Despite herself, Stephanie giggled at the image. Stutter bugs were one of Meyerdahl’s more colorful insect analogues. They were also about the size of her hand, and they communicated by drawing air over vibrating spicules that covered their garishly decorated sides. A stutter bug in full mating chorus looked like a bright orange, hairy beanbag someone had stuffed with a vibrator.
“Sorry, Mom!” She shook her head contritely. “I guess I’m just more nervous tonight.”
“Well, sure,” Karl put in, supporting her excuse loyally. “It’s the first time they’ve let you take Lionheart anywhere off-campus, Steph!”
“I’m sure that explains it,” Richard Harrington said in a tone which—to his daughter’s knowledgeable ear—suggested he was rather less certain of it than his words implied. Fortunately, he let Karl’s explanation stand, although the look he gave Stephanie suggested she might well find herself revisiting the topic with him later.
Well, of course I will! We really should’ve told them already, but if we had, they’d have climbed onto the next Manticore-Sphinx shuttle come hell or high water. And the same people who would’ve wondered why Karl and I were running for home would wonder why they were scooting back to Twin Forks while he and I were still stuck on Manticore. Especially when they hadn’t even seen us in the last three months!
“It was nice of the Foundation to lean on the restaurant’s management,” Richard said instead of following up on the reasons for his daughter’s obvious anxiety.
“It sure was,” Stephanie agreed sincerely as the taxi grounded at the entrance to the park around the Charleston Arms. The same footman who’d opened the door for her and Karl on their first visit opened it again, but this time he smiled at them.
“Welcome back,” he said. “I understand you two are heading home to Sphinx in a day or two?”
“Yes, we are,” Stephanie acknowledged, and gave him a sincere smile. He’d turned out to be a much more worthwhile person than she’d assumed that first evening. “Steve, this is my mom and my dad. Mom, Dad—this is Steve Cirillo.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Cirillo said, shaking hands with Marjorie and Richard in turn. “You’re probably tired of hearing it, but you’ve got quite a daughter here.”
“That’s not really the kind of thing a smart parent admits she’s tired of hearing,” Marjorie replied, and he chuckled.
“And this—” Stephanie reached up to touch Lionheart’s ears “—is Lionheart.”
“So those old…fogies in the front office finally said you could bring him, did they?” Cirillo glanced at Stephanie’s parents from the corner of one eye as he changed nouns in mid flight. “Good for you!”
“I think Ms. Adair had a lot to do with it. She and her cousin,” Stephanie said.
“The Earl usually does get what he wants,” Cirillo agreed, and waved them through the ornamental gate. The days when he’d assigned a minder to make sure they didn’t get lost—or steal any doorknobs—were long past, and Stephanie smiled at him again before her parents followed her and Karl past the gate and along the gravel walk across the restaurant’s manicured park.
There was less traffic about than usual, although the paths were seldom actually very crowded. It had taken Stephanie a couple of visits to realize that the Charleston Arms wasn’t actually a public restaurant at all. In fact, the entire facility was a private club which belonged to the Earl of Adair Hollow. The restaurant was open to the public three days a week, but not on Fridays, which was when the Foundation regularly met here. She’d wondered, since she’d discovered the way things were actually organized, why it had taken so long to clear her to bring Lionheart along. She knew Landing had stricter regulations than Twin Forks about permitting “animals” into eating establishments, but they made plenty of exceptions for service dogs and Beowulfan fox bears. Probably just bureaucratic inertia, she’d decided, and the fact that the Earl himself had returned to the Star Kingdom this week from his extended business trip probably explained why they’d suddenly managed to overcome that inertia.
Of course—
Lionheart’s sudden, rippling snarl cut her off in mid-thought.
* * *
Climbs Quickly tensed, muscles coiling tightly. His ears went flat to his head and his bared fangs showed bone-white in the illumination spilling from the tall pillar of light behind him and his two-legs.
I should have tasted them sooner! he told himself fiercely. Am I a scout of the People or a just-weaned kitten who cannot be trusted out of the nest on his own?!
Even as he thought it, he knew he was being unfair to himself. Death Fang’s Bane’s mind-glow had been clearer and brighter since her parents had arrived at the learning place, but it remained more shadowed than it ought to be, and he was no closer to understanding the reasons for those shadows. Except for the increasing certainty that they had much to do with the People, that was. And the echo of her fretfulness had seeped into his own mind-glow. It had not dimmed his perceptions, but it had focused his own thoughts on his effort to understand what concerned her so, worrying at it like a death gleaner at a two-day-dead horn blade.
Two-leg mind-glows were always strong, but that was part of the problem. He had grown accustomed to being forced to barricade himself against their intensity, like someone shielding his eyes against too-bright sunlight. And he had been allowing himself to luxuriate in the mind-glows of Death Fang’s Bane’s parents—and in the way her own mind-glow had taken comfort from their presence, even if she had not managed to release whatever was causing so much anxiety. But even so, he knew his own preoccupation with her worry was the only reason he had missed the oncoming mind-glows until it was almost too late.
* * *
Stephanie’s head snapped up, turning automatically to the left. It wasn’t until much later that she grasped the real reason she’d looked in that direction and realized she’d felt it from Lionheart. At the moment, all she saw was a blur of movement coming out of the shadows and the undergrowth…and headed straight at her.
“What the—” her father began.
“Richard!”
That was her mother’s voice, and adrenaline rocketed as she realized her parents were in danger, as well.
“Steph—!”
Karl called her name in a hard, harsh-edged voice, but she scarcely heard him through the high, snarling crescendo of Lionheart’s warcry, and she felt herself dropping into a half-crouch.
Five of them, a ridiculously calm corner of her brain reflected. At least five. How—?
But there was no time to worry about how they’d gotten onto the Charleston Arms’ grounds, and she felt Lionheart catapult from her shoulder.
* * *
Climbs Quickly launched himself into the overhead branches, snarling his challenge. It wasn’t the first time his two-leg, his person, had been in danger, and the red fury of rage roared through him. The People knew how to deal with threats to those they loved, and his scimitar claws slid from their sheaths.
Yet even as he snarled, even as he tasted Death Fang’s Bane’s fear—for her parents, not for herself—he tasted a sudden spike of fresh and different apprehension flooding out of her. Apprehension with a familiar tang, even if he had never tasted it so strongly before. She was frightened for him, and not just that he might once more be injured as he had been when they faced the death fang together. In its own way, this fear was even sharper than the fear she had felt then, because it was more focused, something which had been with her longer, and he hissed again, more fiercely, as he realized what it was.