Sickle: The Feral Court, Book IV

Heart sick, tattooed cheeks wet with tears, Sickle is alone. For the first time, his life is in his own hands.

And the price?

Everything.

Warbling low in her throat, her red frill in full flare about her tiny, furious face, a female lava-kin stood her ground. Guarded on all sides by male siblings, she was a perfect replica of the corpse outside. A ferocious predator, born to kill.
She lunged, issuing a single, cooing bark that sent the males into five identical coils.
Sickle lurched back, staggering away from the tiny wryms who watched his every hasty movement. Pupils thin slashes of alien spite, theirs was a glare of primal hatred mixed with a dash of hesitation. The fear of juveniles who lacked the confidence to strike.
A burst of embarrassed laughter bubbled up, and, tracked by half a dozen ravenous glares, Sickle allowed himself a moment to breathe. To laugh in the face of all that ravenous loathing—at himself, for though the lava-kin clutchlings would one day be the most fearsome predators in all the great beyond, that day had not come.
Peering down his nose, he towered above the tiny, starving creatures and knew a brief instant of empathy for the things that would make his next meals.
“Sorry,” he whispered and kicked out a booted foot when the frilled female puffed up her neck and one of the males feinted toward his left. “Not today. Not by you.”
Setting his attention to more pressing concerns, the Omega male turned—his nape aching with the reminder of Balkazar’s claws set deep into his flesh. Balkazar, who’d been infected and had meant to kill Sickle for daring to reach for freedom. For daring to defend himself from rape and a gruesome death.
But defend himself, he had.
Sickle grinned through the hurt, despite the lingering worry and the fear that he too had been infected as the others had. Pleased by the plump, rounded sense of justice, that he’d gotten vengeance on the war chief who might have killed them both. Balkazar could try as hard as he wished, run as fast as his long, Anhur legs might carry him, and still, he couldn’t escape the gaping maw of fate.
He’d be swallowed by the horde. Either to live within it or to die beneath it. Just another causality no one would ever think to record.
None but Sickle, who’d been the engineer of Balkazar’s end.
Baring the points of his teeth, Sickle’s grin grew feral as he recalled the moment Balkazar had finally realized himself outmatched. Beaten by a lowly Omega male who wasn’t strong or fast. Who hadn’t been born with the coveted Anhur measurements, a male the Nine had never bothered to bless, but one who’d outsmarted the once great war chief when it mattered.
Sickle had sent an entire horde of infected lost ambling after Balkazar, and he’d done it with a song of spite and loathing burning in his Hathorian heart.
But he didn’t think of the hurt. The fear that he too was infected. His wounds festering beneath the healing poultice where Balkazar’s claws had marked him. Didn’t think of the prince who’d died to save him or the tiny queen at the bottom of a pit. That dainty, perfect female doomed by the virus, chained to a titan who called himself mate.
King of the beyond.
Giaus.
No, Sickle couldn’t think of them. Couldn’t allow his grief to live alongside the addictive flavor of vengeance that lingered on his palate, and so he set them all aside, knowing they too would meet their end in the horde Balkazar would bring to the clearing on red stone. An ancient riverbed where a queen had been born only to die.
The stink of sulfur-born reptiles was distraction enough. A reminder that he’d claimed refuge in a place that appeared abandoned, but wouldn’t stay that way for long. It was too perfect a hole. Defensible with the promise of many exits, cool and dank enough to store food without risking rot. Hidden and discreet.
It was a paradise for the vicious. Those who survived or died by the flames of the Nine, as Sickle himself had never had to do.
Until now.
But he had no tools. Nothing to protect himself from attack, and no way to hunt and fill his larders with enough to last him the winter.
All he had was a satchel of medical supplies that needed replenishing and a belly full of fumes and hatred.
He glanced at the tiny things lurking in his shadow.
The six fledglings would make a decent meal or two, but what if another brood mother moved in to replace the one who’d died so viciously outside?
What if the thing that had been her end—whatever it was—returned to claim this den?
Ears pressed flat to his skull, Sickle bared his teeth. Fists clenched at his sides.
No.
He would not die here. Not after all he’d done. All he’d seen and lost.
Pacing, distracted and trying to ignore the dull ache of his wounds, Sickle shucked his medical pack and scowled into the gloom.
Sinadim would tell him to find a weapon, an advantage over the dull, primordial brains of the predators who outranked him. Some way for him to triumph against impossible odds.
And if he couldn’t find something… he’d need to make it.
In the absence of Anhur claws or sheer, indomitable power, Sickle had no choice but to play to his strengths.
His wit.
Qualities Balkazar—that worthless doomed relic—would insist no Hathorian possessed.
Swallowing an anxious lump peppered with spite and loathing, the Hathorian male nodded. His decision made, witnessed only by the welcoming dark and the starving things that lurked within it. The creatures who outranked him, and those he felt a pang of empathy toward.
A high-pitched coo dragged his attention into the moment.
He looked and found the female wrym. That crimson frill hidden and folded and tucked flat against her throat in such a way that she might have been mistaken for a male if it weren’t for the dull spots speckling her scaly hide and the secret peek of a blood-red throat. She stood alone in her unblinking vigilance, watching Sickle through slitted glare. Coiled in the dark, her tiny limbs braced to lunge. Neck bent and tucked tight, she trilled again, scales vibrating in a warning Sickle had only ever heard talked about, but had never seen.
“Sorry, Sultana,” Sickle cooed, daring to smirk into that sinister scowl. And, stooping closer, he said, “It’ll be years yet before you’re large enough to burn me with your noxious spit.”
As if to defy him, her frill snapped open in a crimson flare—and instead of molten vomit, she opened her jaws around a warbling tri-toned cry. One that went so much deeper than his ears, it sent his brain jiggling inside its case. The jelly of his eyes turning liquid as he staggered back with both hands pressed to flat ears. Teeth clenched hard enough to taste the scream of crackling enamel, Sickle issued a wretched shriek of his own…
… and stumbled.
Stepping badly on the uneven cave floor, he was sabotaged by an unseen crevasse. A crack in the stone that sent his ankle twisting seconds before he went down in a graceless heap of senseless, Hathorian goo. But he didn’t feel the impact. Took no notice of the way his skin split when it struck a jagged rock and didn’t care at all when the males returned.
He merely tried to crawl away from that piercing howl. Unfolding himself from the fetal position, he pulled his fingertips from ears that had grown tacky with blood and fled. Blind to all else, utterly incapacitated by a fledgling wrym who had no business wielding a weapon such as that, he dragged himself away.
The female fell silent.
Sickle opened his eyes and saw nothing as his brain tried to adjust to the absence. The whites of his eyes now speckled red with blood that couldn’t ooze, the orbs swollen as if having suffered repeated blows to the back of his head.
Shaking, his skin slick with traumatized sweat, Sickle swiped at a trail of tacky wet that spilled from his nose and blinked as his vision cleared.
Five matching sets of vertical pupils waited. That primal hatred replaced by a look Sickle knew well, for it was one he’d seen too many times on the faces of the Anhur who’d ruled him—joy of the hunt.
An insignificant weight landed between his shoulder blades. The sixth clutchling, a tiny female with crimson frill and a voice that would send horror into the blood of the Nine themselves.
She issued one final, dainty trill…
… and commanded her siblings to dine without bothering to kill…