Something struck my face, and I rolled out of bed, my right hand darting to my hip for a weapon while my left swept up to grab whatever had hit me. I snatched something hard but flexible and tossed it away from me, blinking rapidly to allow my eyes to adjust to the light streaming through the open window. Packed dirt gritted beneath my bare feet, and particles of dust floated in the beams of sunlight that splattered against the wall behind me.

“Good reflexes,” the sheriff chuckled from the doorway where he stood. “You always wake up ready to fight?”

I straightened as the last vestiges of sleep fell away from me, and memory pushed the last vestiges of whatever I’d been dreaming about from my head. I had a faint recollection of battling a horde of hungering with an axe that kept breaking, of watching people fall all around me, and then the images of the dream faded. I rubbed my tired, sandy eyes and yawned, stretching muscles that should have been sore from the night before but weren’t.

“Pretty much,” I answered at last. “Do you always wake people up by throwing things at them?”

“Only the ones mumbling in their sleep,” he chuckled. “Bad dreams, I take it?”

“Only every night for the last…” I stopped, considering. “Most of my life, I guess.” That was true; I suffered from nightmares regularly, and they’d only gotten worse once I entered the Doorverse. My dreams had gone from hazy recollections of jobs I’d performed to vivid images of monsters trying to rip my face off or slaughtering the people I cared about. Fortunately, I’d long ago gotten used to living on short sleep.

“Then you should be used to it,” he unwittingly affirmed my thoughts. “Get dressed. Like it or not, I need to teach you about handling, and we’ve got a lot to cover.”

He walked out, and I hurriedly pulled on my clothing. I’d washed the blood off it in the river last night, and as expected, my adaptive shirt fully repaired itself while I slept. The object he’d thrown at me proved to be a holster and leather belt – along with a row of shiny bullets slipped into loops along the side. I quickly loaded the revolver and slipped it into the holster, feeling a bit more confident than I had in days.

My stomach growled, and I grabbed one of the compressed travel bars I’d bought at the general store yesterday with Shina’s advance. The bar reminded me of a dense granola bar; it was made of some sort of grain mixed with dried fruit and honey, then squeezed into a flat bar about six inches long. It didn’t seem like it would be filling, but one of them had held me all night at Shina’s, so I hoped that another might carry me until lunch – or dinner, I supposed. I had no idea how late it was or how long I’d slept in. I washed the mostly tasteless bar down with a swing of water from the bottle-shaped canteen I’d also bought, then walked out of my room into the sheriff’s office.

The old man sat at his desk, once again writing in an open notebook or ledger of some sort. He waved me away from the stools toward a chair next to the stove, one that I swore hadn’t been there yesterday. I gratefully sat down, happy not to have to deal with more splinters in my ass. The man scribbled for a minute or so, then slid open the drawer in his desk, slipping the folder inside and pulling out an old, beaten, stained book bound in cracked leather. He stood up and carried the book and his chair over to sit opposite me. He pulled open the grate on his stove and began slipping bits of wood into it; as he worked, he began to speak, not looking at me as he talked.

“So, Naasi, you’re a handler now,” he began without preamble. “Congratulations. Why don’t you tell me what you think that means, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.”

I chuckled, then considered his question. “I guess I think that a handler is someone who bonds with a powerful monster and uses it to fight other handlers in duels,” I offered.

“That’s what most people think,” he nodded. He finished arranging the wood in the stove and pulled a card out of his pocket. I hurriedly activated See Magic as he placed the card inside the stove.

Once again, a swirl of energy rose up around him, this time glowing bright red as it sank into his chest and arm. This time, I ignored the interplay of magic around his body, though, and focused on how it entered the card. The power leaked from his fingers, noticeably dimmer than it had been when it entered his body, and poured into the hard plaque. The energy twisted and turned, flowing not just in two dimensions as I’d assumed it would but looping out from the card both above and below it, filling a roughly spherical area around the card with loops and whorls of power. The energy suddenly collapsed into the card and shot out as a tongue of bright flame that licked over the wood and ignited it instantly, and the glow around it and the sheriff faded at once.

“Call Flame,” the sheriff said laconically, pulling the card out of the now-blazing fire and blowing on it before replacing it in his pocket. “It’s a weak rune, not much good except against ice or water creatures, but it’s faster and more reliable than a striker or flint and steel.” I shut off See Magic as he sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his chest, tipping the seat back on two legs as he spoke.

“Most of the time, when people see handlers, they see something like that tussle between Boden and Paisley,” he said in his drawling voice, his eyes half-closing as he spoke. “Two people sending their pets to fight one another, tossing magic cards about, and basically wrecking the street. It don’t matter if you’re out here in the backwoods of the Gistal or in the Sarjan capital of Revelia; if you’ve seen a handler in action, that’s probably what you’ve seen. Am I right?” I nodded, and he snorted.

“Problem is, that’s not what handling is all about, not really. Handling is a job, nothing more, nothing less. Handlers bond with pets and use them to do work that might be too difficult or dangerous for a person, and that’s pretty much it. Oh, sure, there are professional duelists who do nothing but go around and fight one another, but for every one of those, there are a hundred like Boden or Paisley, people who barely know how to fight but are useful in all sorts of different ways. You never see most of them because their pets aren’t big and flashy like Parri, but they’re the ones who make civilization work.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me appraisingly. “Does that surprise you?”

I shook my head. “Not really, no,” I admitted. “It’s the same with guns, back where I come from. A lot of people carry them and know how to use them, but for most, they’re just a tool. They don’t go around attacking people with them.”

“Exactly,” he nodded. “Although I admit, I haven’t heard of people going around dueling with guns instead of pets. Must be a new thing back east.” He shrugged. “It don’t matter because it’s the same idea. And just as most people don’t walk around with the brightest, shiniest, fanciest piece they can find, most handlers don’t bond the biggest, meanest, nastiest pet they can manage. They pick something useful, something that lets them do their job, and that’s it.” He shook his head. “Course, you decided to start with something big and nasty, but what’s done is done.”

He picked up the book he’d brought from where he’d laid it on the floor and held it up. “I assume you can read?” he asked. I nodded; I couldn’t yet, but with a book to reference and a bit of time, Sara could unlock this world’s script for me. He handed the book to me, and I took it gently, aware of its battered condition. “Read this when you get a chance,” he instructed. “It’s something I got when I was a younger man from one of those schools back east, a guide to handling of sorts. It’s not exactly definitive, but it’ll give you some history and background, which is what you really need to know.”

He leaned back once more and closed his eyes again. “See, boy, handling is a calling, sure, but it’s also just a job. It’s something you are, and it’s something you do to put food in your belly. Most people bond the simplest, least dangerous pets that can be useful, and that’s the end of that. Of course, that’s the absolute worst thing they can do, but nobody ever bothered to tell them that.”

“Why is that a bad idea?” I asked curiously. “If being a handler is just a job…”

“It’s also just a job,” he cut in. “Remember, being a handler is something you’re born to, and that means you’re born to do it in a certain way.”

He glanced into the fire and nodded as if in satisfaction. He leaned forward, and to my surprise, he stuck his bare hand into the center of the flames, directly into the coals at the heart of the stove. Something buzzed inside the stove, and a shower of spark flew up as the sheriff pulled out what looked like a glowing ember at first – at least, until it moved, fanning a pair of insectoid wings that glowed an angry orange as its six jointed legs writhed and twisted, trying to free itself from the sheriff’s grip.

He looked back at me and must have read the shock on my face. “Surprised, boy?” he chuckled. “Well, you shouldn’t be, not after last night. Remember how fast you healed from your fight? How I clocked you in the skull, and it barely fazed you? That’s part of being a handler. It’s one of the very few things those taan-novels get right and one of the reasons people bond pets in the first place. A handler is basically immune to being hurt by anything other than magic – within reason, of course. The bond protects you, and something that would have killed you drains the bond a bit instead.”

He shrugged. “Of course, every bond has its limits, and if something does enough damage to overwhelm the bond, or the bond is already badly damaged, the handler can still be hurt. That’s where the stories get it wrong. A handler can’t jump into one of those volcanoes down in Teera or swim to the bottom of the Paschig Ocean and expect to see daylight again. No bond is that strong, I’m afraid. Point is, though, it’s hard to hurt a handler with something like guns, knives, or a normal fire – and the same thing goes for the handler’s pet.”

“That’s the rapid healing ability I showed you last night,” Sara explained. “Your body automatically cannibalizes your bond to heal itself.”

“Invulnerability is a cooler name,” I noted with a mental chuckle.

“Also an inaccurate one. You’re not immune to damage, John. You just heal almost instantly.”

“There has to be more to it than that,” I countered, remembering how Chettur’s knife hadn’t done more than dimple the sheriff’s skin yesterday.

“Probably, yes. I’m still figuring out how it works. Obviously, it absorbs some damage in advance, but I don’t know if it does that for all damage, or if it only works with relatively mild injuries like Chettur’s stab wound. Remember, there’s a limit to how much damage a bond can absorb, even for someone with a powerful pet like the sheriff. That’s probably why attacking law enforcement officers is against the law.”

“And speaking of last night,” the man said, “what you did last night was dangerous, if not downright stupid.”

“You mean fighting the bonesnapper? It wasn’t that dangerous.”

“No, it wasn’t, and that’s not what I meant. I meant trying to bond it. That was plain dumb, boy.”

“I didn’t try to bond it,” I explained. “It just sort of happened. I was trying to wear it out so I could kill it without getting hurt, and I happened to catch its eye. The rest…” I shrugged. “I’m not a hundred percent what happened at that point.”

“What happened is that you almost lost your damn mind to that beastie, boy. That’s something that we’re going to make sure doesn’t happen again.”

He held up the whirring, clicking insect in his hand. “This here’s a flameclicker. It’s a Simple-ranked Fire type beastie, nothing terribly dangerous. It’s hot enough to give you a little burn, but nothing serious. I’ve got a nest of them I keep in my stove.”

“Why?” I asked, peering at the bug curiously. The insect was about three inches long, with a glossy, light gray shell covered with glowing, orange whorls. It looked almost like a fiery cockroach except for the pair of glowing pincers jutting from its head.

“Flameclickers eat heat. More specifically, they eat smoke and ash. They don’t need any other food, and they get the liquid they need from steam escaping from something burning. That little nest keeps smoke from getting into my office, helps my fires to burn longer, and cleans out the ashes for me when the fire does burn out.”

“They sound useful,” I noted.

“Oh, they are,” he laughed. “At the same time, though, these little bastards have probably killed more people over the years than all the bonesnappers of the world put together ever will. See, like most Fire types, they’re vicious little things, and they like to spread their flames, so they’ve got more to eat. Left alone, they’ll crawl out of their fires and go exploring to see what they can burn. Some people think they’re the most common cause of random fires, and the Blaze of ’31, where most of the city of Bagur burned to the ground, was probably caused by a nest of these that got into a powder magazine.” He shook his head. “Useful, but dangerous if they’re not taken seriously.”

He looked at me seriously. “People sometimes see a beast’s rank and type and think that’s all there is to how nasty they are, but they’re wrong. Most handlers bond something like this ‘clicker, a Simple beast that’s easy to bond and damn useful, and people usually look down on them for it. Why bond a ‘clicker when you could go out and find something big and scary like a flameterror, after all?

“Thing is, someone like you could bond a whole mess of these little bastards, a dozen or more easily, and it wouldn’t even be that hard to do. Sure, one flameclicker isn’t a big deal, but a dozen could burn a Lesser pet to the ground. A hundred of them could whip Paisley’s wolfion in a few seconds. A hundred thousand of them could turn even Parri into ashes, and she couldn’t even fly away to escape them.

“And this is only a flameclicker’s Simple form. If one lives long enough and eats enough fire, it can rank up to a firehopper, a Lesser beast a foot long that’s as hot as this fire and can jump thirty feet. From there, it can keep ranking up to a Greater-ranked blazebeetle, long as a person is tall and hot enough to melt tin or copper, then to a High-ranked infernabug, twice as big as a person and with a fire that can melt steel or turn wood to ash pretty much instantly.

“Imagine someone with a hundred infernabugs under their command, coming to a town like this – or even one of the cities in the Ohr Valley.” He grimaced. “They’d burn it to the ground. They’d turn the whole damn place into a smoking ruin in a single day, and there’d be no way to stop them. Best we could do is get the hell out and hope they didn’t chase us.”

He leaned back. “In other words, never underestimate a beastie just because of its rank or type,” he finished. “All pets start small, but they grow, and even the tiniest midgemite can get nasty given enough time, food, and care.” He put the flameclicker back into the stove and closed the grate, which I had a feeling was meant to keep the bugs inside and away from the rest of the office, not to keep people from touching the fire.

I looked into the flames; now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see a half-dozen small shapes moving around in the center of the blaze. I wouldn’t have seen them if I hadn’t been looking – their bodies camouflaged them well against the glowing coals – but once I was aware of them, they were pretty obvious. I turned my gaze away from the fire and looked at the sheriff curiously.

“So, if they’ve got so much potential, why aren’t you having me bond one – or the whole nest?” I asked.

“A bunch of reasons, but two big ones. One, you just bonded that bonesnapper, and bonding two things in too short of a time can be bad for you. Two, you don’t have the temperament for a Fire type.”

“The temperament?”

“Yep.” He closed his eyes again as he spoke. “See, boy, every beastie has its own type, and that type tells you a lot about it. Fire types are aggressive, usually pretty violent, and they love to spread mayhem. They’re just like their namesake; they’re always trying to break out of control, and if they do, they’ll destroy everything near them.

“Bonding a pet isn’t just about dominating and controlling it. It’s about taking a piece of that beast into yourself, and putting a piece of yourself into the beast.” He cracked one eye open and looked at me. “Can’t you feel that ‘snapper inside you?”

I nodded. I could feel it; the pressure was a little more tolerable this morning, but it still throbbed in my head. I knew that the bonesnapper was floating at the top of the river right now, enjoying the sunlight, sated from its hunt last night. If I wanted to, I could point directly at it without looking, and I was pretty sure that I could bring it to me with a thought.

“Just as you’re talking to the ‘snapper, that piece of it is talking to you. If you bond a beast whose nature isn’t a good match for yours, then you’ve got something that’s always fighting you inside yourself. It’ll never be as quick to respond to you, as loyal, or as strong as you want it to be.”

He shook his head again. “That’s why I said that most people bond their pets in the worst possible way. They bond a pet based on how useful the pet is, on what it can do, not on whether or not it’s a good fit for them. That’s like buying a pistol that’s too big or small for your hand just because you like how it looks. Sure, you can shoot it, but it’ll never be as accurate as the right-sized one, and you’ll never be really comfortable with it.”

“That makes sense.” I looked at the book in my hand. “So, does this thing tell me about those different types and ranks?”

“It does, yes. I can tell you that monsters are ranked from Simple like that ‘clicker, to Lesser like your bonesnapper, then Greater, High, Paragon, and Epic. Not every creature can reach every rank – a flameclicker don’t have a Paragon or Epic form, for example – but for most people, only the first three matter.”

“Why?”

“Because how strong a creature you can bond is set by your starting Personia,” he explained. “For most people, that means they can’t bond anything higher than Greater-ranked. Only someone with a natural five or better in Personia can bond a High-ranked beast, and only someone with a five-and-a-half can bond a Paragon. Those beasts are super rare anyways, and it can take centuries to rank a Lesser or Greater pet up to that level, so it usually don’t matter much.”

He opened his eyes and looked at me once more. “And that brings us to what we really need to discuss today: your analysis, what it means, and what you need to do to pick a path. This is all in that book, but I’ll go over it a little bit, and then you can read a bit more in-depth about it later.”

He took another card from his pocket, and I turned See Magic back on to watch as he activated it.

“That’s Analyze again,” Sara warned me. “Remember to turn off Resist Magic.”

I shut down my resistance ability and allowed the spell to affect me, watching the pattern of how the magic twisted and whirled around the card in an elaborate sphere before collapsing into the card and whipping a tendril of blue energy at me. The spell passed through me, and a moment later, the glowing numbers appeared in the air once again.

Path: None

Pets: Lesser Bonesnapper (1)

Dominia: 5.7 Personia: 5.9 Arcania: 6.5

Affinities: Predator, Air, Water, Lightning

“That’s still the damndest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” the sheriff shook his head. “And I once saw a man swallowed whole by a chokevine, then spit back out because he tasted so damn bad. You’re a born handler, boy, no two ways about it.” He looked up at the numbers. “Tell me what you think all this means, boy.”

“Well, the pet is my bonesnapper, which I guess is Lesser-ranked. The number one after its name – maybe how strong it is for that rank?” I shrugged. “And those affinities, they’re what you were talking about earlier, about how not everyone should bond every pet, right?” He nodded.

“As far as the scores – I’m guessing that Arcania has to do with magic. Personia sounds like personality, and dominia seems like it’s about control, but I don’t really get how they work.”

“Each score is associated with one of the major handler paths,” he explained. “Or, I suppose, each major path is attached to one score. Together, they measure not only your talent at handling but also your skill at it since you can improve them with practice.”

He pointed toward the first number. “Dominia is tied to the Hunter path. It’s a measure of how strong you are mentally, and the higher it is, the more pets you can have bonded at once. With a dominia like yours, you can probably control at least two or three pets right up front, maybe four if you push it. Hunters control lots of low-ranked monsters, so dominia’s the perfect stat for them, and they focus on training it almost exclusively.

“Personia’s kind of the opposite of dominia. It’s a measure of how strong your personality is. Dominia is about how easy it is for you to keep your own mind when you’ve got beasts inside your head; Personia is about how much of you gets into their head. When you bonded that ‘snapper, you damn near pushed it out of its own mind, in fact.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

“Hell no. The more of its mind you control, the better it’ll do for you and the less it’ll fight you. It’ll react faster to your orders and keep fighting when another pet might give up.” He snorted. “With these scores, higher is better, always. The higher your natural Personia, the more powerful a beast you can bond, and the stronger you can get that beast. It’s tied to the Tamer path, since Tamers like to focus on having one or two stronger pets instead of a lot of weaker ones.

“And Arcania – well, like you said, it’s tied to magic. The higher your arcania, the more magic you can use and the more runes you can have active at once, and with a higher natural arcania, you can use higher-ranked runes. Shapers rely on arcania since they’re all about boosting their pets with runes.”

“Hunters, Tamers, and Shapers,” I repeated thoughtfully. “Is any one path better than any other?”

“Not really, no. They’ve all got good and bad attached to them. A high-ranked hunter can have twenty or thirty pets, if not more, and even if each one is weak, together they can bring down something way tougher than themselves. Of course, a high-ranked tamer might have a single pet so strong that it can wipe out half that hunter’s pets with a single ability. And a shaper’s got the best of both worlds; they can bond a bunch of pets and use their runes to make them stronger, or bond just one or two and make them damn-near unstoppable. Of course, it’s also the hardest and most expensive path to walk, since a shaper needs runes to be useful, and those can be hard to discover and cost a shitload to make.” He shrugged. “There’s no right answer, really.”

“So, you’ve got no advice at all for me?” I laughed. “Come on, you have to have some thoughts. It seems like I should take the shaper path, just based on my scores. Is there any reason I wouldn’t?”

“No, none at all.” He hesitated, then shook his head. “Look, boy, here’s the straight truth. With scores like yours, you should honestly be walking every path at once, and that’s advice I never give anyone.”

“You can walk more than one path?” I asked, surprised.

“Of course. You can do any damn fool thing you please. The problem is, when you split your focus like that, everything grows a little slower, and other people get stronger faster than you do. Plus, hunter and tamer are kind of opposites, and they usually cancel each other out. Hunters get to bond extra pets, but they have to bond pets a rank lower than normal. Tamers get to bond a pet a rank higher than normal, but they can bond fewer pets in return. Someone trying to do both at the same time gets a whole lot of nothing, except…”

He took a deep breath. “Except that your scores give you enough of a boost to counter that, easily. With that Personia, you can already bond a damn Paragon; you’re never gonna get a chance to bond something Epic anyway, so losing the extra rank don’t matter. And with your dominia, you’ll already be able to bond at least two or three pets, the same number most hunters get at the most. And as you go further down your path, your talent will make you stronger than most people who specialize anyway, even if you rank up faster than they do, and if you get to the High ranks, they’ll all join into one path that’ll give you all the benefits of each – to a lesser extent, of course – and none of the downsides.”

“So, the paths rank up, too? Not just monsters?”

“Of course, they do. Life’d be damn boring if you had to do the same thing the whole time, wouldn’t it? A hunter can rank up into a herder, then to a wrangler. A tamer can become a trainer and a master, and a shaper can turn into a bender and a magician.” He shook his head. “It’s all in the book. Read it and see.

“The point is, you can do two things at once if you’ve got the scores for it, or even all three, although that’s usually a good way to be really shitty at everything. In your case, though, I’d learn the skills for all three paths and try to do a little bit of everything. Eventually, you could have six or seven pets as strong as old Parri or stronger, all empowered with a ton of runes. That would be one scary sight, I have to say. Impressive as hell, though.”

“Okay, so how do we start?” I asked.

“Well, the first thing is to learn how to protect your mind from the beasties,” he said. “You remember what happened last night? How you almost got taken over by the bonesnapper’s mind?” I nodded. “Well, that’s what happened to the first handlers, the ones who had to figure all this out. They went feral, killed a bunch of people, and started a few wars. Pissed people off, at least until they figured out how to catch and hold a beast’s mind during the bonding – which is what I’m gonna teach you.”

He pulled out a leather glove and tossed it to me. “Here, put this on. It’ll be a little big, but you’ll need it so the ‘clicker don’t burn you.” As I pulled the glove on, he opened the fire, reached inside, and took out another hissing, clicking beetle. “Here, take this.”

I took the bug carefully in my gloved hand. Even through the leather, it felt warm, but it wasn’t hot or burning. The thing squirmed and shifted, but it was easy enough to hold in place no matter how it thrashed to be free.

“Okay, now what?”

“Now, lift it up to your face and look it in the eye, same way you did with the ‘snapper last night.”

“Look a bug in the eye?” I echoed. “Really?”

He nodded. “Seems foolish, but trust me. Look it in the eye, and you’ll see. Beasties can sense handlers, and they automatically try to take over any handler that looks them in the eye. Just try it.”

Shrugging, I shifted the bug until I was staring directly into its tiny mandibles. It had a pair of tiny, black eyes like little multifaceted jewels stuck on the side of its head, with a pair of orange-tipped antennae waving above them. I looked into those eyes as best I could – they weren’t the biggest targets – and waited, sure that the sheriff was playing a prank on me. In a moment, the office door would open, and Shina, Manas, Saroni, and pretty much everyone who might have wanted a laugh would bust in to see me playing kissy face with a firebug. Or flameclicker, whatever. We’d all have a good time, and then I’d set about seeing just how much punishment the old man’s invincibility could really take. I guessed that punching wouldn’t do the trick, but there were some nice rifles on the wall, and even if they weren’t loaded, one would make a fantastic club. I let myself imagine beating the smirking sheriff with a rifle butt for a moment or two before something leaped from the bug and plunged into my right eye.

A feeling of fear swept through my mind. The fear was all-encompassing, mingled with a sensation of bitter cold and utter helplessness. Dark shapes loomed around me, menacing me on all sides, and I felt an urge to run, to flee into a dark corner and hide from the certain death that held me in its grip, but I couldn’t move. Something held me in place, an iron band that refused to budge no matter how I thrashed against it.

“Focus, John,” Sara said calmly, her voice a lifeline in the darkness. “Remember the cage? Wrap it around the fear, and it’ll go away.”

Panic swept over me, but I pushed it aside. With trembling thoughts, I pictured a steel cage, gleaming in the darkness, and forged it around the blackness. I slammed the door shut and pushed it away, just as I had last night. It moved much more easily than the cage last night had, and in no time, the darkness shrank down to a tiny speck that I easily pushed out of my head entirely. As the last of the shadows fled, light and sensation flooded me, and I came back to my senses. I began to follow the bug’s thoughts back toward it, but before I could, something snatched the insect from my hand, breaking our connection.

“Nope,” the sheriff’s voice spoke easily. “You aren’t bonding this thing, sorry. Now go ahead and get up.”

I opened my eyes and found myself huddled in a ball on the floor, the glove that had held the beetle smoking and scorched. I didn’t remember falling out of my chair, but I must have at some point. The sheriff knelt over me, one hands pressing me against the ground and the other holding the wildly thrashing beetle, which seemed to glow brighter than it had before.

“Ugh,” I said, rising to a sitting position and shaking my head. “That was unpleasant.”

“Always is,” he nodded. “So, what just happened?”

“I – I guess I started bonding the beetle,” I replied slowly, resting my hands on my knees. “It totally overwhelmed my mind.” I laughed. “I can’t believe a little beetle did that. Does it even have a mind?”

“Not much of one,” he chuckled. “It don’t need much when you let its thoughts inside you like that, though. Part of bonding is opening yourself up to the critter completely. You let it into your head to start a connection, then you follow that back and take over its mind instead. When you aren’t prepared, that’ll overwhelm you in a heartbeat. That’s why it’s typical to weaken it first; a beaten or subdued beast is a lot easier to hold out and bond. It’s also why I start naasi like you on bugs first, rather than something nasty like a bonesnapper. The stronger its mind is, the harder it is to push out.”

I blinked, shaking myself. “Well, that felt like a failure,” I muttered.

“Nope, not at all,” he corrected. “Most naasi can’t get the bug out of their heads at first, and I have to break the connection. It usually takes a time or three for them to get the hang of it, and even then, they can’t get it all the way out, just hold it back enough to come to themselves.” He shook his head. “Like I said, you were born to be a handler, boy. You’ve got talent coming out your ears.”

I looked at the bug, which still thrashed furiously. “Is it brighter than it was before?”

He glanced at it. “Oh, yeah. That’s cause it wants to kill you.”

“Kill me?” I repeated with a little amazement. “Why?”

“You started a bond to it. Beasties who aren’t bonded don’t want to be, and once you’ve tried like that, there’s still a bit of a connection between you that you can use to try again a lot more easily next time. It don’t want that, and the only way to get rid of it is for one of you to kill the other.”

He tossed the beetle back into the fire and slammed the grate as it scuttled toward the exit – and toward me.

“That was why what you did last night was damn stupid, boy. If you’d failed, that ‘snapper would have come for you, no matter what, and you’d have had to kill it – and you weren’t in no shape to kill that thing afterward.”

“Why couldn’t you just kill it, then? Why didn’t you to keep me from bonding it?”

“Because killing a beastie once you’ve got a connection hurts you, too. If you do it, the pain’s not so bad. If I did it? Well, you probably would have passed out, and sometimes that can damage you permanently. Like I said, you were stupid as hell. Fortunately, it worked out for you. Your talent helped, but I think you got a little lucky, too.”

I nodded, even though I knew he was wrong. It wasn’t luck; it was Sara, guiding me through the process. I’d take her over luck any day.

“Why, thank you, John!”

“It’s the simple truth,” I said feelingly before looking up at the man. “Okay, so what now?”

“Now?” He reached into the fire and pulled out the angry bug, placing it in my hand again. “Now, you do it again – and again, and again until you can catch the bug’s thoughts without letting them overwhelm you.” He chortled darkly. “You’re in for a long day, boy, no two ways about it.”