Heat (23 page)

“Yes.” His one word was a hammer whose killing impact even Tagen could sense. Public relations had never been one of his talents. “Thank you,” he added awkwardly.

“Are you hungry?” She finished wiping the last shelf and then put her cleaning water aside without waiting for an answer. She climbed down from the counter with a nimbleness Tagen admired in an abstract sort of way, dropping to her knees and then kicking out and onto her feet with a light thump. “I could fix you something,” she offered. “Cereal or something.” She eased around him, pressing herself flat against the counters until she’d passed, just as though there were not an arm’s length of distance between them.

Tagen seated himself at the table as she busied herself with food preparation. It was very strange to watch her move; even in her obvious anxiety, there was a freedom about her. She was so different from the recovered slaves he had known. Even though she was not relaxed, just being in her own element gave her a kind of confidence he was not accustomed to seeing in her kind.

She brought him a bowl of flaked food with a thin, white sauce poured over it. The texture was abrasive, the taste very sweet, but it was cold and so Tagen ate it all. She watched him, standing off to one side and shifting her weight restlessly. ‘This is what it must feel like to have a personal slave,’ Tagen thought idly. Not an entirely unpleasant feeling.

“You look a lot better this morning,” she remarked.

He wasn’t sure how to answer that. It hadn’t exactly sounded like a compliment. “As do you,” he said at last.

She colored and looked away, so clearly that had been the wrong response. “Thanks,” she said glumly, and went back to her cupboards. She wiped at the shelves with a dry cloth and began replacing food in very neat, very deliberate arrangements. “So…do you have any more questions or are you leaving?”

“What I require most at this time is N’Glish,” he told her. “That may take some time.”

“Oh.” Her shoulders hunched. “So…so what am I supposed to be doing? To help you, I mean.”

“Talk slowly when you speak. Allow me food and sleep. Answer questions when I ask them.” She nodded after each command, furthering Tagen’s mild sense of power over her. Slavery was still abhorrent and indefensible, of course, but he was beginning to see why it was so popular.

“How long do you think you’ll need before you can go look for your guy?”

“My…guy.”

“The guy you’re looking for,” she amended. “I mean, once you have your N’Glish down, how long before you…?” She shrugged.

“Leave?”

She nodded, not looking at him.

“It would depend on many things.” He studied the back of her as she finished putting her food away, trying to think of a way to alleviate some of her persistent fretfulness. “I can promise not to stay solely to prolong your misery.”

She flinched and then turned on him. “I’m not miserable!” she shouted. “I’m just a little uncomfortable because there’s an alien in my damn house!”

So much for trying to calm her down. “And there is going to be an alien in your damn house for some time,” he told her evenly. “So you should learn not to be uncomfortable.”

She glared at him. “I need to take the boards off my doors,” she said in a tight voice. She threw down her cleaning cloth, and marched out.

Tagen sighed and resisted the urge to go after her. The skill he would need with the language to make her mind easy was well beyond his current reach. Best to leave her be for now. He picked up his empty bowl and took it to the sink.

The human marched back into the kitchen and snatched the tool he had brought down for her off the table. “I forgot my hammer,” she snapped and took herself out again.

Tagen tried to get his teeth into his good intentions, and gave up. “Wait.”

She didn’t.

Tagen followed her, annoyed. “It is not my meaning to offend you,” he said.

“I’m not offended!”

It was nearly a shout. Tagen stopped in the hall and gave her rein to get well ahead of him. He watched her dig the teeth of the thing she called a ‘hammer’ under the restraining board and pull ineffectually at it. Her whole body was coiled like a spring. He needed to start over. He said, “Do not fear me. I mean you no harm.”

“I’m fine!” She planted her bare foot on the door jamb and heaved back with all her little might. “I’m not scared of y—oh!”

The board pulled free with a snap and a splinter and the human went flying. Tagen darted forward instinctively and caught her; she fit neatly into his open hands, as light as a child.

And she shrieked at the very instant of contact, bucking her hips and kicking so violently that Tagen was startled into letting go. She dropped onto her backside and was scrabbling away from him at once, the hammer raised and blindly swinging until her back struck the side of the sofa. “You leave me alone!” she screamed.

“I am,” he said, baffled.

She stared at him, breathing hard, clutching her hammer in both hands. Tagen kept back until he saw lucidity re-enter her mismatched eyes. She looked at the hammer and then put it down.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Tagen picked up the hammer and tucked it into his belt. Then he hunkered down to put his eyes on level with hers and waited for her to look at him.

She avoided his gaze.

One of Tagen’s talons began to tak out the passing time on the wooden floor.

She hunched her shoulders. “Don’t touch me,” she said finally, still staring fixedly at her empty hand.

The urge, however childish, to reach out and poke her was very strong. Tagen restrained himself. There was a fear in her, but it was not for him, and as an officer, he had a duty even to her. “I will not harm you,” he said again. Much as he may be tempted to at times.

She mumbled something.

Tagen cocked his head to one side. “Repeat, please?”

Now she looked at him, her expression helpless and horribly sure. “Yes, you will,” she whispered.

He honestly could not say what he felt more in that moment as he stared back at her: regret for the storm he had brought into her orderly little life, or just profound irritation. However, it was obvious what showed more, because she flinched and looked away.

Tagen closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. “It has been,” he said quietly, “a very long time since last I was called liar to my face.”

She stared at the floor.

“I know that I do not trust you,” he continued. “I suppose that it is reasonable you do not trust me. However, I know one thing in advantage of you. I know that I am not a liar. And I think perhaps you are not, either. So.”

He stood up, and she raised her eyes to look at his knees.

“So,” he said again. “My mission here is certain to be difficult enough without us warring at one another. I shall pretend to believe you when you say you will not attempt to run from me.” He moved to the door, pulling the hammer from his belt, and removed the broken halves of the restraining board from the jamb. He set them next to the pieces of broken furniture from yesterday’s battle, and then turned to face her.

“I can…pretend to believe you when you say you won’t hurt me,” she said. She gave him half a smile. “There,” she said. “Now we’re both liars.”

Gods, that was almost funny. Tagen rubbed at his eyes. “So we are.”

She got up and started gathering the little pile of debris into her arms. “Do me a favor before the grocery guy gets here,” she said. “In the laundry room…er, in the back of the house where you cornered me yesterday?”

“What of it?”

“You’ll find a little basket with some pairs of socks folded up in it. Put some on.” She nodded at his feet, and then went outside.

Tagen followed her out onto the porch and watched her carry her broken pieces of wood over to a standing container nearly as tall as she herself. She began to unload, wedging bits of furniture and board down amidst bulky black sacks. She didn’t even look in the direction of her groundcar.

“I’m starting to think I’m a better liar than you,” she called, without looking up.

Tagen caught the beginnings of a rueful smile before it could fully form and retreated into the house. He looked down at his feet. Socks, she’d said. The word was unfamiliar. Talon caps, perhaps? Such were worn by civilians, of course, but as a military man, he was expected to keep his claws and talons as well-maintained as any other weapon. Was he damaging her floor? He hadn’t noticed, but if anyone would, it would be her. He glanced outside again—she was already coming back to the house—and then set off down the hall to the utility room.

She’d been cleaning in here. He found the ‘basket’ by process of elimination. There simply weren’t that many open containers around, and she had specifically said the socks would be inside the basket. Socks, as it turned out, were fabric footcovers. Most of them were clearly meant for Daria’s small feet, but near the bottom of the basket were some sufficiently sized to cover his own. Tagen put them on, took a few careful steps on the newly-slickened floor, and tried not to feel as ridiculous as he knew he looked.

When he returned to the front room, Daria was waiting by the stairs. “That’s better,” she said, eyeing his feet.

“Is it?”

Her lips curved up at his sour tone. “You only have to wear them until the grocery guy leaves,” she said, and looked up through the ceiling to the floor above. “Feel like giving me a hand in your room?”

She wanted to move her belongings back to their usual places. Including, no doubt, her knives.

‘She really is a better liar than you,’ he thought bitterly. He nodded once and followed her upstairs.

“I know I’ve got another coffee table in here somewhere,” she muttered, and began to prowl her way through the close jumble of cargo. “Just take everything you brought up here yesterday back downstairs. Dump it all in the kitchen for right now. I’ll make sure it gets back where it all belongs.” She started unstacking boxes.

Tagen picked up a jar of something red and held it in both hands, watching her. Everything in his nature was telling him that it was very wrong to allow a female to labor like this. It was menial. She was human, but still…

She glanced his way after a moment or two, and then straightened up and pointed at the many objects piled on the crate at his elbow. “Take everything there,” she began, speaking very slowly and clearly.

He clenched his jaw to keep from baring his teeth at her, and said, “Thank you. I understand.” He gathered everything he could hold into his arms and went stiffly downstairs.

She was human. He’d seen hundreds of humans recovered from every sort of base labor, from mines, from refineries, from processing pits. The only special consideration a female received was that she might be forced to do her labor in a sex-house. And that was deplorable, of course, but it was not shocking. What in the hell had made Tagen hesitate to watch his human moving her cargo?

Because she wasn’t a slave. She was still her own person, or she would be, if Tagen weren’t here.

Tagen began to wonder uncomfortably if he was seeing her more as a female than as a human just because she wasn’t the sort of human he was used to dealing with.
There
was a complication he didn’t need, particularly with the temperature as high as it had been. He made several trips up and down the stairs, grimly determined not to examine that too closely.

“Oh, and look! Dan’s clothes.”

Tagen paused in the act of collecting dishes and looked at her. Her voice had started out exclamatory but had slipped down into something wistful and sad. She was looking into a box now, her expression difficult to read. He could see folds of fabric beneath her hands, but she didn’t seem to be searching through them, merely holding them.

The sense of her as female grew even stronger, for all that she looked so alien to his eyes, and he was loathe to interrupt her, or even to be here as her witness. Her hand crept up and lay along the left plane of her cheek. She stared into the box, and the single eye that Tagen could see was unfocused.

Tagen forced his gaze down to the dishes scattered atop the crates. He added another one to the stack in his arms.

“I hate this room,” Daria said.

He said nothing.

She picked up the box of folded fabric and put it on his bed. “If there’s anything in there that fits you, you’re welcome to it,” she said. She bent, picked up the low table that had been beneath that box, and carried it away without another word.

Tagen did not watch her go, but once she had vanished down the stairwell, he straightened and looked after her. Some dark emotion sat like a stone in his stomach and would not be moved. So short a time ago, he had sat comfortably in her kitchen and thought he knew what it felt like to have a slave. Now he realized that he was brutally close to making one. There was something very wrong with his human, and his presence here alone was only making it worse.

He should leave. He doubted, unreasonably but intensely, that the human would report his arrival here to anyone. He should leave now and find himself another. If he stayed, there was a very good chance that his time here would end with her mind broken.

Tagen picked up another dish. And then another.

There were no guarantees in life. Earth was hot and its terrain was rough. A single human in a house in the middle of nowhere was the very best that Tagen could have hoped for. He’d never find another so perfect to his needs. Lindaria Cleavon would just have to endure.

He wasn’t going anywhere.

*

Daria arranged the coffee table in front of the sofa and tried not to think too hard about how it made her feel to see it again. She still remembered Dan bringing it home. Garage sale. Two bucks and could she believe it? Yes, she could, actually. It had been such an ugly little thing, beat up and badly-painted, with a loose leg. But Dan had insisted it would be perfect in her living room, it just needed a little love.

He sanded it for three days. Once with the machine, and the other two days by hand, sitting in the grass under the summer sun and stroking long and slow as the shadows lengthened. She’d thought he looked so sexy, flecked with sawdust and muscles rippling, all his attention on his work. And he was right, once it was properly stained and had a few coats of varnish, it was a thing of beauty. Pure beauty. It was the first thing she’d taken upstairs, the thing that hurt the most to have to sit and see every day when it finally sank in all the way that he wasn’t coming home.