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“There,” he said gruffly. “You should heal with no problems now.”

  “Um…thank you,” Harper murmured uncertainly. “For uh, licking me—I mean healing me! Thank you for healing me.” Her face felt so hot she thought her hair would catch on fire. God, how embarrassing. “I, uh, feel much better now,” she stumbled on, trying to sound casual and failing miserably. “I’m sure I’ll be perfectly all right.”

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better. Here—I almost forgot.” He pulled out her shoe—apparently he’d been carrying it since he’d lost her to that damn winged snake—and gave it back.

  Harper slipped it on.

  “How did you find me?” she asked, wanting to change the subject as they left the water tent and started walking again.

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. I was able to follow the slidy’s path visually and saw it was heading for the market. After I got here, I followed my nose.”

  “You what?” Harper frowned. “What are you talking about? You mean you literally sniffed me out?” It seemed impossible but Shad nodded.

  “Kindred have a much sharper sense of smell than humans.”

  “You do? Okay, well I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that you can pick out my scent in the middle of a huge market filled with alien smells and odors.” She laughed nervously.

  “It’s a good thing,” Shad said in a low voice. He cleared his throat. “I would know your sweet scent anywhere, Harper.”

  “You…you would?”

  For a moment his opalescent eyes held hers, rainbow colors swirling in their depths. Then he nodded and looked away. “Yes.”

  “But if—” Harper started to say but he cut her off.

  “Come on.” He jerked his chin in the direction of the road. “We have to get to the forger’s tent quickly if we want to get Master Yll-no. He’s the best life-forger in the entire Thieves' Market.”

  “Master ‘you’ll know?’” she asked, frowning.

  “Yll-no,” Shad corrected her. He frowned. “We’ve lost enough time already. So come on—this way.”

  Harper felt confused at his sharp attitude. It was almost like he regretted giving her the compliment about her sweet scent. Then why had he said it in the first place? And why had he bothered to heal her small wounds? What was going on in that enigmatic Kindred head of his?

  Having no answers, Harper followed the big Kindred along the green cobblestone road running down the middle of the Market.

  What else could she do?

  Chapter Eight

  Harper stared all around her as they passed through the crowded market. It was amazingly colorful and it seemed everywhere there was something to see. After leaving the water tent, they passed through a long narrow corridor of food vendors, each selling stranger looking food than the last.

  Harper saw a basket full of brown, prickly, spiny things almost like sea urchins about as big as her hand. Beside them were smooth, shiny orange pebbles about the size of large marbles.

  “Hey—what are those?” she asked, tugging on Shad’s elbow.

  He glanced at them briefly.

  “Shugga nuts. The prickly ones are unpeeled. The orange ones are peeled. Naturally, they cost less if you peel them yourself but you have to wear special gloves. The spines are poisonous.”

  Harper, who had just been putting out a hand to touch the spiny things, drew her fingers back quickly.

  “What about those?” she asked, pointing at a display of rainbow colored wedges in red, green, blue, and purple spread out on a wobbly looking table.

  The vendor behind the table saw her interest.

  “My lady, these are the finest Bleeka-milk cheeses available,” he called eagerly, motioning her over.

  “Bleeka?” Harper frowned.

  “A type of ruminant common to Juno,” Shad told her. “Looks like a cross between a llama and a dog.”

  “A dog?” Harper made a face. The vendor was offering her a sample of a bright blue cheese but the idea of eating anything made from llama-dog milk didn’t sound at all appealing. She’d had enough strange milk to last her a lifetime at the nursing tent, thank you very much.

  A stray thought flashed through her head—Hope I got that all out of my system!

  Harper pushed the worry away and smiled at the vendor as she shook her head, refusing the sample.

  “No thank you,” she murmured.

  After that, they passed by what looked like an open-air vegetable stall with some of the strangest produce Harper had ever seen. There was a fruit twice as big as a watermelon with a pale yellow rind and a bright blue inside. It was cut in half, showing the tiny red seeds that dotted its vivid flesh. Beside it were triangular vegetables in an improbable shade of neon green. They looked like tiny pyramids and oozed purple juice.

  And then Harper saw something even stranger. To her right, lying in a bin together, were round, dusky black fruits as big as grapefruit and long, crooked stick-like things about the size of her forearm with white, papery skin. Among the other multicolored offerings, the black and white produce really stuck out.

  “Those are retich fruit and kren,” Shad told her when she asked. “You shred the retich fruit with a sharp blade and slice the long kren into flat disks. Then you serve the shredded black retich on the white kren slices. It makes a very visually appealing dish. However, I believe it tastes very strongly—like limburger cheese and sauerkraut if I’m remembering correctly.”

  “Ugh!” Harper exclaimed. Her stepfather liked limburger cheese—maybe because he didn’t have much sense of smell. It was so awful her mother made him eat it on the back porch and didn’t allow it in the house. As for sauerkraut, Harper had tried it once on a hotdog and she didn’t care for it at all. The idea of combining the two foods sounded disgusting.

  Dog’s milk cheese…sauerkraut and limburger fruit…Did they make or grown anything on this planet that was fit to eat?

  Stop it Harper, she chided herself. You’re being judgmental again. Remember, they have a whole alien culture you’ve never even heard of—of course it’s going to seem strange and different to you.

  But she couldn’t seem to help it—any culture which thought it was okay to kidnap women via flying snakes and feed them sex-milk until their breasts swelled to gargantuan proportions already had at least two strikes against it in her opinion. Under the circumstances, it was damn hard to give Juno and its people the benefit of the doubt.

  “Here is something you might find more appealing,” Shad said. He had stopped by a stall where a bored looking girl with pale blue skin was standing over a kind of fire pit, filled with glowing gold and red coals. She held a long black metal rod with a thick wooden cylinder at one end. As Harper watched, she dipped the cylinder into a barrel of pale, cream-colored liquid.

  The vendor pulled out the cylinder, now coated in the creamy stuff, and twirled it expertly over the fire pit. She worked quickly, the bored expression never leaving her face. Clearly she did this same monotonous job over and over all day.

  To Harper’s surprise, a warm, sweet smell like baking bread and fresh pancakes began to rise. The creamy liquid was evidently a kind of batter. Once it turned golden brown from the heat of the glowing coals, the girl dipped it into a vat of pale pink syrup and then rolled it in a shallow pan of crushed nuts—at least, that was what the crunchy little golden-brown nuggets looked like to Harper.

  As they watched, the food vendor tapped the cylinder on a spread piece of blue and white striped paper until the cooked batter slid off. Rapidly, she wrapped it in the paper and handed it to Shad, who paid her by pressing his thumb to a small silver cube.

  “Many thanks.” He nodded at the vendor and then handed the crispy, warm cylinder of cooked dough wrapped in the white and blue paper to Harper. “Here,” he said gruffly. “This should taste better than retich and kren would.”

  “Thank you.” Just half an hour ago, after puking up the sex-milk, Harper would have sworn she never wanted to eat or drink anything from this