Maud inspected the repair. It was like the dent was never there. She chewed on her lower lip, turning the armor under the light this way and that, and moved on to the next dent.
“After that, House Kor hired him,” she said. “To be their sergeant. They were in a land dispute with another House, and it was getting ugly. They didn’t want me, they just wanted him. They needed someone skilled in tactics, with some name recognition, and they needed him fast, because the other House was going on the offensive. Melizard agreed to take the job. He trained their soldiers, he overhauled their entire force, and he did what he always did when you put him on the battlefield: he tore through his enemies. The other House realized that they had to take him out.”
“Did they kill him?”
“No.” Maud paused and looked at me. “They offered him twice as much money. They didn’t want him to fight for them. They just wanted him to not show up.”
“He told them to shove it, right?”
“No. The moron took the money.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s like the planet was slowly driving him mad, eroding his soul piece by piece. I didn’t even recognize him anymore. He took that blood money and he had the audacity to tell me he was doing it for me and Helen. That I, horrible witch that I am, accused him of not caring for his wife and daughter and when he took the money, he was thinking of us and where we would be if he died in battle.”
I tried to reconcile the Melizard I remembered with that and couldn’t.
“According to him, House Kor was too weak to win anyway and all their victories were temporary. But he’d trained them too well. They won and after they figured out what happened, they hired a gang of raiders and tracked us down in another province. They arranged for a local House to offer a lucrative job and when Melizard took the bait, they killed him. I watched it happen.”
Her voice lost all emotion, as if she were talking about something completely unimportant.
“I was supposed to come with him but at the last minute he told me to stay back, almost like he had a premonition. Helen and I were laying on a nearby hill when they cut him to pieces while he was still alive and then burned his body. They put his head on a stake and stuck it on the House wall.”
“Did Helen see?”
“No. I covered her eyes. But she saw the head. There was no way around that.”
Maud glanced at her. “She surprises me. She’s my daughter. She came out of me; I was there. But there are times she does weird things and I don’t know if it’s human weird or vampire weird. This was one of those times. You’d think a child that young wouldn’t be able to understand death, but somehow she figured out that her father wouldn’t be coming back and that a blood debt had to be paid. I thought she would be heartbroken, and she was for a few days, then she bounced back like it never happened. Maybe it’s because Melizard spent so little time with her in the past two years. We were either on the job together or he was on the job on his own. She got used to him leaving. I don’t know.”
Neither did I. I was the youngest child. No baby brothers or sisters and a five-year-old was brand new territory. “What happened after he died?”
“Then a blood debt needed to be paid. So I found them, one by one, and I killed them all. Took me most of these last eight months.”
That was my sister. She watched her husband murdered and then hunted his killers against impossible odds, all the while trying to protect their daughter, and she summed it up like she was describing going to a grocery store on Tuesday.
“By the time I was done, I had a list of relatives howling for vengeance a mile long and two offers of marriage.” Maud took another cloth from the kit, sprayed some black liquid on it and polished the breastplate.
“Didn’t take them up on it?” I winked at her.
“I’m done with vampires. Hell will freeze over before I let another one anywhere near me or Helen. They’re all the same. Anyway, there is no future on Karhari. You were my last hope.”
“Why send a message with a Ku?” I asked.
“Well, I didn’t have a lot of choices,” she said. “And this Ku was hitching a ride on an Arbitrator’s ship.”
“Really?” Why did I have an odd feeling about this?
“An Arbitrator stopped at a Lodge where Helen and I were hiding.”
“What?” It couldn’t be.
“No idea what he was doing on Karhari. I’ve never seen one up close before. Beautiful man, golden blond hair. Walked with a cane.”
George. Just like I thought. The man who’d orchestrated the peace summit.
“Anyway, he paused by my table and said that I looked like someone from Earth and how odd it was to see someone like me and Helen in that wretched place. And I said that I was from Earth and still had family on the planet. He told me that he wouldn’t be going to Earth for a while, but that he would be stopping in the vicinity to drop off some clients and that a Ku in his party liked delivery jobs, so if I were to write a message, he would see that it reached my family. It was a shot in the dark. I never thought it would work.”
George knew exactly who she was. Of course he did. He probably wanted something in return, if not now, then later. That man never did anything without calculating all the variables. And I didn’t care. From now on he would stay free in the inn as long as he lived.
“Thank you for coming to get me.” She reached out to me and I hugged her.
“It will be okay,” I told her the way our mother used to tell me when everything was bleak and all I could do was cry about it.
“It will be okay,” my sister echoed and hugged me back.
CHAPTER 4
I paced back and forth before the circular summoning gate. We were due to arrive in range of Earth at any moment. When we did, the empty space defined by the gate would become blood-red, I’d step into it, and then I would be home. If home was still standing.
Maud and Helen went to the stream to look at the colorful fish, but not before Maud told me I had turned into our mom and then laughed. At least she could still laugh.
“If you keep pacing, your shoes will start smoking from the friction,” Sean said.
I almost jumped. I hadn’t heard him come up behind me. I turned around and there he was, dressed in his usual jeans and a T-shirt, clean-shaven. His hair was still slightly damp. He must’ve recently taken a shower. The heavy duffel rested on his back, the small duffel was in his hands. The subcutaneous armor he had gotten from Wilmos had shrunk into swirls of tattoos and their dark edges peeked out from under his sleeves and above his collar.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” he said.
I realized that I hadn’t even thanked him yesterday. I’d just grabbed Maud and walked away and then didn’t leave the suite for the entirety of the trip back. Not that it was very long—about twelve hours or so—but still.
“Thank you for coming to rescue my sister.”
“You’re welcome.”
It would help if I stopped staring at him like a fool.
“How is she?”
“Maud?” Yes, who else would he be asking about? Ugh. “She’s resilient.”
“Look at the way she stands,” Sean murmured.
When you picked up a child and held her, it was natural to pop a hip out and sit her on it. I’d seen Mom do it in the pictures where she held me or Maud. When I picked up Helen, I had unconsciously done the same thing. Maud was holding Helen so she could see the fish better, but her hips were perfectly straight. She supported her daughter’s entire weight with her arms and Helen wasn’t light. I had no idea what the average weight for a five-year-old girl was, but Helen was probably forty, maybe forty-five pounds.