“Don’t change the subject, Tagen.”
“I do not know how to answer. There may be laws in place that allow a female to refuse to breed. I am not aware of them, but I am male, and as I have said, I have never known a female to refuse. She who bred to me was certainly not happy when her orders came to her, but it had more to do, I think, with time lost from her work than with the orders themselves.”
“Well, what about the males?” Daria challenged. “Could you refuse?”
“Why would I want to?” he asked, so sincerely puzzled that Daria actually laughed in spite of her growing outrage. “It is a tremendous honor to be chosen as sire,” Tagen continued. “I accepted the pains of Heat gladly.”
That gave her pause. “You can’t have babies at all unless you’re in Heat?” she asked.
“Unless we are both in Heat,” he agreed. “No.” He looked into her face and nodded. “So you can imagine how often we seek it out voluntarily. Hence, the orders that come to our females.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not trying to offend you. It’s just very different.” She reached out for the remains of her clothing and began to dress.
“It is.” Tagen lay back down and laced his hands behind his head, watching her. “I have seen on your tee-vee families of humans with many children. Six. Ten. Even more. All at the same time.” He said this solemnly enough to ring a smile back to her lips. “I cannot imagine raising such a family, and yet it is routine here on Earth.”
“It’s not that easy,” she said.
“It seems to be. On Jota, a man is encouraged to take sons whenever he can. A family is certainly a favored environment over the…” He trailed off, spoke a word in his language, and frowned. “The place,” he said awkwardly, “where the young are taken after birth. Where they are cared for until they are…”
“Adopted,” Daria supplied.
“Just so. Or until they reach their…full age.” He was quiet a minute or two. “I was ten.”
Something in his voice, something buried low beneath the mild tones, made her turn around and look at him.
He stared up at the sky, expressionless, his body in the posture of relaxation but every muscle tensed. “My father put a gun in my hand the day I came to him,” he said, still in that idle, just-passing-time tone. “He would not let me unpack my things first. He gave me ten targets and told me to hit eight. It was a test. His first. And I truly believe that if I had failed, he would have sent me back. My father did not love me. He trained me. And that, Daria Cleavon, is Jota.”
He glanced at her, and then sat up and shrugged into his uniform jacket. “The tee-vee shows me mostly ideals. I understand that. Not every human child is loved. But every human child expects to be, and that is a laudable thing. I still hate Earth.” He gave the sun above them a narrow glare. “But I am coming to admire humans in many unexpected ways.”
“So there’s hope for us,” she said. “That’s comforting.”
Tagen shrugged. “I think there is some merit in the way you raise your young. The man you called father, he was your sire as well?”
“He was,” Daria said slowly. “But I don’t remember him very well. He and my mom died when I was pretty young. I was raised by my Aunt Ellen.”
He waited, looking curious, with no idea of the miniature hell she was having to relive thinking about those awful years. As the silence wore on, his expression darkened and became more piercing. “What did she do to you?” he asked at last.
She didn’t even want to answer, but he’d hear worse things than the truth in her silence. She ran her eyes away, looking over the trees that choked out the horizon so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “She ignored me,” she said.
And that was all, really. No beatings, no shouting, no nothing. A cot in the basement next to the washing machine and exactly three new outfits each year if she’d outgrown the old ones, and that was what she got right up until the day she’d turned sixteen. Her birthday present, the only one Aunt Ellen ever gave her, came at the dinner table. “I bought you a car,” Aunt Ellen had said. And before Daria could even open her mouth to voice her astonished thanks, she’d gone on, “You’re going to get a job. Then I’ll help you get emancipated and you’re going to leave.”
It was the longest conversation they’d had in ten years, and Daria hadn’t even needed to contribute.
“You know,” she said now. “Even after all that time, I’m still not sure whether she was my mom’s sister or my dad’s. No, Tagen, not every kid is loved.”
She drew in a breath, let it out in a rush and clap of her hands, and smiled at him. “Well! That’s killed what’s left of my good mood,” she said cheerfully. “I guess I’ll go in and vacuum something.”
She headed for the house with her stomach still in knots and Tagen came in as a blur of black on her right side and yanked her up and off her feet.
“I refuse,” he said, swinging her onto his shoulder, “to let you clean anything. I will take you inside. I will let you cook only because I cannot work your kitchen, but you will not clean. And if you try, I will pour my dinner out on the floor and draw…”
Tagen’s voice trailed off and he became motionless. Slowly, his head raised and he stared fixedly at an empty point in space.
Daria raised herself off his shoulder as much as she could and tried to look at him. His face, almost perfectly blank to start with, was filling in with an expression of incredulous realization. She spoke his name tentatively.
He roared, a wordless and thunderous exhalation of pure understanding. Then he thumped her down on her feet and brought both hands up with a whip-crack rapport to strike himself in the head. He doubled over at the waist and roared again, and this time there were words: “
SHU-RAAAA
!”
She didn’t think it meant Merry Christmas.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, hovering at his side.
He didn’t move a muscle apart from what it took to quietly say, “I am a fool.”
“Tagen?”
He straightened up and gave his jacket a brisk pull to even out its creases. He looked very calm. “Daria,” he said conversationally. “When I watch the media programs, sometimes there is an image behind the speaker.”
She nodded, bewildered.
“Sometimes, the image is that of an area of land, marked with names of cities and such.” He looked at her, flexing the claws of both hands. “Do you have access to one of those for
this
area?”
“A map,” Daria said, and blushed right down to the soles of her feet. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, a
map
! Why didn’t I think of that? All this time—! Yes, Tagen, I have a map.”
She ran into the house and dropped to her knees beside the desk, pulling drawers open and fumbling madly through many years’ worth of collected crap. There were several maps, actually, but only one was the one she wanted: a great big one with all of Oregon and parts of the surrounding states that would unfold big enough to cover most of the open floor in the living room.
Tagen sat down on the sofa and pushed the coffee table wearily out of the way as she crawled to him on her knees. She spread out the map, sprang up and ran to the kitchen for her printouts of Northwest Deathwatch.
Tagen had his head in his hands again when she came back. “I knew there was something,” he muttered. “I knew it would shake itself free eventually. I simply cannot believe it has taken me this long to see something so obvious.”
“You have a great excuse,” Daria told him, uncapping a marker. “You were dying from Heat.”
“I cannot die from Heat.”
“I, on the other hand, have no excuse at all. Okay.” She looked at the papers in her hand and at the map. “I’m going to mark these by date of death. You holler if something jumps out at you.”
It only took seven marks before Tagen’s claw came down.
“I see it, too,” Daria said.
Most of the marks were scattered across Oregon, Washington and California, but there were three fairly close together and in nearly a straight line. A line that moved east.
Daria flipped back to her papers. “Dead campers,” she said of the first mark. “The man had some head trauma, but mostly because he was beaten to death against a tree. The woman was raped.” She moved to the second mark. “Two dead guys dumped by the road in the mountains. Massive head trauma. One of them had his throat torn open.” The third mark. “Head trauma. A man and his daughter killed in their beds. The girl’s chest was crushed, too.” She looked up. “Is it him?”
“It is difficult to say.” Tagen’s eyes moved restlessly along the line of three. “Continue.”
Five more murders went on the map, and then a motel manager with massive head trauma added a fourth point to the same line east.
“How many days between these attacks?” Tagen asked, tapping each of them.
“Three to five between the campers and the roadside body dump. It’s hard to get more specific than that. One or two between the bodies and the sleepers.”
“Yes,” Tagen murmured.
“Two between the sleepers and the motel.”
“Two?”
She understood his confusion. Although the motel murder was on the right road and in the right direction, it was clear the hell over in Idaho.
“That…that cannot be E’Var,” Tagen said at last. “E’Var is on foot.”
“Are you sure about that?” she asked.
He looked at her sharply, then down at the map. “No.” He leaned back and gazed at her again. “I think it may be possible that E’Var can pilot one of your cars.”
She snorted. “I don’t. If he’s anything like you, it’s hard enough to imagine he fits in one. I think he’s got help, Tagen. I think he’s got a girl. And I think he got her…” She moved her finger back and forth between the first and third marks. “Somewhere in here.”
Tagen leaned forward, but his scrutiny was on her face, not the map. “What makes you think it, Daria?” he asked intently.
“Because he raped her—” Daria tapped the first point. “—and not her.” She tapped the third. “He was in Heat over here, and by the time he got here, he didn’t care anymore. And then he clearly got in a car, so…”
“So.” Tagen nodded and leaned back, rubbing at his eyes. “So.”
Daria flipped through her printed pages and finally put them down. “The Blue Ridge murders were here,” she said, making a last mark. “And that’s not a straight line east anymore, but it’s still on the main roads. Just one right turn and one long drive.” Back she went to the printouts, scanning down the papers for the name of any of the towns on the same highway as the motel or the bar.
She found one. “Three dead at a tattoo parlor,” she said, marking it. “Massive head trauma, one guy with his throat cut.”
“Cut thus?” Tagen interrupted. He drew his claw across his own neck to demonstrate, and then put one claw at the hollow of his throat and made a pushing gesture. “Or cut so?”
“It doesn’t say. Why?”
Tagen tapped his throat thoughtfully. “This is often done,” he said, speaking low, as if to himself. “So that the victim cannot scream.”
“Sounds like our guy, then, doesn’t it?” Daria looked down. “And he’s definitely got a car.”
“Yes. And a pilot.” Tagen bared his teeth and stood up. “And is no more traveling on one road only.” He paced out the perimeter of the living room, deep in thought. “He could go anywhere. Anywhere.” Finally, he faced her. “I will hear suggestions,” he said.
Daria considered the map, heavily aware of Tagen’s eyes on her. “Well,” she said slowly. “He may not be on one road, but he’s still traveling in straight lines. And considering that he could go anywhere he wanted to, he still seems to be sticking relatively close by. Maybe…maybe if he turns around again, and if the distances are more or less equal, maybe we can use that to figure out where his ship is.”
Tagen actually gaped at her for a second. “That,” he stammered, “That is brilliant, Daria! Of course he has a
sacrat
!” He stared down at the map, his eyes wide and searching. “And it has a limited range. I…” He looked up at her again. “I think I would never have thought of that,” he said, wonderingly.
She half-shrugged uncomfortably. “Even if we can’t backtrack to his ship, if we knew how far he likes to travel before he turns, we can use that to get in front of him on the road he’s on.”
Tagen gaped at her again and she looked away, blushing.
“Of course,” she went on, “it does mean waiting around here for him to kill a busload of nuns first. I kind of hate that. I guess you do, too.” She risked a glance at him; he was watching her with grim understanding. “You’re in a hard position,” she said grudgingly. “I realize now you’re doing your very best to bring him in.”
“Had I but known that Earth possessed cars, I could have been better prepared for this mission,” he said. “And I, too, hate that I must sit idle while he hunts.” He gazed down at the map, then met her eyes again. “I am grateful it was you I found, Daria Cleavon. When I catch E’Var, it will be your influence that put him in my hands.”
It was easily the strangest compliment she’d ever received, but she blushed with pleasure anyway.
“Come to me, my clever human,” he said, stepping over the map. “Let me show you gratitude. Let me hold you while it is cool.”
“You can’t mean it,” she said, startled, trying to ignore the leap of excitement her body sent out at his words. “We just spent all morning…I mean…You just aren’t serious, are you?”
He stopped where he was and looked at her uncertainly. “You…do not want to make love to me?”
He didn’t sound hurt so much as just requesting clarification, but Daria found it a tough one to answer anyway. She stammered a little, feeling that shivery heat bloom out insistently inside of her, and finally blurted, “Well, damn fella, aren’t you tired?”
He drew back and said, “Of you?” in tones of such astonishment that no woman hearing him could help but feel desirable.
She blushed even hotter and dropped her gaze. “Women,” she stammered. “Earth women, I mean, like me…we’re not supposed to…I mean, there’s only one kind of girl who…so often…”
“Ah,” said Tagen. “I have forgotten. On Earth, it is the male who commands.” He closed the distance between them in two steps and caught her arm when she tried to back away. “So I will command. Daria Cleavon, remove your clothing.”