Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

“She does amazing blowjobs,” Kane informed him and settled back in his seat. “There’s no reason she should have to sit and watch. We can take you together.”

“I…That’d be fine.” The human drove, his hands clenching on the wheel. “Hot damn,” he said after a moment.

“In fact, there’s no reason we should have to wait at all, is there?” Kane smiled at the mirror, where the human’s eyes were on him. “Pull us over.”

“What, here?” The human licked his lips. “Now?”

“If you want.” Kane leaned forward, letting his breath tickle at the human’s ear. “I want.”

The groundcar’s wheels screeched as the vehicle found a turn off the main road and into the woods.

“Back,” Kane said. “Well back. I want to be loud.”

“You got it,” the human said hoarsely.

Kane cocked his arm over the back seat and watched the road disappear behind him. He glanced back and saw Raven staring at him. He showed her his fangs in a cheerful smile and she blinked.

The human parked and Kane got out. “Pack, Raven,” he said mildly, and shut his door.

The human stepped over to him, his face flushed with excitement, and Kane leaned against the side of the car and smiled invitingly. Personally, he would never understand why any male would want to fuck another one when there was a perfectly good female standing right there, but there was something genuinely inspiriting in knowing such a male wanted Kane. He hooked his thumb into the fasten-seam of his pants, and the human’s eyes went straight to it. The human knelt.

Kane held out his hand as the human tugged awkwardly at his fastens and Raven put his pack strap into it. By the time he had his harvester out and loaded, the human had finally managed to work out the way his clothing opened. Kane got to hear the swift, awe-filled breath the human took as he saw Kane’s cock, and then the end came in a snap of bone.

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Kane remarked as the body thumped over on its back. He dug the gland he needed out of the mass of brain matter and let dopamine collect drop by drop. “Flattering as all hell, though.”

Raven snickered. “For a second there, I actually thought you were going to do it.”

“Fucking is fucking,” Kane said with a flick of his claws. “So my father said, and I believe him. But a man is permitted preferences and mine is for pussy. If I haven’t managed to make that plain enough, then clearly, I need to be fucking you more often.”

Raven’s smile faded.

Kane ejected the emptied gland and returned his harvester to his pack. He slung it over his shoulder, freeing his hands to fasten himself back up. “We need to get going before I get hot.”

This was Raven’s cue to search the body, but she didn’t do it immediately. She did bend at last, coming away with the groundcar’s keys and more of the green paper the humans used for money, but then she paused again. Her expression was fetchingly cautious.

Kane laughed, slinging the dead human out of the groundcar’s turning arc. “What is it, Raven? Are you afraid you hurt my feelings?”

“Did I?” she asked, surprising him with her every appearance of sincerity.

“No.” He went to her, searching her face curiously for the meaning behind this strange line of questioning. “Were you trying to?”

“It’s an insult here.”

“What is?”

“To say a guy’s gay when he isn’t.”

Kane left aside the incomprehensibility of that premise to pursue the greater point as he saw it. “Is that what you said?”

“No.” She thought about it, visibly searching her memories. “No,” she said again, with more confidence. “But—”

His hand slipped out beneath her skirt and cupped her sex, mindful of her piercings. “But what?” he murmured.

She sucked in breath and looked at him shakily. “That hurts.”

“Mm hm.” He eased his finger past her steel-ringed folds and inside her. “Go on.”

She didn’t. She stared straight ahead, her muscles locked, as he worked his hand carefully at and in her. It wasn’t long before he’d drawn moisture from her unwilling body, and her face betrayed it with an unhappy wince. “I wish you wouldn’t,” she whispered.

He chuckled. “I’m sure you do,” he agreed. “But not all of you. Some part of you wants me to do this. Mm, feel how it wants me to do this!” He showed her his teeth and she flinched and looked away. “Now, I ask you. Is this the work of a man who fucks men?”

She shook her head, her jaw tight.

Kane stroked at her, tickling at that tender place of pleasure. He watched, smiling thinly, as she fought not to feel…fought and failed. She mewled once, her face twisting, and came, writhing slow on his hand. He kept her high, prolonging her climax and her misery, and finally took his hand away and let her slump against the side of the car.

He wiped himself clean on her skirt and gave her hip a pat. “Does that settle your mind, Raven?”

She nodded, her eyes shut tight.

“Good. I don’t usually bother to enlighten the humans around me on the subject of my sexual preferences. You’re lucky I like you so much.” He cast an eye upwards, measuring the hours left in the day. “Enough talk, Raven. Let’s get moving.”

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Chapter Fourteen

Daria came up slowly out of sleep, which was not her customary way of wakening. Usually, she had the covers thrown back and was halfway to the shower less than a minute after her eyes snapped open, but not today. Today, it was a slow, rolling catlike stretch that brought her almost writhing through her tangled sheets, feeling sleepy and sexy and very relaxed. She could remember nothing of her dreams, but there was a warm glow throughout her entire body. She ran her hands lazily down her breasts, over her belly and between her thighs. Her panties were sopping. It must have been a good dream.

She rolled over and fumbled with the little clock by her bed until she had turned it toward her. 9:47. Christ. Her alien was probably starving.

Assuming he was still here.

She closed her eyes, all her good feelings gone in the blink of an eye…or the slap of a hand. She sat up, feeling sick and sad and angry with herself, and then kicked off her sheets and stared at the wall. On the other side (well, with a closet and a bathroom in the way), was the den where Tagen might still be sleeping. Maybe with her handprint still on his face. She couldn’t believe she’d hit him. She couldn’t believe he hadn’t hit her back.

Daria got up, slid into a t-shirt and got an armload of clean clothes for after her shower. There was a damp towel hanging on the rod here, but not too damp. He’d been up in the night. She put it in the hamper and fetched out a clean one for herself, and after a moment’s thought, another clean one for him. Having another person in the house changed so many little things in so many unexpected places.

Clean, dried, hair and teeth brushed, dressed. Still no sound from the den. He might already be downstairs.

She did not see Tagen in his customary place at the table. She did see four glasses beside the sink, as well as two empty ice cube trays and an empty carton of orange juice, one she hadn’t even had the chance to taste. She cleaned this up, looking awkwardly at the ceiling, listening for him. She heard nothing.

She brought in the paper, fed the cat, sat and read the news front page to last (even the sports section). When she was done, she found she could not remember anything she had just read. She worked on the daily crossword for a bit, in pen, to punish herself, and eventually inked herself into a corner of dismal failure. Scraping the entire paper into a pile, Daria rose and set about making breakfast. A good breakfast.

Over the sounds of sausage sputtering, her ears at last detected a creaking of quiet feet in the room that Tagen had claimed, but he did not appear. Daria loaded two plates with sausage, eggs, and French toast, tossed some syrup and oranges into a bag along with a carton of milk, and carried the whole mess upstairs.

She hovered outside his door, listening to him listen to her, and finally cleared her throat and ventured, “Knock knock.”

“Good morning.”

Was it her imagination or did he hesitate before answering her?

“Can I come in? I brought food.” She chewed her lip as he met that with silence. “Are you still mad at me?”

“Some.”

Honesty could be a harsh thing. Daria felt her heart sinking and her eyes sting. She started to lean over and set his plate on the floor, but heard his footsteps a short instant before his door opened.

Daria straightened, but he still towered over her, one hand gripping the door and the other flat on the wall. He seemed to fill her field of vision, to overflow it, all broad, smooth chest and rippling musculature, narrowing down into the waist of his dark pants. His black hair was limp and damp, and plastered to his body in web-thin strands. His feet were bare, the claws digging at the carpet as if he struggled for balance. He was glowing with a thin sheen of sweat already; she could smell it in the air, a smell of heady, mineral musk.

He looked awful.

“I made you breakfast,” she said, and showed him.

“Thank you,” he said gravely, and held out one hand.

She passed his plate over, clutched her own with both hands and looked up into his golden eyes. “Can I come in?”

Again, there was a hesitation, scarcely noticeable but there, but finally he moved back and gave her room to enter.

The fold-out sofa was a heap of sheets and rumpled bedding, strangely incongruous in the otherwise immaculate room. His clothing was neatly folded in three distinct stacks atop three boxes along the wall—one for Dan’s old shirts, one for his old pants, and one for Tagen’s own uniform. He had cleaned off the desk for his own use, his machinery meticulously and efficiently arranged. He had found a trio of postcards she didn’t remember ever receiving—Oregon scenery in all its glory, one ocean, one forest, and one waterfall—and had pinned them to the wall in a perfectly-aligned row above the desk. All the random junk and little knick-knacks that had lined her wall and covered every surface was gone, presumably into one of the many plastic storage tubs stacked at the far side of the room.

Daria was amazed and a little unsettled to realize that this room no longer felt like it belonged in her house. There was nothing of her personality left in here, and in its place, there were bits and pieces of another life.

Tagen moved some of his devices to one side of the desk and held out a chair for her. When she took it, he backed up a pace and sat on the edge of the bed. He balanced his breakfast on his knees and looked at her.

She set out the syrup and milk and the small stack of oranges, avoiding his eyes. “I forgot glasses, but we can both drink from the carton, I guess. You don’t have anything catching, do you?”

She meant it as a joke.

He said, “No. I monitor my condition very closely off-world.”

“I don’t have cooties, either,” she offered.

“No. I scanned you when first we met and inoculated you against such things as your kind succumbs to.”

“You what?” she gasped, and if she hadn’t just put her plate on the top of a box, she’d have dropped it.

He looked up sharply. “This offends you?”

“Well…no. It was a smart thing to do.” But somewhere deep down, it did offend her. It offended her very damn much to think of him injecting alien microbes or whatever into her blood while she was insensible.

‘Be reasonable,’ she told herself sternly. ‘Remember what happened to the Indians when Spain showed up? Can you imagine what would happen if you caught the Jotan version of the flu? Polio? Ebola, for Christ’s sake?’

“A very smart thing to do,” she said again, and meant it this time. After a second, she asked, “Did I have anything?”

“No. Not the way you mean it. But it would not matter if you had. Humans are very easily cleansed of most ailments. As for danger to myself, there are very few diseases which can cross between our kinds, and all are borne by the blood or…other such fluids.”

For some reason, his expression darkened as he said this last, and he glared at his eggs for a long, tense moment before stabbing at and eating one.

Silence again. She tried to think of a way to fill it.

“The room looks nice.”

“It is very comfortable. Thank you.”

There was a clock in here somewhere. She could hear it ticking.

“Tagen,” she said timidly. “Are you all right? Listen, if I said something…Okay, there’s not really a whole lot of ‘if’ in that. I know I said things and I’m sorry…I’m really sorry I hit you. I never should have hit you.”

“I provoked you and I knew it.” He ate another egg without looking at her.

“Yeah, well, of the two of us, I think I’m still holding the title of Head Provoker and we both know it. Listen…I’m coping with this the best way I can, and I know I’m being a bitch, but I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

“It is going to be hot today,” he muttered, and his scowl deepened.

Daria pushed a neat square of battered bread through a lake of maple syrup.

“You have said nothing I cannot endure,” Tagen stated at last.

“I don’t want you to endure me,” she blurted, and felt herself blush when he looked strangely at her. “I want to be your friend.”

Tagen frowned, his eyes narrow with silent suspicion, and she had a feeling he was having trouble with his translation. She couldn’t blame him. She knew she’d been anything but friendly.

“I know you didn’t even want a partner,” Daria admitted. “And if you’d had a choice, you wouldn’t have picked me anyway.”

He did not interrupt with hurried objections. He was still and silent.

Daria sat staring at her French toast, blinking her eyes dry. She was afraid to speak and betray herself with tears, afraid to remain silent and leave him with just that said. She picked at a miniscule chunk of sausage, forced it down her dry throat, and set her plate aside.

“But I’m what you’ve got,” she said, staring at her knees. “And I’d rather be your friend than just your human host. I’m not very nice and I’m not much to look at, but…having you here has made me realize that…that I’m lonely, Tagen. I haven’t had a friend in a long time…and…” She risked an upward glance.

Tagen had turned away from her, his jaw clenched and eyes glowering, unblinking, at the back cushions of his fold-out bed.

Daria dropped her eyes back to her lap and concentrated on keeping her breathing slow and even. She heard him sigh and saw his huge, three-fingered hand drop over her knee and squeeze lightly. She looked up into his falcon’s eyes; they were distant, troubled.

“I doubt,” he said gravely, “that you would have chosen me to be here with you, but I think that you are good for me. I am becoming…accustomed to you.” His jaw clenched several times as he stared at her. “I do not know the bad thing that happened to you,” he said, and his grip on her tightened slightly when she tried to pull back, startled. “But it is plain that it did happen. And yes, you are coping with this the best way that you can, and in the best way I could expect. I understand what it must mean to you, that you offer yourself to be my friend.”

He stopped there, his hand still heavy on her knee, and looked darkly at the window, all blue sky and bright sunlight. “But it is hot. I am not at my best, and you must endure that. If you cannot, tell me now.”

She tried to laugh for him a little, taken dramatically aback by the seriousness in his voice. “You sound so…grim about it. I only want to be friends, I’m not going to bed with you.”

Tagen’s eyes almost closed in an expression that was very nearly a wince, and his claws pricked slightly at her thigh in a quick, involuntary-seeming squeeze. One side of his mouth turned up in a tired smile, and he patted her once and then drew back and addressed himself to the remains of his breakfast.

That was too abrupt. She’d insulted him. He was doing his best with the language, why did she have to jump all over him every time he got lost in translation? She wanted to apologize, but you could only do that so many times in one sitting. She picked up her plate instead, and pretended to have regained her appetite.

“So…now that we’re friends…” Daria applied more syrup to her last bite of egg. “What’s the plan for today?”

He growled quietly. “There must be a way to track unnatural death over a great distance, or to separate out the count of death in which the cause is known. Perhaps, if this is done, I will see some pattern.”

Oh sure. As simple as that. Maybe if she were the county medical examiner or an F.B.I. agent.

“Okay,” Daria said doubtfully, and looked over her shoulder as if she could see her computer floating in the air behind her. “I’ll see what I can find on the Web. It’s a good place to start, if we’re looking for gory details. What am I looking for exactly?”

“Severe injury.” Tagen frowned. “To the head alone, I should think. Sudden, violent death.”

Daria looked down at her empty plate, her breakfast swimming unpleasantly in her stomach. “Oh.”

“Likely, the skull will be entirely split or removed.”

“Thank you, Tagen, that’ll do me.” She gathered his plate and stacked it over hers, rising to go. “You can keep watching the news. There’s always a chance you’ll recognize your guy’s handiwork if it gets reported.”

“Hm.” Tagen immediately looked exhausted. “I…I ask your patience, Daria. I must…lie down during the worst hours of the day.”

“Sure. The news is on 24/7. Do you need anything?” Daria asked, pausing at the door.

He looked mildly alarmed for an instant before his features smoothed again into a mask of calm. “How do you mean?” he asked cautiously.

“You look…like you hurt,” she answered, and Tagen’s brow furrowed in something that may have been selfconscious shame. “Is there anything I can get you? Aspirin or…I don’t know, Chapstick or lotion or anything?”

“I know none of those words.”

“Aspirin is a pill you take to—”

“No.”

“Okay. Well, Chapstick is for your lips.” She mimed application. “It helps in dry weather.”

Tagen touched his own broad mouth with the pads of his fingers. “I don’t think so.”

“Or lotion? It helps dry skin. It’s a moisturizer.”

Tagen froze with his hand still brushing at his lips and an echo of that disquiet, shame-faced expression recurred. “Yes,” he said, and looked away. “Please.”

When Daria returned from her medicine cabinet downstairs with her half-full bottle of Johnsons & Johnsons, Tagen had already taken the dishes down to the kitchen sink and was again in his room. His back was to her; he did not turn when she set the plastic pump bottle on the desk, but he did bow his head slightly.

His voice, low and oddly guilty, drifted after her as she backed into the hall and closed the door. “I am sorry. Thank you.”

*

Tagen sank down into the soft support of his borrowed bed, exhausted by the effort of removing the last of his clothing. All his senses were burned away except for the searing ache of his loins, throbbing, hot as lava, swelling up with renewed heat when he spread his thighs. He could feel the weight of his hand rubbing in agony at the slight swell of his tsesac, absent of any pleasure or relief. He could feel sweat rolling off his body, pooling beneath him, soaking into the tussled bedding, already damp and soiled from the night previous.

Gradually, he became aware also of sound, of movement downstairs, of the human, Lindaria.

Daria.

Her face had no sooner suggested itself to his mind then it was ripped away by cruel, desperate desire to have her naked before him. He knew it was biologically possible for their two races to couple. The Kevrian did a thriving trade in sex-houses filled with human slaves, and the So-Quaal had made no secret of their on-going attempts to hybridize their race with the natives of Earth despite their declarations of neutrality. And the tee-vee, when the hour grew late, had shown him that humans mated in much the same fashion as Jotan. It was possible, and with Heat burning down into his bones, it was the only expedient solution.

He had seen naked human females in the course of his career, and he knew that Daria’s bared sex would be the same as any Jotan female’s. His hand, slick with the cream she had given him, became her. His mind embraced the illusion, firing new waves of Heat outward from the core of him, until each pass of his hand was a torment. His body, separate from the playacting of his frantic imagination, came slowly to release. His quick-cum coated his fist and belly, never drying fully before new slicks covered him.

‘Friends,’ she had said. ‘I want us to be friends.’ And in his distraction, he had mistaken her meaning. He had thought he’d finally won her. Heat, still dull in the new hours of this miserable day, flared fast outward through his body at the sound of those words, at the meek and hopeful acquiesce on her human face. He had put his hand on her, feeling her skin smooth and cool beneath his hand, already imagining their bodies locked together in frenetic carnal battle. What remaining shreds of his once-thought great strength of will had been spent in keeping his mask of calm as he tried to warn her, to ready her for his possession of her, only to hear her puzzled laughter. ‘I just want to be friends, I’m not going to bed with you.’

He had not been so crushed by disappointment since his first application to the Fleet had been rejected. His heart actually seemed to stop in his chest before slamming back into action with a pang of anguish. And for an instant, just an instant, he had thought of seizing her, throwing her down on his borrowed bed and battering his way inside of her.

When she had first come to his door, he had frozen, certain that she had somehow known what he had done the night before, when cold showers and four tall glasses of iced water had failed to take back the rock-hard swelling of his shaft or the terrible itch of his churning tsesac. He had been pacing the lower reaches of this alien house, gripping and working at himself in useless effort to drain himself of Heat, and he had tried to go to his room and ended somehow in hers.

Her room was dark, the window open to admit the moon and a thin, unhappy breeze, and she lay in her bed in a tangle of naked limbs. Her human breasts were bared, full and rounded and eerily arousing to him, darker at the center where they came to a tip. He had watched his hand move toward her, felt his thumb graze lightly over her smooth, firm flesh, and felt the small, dark circle stiffen at his touch.

He had knelt by her bed, one hand massaging his rigid shaft, the other caressing, careful and soft as moonlight, at the human’s breast. He bent, breathed her in, and turned to watch her when she echoed him with a dreaming purr. Did he breathe? He must have. He could not remember. He remembered only staring at her, wanting her to waken and see him there, gleaming with sweat and burning with mindless lust.

When she did not, he turned back to the study of her alien body, and carefully lifted away her sheets. Her breasts, soft/firm globes arching over her ribs, curving down with lines like a river into her lean stomach, her full hips, the slight swell of her sex, hidden by a thin strip of shimmering red cloth. Her body fascinated him, all those curves and shapes and shadows. She undulated just by breathing.

He touched his hand to her thigh and looked again at her face. She was frowning, but it did not seem to him to be an unhappy frown. Her eyes danced behind their thin lids in sleep. He moved his hand up until he felt the thin folds of her loin-cover, and watched her lips part. He slid his thumb beneath the edging of that delicate fabric and caressed her, just a small, cautious pass of his hand.

Her thighs parted to him, just a little, just enough to admit his hand, and she moaned, a low and shivery sound in the darkness. Tagen moved to fill the place she offered to him, and cupped her sex, feeling it hot in his hand, hot as his shaft, still burning in his grip.

‘Waken,’ he thought at her, stone-faced in the night. ‘See me.’

Tagen had been taking suppressants for more than half his life. He had endured Heat only twice, once because a female colleague had been drafted to produce young and asked Tagen in her stilted, formal way if he would donate the necessary materials, and once because it was his first time, his coming of maturity, and he had let it drive him in prideful, baffled agony to the Flesh-halls, believing in his boy’s way that it would make a grown man of him. In many ways, he supposed it had. At least it had initiated him with brutal thoroughness to uncontrollable, body-wracking pain.

He had sixty-eight years behind him now, and he had no desire ever to experience Heat again. The few recreational partners he had taken were more than enough to satisfy his desire for pleasure, when he had time for it and when the urge took him. Never had he thought to succumb to Heat on this planet, and never had he thought to ever consider a human as outlet for his needs. But at that moment, kneeling beside Daria’s bed and feeling the heat of her sleeping body, smelling the sweat and the musk of her, none of that even mattered. Nothing was as important as the need to drive down on her, into her, ridding himself of his burning seed for just a few blessed hours so that he could sleep.

Tagen cupped her sex, slowly stroking it, combing his thumbclaw through the curls of soft hair he could feel but not see. She was writhing a little, her thighs clenching on his hand, and he obliged her dreaming desires by rubbing harder, slower. His face was close enough to hers now to feel her breath; he opened his mouth to taste it, to give her back his own.

His mind felt trapped, locked into unnatural calm and illogical reasoning. He felt as law the idea that if, and only if, she opened her eyes, could Tagen be free to move over her, slide his legs through hers and join them together in ferocious sex. If she embraced him, clasped him with her long legs and pulled him fast and deep inside her, that would be fine. If she fought him, kicked him, battered him with her fragile claws…well, that would be pretty fine, too.

But she slept on.

He slid one finger down the shape of her sex and back up, parting the familiar but as yet unseen folds, and pressed the pad of his fingertip to the opening he found, hot and damp and rich with her mating musk. She moaned again, arching her head into her pillow and lifting one hand to grasp at air before it dropped back onto the bed beside her. He pushed his finger a little ways inside her and rubbed at her, at her and in her, his eyes burning on her face the whole while.

She made a sound, a shuddering, sobbing sigh, and moved her hips against him in clumsy dreaming rhythm with his own movements. She clenched her hand in the sheets, bared her human teeth, and suddenly he felt her muscles locking and spasming around him, felt the flood of her oils as she came.

The moment seemed to crystallize in his mind. He came to the sudden, almost terrifying realization of just where he was and what he was doing, let alone who he was doing it to, and with it came the fear that if she did wake up now and see him, if she struggled or flinched back or did anything at all, there was no way he could avoid cutting her open on his claws.

That thought, and the despair that rode it, finally broke the stupor of Heat leadening his mind and guiding his actions. He tried to ease his hand back from her, and the slow withdrawal of him caused her to buck once, wildly, impaling herself on his finger for another shuddering climax before she dropped back. He caressed her thigh once more in silent, heartsick apology, and slipped away, back to his room, to finish himself with the oils she had left on his hand.

And that was just the first evening, coming down from his last dose of suppressants. This, this would be his first full day of Heat.

He didn’t know how he was going to survive, let alone continue his search for E’Var.

And he still wanted her. Daria. Lindaria. That small human with the frightened eyes who had taken him in. Not for her mind, which was formidable, or her will, with its unguessed-at depths. Not for her help in seeking the criminal Tagen had followed to Earth. Not even for her body, on which his eyes had so often lingered even while suppressants swam in his system and which he could imagine moving around him like a river.

In the grip of Heat, Heat without end in sight, Heat on this miserable alien world, here and now and bathed in sweat, all he wanted her for was sex. For only her cunt, clenching hot and wet and fast around him. For that, and for only that.

Tagen arched up off the bed, muffling his scream with a pillow and biting until he tasted feathers, as jets of lava-hot cum poured out of him. He twisted, pumping at the air in mad agony, spatters of semen raining down to cool over his burning flesh.

He fell back, gasping and spitting wet down, savoring the bliss of depletion. He stole a weary glance at the window, marking the position of this world’s sun and struggling to make sense of it and time, at last deciphering both. It was late afternoon. Daria would be up any minute with more food. Tagen was ravenous but he was also covered in his own seed.

He pushed himself up, swung his legs out over the bed and swaddled his hips in his sheets. He slipped down the hall to the washroom and indulged in a shower of cool, clean water before soaking and scrubbing at his bedding. That done, he returned to his room and hung the damp sheet over his open window like a curtain to dry. He’d need it again before dark, of that he was miserably sure. And he’d need it again tomorrow, and for as many days as it took before this damnable weather turned.

He prayed, fervently, that it would turn. In the unquiet shadows of his mind, he had begun to fear that it never would. Eighteen days of Heat he’d already withstood while safe from its effects, twice what could be found in an entire season on Jota, and it seemed to Tagen that it was only getting hotter.

A gentle tapping sounded at his door, followed by a hesitant whisper from his young human host. “Tagen, are you asleep?”

“No,” he answered, bending to gather all of the clothing that he could stand to wear. “Neither am I covered. Give me time. I will join you shortly.”