Read Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) for Free Online

rolling onto her side made her want to vomit up what little there was in her stomach. Still, she made it upright, noticing the hand he’d had hovering behind her back only when he withdrew it. If she’d started to waver, would he have caught her, or would his Eldritch instincts have let her fall? She wanted to spit at the look on his face when they were done, and had no idea what made her angrier... that he looked concerned when he had no right to be concerned as the person responsible for this mess, or that his concern wasn’t obvious enough, since she was the one who was going to drag his sugar-pale backside out of his mess. Blood and freedom, but she hated doctors.
    “Good?” he asked after a moment, eyes resting too directly on her for her comfort.
    “Fine,” Reese said. “Check the others.”
    He studied her for a moment longer, then backed away, leaving her to take stock. Aside from a few scrapes and bruises to complement the mother blooming near her temple, she’d taken no additional harm. Her suit had been slashed across her midriff and upper arms. Her knife was missing as well as her belt; she felt the loss of both coins and chalk tablets. She could have used a chalk tablet right now, in fact... but she could have fared worse.
    Reese watched Hirianthial as he bent over Irine. He drew closer to her than she was accustomed to doctors coming, but he never touched her. After a few moments, he spread his hands above her ribs, as if setting them on a barrier that hovered a few inches above her skin. Though she couldn’t tell whether the Harat-Shar was conscious, the Eldritch was talking, and his soft words were so gently spoken they felt like blankets. It made her want to trust him—no doubt one of his Eldritch mind tricks.
    Reese gritted her teeth and directed her attention to their jail. The ground was packed earth strewn with yellow straw; there were no windows, and a wall of thick metal lattice faced the corridor. In addition to the lattice, she spotted red lights lining their door, indicating an operating halo field... not something she wanted to touch, but something Irine could possibly disarm since it didn’t encompass the entire wall. The air was stale and warm, tinted here and there with earthier scents. Their cell formed the end of the hall; all the other cells were empty. She thought of the cell she’d seen upstairs and the figure lying in the back.
    “Hirianthial,” she said—slowly. The consonants in the name seemed to exist only to add a lilt to the vowels.
    The sound of his hair against his back announced him. She wondered how he could walk without making any other noise. She didn’t like it. “There was a man upstairs.”
    “Dead,” he replied. For once the accent, the blanket-soft baritone fell flat. “Bait for me.”
    “They knew you were rooting for information.”
    “Of course. It was foolish to think otherwise.”
    Reese frowned at him. “And you stuck around?”
    “I had a duty.” A wry smile ran to the corner of his lips. “Granted, I should have remembered that part of that duty included returning to the queen with the information she sought, but even Eldritch make mistakes.”
    “Mistakes,” Reese repeated, eyeing him. “With so much at stake.”
    He shrugged, a tiny motion involving the ends of his shoulders. Had she not been watching him, she would have missed it. “I became angry.”
    “Angry?”
    He was staring out through the bars, but even in profile she could see his face change. Harden. The red of his eyes seemed less like wine and more like blood, like the color Reese saw on the inside of her eyelids when she wanted to explode. The doctor, the alien, the inconvenient object of an unwanted mission, those faces became masks, and something darker looked out. “I found a man whose tastes were repellant, even for a slaver.”
    For some reason Reese didn’t want to ask what those tastes were. She didn’t even want to ask, “What did you do to him?” but by the