Page 9 of His Human Believer

I set the thermal array along the base of the wall at four-nanco intervals, facing outward into the jungle. Motion sensors angle up into the canopy where the foliage overhangs the stone. Audio is placed at the corners. The resonance meter goes at the center on its own tripod, because it is the most sensitive instrument I own.

A well-used walking path runs along the base of the wall here, worn flat by beings who walk this preserve for pleasure. The residents have used it for years. Ten diurnals ago it would have been closed to them because the fire beasts come out of the swamps to mate during the rains and the community locks its gates until the herds migrate. But the rains have ended and the herds have gone. The preserve is open, lush and entirely ordinary and safe. But I know that there are hidden safe shelters scattered through this preserve with vine-covered doors in case someone is caught out here when the fire beasts are mating.

Beyond my lights the jungle simply continues. Night sounds. Something small moves through the understory. Both moons are up, which will help the visual arrays and hurt the thermal. The temperature is dropping the way it does here once full dark settles. This is the one place I have ever reliably been myself. Instruments. Placement. Intervals. I enjoy being out in the field, studying the interplay of these legends amongst the actual wildlife, vegetation and climate of our planet.

And then the air changes.

Wind comes down off the wall and carries her potent scent to me.

I do not turn around. “I know you are watching me.”

Margaret steps out of the shadows and she is not alone. The wulver comes with her, shouldering out of the dark at her hip, all three heads up and swinging toward me at once. She has changed her clothes and is more beautiful than ever. The female now wears a blue Hyrrokin tube top. Her shoulders and arms are bare. And her shapely legs are also visible, from mid-thigh down. She wears odd human foot coverings that somehow make her legs look longer.

When has a male ever been this tempted?

“I’m not here to work,” she tells me. “I promise. It’s just that I couldn’t sleep and you’re out here with instruments. What am I supposed to do, go to bed?”

I let out a snort of smoke. “Well, that’s what the rest of the household is doing.”

She shrugs. “I’m a very curious person. I have to see what you’re doing. Is it okay if I just stay out here long enough to understand your monitoring equipment?”

How does she know I enjoy talking about my equipment?

The wulver crosses the grass to me. He sniffs my knee with the middle head, then the left, then decides I am acceptable and turns his back on me entirely and returns to her. He sits down against her legs, positions himself squarely between the female and any danger that might arrive.

Ah.

That is not a beast being companionable. He is a guardian animal placing itself between an unarmed female and the only unfamiliar male in the vicinity.

Hannibal Hellstone has assigned his wulver to the human.

I find I approve. It is a correct decision, made by a male who understood that a soft, flameless human testing the preserve at night requires companionship.

Of course I should demand she leave, immediately. But all I can do is gaze at her perfect, wide hips and that thick waist. Margaret Reyes is mesmerizing.

And then she begins to pepper me with a series of questions about my instruments.

“What does that one do?”

“Thermal. It reads heat differential against the stone.”

“And that’s useful because…?”

“Because a warm body moving along the base of the wall leaves a trace for some minutes afterward. If something passes here at the third hour, I will know at the fourth.”

“What’s your false positive rate?”

“High. In this environment, unacceptably high. The stone holds the day’s heat unevenly. Foliage moves. Small fauna cross the array constantly.”

“So how do you tell the difference?”

“Mass. Gait. Duration. A rock lizard crossing the array reads as a spike. A being walking reads as a sequence. If the sequence is regular, I discard it as fauna. If it is irregular I flag it.”

She crouches down beside the tripod. “And this one?”

“That one is useless.”

She looks up at me. “Then why is it here?”