Read Charlotte Boyett-Compo- WIND VERSE- Hunger's Harmattan for Free Online Page B

any of her
children,” he stated. “She was always too self-centered to care for anyone
other than herself. We all grew up with wet nurses and nannies and myriad
servants. I spent most of my life with my father’s parents before being sent to
military school when I was seven. We all went to Soraniline Military Academy as
soon as we were old enough and then on to the Fleet Academy. It was rare we were
allowed home even on high holidays. My holidays and summers were always at my
grandparents’.” He wiped a hand over his face. “That was why I was so excited
to be assigned to my father’s ship when I got my commission. I was able to
spend two months with him without my mother demanding his attention before it
went down in flames.”
    “You were the only survivor,” she said.
    “Aye and I’ve prayed many a night that I
had died with the rest of the crew.”
    “Your time on R-9 must have been hell,” she
said softly.
    “Hell doesn’t even begin to describe it,”
he told her. “But it’s the reason my mother wants me after forty-four years of
not giving a damn if I lived or died.”
    She looked at him. He didn’t look at day
over twenty-five and she said as much.
    “And I won’t,” he said, before sliding off
the boulder and into the depths of the pool.
    She watched him swim across the milky green
water then leave the coolness of the pool for his pallet. She pushed away from
the boulder and swam underwater to the point where he’d left the pool then
stood up, shaking her long white hair behind her. She waded to the shore then
knelt down beside him. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, his arms
encircling them.
    “Reapers don’t age as you know it,” he told
her as she took up a towel he’d given her earlier and began drying her hair.
“For every year you age, I will age less than an hour.”
    Shanee had not read that in the report
she’d been given on the Reapers. She knew they could live well past two hundred
and even beyond but it had not occurred to her that a Reaper’s physical
appearance would change so little over time.
    “If you cut me, I’ll heal instantly. Stab
me and the wound will close right before your eyes. If you burn me, the flesh
will rejuvenate and my body will re-form itself to look as I did before the
flames touched it. The only true way for me to die is to have my head severed
from my body and the queen destroyed.”
    “At that rate, you could live forever,” she
said.
    “Now do you see what it is she wants from
me?” he asked.
    The knowledge came like a sharp blow to her
solar plexus and she stared at him. “One of your revenant worms!”
    He nodded. “She may think she does but she
has no idea what it is she is asking, what having a hellion inside her will do
to her. All she cares about is not dying, living for as long as she can and
having people cater to her every whim. She craves attention, thrives on
wielding power over those she considers lesser beings. She is not a good
woman.”
    “That was my impression,” Shanee admitted.
She reached out to run a hand along his bare shoulders. “Do you want to talk
about what happened to you on R-9?”
    He lowered his head. “There are only two
people I’ve ever discussed it with and one of them is Tariq. When we spoke of
it, we weren’t face-to-face. He has such power within him, ionúin, it is
hard to fathom it. In our minds, he would speak to us all without our guards
knowing. Without him encouraging us to hold on, most of us would have gone
insane.” He closed his eyes. “Some of us did and had to be put down.”
    Shanee flinched. He spoke of those poor men
as though they were animals.
    “They were,” he said, easily reading her
mind. He opened his eyes and turned to look at her. “I am.”
    “I can’t begin to imagine how you felt when
they gave you…” she frowned. “What did they call it?”
    “Transference,” he said. “They cut you open
and drop the revenant worm on the cut. The fledgling wiggles