Third Watch by Anne McCaffrey Read Free Book Online Page B

addressed. There were indeed two of him represented—both showing up as cat avatars inside the time device room.
    At the same time that he saw this, he heard the growl. A low, menacing, ferocious growl, that of a powerfully fierce beast, almost made him jump out of his fur coat. He leaped three feet in the air, made a 180, and faced himself in the form of a magnificent, tawny tiger cat with a full, fluffy ruff and tail and a long lustrous coat sticking straight up over most of his body in a display of outrage. Unfortunately, Khiindi had little time to admire himself because he—the other he—seemed to be in an uncharacteristically nasty mood. Before he landed, his other cat met him in a midair clash of fang, claws, and filthy feline language.
    “No, wait!” Khiindi squalled. “Hurting me will only hurt yourself. Inhale! Sniff! Do I not smell intimately familiar?”
    His other self ripped his poor little gray ear before the thought sunk in. “You smell like me and—and—the Others! Who are you?”
    His other cat self wasn’t thinking, but Khiindi was. The ear really hurt, but as the other cat’s claws reached out to shred it, Khiindi had seen the gleam of metal among the hairs of the distended ruff. The crono! Quickly, and with great relief, Khiindi changed into his two-legged form, snatched up his feline self, and relieved the cat of the crono as gently as possible, considering that the cat self was filleting his hands. He tried to drop himself back onto the floor as he pulled the crono onto his bleeding wrist, but the other Grimalkin dragged claws all the way down his bare body.
    “Stop it!” he commanded. “I’m only borrowing”—But suddenly, the claws gave way, and when he looked down, no fur or whisker of his other self remained.
    Had he absorbed the other cat self into his two-legged form in the course of the fight? Had the cat recognized his own blood and retreated in embarrassment? He really didn’t care. He’d had no intention of returning the crono anyway. It was his, after all.
    Now to find Khorii and Ariin. From what the girls had said, he was fairly certain they would have returned to the building where he stood. Ariin wanted Khorii to take her place so she would return them to the time when she had lived among his own kind.
    He could have used the crono, but it was easier to use the larger device to confirm the presence of the girls at the estimated time. He saw Khorii’s dot, wavering uncertainly from within the time lab in the future. Ariin’s dot did not wink at him from anywhere on the wall. He could backtrack to an earlier time, when presumably the girls would still be together, but then he decided that meeting Khorii alone would be easier. He wanted to explain his side of things to her without Ariin inserting her own interpretation.
    He triggered the device, and there was Khorii, standing in front of him. He was in cat form again! She gasped as he leaped to her shoulder, crono around his neck again, and with a dextrous maneuver of his left hind paw returned them to the time he had just left. He preferred to be able to shift shapes at will while they finished what they had to do, and his unwilling transformation showed that the time Ariin had taken her to was within the boundaries of his banishment to permanent cat form.
    Once the transition was made, he leaped from her shoulder and returned to two-legged form. He was naked, and naked humanoids were more naked somehow than naked Linyaari. Although he knew himself to be a beautiful male, he didn’t want the appearance of all other males who might be appropriate mates for his young charge to pale by comparison with her memory of him forever after. He turned himself into a tiger, pawed open the panel where the techs hid their work robes, and held it in his teeth while he changed back again while she watched, puzzled, squeaking slightly at the tiger form, then rubbing her eyes while he pulled the robe around his two-legged form.
    “Do not