“No, silly. When we get back to the farm.” Tucking the night scope back inside her jumpsuit, she set off again at a frenetic pace, yours truly in hot pursuit, a renewed bounce in my step—a tiny voice screaming at me from the recesses of my brain.

Ike, can we make a baby?

Not … Ike, can we make love? or Ike, I missed you, or heaven forbid the gold standard cherished by every red-blooded American male, Ike, I want you to fuck my brains out. No, Andria had used the B word, following it up with, “I want you to impregnate me,” as in, I’m ovulating, dear. Be a man and stick it in, all of which added up to three potential possibilities: either I was dreaming and my new best friend Jason Sloan had come through like a trooper; Andria, knowing how much I wanted a family, really did miss me—

—or the woman I was chasing after like a dog in heat wasn’t the real Andria Saxon.

*   *   *

It was well after midnight and raining like a downpour in Manila by the time we arrived at the fence—a simple affair made up of logs placed horizontally between sets of wooden X-supports bound by vines. Andria cautioned me before climbing over; the logs were wrapped in thickets brandished eight-inch needles.

The five-acre pasture held two different species. ABE identified the larger beasts as long-haired gaur hybrids. These immense wild cattle were as tall as horses and twice as bulky, possessing massive shoulder humps and an imposing set of gray horns, the curved tips of which were black and deadly sharp. The two bulls were black and a third larger than their female counterparts, the cows and juveniles dark brown with white legs, outnumbering the males three to one.

The second species were an evolutionary offshoot of an alpaca, a llamalike beast once cherished by the Inca civilization for their thick woolly fleece. The alpaca flitted about nervously in packs of two and three, chewing their cud like cows.

The animals gave us a wide berth as we crossed the muddy field, steam rising off our drenched bodies. I smelled the farmhouse before I saw its silhouette through the curtains of rain, the air heavy with smoke curling up from a fireplace chimney. Moving closer, I could make out stone and mortar walls, a thatched roof covering the windowless single-story affair.

I followed Andria out of the paddock through a hinged gate. The front door of the farmhouse was a circular hunk of wood no doubt painstakingly cut from a redwood stump. She banged her fists twice, then once, then three times more, the two of us huddling in the rain while a wood brace was removed from inside.

The door swung open. Andria entered first, stepping into the wrath of her worried comrades.

I heard Lara Saints ask, “Where the hell have you been?”