Vik’tor looked angry—no,enragedwas the word I was looking for. His glowing blue eyes were blazing in the darkness and his mouth was twisted down in a sneer of pure fury. His muscular bulk seemed to have doubled in size so that he filled the whole narrow doorway and he was breathing hard, as though he had run all the way here. His eyes flickered to my face and then back to R’xs.
“You fucking bastard,” he growled, his voice thick with rage. “Youcuther!”
“Hey now, wait a minute now, your Lordship!” R’xs exclaimed, going pale in the sickly greenish light. “This is all a big misunderstanding!” As he spoke, he fumbled for the blaster on his belt.
“Watch out, Vik’tor!” I shouted. “He’s got a blaster too!”
But as it turned out, R’xs didn’t get a chance to use either the blaster or the knife. Vik’tor lunged forward and punched him in the face so hard the pimp fell backwards to sprawl across the table, where Gr’ub and Bugger were lying dead. It was getting pretty crowded in the small space, especially since two of the crowd were corpses and it looked like a third was about to join that exclusive club as well.
Before the pimp could get up again, Vik’tor was on him. He gripped R’xs’ narrow head between his big, powerful hands and stared down into the pimp’s wide eyes. R’xs’ nose was fountaining blue blood all over the front of his shirt and he was blubbering like a baby.
“Please, your Lordship!” he cried. “I wasn’treallygonna hurt the little whore!”
“Then why did I hear you talking about carving her into pieces, starting with her face?” Vik’tor demanded.
Oh my God—so he’d heard all that? I wondered how much more he had heard—from the rage on his face, it must have been quite a lot.
“It wasn’t my fault!” R’xs blubbered, snot and blood bubbling from his broken nose. “I…I was told to do it, your Lordship.Ordered, even, you might say!”
“Ordered? Bywho?”Vik’tor demanded, his grip on the other male’s skull tightening. “Tell menow!”he ordered, his voice a low, dangerous growl.
“By…by his Lordship, Master Azz’lx!” R’xs gasped. “He said…said she had to be got rid of! Said she was a…a bad influence on your Lordship!”
“A bad influence, huh?” Vik’tor’s mouth twitched up at the corner in a humorless, one-sided grin. “Well, I guess that’s true, since I’ve never killed a man for any other female.”
R’xs’ eyes widened as he comprehended the meaning of Vik’tor’s words.
“Please, your Lordship—don—” he began.
But his words were cut off by a sickeningCRACK!as Vik’tor twisted his head all the way around so that the pimp was suddenly staring at the tabletop he was sprawled across.
Vik’tor let him go and let out a roar that shook the room—that was what itfeltlike, anyway. He dropped the corpse which twitched once, convulsively, and then went limp on the table. When he looked at me, his eyes were glowing so brightly they were like two lamps in the dim room and his fangs looked as long and as sharp as knives.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” I whispered, backing away from him and making sure to keep the chair, which was still tied to my left wrist, between us.
But when he saw me trying to put some distance between us, a change came over Vik’tor’s face.
“Hey, wait a minute, baby—don’t run away.” He took a deep breath and his fangs seemed to get shorter. “I’m sorry,” he said, holding out his hands appealingly. “It’s just—I’m half Braxian, you know?”
I shook my head.
“No, Idon’tknow. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Braxians go into a kind of berserker fury if they feel like their female is being threatened,” he explained. He was looking more normal all the time, his eyes glowing less brightly and the fury in his face had turned to remorse. “I’m really sorry that I frightened you,” he told me. “That wasn’t my intention at all. I just got so…so fuckingangrythat he would dare to hurt you!”
“I could tell,” I said dryly. “I didn’t know Naggian necks bent in that direction.” I nodded at R’xs’ corpse, still sprawled across the table with his body pointing up and his face looking down.
“They’re not fucking supposed to.” Vik’tor gave a short, barking laugh. “But I’m not going to apologize for what I did,” he added, his face going abruptly dark. “He was hurting you and he was going to do a hell of a lot fucking worse if I hadn’t got to you in time.”
“That’s true,” I acknowledged. There was no point in trying to be tough and saying I could have looked out for myself. The rickety chair still tied to my left hand was no match for the knife and blaster R’xs had been packing.
Speaking of the chair, I really wanted to be rid of it now but the knot around my left wrist seemed to have gotten even tighter, so that it was cutting off the circulation to my left hand. I picked at it uselessly with my fingernails until Vik’tor said,
“Here, let me, little girl.”
He picked up R’xs’ knife, which had clattered to the floor when the pimp fell across the table and approached me.
Seeing the glitter of the knife blade in the dim lantern light, I drew back in fear. I couldn’t help it! I’d been thinking of what R’xs had done to Ger’tha and I could still feel the stinging across my forehead where he had made the first cut.