Bebe (29 page)

Neither of them moved for a time. She recovered first, her soft arms coming up to entwine his shoulders, cradling and stroking him until he remembered how much bigger and heavier he was. He could have lain here all night, but he didn’t want to crush her. Tral rolled onto his side, already feeling that comfortable lethargy spreading through him.

The mattress jolted slightly as Bebe rolled onto her side too, facing him but not touching. Her fingers picked at one another while shadow and firelight played upon the hills and valleys of her curves, flowing across her chest, sparking an attractive game of peek-a-boo with the tip of one breast as she breathed.

Where had the blankets gone?

Half sitting up, Tral shoved his pants the rest of the way off and untangled the covers from around his feet, pulling them up over them both. As he lay down again, he beckoned to her, holding up one arm invitingly. “Come here.”

She hesitated only a second before sliding shyly closer. She rolled when he indicated, cuddling up to him with her back to his chest and her hot little bottom nestled against his belly. He wrapped his arm around her waist, nuzzling sleepy kisses across her shoulder and simply enjoying the tactile pleasure of physical companionship until sleep finally overtook him. Tomorrow could worry about itself. For tonight at least, he had Bebe.

* * * * *

Tral dreamt he was human, dressed in hides and lost in the wilds of the Audotat Preserve. Dreadfall wolves were closing in behind him, baying their hunting cries as he struggled to run through the snow. Except that the snow was more like frozen ice. He slipped with nearly every step, unable to find traction enough to run, and no matter how hard or fast he scrambled, he couldn’t seem to get far enough ahead to escape the savage teeth closing in fast behind him. The wolves were so close now, he could feel their fetid breath against his neck, and yet somehow they never quite closed the distance enough to spring.

The ground began to slope upward and when he next fell, Tral scrambled on all fours, sliding down two steps for every three that he climbed, fighting and clawing his way toward the top of the ridge. Halfway up, the climbing steepened, becoming cliff-like as the snow turned to jutting lengths of sheer rock. Twisted, withered
vouka
vines protruded from cracks in the ice and stones, offering him hand-holds to grab as he climbed.

He clung onto them, the thorns cutting into his fingers, breaking off just beneath his skin and oozing poison into his flesh. Hands ruined, Tral found himself perched on a rock only a few inches wide, unable to climb any higher. At least the vines held, giving him something solid to hang onto as the wind swept the rock-face, battering him as he struggled just to hang on.

The wolves prowled restlessly only a few feet below, where the snow met the rocks. The winters were hard here; they all four looked gaunt and hungry. The lips of their short, squat muzzles peeling back from snarling, savage teeth as they licked their chops and tried to puzzle out how to get at him.

“Tral?”

Glancing up, Tral started when he saw Bebe perched at the top of the ridge not ten feet above him. Naked and shivering, she hugged herself with one arm, but then reached for him, her small hands outstretched.

He had to climb higher if he hoped to catch hold of her, but just as he was searching the narrow cracks of rock for a ledge wide enough to support him, a shadow crossed her shoulder. The leader of the wild pack came up slowly behind her, his hard eyes locked on Tral as he glared down that cliff of jagged stone, every bit as gaunt and hungry as the wolves below.

“Tral,” Bebe pleaded, the tips of her small breasts tightening into rosy peaks as she began to sign,
I will not be disgusting any more. Climb up, and let me stay with you.

The wild males closed in around her, all of them so lean, so angry, so intently fixed on taking Bebe and leaving Tral stranded halfway up the cliff, precariously balanced on a sliver of ice and stone, his only stability being the
vouka
vines tearing up his hands. Below and behind him, the wolves leapt at his heels, their slavering jaws snapping just shy of catching him. Above, the leader of the wild pack reached out with trembling fingers to touch the gold of Bebe’s hair. She was shivering and so cold now that she was almost blue.

Let me stay with you
, she signed, her beautiful eyes beseeching him.

The wild pack melted into wolves right before Tral’s eyes.

“No!” Grasping at the face of the cliff, he tried to climb higher but the
vouka
vines snapped. He slipped, falling backwards into the snow below.

The wild pack closed in on Bebe even as the dreadfall wolves snapped their teeth into Tral’s arms and legs. On separate wind- and snow-swept ridges, they were both torn to pieces.

* * * * *

Tral snapped his eyes open, somehow simultaneously snapping his big mouth shut before he made a sound. Bebe was spooned up against his chest, practically lying underneath him and so still and thoroughly entwined in his limbs that for a moment he was afraid he’d crushed her in his sleep. He quickly checked, but no, she was still breathing and when he gently disentangled himself, she stirred, reaching sleepily back in search of his retreating heat. He slipped out of bed anyway, tucking the blankets in around her and stroking her hair once to coax her back into a deeper slumber. She rolled into his still-warm spot and curled in on herself, hands tucked up under one cheek, golden curls like a tangled halo all across his pillow

Pulled on his pants, Tral added more fuel to the fire and then left the bedroom. He padded barefoot down the hall and all the way out onto the front porch. It was snowing again, with a hard and biting wind that whipped around him. He stood staring out at the black and white, the deepening drifts of snow and ice that blanketed the ground, shivering at the phantom teeth of the dreadfall wolves still nipping at his flesh.

Somewhere out across this frigid forest, four men were struggling to keep warm in an earthen cave with nothing more than a fire and a hide tacked across the entrance to keep out the wind. This wind. He couldn’t imagine it was very effective.

He had to help them. Be patient, his uncle had said, but as Tral stood there on that icy front porch, he didn’t think he could go about his days as if nothing had changed. As if he didn’t
know
. He didn’t think he could spend the remainder of the winter pretending ignorance by day, holding Bebe thorough the nights, and all the while knowing the wild pack was struggling to survive. Knowing that somewhere on his world, another family was abandoning their ‘pet’ to the elements, mistakenly thinking it somehow kinder to return their human to the ‘wild’. Somewhere on his world, an entire race of people were living on pampered pillows next to warm heaters or shivering in abandoned city alleys, silently suffering the consequences of his inaction. And the longer that Tral stood shaking in the cold, the longer he realized he didn’t think he knew how to be that callous. He didn’t think he knew how to do nothing.

Not that there was a whole lot he could do. Not for all of them.

Not for any of them, for that matter.

Bebe was the only one, and maybe also the wild pack.

Tral went back side. He closed the door behind him and then just stood there, staring at nothing in particular, thinking. He wished he had his uncle’s broad mind for scheming.

His eyes slid to his computer, and then he went to it, his fingers taping at the dialing keys even before he’d sat all the way down. It was six very long minutes before the steady beep-beep, sung out at five second intervals, finally summoned his uncle to respond.

“The next time I am dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, someone had better be bleeding out both eyes,” Bach growled as the monitor winked on. Though the screen emphasized his face, Tral could see enough of his shoulders to tell his uncle wasn’t wearing a shirt. He probably wasn’t wearing anything at all, having just been ripped out of Pani’s cozy embrace.

“I beg your pardon,” Tral said honestly and perhaps, for the first time in his life, speaking as one man to another, without fear of status or possible reprisals. “I didn’t mean to disturb your sleep.”

“Sleep?” Bach glared at him. “Dear boy, were it only sleep, I’d be a great deal more understanding. Not everyone enjoys living like a monk in the frigid wastelands of Audotat, with nothing to keep him warm but an overactive imagination and his own callused—” Tral didn’t think he’d moved, but something—some telltale flicker of expression—must have betrayed him because his uncle stopped abruptly. Tipping his head at a thoughtful angle, he then offered a deeply amused, “I see.”

Never had so few words carried so much meaning.

Leaning back in his seat, Bach crossed both his legs and his hands and asked, “How far did you get?”

Tral leaned back from his computer too, as if retreating those slight few inches might somehow make him harder to read. “That wasn’t what I called to discuss.”

A glimmer of genuine admiration winked through his uncle’s eyes and then was gone again. “That far? There must be something of me within you after all. That kind of self-control doesn’t come from nothing. I’ll send you a sleeve in the morning.”

“I don’t need a sleeve,” Tral hurriedly said before his uncle could disconnect the call.

“Of course you do. One small slip in the heat of a passionate moment and your little stray will be dead before help could arrive. Unless she’s been altered.” A slight inflection of tone left the statement to hang more like a question.

Tral didn’t even want to think about what would have to be removed in order for someone his size to fit comfortably and completely inside of someone as small as Bebe. That there was even an established procedure in place for it turned his stomach. “There was definitely a finite degree of depth available to me.”

“I’ll send you a sleeve in the morning,” Bach repeated.

Trying not to sound frustrated and failing miserably, Tral said, “I didn’t call for help in improving my sex life.”

“That and my familial joy in learning that you
have
a sex life are the only reasons why my personal guard are not even now speeding their way to Audotat to break your dialing fingers.” Bach frowned. “Why did you call?”

“I need to borrow Pani.”

Bach’s expression never altered, and yet somehow he managed to darken considerably. “If we’re still talking about sex, it’s not your fingers I’m going to break.”

“I have to talk to the humans,” Tral confided.

“All humans or four readily-identified humans in specific?”

“The wild—” Tral stopped himself. “The human men, yes.”

“The men we ripped from their home world, dumped into a barren woodland park miles away from anything even remotely close to civilization, before drugging so that we could steal back the only female they’ve seen in over half a decade?” Bach stared at him as if he’d lost his mind, and phrased like that, Tral had to wonder himself. “They’ll plant a spear right through the middle of you and abscond with both Bebe and Pani. Absolutely not. There is no possible scenario you could imagine in which I would allow that to happen.”

“I have to help them,” Tral said, hating how easily pleading managed to slip into his voice.

By only the barest degrees did Bach soften. “We will help them. Be patient.”

“For how long?” Tral demanded, mounting frustration sharpening his tone. “You’ve had twenty-six years. What, other than this Preserve, have you done? What are you waiting for?”

“For Pani to die,” his uncle snapped back. “In case the backlash from this turns savage. I will not thrust her into harm’s way, not for anyone. Not even for you! That is what you do when you love someone. You sit in the shadows, you maneuver your pieces and you wait!” Catching himself, Bach took a deep calming breath. He released it again slowly, and then said, “Go back to bed, boy. Bury yourself within Bebe’s soft heat and learn how to be patient. The shit, as they say, will spray us all soon enough. Then we’ll either know relief when things go better than planned, or we’ll find ourselves wishing we’d known how to keep our big mouths shut.”

Tral wilted in his chair as his uncle disconnected the call and the monitor went black. He stared at the screen for a long time. Eventually, he stood up and went back down the hall to bed. He never actually went to sleep. He didn’t even get his pants back off. He simply stood there, looking down at Bebe, barely lit by the amber coals of a dying fire, wondering if he could have waited twenty-six years, doing nothing for her sake.

Probably not. It hadn’t yet been one full day for him, and already he didn’t think he could wait another minute. Because it wasn’t just Pani or Bebe involved. There were hundreds of others. There were thousands of them. There were tens of thousands of them.

And they were all of them haunting him.

How could he—how could anyone—just stand idly by and wait?

Slowly, Tral turned from the bed and left the room again. Back down the hall he went, to stand for a time in the middle of the main room. Eventually, he sat down at the table to stare at his computer. It was a very long time before he could make himself reach for it. He didn’t have his uncle’s great mind for scheming, but he knew what he could do. What should have been done years ago, if only someone—and not just Bach—had been able to find the courage.

His fingers hesitated over the keys for some time before he pulled up his daily log. As if this were just like any other day, Tral drafted a report. It was long, and it was detailed. It included every picture he’d ever taken, every shred of information he’d ever gathered, anything individually that hinted to the sentience of the human animal and which, taken as a collective, screamed it. He included all the tiny snippets of information that no one wanted to hear. He involved his uncle, both Pani and Bebe, and implicated all levels of government from the Central staff janitors all the way up to Magistrate Remeik himself. He wrote a wonderful piece of interwoven fact and fiction, turning truth into conspiracy to keep the human race a dirty, shameful secret of slavery within the empire. It was, in short, the most damning report he’d ever created, and when he was done, he attached it to a government-wide and seemingly innocuous inventory voucher in the hopes that it might get circulated through the system before the Central censors caught up with it. He carbon-copied his uncle, the magistrate (although it was far more likely a series of aides would see it long before he did) and then, just to be sure, every large media firm that he could think of.