Chapter 6
HALLUM
Somehow, I ended up holding Lualhati’s hand all the way to the porch.
There did not seem to be an appropriate time to let go of it, especially as she still wore those asinine boots, and I still feared that she would fall.
If I were to let go of her hand, I’d only end up grasping her by the elbow, or some other part of her, instead.
Fortunately, the wagon was not at all far from the house, so I did not have to hold her hand for long.
Having her silken palm pressed to mine made me feel as if something inside me were on the verge of combusting.
Probably something important. An irreplaceable organ. Or artery.
At least, if it happens, I’ve got a doctor with me, I thought grimly. If I somehow collapsed under the weight of her lovely little hand, perhaps there was a slim chance such an event would not actually be fatal.
An absurd series of thoughts, to be sure. I was not a man given to chasing ridiculous notions through my own head.
And I was not a man capable of being felled by nothing but press of a human palm and five slender fingers against my own. No matter how soft and fragrant they were.
By the empire, but she did smell good.
“Thank you,” she said brightly, and not for the first time tonight. She could be quite polite when she wanted to be.
Other times, she seemed nearly flippant, teasing, and tossing smiles at me like bombs.
We’d reached the top of the porch steps, and I transferred my hat to my tail and used my hand to open the door.
“It’s not locked!” Lualhati remarked, seeming surprised by this.
“Who would I lock the door against?” I asked her, gesturing her ahead of me through the door.
“I mean, I know Tasha has told me how good the men here really are, but it’s still a prison planet,” she pointed out as she stepped inside. “You really don’t think you need a lock on the door?”
“No.” I closed the door, then left her side to build up a fire in the kitchen’s wood stove. It took a moment to get the fire blazing, and Lualhati filled the silence while I worked.
“Aren’t there three of them to one of you, though?” she went on. “Although Rivven seems like he isn’t capable of hurting a lamb. I still can’t quite believe he’s here on a murder conviction.”
“He is,” I told her. “Just like the rest of them.”
“And yet you don’t lock your door.”
The fire had truly caught now. Flickering light licked up the logs. I stood.
“Even if they broke in and came at me, all three at once,” I said, “it would not make a difference. I would have them subdued in a matter of moments.”
Her brows rose in such a manner that I did not think she believed me.
It was little matter if she believed me or not. It was simply the truth.
For some reason, even though I’d just told myself it did not matter if she believed me, I found myself explaining anyway. As if trying to convince her.
“Xennet, Rivven, and Dorn are all strong men,” I said, “but they do not have cycles of military combat training beaten into their bones the way I do.” I gestured at my hip. “And they do not have blaster-style weapons.”
“Yes, well, I don’t have ‘cycles of military combat training,’” Lualhati said. “And I don’t have a weapon, either.”
“Are you worried about that?” I asked her bluntly. “About not having a lock on the door?”
She seemed to ponder this. Her little blunt teeth caught her lower lip between them. For too long a moment, I could focus on nothing but that soft, red flesh, and the white biting into them.
Then, she released her lip and shot me yet another smile. Just how many of them did she have at her disposal?
“It sounds,” she said, “like I’ve already got the biggest, baddest thing in the woods right here in the house with me.”
It took me longer than I would have liked to admit to realize that she meant me.
Biggest? Perhaps.
Baddest?
I did not like the sound of that. It was translating into something like “worst.”
I had not cared what anyone thought of me in a long, long time.
But apparently, I cared now. Because I did not like to think that she thought me the worst man here.
“That will be your bedroom,” I told her stiffly, indicating the spare room next to mine. “If it would make you feel better, I will put a lock on its door. And you will be the only one with the key.”
“Oh, no, that isn’t what I meant,” she said at once.
“What is it you did mean, then?”
What did you mean when you called me the worst thing in these woods?
“I just meant,” she said, “that I guess the lack of lock on the front door is kind of irrelevant…” Her gaze darted away, then came fluttering, almost shyly, back to my face. “Since I have you in here to protect me.”
“You do.” It came out as a kind of croak. Perhaps due to the woodfire smoke, though the relentlessly rational part of my mind knew that the chimney was more than adequate. The air quality in here was not to blame.
“Well, that’s all I need to know, then!”
She seemed to mean it. But maybe I should still put a lock on her bedroom door anyway. She did not know me. I was not her trusted friend, or her husband, or even someone she had agreed to live with before today. She deserved privacy, and as much of a sense of safety as I could offer her.
I was dangerously close to letting my eyes go white.
Again. It had been so quick during our human hug, that I wasn’t entirely sure it had happened at all.
But outside, when she’d suggested stripping out of her clothing right in front of me, there had been no mistaking the sensation.
That hot crawl of pulsing light in my skull, however brief.
“I will begin bringing in the boxes.”
As I retreated out the door, I heard her say that she would help, but I once again put stop to that. “No boxes in those boots.”
“Maybe the first box you’ll bring in will be my shoes and boots box! And then I can help after that!” she called, undeterred, after me.
I did not answer her that time. I turned my not-insignificant amount of focus and power to the task at hand, instead of letting myself be continually distracted by her.
The boxes felt good and solid in my arms. I took three at a time now, instead of two, needing the heft of the physical work to ground me.
As I brought in load after load, Lualhati got to emptying them.
This, for some reason, she did right in the centre of my kitchen instead of in the bedroom.
Though perhaps the bedroom would be too small for her methods.
Methods that seemed to involve ripping open each box and pulling out every item inside without a single thought as to where that item might go once she had it.
By the time I brought in the last boxes from the wagon, she was nearly swallowed by the chaotic sea of humanalia all around her.
“Do not forget that more are coming,” I said, tamping down a sense of alarm at the near-instant destruction of my tidy domain.
“I know!” she said merrily, leaning over and unwrapping some kind of item.
The item, once relieved of its protective layer, proved to be a mug, not unlike the large ones Rivven used in his saloon.
But this one was not clear glass, instead opaque and pink.
A darker pink shape was stamped on the front of it, with two rounded parts at the top, and a tapered point at the bottom.
She seemed happy to see this mug, touching the dark pink shape with tender fingers.
“What is that?” I asked her. I glanced about, trying to locate an untouched corner to put down the final three boxes. Unfortunately, I found none, and put these three last boxes down on the table instead.
“It’s my mug! My lola gave it to me for Valentine’s Day when I was a teenager.”
“Your grandmother?” I asked, clarifying the translation that came through for the word lola. There was not, however, a translation for the specific day she’d mentioned.
“Yeah.” She spun the mug around to show me the shape again. “This is a heart.”
Oh. That was not a good sign now, was it? Our doctor did not seem to know what a heart was supposed to look like.
“Is it…some kind of animal heart?” I asked tentatively, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt.
“No, no!” she said brightly. “It’s a human heart!”
I took a moment to consider how to proceed. Lualhati had so far given me no indication of incompetence, either medically or…mentally.
Though she really did smile a lot. And I was not always assured that excessive smiling was the surest sign of sanity in anyone.
I waited for her to explain further, or perhaps tell me she was joking. But she did not. She just held up the mug with the not-heart on it, staring at me expectantly. Unable to think of anything else, I simply said, “It does not look like the heart in the document you helped Tasha create.”
“Well, of course not,” she said at once. “It’s not an anatomical heart!”
“What other sort is there?”
If humans had some sort of second, misshapen, imaginary heart, I had certainly never heard of it.
“It’s a romantic heart.” She traced the shape of it with a slim finger. “And see? It’s even got Cupid’s arrow through it!”
She held it up once more, seemingly wanting me to take it. I did so, cradling it carefully, suddenly afeared that I should drop and break it.
I was not familiar with “arrows,” however, I soon saw what she meant. A pointed projectile of sorts seemed to have gone right through the dark pink shape.
“I still do not understand what a romantic heart is,” I grunted, handing the mug back to her.
“It’s a symbol,” she explained. “Humans talk about love coming from our heart. And this shape kind of represents that.”
Well, at least I now knew that she understood what a proper heart should look like, and that this shape was not it.
Though I still did not feel elucidated about the rest. Perhaps she could see this confusion on my face, for then she asked, “Do Zabrians talk about love differently? If it doesn’t have to do with your heart? ”
“I would not know,” I answered. “You will have to ask one of the married men.”
Perhaps Rivven or Warden Tenn would be able to give her a more satisfactory answer on the subject. Though, for some reason, I did not relish the idea of her going to other men to get things that I could not provide her.
“You…” She lowered the mug. “You’ve never loved anyone?”
“No.”
“No friends? No family?” She wet her lips with the pink tip of her tongue. “No wife?”
“No.” When she did nothing but cock her head and watch me, I found an odd claw of impatience pricking its way up the bones of my spine. Impatience and something else. Not quite shame. But the sense that I had somehow already failed her.
“I am not entirely uncaring,” I found myself saying. “And I have formed attachments to others, born of duty and trust and responsibility.” It was one of those very attachments that had brought me to Zabria Prinar One in the first place. Surely, that had to count for something in her eyes.
“But you’ve never loved someone romantically. You’ve never been struck by Cupid’s arrow, is what you’re saying.” Her softly rounded fingertip pointed at the sharp, piercing end of the arrow, jutting out the side of the heart symbol.
“Since I do not know what that means, I will answer, ‘no.’”
She snorted. “Yeah, fair. It’s part of Old-Earth mythology. The idea that there’s this god of love named Cupid zipping around, and when he shoots you with his arrow, you immediately fall in love with the next person you see.”
“Sounds violent,” I observed dryly.
She laughed at this. “Yeah, well. Sometimes it feels violent.”
Maybe this was accurate. When Shiloh first showed up, Rivven seemed to tumble, head-first and helplessly, into a white-eyed daze.
Like someone had walloped him in the side of the skull so hard that his brain could no longer be relied upon to function properly.
Rather alarming, in all honesty, as I’d always counted Rivven as one of the more sensible men in the province.
It shook me rather strangely to think that Lualhati might have been subjected to such a violence of her own.
Who could have inspired such a feeling in her?
“Do you have a man?”
Her red lips parted at my abrupt question.
“What was that?”
“Tasha did not say anything about you being married,” I said, “and you do not wear a ring as is customary among many humans. But perhaps you have someone waiting for you.”
And perhaps that was why she had only agreed to a temporary contract…
“No.” A harsh brittleness came into her voice, accentuated by her putting the mug down with a clinking sort of finality. “No, I don’t have a man.”
I did not like the little thread of pain that I detected running through her words.
I did not like the oddly smug sense of satisfaction that surged inside me, either.
She did not have a man.
Well.
At least now she could say that she had a warden.