Bebe (14 page)

“Of all the places to develop a crack in the fuselage.” Tral had heard rumors. Apparently, that mechanic liked to talk to himself, too.

Tral drummed his fingers once, his claws takking lightly down against his own leg. His gaze slid right to the little female, who was once more sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bed, half wrapped in his blankets, as if she’d never left it at all—the disobedient thing. Her head was bowed, and with her hands clutching the blanket around her sagging shoulders, she sat gazing sadly back at him. There was an ocean of unshed tears sparkling in those striking blue eyes of her.

Annoyed as he was, Tral had no difficulty ignoring them.

She sniffled and those blue eyes shifted away from him, her bottom lip beginning to quiver. That ocean of tears released and, drop by salty drop, spilled over her lashes and rolled down her face.

Yeah, sure he had no difficulty. Tral grit his teeth, his annoyance fast wavering. He was a pudding. An absolute pudding. Despite all the trouble she had put him through, he was actually starting to feel a little sorry for her. Especially when she shifted on the bed, putting her back to him to lay down again facing the wall. She knuckled ineffectually at the free-flowing tears, and then covered her eyes with her hand as if that alone could hide her from glaring view.

His frown deepened. He was still annoyed, but the urge to deal out another sharp smack to her half-exposed rump was already fast dissolving before the sight of her bandaged feet. Small seeps of blood had begun to soak through the fabric. He was going to need to keep her off her feet for at least two or three days to help the worst of those cuts finally heal. Her little impromptu escape attempt through the woods had caused several to re-tear. He was going to have to watch her carefully to make sure she didn’t succumb to another infection.

He started to sigh, but another round of furious pounding at the window promptly re-kindled his temper. Huffing in exasperation, Tral ripped the curtain back.

“What?!” he thundered out at the leader of the wild pack. “What? Bad, human! Bad! Get out of here! Back to your cave!” He pointed a stern finger back out in the direction of the wilderness beyond the human’s shoulder. “Go on,
get
!”

The big male pointed a furious finger right back at him. He then gestured sharply in the female’s direction before swinging his whole arm in an undeniably clear ‘get-her-out-here’ motion.

“Ha!” Tral laughed, still not amused. “You can’t be serious.”

The wild pack was well-equipped and very well-suited to surviving a hard winter in the Preserve. A naked little female house pet was not. Surely the big male had to know that. Or maybe, all he knew was Tral had a breedable female currently locked out of his reach inside the station.

Or, maybe even—as scary smart as this male was—this was a clever attempt to get Tral to open the door, giving him a chance to get in.

Tral looked at the human’s spear and his eyes narrowed. “I’d rather hug a rabid
chouse
rat.”

Certainly, he’d have a better chance of surviving one of those toxic bites than he did the instant swarm-and-spear party that would no doubt commence the second he turned off the security lock. As for the abandoned stray crying under the blankets of his bed, he could just imagine them carting her off—naked, shivering, her little feet still bleeding—into the evening’s gradually intensifying blizzard. She’d be the only female plaything that these four males had seen in...oh, at the very least, in all the time that Tral had lived here.

The pack male had the gall to snap his fingers and gestured even more pointedly at that invisible spot beside his fur-skinned boot.

“I’d sooner hang a steak around her neck and send her out to play with wolves,” Tral told him through the glass. Not that he didn’t sympathize with the bachelor pack. In the last half-dozen years, he’d lost count of all the nights he’d lain awake wishing someone would air-drop a woman in for him. Somehow, he didn’t think they made requisition forms for that.

The human might not have understood his words, but his tone must have held a universal negativity. The pack leader’s dark eyes narrowed and both hands returned to the haft of his spear. In a sudden lunging step that brought him right up to the window, the human bellowed, his rage so hot it steamed the glass. He stabbed at Tral with his spear and slashed, the sharp rock edge cutting into the window with a high-pitched squeak that streaked from the relative center of Tral’s chest all the way to the side of the sill.

Stepping back, the leader of the wild pack smacked the butt of his spear back on the porch. Grim, chest heaving, he glared at Tral through the cut until, with a faint crunching, crackling sound, the window began to repair itself. As the crack melted seamlessly back into uniform transparency, Tral offered the human a very small smile.

“Very impressive,” he dead-panned. “The answer is still, no. Period. End of conversation. Dead discussion. Good night and good-bye.”

Tral let the curtain fall closed.

Obviously, it was too much to hope that the human would accept Tral’s authority and simply go home. But when that stubborn male began another vicious barrage of fist-pounding against the glass, all but rattling the window and making the unsteady stack of dishes behind him collapse into the bottom of the sink, Tral ripped the curtain back one last time and snapped, “My friend, you are
not
the only human available for me to study. And
if
you succeed in breaking this window, not only will I be
intensely
disappointed in the pet-proofing company that installed it, but I swear I
will
air-drop
your fuzzy butt
all the way to the southernmost tip of the continental pole and leave you there! You won’t so much as
sniff
another female for the length of your half-frozen little
life
!”

Face flushed with fury and far from cowed by Tral’s loquacious scolding, the pack male shifted his hold on his spear to bring the blood-stained tip down to his own throat’s level. In one quick jerk, he pantomimed cutting it and then pointed one steady finger back at Tral.

Tral had never been one for charades, but this one wasn’t difficult to decipher. Not even for him.

Stunned, he blinked in surprise, half concerned for his own wellbeing but the half-hearted scientist in him much more curious as to where the wild human might have seen such a gesture in order to mimic it so believably just now. It took a while for his mounting annoyance to catch up with his zoological curiosity, but when it finally did, it came as close to blossoming into uncontrollable outrage as anything Tral had felt in a very, very long time. This afternoon included. He couldn’t believe he was being intimidated by a wild animal—a child-like beast, with a very small and grossly under-developed brain.

This was not going to work. If he wanted to continue living and working in this Preserve with this particular pack of wild humans for another six years, then he was going to have to regain the upper hand or forever risk losing their respect (and frankly, at this point, he was willing to let respect sail out the window and settle for some form of grudging tolerance).

“Let’s see just how smart of an animal you really are.” Mouth flattening into a tight, unamused line, Tral drew his dart gun from his belt. “Do you know what this is?”

The big male brandished his spear, his dirty fist clenching and re-clenching at the shaft as Tral pointed the gun at him through the glass. It was an empty threat. If a human spear couldn’t penetrate the pet-proof window, then these two small darts of his certainly weren’t going to. But it was interesting to note how, noticing the red-tufts of the twin tranquilizers poking out at the end of the short barrel, the smaller male lowered his spear by a sparse few degrees. He retreated a half-step back, then slowly raised his eyes to glare at Tral again.

“This,” Tral said, using the dart gun to gesture between them, “is what we in the civilized world call an impasse. We could make that your first real word, if you like. Try it with me, say
impasse
.”

Tral drew the syllables out in truly obnoxious fashion, and if it weren’t a dumb animal he were provoking, it might almost have been rewarding to see that tic of annoyance pulsing along the side of the other male’s jaw. Once, twice, and then again the human clenched his teeth until, snapping abruptly around, he stalked off the edge of the porch into the sideways-flying white of the fast-falling snow. The shadow of him very quickly vanished from sight.

Footsteps moved across the roof and a half second later Tral heard the soft bump as one of the smaller pack males hopped down into the snow just off the front of the porch. It was one of the younger humans. He barely glanced at Tral before dashing after two more darker shadows, retreating into the falling white after their departing leader.

Tral waited, peering out the window, struggling to see through the night and the snow until, satisfied at last that they were gone, he closed the curtain. Peace and quiet returned to the small one-man station once more. Finally.

“Ha! Not such a pudding now, am I?” Shoving the dart gun back into his belt and basking in the aura of his minute victory, he turned around. His gaze fell on his little stray female and his eyes narrowed.

Stalking over to his bed, he grabbed the folds of blankets covering her and ripped them off. “Up,” he said with a jerk of his thumb. “Since obviously you can talk, it’s long past time you and I had a conversation.”

Sniffling, the female barely lifted her hand from her watery eyes to look back at him over her shoulder. Undeterred, Tral grab the chair from his work table and thunked it down on the floor squarely beside the bed. When she lay her head down and covered her eyes again, dismissing him, he promptly lay a sharp and stinging smack to the center of her bright red bottom. “I said up!”

She jerked upright, one hand flying back to her smarting rump with a squeak of protest. But then she must have realized he was serious. She shut her mouth with a snap, wilting just a little as she watched him.

Although possessed of a fairly good sense of humor, right now Tral had been pushed about as far as he was going to allow. “Let’s try this again.” Sitting, he braced his hands on his thighs and pinned her into place with a hard stare. “I know you can talk. Now you’re going to tell me exactly how much you can say.”

Rubbing at her flank, she dropped her eyes from his, casting her mutinous frown down at the defenseless sheets.

“Do you know what I’m saying?” he demanded. “Talk!”

He held up a sideways fist, thumb tucked inward to make an impromptu face with which to make talking motions. It was quite possibly the stupidest thing he’d done all day, and the longer he moved that make-shift mouth at her, the faster the mutiny melted from her features to be replaced by confusion and even a budding concern. He put his hand down.

He tried again. “Nod your head if you understand me.”

She blinked at him, but didn’t move and never said a word.

Maybe this Sir or Ma’am hadn’t allowed her to talk. Maybe there was a command for it. Rubbing a claw against his brow, Tral fumbled his way through a list of potential key words. “How about speak? Do you know speak? Converse?” He shook his head. “How about hello?”

A flicker of recognition sparked in her reluctant eyes. “Hello.”

“Hello!” Tral leapt on the word gratefully. “Wonderful! We have found a comfortable basis for future communication. We have a hello.”

“Hello,” she dutifully repeated, her brows drawing together in confusion as she blinked at him.

“What else do you know? Uh...Oh.” He patted himself on the chest with two fingers. “Tral. My name is Tral.”

Ever so slightly, she perked. Sitting up a little straighter, she gave up rubbing at her hip to tap the valley between her own small breasts. “Bebe.”

“Bebe.” Some of Tral’s foul mood faded and he shifted on the chair, scooting a few inches closer to her. His knees bumped the edge of the bed. She looked at them and then at him as he mused, “You don’t seem to understand what I’m saying beyond a few short words and phrases. You know your name and you know hello.”

“Hello,” she echoed and hesitantly scooted closer, pulling her legs up under her until she sat cross-legged directly in front of him. A light of curiosity had come alive in the depths of her alien eyes. He could almost see the wheels and cogs turning in her head as she tried to figure out what he wanted.

Wishing he knew himself, Tral braced his elbows on his knees and rubbed his mouth. “This would be so much easier if you could just tell me who Sir and Ma’am are.”

Her gaze lit up, although not by very much. “Sir. Ma’am.” She tapped herself on the chest again. “Bebe.”

“We’ve covered that,” he said, but gently. “I suppose it’s just as well that you don’t know. This is a federally protected preserve. Your owners will be in a lot of trouble when we find them.” He shook a finger back and forth to share with her the seriousness of what he was saying. “This is a no-dumping zone.”

He realized his mistake when her eyes suddenly fixed on his finger and she went from curious to cringing almost faster than he could blink.

“No, Bebe,” she said, her gaze flicking rapidly back and forth from him to his lowering finger, to herself and then down at the bed in generally, where she came to the obvious conclusion that therein lay the source of his displeasure. “Bad Bebe. Down.”

She slid over the edge of the mattress, her bandaged feet reaching for the floor.

“That’s not what I—” He was just putting out a hand to catch her, when something huge suddenly crashed into the window behind him. They both jumped, snapping around to look at the gently trembling curtain.

Knocking his chair back, Tral leapt for the window, hearing that faint crackle of self-repairing glass even as he ripped back the drape to stare in shock at the giant, round impact shatter that took up the entire center of it. The fine mesh of spider-web cracks splintered out in every direction, reaching all the way to the corners of the pane. As he stood open-mouthed and staring, these fine cracks were already quickly fading back into the glass, disappearing before his astonished eyes.