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He gripped my arm, accompanied by a searing pain. One of his spikes shot from his palm and straight through my flesh. The same purple light of my own plasma blade shone through my forearm. I blinked down at it, the curious spike of light fed through me.
It took a moment for the pain to fully register.
Vorian used that moment to sweep my leg out from under me. I fell back, and before I could roll forward to my feet, he was there, his hand slamming into my throat to keep me down.
I was on one knee, his fingers wrapped around my neck. A thought, and one of his spikes would cut my throat. He could kill me.
In his narrowed blue eyes, I saw that he wanted to.
It was not common for Thorzi to kill each other in these tournaments, but it was not unheard of. He would not be punished. If a Thorzi fell, it was due to their own weakness.
“Do you yield?” Vorian’s voice was a soft hiss.
My breath caught. I glanced beyond him, there, to Lucas at the edge of his seat. His face was pale, his skin gleaming with nervous sweat. But the fear in his eyes decided me.
If I died, he would lose my protection. I had promised him better.
“I yield.”
Vorian shouted, throwing his hand up. It was slick, coated with my blood. His teeth flashed, a challenge to any Thorzi who dared to fight him.
It took all my strength to stay upright, to watch, as my mother’s first-born son took my place in the final match.
CHAPTER17
LUCAS
All I could do was look on in horror as the fourth hybrid who had rescued us back on the ship—Vorian—absolutely took Kaelum apart.
It was clear from the start that the match wasn’t even.
Vorian was faster than anyone I’d ever seen, even in movies, and worse, he was able to teleport around like a freaking weasel on coke. I nearly stood up and cheered when Kaelum broke his leg, then I realized that I was excited over someone being in pain.
But then the guy just... shook it off. Like a leg going the entire wrong way was just a temporary inconvenience. And the next step he took, he put all his weight on the leg that had been broken, and didn’t even wince. Either he healed instantly, or his pain tolerance was impossibly high.
How did anyone ever beat him in a fight?
A hand reached over to grab my arm, nails digging in, and I glanced at Kaelum’s mother to find her jaw clenched, eyes rapt on the fight, and... filled with tears. I whipped my head back around.
Was the guy going to kill Kaelum?
No one had died in any of the other matches, though one or two had needed to be carried out.
When one of his hands reached out to grasp Kaelum’s neck—those hands that had, at times, had glowing spikes sticking out of them—my heart leapt into my throat.
He was.
He was going to kill Kaelum.
Kaelum’s mother gave a tiny, distressed squeak, and her grip on my arm went so tight it was cutting off the blood flow to my hand.
Kaelum himself was deadly calm through it all. He met the other man’s eye and said... something. He was too far away, and the words too soft to be caught by my implant. And damn the fact that I didn’t actually speak the language and couldn’t even read lips in English anyway.
Vorian let go of him, and Kaelum folded forward, breathing hard and holding his injured forearm against his chest.
The reaction from the crowd wasn’t nearly as effusive as it had been for Kaelum’s wins—or even for Vorian’s previous wins. Maybe the king couldn’t be bothered to approve of his son, but it was clear that a large part of the crowd had their prince’s back.
As Kaelum left the field, limping and headed for us, one of the enormous blue men who was guarding the dais slapped him on the back and my interpreter picked up, “Well done, my prince.”
