Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Margaret
Hold on. Did I hear him right? Did this virile, bare-chested Hyrrokin just say he’s taken a twelve-month vow of celibacy? How is this possible? Why would the universe put a male like this under lock and key?
“You cannot stay,” he says.
Oh hells. This is getting weirder by the minute. My head is spinning with a double whammy of intense revelations. First, he’s taken a no sex vow, like he’s a monk or something. And now he wants me out of here?
I can’t hide the pout on my lips. I was getting so comfortable, loving this impromptu night out with this guy because I love a good stake out and figuring out a case. And add an interesting, handsome scientist to the mix, and that’s a perfect evening in Margaret world.
But I’ve misunderstood this whole situation.
Dammit. I should never have come out here in the first place.
He’d told me up front, in the living room that he didn’t want to work with me.
I’d convinced myself that this wasn’t work, just me coming out here to talk with the mysterious Hyrrokin I can’t seem to stay away from.
Weirdly, Skylo decided to join me, but that was fine.
And now heat floods my face because of course he doesn’t want me out here.
He’s working. This male has expensive scientific equipment set up in a jungle and a case to solve and I’m overweight and in the way.
He was being polite this entire time and I mistook his friendliness and what I thought was heat in his gaze…
for something else, which is a thing I have done exactly twice in my adult life and swore I would never do again.
“Okay, you’ve got work to do, I understand.” I’m up. I’m doing the smile. “I didn’t mean to hover while you’re trying to work. Skylo, come on…”
“That is not the reason you need to leave.”
I stop. “No, I understand. You don’t have to explain.”
“I do.” And then Dr. Vidar Coalstone pushes up those reading glasses on his crooked nose. “I want you.”
My brain simply stops working.
The words hang in the air. I heard them, definitely said out loud in that luscious deep voice that could be on the audiocast stations. The male stands four feet in front of me, and I understand each individual word, but in that order they do not compute.
I actually look around.
There is nobody else out here. I’m near an enormous stone wall, on the edge of the dark jungle, equipment is set up nearby, and a three-headed wulver has fallen asleep on my feet.
Wait, did this male just say that he “wants me”? As in, wants sex with me? I look down at myself and tug at the hem of my shorts. This cannot be possible. It’s a mistake. “No, you don’t.”
A hint of smoke wafts from his nostrils. “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, you might think you want me. You’ve been out in the field a long time. Alone, by your own admission, because you prefer it. And humans are a novelty here. Apparently, your species finds us interesting. That’s a documented thing. That’s not the same as—”
A growl rumbles in his chest. “It is not that.”
“—and you’re being polite, which I appreciate, but I’m thirty-four years old, and I admit that I’m overweight and I’ve been this way for my entire adult life.
” I lift my chin. “I’m not going to change.
My hair looks like I lost a fight with a pillow, and I came out here in somebody else’s shirt and asked you if your field burner was for ambiance.
If you do feel an attraction for me, I’m certain it’s just because I’m a kink you would like to scratch and that’s not something I’m interested in, so I’m going to return to the house.
Thank you for the talk and don’t worry, this doesn’t have to be weird between us.
I’ll stay out of your way as you already requested. ”
“May I respond?” he questions.
“I mean, you don’t have to…I’m going to leave now and this can be over.”
“I would like to respond.”
I exhale and nod my head, bracing myself for more talk that will probably hurt my feelings.
“You are the most beautiful female I have ever encountered. I think you are perfect the way you are and I find you sexy beyond all reason.”
My mouth drops open.
“I mis-set a thermal sensor twice this evening,” he says. “I set it incorrectly because I was thinking about your lips. I have watched your ass constantly since you came through that gate. I want to know what the follicles on your head feel like between my claws as I take you from behind.”
I shift on my feet, trying to relieve the insistent heat between my thighs.
“I have answered every question you have put to me tonight, when I should have sent you inside long ago.” His voice drops another register and my traitorous body reacts to it, immediately.
“I have not been able to make myself stop speaking to you. I am a male who is known for silence, Ms. Reyes. Ask anyone at the Academy.”
“Margaret,” I say faintly.
“Margaret. You are not a novelty. I have met humans before. I have never once in forty years felt any attraction towards another human female. Only you.”
This fire-breathing male in reading glasses, with the most perfect red chest, is standing in a jungle, telling me he thinks I’m sexy and he wants me in his bed?
I’m trying to make this compute. “I noticed things,” I hear myself say.
“In the living room. When you…” I make a vague gesture.
“Your body language seemed… This is why I couldn’t stop thinking of you and came out here.
I was interested in the case, that’s true, but more interested in seeing you again because I guess I thought there was some spark there and I had to see if it was true. ”
“All true.”
“Wow.” I blink. “Well, if that’s how you feel, then why do I need to leave? Why can’t I stay here longer with you, getting to know you better on this stakeout? Shouldn’t you want me to stay?”
Vidar unfolds a second chair and sits down next to me. “I have taken a vow.”
“Oh yeah, sorry.” I shake my head. “You said that earlier, and of course that’s a big deal. Tell me more. What does this vow of celibacy entail, exactly?”
“Two months ago, I stood before the full council of the Royal Hyrrokin Academy and swore the Vow of the Empty Hearth. It was witnessed by every Fellow in the chamber and entered into the permanent record under my own name. It is a twelve-month vow of complete celibacy. I am not even allowed masturbation to find relief.”
“You can’t even touch yourself?” I bite at my lip. “Why would you do such a thing?”
“Because the legend does harm. The Skyggjar is not a harmless story. Families still keep the old protections. Children are told the dark wants them, that if they flame at the wrong hour something will come for them. There are households in this region where offspring are not permitted outside during alignment, and offspring who believe, genuinely, that this is because something will take them. I have been called to three separate incidents in my career in which a frightened being entered a preserve at night with a weapon and did not come out again. Three. I have documented one instance in which a fire beast, an endangered animal, a protected animal, was destroyed by a landowner who was entirely certain it was a Skyggjar. There are collectors in the outer sectors who would pay a fortune for a Skyggjar claw. And there are beings willing to go and look for one. That trade exists because the story exists. It does not require the creature to be real. It only requires that the question remain open. A story that is not true still kills. So I will retire it, properly, with evidence.”
“And what does the vow have to do with this?”
“The vow is a protective custom. Any scholar who goes into the field during an alignment intending to find the Hidden One is expected to observe it.” He shifts his weight.
“Sixteen years I have studied this legend from archives and interviews. That requires nothing of a male. Reading is not hunting. The custom has never once applied to me before. But I am here because your human holiday you call Halloween, is on the same night as the alignment. The alignment comes once in a generation, Margaret. I am forty years old. There will not be another in my working life.” He looks out at the black canopy.
“The reports at this wall began nine weeks ago, before the alignment. That is why the Academy took them seriously. And that is why I am standing here.”
“So you swore the vow—”
“The day the consultation was confirmed. Two months ago.”
“Why does it have to be for a whole year?”
“Because it is meant to be a difficult vow of endurance. I do not believe a word of the folklore behind this vow, but if I break it, every finding in that paper becomes something my critics can dismiss. A single failure of observance and the entire investigation is a commoner’s sloppy work, and the story survives, and it goes on harming beings. ”
“So you’re doing this to keep being safe.”
“Yes…Margaret.” He growls. “You need to leave and return to the house. If you stay out here for too much longer, I will find it difficult to not try and talk you into my bed.”
I chuckle. “You think I can’t say no? I’m not afraid of you.”
His barbed tail flicks behind him. “I can be very persuasive.”
“Oh, I imagine. But, you’ve taken a vow, yes and I’m telling you that I’ll take a vow too.
I vow, that during this whole case, during the entire time you’re here on Tarvos and tied to your vow, I will help you maintain it.
I won’t flirt with you. I won’t try and touch you.
And if you try and do the same to me, I’ll cut you off with a very mean-sounding voice.
” I smile. “I won’t let you break your vow, Vidar Coalstone.
I want you to win at this as much as you do. ”
Smoke drifts, very slowly, from one nostril.
“There are conditions, though,” I add.
He snorts. “Of course there are.”
“First, I don’t agree with you.” I fold my arms. “About the Skyggjar. I know you have all your reasons you consider very valid to think the Skyggjar is nothing more than a harmful legend, but six kids told the same story in the same words about their sightings. I’ve built an entire career on the principle that when that happens, you listen, and I’m not ready to call it folklore.
I’ll listen to your evidence but I’m not there. ”
“That is acceptable,” he says. “That is, in fact, correct methodology.”
“Second, your findings will stay clean because I’m not here as an investigator. I’m here as a friend.”
“Agreed.”
“And…”
Skylo lifts all three heads off the ground at once.
Every head comes off my ankles in the same motion, three snouts swing to the same point in the canopy above the wall, and the barbed tail stops moving entirely.
The jungle has stopped making noise. Between one breath and the next, every small rustle, click and call in the understory has cut out at once. The only sound left in the entire world is the low hum of the resonance meter.
Every hair on my arms stands up. “Vidar.”
“I know.” He has gone completely still.
The motion array chirps. Vidar is at the readout in three strides. I’m right behind him.
“Two-point-one seconds. Upper canopy. Sector four.”
“Which is where?”
He points with one silver-tipped claw. Forty nanco down the wall, where the foliage overhangs the stone.
We stare at it, but nothing moves. Then the sensors chirp again.
“Sector two,” Vidar says. Something in his tone has changed.
“Sixty nanco in the opposite direction.” He looks up from the screen and out into the black.
“Margaret. Nothing crossed the intervening arrays. It did not walk between them along the ground.” His claws move over the readout.
“Meaning it went above them. Through the canopy, over the top of the field, from one end of my equipment line to the other, in under ninety seconds, without registering on four intervening sensors.”
The hum of the resonance meter is very loud now.
“Heh. That’s not wind,” I say.
“No,” he answers quietly, and he is not talking to me. “Wind does not choose a direction and travel the length of a wall. That is a search pattern.” And then Dr. Vidar Coalstone, Senior Fellow of the Royal Hyrrokin Academy, walks over to where the sound originated.
Of course I follow him.
Skylo goes ahead of us both, moving absolutely silent. The wulver stops and all three heads sniff the ground.
Vidar’s arm comes across in front of me, not touching, just there, a barrier of red skin and silver claws hovering an inch from my collarbone.
He turns on a work light for the first time all night and scans the ground.
“The ground here is soft,” he says. “There was rain ten diurnals ago and this stretch never dries because the wall keeps the suns off it.”
The light shines on animal prints in the ground.
Vidar crouches. “Four of them, in a line, coming out of the tree line and stopping at the base of the stone wall. Four-toed, deep, clawed impressions at the front of each one, dragged slightly. And they’re spaced like something that walks on two legs. I’m going to measure for stride length.”
He goes down onto both knees in the dirt with his face about nine inches from the ground.
Then he takes out a scale marker and sets it beside the nearest print and uses his screen to document it from four angles.
He measures the stride and measures it a second time.
He sits back on his heels and looks at the number.
“One hundred and ninety nanco,” he says.
“Is that a lot?”
“The largest bipedal predator in this hemisphere has a stride of one hundred and ten.”
“So what made them?”
“It must be insufficient data.”
“Vidar—”
“Insufficient data, Margaret.” He is already opening the case for the casting compound, already working, already reaching for his tablet.
“I have four prints in soft ground at night. I do not have a gait analysis. I do not have depth-of-impression against a known mass. I do not have a second track line to establish a pattern. I have four prints and a stride measurement and nothing else.”
He works. The casting compound goes down white and thick in the beam of the work light. Skylo lies on the path with his center head on his paws watching. Somewhere out past the tree line the jungle has gone completely back to normal, as if nothing came out of it tonight at all.
“Vidar?”
“Mm.”
I’m looking at the prints, not at him. “You’ve been at this for years you’ve said?”
“Yes.”
“And during that time, how many tracks have you found that could be attributed to the Skyggjar and not attributed to any other animal on Tarvos?”
His claws stop moving in the compound. He looks up at me. “None.”