The covers on the bed shift and bunch from the invisible enemy's stagger. The force of Grant’s panicky kick causes a thunk against the hardwood as his target connects with the bedframe.

A lavender-shaded woman melts from the air. Her head is shorn to a tight buzz cut that shows the flaps of her ungrown horns. Her eyes blaze with compulsion flash. “Freeze!”

Grant doesn’t freeze.

He launches himself out of bed into a diving tackle. 85 kilograms of enraged, terrified Maekyonite slam into the bedframe; the wood snaps into splinters and both Grant and his gasping target tumble onto the floor. Before she lands, she’s gone invisible again. Grant throws an elbow into an invisible face and is rewarded by a grunt of pain. Before he can deliver another, a knee blasts the air from his lungs.

He wheezes for breath as he flails, trying to locate an arm or a leg or a—

A tail slams into his face, hard enough to leave a burning welt across his cheek. He’s yanked onto his back. “Sykora,” he gasps, clawing against his unseen attacker. “Sykora!”

His head is twisted violently to one side and he sees his wife lying in bed. She’s twitching and whimpering. A stream of foam is pouring out of the corner of her mouth.

Bite marks in her neck.

Grant’s arm snaps protectively up to his throat; it roundhouses into something that feels like a face, and there’s a yelp as a weight departs him. He lunges, trying to catch an invisible limb, but finds only thin air. He pushes upright, eyes wild, scanning the dark.

The room door opens. Quartermaster Kymai, shirtless in a pair of silk pajama pants, stands in the rectangle of light. A heavy pistol is in his hands. “Majesty?”

“Kymai!” Grant throws his hand out. “There’s a—”

The arm holding the gun twists as the assassin tries to tear the gun from Kymai’s hand. The quartermaster drops to the floor and Grant cries out—

But Kymai does not let go of the gun. He’s rolling with the motion, Grant sees, and he isn’t being borne to the ground; he’s hitting a takedown.

Grant’s mind catches up to his eyes with the whiplash realization that Quartermaster Kymai is fucking jacked. What Grant took for dumpiness in a uniform is revealed to be thick, brutal muscle. He’s never seen a man whose body looks like this outside of grainy professional wrestling tapes.

Kymai comes up on his knees, straddling the invisible woman. Grant seizes a piece of the wooden bed and swings it in an arc in front of him. “Back,” Kymai barks. “Back, Majesty. Find cover, move the Princess. Eyes shut.”

Grant seizes Sykora from the bed and drags her behind a heavy stone dresser. Will this be enough cover? He has no idea.

Kymai’s gun weaves erratically as he battles with the invisible woman; a bright, tearing BANG lights the room in a split-second day. A howl sounds; blood is leaking from thin air. Kymai’s unoccupied hand shoots to his side and binds across his body as his invisible enemy grapples him. His anticomps go flying off his face. He stomps hard onto the floor; the air cries out.

The woman appears again, her arm winged and pouring blood, her eyes flaring. Her tail is trapped under Kymai’s heel. Flash. “Kill yourself,” she snarls.

But Kymai slammed his eyes shut the instant his anticomps were pulled off, and she has only milliseconds to duck and twist away from the replying bullet he sends her voice’s way. She yanks at her tail as she goes invisible again; Kymai’s leg slips into the air as her tail darts from beneath his foot.

Kymai brings his foot back down into a spread-out stance. He takes a deep, chest-expanding breath. His eyes remain tightly shut.

He lets out an explosive exhale as his head powers forward and down, like a bullet-fast bow, horns whistling; a pained grunt sounds. Kymai’s gun-hand moves with lightning speed and another bright, cacophonous flash summons a plume of dark blood out of midair.

The woman’s invisibility falters. She drops to the floor, thrashing and gasping with a hole in her stomach. Her nose is busted open and leaking blood from Kymai’s headbutt. She scrambles backward. “Wait—”

Kymai shoots her twice between the eyes.

“We’re clear, Prince,” he calls. “Put Her Majesty on the bed, please.”

Grant staggers to his feet and carries Sykora out from cover. Her twitches have exacerbated into violent thrashes. She isn’t moaning anymore; her face is flushed with blood. A bubbling whine where there should be the sound of her breathing.

“Sykora.” Grant’s dizzy and unthinking with panic, clutching her as he lays her back down on the bed. “Kora. No, no no no. Batty. Look at me.”

“Majesty. Majesty.” Kymai tugs at his shoulder. There’s a slim syringe applicator in his hand. “Please move out of the way.”

Grant stumbles backward away from his dying wife. Kymai slams an applicator into her chest and pushes the plunger in.

Sykora thrashes violently, gasps like a drowning woman, and lets out a deluge of wet coughs. She rolls onto her side and shudders with them. “God fucking—” she begins, and then another coughing fit interrupts her epithet.

“God fucking dammit,” she finishes, in a ragged scrap of a voice.

“You’re okay. Holy shit. You’re okay.” Grant clings to her. “I was so fucking scared.”

“Don’t be afraid.” Sykora’s voice is more like a wheeze. Her hand reaches shakily up into his. “Just a few minutes. I’ll be right as rain.” She touches his stinging cheek. “Oh, dove. Your face. What the hell happened?”

“There was an assassin. She’s dead.” Grant forces his breathing to slow and manages to iron some of the shaking out of it. “I’m okay. I’m good. Honestly. Thanks to Kymai. I swear to God, Quartermaster, you’re a—” Grant looks over at the Quartermaster, who has turned away and is facing a corner like he’s in a Blair Witch situation. “What are you doing?”

“You are both naked, Majesties,” Kymai says.

Sykora sputters a hacking laugh that sets off another fit. She wraps the sheet over herself like a toga. “I’m not—” she manages, through the convulsive coughs. “Grant, can—”

Grant cradles the wrapped-up Sykora in his lap. “You can turn around, Kymai.”

Kymai scoops his anticomps off the floor and places them over his face. Then he turns and bows.

“Majesties,” he says. “My deepest regrets that I could not secure your attacker for questioning.”

“What the fuck, Kymai? You’re a badass.” Grant stares agog at the fussy Quartermaster. “Where did you get—what did you put in Sykora?”

Kymai gestures to a satchel on the floor. “The antivenom was in her effects. I presumed it would be required; she’d coated her fangs with the toxin. Would you pass me a sheet, please?”

Grant mutely does so.

Kymai drapes it over the dead assassin. “Crag frog venom, I’d guess. An old standby.”

“Hellfire.” Sykora reaches gingerly for her reddened neck. She spits an ugly brownish gob onto the bed. “I owe you my life, gentlemen. My heroes.”

“His Majesty is a hero.” Kymai drops the shell casings into his pocket. “This is simply my occupation.”

Grant prods the satchel with his foot. “How did that bag go invisible with her?”

Kymai lifts it by the strap. “It is made of skin, Majesty.”

“Skin, like… Taiikari skin?”

“Yes, Majesty.”

Grant stares at the toe that made contact with the Taiikari-skin bag.

Footsteps and indistinct voices come pounding down the hallway. Kymai snaps back into trained-killer mode, flattened against the wall with his pistol raised up to the door jamb.

“Majesty!” A panicky voice echoes into the room. “We heard gunfire.” Simund comes round the corner. “Is—”

“Stop.” Kymai raises the hand that isn’t full of firearm in a palm-out freezing motion. “Hands visible. Remain where you are.”

Simund’s bruise-purple goes ashy as he stares down the pistol. His hands raise above his head. He sees the bloody lump below the sheet in the center of the room. “What’s happened?”

“An assassination attempt.” Sykora straightens her back and muffles the cough it causes. “Get me the Marquess.”

“She’s, uh—” Simund glances at Kymai. “May I move, sir?”

Kymai nods, but doesn’t lower the pistol.

Simund steps backward, out of the room and into its threshold. “Madame,” he calls. “The Princess requires you.”

Murmured conference. Marquess Reka peeks around the doorjamb.

“Majesty.” Her voice is quavering.

“Marquess.” With every second Sykora’s steely mien is reasserting itself. “There has been an attempt on my life.”

“I—it—please accept my gravest apologies.” Reka blinks rapidly. “I assure you, this is—”

“Your infrascope painter was inactive.” Sykora plows over the stuttering Marquess. “What time is it?”

Kymai’s lowered his gun, but he remains alert. “0400, Majesty.”

“All right.” Sykora wraps her impromptu bedclothes tighter. “The Prince and I are returning to the Black Pike. We’ll spend the night there. You have five hours, Marquess, to conduct a preliminary audit of your security system and deliver it to my Majordomo. I don’t expect a clear and definitive conclusion in that time, but I require, at minimum, a convincing explanation of how this failure occurred on your watch, and the actions you’re taking to continue the investigation.”

“Of course, Majesty.” Reka inches further into the room, eyes boggled at the sight of the covered corpse. “Of course. We’ll take every pain.”

“See that you do,” Sykora says. Her voice is still scratched raw by her earlier coughing fits. “I will be returning to Tamion’s surface in the afternoon. I dearly hope that I will have a satisfactory report in hand, and my return will be in friendship, and I’ll tour your facility without incident. Although the fabricators will need to accommodate a section of marines, as well. I trust that will be acceptable.”

“Uh, yes. Yes, Majesty. More than acceptable.”

“If I do not have a satisfactory report, I will be returning for a different reason. Neither of us want that. Step out, now, Marquess. I’m putting my clothes on.”

Reka disappears back into the hallway. Sykora licks her dry lips and slides out of Grant’s lap with a tight squeeze of his wrist. Kymai averts his eyes as she lets the sheet drop and finds her discarded dress. “We’re going home,” she whispers to Grant. “Get dressed. Stay close. We’re almost home.”

He reassembles his hastily-removed suit.

“We will be taking the corpse with us,” Sykora straps her heels back on. “We’ll share what findings seem prudent.”

“Thank you, Majesty.” Reka is battling for calm in the hallway. The whispered conversations continue beneath her. “And I swear to you that I had no knowledge of anything, or, or—”

“If I had good reason to believe you did, I would already have detained you, Reka.” Sykora’s tail zips her dress up. She picks up the lumpen satchel by the corpse and gestures to it. “Have your people bring that body to my shuttle, Marquess. Let’s retrieve your uniform and be gone from here, Kymai.”

Their shockingly lethal Quartermaster bows and leads them out of their room, past Marquess Reka and a row of her terrified subjects. Sykora muffles another cough as they depart. Grant puts a hand at her back. Her tail finds his forearm and cinches tight around it.

***

Grant and Sykora ride the lift back to their cabin in bleary, closeknit silence. He’s got a cold compress pushed up against. his face. She’s got a bottle of pain meds and a neck wrapped in gauze.

“The food was good.” Grant breaks the silence.

“The food was good,” Sykora says.

“Service could have been better.”

Her rough-grained laugh draws a wince out of her. He rubs her shoulders. The lift opens and they shuffle back into the safety of their cabin. Sykora fills a glass from the kitchen and swallows her meds with it. “I am going to relish returning to that world with a wall of marines,” she rasps. “Reka got far too chummy with me. You weren’t thinking of partnering with her, were you?”

Grant adjusts the cold compress as he slides into bed. “God, no.”

“Good.” Sykora smooths down the bandage on her chest and slouches down next to him. “We’ll make a shortlist tomorrow. I’ll give you all the help you like.”

Her leg folds across him. He caresses her knee. His face still stings, but he’s already feeling better. “Did you know Kymai was some kind of badass?”

“Oh, yes.” She clears her throat. “He’s the only one aboard the Pike who could beat me in hand-to-hand combat, I think.”

“Is this some kinda need to know thing?”

“He doesn’t like it spread around. It embarrasses him, and every time a marine finds out, they always ask him to train them.”

Grant recalls the taut, swift violence Kymai dealt. “Not such a bad idea, the way he moved.”

“Perhaps not.” Sykora manages a smile. “But it would get in the way of cooking, and I really don’t want him to stop cooking. He might experience some kind of critical stress reaction and implode on the deck. I have several hundred trained killers on the Black Pike. I only have one Kymai. He’d very much appreciate it if you pretended that this unfortunate morning never happened.”

“That’s a strong overall policy, I think.”

Sykora nods. “With the exception of a ruthless pursuit of our dead woman’s coconspirators.”

Grant gingerly removes the cold compress and underhands it out of the bed onto the cabin floor. “Can I just… can I leave that there?”

“Mmhmm.” She curls into him. “My hero.” She sniffs. “You’re my hero.”

A tear drops onto his chest. He holds her tighter. “All I did was get my ass kicked and scream loud enough.”

“I am going to extract that humility from you, Grantyde,” she whispers, and presses a finger to his chest, over his heart. “This time next decacycle, you’ll see. Your head is going to be as swollen as my belly.”

He kisses her forehead and tries to ignore the wincing pain in his face. “Tonight. Was this about the daemon, do you think?”

“There’s many reasons someone might want me dead,” she says. “And patterns and connections are seductive. The only thing I know for sure right now is that I intend to sleep until noon. Perhaps we’ll have an identification by then from what’s left of our attacker’s face.”

He shudders.

Her grip tightens in response. “Poor dove,” she murmurs. “Another death in front of you. I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“I don’t,” he says. “She tried to kill my wife? Fuck her. I only wish I’d pulled the trigger myself.”

“You don’t mean that.”

He sighs. “I don’t, I guess. But I’m fine, I swear.”

“I’m not.” She shuts her eyes and presses her forehead to his. “I am fucked up. But I’ll fall asleep in my husband’s arms.”

Her shoulders loosen. The trembly tension is finally, finally departing her.

“And I’ll feel better,” she whispers.