Hotbloods 6: Allies

Navan pulled me down from the table, to a chorus of boos from the nearby pirates who’d clustered around me. He ignored them, grabbing Angie too, hauling us both away from the casino like we were naughty schoolgirls. We giggled, raising our arms as they chanted my name. As we left, I took one last look at my newfound friends and noticed a hooded figure lurking in the corner, beside the casino entrance. The figure seemed to be watching us intently, though I couldn’t see their face.

A shiver of terror ran up my spine, but I was too many sheets to the wind to know why.





Chapter Fifteen





I awoke in a darkened room, with something pounding on the backs of my eyeballs. My head was pulsing, like someone had forced a pneumatic drill into the center of my skull, and my mouth was drier than the Sahara. I tried to sit up, but a wave of nausea came crashing over me as acrid bile rose up my throat.

“Lights on!” I rasped, praying I was back on board the ship and not locked away in some box in the middle of the scrapyards, abandoned by Kirin and her pirate crew. The truth was, I couldn’t remember getting back from the casino, or what had happened after I’d stood on the table and announced my revenge bounty on Stone. I vaguely recalled a shadowy figure, but that could well have been due to the drink. A second later, the bedroom sensors picked up my voice, and the lights blazed to life, searing my sensitive eyes.

“Lights dimmed!” I shouted desperately, throwing the covers over my head and trying to push away the sick feeling. I genuinely felt as though my insides were rotting away from whatever alien concoction Kirin had given me. This was probably what a hangover felt like.

Nonalcoholic my ass. That is the last time you ever drink anything an alien gives you, I scolded myself, noting the exception of Kaido’s serum. At least that was for some sort of useful, medicinal purpose, whereas this had been purely recreational.

My heart sank as I realized the full extent of what had happened. I hadn’t intentionally gotten drunk, but what if it didn’t matter—what if I became addicted anyway? What if I ended up just like my birthparents, an alcoholic who prioritized a buzz over the people she loved? After all, I still had that silver root in my system somewhere, wielding its addictive control over me. I’d avoided any effects so far, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t appear one day.

I also cringed as I remembered the way I’d clambered up onto the table and shouted about Stone, offering ten thousand credits for him to be brought to me alive. That was a hell of a lot of money, which wasn’t even mine to give. I presumed it was way too late to try to take it back or pretend I didn’t want a revenge bounty anymore. Some of the pirates would, likely, already be on the case, and if they came to me with Stone and I refused to give them their reward, I imagined there’d be hell to pay.

There was a hiss of hydraulics as the bedroom hatch lifted, and Navan walked in, carrying a tray. I was expecting him to be mad at me, after my actions the previous day, but he was smiling as he approached the bed.

“How’s my drunken pirate queen this morning?” he teased, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting the tray of food in front of me. I presumed he’d used the food printer to make it, but I wasn’t in any state to eat much. To my relief, it was a simple spread of plain toast and butter, with a steaming mug of herbal tea beside it—just the thing to settle my churning stomach.

“It’s not funny, Navan.” I grimaced. “I ache… all over, and my head’s all fuzzy. I told Kirin I didn’t want anything alcoholic. What if it’s done something to me? What if it’s like… the gateway to the same life my parents led?”

Navan leaned closer and brushed a strand of hair behind my ear. “It won’t be, Riley. You aren’t your parents,” he assured me. “I know you’re worried about the silver root, but you only had a couple drinks; you’re going to be fine. You’d need to drink way more than that to become addicted.”

“Why did I keep drinking it, though?” I pressed. “I should have known that it wasn’t nonalcoholic as soon as I started to feel funny.”

“That stuff turned out to be what we call a ‘zombie mix.’ I never would’ve let you drink it if I’d known,” he said sympathetically, scooching in beside me on the bed. “It’s a whole bunch of booze, mixed in with syrups and juices that take away the flavor of the alcohol. It’s a one-way ticket to oblivion, even for species with a higher tolerance—which humans do not have, by the way—and Angie was pretty sure you both drank about four of them.”

I groaned. “Everything hurts. Stroke my hair and tell me I’m pretty.”

He laughed, cuddling me into him and kissing my forehead. “You’re pretty.”

“How is Angie doing?” I asked.

“Not much better than you, though Bashrik made her get up and get some fresh air,” Navan explained, with a wry smile. “To be honest, I think she got rid of most of it on the gangway, when I was dragging the pair of you back here.”

“Did I do anything embarrassing?” I cringed, waiting for the news.

“You didn’t do anything embarrassing, per se, but you were shouting quite a lot of stuff about our… love life,” he said, grinning. “I’ve got to say, I came out of the whole thing looking pretty good, and you very nearly shocked the prostitutes with what you were yelling.”

Heat rushed to my cheeks. “Nooo…”

“Don’t worry. Kirin was even worse than you and Angie. She tried to proposition the tiger twins, but when they rebuffed her she punched them both instead, knocking one out and breaking the other one’s nose. According to Zippi, it’s what she always does when she’s had too much zombie mix. The sad thing is, one of them is actually in love with her… though I forget which one,” he said. “We had a bet on who would end up knocked out. Zippi owes me twenty credits.”

“Did I really announce a revenge bounty?”

“Oh yes, all ten thousand credits of it,” Navan said lightly, stroking my hair. “But hey, if it gets us to Lauren quicker, it’ll all be worth it. Plus, what else were we going to spend that kind of money on? Killick left a bunch of those devices, with about twenty thousand on each one. We’ve gone from being broke to filthy rich in the time it took to hijack one generous merevin’s cruiser.”

I was surprised by how casual he was being about all of this, but I was glad of it, too. I wasn’t sure my hungover brain could have handled a lecture. Navan probably knew that and was being extra sweet to comfort me.

“Did Angie tell you what we found out from Kirin?” I wondered. It wasn’t all that much, from what I could recall, but it was something. Her glowing character reference about Stone had made me more hopeful that we’d find Lauren in one piece, with her life and dignity intact.

“She filled me in over breakfast this morning.” He gave me a tight squeeze that made me feel suddenly queasy again.

“Don’t suppose you’ve got anything to fix this, do you?” I muttered, feeling sorry for myself. I’d never been hungover before.

He plucked a tiny jar out of his pocket and tipped two lurid blue tablets onto his palm. “I thought you might ask that,” he said, offering me the tablets.

“What are they?”

“A cure-all for hangovers, headaches, tummy-aches—all the basic ailments of the universal race.”

“Even humans?”

He gave an uncertain shrug. “There are lots of humanoid species in the universe, and they don’t have any problems with it.”

Eager to try anything that would take this hellish feeling away, I took the pills and popped them into my mouth, washing them down with a gulp of the herbal tea. I waited, expecting them to get to work right away, but my head was still banging, and my stomach was still turning.

“They’re not instant,” Navan teased. “Come on, let’s talk about what we’re going to do with Stone and Ezra to take your mind off your raging hangover.”

I grimaced. “Well, we know that Ezra is coming back in a couple of days to meet his supplier, which we have to hope is going to be Stone. Kirin said that Stone always hangs around at the Salty Siren Inn, whenever he’s on the Junkyard. So, it stands to reason that he’ll be meeting Ezra there, if it’s him. From what Kirin said, it’s isolated, it has escape routes, and it’s familiar territory to Stone.”