"Posthumous vindication isn't that appealing to me."
He squeezed gently. "Do you think I'd let it harm you? There are beings, creatures, I couldn't be sure of stopping, but this isn't one of them."
"I love your confidence, but you don't know much about chameleons."
"I know mass is conserved when they change form. This one looked enough like you to fool someone who knows you, so its mass is similar to yours. If it comes after you, I can stop it."
She chewed on her lip, trying to think her way past the fear. If she gave herself up to the police, she might be in danger from other prisoners, maybe even the guards. If she hid out, the monster might come after her.
The chameleon was certainly the bigger danger, but here she had Nathan. In jail she wouldn't. And they needed the chameleon to prove she wasn't the killer. "Do you Change? Like a lupus, I mean."
"Eh. No. I've had a human body and brain for more than four hundred years now. I can't go back to my hound body, not on my own."
Four hundred years? She'd known he'd lived much longer than a human, but that... that would take some getting used to. "Tell me." She reached for the hand on her shoulder, clasped it. "Tell me how you came to be here. How you came to have that human body and brain."
"My queen sent me, and I needed a human form for the hunt. We knew it would take time for me to track the... Kai, are you going to allow me to keep you hidden here?"
"Yes."
Relief stripped him naked. She'd never seen his face so raw with feeling. "May I... is it all right to hold you?"
She didn't bother with words. Arms were better, and hers slid around him as naturally as if they were already lovers. His arms answered, wrapping her breath-stealingly tight for a second, then loosening. He ran his hands up and down her back, buried his nose in her hair. "I have wanted this," he said fiercely. "For so long, I have wanted..." His breath shuddered out.
Silence wrapped itself around them then - a silence of heartbeats and breaths settling into a shared rhythm. Kai closed her eyes so she could absorb the feel of him through muscle, scent, and skin.
Which wasn't touching his, dammit. Though the way their bodies were touching, she knew he wasn't sexually indifferent to her. Not anymore. "I've wanted, too," she said softly. "I still do."
He raised his head. She saw his throat work as he swallowed. "Kai." He said her name the way he smiled - as if he'd just found it, just this moment wrapped his lips around the sound. He ran both hands along her hair. "I can't... if I'm to keep you safe, I can't be distracted."
"You're turning me down."
He grimaced. "I'm turning us both down, but it's hard." His eyebrows lifted in brief surprise. "That was a pun, wasn't it?"
Actually, it wasn't hard. Not anymore. "Ah... did you do something just now? Because you aren't... things changed."
"I control my body. I've been controlling it around you from the first day we met. The wanting is still there, but it isn't reinforced physically."
Well. He'd been controlling his desire from the time they met? That struck her as a good news, bad news deal. He'd wanted her all along, but he didn't want to want her... because sex was too lonely without a bond, he'd said.
But friendship was a bond, a strong one. That tipped things to the good news side, she decided. "Who's this queen that sent you here?"
"I'll tell you." With a sigh he released her. "Sit with me and I'll tell you whatever you want to know."
Chapter 11
When Nathan was sent to Earth to find a renegade mage, a redheaded queen was sitting on England's throne. The Spaniards had just founded the first European settlement in North America at St. Augustine, and William Shakespeare hadn't yet set foot on a London stage. In Italy, a young man named Galileo Galilei was disappointing his father by studying pendulums and other nonsense instead of medicine. And the Purge was just beginning.
For thirty-two years, Nathan had tracked the mage. When he finished his hunt, both Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth were dead; Jamestown had been established; and the Purge was over, with thousands of Gifted dead at the hands of the Inquisition, their governments, or their own neighbors. And Nathan had been stranded, cut off from all he knew, even from his proper shape.
"Ilke had violated many laws, committed many sins," Nathan said, "but the queens don't intervene in lesser matters. But he crossed one line too many when he practiced death magic."
Kai lay against Nathan's chest, listening to his heartbeat as well as his voice. His arms were around her; his colors swam with hers. In front of them the mage light burned steadily like a heatless campfire. "Death magic, huh? He' must have been a major bad guy."
She heard a smile in his voice. "Hellhounds aren't set on the trail of jaywalkers. You are... okay with this? That my purpose was to hunt and kill those who broke the queens' laws?"
"I'm okay with policemen and soldiers. Your role was something like theirs."
He fell silent, toying absently with the ends of her hair in a way she found most distracting. Not that she wanted him to stop. Finally he said, "I haven't killed only at my queen's command. When I was stranded here... an able-bodied man can't simply decide to never again use his hands and arms. Common sense and instinct will defeat him. That's how it is for a hound and the hunt. I couldn't simply decide not to hunt, but it was hard, very hard, to learn how to choose my own hunts. The queen never loosed me lightly, so I tried to choose as she might have, but at first I didn't understand human society. Death isn't always a solution. Even when the prey is causing obvious harm, killing can spread ill instead of containing it."
"Have you... here in Midland, I mean. Have you hunted here?"
"Not a true hunt. Not to the death, except for the ghoul. I've learned to take satisfaction in lesser hunts, though. I couldn't be a law officer otherwise."
"Ghoul? You mean there was - No, never mind." She set that aside for another time. "I'm having trouble getting my mind around this. I know you, know your colors, the shapes of your thoughts. I've never known anyone with less anger. You aren't a violent man."
"Anger is too big a response for most things. It gets in the way. You haven't seen me on a true hunt. I am violent then, Kai."
He wasn't apologizing. He was stating a fact.
She didn't say anything for several minutes. She wasn't sure how she felt. Nathan killed according to rules she didn't know, but he'd spent years - lifetimes, maybe, by her way of measuring - evolving those rules. He didn't just come from a different culture, but from a different species.