sat on two committee meetings to discuss whether juvies should go to the Planetoids. Jaguar said they should send the parents up instead.
“Are you suggesting a Greenkeeper’s responsible for that?” he asked.
“I’m speculating about possibilities, great and small. Does Davidson offer any ideas for capture or cure?”
“No cure. There is none. And capture is difficult. Theoretically they can regenerate wounds rapidly, so bullets won’t work. If you keep one locked up long enough without feeding maybe they’ll dissipate for lack of energy—a kind of starvation—but try keeping them locked up if they really can shapeshift. Stories say salt burns them—a bad interaction with their biochem—but it won’t kill them. Also they fear snakes because systemic poisoning makes quick regeneration difficult. But according to Davidson the only viable way to deal with them is your ancestor’s treatment.”
“Which one?”
“Rip their hearts out,” he said. “Basically you have to do enough damage rapidly enough that they can’t regenerate. Getting as close as you need to do that without being killed is the tough part. You only get one shot at a Greenkeeper.”
“Right,” she said. Then, “How do you happen to have all this information at your fingertips?” she asked. “Idle curiosity?”
He was going to try that answer, but since she’d anticipated it, he went for the truth instead. “About a week ago I picked up Davidson and read it through,” he answered. “I don’t know what impelled me, but it did seem important at the time.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. He understood the question in her face, which asked whether this was from Adept space, a precognitive sense that this knowledge would be needed soon. In the absence of a definite answer he merely shrugged.
She accepted that in silence. She stood and walked over to the window, where she stared out over the replica city of Toronto, built to mimic the original for this zone of Planetoid 3. The sun was dipping over the horizon, the buildings washed in soft gold.
“I still want to know why you’re interested,” he noted. “If you think your current prisoner shows tendencies that way, that’d be important.”
“No. Nothing like that. Just—the book fell off the shelf.”
He supposed that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone else, but he understood. Empaths were trained to pay attention to small signals. When books leapt off shelves at your feet, you picked them up and read them, even if there didn’t seem any reason to do so. Later, you might find out that part of the shelf wasn’t level. Or you might find this was exactly the information you needed. Either way, knowing the reason behind her curiosity settled his nerves, for now. It could also explain his sudden interest in reading the same book. Their history together included a great deal of close empathic contact, and that sometimes created interesting synchronicities.
“Did you like the Davidson book?” she asked after a while.
“Very much. It’s an evil kind of creature, but her writing’s always beautiful, so it’s worth the read. I think,” he noted more philosophically, “beauty may be the only antidote there is to evil.”
“That’s a romantic notion,” she said.
“Then I’m a romantic. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
His tone gave him away. She turned to him, her face full of questions. She started with the most obvious one. “You didn’t come over to talk about vampires, did you?”
He leaned back and asked his breathing to normalize itself, asked his heart rate to slow down. After all their circling dance, today he was ready to call some new steps. It wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be.
They shared friends and work and knowledge in the empathic arts. They shared assignments and risks and rescues. One way and another, they spent more time together than apart. Their high regard for each other had even survived sleeping together. And here he was, skittish as spit on a griddle about asking her out.
“No. I wanted to see if you’d like to have dinner with me,” he said.
She tried to absorb the question and failed. It was already past dinnertime. “Dinner?” she repeated.
“Later this week. I was thinking La Loba. You said you like their Tequila.”
He saw complexities cross her thoughts as she chewed the inside of her lip. She wasn’t getting it.
“I’m asking you out, Jaguar,” he said, his voice like gravel in his throat. “On a date.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”
And then, silence, as she stared at her hands.
At least, he thought, he had the satisfaction of seeing her shocked into speechlessness. That was a rare and precious moment. He savored it briefly, then asked, “Is Thursday good? ”
She conducted another interview with her emotions, and although they weren’t in empathic contact, he could guess the nature of her thoughts. They probably weren’t much different than his, which asked him repeatedly what confused sense of chivalry impelled him to do this.
He had other options. She’d be amenable to something casual, to being intermittent lovers with no strings attached. They’d stay friends and nothing much would change. And she wouldn’t push if he let it drop altogether. Eventually it would disappear, swallowed by his favorite ally, time. But to try and establish something real between them could be pure and gallant stupidity of the most egregious kind. To say I want this, and I want it real was probably the last thing she expected, and the most foolhardy thing he could do.
He waited, while her internal conversation rounded itself out to resolution.
“I’m singing with Moon Illusion on Thursday,” she said at last. She regularly sang with this band of former prisoners so it was a valid excuse, but his disappointment was sharp. He was debating what to say next when she breached the gulf of silence.
“How’s Wednesday?” she asked.
He let his pulse steady itself, then raised himself from his chair to leave.
“Wednesday’s good,” he said. “See you about seven, if that’s okay.”
“Sure,” she said. “Seven’s fine. See you then.”
He thought about saying more, but she’d already turned away. Enough, he thought. Enough for now.
He moved toward the door, and let himself out.
Chapter 2
The Planetoid atmosphere, created through a mass generator, had spit out a hot day. On Wednesday morning Jaguar stood in heavy humidity on Yonge street, staring at a bronze and gold silk pantsuit in a store window as the sun pressed against the back of her neck.
She’d woken early to finish her final report on her last assignment, then decided to take care of a few errands downtown. She was almost done when she was captured by the outfit in the window of Wild Child Boutique.
She pressed a hand against the glass. Shimmering bronze and gold washed silk,
