Chapter 4
Thyaar made a long-suffering sound and reached for Barnaby again.
Oh bless him, he learned slow.
Barnaby finished washing the insult off his fur and started in on his back paw with the careful attention of a cat who was ignoring idiot humans…
err, aliens. Thyaar's hand closed around his middle and the cat went limp the way cats do when they want to lodge a formal complaint — every muscle suddenly liquid as his whole body sagged in protest. Thyaar straightened up with what was now about twelve pounds of disgruntled spaghetti, deposited Barnaby on the bed, and stepped back.
Barnaby sat. He looked at Thyaar with the indignation of a cat who had been wronged. Then he jumped off the bed and walked away. Again.
"Oh, for—" Thyaar pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing when his fingers found the bruise.
Letting his hand drop, he turned to her.
The look on his face was almost funny. He'd kicked her door in like a one-man invasion force, slung her over his shoulder while she screamed the building down, and carried her halfway across a city without breaking a sweat.
And one fat ginger tom had reduced him to standing in his own medical bay looking like someone had kicked his puppy.
She bit down on the inside of her cheek.
“Oh… fine," she said, pushing off the wall. "Move."
He moved. Possibly faster than he meant to — she watched his eyes flick to her face and then away, and there was something about how careful he was being not to crowd her that didn't fit the way he'd just kicked in her door.
Interesting.
Crossing to where Barnaby had settled with his back turned, she crouched and held out one hand.
He recognized the gesture and sniffed, making her wait.
He always made her wait. After a measured pause he no doubt felt was the correct amount of disrespect, he stood, stretched, and trotted over with his tail up.
"Traitor," she muttered, scooping him up against her chest.
He bumped his head under her chin and purred. Of course, he did. He’d wanted to be picked up the whole time. He just hadn't wanted Thyaar to be the one doing it.
She straightened up with him in her arms. Barnaby was about the weight of a small bag of cement, and she felt every gram through the soft warmth of the borrowed shirt.
He nestled in like he intended to take up residence.
Climbing onto the bed because there wasn't anywhere else to sit, she settled Barnaby in her lap, and looked up at Thyaar.
"Now what?"
Thyaar approached slowly. Like she was the one with claws.
"I scan him first," he said. "Then we treat what I find. The ring will move overhead, but it won't touch him. He will feel nothing."
She snorted. “He won't believe that."
She didn’t believe that, eyeing the medical contraption.
He tapped something on a panel set into the wall.
The ring of white metal above the bed hummed soft and began to move.
She felt the air shifting around them and so did Barnaby.
He opened one eye, registered the furniture was moving, and decided the change was not to his liking.
She gathered him closer with both arms before he could leap.
"I've got you, baby boy,” she murmured into his ear, very quiet. "It's just a fancy x-ray. We've done x-rays before."
She had no idea if this was a fancy x-ray. It was probably nothing like a fancy x-ray. And Barnaby didn't speak English, and what he understood was the tone of her voice, so she kept it low and calming.
The ring stopped a hand's width above them. Light pulsed across it once, soft as a blink, and was gone.
That was it.
Barnaby blinked twice, looked offended on principle, and went back to glaring at Thyaar.
"It's done?"
"It is done." Thyaar was reading something off the panel across the room. His face shifted — the easy, still-amused look slipped, and what replaced it wasn't anger exactly, but it wasn't far off. His jaw worked. He scrolled something. He didn't look at her.
"What?" she said.
"Your cat has the sugar disease."
“I…. Well, yeah. I know that.” She hadn't meant for her voice to go tight, but it did. “I told you he had diabetes. He's on insulin. I do the injection every day. There's a vial in the fridge at the apartment. I need to—"
"You will not need it."
"You don't understand, it's expensive, and I can't—"
"You will not need it," the big alien repeated, looking at her over the top of the screen. "Because I am going to cure him."
She stared at him. Then she laughed. “Yeah, right. Sure you will, handsome.”
“Wait there.”
“What… like there’s somewhere else I have to be? Look, if you really are going to take us to Emily, I need to go and get Barnaby’s medication.”
And a change of clothes for herself wouldn’t go amiss either. She couldn’t go around wearing his underwear… She looked down at herself. If that’s even what this stuff was. Thermal underwear, maybe?
He ignored her, rifling through one of the drawers built into the wall behind him, before producing a small instrument she didn't recognize. It looked, more or less, like a stubby silver pen. He held it up so she could see it.
"This will repair the part of him that is broken. Do you wish me to continue?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
A cure. Not a treatment. Not the fifty-credit-a-pop injections she’d been giving to Barnaby out of pay she didn't have to stop him becoming a furry ginger corpse… and this man… alien was going to fix it with a pen.
“And it won’t hurt him?” she asked, her arms tightening around the purring bundle in her arms.
Thyaar shook his head. “He will not even feel it. We have similar lifeforms… we call them deearin. They are bigger but essentially the same.”
She tilted her head, looking up at him to search his face. She wanted to believe him, she needed to believe him. If the only thing that came out of this sorry mess was that Barnaby was cured, then that was a good thing. Right?
“And they get dia—the sugar sickness as well?”
He nodded. “It is a common ailment with them. Simply fixed.”
“Okay. Do it," she said.
He nodded and stepped closer. Barnaby tensed, growled a warning, and then relaxed into her because she was the warmth and the smell he trusted.
Reaching out, Thyaar moved Barnaby's fur aside at the back of his neck carefully and pressed the silver instrument into the skin.
It made a small sound, less a click than a sigh, and he lifted it away.
She blinked in surprise. "That was it?"
"That was it."
She looked down at Barnaby and he yawned at her, blinking sleepily. He looked exactly the same. Her throat hurt, and she dropped a kiss on the top of his fuzzy head.
"Fine," she said. "Good. What about you?"
Thyaar looked at her, eyebrow raised in a way that was, she was going to have to admit, unfairly attractive.
"Your face," she motioned toward his nose. "I broke it. We should — I don't know. Doesn't it need fixing?"
"It will keep."
"It's bleeding."
"It has stopped bleeding."
"You said your nose was broken."
"It will heal," he said, and shrugged. "It is not currently a priority."
Rigggght. What did she say to that?
Barnaby purred again, rattling brokenly, and she rubbed under his chin.
Then Thyaar held two small gray discs between his fingers and said, "Hold out your arm."
She obeyed without thinking. Then she registered what she'd done, jerked it back, and held Barnaby in front of her like a shield. "Wait… no. What the fuck is that?"
"It is—"
"No. Words first. Weird discs second. What. The. Fuck. Are. They?"
He paused. She watched him reset, as if he were running a calculation about what tone to take and which version of the truth would land.
She'd seen Emily do the same thing on call with her mother. It had pissed her off then as well. With Emily because she’d had to do that in the first place, and now because this asshole was trying the same trick on her.
"Two things," he said finally. "One is a translator matrix, so you understand languages other than your own when you encounter them. The other is a general immune patch. There are bugs out here your body has never met. I don’t want you to die of a sneeze."
"And you were just going to slap them on me."
"I asked." He sounded disgruntled, his brows snapping together. Still cute, she decided. But still an asshole.
“No,” she shook her head. “You said hold out your arm."
His lips quirked a little at the corner. "In my language, little kelarris, that is a question."
“Uh-uh… In mine, that's an order, asshole."
He inclined his head, and amusement warmed his eyes. "Then I am asking. May I? I have already given the cat a similar immunity booster.”
She looked at him for a long second. Then at Barnaby, who had begun to knead her thigh with his claws out, because he believed in tactile affection. She sighed and held out her arm.
The first patch went on the inside of her bicep. The second went next to it. He held her arm steady the whole time, one big hand nearly swallowing it whole, and her stomach did a slow roll. Down, girl.
"That's it?" she asked in surprise.
"That is it. Your body will absorb both within minutes.”
"I — okay. Fine. Whatever." She wasn't going to argue with how alien medicine worked with an actual alien. Tugging the borrowed sleeve back down, she slid off the bed and slung Barnaby over her shoulder like a baby as Thyaar turned for the door. "Where are we going?"
"Bridge."
She followed him out into the warm corridor, padding along on bare feet on the impossibly soft carpet. She had questions. A lot of questions.
"Hey." She caught up to his elbow. He was so much taller than her she had to half-jog to stay with him.
Barnaby protested the gait with a wounded mrrrp in her ear.
"If you have translators, then why did I need one?
I can understand you fine. I've been understanding you fine since you came through my door. "
He didn't slow down.
“Hey! I'm talking to you. Why—"
He looked down at her and said something.
It wasn't English.
It wasn't anything. Not Spanish or French or any of the smatterings she'd picked up at the shelter, not even the snatches of Mandarin from the factory floor… hell, it wasn’t even something she could map onto a language. No snatches of words she recognized. It sounded different… moved differently.
“What did you say?”
He grinned, switching to Terran. “You understood me because I have been speaking your language since I walked through your door.”
She stopped walking. Well, shit.
He took two more strides before he noticed and turned.
"You—" she said. The word came out flat. "You've been speaking Terran? The whole time?”
"Yes."
"Why?”
He tilted his head, his red hair falling and sliding over the leather shoulder of his jacket.
"Because it is harder to be afraid of someone you can argue with," he said.
Well, shit. That was a low blow. She'd been calling him an asshole for an hour, and he'd just let her, because it stopped her being scared. Her chest went tight.
Barnaby chose that moment to attempt a leap from her shoulder to a passing wall panel. She tightened her arms around him before he could wriggle free. The cat, indignant, settled against her chest and started purring louder than necessary, the smug little bastard.
She looked at the too-handsome-for-his-own-good alien standing in his too-warm corridor, in his ridiculous black leathers, on his stupid ship…
"Bridge then,” she said with a sigh. “Since you’re not going to let us go.”