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“What did you give me? That silver…”
“It’s just a little device to help you speak to me.”
“Does it make me have to agree with you?”
“No,” he laughs. “It does not do that. It’s something we use to help us communicate with all manner of species. Everything has a language. What I gave you just lets me understand you, human female.”
“My name is Jem,” I tell him.
“I am Gruff. I am the Buck of these woods.”
“What is that, like the alpha?”
“Yes. Like the alpha,” he says. He is smiling at me, those green eyes twinkling, his pants holding back a monster surprise of their own — judging by the way they’re throbbing and quivering in a rod-hard line. “I am the master of this terrain, and keeper of all in it. That includes you, Jem, human woman.”
“You can just call me Jem. How do you know I’m human?”
“We have encountered your kind before. You’re on the list.”
“The list?”
He pauses for a moment before answering me, as if he is trying to determine whether or not I deserve the truth. “A list of hostile species best to be culled on sight. Invasive, generally speaking. With a tendency to make land and colonize.”
“Oh. You’re not going cull me. Are you?”
“Have you brought any males with you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
I’m caught in his aura, so swept up in the majesty of the moment and his incredible alien presence that the darkness of that brief conversation almost goes completely over my head. Almost. This creature, Gruff, is dangerous. His horns and fangs and massive musculature are signs of that, but I suspect he is just as dangerous, if not more so, in mind than in body.
“Do not look so worried. You are female. We do not kill women.”
“Sexist,” I mutter under my breath, more as a reflex than anything else. I am not impressed that I will be spared just because I happen to be a woman. I wonder if EET knew that about these species before they sent me here? I wonder if they were quite well aware that they needed someone non-threatening and a little bit of a bumbler to infiltrate this planet.
“Perhaps, but in your favor,” Gruff points out.
I am wary. Horny, but wary. I can’t deny the excitement I feel in his presence, and I have already sampled his technology.
“I should take my goat and go.”
“Go where?”
“Back to my camp, I suppose.”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “I think you should join my herd.”
He’s still speaking in a kind and open way, but there’s steel in his voice. I’m not being offered the opportunity to join his herd, whatever form that might take. I am instead being told that Iwilljoin his herd. I hear that very clearly, even though he didn’t seem to say it. Maybe that is part of the technology now swimming inside me.
“Uh. Yeah…” I draw the word out. “I’m going to get going. Thanks for the alien communication technology. Maybe Strumpet and I will see you around sometime again.”
“Your doe has joined with my buck. In a matter of months, she will bear his young.”
“That’s how it usually works, yes.”
“You are not yet in season,” he says, “but in a matter of days, you too will be fertile and breedable. Then you will return to me and be mated.”
