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“Alright, it doesn’t look great,” I admitted. “Wait. Hold on. Why was Darcy having a mental breakdown out here? Was it about something Fallon did?”

“It was about somethingshedid,” Cherry replied.

“Which was?”

“Falling in love with him.”

Oh.

“And, also,” Cherry added off-handedly, “that time she thought his dicktacle was a venomous snake and she very heroically tried to rip it off. The poor man was practically maimed. She felt so bad.”

Before I could even begin to try to understand Cherry’s anecdote about the heroic near-mutilation of Fallon’s“dicktacle,” the sound of a door opening penetrated the muffled wall of the quilt.

Not such a great sound barrier after all…

Heavy, measured footsteps approached, then stopped.

I didn’t need to lift the blanket to figure out who it was. I recognized the warden’s deep, spine-tingling voice well enough by now that I could practically picture his unimpressed expression when he asked, “What in the great blue blazes are you two doing?”

5

TENN

If it were not for the sounds of two human females breathing, I would not have located them as quickly as I did. They were not anywhere I’d have expected to find them in such a small room. And even when my gaze did discover the source of the sounds, I still could not actually see them. All I could see were two little lumps beneath a blanket on the floor of Silar’s closet.

“What in the great blue blazes are you two doing?”

“Nothing!” came Tasha’s indignant reply from beneath the bed-covering.

“Well, clearly you are doingsomething,” I replied, crossing my arms over my chest and regarding the blanket-bumps with a furrowed brow. “You are sitting beneath a bed covering on the floor.”

The blanket-bump on the right – Tasha, I was certain – shifted, as if squirming beneath my gaze.

“We are having a very important and very private meeting!”

“I see.”

“If you see, why aren’t you leaving?” she countered testily.

“How do you know I haven’t left yet?”

“Because I haven’t heard your big, loud boots go clomping out the door!”

“I would not describe my gait as clomping,” I said, glancing down at my so-called big, loud boots. “Unless,” I added, “clomping has a different connotation for humans. If it means anything close to walking with great power and determination, then yes, I concur.”

“Sorry, I have to get out of here,” Cherry gasped before tossing the blanket away from her side of the fabric fortress and crawling out of the closet. She got to her feet and tipped her head at me. Then, she tapped her index finger against her forehead, and then aimed it at me in an odd, one-fingered human salute of some sort.

With her partner having vacated the blanket meeting space, Tasha sighed audibly and got to work disentangling herself from the bed-covering. She bunched the blanket up and stood, carrying it over to the bed where she dumped it down.

“Is it typical,” I asked her as she smoothed her hair, “for humans to hide beneath blankets in closets in order to conduct their meetings?”

“I told you it was a private meeting,” Tasha said firmly, turning to face me. Her cheeks were very red, as was the skin on her neck. A tail of tension wrapped itself around the base of my spine as I fought down a sudden, blistering urge to reach out and touch those reddened parts of her body.

“If you want privacy, perhaps you should not be so loud about it.”

Tasha’s eyes grew large in her face, those odd little hairs nearly brushing her upper eyelids.

“You heard us?”