Page 96 of Feral Keep

Red’s whole body changes as we approach, the wings half-spreading, the tail going rigid, the posture shifting from man-walking to predator-assessing. His gold eyes lock on the supply building door, his lip pulled back from his fangs.

“Stay behind me,” he says. Not a request.

I don’t argue. The growling is louder now, a vibration that makes my teeth ache, something primal in me answering: predator, danger, do not approach.

Red opens the door.

The supply building has been converted into a cage.

The shelves are stripped, the walls reinforced with planks—crude, nailed with bent metal, the work of someone who had limited materials and unlimited motivation—the whole space, maybe fifteen feet by twenty, turned into a pen. And inside the pen, chained to the far wall with a length of heavy chain bolted to a floor anchor⁠—

A Nethershade.

My breath stops, something older than the camp-freeze rising in me. The sight of a male chained to a wall hits a place in my chest that the rut carved open, the place where Red’s body lives inside my understanding of what a Shade is. Because Red is free. Red has a territory, a grave he tends, a pregnant mate. Red is what a Shade becomes when the mutation works and the feral finds something to protect.

This is what a Shade becomes when humans chain it to a wall.

My throat closes around nothing, no words, just a hard swallow that doesn’t go down right. I think of Red chained like that, Red pacing a groove into a floor, Red’s eyes going flat and empty the way this one’s are, and something low in my gut cracks so fast and so quiet I don’t even have time to brace for it. I didn’t know I could feel sorry for a Shade until right now.

He’s smaller than Red. Maybe seven feet. Lean where Red is broad, the musculature ropy instead of massive. His skin is a mottled green-brown, the color of stagnant water. His eyes are gold like Red’s but the similarity ends there. These eyes have nothing behind them. No warmth. No intelligence surfacing. Just the flat, feral blaze of a male who has been caged and is losing his mind to it.

His wings are wrong, folded at angles that suggest they’ve been bound, abraded spots where rope cut into the leathery surface. His tail lashes behind him, striking the walls, the chain rattling with each impact. The growl is constant, a sound that comes from his chest without pause, without breath, the continuous vibration of rage.

“God,” Lisa says behind me.

The smell hits next—sour, wrong, nothing like the clean musk of Red’s territory, nothing like the warm, dark scent that stopped being threatening weeks ago. The smell of a male whose venom has nowhere to go, the excess curdling in his system with no mate to receive it. Like milk left in the sun, sweet turning to rot.

The chain has enough slack for him to pace. Three steps, four. The arc of his movement wearing a groove in the floor. He sees Red and the growl becomes a roar, the full-throated, territorial challenge of a male seeing another male in proximity to claimed space. Except he has no claimed space. He has a chain and a cage and the smell of his own waste in the corner.

Red doesn’t enter. He stands in the doorway, his massive frame filling it, and he looks at the caged Shade with an expression I’ve never seen on his face—something that might be grief if grief could look like fury.

His wings twitch, folded tight against his back, the dark red membranes taut, his whole body reading the caged male’s distress through the scent and the sound and whatever silent thing passes between Shades that I can’t hear. His tail is rigid, the white tip trembling—not fear, but fury held so tight it’s become its own kind of stillness.

“How long,” he says. His voice is quiet. Dangerously quiet.

The answer comes from behind us.

“Four days.” Shayla’s voice. I turn. She’s standing at the door of the nearest barracks, the door cracked open six inches, her face in the gap. The grey hair, the sharp eyes. She looks thinner than six days ago. The composure is still there but it’s brittle now, the shell of a structure that’s been compromised. “The Ordained delivered him after you left. Trade for services.”

“Trade for—” My voice comes out raw. “You traded what?“

“Information. About you. About your Shade. About the raid.” Shayla’s chin lifts. The administrator’s defiance, the posture of someone who is losing and knows it and has decided to go down maintaining. “The Ordained wanted to know how a mated Shade penetrated a secured camp. I told them. They sent the male as compensation.”

“Compensation for what?”

“For the Unmade you destroyed. For the Eunuchs that fled. For the damage.” Her eyes move to Red, then back to me. “The Ordained don’t abandon assets. They replace them. This male is my replacement security. And my—” She pauses. The first crack in the brittle composure. “My leverage.”

“Leverage,” Lisa repeats. Flat. The word landing like a stone.

“Come inside,” Shayla says. “I’ll show you.”

We follow her in, Lisa a half-step behind me. The barracks smells like fear and venom.

The women are inside. Twenty-three of them, two fewer than when we left—I don’t ask where the two went—sitting on the bunks, the floor, pressed against the walls. They look worse than six days ago. Thinner. Some of them have a glazed look—the dull shine of eyes that have been exposed to something chemical.

Venom. The sweet, sharp scent of Shade venom is in the barracks, applied to skin, to cloth, hanging in the air. Someone has been administering venom in this space.

In the far corner, on a bunk separated from the others by a hanging cloth, a girl lies on her back. She’s young—maybe seventeen. Her eyes are open but unfocused. The glazed quality is strongest in her. Her pupils are wide, the irises barely visible, the dreaming look of someone who is deep in a chemical haze. Her body is relaxed in a way that isn’t natural—the muscles slack, the limbs loose, the posture of a person who is not in pain and hasn’t been in pain for a while.