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Mita ducked back around the shelter of his legs with a suitably vile curse.
She was acquitting herself well enough with that light bolter of hers, keeping the hit squad of inquisitorial forces at bay while he was reloading his own weapon.
‘Ten of them alive, even spread, one psyker on the left’, she reported with clipped, precise motions of her hands while Sahaal threw one of their remaining grenades towards the right side of the abandoned manufactorum hall. His little witch slotted herself more solidly behind his bulk to avoid the shrapnel.
A moment’s pause, then a loud bang. A look of focus flitted over her face as she stretched her mental fingers in search of their enemies.
‘Six alive, one burning. Focus left.’
Good. ‘Stay here, cover me against the witch’.
Better to finish this now, before their enemies could regroup or reinforcements arrived.
Instead of wasting time on a reply, he could feel Mita settle over his mind, a chainmail cloak ready to harden into bladed auramite, should he need it. It left her vulnerable, to lay her focus on him so strongly. But it also worked very, very well.
He vaulted over their cover and straight into a new burst of enemy fire. Light rounds and lasgun shots plunged and scattered over his armour, only to be ignored completely as Sahaal wove between the latticework of pillars and shadows that tricked the human eye.
Firing solutions overlaid his helmet display, but he ignored them. The Inquisition knew what he was. He didn’t need to be subtle. He needed to send a message. A charge crackled down his fighting claws.
Another leap and he was among them. The first agent didn’t even have time to scream, chest and shoulder crushed to paste under Sahaal’s feet. The claws dug into the rockcrete, grip holding through the slippery paste of organ meat, to let him launch at the next one before she could finish fumbling with her grenade.
He had a dispassionate impression of youth, dark eyes, before her head went flying, wound cauterized by his claws.
He spun, gauntlet intercepting a hail of las shot streaking at his face. Three of the agents had gathered into a firing squad, discipline holding despite the fear rolling off of them. Their discipline held even as he came for them, shouldering through their impromptu barricade like it was spiderwebs and parchment.
A metal grate crushed one of them against the floor, head flattened into a crimson flower. The other two died together, still trying to fall back with some coordination, instead of in a blind panic. It was a rather admirable display for mortals.
It also didn’t matter. A heavy bolter shell glanced off Sahaal’s pauldron as he closed on the two, claws sinking back into their sheaths to instead let him just punch his fist through the body armour and ribs, grab hold of the spinal column and twist, slamming the twitching, dying body of one soldier into the other, breaking bones in both of them.
His claws sprang free again, electricity racing along the blades into the corpse impaled on his fist and out the side, where they had slid deep into the last soldier’s ribcage.
For a moment, they both twitched with the violent charge the claws fed them, then he dropped the smoking piles of meat.
The psyker - interrogator, he knew their heraldry now - scrambled back from the destroyed barricade and tried to send his mind at him. Behind his helmet, Zso Sahaal grinned. His witch could have that one.
He felt the impact of mind against mind, the interrogator clawing at the shield Mita wrapped around him and finding it not just resilient but hostile. The configuration of it shifted, non-newtonian fluid hardening into spikes and blades that cut into a mind clearly unprepared for such a defense.
The interrogator flinched, tried again, except this time Mita came to meet him in the battlefield of mind and souls.
Sahaal felt her slip forward, a blade-limbed, quicksilver wraith that embraced their enemy and started shredding his mind apart with swords and teeth composed of soul-stuff.
Sahaal could take his time now, slowly approaching the psyker writhing on the floor. First just in pain, then in great, heaving contortions that arched his back, finally in spasms so hard they cracked his joints and bones with their strength. Mita was taking her time, and he saw no reason to make her hurry in this.
The interrogator collapsed in a disorderly pile of limbs, a puppet with its strings not just cut, but all its joints loosened too. Still alive, if only just.
Bloodshot eyes rolled in their sockets, but Mita had cramped the man’s jaws far past the breaking point. His teeth were splinters, his jaw fractured. He tried to speak anyway, and that was when his little witch lost patience.
He felt her lean against his mind again, glowing with satisfaction at her kill, felt her reach out and twist, until a great rush of bloody cerebral fluid gushed out of the man’s nose, his final thought a curse at them both.
Mita was all but purring, her contented sound only disturbed by the mewling of the last, burnt survivor of the group.
Sahaal tugged on her perception to call her over. It was time his witch learnt how the VIIIth sent its messages.
–
They were more careful after that, and yet. A second, then a third strike team found them, each one better equipped than the last.
“We have to get off planet.” Mita paced the length of their little hide-away, waiting for the ceramite filler to dry on his helmet, pauldrons and arms. The better equipped teams had left their marks.
She was getting good at handling that part of an artificer’s work - soon she would be ready for some plate of her own, in some sea-dark color - the same way Sahaal was getting better at barricading his mind to anyone Not-Her under her tutelage, both of them teaching and armouring the other.
It was a delicate balance with the familiar sense of brotherhood about it.
“We can’t. Not while they follow us this closely.” This, too, was familiar to him; Sahaal guarding the back of his impulsive siblings. But the point still stood. They needed breathing room, not this tightening noose.
“I know. Damn it all to the warp thrice over, I know. I just don’t know how to shake them.” Her frustration spiked the air around her, not unlike a sandstorm.
“Could they track you with another psyker?” His little witch was using her gifts liberally these days, and while Sahaal could appreciate her skill, he had wondered before…
“No, not at this range. Too many false positives.” But it gnawed at her, he could tell. She chewed the insides of her mouth the same way she chewed over a thought.
“The Inquisition uses tracker implants. Sometimes.” The words came slowly, reluctantly, the coarse whirl of her frustration dispersed into confused eddies.
Sahaal just stared at her, long enough to make her freeze up at the other side of the room like she’d only just recalled what kind of predator she shared her life with.
“You think of that now?!”
“I don’t recall ever getting a tracker implant.” Her shoulders came up in defense.
“You think I remember all my implantations?” The last few ones, yes, but even then only diffusely, the dizzy pain of waking up afterwards clearer than the procedures themselves.
His words came out a growl, but how else was he supposed to handle that she might have had a tracker under her skin the entire time?
Still, Mita bristled into a wordless hiss at him, teeth bared like she really had the fangs that would suit her so well.
As much as he liked seeing her like this, it didn’t solve their problem.
“Which of your scars do you not remember getting?” Which ones had been erased from her mind?
Mita shook her head. “That won’t help. The Inquisition has biomancers. They could heal an injury without a trace.”
Her snarl softened into that pensively chewed mouth again.
“But it wouldn’t be a limb, probably, and it can’t sit too deep…”
She looked down her body, as if there wasn’t a much more reliable way to check this.
“Hold still.” He was across the room quickly enough to startle her, but when Sahaal picked her up and pressed her chest against the wall, augmentic pinning her in place as gently as he could, she did not lash out, even though he was behind her, making her so vulnerable.
Her psykana flickered, then settled around his mind in the gentlest constriction. A threat, but only that. Good enough.
Mita had said it wouldn’t be in her limbs, but the only one he trusted that assessment for was the augmentic arm he’d watched her get.
So he did run his flesh hand over her mortal arm, from wrist to shoulder, with enough pressure that he’d feel the hard metal of a tracker buried inside her, if there was one.
Then down over her back, keeping her in place even as she squirmed under his hand with a half-breathless complaint of ‘Ticklish!’ when his hand followed the curve of her waist down to her hips.
“I told you to hold still. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You could put me down.” Mita turned to face him as much as she could, a little smudge of dirt on her jaw now. There was some expression on her he couldn’t spare the time to decipher right now.
“You’re too short to do this differently.” Sahaal had pinned her more than a foot off the ground to make this less of a hassle. Somehow, that only made her squirm more, trying to turn to him fully.
“Hold still.”
His augmentic pressed down a fraction more, just for a moment. It’d be too easy to break her ribs in this position, or crush muscle in a way that would kill her two days from now when her kidneys shut down.
“You could kneel.”
This time he could read her voice, and her expression: teasing. Cutting at him with the bluntest of blades to make her disagreement with the situation known, without tightening her grasp on his mind.
Sahaal sighed, and leaned in until his mouth was very nearly brushing the shell of her ear, letting his half-offense at her suggestion seep into his voice.
“No.”
And then he was back to his task, free hand firmly running down her leg. The muscle of her thighs would make a good place to hide a tracker, no matter what she thought.
At least she stopped squirming, though the way she stilled and held her breath when his fingers pressed down on the inside of her thighs prickled at his mind more than her squirming had. There was fear there, almost animal-basic, and he could tell from the ebb and rise of it in her scent that this witch was trying to argue herself out of it.
Would it help to tell her, again, that he meant her no harm here? But words were just that, noises with alleged meaning attached; the only real proof lay in action. Except here it would have to be the absence of action instead.
So once he was satisfied that the rest of her limbs were as free of implants as her augmentic, Sahaal set her back down on the floor. Mita turned to face him, expression - and mind - carefully closed, withdrawing from him. She was waiting, stress hormones in her scent slowly ramping up instead of fading away as he’d hoped. With a sigh that likely sounded exactly as annoyed as he felt, Sahaal sank to his knees. If this was what she required….
Realistically, it made no difference at all. They both knew he could destroy her in a blink, no matter if he loomed over her or not. But it felt different, being of a height with Mita.
It felt almost alien when he grabbed her by the hips and lifted her to stand on his armoured thighs, the ceramite of his cuisses smooth enough to force her to balance herself back against the wall. He’d never been shorter than her before.
But it worked as intended, her fear melting down into surprise long enough that he’d managed to work his hand over the front of her legs before she could tense up again.
Unfortunately, it meant that by the time his organic hand started down from her shoulder, she was well past surprise and more than capable of growling at him. Sahaal paused, hand stilled just over the curve of her breast, half an answering growl in his throat before he shook the reflex off and just arched a brow at her. Was she going to be difficult about this?
She settled, so evidently not. Or perhaps it would be more right to say that she wasn’t, but her clothing made up for the difference.
Whatever she wore as a breastband was firm enough to hide something as small as a tracker, and he said as much, earning himself more grumbling.
“Don’t drop me?”
As if he would do that.
Granted, it took him a moment to understand what exactly she was doing, writhing in her clothes, one arm vanishing into its respective sleeve before coming back out with a small pin - and then moments later Mita just pulled the entire length of fabric free from underneath her blouse with a triumphant ‘hah’. The fabric flew to the side.
“There, now you can’t complain.”
“There was no complaint.” He had merely noted that her clothing was in the way.
Which it wasn’t anymore, letting him continue his examination.
Without the breastband holding everything in place, Mita’s body was softer, tissue moving under the pressure of his hand the way it usually didn’t. Or maybe he just usually didn’t notice it because of the gauntlets. He had not made it a habit to paw at her either way, but he’d already found that his extensive experience at tormenting people hardly compared to carrying his witch up a wall or leaning close to teach her the finer points of armour repair. There had been some growing tension there, like fear but not, closer to the anticipation of battle.
Sahaal pushed these thoughts from his mind before they could slow him down. His hand continued down, over the harder resistance of her sternum to the padded, vulnerable softness of her stomach.
He didn’t get any further.
Hidden behind a screen of subcutaneous fat and the firmer wall of her rectus abdominis, something solid sat.
He pressed down a bit harder, enough to make Mita flinch back - and then press close again, her own fingers probing next to his.
Her face scrunched up into concentrated focus as he showed her the outlines of the thing inside her. It was small, even on her scale, a square no longer than the last digit of her middle finger on each side.
“Warpspit and piss, they did implant a tracker” Mita pressed down on the spot once more before clearly losing patience and all but tearing her blouse off. It nearly unbalanced her onto the floor, not that she seemed to care about that - or about this augmentic hand on her waist keeping her steady, or her nakedness. She was much too focused on examining the seemingly pristine skin of her stomach.
“How do we get that out?”
For all her sharpness - and his witch was very sharp - Mita could sometimes miss the most obvious solution.
“We cut it out.”
Sahaal didn’t have his lightning claws on, but that could be changed, except Mita picked up that thought. Her hand shot out to dig into the muscle of his neck, hard enough for him to feel the semi-circle pressure of her nails.
“Not the claws. Absolutely not the claws.”
Her voice had gone hard, rigid with fear underneath.
“Why not? It will char the wound so you don’t bleed.”
Surely she would see sense. He could of course just hold her down and do it regardless of her protesting, but part of him balked at that.
Not because her witchcraft would make it more of a struggle - even though it would - but because it seemed… disrespectful. He was no apothecary, who could force his brothers to bend to his will and not expect revenge for it. Mita was the closest thing to a clawmate a mortal could be. She deserved more consideration than a mewling slave.
“Because I don’t want a charge like that in my guts? Do you know what that could do to me?”
“...Yes?” Better than she knew, most likely. He’d have to keep her restrained, but Mita was such a slip of a girl. It wouldn’t be hard.
“Still. Not the claws.” Her jaw set firmly, mouth turned down as she considered her options. “Can you do it with a knife?”
For a moment, Sahaal wondered if that was a real question, but she just looked at him, eyes wide and mouth pursed.
“Of course.”
She nodded once, the motion sharp and sudden, before leaning more solidly against the wall, leaving herself open from throat to hip. It was as much an invitation as it could possibly be.
Sahaal worked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in a long swipe to gather the faintest trace of Betcher’s gland acid and then leaned forward, licking over the skin he would have to cut into to excise the tracker.
It made Mita squirm again, hands - one warm flesh, one cool metal - bracing on his shoulders as she struggled to stay still.
When he leaned back, her skin was inflamed red, but whatever germs might have lived on it were dead, and there were none that could live in such a poisonous environment as an Astartes’ mouth to replace them.
The edge of his knife got the same treatment, just enough acid to remove any contaminants from the surface, without damaging the metal.
There was a butterfly wing flutter of interest-embarrassment from Mita at the sight of that, something he filed away to interrogate her on later. Now they had other things to do.
“Don’t move now.”
“I’m trying.” Her little claws dug into his shoulders again, but even her augmentic didn’t break the skin. It was her mind he had to trust her to restrain as he set the tip of his knife against her skin and pressed down the slightest bit.
The blade was sharp enough that her flesh took a moment to bleed, red only running down her skin as he pressed deeper.
The tracker was below the first layer of muscle, Sahaal had been able to tell that by feel alone. So he cut through it, fast enough that Mita had no time to flinch or tense before he had cut deep enough to see the capsule of scar tissue that surrounded the thing.
That certainly made it easier.
A slice down along the edge of the capsule - her metal hand vice-tight against his shoulder, slowly sinking into his skin, the flesh one smothering a gasp of pain - then another horizontal one that strobed an echo of her pain into his mind before she smothered that, too.
He could start lifting the capsule up and truly cut it free now. Blood dripped down Mita’s stomach, the scent of her suffering rolled over him with each inhale… but not fear. Even now, with his blade in her body, she trusted him not to cut any deeper than he had to.
He wouldn’t, for all that some idle, hungry part of him wondered what she would do if he left a true mark on her. Not the scar of a necessary surgery, but one of belonging, a claim carved into her for all to see.
“Sahaal.” Mita swallowed above him, voice shivering with pain, but shivering in the way a plasteel cable might in the gale: responsive, not fragile.
He met her eyes, blade hovering less than a hair’s width from her quivering flesh.
“If you do that, I’ll be doing the same to you.”
It wasn’t a threat, merely fact. That was alright with him. An equal exchange of marks… felt right, the way their matching augmentics felt right, another facet of their mirror-images aligning.
Without looking away - without blinking - he leaned in, mouthed at the trail of blood soaking into the hem of her pants, up to the wound he’d given her.
She wasn’t blinking either, the weight of her attention a silk ribbon around his neck, tightening further as his omophagaea kicked in. She wanted this, wanted him, wanted to belong and to own, wanted the scales between them equalized in blood.
Their eyes were still locked across the shivering expanse of her body when he pushed his tongue into the bleeding cut on her stomach, muscles quivering against his as her body was strung between the pain of what he was doing to her and the weight of what it meant. Her metal hand clenched at the same time, claws cutting until they met the resistance of his carapace and he welcomed the sweetness of that pain, of both of them bleeding together.
She was screaming, the vowels of his name melting into a cry of pain, but she wasn’t refusing him, his mind awash in the mire of needs that tore her this way and that. Mita wanted this, wanted his mark, wanted her mark on him. The sculpted nails of her augmentic raked along his carapace, five pulsing lines of fire that matched the motion of his tongue against the inside of her skin. She wanted away from the pain but instead she was pushing into it.
His tongue curled under the hard, foreign body of the tracker, prying it loose more through strength than finesse, teeth cutting into his own tongue now, mixing their blood together as the damned implant slowly came free.
With a sound like the rending of sodden fabric, the last of the scar tissue let go. A gush of blood filled his mouth where he’d pressed it against her stomach, eyes still rolled up at her, fixed between the channel of her breasts and the next blood-carried thought that crystallized into his mind, hot and musky with desire, was where else she wanted him to put his mouth.
Before, the thought would have been confusing at best, most likely insulting… Now, with the proof of their commitment dripping down their bodies, there was something… enticing to the idea of drinking her down like that. Not now, but… perhaps he would consider that idea later, when they were somewhere safer.
Now he just wanted to deal with the tracker. The capsule of it sat loose on his tongue, easy to pull out of the body.
Of course Mita was still bleeding freely. The mutations that had made her a witch did little to strengthen her physical body, and she knew it, too.
Her organic hand pressed firmly down on the incision, trying to stem the bleeding without getting very far, while he spat the tracker to the side. They’d have a use for this later.
He had a witch to fix first. Sahaal’s teeth cut into the inside of his mouth once more to fill it with hot, rapidly clotting blood.
He pulled her hand away from the wound and leaned in once more. What he meant to do swirled right at the surface of his mind, easy for her to grasp and understand.
This time she would not lose any part of her to his teeth.
No, this time he licked a thick mouthful of blood into her wound, letting it clot there and close her wound in a way her human body could not have done.
By the time he leaned back, both their bleeding had been stemmed. Instead, five newly granulated, deep grooves in the shape of her augmentic fingers decorated his shoulders, skin and muscle marked in a way that would last.
It was her turn to hold his gaze as she lifted her bloodied hand from him. Scrapes of tissue clung to its clawed points, blood clotted into soft stalactites. Her mind focused, sank into his as Mita brought her augmentic to her mouth and sucked the digit clean of his gore.
Distantly Sahaal wondered if there was some witch way to offer her that which his organs did for him on their own: an intimate view into memories.
But primarily, like the moon eclipsing a star, her thoughts rolled over him, the faint disgust at the texture of clotted blood subsumed under her desire to consume - to consummate - their bond in blood, the way all bonds should be.
His throat worked with the ghost sensations of hers, swallowing down the thinning remains of blood until she dropped her augmentic hand to her side. Bright crimson smeared her mouth, and for a split second, Sahaal slipped fully into her mind, saw himself kneeling there, chin and bodyglove stained: a study of hunger in white and black and red. Their shared focus tilted, shifted, and he knew that she could see herself now, blooded, bloodied, and no less hungry than he was.
Mita broke the contact with a hiccuped little breath, cheeks coloring in unneeded embarrassment. But if his witch wanted to pretend that she’d not seen and been seen, he could allow her that pretense to secrecy for now. Hunting always required patience. And perhaps, by the time she would let herself be caught again, he’d know what to do with a prize like this, too.
Slowly, carefully, he lifted her off his thighs, hands on her waist until she was sure her legs would hold her.
The tracker was still there, but now, free from her flesh, it could be made useful for their plans.
“So, rat or pigeon?” Mita looked down at the bloody lump of tech that had been inside her. Sahaal found that he liked the haughty note in her voice, and more, that he liked the way their minds ran parallel so often these days.
“Neither. It would be too easy to figure out. We’ll slip it into someone’s luggage in the space port. That should tie them up long enough.”