We were around the dinner table, Fauve was looking down at her datapad, a smile on her face of the sort that I didn’t know she could make. Not that she couldn’t smile. Far from it. Rather because I was now accustomed to the faces of humans, I recognized it as something other than the usual happiness.

It was, for lack of a better word, ‘evil’. The messages streaming through on her datapad, which she now watched openly, were full of pleas and apologies. She answered none of them. She munched on an apple, holding it with one hand, the crisp sharp noise of her teeth tearing away at the flesh of the fruit, and held the datapad in the other watching the messages flow over the screen.

She was enjoying their distress. She was enjoying their suffering. I have made much of the goodness of humans, that they are kind, loving, affectionate, accepting, and so much more.

But they are predators. I was one of theirs now, so I was fine. But these faceless figures who sent threats, harassment, and cruelty her way? In the minds of the Walkers, these were the enemy.

While Fauve watched the screen and munched contentedly, William and Rebecca were on the phone, each one speaking to a different lawyer. The full text of their conversations are not relevant, but I will provide some snippets that highlight the character of parental units that are crossed.

“...So now that you’ve got the evidence and the first arrests have been made, how long before you go after [Wolfbeard’s] father directly? He facilitated his son’s actions. There’s no way his son has anything of his own, the pervert just works the ticket booth. It’s all his father keeping his, ‘failed human’, that’s what Bailey calls him, out of jail…”

William’s eyes were on fire, the drab, weary look on them was gone, and the man was restored. For better or worse, there is, to humans, something restorative about vindication. Perhaps seeing how his daughter could stand on her own two feet, reinvigorated him. Perhaps the fact that she had to at all, drove him over the edge. But while I listened to Fauve crunch down on the apple while Michael slapped at the bits of ravioli on his plate, smearing red sauce all over the place in his happy ignorance, I also turned half my ears toward Rebecca.

“...I’m sure it was hard to get a discovery motion granted… Yes, our Bailey pulled some strings but that’s all. Well, that’s the problem with nondisclosure agreements, their contents don’t get disclosed very often. But now that you’ve got the records… yes, our friend again, either his people’s or, who knows, maybe Mr. Barnum, I don’t know, but what did you find?” Rebecca was speaking a mile a minute into the phone, it’s worth noting that her voice was chipper, like she’d gotten a wonderful present she hadn’t expected just dropped into her lap.

I sipped my coffee and chowed down on my steak, tearing at the flesh… and let me tell you, human cuisine is a delight. Their best chefs are rumored to be somewhat insane, mad geniuses, artists whose art doesn’t endure but is never forgotten by those who experience it. Having tasted the cooking of perfectly ordinary humans, I was prepared to believe it.

Fauve’s own steak lay waiting for her on her plate, untouched, she was savoring her own cold revenge far too much to even care much about the meat in front of her.

“...That many? You can’t be serious? Thirty-seven nondisclosure agreements? At any other job he’d have been fired right away. Good lord?! So between the bathroom creeping and the underage… how much actual criminal behavior have you found, things that could get him sentenced to prison or confinement?” Rebecca’s foot was tapping rhythmically on the floor, her good humor gone and her patience with it, she clenched and unclenched her left hand like she wanted to use it to hit somebody.

In most species, the male or female are the only dangerous ones. With the other existing solely for the sake of reproducing with the dangerous one. But on the deathworld that is Earth, while this pattern of dimorphism can exist, it is not universal. In my own species, a male and female dlamisa are almost indistinguishable from one another, with the female being only a little bit smaller and a little bit more social. Otherwise, we are not much different.

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

Humans however, have very clear dimorphism between their sexes, but rather than this creating one dangerous sex and one merely compliant one to reproduce, this social apex predator has both deathworlder sexes, both capable of and prone too retribution and violence when it is crossed the wrong way.

Fauve’s serene, contented smile as she watched messages scroll past that, from a quick glance, were people begging her to drop charges against them as they were only ‘harmless pranks’.

William’s burning anger was his relief from the stress under which the family had been placed of late, and as he talked on and on about asset discovery and legal suits that would no doubt ruin a multitude of lives and drag many a name through the mud, his wife occasionally mouthed information to him while she dealt with another aspect of their counterattack.

Directly targeting the two they now deemed responsible.

“...So how many have you been able to reach? Well, it is late in the day so it’s no wonder, a lot of them probably moved, it’ll be hard to find them, but since we have…” She flashed a smile in my direction, “an ally in two governments now, just arrange for a very public arrest, we’re paying through the nose here, and trust me, it won’t be hard. They’ve kept him out of the public eye so far, the xenophobes have made him an anonymous martyr, let’s drag this gross pig out into the light of day and see how much they love their hero when they can practically smell the dirty socks and old cheese odor through the screen. And I’ll bet you won’t have to work hard to track down the people they paid off then. They’ll probably give up anything to get that stink put away.” Rebecca actually laughed when she finished saying that,

I must add, humans place a great deal of importance on hygiene. They may not have much of a sense of smell, but their sense of smell is closely tied to their sense of taste. And if that sense of smell is offended, you’re offending two senses for the price of one. In my research of what they refer to as the ‘adult’ industry, wherein males (usually) would hire a female (again, usually), the workers cared very little about how their client looked. But they cared deeply about how their client smelled.

Ritual cleanliness is vital to human wellbeing, and those who reject that, are going to fail as humans. I understood Rebecca’s remark to be utterly scathing commentary. In my own view, she wasn’t wrong.

“I can still taste him in the back of my throat.” I chimed in and drew three very sympathetic looks in my direction. I melodramatically stuck out my tongue and wiped it with a napkin, drawing amused little smiles while the trio savored their moment individually.

Rebecca and Michael hung up at almost the same moment and sat down at the table, “So, that was interesting.” Rebecca said, I held out my coffee cup, and she refilled it while she spoke, “It seems there were quite a few settlements paid out under nondisclosure agreements. All to young women or girls, or their families. They didn’t get the records unsealed until today, it was hard getting a judge to sign off on it. But now the facts are out.”

My cup was warming up like my hearts, and to my surprise, my own predatory instincts were ignited. Dlamisa predators are not typically vicious, when we hunt, as some still do, there is no enjoyment in the actual process of the kill. This however, was something else. It was like circling the prey. When I was a young dlamisa I tasted this sensation, a colleague of mine took me hunting, and the prey we sought was one of the few prey animals capable of putting up a serious struggle.

This particular creature, a Mlasi, is a tripedal creature that pulls itself on its tentacles to create great leaps, it is highly territorial and lives as a loner until mating. When it secures its mate and reproduces, it launches itself toward threats, balling itself up into an armored ball and rolling toward potential threats to its nest. To hunt it, I acted as bait, approached its territory, and got it to chase me. We dug a pit into the ground, and put it just over a drop off, as it chased me, I jumped down and scooted under the drop off. The mlashi rolled well over it, could not stop on the downward momentum, and then landed in the hole we dug, whereupon my colleague secured the top so that it couldn’t escape.

I stood over the pit, opposite my colleague, and felt the unbridled satisfaction of standing over my target…

The Walker household felt just like that.

And what’s more?

I liked it.