Sickle by Myra Danvers

Author:Myra Danvers [Danvers, Myra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781989472309
Publisher: Myra Danvers

13

Pressing his back to stone, ears flicking back and forth, Sickle scanned the landscape for any hint of lurking predators. Braced for attack. Counting the beats of his heart as he stared at the smoking corpse laid out before him. The brood mother, or…

… what was left of her.

What had once been a breathing nightmare was now a smoldering wreckage of horrors. Leathery, impenetrable skin left sagging from charred bones, every last scrap of meat the brood mother might have possessed had been consumed from the inside. Hollowed out by her own offspring in a final gesture of reptilian love, her massive vacant eye sockets had been left to stare into nothing for the rest of time. Void of everything but twin, fragile tendrils of rancid smoke curling around empty ocular bones.

But it was her jaws—wide enough that he could fit his head, neck, and shoulders inside and still have room to turn—that spoke of what had happened here. Left jarringly askew, they’d been unhinged by some awesome force, the joint shattered high at the connecting point where mandible met skull.

There had been a battle here.

A clash between titans of gruesome proportions, their passage marked by the loser of a contest Sickle was glad he hadn’t witnessed.

Still… he would do well to respect the victor. Absent or not, for it was a predator greater than even the most feared beast in all the great beyond—the only thing marking its passage was the carnage left smoking in its wake.

It was an instinct exclusive to Hathorian males, his compulsion to cling to shadows. Not something a prized harem Omega could possibly know, for although it was true that his female counterparts where kept safe and cherished in secret subterranean vaults… Sickle had been raised in the courts. Traded and marked at the whims of a predatory species, he knew too well what it meant to suffer consequences of rash decisions.

All the Omega male could do was guess at what had been capable of doing damage like that to a nesting brood mother.

But he did not charge forward, reckless and flush with the excitement of his foundling idea. He refused the urge to celebrate the boon of some greater monster’s table scraps, and instead clung to shadows and searched the barren landscape for any hint that that fearsome predator had yet to move on. Searching for a demon lurking in wait, one clever enough to use a corpse as bait to nab an easy meal.

Heavy with the scent of flesh cooked in sulfur, only the wind dared to offer a vague answer, useless though it might be.

Grimacing, ears tucked flat, Sickle inched from the darkness. Ready to bolt back into the tunnels at a moment’s notice, his heart hammered at the backs of his eyeballs. Echoing in his ears where it pounded a rhythm in the very tips of his fingers… all the way down to the twisted nub of his severed tail.

It was madness to stay, to make a stand and claim his place among the wild and brutal.

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