The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  “I don’t. I just wanted to fuck,” he said coldly.

  * * * *

  As dissatisfied as Gah-re-al was with his encounter with Maya, he was even less pleased to discover when he headed back to the campsite where he’d left the humans that a convoy of social workers was in route with the requested supplies. He had asked for, and expected, a supply drop. He’d chaffed at the likelihood that they would get in no rush to deliver despite his insistence that the supplies were urgently needed and any lengthy delay could result in a loss of lives, but he’d known the actual delivery wouldn’t take long since they were less than fifty clicks from the colony of Choa-toa—his home base.

  He hadn’t expected interference from the damned social workers!

  Because it hadn’t occurred to him that command would shuttle the task off on them when the relocation itself was a military matter and under their jurisdiction. He’d anticipated turning his charges over when they reached the designated location and not before. Until they were safely settled, the villagers needed his protection. For that matter, the social workers might need it—from the villagers. Well, he thought as he passed over them without acknowledging them, he had every intention of completing the transfer from village to relocation site whether it pleased them or not!

  It struck him forcefully that if command had simply passed off the order for supplies—and clearly they had—then Maya had known ahead of time that he was there.

  She’d been expecting him. He recalled abruptly that she’d said she didn’t think he’d come by—but she’d known he was there and hoped he would. That was what that entire scene played out at her door had been about. She’d cooked it up to play mind games with him. No doubt, she’d expected him to explode with jealous rage at the discovery that she had someone else in her bed.

  Unfortunately for her hopes, he not only didn’t care enough to feel any possessiveness, he’d never believed he was the only man to occupy her bed.

  Not that he hadn’t been damned disappointed. The only thing worse than having blue balls from a prolonged period of abstinence was having the expectation of taking care of the problem yanked out from under you.

  He spied Lexa, standing a little apart from the villagers, as he landed a short distance from the campsite. She’d watched his descent. He was fairly convinced she’d been watching his approach for a while, although she very pointedly ignored him once he had settled on the ground.

  All the same, he thought he’d detected a lightening in her expression before she turned away. Was she glad to see him return, he wondered, or was it merely his imagination because he wanted her to be glad?

  Because it was hard to ignore the relief he felt to see that she was alright or the realization that he’d been on edge from concern that something might happen to her in his absence.

  Or that she might take it into her head to take advantage of his absence to take off.

  Unfortunately, he discovered it was hard to convince himself that he hadn’t imagined she was glad to see him return. She had avoided him since he’d tried to question her.

  “You brought … others,” Lexa said when he reached her.

  Considering his recent unpleasant encounter with Maya he wasn’t in the mood to deal with the accusation in Lexa’s tone. “They’re bringing supplies,” he replied curtly.

  “We’ve got a lot further to go then?”

  Gah-re-al studied her for a long moment, trying to decide whether she actually sounded relieved or not and if she was, why she was. Because he’d been right to begin with and she actually had missed him? Or did she think that gave her more opportunities to escape? “A few days.”

  She nodded. “You’ll leave now, though, right?”

  He tilted his head, eyeing her speculatively. “You think you might have the chance to escape if I’m not here to watch you?” he asked bluntly.

  Her face turned nearly the color of her hair and then the color drained away sharply, leaving her far more pale that she was naturally. Instead of responding, she stalked off and sat down in the dirt near of a large group of females.

  If she thought that was going to deter him, he thought angrily, she didn’t know him very well!

  He narrowed his eyes at her and finally followed, standing over her. “Don’t even think about it. I can and will track you down and haul you back.”

  She tipped her head back to stare up at him, blinking owlishly, but it was impossible to guess what was running through her mind when she blanked her expression like that.

  It annoyed him even more. Generally, it was no great feat to figure out what was going through her mind because the emotions her thoughts generated flashed across her face. Apparently, she’d figured out how he was ‘reading’ her, though, and she’d become far more cautious and secretive.

  She frowned after a moment and ducked her head, studying the toe of her boots. He wasn’t particularly satisfied, but he knew her well enough by now to know he wasn’t going to get a verbal response and he stalked off to meet the group of social workers when they arrived.

  It was almost an hour before they reached the group. He wasn’t surprised since they’d used a walker to bring the supplies—a robot transport specifically designed to haul large loads of supplies over rough terrain, but as slow as be damned!—but he was angry. He thought he’d made it clear that they’d been without water for almost a full day already—without food for that matter, but the hunger wasn’t as dangerous as dehydration. They’d had to ration the water before that so no one had had what they should have had even before the water gave out considering the heat.

  He should’ve left them to requisition supplies earlier, he thought angrily, but then he had been too focused on his personal concerns to realize just how dire the situation was.

  And he hadn’t realized that they’d ignored his orders to ration the water in their attempts to fill their empty stomachs because they had so little food.

  Too stupid to live popped into his mind, but with the exception of Lexa, they weren’t used to living on the trail as far as he knew. Water was always a problem in the wild territories, but the villages generally sprang up where there was a sufficient supply for the demand.

  Generally.

  They didn’t seem to worry much about over-breeding for the resources available to them, but then that might be because life was hard enough the turnover was fairly rapid. The elderly and the very young were the most frequent victims of the harsh life of the primitives.

  There was a female he recognized in charge of the group.

  She gave him a cold look, which he interpreted to mean she wasn’t harboring a lot of affection for him since their last encounter—which he thought had been pleasant enough.

  He supposed departing while she was still asleep hadn’t gone over well with her.

  “If you will line up in an orderly manner, we will issue water,” she called out to the humans as they brought the walker to a halt.

  Despite their wariness of the udai and the uneasy way they’d watched the robot carrying the supplies Gah-re-al wasn’t surprised when everyone immediately leapt to their feet and charged toward the group, shoving and pushing to be first.

  “Orderly!” he bellowed. “Form a line!”

  His bellow halted the threatened stampede. They merely gaped at him, however, as if they had no concept of what he meant by forming a line.

  The leader of the group, Phil-a-shee, motioned to two of the men who’d accompanied her. “Draw a line and show them how to line up. You have to be firm with them. They’re like children—that aren’t very bright,” she said in their native language, smiling and nodding at the primitives in direct contrast to the insulting nature of her comments.

  Gah-re-al sent her a sharp look, feeling a touch of anger. He’d always felt pretty much the same, but he’d never noticed that the social workers had that kind of attitude. He’d thought of them as bleeding hearts that pitied the savages because they didn’t realize just how dangerous they were. Clearly,
he thought wryly, he’d mistaken their empathy—or at least Phil-a-shee’s.

  Or maybe working with them had soured her?

  One of the men used the narrow tip of his trida to scribe a line in the dirt. The other followed him, pointing to first one human then another and then the dirt beside the line. “You! Here. You. Here.”

  They still looked confused and frightened, but they followed the man’s directions.

  Gah-re-al studied the line he was forming for a few moments and finally yielded to the urge to interfere. Moving down the line, he studied the faces and sent those that appeared to be most in need of water to the front. When he’d gone all the way down the line, he walked back to where Lexa was standing, caught her upper arm in one hand and led her to a place near the front, as well.

  Phil-a-shee was staring at him disapprovingly when he returned to the supply wagon to oversee the disbursement of the water and supplies.

  “We’ll get to them all. That wasn’t necessary.”

  Gah-re-al gave her a cold look. “Some are stronger than others and fare better, longer without water. They’re in my charge.”

  She reddened slightly but merely shrugged and turned her attention to the task at hand. “Weeding out the weak is part of the natural process. We aren’t here to make pets of them, but rather to teach them to take care of themselves.”

  Gah-re-al was certain the comments were directed at him even though she spoke ‘at large’ as if she was instructing her helpers.

  Considering Maya had accused him of much the same thing it flickered through his mind to wonder if they’d been communicating.

  Which might also account for the cold reception, he supposed wryly, if they’d been comparing notes. “Since I removed them from their habitat—on orders—and marched them across a desert poorly supplied and prepared, that’s hardly non-interference, however. They had a water source and food and shelter where they were.”

  Phil-a-shee’s lips tightened, but she didn’t pursue the debate. “Do you plan to accompany us the remainder of the trek?”

  “Since that was my orders and I haven’t received any instructions otherwise, yes.”

  “Well, unless you have some objection, we should set out, then, as soon as we’ve finished disbursing the supplies. They’ve had plenty of time to rest and at the rate they’ve been moving it’ll take another week’s march to reach the relocation site.”

  They’d made damned good time—all things considered—and Gah-re-al knew for a fact that it wouldn’t take them more than a couple of days more to reach the drop off point, but he was well aware that his mood was really foul and he didn’t think a heated verbal exchange in front of the villagers would go over well once it was reported.

  And it would be. One of the things he’d found least attractive about Phil-a-shee was her problem with her wagging tongue … and her propensity to spy on people so that she had something to wag her tongue about.

  It was a damned good thing he only had to get through a couple more days of close proximity to temptation, because he’d thought it a damned stupid idea to make a try for Lexa before Phil-a-shee’s arrival.

  Trying anything now would be professional suicide. He’d be busted so far down the ranks for that kind of indiscretion, he’d end up on a shithole colony worse than this one—probably one where the life expectancy of a soldier in the ranks was less than a month.

  * * * *

  Lexa didn’t know why it was that she hadn’t been able to convince herself she had no interest in fucking Gabriel. Beyond the fact that he was so damned certain he was superior to humans and so obviously looked down on them, it shouldn’t have even crossed her mind, ever, that she might want him to do that to her. She’d hated every minute of it when Ralph had rutted her. It didn’t always hurt—unless he was just trying to hurt her. Sometimes it was just disgusting and uncomfortable, but she would never have imagined that she would ever think that she would want a man to do that to her!

  And yet she’d been thinking about it ever since she’d realized the villagers thought that he’d claimed her.

  Of course Gabriel wasn’t a man, but she couldn’t imagine that it would be different with him.

  Unless, of course, he wasn’t like a man there.

  He’d suggested that they did it pretty much like humans did, though, which also suggested that they were made pretty much the same … there.

  Well, she thought, he actually hadn’t suggested that. He’d told her that he never fucked women unless they wanted him to, though, and it seemed to her that he was saying it was the same except, for some reason, women wanted him to.

  As bad as she hated to admit it, even to herself, she was dying to find out why women wanted him to. There was just no getting around it. She hadn’t been able to forget it even when he’d told her that it was something she should discuss with the women of his people.

  The problem with that was that by the time she got to the place where she might have that opportunity, Gabriel would be gone and it seemed unlikely she would see him again.

  She thought that was probably a good thing in a lot of ways. She didn’t like being a prisoner even though he hadn’t treated any of them badly. She didn’t like being told what she could and couldn’t do or where to go. She couldn’t deny that it was nice to have someone else worry about where she would get food and water for a change, and to produce it when she needed it, but she didn’t think she would’ve taken it if she’d had a choice.

  She’d spent a lot of time being lonely and scared after she’d left Ralph, but she supposed she’d gotten used to it because she didn’t feel like she belonged with the people that had been captured with her.

  They didn’t think she did either because they shunned her.

  Of course, they shunned her because of Gabriel, partly because he was around her too much for their comfort and they were terrified of him and partly because … well, she didn’t think she’d imagined that they thought she was his woman or at least that he’d fucked her and that was sort of a contamination thing as far as they were concerned. She wasn’t fit for human company because she’d been fucked by an angel-demon.

  And they hated the angel-demons as much as they feared them.

  Or maybe they hated them because they were afraid of them?

  In part, she supposed her inability to forget about fucking Gabriel was because everybody seemed to think she already had. She’d heard them mutter about it under their breath whenever he wasn’t close enough to hear.

  She wasn’t sure why they thought that, but there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to tell them she hadn’t. Even if they’d given her the opportunity, which they didn’t because they’d already made up their minds, she didn’t think they would believe her. She’d arrived in their village at the same time he had and that had settled the matter as far as they were concerned. She was with him therefore she must be fucking him.

  She supposed that ought to have been enough by itself to turn her off the idea of doing it. It was plain to see that she was going to be an outcast forever more if she did, that there would never come a point in time when they finally stopped hating her and thinking of her as an outsider.

  On the other hand, she was already an outcast just because they thought she had and there didn’t seem to be much point in worrying about their opinion when it was already done and there didn’t seem any way to convince them otherwise.

  In any case, she hadn’t been able to convince herself that it wasn’t anything she wanted any part of. In point of fact, it seemed the more she thought about it the more she wanted to—and the closer they got to their destination and the time when Gabriel would leave, the more desperate she felt.

  She decided she just wanted to know if fucking could be something a woman could like to do. Men certainly seemed to like doing it. She didn’t really believe, deep down, that it could possibly be something she would like to do, but the possibility was certainly intriguing since she’d been basically running from it for
years. If she at least didn’t hate it, wasn’t it possible, then, that she might find a human man that she didn’t hate fucking and could stay with and breed children?

  Or would fucking Gabriel eliminate that possibility forever because she would then be ‘tainted’ and no longer acceptable to human men?

  Actually, that thought wasn’t particularly unappealing, either. If all she had to do was make sure they knew she’d fucked one of the angel-demons to discourage them from wanting her, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.

  It seemed a good enough reason to approach him and ask him about it, anyway, and it still took all the nerve she could muster to do so. She was running out of time, though. She couldn’t afford to be a coward about it.

  So she waited until they stopped for the noon rest when Gabriel had settled a little apart from the group as he generally did. She didn’t like the fact that that circumstance made it all the more noticeable when she approached him. At the same time, it made it possible to talk to him without the others hearing, though, and that was highly desirable when she thought there was a really good chance that he would completely reject the idea.