Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,1
purchase a bus ticket, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to get back here again. And if I’m hired—when I’m hired—I may be leaving in a hurry.” She paused. “Thanks for everything. When I get to wherever I’m going, I’ll light a candle in remembrance.”
Jana hurried through the park, gauging that she had just enough time to reach the bus stop near the park gates and catch the bus back to Hubb NE. She hoped that by this time next week she’d be heading to another town to do the only job she’d ever wanted to do.
CHAPTER 2
Windsday, Sumor 25
“I quit.”
Tolya Sanguinati studied Jesse Walker as they faced each other over the counter in Bennett’s general store. The look in her eyes made him think of the lightning that sometimes filled the sky in this part of Thaisia. Despite being a dangerous predator—far more dangerous than the humans here appreciated—that look made him wary. “You can’t quit.”
“Oh, yes, I can.”
He took a step back and considered. It was tempting to point out that, since she didn’t actually work for him, she couldn’t, technically, quit. But Jesse Walker was the unofficial leader of Prairie Gold, a small Intuit town located at the southern end of the Elder Hills. As such, she was his most important human ally. He couldn’t afford to lose her knowledge or cooperation, so it probably wasn’t a good idea to point out anything.
Erebus Sanguinati, the leader of all the Sanguinati on the continent of Thaisia, had told him to take over Bennett after all the humans had been slaughtered by Namid’s teeth and claws. The town had a train station that serviced all the ranches in the area, as well as Prairie Gold. That made it an important place that the Elders would no longer allow humans to control because, under human control, the trains that traveled back and forth across the land had brought enemies to this part of Thaisia. Had brought death to the Wolfgard and other shifters.
Every place inhabited by humans was in turmoil right now because no one knew how many of those places had survived. With quick communication between regions severed by the Elders’ destroying the telephone lines and tearing down the mobile phone towers all along the regional boundaries, e-mail and phones of any kind were useful only within a region. But even within a region, no one really knew whether a phone went unanswered because someone wasn’t in the office at that moment or because there was no one left in that town to answer it.
But the rest of the Midwest Region wasn’t his problem. Right now, his problem was the slim, middle-aged, gray-haired woman who had been helping him prioritize the tasks necessary to keep the train station open and to deal with urgent things like spoiling food and pets that had been left in residences.
Until he traveled to Prairie Gold to be Grandfather Erebus’s eyes and ears, Tolya had lived his whole life in Toland, one of the largest cities on the entire continent. He’d had the most extensive human-centric education available to the terra indigene and had been among the Sanguinati who monitored the television newscasts and the newspapers as a way of keeping an eye on what the duplicitous humans might be planning. And he’d been among the Sanguinati who had actual contact and dealings with government officials and businessmen. But those meetings had been formal, official, devoid of personal contact and feelings beyond the loathing each side felt for the other.
Nothing in his education or years of experience had prepared him to deal with messy, daily interaction with humans who had no interest in being formal, official, or devoid of personal contact. Even his previous interactions with this woman while he helped her and the other residents of Prairie Gold prepare to hold out against humans trying to cut them off from supplies hadn’t prepared him to deal with her now.
“Why?” he finally asked.
“Because you’re not listening,” Jesse Walker snapped.
“I listen to everything you say,” Tolya countered.
Her right hand clamped around her left wrist.
Jesse Walker was an Intuit, a kind of human who had a heightened sensitivity to the world, and her people had feelings about everything from animals to weather to sensing if someone was lying. Each Intuit didn’t have feelings about everything—their minds would break under that kind of strain—but each developed a sensitivity that matched who they were or the work they did. For Jesse Walker, it was people, and an