Page 62 of Red Boar's Baby

Her keen hearing caught the sound of something large approaching through the sparse sagebrush on the hillside. Diana leaped into the air and spun around, prepared to shift if it was anything dangerous, but from up here she could easily see Costa coming through the brush and the boulders toward her.

She hadn’t had a good look at Costa’s shifted form since they were much younger. He was an extraordinary creature, large and hump-shouldered and powerful, covered in bristly hair that caught the sun with a reddish tint. Gleaming tusks curled from either side of his muscular jaw.

He was carrying something in his mouth, a bundle dangling from a cord or rope. As he got closer, she recognized their balled-up clothing. The rope was his boot laces. Costa looked up and saw her, dropped it in the sand at his feet, and shifted.

“Morning,” he said cheerfully, while Diana’s hindbrain tried to recover from the sight of Costa, muscular and naked and now with his lightly reddish chest hair catching the morning sun. He separated out Diana’s jeans and the shirt of his that she’d been wearing, then reached for his jeans and pulled them on.

Diana fluttered down from the top of the plane to land near him and shifted back herself. She was well aware of Costa’s appreciative gaze on her as she began to dress, darting swift looks at him out of the corner of her eye. She was also all too aware of the vivid sense-memory of last night, running her hands over his chest in the dark.

“Sleep well?” she asked to get her mind off it.

“Until I woke up to find you gone.” There was a slight edge to his voice.

She hadn’t thought about that part. “I would’ve left a note, but it’s hard to hold a pen in a roadrunner’s claws. Also, I didn’t have a pen.”

Costa snorted. “I checked on Farley on the way over. He’s all right, got through the night okay. I pointed him in the direction of the water hole so he can get a drink.”

“Good for him, I guess.” Dressed now, at least as dressed as she could get, she sat in the sand, brushing it out of her cuffs. “Quinn, what are the odds of someone coming for us?”

“A hundred percent,” he said immediately. “They knew where we were going, and they’re well aware now that we’re missing. An agent and a civilian can’t simply disappear without people looking into it. I checked in before we got on the plane, didn’t exactly give them many details, but the office knows we were flying to Alamagordo, and by now they’ll know we didn’t get there.”

Diana looked up at the clear blue sky, flecked with small clouds turned gold in the newly risen sun. “I don’t see a search and rescue flight.”

“They may be too far north. You said we were pretty far off the flight path. Or they could still be checking things on the ground. I expect Thornburg is having a hard time right now, between my agents grilling him and his plane being even more off the grid than he was expecting.”

Costa smiled a little at the thought. Diana wondered if he was imagining Agent Caine giving Thornburg the third degree. She would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall for that.

“Classic advice in the event of an accident is to stay with the vehicle,” she said. “And I’ve seen plenty of evidence of the truth of that, doing S&R in the parks. It’s much easier to spot something the size of that—” She pointed at the hulk of the burned-out plane. “—than a person, or a couple of people, walking in the desert.”

“I know.” Costa frowned at the plane as if it had personally disappointed him. “We ought to stick around for a while, at least. It’d be different if we were starving, but we’re not. Although my mouth tastes like dirt.”

“At least it doesn’t taste like lizard.”

He laughed. “Want to give me a hand putting out a cry for help?”

“What do you mean?”

Costa picked up a rock and hefted it in his palm. “This is a good size. Let’s collect a few of these, anything that’s big enough to show up on the sand.”

“Oh!” Diana brightened. At least it was something to do, and the sand wouldn’t be too hard on her feet. Walking around barefoot in the desert was a growing concern. All she needed was to get a cactus spine in her sole, and then she’d be in real trouble.

They soon developed a rhythm. Costa collected rocks of a convenient handheld size, while Diana walked slowly back and forth on the sand behind the plane, placing them on letters Costa had drawn out five feet high with a stick: HELP. CRASH. SOS.

“That’s not much detail,” she said as Costa arrived with another load of rocks. Since she was wearing his shirt, all he had on was a sleeveless singlet, which did more to display his assets than to conceal them.

“We could add some more context, but we’d be collecting rocks all day. If we do have to walk for help, we can put in an arrow to indicate which way we’ve gone.”

“Why, Chief Costa, how very resourceful. I can think of no one else I’d rather be stranded in the desert with.” She grinned at him, but in truth, she was serious. If she had to be out here, she really wouldn’t want to be with anyone else.

The sun was becoming intense as the day’s heat grew, shimmering above the sand. Diana plucked at her borrowed shirt, sticking to her damp skin with sweat and gritty with sand. “You know what I could really use? A bath. I wonder if there’s enough water at the spring for a good wash-up? Or at least a military-style spit bath.”

Costa brushed sand off his arms and grinned ruefully as most of it just ended up on his jeans. “I could really go for a shower right now myself.”

They left the sandy basin behind and climbed the hill. Diana turned to look back from above. The sun was hitting their rock message in a way that cast shadows behind the stones, making it pop. It was perfectly readable, and if any planes flew over at anything lower than jet cruising altitude, they would certainly notice it.

She glanced up at the empty blue bowl of the sky. Now they just needed a plane. A sightseer, a military training flight—something. She’d settle for a badly lost balloonist.

They found Farley sitting among the rocks at the top of the hill, shifted human again and half-dressed. He was working on a crude sling for his arm made from his shirt. He lifted his good hand in a small wave of greeting.

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