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That, at least, was heartening. Even if Kaelum didn’t seem happy about it. No, he just nodded to the guard and glanced up at his father, who was sitting on his throne, jaw clenched, glaring at the field. The big blue jerk didn’t even acknowledge his own son.
What the fuck was wrong with him?
I jumped out of the chair I’d been sitting in, shaking off his mother’s now loose grip, and rushed over to him. “Where’s the doctor?”
He gave me a momentary blank look, brows drawn together in an expression that seemed entirely human—confusion. “Doctor?”
“For your wounds.” I wanted to grab him and drag him toward wherever it was people were being treated, but I didn’t see it. There was no triage tent, no roaming medical professional that I’d spotted. Even the men who’d had to be dragged off the field, that had been by their friends.
Fuck me, were they just expected to live with their injuries?
Kaelum gave me the sweetest smile, like I’d said something good, and not stared at him in horror, but he turned me around, back toward the chair I’d been sitting in.
When we got there, he sat down and pulled me into his lap to sit on his good leg, like I was some kind of gangster moll. I turned and looked at him, blinking, and hissed, “Are you messing with me right now? You have a hole in your leg.”
He leaned in and whispered, “And we will watch the end of the tournament, because that is the way of things on Thorzan. To leave would be to insult my brethren who have come this far. To act like a spoiled child who cannot stand to lose.”
I glanced up at his father, who still hadn’t looked our way, and his mother, who was staring at him with huge, luminous brown eyes, swimming with unshed tears.
“Then at least reassure your mother you’re all right,” I snapped at him, and turned back to the field.
From the corner of my eye, though, I watched as Kaelum reached out and ran a hand along his mother’s arm. The attached forearm was the one with a neatly cauterized hole all the way through it, and I had to work not to wince at the sight.
Kaelum’s mother grabbed the hand and clung to it, staring at her lap as though somehow she was the one who had failed. What, like she should have had better DNA? I would have to ask Kaelum later why she felt guilty about his loss, because it seemed irrational, even from the Thorzi cultural point of view I was starting to build in my mind. They were individualists, and obsessed with strength, and frankly, Kaelum had done incredibly well. He’d done better than the three-quarters of competitors who had been defeated before him.
In the end, there were eight guys in the finals, and only one was a hybrid.
I had noticed, in the matches, that the hybrids had been treated a lot like low contenders in Earth-style tournament competitions—placed opposite the very biggest, scariest guys so that they would lose their first match. Half of them had been eliminated in the first round. Only Kaelum, his friend Jax, and Vorian had made it to the third.
And only Vorian made it to the final round, as Jax was defeated in the match right after Kaelum’s.
Kaelum’s shoulders slumped when Jax capitulated, and the man himself was clearly frustrated with his showing, pounding a fist into the floor of the arena even as his opponent offered him a respectful hand up. The look on the bigger alien’s face, in fact, was downright thoughtful. Like maybe he hadn’t expected a hybrid alien to give him a run for his money at all.
After that third round, they put all eight remaining contenders on the field together, some kind of free-for-all battle royale.
Some kind of free-for-all, except that it became instantly obvious that the remaining full-blooded Thorzi contenders had all decided to gang up on the only remaining hybrid.
Now, I was more than a little pissed at Vorian. He’d hurt Kaelum, which sucked, but apparently, he was also the son of the asshole who’d kidnapped me. Vorian, son of Crux—that was what the cute older guy calling the names had been referring to him as when he announced matches.
But pissed at him as I might be for hurting Kaelum, it was horrible to see the way the seven giant blue aliens all shared a look and immediately turned on him. I had the distinct feeling that it wasn’t even because they’d seen how unstoppable he was.
They just didn’t want to be seen to lose to the “weak” hybrid.
Assholes.
A moment later, I started to wonder if he’d been taking it easy on Kaelum. He lowered his head, closing his eyes and focusing for just a second, and then he was a blur of motion. He sent one alien who sprang at him sprawling into another with a well-placed hand-spike-thing to the side, then in less than a blink, appeared behind another with a play from Kaelum’s fighting, smashing a heel hard into the guy’s knee until it made a horrific cracking noise and bent sideways.
That alien did not get up and shake off the broken leg—he fell to the ground and howled in pain. Vorian used his prone body as a shield between himself and the others, and proceeded to pick them off, one by one by one.
When he put the last on his knees, the one who had defeated Jax, gleaming purple spike to his throat, he forced him to shout his surrender loud enough for everyone to hear and gazed up at the king in challenge.
Oh.
Suddenly things made a little more sense. There was clearly some ill will between the king and Vorian. The king had asked Kaelum about him, hadn’t he? “Vorian lives?” or something like that, like maybe he hoped he didn’t.
Still, personal grudge aside, the king needed to acknowledge this. A hybrid had come out on top of a pack of sixty-four warriors. And who knew what competition they had to have won to get into the tournament to begin with?
This was a big deal, and proof positive that hybrids were nothing resembling weak. The king needed to put his son, and the future of his whole race, over any petty differences and acknowledge it. Right?
