by Anne Bishop
Still, there was no reason to take chances.
He hadn’t expected anything different.
“I’m Tolya Sanguinati,” he said as he and the Harvester crossed the street. “What is your name?”
“Scythe.”
Blessed Thaisia. “Welcome to Bennett.” He opened the door of the government building. “Let’s see what we can do about finding you some work.”
* * *
* * *
Virgil waited until Tolya had gotten the Plague Rider out of sight. Then he grabbed one of Barbara Ellen’s arms and hauled her over to the jail. She tugged and pulled, finally realizing she had done something wrong. She yipped and yapped at him. He ignored the yipping and yapping, glad to see Kane racing ahead of him and shifting to a human form to open various doors in the sheriff’s office.
“He shouldn’t be naked in public,” Barbara Ellen said, taking a break from the yipping and yapping about Virgil hauling her to the jail.
“Virgil,” Isobel warned.
He ignored Isobel too. Barbara Ellen had too many ties to the Lakeside Courtyard for him to do what he should do, which was force her down until she showed her belly in submission. He figured, for a human, this would be the closest thing.
He grabbed her other arm and lifted her until she was trotting on her toes and too unbalanced to realize what he intended until he put her in one of the cells and locked the door.
She stared at him, shocked. “You’re arresting me? For what? Being polite?”
“You’re like a puppy trying to befriend a rattlesnake!”
She blinked. “She’s one of the Snakegard?”
“No, she’s not Snakegard.”
“Then why did you say—”
“She’s dangerous!” The words came out as an angry howl. It was good she was in the cell. The bars kept him from biting her.
“I thought she was someone like Tess,” Barbara Ellen said. “Her kind of terra indigene, I mean. And Tess isn’t dangerous.” Her forehead wrinkled. “Unless someone makes her angry. My brother told me several times to get gone if Tess got angry.”
What was he supposed to do with a human who could recognize a Harvester and still didn’t understand she was dealing with a deadly predator?
Keep her here and let Tolya deal with her, that’s what he could do.
Virgil looked at Isobel, who had followed him to the cellblock.
He walked out with the Sanguinati, closing the cellblock door to muffle the renewed yapping.
* * *
* * *
Tolya stared at Scythe. “You want to run a saloon? The kind that would have been here when Bennett was a frontier town?”
“Yes.”
“Why? How do you know about such a place?”
“My . . . kind . . . have hunted in such places since humans first came to this part of Thaisia. I like the stories about the olden times. I thought this place might . . .” She looked around, disappointed.
Even among the rest of the terra indigene, so little was known about Harvesters. Scythe looked to be in her late twenties but she could have been a hundred. From what she’d said, she’d had no formal human-centric education, but she’d learned to read and do sums and had listened to the teaching stories that were the accumulated knowledge of her kind. And she had learned to take the human form to mask her true form, whatever it was.
He didn’t doubt for a second that nothing but another Harvester could look at that true form and survive—the possible exceptions being the Elementals and Elders, and he wasn’t sure about the Elders.
Leaning forward, Tolya rested his hands on the desk. “So you want to run an old-fashioned saloon. With . . . girls?”
“Yes.”
“For . . . mating?” Human mating practices were much different from those of the terra indigene, but he found the idea of bringing human females to Bennett and permitting them to be . . . used . . . extremely distasteful. Perhaps some females enjoyed mating with several males, but if the males weren’t a united pack of some kind, they wouldn’t work together to raise the young that came from such mating, so he didn’t see the point of that kind of behavior on the female’s part. It wasn’t practical.
“No,” Scythe said coldly. “I want to run a saloon, not a brothel. The girls would dance and talk with customers. They would sing to entertain. Any male who tried to have more than that . . .”
She smiled, and something in her black eyes told Tolya that males who tried to have more suddenly wouldn’t have enough energy to make it out the door on their own, let alone do anything else.
A hunting ground, and not just for Scythe, who would be able to take a little sip of life energy from many people instead of draining—and killing—one person. The Sanguinati could also help keep things calm. They didn’t have to bite to feed. In their smoke form, they could draw blood through their prey’s skin.
“I have not read stories about frontier towns,” Tolya said. It was a hole in his education that he would have to remedy quickly. He would ask Jesse Walker to recommend books. He should be able to find her suggestions among the books in the houses or in the bookstore or library, which were still closed because they couldn’t spare anyone to work in those places. “What else did humans do in such a saloon?”
“They played games involving cards. Usually for money. Sometimes a human cheated and there was fighting. That I will not allow.”
Which meant Scythe’s saloon could be a place where the Simple Life folk who would be working on the ranches could come and socialize and not become prey for other kinds of humans.
“I think I know a place that would suit you,” Tolya said. “There is even a suite on the second floor for the owner and a small office on the ground floor.”
She watched him.
“I would suggest that you use a stage name for your business dealings with humans.” He smiled, showing a hint of fang. “With humans, there is such a thing as too much honesty.”
She thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “I will be called Madam Scythe.”
He’d been thinking of something more benign, but maybe having a saloon run by someone named Scythe would encourage good behavior.
“Madam Scythe it is.” Tolya wrote the name on the pad of paper. “While you journeyed here, did you consider a name for your saloon?”
There was warmth and a little bafflement in her smile. “No, I didn’t. Tell me about the yellow bird the Barbara Ellen female will bring me.”
Not sure what one thing had to do with the other, he said, “It is a kind of bird that humans call a pet. It lives in a cage. I don’t think it could survive here if it were released outside.” He didn’t know if that would be true under other circumstances, but with the number of predators in the area, he doubted a small bird that wasn’t native to this part of Thaisia would survive long.
“Rather like the humans themselves, living in a place that is surrounded by Elders.” Scythe smiled again. “I will call my place the Bird Cage Saloon.”
Tolya pushed back from the desk. “Let’s take a look at the building and see what needs to be done to get your business up and running.”
CHAPTER 9
Watersday, Messis 4
Tolya walked around the town square, appreciating the park that made up the center of the business district—a park made possible because of the spring that bubbled up out of the earth, defying its man-made containment to spill over into a narrow channel that ended at a small pond. The spring had originally been a natural watering hole for everything that lived around here, but when humans reached the northern edge of the Elder Hills and negotiated with the terra indigene to
settle in the area, they made the spring the center of their territory, corralling the water and siphoning it off to supply water to all the businesses. Trees and grass grew in the square. Birds and small mammals lived in the square, but none of the larger “normal” animals that lived in the area made it in far enough to reach this source of water.
There were other sources of water in the wild country. Or so he’d been told. During frontier days, he imagined the square would have been used as a place for horses to drink and graze while humans bought supplies in the stores. Now?
Tolya stopped and watched two ponies—one black and one brown—grazing near the pond.
Now the square provided a shady place for a different kind of steed.
He continued his walk, past the Universal Temple and the community center, then up the other long side of the square, heading toward his office.
Hundreds of humans had lived in and around Bennett. Maybe a few thousand. Tolya didn’t know, didn’t care. The task of clearing out all the homes was daunting. He wasn’t sure they ever would—and with everyone feeling pressured to provide living spaces for the humans migrating to Bennett next week, he wasn’t sure they should. Teams of human males were still going through the houses and collecting the food that could be salvaged. Other teams were going through an office building that had small offices that could be used by a variety of professions. Jesse Walker recommended letting the newcomers sort through the business files or box them up and put them in the basement storage area, but she emphasized the need to clean the offices and hire people for janitorial services for the whole building.
If the people who were going to run the businesses were expected to sort through the files in their new offices, why couldn’t they sort through the belongings in their new homes? And how upset would he make Jesse Walker when he announced his decision to stop the cleanup as it was currently being done?
And how was a species that seemed to need so much going to be able to survive on so little? Bennett would not be allowed to swell to its original population, and life would be simpler because of that.
Tolya stopped in front of the Bird Cage Saloon, which was a hive of activity. For a form of terra indigene that lived on the outskirts of almost everything, Scythe had recognized the one business that had galvanized all the humans who were already in Bennett. And not just because it was a saloon and a place that provided the alcoholic beverages humans liked to drink. It was a frontier saloon, with bartenders and girls dressed as they had dressed decades ago. Madam Scythe even hired an Intuit who would be the saloon’s professional gambler. Jesse Walker said there was romance to the idea—a concept he didn’t understand but accepted.
He felt another predator silently moving toward him but gave no sign of knowing until Saul Panthergard said, “Tolya.”
He dipped his head to acknowledge the Panther. “Saul. Are you settling in?” It had surprised him that one of the Panthergard had wanted to be this close to humans—until he’d been introduced to Joshua Painter, a human who had been raised by Saul’s kin and was, in human terms, considered Saul’s younger brother.
The Panthergard weren’t as solitary as the cougars whose form they had absorbed many generations ago. They had learned how to hunt as that cat hunted—in fact, they could hunt far better than the animal. But regardless of whatever form the terra indigene absorbed to keep them the dominant predators in the world, regardless of whether they took the shape of Ravens or Wolves or Panthers—or humans—they were still terra indigene and lived solitary or in packs according to the ways of their particular kind of terra indigene and not the shape they could wear over their true form.
“The cub needs to be socialized with his own kind, but I can’t teach him how to be around humans or even talk to humans,” Saul said. “He needs a task so that he can fit in, and he needs a teacher.”
Movement in the square made Tolya turn. Barbara Ellen, riding the blue horse named Rowan, cantered toward the sheriff’s office, her face scrunched up in anger—an expression so unusual for the usually bouncy almost-vet that Tolya realized she must have been brooding about yesterday’s clash with the sheriff and had finally worked up to being mad enough for a confrontation.
“Follow me,” he told Saul. “I have a teacher for Joshua.” If Virgil doesn’t eat her, he added silently as he shifted to his smoke form and raced toward the sheriff’s office.
He arrived just ahead of Barbara Ellen—and just in time to shift back to human form before Virgil walked out of the office. There were flickers of red in the Wolf’s amber eyes, a clear warning that Barbara Ellen wasn’t the only one who was angry.
Barbara Ellen’s blue eyes didn’t change to provide such a warning, but the horse reacted to her emotions. Or maybe Rowan reacted to Kane’s sudden, and silent, appearance in Wolf form as the deputy came around the side of the building.
Barbara Ellen dismounted and said, “Hold this,” as she flicked one of the reins at Kane. He snapped at the leather and then looked surprised that he was now a horse holder.
Exploding fluffball, Tolya thought, remembering Vlad’s phrase for uppity human females as Barbara Ellen stomped up to Virgil.
“Look!” She pushed up the sleeve of her shirt to reveal dark bruises. “Look! That’s police brutality!”
Virgil leaned toward her, bringing his face closer to hers before he pulled back his lips and revealed teeth that were too long and sharp to be human. “You were resisting arrest.”
Her mouth dropped open. “I wasn’t arrested. You didn’t arrest me!” She looked at Tolya, who wondered what he was supposed to do.
“If you howl ‘police brutality’ for a bruise you got because you fought me, then I’ll write up your stay in the cell as an arrest for disturbing the peace,” Virgil growled. “Or we can just say you spent a few hours in jail because you needed some ‘me time’ to help you remember that many predators who will be in this town don’t know much about humans and need to be approached with some measure of caution and sense. Which way do you want me to report this to your brother the cop?”
Her mouth opened and closed, making Tolya think of a fish out of water—a comparison he was sure should not be shared with any female within a day’s travel of this town.
“Barbara Ellen and I have business to discuss,” Tolya said to Virgil. “Do you need to continue this discussion?”
“I wasn’t interested in this discussion in the first place.” Virgil stared at Barbara Ellen and growled, “The next time, the bruise you get as discipline will be from my teeth.”
Barbara Ellen lowered her head and muttered a word quietly enough that a human wouldn’t have heard what she’d said. Unfortunately, the four males standing around her heard the word just fine.
Virgil showed his teeth.
Virgil eyed him, clearly torn between wanting to establish dominance over the fluffball and getting her out of his fur.
More gently than Virgil had grabbed her yesterday, Tolya closed his hand over Barbara Ellen’s wrist in an inescapable hold. “Come with me.”
“What about Rowan?” she protested. “I should take him back to the stables if I’m going to be a while.”
“Kane can do that for you.”
Kane didn’t sound interested in being a horse walker.
Tolya didn’t respond to the Wolf. Instead he reached out to the Panther.
“Are all the pet animals fed and watered?” he asked. Since she was an almost-vet, this was her primary task right now—caring for the small animals that had survived until she could convince other humans to take them.
“Yes, but—”
“Good. I need you for a special task.”
“We’re all supposed to help sort things from the houses for a couple of hours each day.”
Tolya nodded. “You’ll be sorting books.” No one had asked why he’d designated a room in the government building as the place to store the books that had been removed from houses and now would have to be sorted into some kind of order. The truth was, he’d wanted to keep that task for himself instead of handling other, less interesting, human possessions. But to keep the peace, and to help Saul, he would give up some of the pleasure of looking through the books.
“You’ll also be showing another member of our community how to do this sorting,” he continued. “In return, you may select a bag of books as a bonus for being a mentor. I would also appreciate you setting aside any books you find about the frontier days. Those would be for me.”
“Okay. Who am I helping?” she asked, almost pulling ahead of him now that the task sounded interesting.
“Joshua Painter.”
“Oh.”
What did “oh” mean? Good? Bad? He guessed it meant something good since her blue eyes now had a sparkle to them that had nothing to do with being angry with Virgil.
“Saul feels Joshua is ready to interact with humans,” Tolya said. “I thought sorting the books would help the cub reinforce his reading skills, and you, having experience with shifters because you lived in Lakeside, could help Joshua bridge the gap between his old life and this new one, as well as answer any questions he has about human things.”
“I can do that.”
Barbara Ellen had not shown this level of excitement when she’d met other young males who were staying in Bennett. She had been friendly, and being one of the few human females currently living in the town, her company was sought after by many. But this . . . giddiness . . . for a male she hadn’t met? Well, he would assess her emotions at the end of the day. If there was no change, he would preempt receiving another message of alarm from Officer Debany in Lakeside by writing to Vlad and telling him about Joshua Painter. After all, if Barbara Ellen’s brother was going to get excited about her living with a parakeet named Buddy, he could imagine the man’s reaction to a male who had grown up among the Panthergard—a male who was a few years younger than Barbara Ellen, although just old enough to be considered an adult. He wasn’t sure that mattered or should be a concern, but it was another thing to keep in mind.
