Heat (49 page)

He hung his sheet out the window to dry and headed for the stairs. Daria came up them as he went down, carrying the device she called a ‘vacuum’. She looked at him and her cheeks colored. Then she ducked her head and passed him, leaving a trail of musk behind her to aggravate Tagen’s Heat-heightened senses.

He paused on the lowest step to look after her, indulging in a pleasant fantasy of pursuit. In her darkened room, with all the cool ocean colors around him, he would catch her. Now. Before Heat had a chance to sink down into his senses again, while he could still be gentle enough to ease her to passion in the slow way that humans required. He would sway her, and she would have him.

But she did not so much as glance behind her as she climbed. She disappeared into her room and soon the roar of the vacuum sounded. Grendel came spilling out a second later, all his fur on end.

Tagen commiserated with the cat’s pique. He picked the animal up and carried it into the kitchen to feed it. He knew Daria must have offered it a meal already, but damn it, Tagen needed to have something in this house fawn over him. Tagen assembled a line ration out of bread and meat, and shared it out with Grendel as he sat in the shade in the corner. The cat ate, and then leapt up on Tagen’s lap, clawing at his chest and butting its head into Tagen’s jaw, purring. If only bologna had the same effect on humans.

Tagen rubbed at the cat’s nose, neck, and tail, and then set it down on the tiles and stood up. He had little time before Heat returned. He had to use it wisely.

Tagen knew he should be watching the media feeds, but he lingered in the kitchen. Daria’s computer beckoned. Beside it, the loose fan of pages she’d made for him. She’d marked several listings.

Tagen traced his claw over her messy alien letters, wishing he could read them. She was working so hard. If E’Var was anywhere on this world, she would find him. He believed that. She had a keen intellect and an ability to deduce that Tagen genuinely admired. Hers was not a military mind, but it was a ready one, and it complemented his perfectly.

If he knew how to voice this, would it matter? One of the programs he had seen on the tee-vee had a female who had refused a mate because he wanted her body and not her mind. Tagen did want Daria’s body, he wouldn’t even try to think otherwise, but it had been his high regard of her mind that had allowed him to see her as desirable and not merely human. Perhaps—

He could not do this. It was pointless and it was depressing, and with Heat searing in his blood, it was also torturous.

Tagen poured himself a glass of water and added two handfuls of ice. He hesitated, hating the unprofessionalism of it, and then surrendered and took a last ice cube and rubbed it over the back of his neck.

Bliss.

As the ice melted under his palm, Tagen did his best to cool as much of his body as possible. His chest, his shoulders, his stomach—ice burned a path down and around him while he concentrated just on keeping his mind free of the female who obsessed him.

“Oh!”

Daria. Tagen flinched and the ice slipped between his fingers and broke on the floor. He backed up and Daria grabbed a towel and came to clean it. He hadn’t even heard her come to the doorway.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.” She knelt at his feet, mopping at the shards of ice and drops of water as though it were unrefined oil.

On her knees.

Tagen swallowed hard, his eyes fixed on the rocking movements of her body. The itching of his tsesac became more insistent. He turned away, taking his glass to the table, where he could better hide the hardening of his shaft. If he retreated too suddenly, she might follow. He would wait, and she would eventually wander off to clean something, freeing him to withdraw to his room and lock the door.

“Have you got a minute?” Daria asked, rising and dropping her towel in the sink.

Would it be too suspicious a thing to say no? Before he could decide, Daria added, “I may have found some things.”

“Truly?”

Daria’s hesitance was a hopeful thing. The slow nod with which she finally answered was so heartening that even Heat was driven from Tagen’s mind. She had found something. She really thought she had.

“Tell me.”

She crossed the room, bringing with her the maddening perfume of her sweat, shot through with lingering traces of musk, and Tagen stared into his drink and thought disjointed thoughts of touching, of taking. She sat at her computer, not with him at the table, and he supposed that was for the best, but it tore at him anyway. He closed his eyes, thinking that it would be a natural enough thing to rise, to go and stand behind her as she looked into the screen of her computer, perhaps even to place his hand on her shoulder.

“Okay, so I went back to Deathwatch and picked through the archives for the last thirty days. That’s a little bit further back than even you told me to go, but I figure better safe than sorry.”

Indeed. Better safe than sorry. He stayed where he was.

She continued to talk, but the words blurred out of comprehension. Heat had him, and there was a female here. Seeing her, smelling her, was an agony all its own.

Tagen wanted to go back upstairs, back to the privacy of his room and his bed, to empty himself for another short span, enough time perhaps to see out the remains of this day. If there was any sympathy in the Divine Will that governed this universe, perhaps it would cool down enough not to re-stimulate his tsesac after it was drained. And perhaps it would stay cool throughout the next day.

And perhaps E’Var would let himself in through Daria’s front door, already in binders, and surrender himself to be taken home. As long as he was wishing, why not go big?

He focused again on the words coming out of Daria’s mouth. Everything she was doing, she did for him. She deserved more of his attention. He felt guilty, but it did not keep the sweat from rolling down his back or the itch from sinking deep into his tsesac as it churned, swollen with seed. His hand strayed beneath the table to press on his stiffening shaft. It hurt to touch himself, but the pain was better than the endless, mindless itch.

“…finally got it narrowed down to just violent death where the weapon is not proven, although you can see that the cops are making some guesses. Like, there’s this spree of camper-killings over here. Most of them say cause of death was blunt force trauma or an axe, but the first two were just your basic dead people. The guy was beat to death against a tree, and the girl drowned, but only after she ‘sustained massive sexual trauma’. Hopefully it was after. I don’t know, though. Is your guy E’Var a rapist?”

Heat. Carefully, Tagen said, “I would not know. My knowledge of his activities is limited to those employed on-world.”

“Okay, well, so my keywords were ‘violent’, ‘massive’, ‘severe’, ‘head’ and ‘brain’, but, as you can see, I still turned up a whole lot of shootings and stabbings and stuff. I’m afraid to whittle it down any further because I don’t want to accidentally screen his stuff out.”

“Understandable.”

“So let’s pretend that these campers are his. The time’s about right. Then we have some random body dumpings along the highway…those could be his. And there’s two guys in a trailer park, but I don’t know…something about that one doesn’t sound like our guy. And someone took an axe to a post office, but I think that’s just your basic postal problem. There’s two blunt force to the heads at a playground, but I’d think you’d need a mature human hypothalamus for this drug of yours, so I’m kind of discounting that one. But this, though…this one I think is a match. Someone went to a bar in Blue Ridge and killed everyone inside. More than thirty people.”

Tagen sat up a little straighter, winced, and pressed his hand a little harder on himself, resisting the urge to begin rubbing. “How would that be possible, even for E’Var? Someone must have struggled, shouted.”

“Yeah, well, whoever it was shot the place up pretty good. When guns start going off, it’s human nature to hit the deck. That might have made it pretty easy for him to get everyone else under control.”

Tagen was shaking his head, closing his eyes again. “No, that would never be E’Var. What could it possibly profit him to use a gun on humans?”

“He only shot some of the people,” Daria replied. “The others, quote, sustained massive cranial trauma with an unknown instrument, end-quote. In other words, someone bashed in the back of their heads. Tied them up, it says, and went one by one down the line. It doesn’t specifically say that parts of the hypothalamus were removed, but then, the cops’ll probably want to keep that little tidbit to themselves.”

“Why?”

“To weed out false confessors. And don’t ask,” she said, as he opened his mouth. “I don’t know why anyone would want to confess to a crime they didn’t commit, but people do, and cops have to keep secrets to keep from running wild goose chases all day long. That’s just how it is.”

“Wild goose chase,” Tagen echoed. He liked the sound of that, even though he didn’t know the second word. It had a crazed, frenetic feel to it. He knew exactly what it would feel like. Wasn’t he on one right now? “And do the police claim to have a suspect?”

“Funny you should ask. They say they’re investigating leads, but they always say that when they don’t have the slightest idea where to start looking. But they also say that the attack was gang related because all the victims were associated with a biker gang called the Dog Pack. I don’t know. My instincts say this is our boy, but it could just be a…Are you copping a feel on yourself?”

Tagen eyes snapped open wide and he yanked his hand up above the table. Heat immediately poured in to fill the place his grip had been and he bent almost double, digging furrows into the tabletop to stop himself from seizing his swelling shaft again.

He was caught. He flicked his eyes at her, saw her bewilderment turning aghast, and stared stonily at the table. He could feel himself throbbing to full erection, chafing at his tight coverings well beyond the point of mere pain.

“Jesus, man!” he heard her say, and he closed his eyes. “We don’t…we don’t
do
that out in the open!”

“I know.”

“What were you thinking?” Incredulous. Disbelieving. Damned near to panic.

“It is the heat.”

“The
what
?” She drew away from him, her hands curling back into protective fists, as though the bulge pushing hard against his clothing were a disease she could catch if she came too near.

“The heat.” His hand was shaking with the need to assuage himself. “My kind…I have no choice. It is the heat.”

“Can’t you…do something else about it?”

Yes, he could throw her down on this table and—

Tagen bared his teeth and snarled the thought away, sending Daria flying back in a staggering leap, out of her chair and halfway to the door. “I have been taking something…a kind of medicine, you might call it. I was not prepared for ninety days of your summer. Who could possibly expect that?” he added in a furious rush.

She came an edgy step forward, allured by vulnerability, perhaps. He imagined he could smell her sex musk, and his claws gouged deeper into the table. Her eyes were still frightened, anxious and unreasoning, and it came out of her, as he knew it would, in anger. “Why didn’t you say something earlier?” she demanded, almost shouting at him. “I
have
a goddamned air conditioner! I could have found the money somehow to get it repaired if I’d known you were going to jack yourself off in my goddamned kit—”

Tagen lifted his head and glared back into her eyes, clenching his jaw as though he could bite his own answering anger in the throat before it escaped him. “Do not shout at me,” he said, very quietly. “I cannot help it any more than the color of my hair.”

Now she flinched, hard, and looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. Her hands began to twist at themselves. “I’m sorry. I know you can’t.”

No. No more than she could help her unreasoning, persistent fear. Tagen put out one hand, splayed for apology, and Daria uttered a shrieking little gasp and slapped it away, showing the whites of her eyes in panic.

Tagen’s patience snapped, almost audibly (although the cold, even voice of his dark heart remarked that as long as she was aware of him and frightened anyway, he might as well give her something to fight against and get himself relief as well). He shoved himself away from the table and immediately pushed the heel of his hand against his loins, stroking hard up and down along his length, baring his teeth at her in fury. “I cannot help it. Do you think I would come into your house if I had any other choice? Do you think I want to see that look in your eyes, or hear my name as you curse?”

He advanced on her, stalking her, exaggerating the sliding, squeezing grip of his hand and she retreated with such speed that her bare feet slipped out from under her and sent her in a heavy sprawl over the stone tiles. He reached for her and caught her arm, and she screamed, just once, with wordless terror. Tagen flexed his claws, staring down at her with some evil desire to hurt her as much as he was able, and then he hauled her up and set her roughly on her feet.

“If it comes as any comfort to you,” he snarled, his mouth twisted in mockery of a smile. “It hurts more than I have words to say. You can think of me…copping a feel and know that I am screaming.”

He turned away from her without another word, staggered up to his room, and slammed the door.

*

Daria cried herself dry of panic at the kitchen table. It took a long time, and when the storm passed, she got up and went sickly down into the laundry room and ran a load of linens. She organized her tool shelves as they washed. She readied three dozen planting pots as they dried, just in case she decided to plant something in the fall. She folded sheets and pillow shams, staring at the empty wall and forcing herself not to think. Her heart was a stone in her chest.

She went upstairs to put the clean towels on the shelf and heard, through the wall and over the drone of the TV downstairs, a muffled, gasping cry from Tagen’s room.

Know that I am screaming
.