Page 12 of Rauf: Minotaur Mates

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“I’ll know once I examine the goat.”

“I’m not talking about that.”

I felt like an ass.

I should have told him before he spent any more time trying, but ending a courtship in the middle of the street felt too much like starting an argument. I needed a quiet place and a sentence that didn’t begin with an apology about a goat.

I drew a breath. “Korfas, I⁠—”

His eyebrows drew together, and I lost my nerve.

“I’ll see you later, okay?” I got on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek, pulling all the way back before he could try for something more intimate.

I took off down the road for the farm and didn’t look back.

5

TERESA

My shoulder burned with the weight of the bag, and I could hear the bottles I’d taken from Otho’s clinic clinking around. I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d grabbed, and whatever it was, there was too much of it. I was halfway to the farm and half tempted to dump out some of the things to lighten my load. But I didn’t know what the goat would need, and the last thing I wanted was to end up back at the farm with nothing that could help.

After another twenty minutes of burning pain in my shoulder, I paused and sat on a boulder on the side of the road. I gave myself time to rest as I rubbed my shoulder and wished for a minotaur to amble down the road and offer to carry my things for me.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to say no to letting Korfas accompany me.

The day had been warm when I left town. Hauling the heavy bag made sweat stick my shirt to my back between my shoulder blades. The breeze moving over the road had turned cold enough to raise bumps along my arms.

The dark clouds I’d carefully ignored earlier now covered half the horizon. They had climbed higher and spread wider while I walked, piling over each other in thick gray layers. The farm was closer than town. I would get there long before the rain did. Probably.

I looked away before the clouds could argue.

I didn’t know why I thought I was leaving my practice behind. You could take the veterinarian off the planet, but you couldn’t take the animals out of the veterinarian, or something.

I smiled at the weird tangents my thoughts were taking me down and picked my bag back up with a groan. I was more than halfway there. I only had to make it the rest of the way.

As I approached the farm, I realized it was possible that Rauf and the other Butchers might not even let me on the property. He had been only too eager to drive me away the other day. Now I was approaching unannounced again and assuming they would let me in.

The thought made me slow down, and I changed the direction I was coming from, looping out around the farm to the same way I’d come when I found the goat.

I didn’t mean to examine the bushes, not at first, but maybe there was something that could offer a clue to what had sickened the goat. I didn’t know enough about the ecology of this planet to know what plants were safe for goats to eat and what would sicken them to the point of death. But animals didn’t survive very long if they didn’t know what they could eat and what they couldn’t. That goat had been a full adult. It knew its own home and had the survival instincts that got it to live as long as it had.

Nothing under the bush offered clues, and if I hadn’t known the goat had been there, I still wouldn’t.

The ground beneath the branches lay smooth and firm. I couldn’t find a hoofprint, a scrape, or even a shallow groove where the goat’s body had rested. The dry grit on top hadn’t been kicked into the leaves around it.

I crouched and checked the plants at the edge of the bush. None of the stems had been torn. The lower leaves were intact, without fresh bite marks or wet ends where something had chewed them. There were no scattered berries, seed pods, or anything else the goat might have eaten.

I widened my search, following the edge of the bush in both directions. I found one old hoofprint baked hard near the fence, but nothing connected it to the spot where we’d found him.

Something buzzed in my ear, and I slapped at it, thinking it was a bug. But it was mechanical, strange and whirring.

The sound stopped the moment I turned my head. I held still, listening. Wind moved through the scrub and the farm fence creaked somewhere behind me, but the whir had vanished.

Then it started again near my other ear. A thin mechanical hum rose and fell, too steady to belong to wings. I spun around. There was nothing above the bush, nothing on the road, and no movement in the field beyond the fence.

The hum sharpened until it vibrated against my teeth. I backed into the road and looked up. Empty gray sky stretched above me.