King of Swords (The Starfolk) Read Free Page A

heading?”
    “Doesn’t matter. I’m a hobo. All roads are the same to me.”
    “I’m heading back to Nanaimo and the Vancouver ferry. I want to get an early start, so if you wake up and we’re moving, that’s where we’re going. Don’t assume that I’m trucking you off to a hospital.”
    She was watching his face. He tried not to let his fear show, but he had never felt so vulnerable. She joked about a man in her bed but she didn’t mean a freak like him. He reacted to human girls the same way human boys did, but the reverse wasn’t true. The only other person who’d learned his secret—besides Gert, that is—was a girl named Enid, who’d let him touch her breasts. Afterwards, she’d said, “Tat for tit,” and slid her hand inside his shirt. When she’d felt what was there—nothing—she’d told him that nipples didn’t matter on a guy but then the fun had stopped, and a few minutes later she’d asked him to take her home. She’d never told anyone, so far as he could tell, but that was probably because she was worried that people would laugh at her.
My boyfriend the alien.
Now he was completely at the mercy of a woman he didn’t know.
    On the other hand, she couldn’t tie him up without waking him and the lock on the door would be designed to keep people out, not in. If she did try to kidnap him, he could escape atthe first red light, and he could run as fast on bare feet as he could in shoes.
    “Why a hospital?” he said. “Why not a TV station? Or
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
? Or the
National Enquirer
? They’d pay big bucks for a story like GIRL KILLS GRIZZLY WITH HANDGUN, RESCUES ALIEN .”
    There was no harm in letting her know that he could spill secrets too, if he had to. She caught the threat right away and her eyes chilled.
    “It was a black bear, and I have a license to carry that gun.”
    Oh, did she? A license for a
handgun
? In
Canada
? It was hard to shrug while lying down. “I’m glad you had it handy.”
    “An autopsy on that bear might be interesting. I’m pretty positive that the brute was dead when I shot it.”
    So he hadn’t just imagined it, then. “You accusing me of strangling it?”
    “When I went out to get your stuff, I saw that it had been stabbed. Right through the heart, I suspect.”
    “Yeah, sure. I ran it through with my trusty Swiss Army knife, which I then wiped clean and slipped back in my pack. Get real, lady.”
    For a moment she just stared. Sometimes humans were hard to read. So were aliens—he stared back.
    “Let’s talk it over in the morning, you and I,” she said eventually. “I need some sleep.”
    “What time will you leave?”
    “Before dawn.”
    “I’ll be here,” he said.

    In fact he was down at the stream, naked except for the silver bracelet on his right wrist and a rubber band on his left. Dirt he abhorred—he showered three times a day when he could. His stays at Tofino and Ahousaht this spring had been heavenly because he’d had the beaches all to himself. The Pacific in March was too cold for humans, but not for him.
This
stream would have frozen a human man in minutes. It was a bit nippy even for him, but dried blood was utterly repulsive, and had to go. His wounds had scabbed over nicely—they just itched a little around the stitches—so here he was, sitting waist-deep in icy water, quietly snipping the silk away with the scissors on his Swiss Army knife.
    He’d always been good at moving quietly, but sneaking out of the Winnebago in the dark without waking Mira had been an interesting exercise. His every step had set the truck to rocking. He’d left all his possessions behind except for his soap, his towel, and his formerly-second-best-and-now-only jeans, so that she’d know he was planning to return.
    Sudden realization that he was being watched made his head whip around. She was standing on the bank in the predawn gloom, staring at him.
“Voyeur!”
he said, trying to hide his anger behind