Bebe (13 page)

“Oh for the love of—” Planting his hand on top of her head, he took the tissues back and covered her nose with them. “Blow,” he said, expelling air through his own nose when she only looked at him. “Come on. I mean it, blow.”

Tentatively, she blew.

Thoroughly unimpressed, he said again, lower and slightly more impatiently, “Do it again, this time as if you actually mean it.”

She blew harder, and he wiped her nose.

“Thank you,” he said, and would have directed her attention right back into the corner again had his own not suddenly been captured by a very slight, crunching sound. It was so soft, almost completely drowned out beneath the muted pops and crackles of green logs being consumed in the fireplace, but when Tral tipped his head to the door and listened intently after only a brief pause he heard it again. Soft, evenly spaced crunches. He raised his head, following the sound blindly through the station wall as he suddenly realized he knew exactly what it was. He heard it every time he ventured out into the snow. It was the sound of footsteps. Smaller than his own, definitely, but there was no mistaking the crunch of feet—little feet, more than one pair even—prowling through the snow right outside his front door. Maybe even a whole wild pack’s worth.

The little female jumped when Tral grabbed her off her chair, yanking her up into his arms where he could keep her close. As if they both weren’t perfectly safe inside this locked station house.

They were in a locked station house, weren’t they?

“Oh crap!” Dropping his human on the bed, Tral leapt for the door, reaching it just as soft human feet scaled the porch. Tral hit the locking pad and then stayed there, leaning hard against the door just in case. He was slipping.

For almost a full minute, everything was quiet. The crackling of the fire in the fireplace was the only sound. Very softly, the footsteps moved back off the porch, retreating beyond what he could hear.

Glancing over his shoulder, he met the wide blue stare of his female stray. She was kneeling on the mattress, watching him with wide startled eyes. He pointed at her. “Stay. Don’t move.”

As quietly as he could, Tral went to the window behind his work table. With two fingers, he peeled back the curtain and peeked cautiously outside. The yard was clear but for a swarming trail of footprints haloing all sides of the snow-covered porch. It wasn’t hard to tell what direction they’d come from either. Apparently, he noted with a groan, they’d followed the same snowy tracks he’d left behind after chasing down the little female earlier. His footprints were completely obscured by a trampling of smaller man-sized ones. The wild pack had hunted him all the way home.

“This is not good,” Tral said.

It didn’t get any better a half-second later when, on the tails of that realization, the pack leader, who had apparently still been standing quietly on the porch-side of the wall, abruptly stepped in front of the window to confront Tral through the glass partition. He was a short animal, the top of his scruffy brown head only coming up to Tral’s ribs, and wild. Very wild.

The startling differences between an untamed human and a house pet became irrevocably cemented in Tral’s mind when, from a distance of less than two feet, the pack leader yanked back his spear and jabbed at him with startling force of purpose. The sharpened tip struck the window at chest-level, bouncing harmlessly off again though not for the human’s lack of trying. Had it not been for shatter-resistant glass, Tral knew he’d have just been killed. It took a moment for that realization to fully sink into him and for Tral’s heart to start beating again. Someday, he really ought to thank his uncle for all the foresight and personal funding that had been poured into making this old station the human-proofed bastion of security that it now was.

The wild pack leader seethed, steaming the air outside with his breath. His dark eyes narrowed on Tral before, spear in hand, he turned sharply and stalked stiff-legged off the porch. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave. Signaling to the rest of his four-man pack, the humans began to spread out around the house.

“Damn,” Tral said—calmly even, all things considered. This really was not good. Not at all.

Moving away from the window, he drew the curtains closed in the hopes that not being able to see him directly might help reduce their aggression. Circling through the small house, he drew all the windows’ curtains closed and checked to make sure everything was locked up tight. Why were they here? The Preserve had been fully stocked with game at the beginning of the winter and his close encounter with the wild man had revealed a male in good physical health, so Tral knew they weren’t starving. He could chuck a few packages of food out to them, he supposed, but the last thing he wanted to do was reinforce their bad behavior with edible rewards.

They’d never come this close to the station house before. Something had to have brought them. His eyes swept the small room, coming to rest on the little female sitting on his bed. Tral stared at her for almost a full minute, too stunned to move. Then he began to laugh. “Great. Just great.”

Her eyebrows quirked as she watched him, and her fingers began tapping nervously together.

Maybe they had seen him carrying her back here. She might be in heat; maybe they could smell her.

What was he going to do?

He ran his fingers through his short hair. “I have no idea.”

Where was his dart gun? He turned in a tight circle, searching the floor with his eyes, but a soft bump against the ceiling quickly redirected his attention towards the barren wooden rafters of the station house.

“What are you doing, you cunning little bastard,” Tral laughed, tracking the soft movements of the human sneaking across his roof towards the chimney flew.

Crossing the room, he quickly added two more logs to the already high blaze. His eyes met the female’s. She was following him, crawling from one corner of the bed to another, watching him closely. Now and then, her gaze darted from him to the ceiling and back again. Although nervous, she didn’t look anywhere near unnerved enough considering he could probably end this whole conflict right now by setting her out on the front porch.

“You’re very fortunate I’ve got a conscience,” he told her sincerely. “And nowhere near enough gift-wrapping.”

Over his shoulder, whisper-soft footsteps padded up to the front door. Very softly, the latch was tested. Another faint scratching came from the direction of the bathroom. Tral promptly went back there, throwing open the door and turning on the light before smacking the flat of his hand half a dozen times against the wall. Just so the humans would know he could hear them. Already the paperwork on today’s activities was swiftly approaching novel-length proportions. The last thing he wanted was to have to explain to his superiors how a wild animal managed to tunnel through his bathroom wall in pursuit of a mate.

Leaving the bathroom light on as a warning, Tral returned to the main room. By sheer accident, he spotted his dart gun on a shelf. If it had been a human, it would have stabbed him.

“Really bad analogy,” he muttered as he pulled it down. He was just tucking it into his belt when he heard something that raised the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Someone knocked on the window by his work desk. It was a very deliberate sound, a slow and steady, one-knuckled rap that repeated five times and then stopped.

The little female straightened abruptly. She stared at the window with those wide blue eyes of hers, weaving a little unsteadily as she crawled to that corner of the bed and whispered hopefully, “Sir?”

“No. It’s not Sir.” Tral didn’t move. She looked at him expectantly, then fixed on the window again. That slow and deliberate knock came a second time, six steady raps that faded quickly into silence soon after the last fell.

Tral jumped when the little female let out a sudden squeal of delight. “Sir!” She fell off the side of the bed and then, crying out when her feet touched the floor, to all fours on the floor. That minute pain didn’t dampened her excitement or stop her from crawling towards the door. “Sir! Sir!”

Images of her blindly throwing it open to admit the wild pack into his station hurtled Tral to his feet. He threw out both hands, snatching her back when she tried to use the latch to pull herself upright again. “No!”

“Ma’am! Sir!” she cried, struggling against his restraining hold until, in a fit of frustrated desperation, he dumped her stomach-down over the edge of the bed and gave her still warm bottom a resounding smack.

“I said, no!” he thundered. Whether it was the smack or the shout, finally she froze, cringing when she looked at him, her blue eyes huge in her all-too people-like face. “Stop!” he ordered, then pointed at her, doing his best to seem as big and imposing as possible. “Sit! Stay!”

At least twice her size, he must have succeeded because she stayed. Rolling over, she sat where he put her, blinking back tears. Her legs still dangled over the edge of the mattress, her bandaged feet only inches from the floor, but at least she stayed.

“Don’t move,” he warned, backing slowly towards the window and the source of the deliberate knocking. Hardly daring to take his eyes off her, he reluctantly reached out to part the curtains.

The leader of the wild pack stood directly in front of him once more. Glaring, unsmiling, the shaggy lengths of his dark hair billowed around his grim face as the wind began to blow. There were flecks of white in his beard and hanging from his bangs; Tral hadn’t realized it had begun to snow again and so hard in so short a time.

The human scowled at him, the hard angles of his face harboring a dark and not entirely unexpected dislike. A good two feet shorter than he was, the leader of the wild pack was nevertheless doing a very effective job of staring him down.

A hand touched Tral’s arm and he jumped, that well-known phrase ‘nothing as bad as human behavior’ taking on a whole new level of meaning in his mind when the little female pushed past him. She wedged herself in between him and the window and, ruined feet or not, arched up onto her tiptoes to better see over the high sill. She barely looked at the wild male, but he definitely noticed her. The black stare vanished behind a veil of open-mouthed surprise. He made a sound and tried to catch her attention, pressing his hand—the one not currently carrying a spear—flat against the glass before her.

The little female ignored him completely. She twisted her face this way and that, trying to see beyond him and out into the snow. She smeared the glass with fingerprints and steamed it with the heat of her breath.

“Sir?” she whispered brokenly, but wherever Sir was, he wasn’t out there.

After a moment, crushed by a disappointment so obvious that it was nearly tangible, she lowered herself back onto her bandaged feet. She made only a single soft, keening sound as she turned and walked back to the bed. Lying down on her side, she pulled the blankets completely up over her and began to cry.

The human male pressed to the glass, trying to keep her in his sight for as long as he could, but the minute she vanished under the blankets, his unforgiving stare found Tral again. Slowly, seething with every heaving breath, the human’s face underwent a positively volcanic change. Gone was the icy dislike. His dark eyes burned with savagery; his alien face flushed with rage and a deep-seated, unequivocal hatred so intense that Tral could feel it trembling out of that smaller male’s body, right through the unshatterable glass of the window and straight into himself.

Not knowing what else to do, Tral let the curtain fall closed. In hindsight, he probably should have done that right from the start. Halfway expecting the human to suddenly launch himself into some form of exuberant spear-pounding-into-glass activity, he also took a healthy step back.

This was not good. Oh no, this was not good at all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Now What?

Three sharp all-business raps on the window requested another audience. It was followed by a bare three-second, impatient pause before the insistent knock became a full-fisted, rapid-fire pounding that was hard enough to shake not only the glass but the dishes in the sink as well.

Tral frowned at the drawn curtain. In all the literature and all the reports by fellow zoologists, not once had anyone reported this kind of blatantly social, interactive behavior from a wild human before. He didn’t relish being the first. As it was, by tomorrow his computer in-box was going to be positively aflame with requests for clarification and extra paperwork, all of which he would need to fill out and file with the proper departments, in triplicate no less, and all to the inevitable conclusion that none of his supervisors, or their superiors, or even their superiors above them, would ever believe a word of it. There was, in fact, a very good chance that he would be labeled delusional—

“I do talk to myself,” he wryly muttered.

—or a trouble-maker who let his bleeding-heart animal-activist roots (he had his uncle to thank for that) color his perception and his reports. In any case, he had no illusions that anything he submitted today would be regarded as utterly worthless, at best, and at the very worst might well cause his immediate suspension of service. As a zoologist or in any other governmental capacity.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. There would always be a need for janitors and minor mechanics. Especially on deep-space stations, where men narrow enough to crawl through all that ductwork were consistently in short supply.

Just his luck, Tral was probably narrow enough. He could already smell the recycled air, perpetually tainted by the staleness of old farts and a diet exclusively based on one or two variations of the same re-hydrated meal packets, eaten over and over and over again until somebody finally snapped. Like that minor mechanic on Baystex 11, who killed every other person on the station, starting with his roommate—by all reports, a cheerful albeit talkative fellow—who he’d then hollowed out and worn like a stretched-out jumpsuit until the day a passing mining barge docked for minor repairs only to find itself being attended by a roommate-wearing mechanic.