Bebe (18 page)

His uncle had a pet. He knew all about human behavior at its worst. He might be so overwhelmed with sympathy that he’d simply untie the ropes and allow the whole matter pass without further comment or humiliation.

Ha.

Mouth flattening into a tight, hard line, Tral glared at the ceiling, unable to spin that unlikely outcome into even a semi-convincing fantasy. At long last, he drew a deep breath and let it in a slow, long-suffering sigh.

“Crap,” he said again.

* * * * *

Bright and early the following morning, a transport drove directly into the Preserve. The windows rattled as it cautiously circled the station house once before descending to land not far from the porch. The engines blew a briefly blinding storm of swirling snow out in all directions, inadvertently clearing a path as it touched lightly down and spattering the side of the house with small pebbles and chunks of ice. What snow was not instantly scattered beneath it, the engines melted.

Tral lay patiently, angled across his bed, stretching his arms as much as he could and flexing his feet and hands while he waited for the telltale crunch-crunch-crunch of heavy footsteps to make their way to his door.

“Stop kissing the ground,” his uncle grumbled. “We weren’t going that fast.”

A fan of half a dozen footsteps more moved around the porch, sending shadows dashing across the drawn curtains as the house was circled. In search of any aggressive humans that might still be lingering in the area, no doubt.

“Heat signatures?” Bach asked.

“One,” came a low and distance-muffled replied. “Inside. Nothing larger than ground rats out here.”

“Hm,” his uncle said.

Crunch-crunch-crunch. Then silence.

Tral stared up at the ceiling and waited. The fire had died shortly before dawn. Although not terribly cold yet, the house had cooled and his fingers and toes were really starting to ache.

“Hm,” his uncle said again, his low voice lacking any easily decipherable inflection. Finally, “Come, Pani,” he called and slow, steady tromping boots came up onto the porch.

Never had three light raps on the door sounded so good.

“Come in,” Tral hailed, trying not to sound as giddily grateful as he suddenly felt. “It’s open.”

There was a brief hesitation, followed by a soft click as the latch turned and the door swung inward. With a single step, his uncle entered the house just far enough to fill the doorway. Then his eyes adjusted to the unlit gloom of the interior and he separated the shadows of the tightly bound Tral from the rest of the room, and he stopped.

Grim, tall and imposing, Bach stared at him. His expression was entirely closed, revealing nothing of his thoughts.

“Good morning.” Tral managed to smile. “I’d get up and greet you properly, but...” he glanced up at the ropes that bound him fast to the headboard. “...I’m momentarily...ha ha...tied up right now.”

His minute attempt at humor did not go over well.

The corner of his mouth quirking into a tight frown, Bach took another deliberate step inside before closing the door behind him.

From just outside, softly feminine voice immediately protested, “Hey.”

Bach glanced down at his side with a slight flicker of surprise before cracking the door once more and shooing Pani in to join them. He quickly shut it again to prevent anyone else from witnessing this intensely embarrassing scene.

“Uh oh,” Pani said, when she saw Tral. Dressed completely head to toe in a one-piece snowsuit, the red and white fabric matched the fading wisps of hair poking out around the softly feathered hood. She started towards him, but stopped when Bach quickly caught her shoulder.

He held up a staying hand when she glanced up at him, but said nothing. He looked right, into the kitchen, then left at the cold fireplace, and then back at Tral.

“They’re gone,” Tral said helpfully.

His jaw clenched. His frown deepened. Grudgingly, he took his hand from Pani’s shoulder. Unfastening his long black coat and shoving his sleeves up to his elbows, Bach approached the cold hearth and dropped to one knee.

This was going about as well as Tral had expected. Fighting the urge to simply start babbling explanations, he lay helplessly where he was while his uncle lit another fire and Pani padded past the bed into the kitchen area.

“Messy,” Pani said, grimacing as she looked from his desk to the sink and then the floor.

“The humans kind of tore through the place,” Tral told them, but his uncle snorted. It was the sort of laugh given when a man found himself perched at the entirely wrong end of the amusement scale. Tral frowned. “All right, fine. Some of this was the humans though.”

Poking at the budding flames of the fire, Bach glanced once at him and then shifted that look to the much smaller Pani. “Mind your manners.”

Unsure exactly which of them he might mean, Tral stayed quiet until the fire was established. Laying several logs across the top, his uncle stood and lightly brushed off his hands. He cast Tral a sidelong glance. Frowning heavily, he came back around the end of the bed, taking command of the chair Tral had used for his impromptu interrogation of Bebe the night before. Crossing his legs, Bach folded his large hands upon his knee and then looked at his still tightly-bound nephew.

“You’re still alive,” he finally conceded.

“Yes, and thank you so much for coming.”

Bach waved that aside with little more than a sweep of his fingers. “Tell me...” he gave the bed a pointed look. “Your stray?”

“No,” Tral quickly shook his head. “It was the wild pack, although I rather suspect she opened the door for them.”

“The females have a very strong penchant for getting into things they shouldn’t,” Bach said mildly.

Nobody looked at Pani, rustling through the dirty dishes at the sink, shaking her head and muttering to herself. She brought her mitten-covered hands to her mouth and began loosening the ties with her teeth.

As the silence began to stretch on, Tral finally asked, “I don’t suppose I could throw myself upon your good nature and ask you to untie me?”

Other than drumming his fingers lightly upon the back of his other hand, Bach didn’t move. “Where is she, this defenseless, unhealthy stray of yours?”

“The males took her.”

“Ah.” Back shrugged with his graying eyebrows. “Problem solved, then.” Bending slightly, he pulled a small knife from his boot top and began to snick through the ropes binding Tral’s ankles. His summary dismissal of the ‘problem’ nettled just under Tral’s skin.

“I’ll be going after her as soon as I’m free.” In hindsight, he probably should have waited until he’d been cut completely free before saying anything, because his uncle promptly stopped what he was doing and sat back down. With a look of mild (that it was glimpsed at all meant it was probably much more severe) irritation, Bach crossed his legs and rested his hands upon them again. He turned the boot knife in his seemingly idle fingers and glared at his nephew.

“Why?” he finally demanded, probably when he was good and sure he could hold onto his temper as he said it.

“Because she’s domesticated,” Tral replied, trying not to sound as exasperated as he suddenly felt. “Because she rolled in every
vouka
plant between here and the fence. Because, while I’ve been giving her exceedingly high doses of antitoxin and combo antibiotics, she isn’t anywhere near as well as she currently feels, and because until the poison is completely out of her system, she could easily relapse and be dead inside of two days. And lastly, because even if she wasn’t slowly dying right now—as we sit uselessly by doing absolutely nothing, I might add—she’d still
never
survive out in the wild! Now,
please
cut me loose. My fingers are starting to go numb.”

“You should be more concerned about the numbness between your ears,” Bach countered, turning the knife again.

“Ouch,” Pani commented from the kitchen. She had managed to get her mittens off and was now standing on a chair by the sink, slowly filling it with hot water while she struggled to get the soap bottle open.

“Stop doing his housework for him,” Bach snapped back at her over one shoulder.

Dumping a liberal amount of soap into the water, she only half-heartedly glanced back over her shoulder at him. “Mess.”

“He made it by himself; he can clean it up the same way.”

Apparently, that didn’t even warrant a glance. Pani simply shifted the first stack of dishes into the water and began washing anyway. “Grouch,” she muttered under her breath.

Shifting in his chair, Bach visibly ground his teeth but pretended not to have heard, and for a moment, all Tral could do was marvel. There wasn’t a grown man on the face of this planet brave enough to deliberately bait his uncle, and yet this tiny human pet, not even six feet tall, stood boldly at the sink and did just exactly that.

He should have kept his mouth shut. The last thing he wanted was shift his uncle’s mounting ire from Pani (who was probably used to it) back onto himself. But with his very next breath, he suddenly heard himself blurt, “How long have you had her?”

Bach snapped the heat of his glare back onto Tral. The lines age had carved into the hard angles of his face hardly softened, but after a moment he said, “Twenty-seven years. Far too long to have either the energy or the inclination to train another.” His uncle raised his voice and twisted in his seat to cast Pani another frown. “And well she knows it!”

Without looking up, Pani raised one wet hand and made flapping motions at him with her soapy fingers.

“I talk too much,” Bach dryly translated when Tral started.

“So long, and yet...” Tral hesitated. “Is...is that all the better she talks?”

Leaning back in his chair, Bach narrowed his eyes. Wheels of information were churning in the black depths of his eyes. Now and then, one finger of his folded hands rose slightly before tapping back down into place, as if he were picking and choosing through a veritable blasting-field of possible explanations. He drew a slight breath, and then reluctantly confessed, “Humans understand far better than they articulate. Pani is exceptional in that her vocabulary exceeds more than two hundred words and phrases. However, the fact remains, she only has four vocal folds in her throat. Like the rest of her species, she hasn’t the physical capacity to vocalize our growls and clicks, and that makes our language extremely difficult for her. If it’s any consolation, we don’t speak their language any better. It sends her laughing into hysterical fits every time I try.”

“Language?” Startled, Tral tried to sit up, but the way he was bound made it impossible for him to do more than raise his head up off the mattress. “Are you serious? They don’t have a language!”

Bach blinked at him, his turn now to be surprised, although he mastered it better than his younger nephew. Bending, he slipped his knife back into his boot sheath and stood up to gather a loose stack of paper reports off Tral’s bedside table. He rolled them into a tube and promptly smacked Tral smartly across the head. Twice, from side-to-side in rapid succession. A fleeting grimace of disgust snarled his mouth before he flung the papers down across the pillows and reseated himself in the chair.

They glared at one another, Bach flicking his thumb claw against his forefinger in an open show of irritation. “Exactly what is it you think I sent you up here to do?”

“Freeze!” Tral snapped before he could stop himself. He did not like being hit.

“You’ve been here six years,” Bach snapped back. “How in all that time can you not have seen one useful thing, one suspicious interaction to give you pause, regarding who and what they are?”

Tral opened his mouth, but stopped and immediately ducked into a cringe, trying to hide under his bound arms when his uncle grabbed up the papers and smacked the top of his head again. And kept right on smacking, a new blow emphasizing each point as he said, “They use
tools
, they make and wear
clothing
, they
decorate
their bodies, they have
preferences
, and they organize themselves to
attack
—” smack-smack “—self-absorbed
idiots
, who apparently haven’t even the common sense to notice a
sentient
race of
people
after
six damned years of study
!”

Bach whacked him one last time for good measure and then threw the papers on the bed, scattering them across Tral, the blankets, his pillows and off the other side onto the floor.

“Do that again,” Tral growled through tightly clenched teeth, “and I don’t care who you are, I will make you eat those reports!”

“Ha!” Bach dropped back onto his chair, taking that threat for exactly what it was worth. “If you weren’t my baby sister’s only offspring, I’d carve you into pieces and feed you to the ground squirrels.”

They glared at one another in seething silence, Tral helpless to do anything more than flex in his bonds, his uncle slowly fading back behind his customary, unemotional mask.

“They’re smart,” Tral finally conceded. “I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes they are even frighteningly smart. But reeser birds use stones to break into their nuts, scuttle crabs decorate their shells with stingers and rocks to attract the best mate, and wolves organize every time they leave their dens to hunt. They bark and they howl, but nobody would dare call
that
a language and nobody calls them people!”

Tilting his head, Bach stared at his nephew for a full minute in silence. “All right,” he said thoughtfully. Bending to retrieve his knife, he rose to stand over Tral, considering him silently for so long that the ragged edges of Tral’s ill-advised temper began to slip into nervous uncertainty. Almost afraid he really would be cut into pieces, he jumped when Bach finally bent to catch hold of Tral’s arms and neatly snick through the remaining bonds.

Scrambling off the opposite side of the mattress, neatly putting the bed between them, Tral grabbed his wrists and eyed his uncle. He alternately rubbed the burns the ropes left behind and surreptitiously counting his fingers.