Hotbloods 5: Traitors

“RILEY! ANGIE!” Lauren shouted. “PLEASE HELP ME! PLEASE—” Lauren’s harrowing cry echoed in my ears as Stone carried her into the belly of his junkyard ship. What made it worse was knowing Stone could’ve frozen her again if he’d wanted, but he hadn’t. I guessed he wanted to test the extent of her strength before he committed to selling her off to some unsuspecting bidder.

Stone stood in the open hatch and kept his eye on us as the ship rose up, taking him and Lauren far away. I had no idea where they were going. The terror was overwhelming, surging through my body in devastating waves. Tears pricked my eyes, but the rest of me remained frozen, unable to express the agony I felt rising inside me.

I wondered if this was how the coldblood miners had felt on Zai, trapped inside their opaleine prisons. At least for us, this would be over as soon as Stone turned away his gaze.

I’d never wanted to scream so much in my life. He’d kidnapped one of my best friends, and he’d taken the notebook that could potentially unlock the code to the immortality elixir’s formula. I knew which one I wanted back more, but I also knew which was more dangerous, left in the hands of a nasty scavenger. If he found out what was in those pages, he would sell it to the highest bidder. We already had three factions fighting to succeed first—we didn’t need a fourth.

The ship was almost thirty feet in the air when Stone disappeared from the lip of the hatch, releasing us all from our frozen states. Without a word, Navan opened out his wings and took to the sky, struggling through the altered balance of his damaged part, while Bashrik soared upward in a twisting spiral. They flew as hard and as fast as they could, but the ship flew higher and faster, taunting them. For a piece of patchwork junk, it was remarkably swift.

For a moment, it looked like Bashrik was going to reach the underside of the ship, Navan trailing a short distance behind. He reached out his hand to grasp the lip of the hatch door, when it slid open, revealing an irreverent Stone. He hadn’t yet put his bandana back on, and as soon as he looked down at Bashrik, the coldblood’s body—wings included—froze solid. He fell out of the sky like a rock, hurtling toward the ground.

“BASH!” Angie screamed, running underneath him as though she could somehow catch him.

I kept my eyes on Stone, watching him disappear into the belly of his ship. “Bashrik, beat your wings now!” I shouted, knowing Stone’s hold on him had gone.

He extended them, but it was like he was a parachutist whose chute had failed. He was falling too fast and too wildly, spinning out of control. Navan soared after him, tucking in his wings to make himself more aerodynamic, while Ronad joined Angie in running around underneath, in the hopes of catching him before he crashed into the earth.

I screamed as a Titan appeared beside me from nowhere. It ignored me, moving toward the area of ground that Bashrik was headed for. Carefully, it lay down on its back with its potbelly facing the sky. A moment later, Bashrik careened into the fleshy mass, which disintegrated like a crash pad, deflating on impact. The Titan had saved Bashrik’s life, the coldblood rolling away from the folds of skin, apparently shaken but no worse for wear.

“You owe me for that,” Mort muttered, morphing back into his shifter form. The fleshy pools at his knees and elbows looked more saggy than usual, with a few extra flaps of skin under his chin. “Mother of a waggleflapper, it’s going to take weeks for that to shrink back to normal. This is why we don’t do big shifts! It ruins us!”

In any other circumstance, I would’ve found what had happened funny, but right now I didn’t feel like laughing. Nothing could make me smile. Not with Lauren gone.

I sank to my knees, overwhelmed with pain, looking skyward at where my friend had disappeared. Navan landed close by and moved to kneel beside me, wrapping me up in his arms, but nothing could comfort me. That bastard had said he was going to sell her in the slave trade—what horrible fate awaited her, wherever they were going? It didn’t bear thinking about. All I knew was, she was alone and probably terrified, being stolen away by a bunch of ragtag scavengers… and I wasn’t going to stand for it.

Pulling myself together, I got to my feet and stormed toward our ship, clutching Navan’s hand as I strode up the gangway. I turned at the top, looking down at the others, feeling like a leader for the first time in my life. A newfound strength stirred inside me, and I raised my voice to them, more determined than ever.

“Come on, let’s get this ship fixed and back in the air. We don’t have a second to lose.”