Hotbloods 6: Allies

“I told you not to trust me,” Mort retorted, a cold smile on his face. “Still, I’ve never been anything but honest, unlike you and your bloodsucker boyfriend. The two of you have more secrets than the rest of us combined!”

“That’s not true and you know it!” Navan shot back furiously, though his impulsive rage made me worry there might be some truth in Mort’s words. I wasn’t keeping anything from Navan, but I couldn’t say the same for him.

“Ah, but Riley kept that news about Seraphina to herself for ages, even though it opened up the field for Aurelius—the old horndog,” Mort said smugly, shifting briefly into the figure of Aurelius. “And you, Mr. Goody Two-Shoes, you hid the fact that you were already engaged! The two of you are a joke.”

How had he managed to learn so much about us? Maybe that was the whole reason he’d gotten so buddy-buddy with Angie. Whatever creepy means he’d used, him pointing out the hiccups in our relationship made my temper flare.

“I don’t know why we keep you around!” I snapped. “You’re like a poison, infecting everything you touch.”

“I think you mean a disease, princess,” Mort sniped. “Is this really because I didn’t tell you Ezra was Pandora’s brother? Did you want to make it a matching pair or something?” Punctuating the point, he shifted into Ezra’s form, and a shiver of fear coursed through me.

“No, I didn’t,” I shot back, recovering my nerve. “You know you put us in danger—you put me in danger, by not telling me that.”

“So?”

“What if he’d killed me? What if he’d gotten revenge on me?”

Mort grinned. “Again… so?”

I yanked open one of the drawers underneath the control panel and pulled out a small credit device. Killick had loads of them stowed away all over the ship, but we’d put most of them in this drawer for safekeeping.

Mort glanced down at it casually. “What’re you going to do, put a price on my head?” He cackled, pleased by his joke. Well, it was the last one he’d tell on this ship. Enough was enough. If he wasn’t going to watch our backs, or contribute anything to our mission, then he was just dead weight that we could do without.

“No, this is me buying out my end of the deal,” I said, throwing the device at him. He caught it awkwardly. “Take it and go get revenge, all by yourself. See how far you get without us. With that, you can buy your own ship and enjoy your freedom, just as I promised. But my part in all of this is done.”

Mort gripped the credit device and stood sharply, his red-veined eyes glowering in my direction. “It was getting a little too crowded for my tastes, anyway. A merevin was bad enough, but an ambaka? There was a reason the coldbloods wiped them out. You’re fools for trusting him,” he spat, making for the door of the cockpit. “Besides, I don’t want to be around when all of this comes crashing down on your heads! Let’s see who misses who first, shall we?”

I hauled myself out of my chair and followed him to the door, determined to make sure he actually left the cruiser. There were too many places to hide on this ship, and I wasn’t about to have a vengeful shifter creeping around without our knowledge.

Opening the hatch, he turned and shifted into the form of Galo, my lycan friend who’d been cruelly murdered by Orion and his vicious control devices. He grinned at me through wolfish teeth, his eyes glittering strangely. I knew he’d done it to hurt me, evidently knowing the lycan from his time as a prisoner at the rebel base, but I refused to give Mort the satisfaction of reacting to it. With a smirk, he exited the ship, the hatch closing behind him as he ventured into the wild Junkyard.

Good riddance, I thought, although it was laced with a twinge of regret that I quickly brushed aside.

As I headed back to the cockpit, a vague memory flooded through my mind, of Galo telling us to seek out the star. I’d thought it was a weird thing to say, even then, but now it seemed even stranger. He hadn’t been able to finish the sentence, with death coming so quickly for him, but what if we’d been wrong all this time—what if he hadn’t been telling us to seek out a star? What if he’d been telling us to find the Stargazers all along?





Chapter Twenty-Five





I decided to keep my thoughts about the Stargazers to myself, especially after the conversation I’d had with Stone about them. Even if we wanted to get them on our side, Stone had made it sound impossible, and right now we had enough on our plates. Plus, our first stop had to be Glossa, to placate Stone and keep him sweet.

The cruiser was faster than a lot of ships, but it lacked the deep-space technology that Orion’s vessels had. Although, Stone had assured us, after a lengthy discussion, that he had the required materials on his ship for Navan, Bashrik, and Ronad to use to soup up the cruiser, using the design they’d built with Ianthan and Jethro. He figured they’d have to improvise a bit, but he had the basic items. Whether that was true or not remained to be seen, but Lauren had backed up the claim, telling us he had a load of cool stuff tucked away. I mean, if anyone had the goods, it had to be the man who scavenged and traded rare things for a living.

With that in mind, and with nothing available to improve our engines just yet, our journey to Glossa was set to take four days, though we’d reach Vysanthe on the morning of the third day, by Bashrik’s estimate. I wasn’t really looking forward to being near the coldblood planet again, but it was a necessary evil. We needed to know what the queens were up to, and that was the only way to do it, unless we wanted to go traipsing around a load of port-planets on the off chance of overhearing some news in a ladies’ changing room.

Truthfully, it was nice to put the Junkyard behind us. With so many revenge bounties on my head, I hadn’t felt comfortable sticking around any longer, even though I knew the pirates could attempt to seek me out in the depths of space. However, I’d come to learn that pirates didn’t like exerting any more energy on something than they really had to, and me being far away definitely worked in my favor. They wouldn’t try to track me unless they really wanted to, which I doubted any of them would.

Things weren’t exactly peaceful on board the cruiser, though. On the agreement of almost everyone else, Lauren had let Stone out of his storage closet prison, much to the chagrin of the only one who’d objected—Xiphio. He seemed to think it was his right, as a Fed agent who’d been personally slighted by Stone, to arrest him and see to it that the ambaka stayed locked up. Still, he was reluctantly abiding by the majority vote, though I could see it pained him to do it.

“I really think he ought to be placed in one of the cruiser’s bedrooms. I’m not suggesting we put him back in the storage cupboard, but he really shouldn’t be permitted to roam free,” Xiphio complained, as we sat around the cockpit, utilizing the fold-out table by the floor-to-ceiling windshield. “It goes against every moral fiber of my being.”

“Maybe you could help Lauren with the diagnostics?” I suggested, knowing we were moments away from an all-out dispute. Stone was keeping to the other side of the cockpit, but his mere presence was a constant source of irritation for Xiphio.

Xiphio glanced over to Lauren, who was standing at the far side of the windshield and scanning a flat device that scrolled with a list of the ship’s diagnostics and inventory. Well, that’s what Lauren had told me it contained, anyway. With her contact lenses, she could read the alien language, but Angie and I were stuck with our regular human vision, the alien words nothing but a jumble of symbols.

“I would not wish to intrude. She looks so very peaceful,” Xiphio said, admiring her from afar.

“She won’t mind, I promise.”

Angie nodded. “Carpe diem, my man, carpe diem!”

“Excuse me?” Xiphio mumbled, confused.

“Seize your moment with the beautiful woman before the three-eyed thug does it!” Angie hissed.