“What is it?” I had dumped, that is delegated, the responsibility for the 2nd Trial, the talent show, onto Gaston and Tony. They should be at the rehearsal now.
“One of the talent demonstrations is in poor taste.”
“What do you mean?”
“I personally find it distasteful,” he said.
What would Gaston find distasteful? Orata warned me that the candidates were allowed a lot of latitude when displaying their talents. Even if one of them were to light themselves on fire, we couldn't interfere.
“Is it dangerous to other guests?”
“No.”
“You have to let them do it. If we block any of the candidates from demonstrating their talents, they could claim we prevented them from becoming a spouse.”
“Understood.”
He broke the connection. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes.
“You win,” she said finally.
I waited.
“I saw you kill that thing before I passed out. You’re stronger than me, so you win.”
“I never was in competition with you.”
She looked away.
“What’s wrong with your ossai?” I asked.
She gave me a dark look.
“You didn’t go into a wetwork form during the fight,” I told her. “And your rate of regeneration is lower than that of a typical werewolf.”
The ossai were a marvel of bioengineering. A programmable synthetic virus, it was the reason werewolves could bounce up tall trees, murder their opponents with insane speed and accuracy, and change shape. The werewolves had three forms: the human form they called OPS; the OM form, a quadrupedal animal shape they used for scouting and covert action; and the wetwork form, a huge human-wolf monster, which they used in combat.
Werewolves changed forms without thinking. It was instinctual like breathing. Sean had shifted into the wetwork shape when he’d attacked the cruiser and then shifted back, probably without conscious effort.
She didn’t. The corrupted ad-hal nearly killed her, but she had stayed human.
“What’s wrong?” I repeated.
The werewolf sucked the air in and let it out slowly. “Activation failure. In your boyfriend, the ossai are linked into a single bionet. They communicate with each other. My ossai don’t. Sometimes chunks of them link up, and I get a boost, but most of the time they fail.”
Oh. Like a faulty fluorescent light. When Sean flipped the switch, the light came on instantly and was blindingly bright. When she flipped the switch, it pulsed and flickered.
“Can your ossai be fixed?”
She shook her head. “I hoped so, but Wilmos said no.”
Sean was right. She had a problem, and she went to see Wilmos. Except this time he couldn’t help.
The werewolf shrugged. “It took me three years to make my way to him, and in the end, it was for nothing. My parents are normal. Apparently, this just happens sometimes during fetal development.”
“You fight well.”
She gave me a bitter smile. “I like how you didn’t say the second part out loud. I fight well—for a defective werewolf.”
“Only things can be defective, not people.”
“Spare me.”
There was a lot of self-loathing there. Arguing with her would only provoke hostility.
“Wilmos said that if I find a strong werewolf, the kids would be normal. If at least one parent is fully active, and the fetus is monitored and treated in the womb, the activation failure usually doesn’t reoccur,” she said.
“Is that why you fixated on Sean?”
“I asked Wilmos who the strongest werewolf was. He said Sean but he was taken. I never run away from a fight.”
“No, you just run into it without thinking.”
She glared at me.
“I was talking to the thing that took Wilmos, and you attacked it before I got anywhere.”
It took a few seconds to sink in. She slumped against her pillow.
“You know where Wilmos is,” she finally said. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Why they took him? Is he alive? What do they want?”
She looked at the ceiling. I could see it in her face: she realized that she screwed up. It wasn’t the first time, and I could tell it was getting old for her.
“Have you ever seen Sean fight?” I asked her.
“Fight? No. I barely got to talk to him. The first time, he threw me out of your inn. The second time he came out to get the guy with weird teeth and told me to stay out of his way.”
I flicked my fingers. A screen appeared on the wall. On it, a battle raged across the barren hellish landscape. Armies clashed, vampires in black syn-armor, otrokars in battle suits, and the Merchant mercenaries in tactical gray.
“Nexus,” I told her.
A clump of fighters burst on the right and a single figure tore out into the open. He was seven feet tall and clad in obsidian black. The armor coated him like a second skin, flowing over his muscular body, completely seamless. It turned into clawed gauntlets on his oversized hands, into boots on his feet, and into a hood on his head. Inside the hood was darkness. Ink-black darkness that looked back at you.
The fighter ripped into the soldiers, moving with insane speed. The two green-edged blades in his hands sliced, stabbed, and cut with relentless, controlled fury.
The werewolf woman stared, open-mouthed.
“Nexus killed all of Sean’s predecessors. Every Turan Adin before him died,” I said.
Nuan Cee had given me this recording after the Peace Summit. I never knew why. It just arrived one day to the Baha-char door, a small datacube inside a little box with Clan Nuan seal on it. I had watched it twice so far, and I’d cried every time. A familiar heat warmed the back of my eyes. I had to hold it back until I got my point across.
“Consider the kind of willpower required to wake up every morning and fight through hell, then heal your wounds, and do it again. And again. And again.”
The vampire and otrokar warriors moved as one, their blades slicing, creating a deadly whirlwind with Sean at its center, their own fighting forgotten. Blades flashed, and then the ring of weapons and fighters broke, and he was through, splattered with blood. He didn’t feel like Sean. He felt like a force, as if the rage and the bloodlust that emanated from the fighters had coalesced into a humanoid form and tore through the battlefield.
I wiped the tears from my cheeks.
“Why are you crying?” she asked me, her voice quiet.
“Because he is inside that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He was protecting the Merchant fort. He didn’t fully understand what was required of him until he arrived there. He found refugees, families, children, the elderly. Creatures who had no place to go. Their lives depended on him. He couldn’t leave. There was no escape, so he killed a part of himself, the one that was kind and funny and was bothered by hurting others, and became that. I cry because I know what it cost him.”
She looked back at the slaughter.
“It took him a long time to come back,” I told her. “Do you understand now? I haven’t trapped him here. I’m not guilt-tripping him into staying or keeping him from being the best werewolf he can be. No force in this galaxy could make Sean do something against his will. I knew him before he was Turan Adin, I saw him with the armor on, and I was there when he took it off. He stays here because he loves me, and I love him.”