The Forest Whispers

Protocol was such a royal pain in the ass, Ranger Lana Eloy thought as she knelt and bowed to the monarch of Ata Prime, in the Kilkain Galaxy. Your highness, I am Ranger Lana Eloy of the United Confederation of Planets' Intergalactic Rangers. I have tracked a killer to your world and seek permission to apprehend the criminal on Ata Prime soil.
Rex Pimetrius, an ancient with steel colored hair and fierce eyes, studied her skeptically for several moments. A female killer?
Lana's lips tightened. She knew what was coming. The patriarchal society of the barbarians of Ata Prime was well known for their attitude toward women, which was why she'd been ordered to stand down when she'd tracked the serial killer, Sadin Quyz, to Ata Prime until another ranger could be sent, a male.
She wasn't about to let the son-of-a-bitch have the chance to slip through her fingers again, however, and she sure as hell wasn't letting someone else make her bust when she'd been trailing this bastard for three years.
Resisting the urge to glare daggers at the man for his condescending attitude, Lana kept her gaze trained on the Rex Pimetrius' hairy toes, left bare between the leggings and the scandals he wore. He is a murderer of women, sire, she said coolly.
Perhaps his woman displeased him, Rex Pimetrius responded, equally cool.
Rage boiled through Lana, suffusing her pale skin and giving her anger away even as she fought to control it. Sadin Quyz is a predator. He has raped and killed more than a hundred women, that we know of, on ten worlds. He will continue killing, because he enjoys it, until he is stopped.
He will not dare to harm one of our women, Pimetrius said confidently. I can not fathom why they would send a female to do the work of a man if this Sadin Quyz is so dangerous.
He sounded genuinely curious, which was almost as bad as when he was being deliberately insulting. She felt like informing him that she'd been assigned the case because she was the best '˜man' they had, but not only did she doubt that he would believe her, most likely he would be amused, and she wasn't certain her temper could handle much more of his superior male attitude. She lifted a limpid blue gaze at him. Because they had no one else, sire, she said, smiling with a tremendous effort.
His brows rose, then his eyes narrowed on her face. After a moment, he turned and lifted a finger, summoning someone from the rear of the royal audience chamber.
A shadow fell over Lana that was so massive she couldn't prevent the instinctive glance she sent toward the mountain of a man that had come to kneel beside her. Like all the Ata Prime males she'd seen since she'd arrived a couple of hours earlier, his skin pigmentation combined with their sun had produced dark red flesh tones. Typically, they seemed to be dark haired. This one's hair was as dark as a black hole, glinting with silver and bluish highlights in the light from the torches that lined the chamber walls. Though his hair was darker than most, the style was the same, plucked, or shaved, from all but the center of his head and running from the front hairline to the base of his skull, but allowed to grow long instead of trimmed to a spiky ridge as the statesmen wore theirs.
He wore the armor typical of the Ata warrior, the stiff but flexible hide of some armored type of animal, which consisted of leggings, lower arm and elbow guards, shoulder guards and a cod piece.
The specimen beside her was wearing a shoulder guard and cod piece '˜trimmed' with the teeth of one hell of a beast and she wondered if the tattoo on the upper right of his chest, which disappeared beneath one shoulder guard, was the same that sported those wicked four to six inch teeth.
The cod piece was impressive enough without the teeth, if the anaconda sleeping inside of it looked anything like the rest of him.