Tagen locked his voice behind clenched jaws as he erupted out into the night.
Better, he thought, catching his breath and slowing his racing heart. At least it was acknowledged and out of his system. Maybe now he would be able to concentrate.
He glanced up at the house as he fastened his breeches again, and saw the light in Daria’s room switch off.
She was still awake. He could go to her right now, before she slept. He could knock. If she said nothing, he would know what it meant. But she might admit him. He had to do something.
‘If I want you in my room, I’ll leave the door open.’ The memory of her voice was as clear in his mind as if she were directly behind him.
He would not knock. When she was ready, she would invite him.
He would wait.
T
agen woke up with no suppressants. He looked anyway, staring for a long time into the empty bottle, punishing himself with the sight of it while Earth’s sun rose. He could feel the temperature rising, could actually
feel
it. Already.
He could only hide in the shower for so long. The water was cool, but the damp and the heat of the room began muggy and became smothering very soon. The rest of the house may be as hot, but least it was drier.
Tagen watched the media briefings as long as he could stand to. It was hot, and the images of persistent violence got in under his skin and stung at him like salt. He felt restless and irritable and eventually, he just had to get away from it all.
He went outside. He supposed it was hotter in full sun, but there was a breeze now and then and the air was free of the ever-present sting of disinfectants that clung to Daria’s home. He paced around the shaded side of the house, telling himself he was contemplating E’Var’s location, but in truth unable to concentrate or even form a coherent thought. He was walking just to walk, and all the while, the shade shrank and the sun burned down.
At last, he permitted himself to be defeated and he went to the kitchen for iced water. He paced rapidly around the kitchen as he drank, and then sat down at the table in the corner to chew the ice. There, exhaustion fell in on him all at once, leadening his limbs and stealing the breath from his lungs. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out heat along with light. It was psychological, all of it. He could not go into Heat so soon.
He wanted to shoot something. Not out of malice. Not even to do harm, and certainly not to a living thing. But just to have weight and resistance in his killing hand, to hear the whine of fire and see something break and burn. To have damage that was physical, damn it all. To have something real before him and see it shatter. To exorcize his mood with effects he could see.
The heat. Damn this hell-shat
heat
!
“I’ve been looking for you all over!”
Tagen flinched and snarled hard, and Daria’s strident voice cut itself off while the last word still hung in the air. He dragged his eyes open and glanced around, knowing he should apologize, but unable to muster the motivation. She was standing in the doorway behind him, looking nervous.
“Where have you been?” she asked timidly.
“Out.” He glared into his glass. Some of the ice had already melted. He drank.
Daria continued to stand and watch him. The longer she did so, the more her sweat seemed to permeate the air.
He didn’t feel like ignoring her any more than he felt like watching the tee-vee. He raised his head and stared back at her, letting his eyes drink in what his nostrils could scent—a female, young and healthy. What matter that she was alien? She was here.
Daria stepped back under the directness of his gaze and her face first lost color and then gained it back in shades of pink. “Are you okay?” she asked.
Was he okay? Hmmm.
“Do you have a headache?”
“No.”
“Well…” She shivered and then sparked with that fear-born anger and stalked over to the sink. “Well then, stop staring at me.”
Tagen chewed on ice, letting his eyes trail down her narrow back to the sensual swell of her hocks.
“While you were out, I was busy,” she announced, “trying to find your guy on the internet.”
Tagen said nothing. She glanced back as if to determine he was still there, still listening, and when she saw his steady gaze, she flustered. “What did you find?” he asked, forestalling her.
“F-find what?” She blinked rapidly and then cut her eyes at the computer and rallied. “Nothing,” she said, and somehow made it an accusation. “I found a whole lot of it, too. You know what? I don’t think your guy’s on Earth.”
“Hm.”
“So you can leave,” she said, and set her jaw against him.
He found the look, unusually assertive for her, intensely arousing.
The pink of her cheeks darkened to red. She turned her back on him. “You can’t live here,” she said curtly. “Your guy is dead. Go home.”
“No.”
She went rigid so suddenly, so completely, that it was as if she’d had been shot. The muscles of her arms stood out in sharp relief, but she did not face him. Tagen realized that she thought he was going to come for her. She expected him to come for her right now, right here in the kitchen, and…and do what, exactly? Oh, he knew what he wanted to do, but what did she imagine?
The same thing, probably. For a long, black moment, Tagen was tempted to do it. He would stand up and cross the room, just to see what she would do. She would panic, or perhaps she would not. Perhaps, in the extremity of her expectations and terror, she would instead submit.
Tagen raised a hand hooked into claws and held it before his face, shaking with the urge to strike out, even at himself. Pain would be welcome respite from this damned maddening irritation. When it passed at last, it took all the strength from his body with it.
He slumped forward, heavy and exhausted, and stared down at the tabletop. “He is here,” he said. “I know he is here.”
“Look, I just don’t know what else to do.” Daria shook herself back to life and started running water into the sink so that she could scrub her spotless countertops. “I’ve been watching the news and I’m just not seeing some big scary serial killer stalking the west coast.”
Tagen rubbed at his temples, trying to stave off the headache he sensed coming before it could get a claw-hold in him. Conversation with Daria was something to alleviate the long hours of Earth’s day when he had nothing else to occupy himself with, but there were times, and this was one of them, when it could be more exhausting than it was worth. Beneath her tones of feigned indifference he could hear her uncertainty, her enigmatic fear. She wanted guarantees, and he had none to give her.
“Would you?” he asked simply. “Would the people of your world truly announce such a thing if they had no suspects?”
That seemed to stump her, but only for a second. “There’d still be something,” she insisted. “At the very least, there’d be missing-person alerts all over the place. Do you know what made the lead report in the morning news show today, Tagen? Lucky, the three-legged cat, finding a new home at the animal shelter. They don’t report stuff like that if people are dying!”
Tagen merely looked at her. He could see the precise instant when she remembered that he watched the media feeds as well, and therefore knew exactly how many humans were dying all over this hot, miserable planet.
Daria flushed and resumed cleaning. “Okay, people die. People die every day. I’m just saying there’s nothing unusual about the way we’re doing it these days. Tagen, are you sure this guy landed where you think he did?”
Tagen bared his teeth at his human’s back, and then scowled at the table top. Leave it to Daria to voice that fear that had been gnawing at his own heart all this while. “No,” he said. “Only that this is where the ship he drove came through Earth’s outer field. It is possible he thought to elude pursuit by seeking out another site to land, but I prefer to think he did not. E’Var thinks in straight lines. I want to believe he pilots in them as well.”
“You are all kinds of warm and comforting, you know that?” Daria shook her head, oblivious to the bemused look Tagen sent her way. “So, let’s say you’re right and he is somewhere close by. Then you need to come to terms with the fact that he is not the ruthless killer you think he is. Okay? Wherever the hell he is, he’s not slaughtering people at random.”
“He is.” Tagen was beginning to dislike the sound of his voice; he sounded tired and defeated. “He is just not being caught at it, and I cannot think why.”
“Maybe he’s lying low.”
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye, beneath the cover of his own loose fall of hair. She had turned around and was peering at him, searching his total lack of reaction for clues. She still persisted in the belief that he knew more than he was telling. He did, but damn her for knowing it. His headache slid a few degrees further towards reality.
Daria twisted one side of her mouth, raising her cleaning cloth and clutching it before her like a shield. “Maybe he’s not killing people because he knows you’re looking for him.”
“I say again, he
is
killing people.” Tagen lifted his head away from his hands and splayed them for her. “I do not know how he is escaping notice, but it is not through subtlety on the part of Kanetus E’Var. I trust him to choose his victims deliberately and to hide them carefully when he is done. Perhaps your…”
He was halted first by his incomplete vocabulary, and then by his common sense, which told him that the best way to keep his human host in good humor was perhaps not to insult her planetary defense forces. Tagen’s silence drew out and he glared frustration at the table.
“My what?” Daria asked. She had that look again, that tight ready-for-anger look that pinched her brows and made a hard line of her mouth.
“I do not know the word.” And he was beginning to wish he’d never joined in the conversation.
“What does it do?” she pressed.
“I do not know that word, either.” He shook his head, mostly for his own benefit, mentally chastising himself for ever starting down this line of thought. He was going to have to give her some sort of answer and she was going to want to pin his hide up with nails when she heard it. “Humans…seeking others…as I am seeking E’Var.”
“Cops, you mean? Detectives?” She regarded him suspiciously. “You can’t possibly watch as much
Law & Order
as you do without knowing those words.”
“Very well.” Tagen gave her a hard stare. “Tell me the word for a detective who watches over your planet and prevents alien invasion.”
Daria swallowed and dropped her eyes.
“Because unless you have such a force, the police of your world may not be able to adequately…”
She let him hunt for human speech for several seconds as her hands twisted her cleaning cloth. “You’d better not be trying to say ‘investigate’,” she said at last, in flat, hard tones. “There’s nothing wrong with Earth cops.”
“I did not mean to imply otherwise.”
“It sure sounded like you were. It sounded like you were trying to hold Earth police responsible for your inability to catch your criminal.”
Tagen closed his eyes and rubbed them some more. He couldn’t see any way out of the argument and he was too damned tired to try. “If I offend you, I apologize. I would have more tact if I knew more speech.”
Daria scrubbed at the counters for a few frigid minutes and when she ran out of surface space, she swung around again and Tagen braced himself for a new assault.
It never came.
He stole a glance at her and found her frowning, not with irritation, but concern. With his hands still at his temple and his hair hiding his movements, Tagen took discrete stock of himself. He could see his chest, bared to the waist, pale and shimmering with a thin veil of sweat. So it wasn’t his imagination, after all. The last of the suppressants had left his system already.
Well, hell.
Daria came a small step towards him, half-raised one hand, and paused there. “Are you okay?”
Tagen grunted.
“Do you want a soda? Or some more ice water?” She sounded frightened.
Tagen turned his head just enough to roll one eye at her. She looked frightened, too. He sighed, returned to his previous position. “Anything,” he said. “Thank you.”
She popped out half a dozen ice cubes and poured cold water over them. “What’s the matter?” she asked timidly, as she brought it to the table.
Tagen sighed again as he closed his hand around the tumbler. For the first time, he considered the merits in a good, old-fashioned lie. He supposed he didn’t really know the human well enough to say for sure how she would react to a Jotan biology lesson, even if he had the means of lecturing her, but he suspected it wouldn’t be with overwhelming delight and acceptance, and he was too damned tired to handle her below-surface hostility. He settled for a half-truth.
“It is the heat,” he said finally. “There is nothing you can do, and I will endure.”
She only stood there, chewing her lip, with that look she sometimes got when she believed he was not being completely honest with her. “Tagen…it’s been hotter before today…and you look pretty bad right now.”
“It is the heat,” he said again, clenching his jaw. Of all the humans on this miserable planet, he had to find one with reasonably good powers of detection. “I’ve been taking something to help, but there is no more and now I will have to endure it.”
“Are you sick?”
“No.” But he hesitated before he said it, and Daria noticed, as Daria always did.
“Are you?” she demanded, alarmed. “Are you dying?”
“No!” He started to bare his teeth at her, drank his water instead. It helped a little, and he forced himself back into calm before he continued. “I will not die of it. It is not possible to die of it. I will be uncomfortable, but I will endure.” He thought a little, and smiled thinly. “And take grim comfort from the knowledge that E’Var must suffer as I do.”