“Yes,” she whispered in a voice that trembled only a little. “Yes, I’ll come with you.”
“Good.” Rarev rose as smoothly and gracefully as he had dropped to his knees. “There’s no time to lose—let’s go!”
5
“Wait!” Em exclaimed, just as they were about to charge out the back door of her flat.
“What is it?” Rarev turned his head, frowning at her, his blaster in one hand.
“You can’t kill them—any of them,” Em said earnestly. “They may be a bloody nuisance, but they’re still my constituents! Also, if you kill someone, the Press are going to make you out to be a monster—they’ll vilify your entire race!”
“Very true.” He nodded thoughtfully. “You’re very wise, Minister Oxley.”
“No, I’ve just been in public service long enough to know what people are like,” Em said grimly. “Can you get us out of here and to your ship without killing anyone, do you think?”
“I can, but I’m afraid it means letting the human mob get a lot closer than I’d like.” He frowned. “I do have a personal shielding device I can activate—you’re so small, I’m sure I can share it with you as long as you stay close.”
Em did her best not to snort at this—it wasn’t ladylike. But she had not often been referred to as “small” before, especially in the tabloids.
“All right,” she said blandly, managing to keep a straight face. “I’ll stick close by.”
He frowned—again, an expression that was most visible in his golden eyes.
“I don’t mean you should stay by my side—I mean you’ll have to touch me at all times. If we lose contact, the shield won’t cover you. In fact, you’d better put an arm around me and I’ll put mine around you.”
Em might have protested this intimacy—especially after the way he’d been looking at her earlier—if the situation wasn’t so dire. As it was, however, she felt she had no choice.
So she didn’t complain when Rarev drew her close to his side, looping his muscular left arm securely around her shoulders. It felt rather awkward to Em to be so close to him when he was little more than a stranger, but this was literally a matter of life or death. So she put her right arm around his trim waist, noticing as she did so that he was extremely warm and he smelled absolutely amazing.
“I’m going to keep my blaster out,” Rarev told her. “I won’t use it unless I have to. But if the humans threaten you or try to take you from me, I will shoot them.”
“But you can’t—” Em began.
“Look at me, Emilia…” He ducked his head to look into her eyes. “Your safety comes before everything else. I’ll kill them all before I let a single one of them touch you—do you understand?”
“I understand,” Em said rather breathlessly. Since entering the life of a public servant, she’d had plenty of bodyguards protecting her, but none of them had ever talked to her like this. The Monstrum Commander might be arrogant, but he was also very self-assured, she couldn’t help thinking.
Rarev nodded.
“Good. Then let’s go.”
They pushed out the back door and Em saw at once that the back garden was rapidly filling up with angry protesters. Some had bricks in their hands and some had bats—one or two had knives. She blessed the fact that guns were much harder to come by in the UK than they were in some other countries she could name, but she would be just as dead, no matter what instrument did the dirty work, if they got at her.
“There she is!” one of the protestors shouted and the lot of them turned to see her and Rarev leaving the flat.
They were almost all men, Em saw. Women, as a whole, weren’t nearly as upset about the Kindred Bride Draft, or the Monstrum joining it. That was probably because in the ten years since they had been protecting the Earth, stories of the way the Kindred treated their wives had leaked out. In a word, the big alien warriors treated their women like goddesses—something that couldn’t be often said of human males.
“Look—she’s got one of them with her!” another protestor—a man with a red face and a great, round beer gut shouted. “Beast fucker!” he snarled and threw the brick he was clutching right at Em’s face.
Em barely had time to flinch before the projectile bounced off an invisible barrier which seemed to be just inches from the end of her nose.
The shield—it must be the shield! she thought, amazed at the alien technology.
Rarev’s arm tightened around her and he snarled at the man, his upper lip curling to reveal two long, sharp fangs exactly like a lion’s.
“Try that again, human, and you’ll be sorry,” he growled, narrowing his golden eyes at the protestor with the beer gut.
The man stumbled back a step, his eyes going wide. But other protestors were there to fill the gap he’d left.