She flicked her fingers along her neck to her chin and out toward Raven’s face, a slow and contemptuous physical curse, and Raven backed up a step. “Go practice your penmanship,” she snarled, and turned her back.

She hobbled into the bathroom. Kane was in the shower. He glanced at her as she entered, but didn’t speak, not even when she stepped into the tub behind him. That was all right. He let her stay and that must mean something.

Every little thing meant something.

*

Coming down the long dirt path to Daria’s house had felt absurdly like homecoming to Tagen and he knew Daria was relieved as well. They’d been up all night, they should have gone directly to their own rooms to sleep. Instead, he had come in here to stare at his map and comfort the distressed and starving cat, and Daria had disappeared into the fathoms of the house to clean something. He didn’t stop her. She needed the comfort of her routine, of action. He understood that. More than anything, he’d like to take his weapon out to a shooting range and blow a few thousand targets into vapor.

At least the itch was purely mental. The day was cool, even overcast. The door had been open all night and the front room was nicely freshened for it. The cat had missed him. Deeply. It was soothing to Tagen’s soul to be greeted in so enthusiastic a manner. He solemnly offered up his body to be the cushion for Grendel’s enormous bulk, and massaged happy growls from the creature while he studied his map. He could comfortably sit thus, with cat under hand and the gentle noise of Daria at work somewhere in the background, until sleep claimed him.

But there was work to do and the words of the human lawman kept running through Tagen’s mind. E’Var and his two human females, responsible for fifty-eight deaths at a single hunt.

Two females. Why two?

One for Heat and one for…for what? Could not both females pilot the groundcar? And if not, why keep the human who could not pilot? If one listened to Daria, it was because he liked her. Tagen found that difficult to take seriously, but then, even the very worst men could have unanticipated moments of sentimentality. Uraktus, for example, had adopted a son. And died for him.

Enough. Regardless of E’Var’s reasons, what mattered now was not who he traveled with, but where he traveled to.

Tagen sat before the map of killings, staring down at indications of trees, rivers and mountains until the colors lost their meaning and all that remained were Daria’s markings. His eyes tracked restlessly along the path of his prisoner, up and down the roadways from murder to murder. There were gaps, he was sure of it . Bodies the humans had not found, killings attributed to other causes, but E’Var was here. He and his two human companions, sweeping back and forth across the hunting grounds of Earth, taking what they needed as often as they could.

Companions. That was too gentle a word. Accomplices. That, perhaps, was a better one. They were not E’Var’s prisoners, or at least, not fully. Who but a human could tell E’Var the nature of this ‘movie theatre’ and then direct him to one? They were helping him to hunt. They were driving him around in their own groundcar. They were feeding him, sheltering him.

What had he promised them in exchange? Perhaps life and nothing more. And perhaps Tagen was being too harsh with these unknown females. E’Var had surely not asked for aid. He had abducted them. Raped them. Killed others in front of their eyes. And they were human, smaller and weaker than Jotan, unaware that they were not alone in the universe until the moment that E’Var had stolen them. Tagen supposed he could not condemn them for surrendering to E’Var’s will. Not fairly, anyway. He really was a rotten officer.

Tagen touched a claw to the black circles marking E’Var’s killings. East and east and east on foot. Well east, in the groundcar. Then North and then all over. There were great blocks of time unaccounted for, but if there was a pattern here, it evaded Tagen’s eye.

He leaned back with a sigh, pulling Grendel high onto his chest and massaging the cat’s ears. From back in the bowels of the house, he could hear a muffled thump and rattle of Daria at work. It was a soothing sound, but the map before him kept catching his eye and tightening his claws. If only he knew how E’Var was guiding himself around Earth. The humans who accompanied him were navigating the groundcar, but it must be E’Var himself telling them where to go and Tagen couldn’t believe it was purely at random. That was just too stupid a way to hunt, and stupid hunters get caught a whole lot faster than it had taken Uraktus E’Var and his crew.

Tagen put the cat onto the floor and stood up before Grendel could leap back onto his lap. The animal gripped at his knee and wailed, but Tagen unhooked its tiny claws with a firm hand and stepped over it and out into the hall. He needed Daria’s eyes. Her insight, her Earther experience, her wisdom, her…just her.

Tagen followed the sounds of movement to the utility room and there found Daria rummaging through her tall shelves. She was dressed scantily, uncharacteristic for her but quite a pleasant surprise for him. Her legs were mostly bared beneath shortcut jeans and she had a white shirt tied just below her breasts to expose her midriff. Her long hair was shaped into a rope that hung well down her back and swayed like a Kevrian tail with every movement. Tagen leaned against the doorjamb and admired her, thinking how eerily beautiful it was to see light and shadow playing through all those uniquely-human curves.

He made no sound, of that he was sure, but his stare must have grown some weight of its own because she peeked over one shoulder and saw him, startling just a little before laughing selfconsciously.

“What are you doing, just standing there and looking at me?” she asked.

“Yes.” He smiled, and let her see him run his gaze down to her heels and back up, savoring every part of her. “A most worthwhile pursuit. And what are you doing?”

“I can’t find anything since we put this stuff away,” she said, as though apologizing. “I must have re-organized this place ten times—”

“At least.”

“—but I still can’t remember where I put everything. Oh!” She stepped off the little bucket she’d been using for a step-up and displayed her prize: a long-armed set of shears. “I need to prune the trees,” she said.

“Need you?” he sighed, but he came down into the room to join her. “Then I will help.”

“Aw, you don’t want to go out there and work,” she said, but she looked pleased. “Stay in here where it’s cool.”

“It is cool enough,” he replied, tossing his shoulder in that fine human shrug. “And I may as well occupy myself with other tasks. I have never found a way to accustom myself to leisure.”

“Me, neither.” She handed him the shears and opened the back door.

“I warn you, my motives are less than pure.” He arched a brow at her with mock seriousness as he stepped out beneath the sun’s cloud-smothered gaze. “I hope that when you see how I labor on your behalf, you will be desirous to mate with me.”

“It’s working.”

“Ah, well then. I shall work the harder.”

She made a point of showing him how to operate the shears she called ‘pruners’, and then took him to her garden, where a tall step-up already waited. She tried to explain what was to be done and Tagen let her, but he had done this before, if not on quite the same trees.

“It’s the wrong time of year for this, I would think,” he commented as he took his first cuts.

“I know. But it’s easiest to tell which branches are dead when there are leaves on them. In the winter, they all look dead.”

“Do they?”

“Don’t the trees on Jota drop their leaves when it gets cold?”

“Only a very few, toward the planet’s mid-point. I suppose our trees have accustomed themselves to cold over the past several billion years.”