Page 17 of Rifted Hearts
The two of them walked through the market, with nearly everyone calling out greetings to Kaveh or coming up to give him a hug. Remi tensed after every one, as if he was jealous—which was ridiculous. He hadn’t even slept withthe man yet, and Remi never felt possessive about the marks he was sent to seduce.
Somehow, Kaveh was different, and different wasn’t a good thing. It was dangerous.
Remi had left his drone back in his room, not sure how reliably pure Earth tech worked in the monstertown. He gave his watch screen a discreet tap, getting a confirmation from Bug that the town’s wi-fi was functioning. After sending a firm command for Bug to stay inside, Remi pretended he had an ordinary smartwatch and cobbled together a video stream by asking touristy questions of the vendors at the farmers’ market. He ate cactus flower candy and filmed Kaveh smiling as he made the rounds.
They stopped by another stall, this one featuring a version of a Riftworld drink made with spiced milk. The two vendors were a couple known as the Goat Sisters. One was a cheerful human woman wearing a garish sundress, and the other was her wife—who wasn’t human at all. She came from a Riftworld clan often called fauns, with a humanoid upper body and a lower body complete with hooves and a tail. The two of them had a herd of goat-like animals with mixed Riftworld ancestry who had suffered various ailments, all treated by Kaveh. The women couldn’t stop talking about one newborn mon whose life the vet had saved. Remi got it all on the stream, switching from a funny bit where he made faces as he drank the milk to the poignant moment when the baby goat, now healthy, nuzzled Kaveh. The views were astounding, and Remi basked in the flood of effusive comments from his subscribers.
They finally moved on, after Kaveh’s efforts to pay for Remi’s drink were firmly rebuffed. It was a similar story with everyone they met—the stories of Kaveh’s medical cures, anxious rift people asking him about new symptoms, andmore full-body embraces that made Remi wish he could get away with hugging the vet.
After the first half hour, Kaveh started to relax. Remi had reined in all of his lust magic and hadn’t made a suggestive remark the entire time. This was an unprecedented level of self-control on his part.
“You’re a popular man,” Remi said. “Rave reviews from all of your patients.”
“I’m fortunate I can help them.” Kaveh greeted yet another well-wisher, a young woman with purple hair and a dress covered in puppy designs. A large dog with black fur and glowing eyes loped next to her, and Remi had to hide his shock when he recognized Lyall’s collar around his neck.
This had to be José and his pet human, only thanks to the collar, the cadejo was on a leash. Why were they walking around like this?
Remi tried to cover up a nervous swallow as he scanned the market for an escape route, his earlier bubble of happiness popping out of existence. This could be bad. If Kaveh connected Lyall’s collar back to him, not only would Remi’s mission go down in flames—he could personally be in danger. He doubted Kaveh would get violent if he suspected the truth, but the townspeople might not react well to a spy from the Colony with a hellhound bodyguard sneaking into their farmers’ market to gather intelligence about the drakones. He could make an excuse to leave Kaveh’s side and make a run for it, but the only option for getting back to the ranch was riding Amanita. Anxiety rising, Remi missed the first part of the woman’s interaction with Kaveh, but her next words made clear what the problem was.
“It was fun at first, but now I can’t get it off.” The woman’s oversized glasses were purple as well, making her look like a little kid dressed up in her grandmother’s closetdiscards. “And José can’t tell me how because he’s in his alter form and can’t come out of it.”
Kaveh dropped down into a crouch, inspecting the collar with a frown. “Jessie, where did he get this?”
Remi tensed. But Jessie gave a helpless shrug, and the cadejo only let out a low whine. Lyall had created a disaster. Although the Colony’s hold over Lyall didn’t depend only on the collar, the tech it used was specific to binding and controlling a prisoner. If Kaveh brought José back to his drakone masters, they would undoubtedly recognize it, and the number of Riftworld clans with access to this type of construct was limited. Especially after the clusterfuck in Salem last summer, the drakones were on guard for more trouble from the Colony.
Remi could get the collar off the cadejo, but he had a hard time imagining how he would do that and keep up the pretense of being a clueless human taking a tour of a monstertown. If he didn’t do something though, Jessie might give Kaveh enough details to incriminate Lyall and, with him, Remi.
“I’m great at getting these things off.” Remi dropped down next to Kaveh and reached for José’s collar, ignoring the cadejo’s warning growl. “Lyall is always getting burrs under his.”
Remi knew his babble made little sense, but he had to say something. He closed his fingers around the leather-and-metal-studded restraint device and sent the device a mental image of a zipper being pulled down.
José jerked his head back, perhaps in preparation for sinking his teeth into Remi, but the collar was already off.
Remi wasted little time backing away, waving the now inert device in the air.
A snarl escaped the cadejo’s jaws as he collapsed to theground, writhing about as the transformation from dog to human form played out. In a moment, a handsome, dark-haired man in his twenties climbed to his feet, dusting off his jeans.
Remi rearranged his expression from relief to the shock and awe that would be expected from a human with limited experience with Riftworld people. Inwardly, though, he was impressed with José’s smooth transformation. Maybe the cadejo had a talisman similar to Lyall’s living leathers but a more fashion-forward version.
“Thank you!” Jessie flung herself at Remi and wrapped him in an embrace before planting a kiss on his cheek. “Kaveh, your new boyfriend is awesome.”
9
Kaveh didn’t know how to feel about Remi. He had gritted his teeth and asked the streamer out on a date, focused on his duty to protect the clan and uncover what Remi was up to, if anything.
So far, the date wasn’t as awful as he thought it would be. After Remi had mercifully stopped with the flirtatious jokes that Kaveh didn’t get, things had smoothed out. Kaveh could catch glimpses of the real Remi—sarcastic, intelligent, more than a little unsure of himself, and good at hiding it. Helping him stream a video about Kaveh’s friends at the farmers’ market had been fun.
But one thing was clear. Remi wasn’t human.
Amanita’s reaction had raised Kaveh’s suspicions that Remi had a Riftworld background, given his ability to turn away her psychic attack. He felt guilty about standing by as the repoequus mentally assaulted the vid streamer, but perhaps she had wanted to challenge Remi. Amanita had done the same to Kaveh when they first met, but she only caused humans who came near her to feel unsettled and spooked. Remi, for his part, had done something back to therepoequus and clearly gained her respect. Aside from Kaveh, no one else on the ranch had been able to ride her, although she would tolerate grooming and snacks from Kat.
Any doubt that Remi was mixed had vanished when he deactivated and removed José’s collar. The cyberbug fused on Remi’s phone was suspicious enough, but the collar was Riftworld tech that a fully human individual couldn’t have removed, which was why Jessie needed to ask for help. Kaveh had wanted to get a closer look at the device, but the cadejo had grabbed it back from Remi before Kaveh had a chance.
Now it was only Kaveh and Remi, alone together in the clinic office. The first-floor room had been kept frozen in time as a medical practice before the advent of computerized records. Shelves held patients’ charts with color-coded tabs in alphabetical order, all with notes typed out on an antique typewriter sitting on a metal desk from the 1950s. The monstertown had universal internet some of the time, but Kaveh needed access to charts during rift storms.
Remi had offered to help out while Kaveh saw a few patients, so Kaveh put him to work cleaning the aviary cages in the back. They held rescue birds, mostly Riftworld hybrids who shouldn’t have been kept as pets by humans in the first place. It was a dirty job, and Kaveh was surprised and somewhat impressed the streamer had agreed to do it.
“Those cages were disgusting. The one you warned me about, Snow, gave me a good nip when I took him out of his cage.” The streamer slumped into a chair, holding up a swollen finger wrapped too tightly in blood-dampened Band-Aids.
