Heat

She bucked up at him desperately, but he stopped with his open hand just above her. She ground at the empty air, screaming into her gag, and he gri

“I would give the blood out of my body to have you remember this,” he told her. “We’ll see. Close your eyes, Raven. Count to a thousand.”

He kept saying it as her struggles waned and finally, she obeyed. She lost count somewhere around two hundred, and slept.

*

“Like sands through the hourglass,” the tee-vee intoned solemnly, “so are the days of our lives.”

The words had a profound impact upon Tagen, as did the imagery of sand slipping through the glass fu

He had been here four days. No, for today was his fifth rising from the bed in the room of holding, and he didn’t even count that first day when Daria had been drugged. He had been here six days, six! Time, like sand, falling through his fingers faster the harder he tried to grip.

He had seen no recognizable sign of E’Var on the human media shows, but that was evidence of nothing. The media was filled with death and it was impossible to tell how near to Tagen’s location any of it was. His gut told him E’Var was here; for now, he had to trust to that. But time, those cruel sands, was against him. He had only two suppressants left in his supply pack, two more chances to stave off the brutal weather before Heat set in. Heat. Here. On Earth. In Daria Cleavon’s home.

Just for a moment, that thought, which should have produced in him an ominous apprehension, stirred a wholly different effect. And for that moment, that briefest of moments, he imagined freely the sensation of Daria Cleavon’s small body fastened to his.

Tagen growled low in his chest and it was not a sound of irritation at all.

Then he shook his head, breaking the thought into pieces he would not allow to reassemble. Heat was not pleasant. Even in the most ideal of situations—with a female similarly affected and wild to mate—it was at best an act of uncomfortable necessity, with little pleasure to be had. He did not want it and he certainly did not want to inflict it on his human.

He put the thought away for now, knowing even as he did so that it would return. In the late hours, when Daria had taken herself to bed, Tagen’s hand had a way of finding the tuning control for the tee-vee and scrolling down to watch humans mating. Every night, he told himself he wouldn’t. Every night, he did and told himself it had nothing to do with Daria. Every night, he watched and thought of her, wondering how she would move, how she would sound. And every new day, he watched Daria occupy herself with work, studying surreptitiously the curves of her alien body and imagining.

All of this, yes, but at least he was also working. He was learning to hear and speak N’Glish, he was familiarizing himself with human technology, and he was at least trying to find E’Var’s mark amid those of every other human murder. Once Heat came, Heat would be all there was.

“How’s it going?” Daria asked now, bringing him back to himself. She was standing at the edge of the front room, holding a plate of food and a glass of iced drink out to him. Her eyes were on the tee-vee. “This doesn’t look like Law & Order.”

“No.” He didn’t know what he was watching, actually. He had stopped while scrolling because he had seen a ship in space, but this program’s version of deep-space tours appeared to be more or less all humans, doing everything humans did now, except that they did it in stranger clothes.

“Aha, Scylla Six, I’ve seen this one.” She gave him a knowing sort of smile. “How do you like it so far?”

“I note that it appears all humans are good and all aliens evil.”

“Yep, ‘fraid so. But the cyborgs are evil, too, and they look human.”

Tagen took the food from her—bread and meat flavored with sauce and stacked together to be easily eaten with one hand. It was a more complicated, and tastier, version of line rations that any Fleet recruit would recognize. He ate, raising his glass to her in thanks.

“Cheers,” she said, looking pleased. She walked away without explaining herself.

Tagen watched her go. Her hips had the most fascinating sway…

He sighed and turned his attention to the tee-vee again. On-screen, the aliens, which looked a great deal like slime-coated, grey insects, were slaughtering their way through a roomful of humans for no apparent reason. The male who was clearly the heroic element of the story was battling them off with a sword. And the aliens, who had somehow mastered deep space travel despite the very real handicap of having only one finger on each leg, had not thought to develop a gun at any point. The male’s companion, a female with whom he had been bitterly arguing throughout the program, was fighting bare-handed, by the gods, actually kicking the aliens to death with very little effort. Aliens with exoskeletons, no less.

“Are there other aliens besides you?” Daria asked, returning to the front room with her own food and drink. “Or us, rather. Whoever. Are there other planets with intelligent life, is what I’m saying.”

“Yes,” Tagen said warily. “Two others, that we know of. Two homeworlds, I should say. By now, we have colonized some fifty worlds or moons between us.”

“Wow.” Daria looked skyward, seeking out those worlds through her ceiling.

“There must be others,” Tagen continued, considering the shape of her rounded breasts from the corner of his eyes. “But we are not actively searching any more.”

“Why not?”

“The cost was prohibitive.” The So-Quaal were almost certainly still searching for new life-forms, but Tagen did not elaborate. He could not tell her about the So-Quaal without ru

“So, is Earth the only planet of aliens you don’t…like?”

He looked at her inquiringly.

“Do you talk to the other aliens? Or do you avoid everyone the way you avoid Earth?”

Tagen hesitated. No matter how he answered, it would be easy to take insult. “Earth was…hostile…when it was discovered.”

She smiled faintly. “Not like now, huh?” she said, with just a trace of irony.

He watched the tee-vee. The aliens had managed to give the kicking female an extremely superficial wound in the shoulder, which everyone around her treated as life-threatening. It made Tagen think of his last injury in the field—a five day siege at the docking station for Kevrian cargo raiders, every day on that world equal to three of Jota’s, and every shot fired a threat to the integrity of the hull. Tagen could remember hugging the back of a support pillar as he charged his blaster, watching the shots from either side exchanged in the air before him, and thinking of the total lack of oxygen on the planet’s surface outside. On his first day of that conflict, Tagen had been caught in a crossfire and taken blaster fire to his face, chest, back, and gut. His commander had pulled him from the lines, injected him with pain censors and stimulants and then thrown him bleeding back into the fray.

“You’re smiling,” Daria observed, and looked at the tee-vee dubiously. “It can’t be the movie. What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking about time,” Tagen said.

She nodded, accepting that. “It really flies when you watch tee-vee all day.”

There was no sarcasm in the words. In point of fact, her tone was almost rueful.

“When I first came home,” she said, her hand rising to caress her cheek, “I did nothing but watch tee-vee. Just…just to have a voice in the house, you know? I’d watch for, like, sixteen hours and then not be able to name a single show I’d watched. It was like drowning in sand.”

She seemed about to say more and then she looked at him with mild surprise, as if she’d forgotten he was there. She uttered a nervous laugh, rubbing her face before clasping her hands together. “At least you’re getting something out of your tee-vee time.”

Yes, he was getting further and further behind E’Var. Newly discouraged, Tagen eyed the screen, where the male and female were heavily conversing in a medical bay, all their bickering forgotten.

Daria came and sat beside him, and immediately, all thought of the show’s improbabilities went completely out of his mind. Tagen didn’t look at her. He moved no muscle at all apart from what it took to continue breathing. But he was aware of her. He felt her; the space she occupied seared his entire left side. Her scent dug into all his senses. Female. Very female.

And all at once, Tagen had an epiphany, his very first.

He wanted her. He wanted not just a willing female for a restless bout of sexplay, he wanted her. He wanted Daria Cleavon.

He didn’t know why. She was human. That alone should have been reason enough not to want her. But the more time he spent in her home, the fewer their differences seemed to matter. And no, she was not the sort of female he normally found attractive, but that was all right, too. He was in the unique position of holding power and authority over a female and he found it very arousing.

Tagen’s claws dug in at his knee where he forced his hand to casually rest. The pain was centering, reminding him in no uncertain terms that if he should make an overture, even if he knew how, he would not be welcome.

The tee-vee program chose that precise moment to cut to a scene of the two humans naked, writhing in a swaddle of sheets and sweat-damp limbs.

Tagen continued to stare without changing expression, but he was intensely aware of Daria at his side and of her sudden stillness.

The male’s hands moved up the female’s undulating body, gripping her breasts before consuming her in a kiss. This was how humans mated. This was how Daria would move beneath him. These were the sounds she would make. This—

Tagen suddenly pulled in a breath, his mind closing to the visual and opening on reality.

Musk. Mating musk. Daria, here beside him, neither touching nor looking at him, but thinking of him, perhaps. Wanting him, as he wanted her.

Why, damn her, why would she not advance? Why would she not turn to him, speak to him, tell him what she wanted? He did not dare to move first. Even if every instinct went against taking the first step when a female had not indicated approval, he could not risk antagonizing her. He could not withstand the flood of fear in her eyes, not now, not when he wanted her so completely.

In programs such as this, a female frequently a