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Not if there was anything I could possibly do to make it otherwise.
I trussed her injured limb tightly before picking her up again.
“I’ve got you. I will take care of you. You will be all right,” I told her, cradling her against my chest, so that she could share my heat as I moved us down the hall.
As much asI wanted to go back and discover who the men who’d been hurting her were, so that I could destroy them utterly, I knew doing so wouldn’t be safe. I couldn’t take her out the way I’d come in—the trip would be too arduous, and crossing the cavern full of men would leave us tooexposed. If we were spotted, I wouldn’t put it past them to use guns.
But I wasn’t sure which way out was best.
Or how it was that I was meant to bond with a human.
I kept my forehead bowed to the top of her head, walking mechanically, trusting in my body’s ability to sense everything around me via pressure changes, sensations, and the tiny hairs that spiraled my legs, while my nose filled with her scent.
How had this happened? How could it be?
And how would I explain it to her?
Because I did not think she felt as I did—and the thought that we might be at odds on this—on anything!—burned me.
There were more important things to take care of first.
I paused and let the spiracles on the sides of my abdomen take in great breaths, and then went in the direction they told me held water.
Half a day later, we were in another open cave on the edge of a cliff. There was a still pool in the center, its waters fed by dripping down from stalactites above.
I had a feeling she was too weak to take the high-energy rations I’d saved for her, but if I watered them down, they might work. I lowered her with infinite care, placing her back against a smooth rock, and found the shell of an old gloamseeker that I could clean with a web and use as a bowl, and then I went through the rest of the contents of my bag for a lighter...only to find that one didn’t exist.
I chittered to myself, and pulled out everything that wasin the bag in irritation. Normally I always packed my own bags for missions, and this was why, so that nothing would ever be left out—and normally if someone else were to have packed one for me, I still would’ve taken the time to check it.
But I’d been so convinced of my own doom I hadn’t bothered checking Royce’s work, and now my mate was cold and starved.
I cursed at the walls, in words that not even the translation device could translate, and then thought quickly about what I else I could use. There were no other strikable objects here. The tablet held some charge, but was too solid state, the lantern was the kind you cranked, and too useful to lose.
The translation device, on the other hand . . .
I slipped it off my ear and thought about its wires and battery.
I knew I could make it spark. If I did, though, it would never work again.
I looked from the device to Sloane—and to her beautiful legs, one of which was now damaged, because of me.
I disassembled it at once and started spinning silk to burn.
The bioluminescent fungiwas also flammable, so I scraped some off of the walls to keep the fire going once it’d started, and then I heated up water so it would be safe. I made a thin soup of the rations for her, and dribbled it intoher mouth with utmost care, and she appeared to swallow it.
I wished that I could will her my shell. I had never imagined loving anything so fragile in my life. I was tormented by all the thoughts of things that might happen to her if I couldn’t keep her safe.
My world, which had seemed so hollow and pointless less than a week ago, was now a blizzard of concern for the soft, shell-less creature in my arms.
I said comforting things to her that she would not be able to understand, praying that she might feel what I meant as I said them, and when I thought her small belly might be full, I began disrobing her to clean her off with the remnants of the heated water.
One of the men had given her one of their coats, which didn’t fit her, and worse yet, smelled like him. I took this off of her and opened up its stuffing, to feed it to the fire. I knew few creatures were as sensitive as I was in the caves, but I didn’t want my mate scented by anything else but me.
Beneath the coat, she was still in the clothing she’d been kidnapped in: a sheer top that was torn, which I took off of her with care, and a short skirt which I left on, because I knew humans had certain predilections where their mating anatomy was concerned. She wasn’t wearing shoes.
The nails of her fingers and toes had once been painted pink. In my former life, I thought it so odd that humans would decorate their own shells. Now, seeing my mate’s paint scraped by what I imagined were her prior attemptsto escape—acid wanted to burst from my fangs so badly it was hard to hold it back.
It took hours to clean her, and when I was done, I spun her a new shirt, although I kept her old in my bag, in case it was her favorite. Then I scraped enough of the fungi off of the wall to keep the fire going for the next several hours and set myself behind her so that my bulk would radiate the heat of it back onto her.
