Bebe (8 page)

Her fingers gripped the edge of the tub so tightly that her knuckles whitened. Considering the vulnerability of her pose, he supposed she had a good reason to be concerned. She never said a word, however, and she didn’t move, not even when he uncorked the vial of oil. She twisted back her head to stare at the vial and then quickly turned her face away. She stared into the tub again, her buttocks clenching and her breasts heaving as her breaths came faster, becoming shallow and faintly panicked.

“Yeah, I know,” he gave the slope of her back a comforting pat before donning a pair of protective gloves. “It’s scary stuff. It’s hard to believe, but some guys actually like how this stuff heats up and will use it while they...” He made a pumping gesture with one hand down near his hips. Her eyes remained firmly fixed on the bottom of the tub.

“Do you understand anything I’m saying?” he finally asked. He tapped her on the shoulder when she refused to look at him. “Nod your head if you understand me. Can you nod your head?”

She stared at him, pale, her knees trembling a little as she remained tensely bent into position over the side of the tub.

“No, huh?” Oh well. He could still probably talk enough for the both of them. “Brace yourself. It’s going to burn like fire for about five minutes, but then it’ll feel pretty darn good the rest of the night. By morning, most of these bruises will be gone. I’d use the stuff on your feet, except it would make the outside heal faster than the inside, and if the interior festers and then I’d have to cut them open again. Trust me, that wouldn’t feel good either.”

He let a sparse dribble fall from the vial onto her back and, as softly as he could, rubbed it into the bruised weals. He knew the precise moment when the oil began to absorb and heat because that’s when she sucked a sharp breath in through her nose. Her muscles stiffened and, pain or not, she came right up onto her tiptoes. Her gasp became a high-pitched whine when he poured a more liberal dose directly onto her buttocks. He set the vial aside to catch her hips, holding her steady with one hand while he rubbed the oil over every inch of bruise-marked flesh.

“Liquid fire,” he reminded when she tried to push herself up. Her hips twisted towards him, as if she thought tucking up against him might make it harder for him to reach her bottom and somehow alleviate the pain. He locked his arm around her waist, trying to keep her steady. “I know, I know. It hurts. Hold still.”

But she didn’t hold still. Her wiggles grew more frantic still as the fire in her flanks intensified. Her stance finally broke, and he barely caught her arm before she lurched forward, scrambling into the tub just to get away from the heat and from him.

She burst into tears when Tral dragged her right back out again. Standing, he hooked his arm around her waist and pinned her bent across his hip. Being bigger and stronger definitely had its benefits. He held her firmly and, no matter how she fought and wiggled, didn’t stop his ministrations until the entire oily surface of her backside shone wet in the light.

Wailing sobs shook her as she wiggled against him, flashing peek-a-boo glimpses of that little puckered bud nestled between her clenching buttocks and of the feminine folds of her sex, again so much like a real woman’s that Tral almost tried to touch her. That would have been devastating, considering the hand he reached for her with was the gloved one still covered with healing, heating oil.

“Maybe not,” he said removing it from his hand. Just in case he forgot himself and tried to touch her again. He ended up holding her until her skin had absorbed the majority of the wet shininess. Her wild thrashing dwindled to exhausted gasps and the minute grasping motions of her hands as she still struggled to reach back and put out the unseen flames, which had turned her flesh everywhere a brilliant shade of pink, speckled by dark red dots every place he had plucked a
vouka
spine. Those scattered across the hills of her buttocks were swelling as
ulali
encountered poison, resulting in a fresh breakout of tender weals. There were several dozen across her bottom alone, and that didn’t count the wounds stretching the length and breadth of her everywhere else, each one festering with poison.

Tral shook his head. “You’re in for a rough couple of days. The
vouka
is going to make you incredibly sick.” He smoothed his hand over the back of her thigh, encountering more tiny red dots than he cared to count. “Maybe we caught it in time.”

He tried to sound optimistic, but at this point, it would take a miracle to avoid infection and the longer he looked at those tiny pin-prick wounds, the more concerned he began to be. He should take her temperature. If she wasn’t feverish yet, she probably would be soon enough. But if she was feverish, that would be his first indication of how much antitoxin he’d need to give her.

Releasing her waist, he allowed her to straighten upright once more. He caught her shoulder when she tried to slink away from him and, sitting down on the lip of the tub, tried to pull her onto his lap. It took a lot of coaxing, especially when every time she tried to put a hand back to rub at her burning bottom, he caught her wrist to prevent it.

“Don’t rub your bottom. Trust me, you don’t want the oil on your fingers. Come here.” He patted his knee. “Come on.”

Sniffling, casting wary peeks at his face from between the tangles of her hair, she finally complied. She perched uneasily on his lap, fidgeting with her fingers as he bent to dig through his medical kit. Finding the temperature gauge, he brushed her hair back from her forehead and ran it lightly across her brow.

She jerked back at that slight touch, looking at both it and him in worried confusion. From this vantage he could already see her pupils were slightly dilated, which meant the poison was definitely affecting her system. He tried to catch her chin to look in her eyes, but she twisted her face away and then tried to wiggle up off his knee.

“Hold still,” he said, and she did. Her struggles froze and she sat, stiff and unmoving, nervously picking at her fingers while he ran the gauge across her forehead again.

The result came up inconclusive. Damn. It wasn’t calibrated to read the lower body temperature of humans.

“I guess we’re going to have to do this the old fashioned way.” He bent to dig through his medical kit again, finding a digital thermometer in the very bottom. It must have looked familiar to her because, as he started to unwrap it, her face developed a very worried expression.

“This won’t hurt,” he promised. Tipping a finger under her chin to angle her mouth upward, he said, “Say ah.”

Leading by example, he opened his mouth wide. Those bright blue eyes of hers flashed from him to the end of the thermometer he brought to her lips. With a grimace of disgust, she shoved away from him. It was so sudden and unexpected that, had he not caught her arm, she’d have toppled backwards off his knee and landed in the bottom of the tub.

“Whoa!” He caught her just in time, but no sooner had he steadied her than did she slap both hands over her mouth. She twisted, turning her shoulders to the thermometer, and Tral did his best to stifle an impatient sigh. “All right, fine. Apparently, someone is used to doing this the really old fashioned way.”

Mouth still covered, she stole wary peeks at his face, trying to gauge how he was taking her disobedience.

He frowned. There was no help for it, though. He needed to mix the antitoxin, and a fever would tell him how strong to make the dose. He tried one last time to pull her hands from her lips and wedge the tip of the thermometer into her mouth. It was like trying to thread an eel through the eye of a needle. She twisted and squirmed, turning her head this way and that, blocking her mouth with both flailing hands, and then tried to stand up. When he refused to let her, she went abruptly boneless upon his knee and very nearly slid right off him and onto the floor at his feet.

“All right, fine!” Tral snapped, starting to lose his patience. “Just remember, I tried to make it easy on us both.”

Before being dropped into the Preserve, Tral had been forced to take a training course on basic human first-aid techniques. During that course, he’d watched a video on how to administer basic care to a sick human and which had shown a brief segment on how best to take a rectal temperature. In that video, the temperature taker had caught his recalcitrant human, flipped him neatly across one knee, pinned his legs between strong thighs and promptly inserted the thermometer the instant the man landed face down into position. The video had made it look simple. Easy, even.

Well, the video lied.

When Tral tried to flip his little stray female into that very same position, all of her limbs went flying on opposite directions. In the minor struggle that ensued, her hand smacked into his, which sent the thermometer clattering to the floor. His female burst into tears, her tiny hands clutching at his trousers while he retrieved it, which showed quite plainly that she wasn’t trying to fight him. At least, not really. But she was obviously uncomfortable with what was about to happen and was not about to undergo the procedure quietly.

“You’re going to feel awfully silly in a minute when you realize how painless this is.” Pinning her into place was a battle he won with very little effort once he got his legs clamped around both of hers.

She settled down quickly after that, but kept her hands fixed tight across her mouth. Although not crying exactly, she was making frightened squeaking noises, over and over, higher and higher pitched as he applied a dollop of lubrication to her bottom’s tiny orifice.

“What a lot of fuss over nothing,” he chided the back of her head and slipped the tip inside her.

She stiffened with a mew, her hands fisting against his leg, teeth-gritted so intensely that it occurred to him to wonder if she hadn’t expected the lubricant to also heat and burn. Gradually, when that didn’t happen, she began to relax.

“See?” He held the tip buried inside her to keep her from pushing it back out again. “Don’t you feel just a little bit silly?”

Her chest was still heaving slightly heavier than normal and her fists still gripped his leg, but she had stopped struggling. She lay draped over his knee, not moving until the thermometer beeped that a reading had been achieved. It read 99.9.

“You humans really are cool-blooded,” Tral said in no small surprise. He cleared the reading and slipped the thermometer back inside her, just to double check. “According to this, you’ve been dead at least three hours.”

When the second reading came out the same as the first, Tral accepted it. In deference to her badly cut feet, he carried her back out to the main room and set her gently on his bed while he looked up what a proper human temperature ought to be. He got his next surprise when he discovered anything above 99.2 was considered feverish.

“Unbelievable.”

Mixing up what he hoped was an appropriate level of antitoxin, he was vaguely aware of the little stray watching him from the bed. She whimpered once when he stood up from the table, syringe in hand. Rolling onto her stomach, she tried to crawl away, but he managed to catch her by the leg. One quick stick to the hip and he was done.

“Yeah, I know,” he said when she glared at him. It was a token resistance at best since he caught her by the leg before she reached the other side of the bed and gave her the shot anyway.

“All done,” he said cheerfully, and packed up his medical kit. For the first time in probably two years, he actually put it away, high on a shelf where curious little human fingers might not reach it. Then he looked at her again. She sat huddled where he’d left her, her legs drawn up to her chest, softly rubbing at her feet and probably wondering the same thing he was as she stared so quietly, so somberly back at him: Now what?

She switched from rubbing her feet, to rubbing at her hip, and then her bottom, and then she turned her face away. She caught a shaky breath, a single tear trickling from the corner of her eyes to run unhindered down her cheek. He watched as it dripped off the tip of her chin, splashing down onto her knee. Unable to do anything else for her, he reached out awkwardly and dried away the moist track with the pad of his thumb.

“How about that tea, huh?” It had certainly had long enough to steep.

On his way to the sink, Tral paused long enough to pick up his camera and equipment from off the floor where he’d dumped them. He tucked his dart gun into the belt of his trousers and put the rest up on the shelf next to his medical kit. Somehow he doubted the little female would be up to wandering the small station house, looking for trouble, but better safe than sorry...especially where the camera and dart gun were concerned. And she was good for him, he decided. Already the house hadn’t been this clean in ages.

Rooting through the sink, he found two relatively clean mugs and rinsed them out. The tea had boiled down quite a bit, but there was just enough for him to pour each of them a cup. He brought one to the little female, but while he’d been occupied with tea, she had rolled onto her side away from him. She now lay on her side, curled in a fetal ball with one red and wounded hand hiding her eyes from view. He’d have thought her asleep except for her mouth, which was bared in a grimace. She breathed in softly, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs.

“Come on, now,” he gently chided. “You’ve done enough of that. You’ll make yourself—” He was going to say ‘sick,’ except that seemed so pointless. Shifting both cups to one hand, he patted her hip. “Come on. Sit up.”

She keened a breathy whine, but didn’t move beyond the bout of shoulder spasming sobs that shook her.

Shifting his hand to her bottom, Tral patted her again and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Up, I said. No sense wasting your fluids on tears. You’re dehydrated enough as it is. Come on.”

Reluctantly, she took her hand from her eyes and looked at him. It was the saddest look he’d ever seen on a human, pet or otherwise.

With somnambulistic slowness, she pushed herself up to sit beside him. When he held out the cup, she took it in both raw-red hands and then just held it until he pressed two fingertips under the bottom and nudged it up toward her mouth. Two more tears spilled down her cheeks, but she drank.