Page 27 of Taken for Granite
He hesitated, not sure how much to share. If she were from the Syndicate, then she already knew of the Khargals and had a rough estimate of their numbers. If not, her natural curiosity would make her continue to ask until satisfied. “How far are we traveling today?”
Juniper gave an inelegant laugh, snorting through her nose. Tas grinned at the sound of it. “Two hours if we took the turnpike, but I don’t want a record of the van in a database, so we’re taking the slower route. So—three hours.”
What a belabored way to answer a simple question. Their journey would be an arduous three hours. Tas got the basic facts of his history out of the way but glossed over the long war in which his home had been embroiled for so many decades.
“I am from a planet called Duras. I am a scout in the military. Our ship malfunctioned and crashed off the coast of what is now France, nearly a thousand years ago. Most of the crew did not survive. I cannot give you a specific number as I did not count heads at the time.”
“You were in the crash?” She paused. “How old are you?”
“My people are long-lived.” The average Khargal lifespan was three thousand years. Tas had barely been more than fledgling when he joined the military. With extended periods ofduramna, the aging process could be slowed dramatically. He knew of several Khargals who waited out the years induramna, deep in slumber.
“So you’ve been hanging out in France since the Middle Ages?”
“We spread out and hid. Our stone forms blended well with the buildings in large population centers.”
“Cities. You mean cities, don’t you?”
She wasexhausting.
“As you say.”
“But you have a spaceship and super advanced tech. Why didn’t you take over the place? That’s what I would do,” Juniper said.
“Less than fifty soldiers conquering a planet?” He snorted derisively. He’d read human books where such preposterous plans worked, but the fact remained that humans vastly outnumbered the Khargals. The captain of the ship, Skot, swam to shore only to find himself in the hands of a mob. The idiot violated protocol and tried to initiate contact. The frightened and superstitious mob took it as well as could be expected.
“We have a directive that forbids contact with primitive cultures, so we hid and waited for rescue,” he said.
Juniper whistled. The trilling sound hit him with unexpected delight, stroking the sensitive parts of his ears. A shiver spread through his body.
“You’ve been waiting a long time,” she said.
Tas said nothing. Weeks ago, when his captors sent him over the ocean, his sigil pinged him with a new message, the first message since the crash. A solar flare had disabled the Khargal ship and the rescue beacon. Somehow, improbably, the beacon had been repaired, and the call for aid answered.
At long last, rescue was coming.
He needed his sigil. Not only did it contain a message with the retrieval time and location, but it was the key to be teleported aboard the rescue ship. The Syndicate still had his sigil, necessitating that he march back into the enemy’s den to fetch the device.
“Those people, the Rose people…” Her voice drifted off, as if collecting her thoughts. “Look, I have to say it. You’re a hot mess, just an absolute wreck.”
“Thank you. Did you have a point or is this merely abuse?”
“We only missed them at Mickey’s by minutes. They probably watched us pull up.”
“Nothing probable about it. They were watching,” he said with certainty.
“So why didn’t they grab you? Why this farce of having a chick bring you in like a bounty hunter? I mean, I’m awesome and all, but I got zero combat skill. If you didn’t want to come along, there’s nothing I could do about that.”
“I would not be so certain,” he muttered. Her breath hitched in her throat, as if she caught his words. “They have an item of mine that I need to retrieve,” he explained, lest she infer his words to mean something other than the need to retrieve his sigil.
“And they have it where we’re going?”
“Perhaps.” A vague sense of direction pulled him to the north. “At this distance, my link with the sigil is weak, but I believe we have the correct heading.”
“Okay. That answers my next question. Why are you willing to just waltz right back to the people you escaped from?”
Tas felt no need to reply. Let her believe the sigil was the only reason. The attraction his body felt, the urge to mate and the swelling of his mating gland, had nothing to do with his willingness to follow the female. He did not want to rescue her youngling. He did not want her gratitude or odd human kisses.
In the centuries he observed humanity, he’d seen the affectionate pressing of mouths to the face, or mouth to mouth. Such a practice was unheard of for his people, but humans seemed to enjoy the experience. It probably had more to do with nerve receptors in the mouth than anything else, and it looked unhygienic.
