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If there was one thing worse than waking up to explosions, it was waking up to screaming. Unless, of course, it was the joyous sound of Bloodwing plucking out a few eyeballs from Hyperion soldiers. But the shrill shrieking that Mordecai jolted awake to was not that—Bloodwing was sitting in the window keeping up her constant watch. It was those fucking varkids.
Mordecai swore and staggered to his feet, blindly groping along the wall for his sniper rifle. Instead, he caught his foot on it (having apparently knocked it over in last night’s drunken celebrations) and only managed to desperately grab onto the ledge of Bloodwing’s window to steady himself.
“So loud…so angry,” he mused to himself. He shook the lingering remnants of sleep from his eyes and clambered through the open window and onto the outside circular balcony of his watchtower, landing surprisingly deftly for someone who had just tripped spectacularly.
“So dead.”
Bloodwing fluttered to his shoulder and gave his ear an affectionate nibble as he hoisted the sniper up and leveled his eye through the scope to silence those noisy fuckers.
He laughed as he watched two of them explode from his shots, but then he caught sight of a figure flitting among them. She was fast, built light and lean, her hair an unnatural shade of blue, perhaps meant to draw attention away from the similarly colored tattoos that ran from her left hand up to her neck.
A Siren.
Who was purposefully setting the varkids on fire.
Suddenly understanding, Mordecai grinned slightly and turned on his ECHO communicator. It flickered to life as reluctantly as its owner had awoken from his post-celebration slumber.
“Hey there, Vault Hunter,” he spoke into it.
The woman did not acknowledge his message immediately, instead choosing to stomp harshly down on a wriggling varkid’s head. Though he could not hear it from this distance, he saw her head tilt back and she laughed delightedly.
Oh, he liked her.
“Welcome to the Crimson Raiders,” he continued. “I might have celebrated a little too hard last night after Bloodwing and I raided a Hyperion convoy.”
He laughed at the memory, taking a few seconds to particularly relish the mental image of a big guy fleeing futilely in terror before Bloodwing swooped in and swiftly removed his eyeballs from his face.
“Ain’t that right, girl?” he asked the bird on his shoulder.
She screeched in response, and he gave her beak a love tap.
“Eassssy, girl,” he told her before turning his attention back to the Vault Hunter who was working her way through the mounds of insect bodies surrounding her, plucking ammo from their innards.
“So, a Hyperion train is speeding through the Tundra Express. If my intel’s good—and it usually is—the Vault Key itself might be aboard.”
The Siren gave a mock salute in his general direction, and he found himself grinning again.
“You got a name, Vault Hunter?”
She did not answer, instead bending down to sweep up some cash splayed across the tundra ground that one of the varkids had dropped when she’d dispatched of it. Mordecai suddenly found his scope with a beautifully spot-on view of her ass. And…
“Damn, Blood,” he said. “You think it’s a Siren thing to have a fantastic ass? Cause we’re two for two here.”
“I can still hear you, you know,” a voice spoke over his ECHO.
He nearly dropped the gun in shock and hastily cleared his throat.
“Uh…anyways, you’ll want to be getting aboard that train.”
“Maya,” she said.
“Maya,” he repeated. “Name’s Mordecai.”
“So you’re an ass man, huh?”
He took the opportunity to shoot a skag approaching her to dodge the question. Out of his peripheral, he saw her laughing again.
“Damn it, Blood," he muttered.