoured the pathways clean, driven by a hunger it can never satisfy.

“We go now,” I say.

“Maeve, your condition⁠—”

“We go now.“

His jaw sets. He doesn’t argue. He knows the voice. The same voice that said take me back. The same voice that said I go first. The voice of a woman who has twenty-five people behind a door and something worse than an Unmade heading toward them.

“Lisa!” I shout from the warren entrance. My voice carrying across the clearing, cutting through the evening routine. “Lisa, we’re going!”

She looks up. Reads my face from fifty feet away. Doesn’t ask questions.

“Gretchen can run the schedule,” Lisa says. Already moving. Already packing. “I’m coming with you.”

Red drops from the warren to the clearing. Nine feet, landing on his feet, the impact absorbed by the massive legs. No hitch. The cracked rib either healed or overridden. He reaches up for me. I climb into his arms. He sets me on the ground.

Three of us: a nine-foot Shade with healed ribs, a pregnant mate, and a camp-survivor who keeps lists of the dead.