If he couldn’t have his little redheaded faery, he planned on beating the hells out of anyone and anything that came his way until the truce broke down. It would happen. It was just a matter of time. These truces never lasted long. He grinned and slid under the troll’s guard to deliver a jaw-shattering blow.
Bone crunched and some spectators around the practice circle winced. A few, knowing they might be up next, took the chance to melt into the undergrowth, obviously deciding that the better part of valor was running the fuck away.
The troll dropped to his knees, swaying like a reed in the wind, and then sprawled face-down in the dirt, unconscious. The crowd erupted into roars. That was the thing about orcs. Bloodthirsty bastards would cheer for anything, as long as there was enough blood.
Ignoring the unconscious man, Karak stepped from the ring. He didn’t care that the orcs in front of him scattered as he made his way through the camp. He didn’t care that he terrified even the hardiest of them, or even that the camp whores avoided him as if he had the plague. He credited them with intelligence on that score. The female who touched him was either brave or suicidal.
A shudder racked him at the thought. He wanted only one female touching him, and as soon as this stupid truce broke, he was going to storm the fae lines and get her back.
He dropped back his head and roared to the night sky.
He loved her and she’d left him.
He’d find her, haul her back and then…
He’d make her pay for breaking his heart.
“I’m so sorry for the confusion, Ms. Kingston. Please be assured we’ll get you back home as quick as a wink,” the faery bustling along beside Kelly assured her in a bright, chirpy, singsong voice. She was tiny, tinier even than Kelly who wasn’t exactly blessed in the height stakes, with bright wings that fluttered occasionally against her back.
“We didn’t even realize the rift had opened,” she apologized for what had to be the eleventy-billionth time since Kelly had arrived in the faery army camp and the tiny faery had been assigned as her case officer. “The mists are terribly unpredictable these days and we’ve been getting a lot of inadvertent crossings. Most of the time they’re in friendly territory, but sometimes they, well, then we have to send a team into orc territory to recover the…” She stopped suddenly, blinking. “Crosser? Crossee? Is Crossee even a word? I’m not sure it is.”
“I think it defines the situation well,” Kelly said warily, sure the little faery was, in fact, quite mad. Or she was. One or the other. Right at the moment, it didn’t matter.
A group of other faeries walked toward them, talking amongst themselves. All female, they were bigger than Talullah, her case officer, and dressed for war in mail and leather. They walked past, barely a glance toward Kelly and Tallulah, who had now conjured up a scroll and was checking down it, her lips moving as she read. Kelly was more interested in the amazonian faeries.
“For moon’s sake, Lilliana, it’s a simple plan!”
“What part of it don’t you get? We dress up in white and pretend to be claimed.”
Two of them asked one of their companions, who had a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp. “Yeah, yeah… that I get. But as one of the claimed? Really? I swear to the goddess, Marigold, the first green asshole who touches me loses a hand.”
Kelly’s breath caught in her throat. They were going into the orc camp?
Deftly, she turned the reading faery around, Tallulah barely noticing the change in direction as she continued reading. “No, no, I’m fairly certain crossee isn’t a word. Perhaps we should call you an unwilling participant in a parallel world crossing?”
She paused for a second, pursing her lips. “Rift traveler maybe? Rifaller?” she mused half to herself as Kelly carefully nudged her to start walking again, making sure to stay in hearing range of the faery amazons.
“It’s not going to get as far as any of them touching us, Lilli. We’re just going to get in, activate the f-bomb and haul it outta there.”
F Bomb. Kelly almost stumbled. They had to be talking about faery bombs. And they were going to take a faery bomb right into the orc camp?
“Tallulah…” she asked carefully as the amazons got further away. “What are the claimed?”
“Hmm?” The little faery looked up, an expression of distraction on her heart-shaped face. “The claimed? Oh, they’re our agreed tithe to the orcs. It’s an old tradition that’s only just been resurrected. We send twenty poor souls over to them as… well…” she shuddered, even to the tips of her multicolored wings. “They… they…”
“Shhhh,” Kelly cooed, soothingly. “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”
She had a very good idea of what the orcs were going to do to the faeries… the claimed. And if the claimed took the faery bomb in with them, they’d take it right past the wards.
She’d seen the after effects of those bombs. She knew what it would do to the orcs. What it would do to Graal… Claw. What it would do to Karak.
Her heart almost stopped right there in her chest as the image of her beautiful mountain of an orc lying dead, his moss green eyes open and staring sightlessly up at the sky.
“We’ll just call you a traveler!” Tallulah decided, snapping her fingers and making the scroll disappear. “Now, let’s get you back to the portal and we’ll have you home, lickety-split!”
Kelly plastered a false smile over her face as she made a life-changing decision mid-step and looped her arm through the faery’s.
“Awesome, let’s…” she said as she led the little faery into the darkness of the undergrowth.
There wasn’t a hope in hell she was going home. She couldn’t go home. Not when she had some orcs to save…
“Lord Karak. My Lord!”
A pixie, tattooed and pierced, slid to a stop a couple of feet away from Karak, sensibly well out of reach. One thing was to be said for pixies. They weren’t slow on the uptake. He’d only had to throttle four before they got the message not to get close to him.
“What?”
His glare said that whatever the pixie had to say had better be important or there would be pain in his future. And Karak could get really inventive when it came to dishing out pain. Especially now.
“The claimed are here, Captain General, sir. His Majesty insists you attend.”
Karak glowered until the pixie quailed under his gaze. The creature’s body started to shift sideways, as though trying to edge out of Karak’s sight without actually moving. If it thought it could disappear up its own ass, Karak was sure it would try to do just that.
“His Majesty can go fuck himse… don’t say it!” he snapped as the pixie’s lip twitched. He just knew the little fucker was going to come back with Batak’s own quip about impossibilities. If it did, the little shit was getting skewered here and now, damn the consequences.
“I’ll be there,” he grumbled, even though he had no interest in seeing scantily clad faeries being stripped and summarily fucked. In a move worthy of his “silver-tongued” epithet, Batak had pulled a fast one on the fae, writing into the treaty that the queen would hand over twenty young women as per the old laws. Karak pitied them. Yeah, the faery queen had insisted on the women being treated right, but right for a faery was hugely different than right for an orc.