Wild Country (The World of the Others #2)- Anne Bishop Page 0,120

didn’t travel outside Bennett.

“Definitely too much audience,” she replied.

The smile he gave her had enough heat to produce a nice little flutter. She wasn’t sure what to do about the flutter, but it gave her a boost of confidence before she walked into the office and had to deal with a growly boss.

* * *

* * *

Tolya Sanguinati studied the two maps. One was a large map of the Midwest Region as it had been a few months ago. Even before the Elders and Elementals had raged across the continent, the human-controlled towns had been sparse in this region. There were way stations indicated on the map—Carter’s Way, Silver Way, Shooting Star Way. Those places were little more than a stop for the freight and passenger trains and had a few dozen people living there at best. Other places were small Intuit or human communities that had a major roadway running through them.

And some of the more isolated places were ghost towns now, reclaimed by the terra indigene.

Many of those places—maybe all of those places—depended on Bennett’s survival in one way or another.

Tolya shook his head. Those other places weren’t his problem. Even if he had the outlandish idea that he should take some responsibility for them, he couldn’t do it, because he had enough problems right here.

Putting the regional map aside, he considered the map of the town and the red lines he’d drawn last night after Air arrived at his house and told him the Elders wanted to see him.

What had stood before him … Not their true form. Not even the animal forms he suspected had been taken by their ancestors a very long time ago. No, these Elders had walked on two legs, but they hadn’t been human in any other way. They were some of the nightmares that had wiped out the humans who had previously lived in Bennett. And they had summoned him to the edge of the Elder Hills to deliver a message: Enough.

In his smoke form, he had followed them through the streets of the town. Their claws scarred utility poles and post office boxes. By his reckoning, they were marking boundaries two streets beyond what he and Virgil had currently indicated as the town lines. He didn’t know if they understood the purpose of some of the buildings that were now restored to the official part of the town, including Bennett’s small hospital and a shopping center, but by the time the sun began to rise and people began to stir to prepare for the workday, he knew where the lines had literally been drawn.

Because the two official salvage companies had wisely offered jobs to any terra indigene who had expressed interest, they would be allowed to forage beyond the town line during the day. But those houses were now potential dens for the Others. Humans who tried to squat in any of those places would become meat.

One of the Elders left an animal in the town square to feed the terra indigene who were working with the humans. Today it was four-legged prey. Tolya had no doubt that, should humans become careless, the prey left in the square the next time might be someone the humans recognized.

That was one of the problems now. The terra indigene had been the dominant predators since the world had been new, adapting and learning the forms of the hunters around them as they changed with the world, but the Sanguinati were the only branch that had adapted to be urban predators who hunted humans as their preferred prey. That worked in the larger human-controlled towns that had a Courtyard. Or it had before the Elders had made being out after dark a form of suicide. The Sanguinati had hunted in the dark—smoke hiding in the shadows of an alleyway, taking nothing but blood from an unwary passerby; a shadowy lover in a dimly lit bar, exchanging an evening of romance—and sometimes even sex—for a fresh liquid meal.

Yuri, Anya, and Nicolai were in positions that made it possible for them to lightly feed on several individuals during the course of the day. Even Stazia at the bank and Isobel at the post office had opportunities to touch humans and draw a little blood through the skin. At least until humans became wary or even afraid of being touched.

As the leader of the town, he did not have those opportunities. He was Sanguinati, and all of Bennett’s citizens were aware of that. He would need to