She heard it hit the table with pindrop clarity in spite of Zhuqa’s draconian roars. Gagging, she slapped frantically at the tabletop, searching for the hook. She found it, or rather, felt it stab into the center of her palm, and choked out a howl around the enormous muzzle of his cock.

“Sorry,” groaned Zhuqa, letting up on her a little. “Don’t stop. Close your mouth again, just close your—yes! Ah, fuck Gann!”

Amber shrugged his leg off, tonguing madly at the hooked tip of his cock, and he dropped flat on the table, spreading his legs wide open around her—Zhuqa the dirty girl—grabbing her head between his hands like it was a zit he wanted to pop. And there it was and this was it and even he couldn’t go all night, so Amber reared back with a gasp, bit the hook from the meat of her hand, plucked it back from between her lips, and slashed.

If it took as much as one whole second, it would have surprised her.

He still almost kicked her away in time.

His feet were on her shoulders hard the same instant she had the hook in her hand and she went flying. Her cut went wild, but she got something because she felt him ripping all the way up her arm to her shoulder and the heat of the blood spraying over her hand. Then her back hit the wall and her ass hit the ground and Zhuqa was on his feet with one hand clapped to his gushing slit and a knife in the other. He took two running steps, roaring as he came, and went down on his face hard enough that she heard the crunch of his jaw breaking on the stone floor. Blood spat out between his teeth. He sucked in a breath, spat out some more, and lay writhing just a little.

She got up, staggering some on her bad hip, ready for him to leap up and take her down. He might have tried. His legs shifted, dragging through what she now saw was an amazing lake of blood for just a few seconds’ worth of bleeding, but that was it. His eyes alone moved, watching her inch closer so that she could first kick the knife out of his hand and then pick it up. He said something too mangled to make out when she did it, then spat out a bit of ropy blood and said, with startling clarity, “Fierce little thing.”

And then he was dead.

It wasn’t a big moment. There was no sudden sagging of his body, no death rattle at the end of some hoarse exhalation, no nothing. He was seeing her one second, and the next, he wasn’t.

“Yeah,” said Amber shakily, circling around him. “Yeah, I’ve seen this movie. Fuck you.”

She dropped onto his back—the death rattle finally came out with a gurgle between his broken teeth—yanked his chin up—it came easily—and cut his knife across his throat. She felt the knife’s blade scraping over his spine and his open eyes just kept staring. Amber scrambled back, rubbing at her mouth until she realized she was rubbing his blood onto her lips. She spit it out, gagged, then went ahead and threw up so she’d get it over and done with and could get on with the escaping.

“Okay,” she whispered once that was done. “It’s all over. Time to get up—”

The door banged open. “Get up!” bellowed Iziz. “Ghelip—ah,” he said with remarkable mildness as he skidded to a stop in Zhuqa’s blood. He looked down at his boots, his brow-ridges creased with confusion, and then over at Amber. At Zhuqa’s body. At the knife in Amber’s hand. At Zhuqa.

His spines flicked once and lay flat.

His throat filled in with color.

His chest began to heave.

And then he yanked out his hooked sword and came at her, screaming.

Amber threw herself back and rolled under the table. The sword hit the floor twice and then the table—chink chink chunk—before he came diving in after her. She kicked him in the face; he caught her by the ankle and yanked her out beside him—shhhhoop!—in a single pull, sliding easily over Zhuqa’s blood and her own puke. She still had Zhuqa’s knife in her hand. She realized that only after she saw her hand on the hilt that was buried in his back.

He let out a howl that was more angry than hurt, slapping at her in a storm of inarticulate snarls. She flung her arms up, but he knocked them aside without trying, maybe without even noticing. Through the dark blur of his hand hammering at her, she could see the colors at his throat actually shimmering with the force of his rage, but as soon as he remembered that he had a sword—

‘Sex and killing,’ she thought, as suddenly and as calmly as if it were a separate person whispering in her ear. With a cry, she abandoned her feeble efforts at defense and instead thrust her hands between them to loosen his loin-plate.

Iziz reared back without hesitation to battle it all the way open and let his cock out. It didn’t take long. Just long enough for her to yank the knife out of his back and slam it home in his head.

It hit hard, numbing her hand, and suddenly Iziz was two hundred pounds of lizard on top of her, oomphing his last breath into her face. She heaved him off without really being aware of doing so and then stood over him, brandishing her knife for maybe half a minute before realizing there was no blade in it anymore.

It had broken off.

In his head, she thought, looking down in horror at the remarkably small, bloody gash in the center of Iziz’s flat skull. There wasn’t anything sticking out. It must be all the way in there. In his brains.

g rey

‘You absolutely will not faint!’ she thundered at herself, and like thunder, it had to roll a long way to meet her. She climbed up onto the table and there she sat, her eyes going from one raider to the other, waiting for them to move…rise…maybe get their cocks out and come finish what they’d started…

The only thing moving was the blood out of Iziz’s head and it was a slow, small trickle at that.

“Okay,” said Amber.

No one answered.

“Okay,” she said again and slid off the table onto her aching hip.

Still no answer. The door still stood wide open. Zhuqa and Iziz were still dead.

Amber started to bend over, but it made that faint feeling come back, so she knelt instead, tugging the sword out of Iziz’s slack grip. His hand, emptied, curled slowly into a loose fist.

“Okay,” said Amber, and to her surprise, it came out almost exactly the way the old Amber would have said it: tough and strong and able to handle things. It didn’t even sound like the voice of a stranger. “Come on, little girl,” she said, liking that voice more and more. “They say it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings and I’ve lost too much weight for the bitch to be me. Let’s see how far we can get.”

There was no one in the corridor, no one on the stairs. This she found so unbelievable that her feet kept backing up on her, wanting to retreat to the false security of Zhuqa’s room where being ravished by two zombie-lizards was infinitely preferable to being ambushed and ravished by all the live ones. She had to keep reminding herself of the way that Iziz had torn into the room. Surely he’d been raising the alarm all the way down; anyone who had been here had simply gone up to fight. She could hear commotion of some kind on the surface—people running, screaming, fighting—and she had no idea how she was going to get past it, but never mind that for now. Xzem might know of a back door, but whether she did or not, Amber had to get the baby.

She knew the floor where the slaves were quartered, not because she’d been going there every day, but because there was a dead lizardlady lying on the landing, hacked almost in half.

Gripping her sword in both hands, fear churning like molten lead in her belly, Amber ran down the hall, opening every door she found.

Empty. Empty. All empty.

She could hear whatever was happening on the surface working its way down into the stairwell. When she cast a terrified glance over her shoulder, she was just in time to see a headless body drop down the shaft. ‘It’s a raid,’ she thought. ‘It’s a raid from this Ghelip person and they’ve already taken the girls. Run. Just run.’