Elgin sat in his office. Alone now, as he had Alvin trundle the chair and guest both off to the back of the shop. There was a corner of the employee break room where now sat a tall, elegant Egyptian man who snoozed piecefully, possibly dreaming of seeing his god being used as a messenger and delivery boy by other, older and more powerful gods.

  It was his place of calm, at the center of his ever moving world. The walls had been painted a restrained color that Elgin liked to think of as the color of the sandstone and granite that had made up much of the scenery of his own childhood. The yellows, browns, and gray tints tones and shades of color had been painstakingly recreated for him almost a century ago by Ahoo after an anniversary trip they had taken to the Lake Kitangiri region of Tanzania.

  She had wanted to know where he had “come from” early in their marriage, and that was the closest he could come to finding the little river canyon by the large lake he had remembered from that long ago childhood. It hadn’t been until the last day of that trip, when they had found a heavily eroded natural wall of stone. Those specific colors had brought his earliest days rushing back to him in a cascade of grief.

  So now, in the office he held in the jewelry trade shop that he ran, at the little natural dark wood desk where he spoke with customers, and worked on his smaller, simpler designs, he would be surrounded by the soothing colors of his childhood.

  The small fireplace to the left of his desk and across from the room’s entrance, a humble red brick fireplace with an unusually tall and narrow firebox topped by a thick lintel, crackled away as a few quartered logs of sycamore fig wood worked themselves down to embers with fragrant abandon. Three quartered stone length cuts of wood placed in the hearth at 8 a.m. would take three hours to burn down, usually at which point he would throw another quarter cut on, and then go to lunch. He loved winter for allowing him to indulge in using his office’s little fireplace, if for no other reason.

  Ahoo sometimes found him ignoring his work as he sat directly in front of the lit fire, roasting a small snack or a treat. Elgin knew that some habits were harder to break than others.

  After they had heard the thing two blocks down begin to roar, he and his wife had stepped over to the brightly lit window in his office that looked out on Cary Street. They had watched in confusion as the small group of Amra’s men had led the beast up the sidewalk.

  The men had been struggling to keep their charge under control. Elgin had blinked hard, willing his sight into the further reaches of the magical spectrum, seeing that all three men had restraining spells hung about themselves, and connected to the lumbering hulk who now pulled and chafed at those restraints as it slowly made its way up the sidewalk. It was chasing something.

  Someone? A particular “one.”

  And then he realized what Amra had done.

  Tamir had been the distraction who had been sent to flush out the boy as if he were a ptarmigan in the gorse. And the boy had flown as soon as the beaters had made too much noise around him in the brush and scrub.

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  Elgin knew he was stretching the analogy, but if the boy was the bird, and the behemoth was the hound, then there had to also be some hunters.

  Elgin had then sent Kurt out to see to it that the behemoth wouldn’t hurt anyone, and possibly to distract the thing and it’s handlers while he had Cole track down ‘Ker. He might send one or two of his daughters out to look, as well. One couldn’t be too careful, he knew.

  The huge creatures, related to ground sloths, had been just on the edge of sentience a few hundred thousand years ago in the region of what was now the Kazakhstanian Crater, but then had run up against another group who had already achieved it. And with that race to sentience came such things as houses instead of burrows, spears and atlatls, rather than just rocks and sticks.

  Pit traps had worked better than Alvin’s ancestors had expected, and so this poor creature’s ancestors hadn’t been able to proliferate with as great a level of success as would otherwise be required. Elgin knew they weren't quite gone yet, but unlike the ancient gigantopithecenes, behemoths had not flourished. A moment later, he had sent Cole out to find ‘Tj’Chin’Ker.

  Elgin had been on the verge of waking the well dressed young man snoozing in the comfortable office chair when his personal datpad had begun to chime.

  Kurt had called him.

  The big man had somehow tricked the handlers, and was apparently running the behemoth back around the other direction. They were now deep into the “Historic Fan District,” and headed at a fast walking pace toward the university.

  In the hazy hologram of the holochat on Elgin’s datpad, the large, square facial features of Kurt had a smile. “I’m trying to get the thing to wander down into one of the small parks.” He said. From the background motion in the image, it looked to Elgin like his employee was out for a pleasant jog in the Fan.

  The holo view flipped and spun, before settling on the sight of the large, shaggy animal lumbering on all fours down the sidewalk of Main Street toward Kurt. There were no signs of the animal’s handlers, and Kurt was laughing. His usual baritone was laced now with a childlike delight. Kurt loved having the opportunity to “play” with things that he couldn’t easily break, and this holo showed Elgin that the young man had just found the world’s largest “puppy.”

  Elgin smiled. Turning to his door, he yelled for his stepdaughter, “Meghan?”

  The young looking half-djinn popped her head around the corner of his office door, her blood red locks bouncing. “Yes, Papa?

  “I need you to run an errand for me, please?” He asked. “Could you take the car to the market, fill it with at least ten pounds of winter squash, and any other squash and nuts they have available, and meet Kurt at the edge of Sydney Park? He has a playmate that may need a snack.”

  Meghan’s narrow face looked skeptical, “Shelled or unshelled?”

  “With shells, please.”

  Her face lit up, and with a squeal of joy she disappeared down the hallway toward the small parking lot at the back of the building, just outside the polishing room. He could just hear her call out to her sister as she ran, “Back in time for lunch, Caroline!”

  Turning back to the holochat on his datpad, “Kurt, Meg is on her way to meet you at Sydney Park with treats for your new friend. I’ll message David to join you. He’ll throw up a glamour and then make a door. You get your friend through it, please. Richmond is no place for such a critter.”

  Kurt looked like Elgin had just taken away his puppy.

  “You can go too, I just want you back here by dinner, please.”

  The man once again looked overjoyed, his mood as mercurial as a cat's, and yelled “Thanks!” into the holochat before he clicked his end of the call off.