Sinking into a tiny window seat, I rested my forehead against the dirty glass and watched as the shuttle pulled away from its dock and maneuvered through Calicto’s environmental locks. Twenty minutes later, the little shuttle was accelerating into Calicto’s abrasive atmosphere. The walls and floor rumbled, rattling every loose bolt and its passengers. I gritted my teeth until the shuttle eventually leveled out. Calicto’s vast environmental domes glittered below like a collection of bubbles on rocks. From the outer atmosphere, those domes sparkled and shone, looking idyllic. I remembered thinking the same thing when I’d first arrived five years ago. The fae painted all humans as animals. I’d been expecting hideous living conditions and a brutal existence. What I’d gotten was something between the two.
“Is this seat taken?” The marshal gripped the pole and swung himself into the seat beside mine, filling the cramped space with his coat, his wry smile and all his pretty manliness. Shimmying past his knees was out of the question; there was nowhere to go. The shuttle wouldn’t dock for another few hours. I was stuck with the lawman, and his lopsided grin told me he knew it.
“What are the chances of me meeting you here, huh?” His dark green eyes sparkled at some secret joke only he knew.
I ignored him, or tried to. Clearly, he was going to be a problem.
He still wore his long coat. It didn’t appear to have any enhancing abilities but as an expert at deception, I knew there were other ways to hide the truth. He would be armed. And I knew he was a killer. “You just happened to be traveling to the colonies, Marshal?” I asked, making small talk.
“Something like that.”
He’d been tailing me. There was little point in avoiding the obvious. “How did you find me?”
“You’re not as invisible as you think you are.”
I shot him a pinched, tight smile. I had gone to great lengths to whisper my way across Calicto and onto the shuttle, so the marshal was either full of karushit or he was very, very good at hunting people down. “Do enlighten me.”
He leaned back in the seat, getting comfortable, and why not, neither of us was getting out of this conversation anytime soon. “Once I had a feel for what you are, I looked for surveillance black spots. Dead space. Tek glitches. Followed you right here.” He let that sink in for a few moments, appearing to absently watch the people around us, and then added, “You were at the Crater assassination.”
My smile vanished. I checked the faces of those nearby. Burly men, haggard women. Some might be Crater’s people. Most were lost in their personal entertainment devices, but if any heard the marshal and suspected me, it wouldn’t take much to fire off a message and organize the kind of welcoming party I wouldn’t wake up from.
I narrowed my eyes at the marshal. He was dangerously close to getting in my way.
“You going to arrest me, Marshal?”
He twisted in his seat and looked me square in the eye, issuing a challenge. “You keep asking me that. Do you want me to?”
The shift in his position had bumped his knee against mine. He didn’t appear to notice, but I did. He had hemmed me in. “Isn’t arresting people what you do?”
“Guilty people,” he corrected. “It’s an important distinction.”
Important distinction. Damn, his tight accent slew me. It wasn’t a Calicto dialect. Maybe he originally came from one of the farming colonies where dynasties dealt in crops. Focus. It doesn’t matter where he comes from. “Ah, so you’re an honorable marshal. Well, aren’t you cute.”
His lips twitched. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”
I touched my chest and gasped, eyes wide. “Really?! I can’t imagine why.” Turning my face away, I pretended to stare out of the window at the star-speckled blackness but instead studied the marshal’s reflection. His smile faded before vanishing completely, leaving his expression somewhere between concerned and curious. I might have imagined the pointed teeth I’d seen when he killed the intruders. They weren’t there now. Perhaps those lethal weapons only came out to play when things got rough. As an expert at illusion myself, I wondered if the marshal’s pretty was camouflage and beneath all that alluring male plumage lurked a shrewd and dangerous lawman who had me firmly locked in his sights. He had followed me this far, but now that I knew I had a tail, I would ditch him at the next port. All I had to do was survive the next few hours without giving anything away. And if I was right about the marshal, he was about to try everything in his little black book of charm to get me to talk.
“If you’re not here to arrest me, why are you here? What do you want?”
“Call me curious.”
I’d call him something, all right.
The shuttle’s engines whined, signaling it was slowing down, but out of the window, we weren’t anywhere near atmosphere.
The marshal leaned out to peer around the standing passengers and narrowed his eyes. He caught me watching him closely and pressed his lips together, apparently annoyed. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t good.
The shuttle jolted, and the pilot announced over the comms, “Please stand by for inspection by the port authority.”
“Just when I think it’s safe to talk, someone tries to kill you.” The marshal slipped a hand inside his coat.
Wait. What? I reached for my whip.
He removed his hand and dangled wrist-cuffs between his fingers.
I jolted away, pressing my back against the window to force some space between us, but there was no room to swing the whip.
He snatched my wrist and ratcheted the cuffs on with a click. He gripped his cuff with his fingers, not latching it on. “Hold still.”
“Hold still?” I hissed and yanked on the cuffs. “You said you weren’t arresting me!”
Nearby passengers glanced our way.
The marshal yanked me forward and leaned in, bringing me nose to nose with him. There was no laughter in his eyes now. His glare captured mine and held me still. “I’m not arresting you. I’m helping you. Like I’ve been trying to since the beginning. Now sit still and shut the hell up.”
Who in Halow did he think he was? I balled up my fist and swung, anticipating the satisfying crunch when I broke his pretty nose. He caught my knuckles in his palm, close enough to his face to ruffle his messy bangs. Green eyes glared, their startling intensity another reminder of how the marshal wasn’t entirely human. His gaze warned that, should I try anything, he would retaliate, screw our audience, screw the authority about to board. He would throw down right here, and only one of us would walk away. I’d seen what he was capable of. A cramped interplanetary shuttle was not the place to test him, but once we got outside, all bets would be off.
“Marshal,” an authority official nodded down at us. “Who do you have there?” Beady-eyed and pointy-chinned, he looked like he hadn’t laughed once in the last decade. I almost felt sorry for him.
“Cattle rustler.”
Seriously? He was going with that lie? I looked about as likely to be a cattle rustler as he looked like a miner. I rolled my eyes. At least he was terrible at something.
“I’m taking her in for processing.”
“Destination?”
“Catacoon.”
The authority man raised an eyebrow, probably because we were heading completely the wrong way to be docking anywhere near Catacoon. As ruthless as my marshal was, his lies needed work.
“Name?” the authority guy asked.
“Marshal Kellee.”
Authority man jerked a thumb at me. “Her name.”
The marshal sighed. “Yah know,” he said to me, “this isn’t working.” He pulled a pistol from his coat and—swish, click, boom—shot the man in the chest. The authority guy sprawled backward, spilling into onlookers. Screams rang out and the crowd surged.
I froze. Did he just kill that man?
“It’s set to stun,” Marshal Kellee explained, dragging me off the seat by the cuffs and into the heaving crowd. He shoved and elbowed his way through, pulling me behind him. At the door, where the other marshals fought to keep the masses back, Marshal Kellee lifted his gun into the air and fired off an energy round. Sparks exploded overhead. The crowd dropped, and the authority men went for their weapons.
“I’ll be needing your shuttle,” the marshal told them.
“W-what?” one stammered. His gaze fell to the star on the marshal’s chest.
“Your shuttle is now mine,” Kellee said without a shred of doubt. “Step aside.”
Nobody moved.