Heat (105 page)

She had just one instant to act. So she acted.

She raised her fists at once and socked him in both eyes. Not a wise thing to do by any means with a gun in her mouth, but to her utter astonishment, not only did E’Var not stop her (all his attention was fixed on Tagen) but he didn’t shoot her, either. E’Var’s reaction to getting hit was as instinctive and unreasoning to him as her panic attack had once been for her. He yanked the gun out of her mouth and walloped her with it, knocking her to the ground so fast, she was seeing the bells of impact even before she was aware she’d landed.

There was a split-second of perfect stillness during which E’Var actually gaped down at her as he realized he’d just thrown his own hostage and only shield out of the way. And then the whole world went to war.

E’Var was blasting away, Tagen was blasting back, and every bird for a five mile radius suddenly took off at once, screaming blue hell and a British invasion. White fire was spitting from the muzzle of the handgun, answered by bolts of brilliant blue from Tagen; both of them were running for cover and neither of them seemed to notice that she was lying there directly under their feet. Suddenly, two hands came out of nowhere, seized Daria’s feet, and yanked her into the bushes.

Roots and rocks scraped up her back, momentarily eclipsing all her other senses (even the holy agony that was the inside of her mouth, ripped to hell when E’Var had pulled the gun out), and when her eyes stopped tearing, she was looking at a girl.

She’d clearly come out the worst of all of them in the car wreck. Her shirt was gone, tied around her knee in a bloody make-shift bandage, and the chest this exposed to open air was badly bruised. She was gripping her side, breathing with what looked like a lot of strain, but she still managed to look more frightened than hurt, and that had to be promising. The face was instantly recognizable, despite the fact that Daria had never seen it before. A smooth little heart-shaped face, with rings of gold above the eyebrows and locks of white hair fringing out a fall of eggplant-purple. Her head was bloody, her face swollen in an airbag rash, and that took out a lot of the cute-factor that ordinarily would have stuck to her, but not all of it. Some girls could be cute no matter what.

“Raven, I presume,” Daria said.

The girl raised a finger to her lips and shhh’d, her eyes owl-wide. In a sketchy whisper, she said, “He’ll hear you. He can hear everything.” The girl’s lip quivered and she bent violently over, her hands covering her face and her shoulders shaking with the force of silent sobs.

Daria sat up. She started to reach for Raven and ended up grabbing her own swimming head instead. E’Var had really cracked her a good one. She peered back through the bushes, struggling to see past her headache, and what she saw on the other side chilled her.

Tagen had caught a bullet in his arm, maybe the last bullet, since E’Var was now using the handgun as a club. The sound of it thudding into Tagen’s body was very nearly the only thing she could hear. They weren’t shouting. They weren’t even snarling. They fought as Titans must have fought before the age of gods, slashing and grappling and stomping and all of it in near-total silence.

There was no walking away from this one, Daria realized. Someone was going to win. And someone was going to die.

The thought kept striking, like a hammer on a bell, sounding starker and starker with each repetition until Daria was physically flinching at the reality of it. And with the final silent tolling of its gruesome truth, she saw Tagen’s foot slip and he fell.

*

Raven came out of the dark in patches. First, sight-black lace over blue, dazzles of light like mental explosions. Then, sound—Kane’s voice in his language. She found herself dazedly trying to spell his words.

Another voice, same language. Who—?

Raven sat up, both hands pressed to her head as if to hold it on. Her eyes went first to the pack nestled at her side. The strap was wound around her wrist, but it still took her several groping efforts before she could catch on to it. Once it was securely in her grip, she felt much better, anchored back in the real world and ready to move on.

Where was she? She was in the woods. Lying on the ground in the woods. The car. Where was the car? It must have crashed. Had she been thrown all this way? The other car had bumped them. Bumped them, going ninety on that road! What kind of crazy goddamn driver…?

Raven rolled over, meaning to crawl onto her knees, and instantly, she collapsed on her belly biting both wrists to keep from screaming. Her sight trickled away from her, losing color first, and then clarity, until all the world was a fuzzy palette of grays. When it came back to her, she looked down and saw her leg.

‘I fell off my swing,’ she thought distractedly, and then gave her head a hard shake. ‘That’s broken,’ she thought next, more alertly. There was no bone showing through or anything nasty, but nothing could bleed that much and hurt that much unless it was broken. But it was broken below the knee, and that meant that, from a strictly physical standpoint, she
could
crawl.

Raven pushed herself up onto her palms first, then her good knee, and finally—

…
jesus
…

—to all fours. She took several ragged breaths, tasting dirt and heat and grease and blood, and began to crawl toward Kane’s voice, dragging the pack behind her. He wasn’t too far. She settled against a stump and peered through some bushes at the Mexican standoff he was forming.

Kane had his gun in some lady’s mouth and was speaking past her to another alien.
V’kai
, Kane had called him, and if Raven had ever needed to know for sure that word really meant ‘cop’, she only had to look at him. Uniform and everything.

As she watched, the cop bent and put the ugly flashlight-looking thing he’d been holding on the ground, so Raven guessed negotiations were well and underway. She leaned back against the rotting support of her stump and closed her eyes, exhausted and sweaty and shivering, to listen to the sounds of their voices and wait for it to be done. After a while, she heard Kane say, “Start walking,
ichuta’a
,” and that, figured Raven, was it. All over but the shooting.

And no sooner had the phrase wobbled through Raven’s addled head, then some real shooting started, making her think for a second that she’d caused it somehow. She opened her eyes and pawed at the bushes in dismay, and there it was—lady on the ground, maybe dead, and both aliens popping away at each other like kids with squirt guns.

Kane sprang to one side, firing fast as he ran for cover. The cop hit the dirt, came up with his flashlight, and sprayed out a volley of blue beams of light. The bullets were busting up chunks of bark and whatever the cop was shooting was turning into huge fiery craters when they hit, and the whole thing lasted maybe two seconds and ended in a splash of blood as a bullet hit the cop in the hand and his flashlight dropped. Undaunted, the cop lunged—must pay them better on Jota—and Kane smiled, aimed his gun right at the cop’s face, and squeezed the trigger.

Kik.

No more bullets.

Kane’s expression buckled briefly into a flawless ‘Jesus-Christ-what-next’ and without another sound, he twirled the empty gun around, gripped the muzzle, and hammered the thing into the cop’s head like the world’s most mis-shaped set of knuckles. The cop rolled with it like a champ, came back with a fist to Kane’s right side, and then the two of them were locked and at it. They didn’t make a sound, not one. Not a gasp, not a growl. Not nothing but the killing.

The cop was bigger, but the cop was injured. All the same, it occurred to Raven that Kane might not win this match. Especially if the lady did something stupid like grab up that flashlight and shoot a hole through him.

Raven leaned out of her bush, grabbed the lady’s ankles and pulled as hard as she could, dragging her back and out of the arena. If Kane won, he’d thank her for getting the lady under wraps. And…and if he lost, Raven could always say she was trying to protect her.

He wouldn’t lose. Kane wouldn’t lose. He just…couldn’t.

“Raven, I presume?” The lady’s voice was slurred, but steady and not without humor.

Raven hushed her, her eyes on Kane. He was flagging, straining. God, he was losing. Fear put a tremor in her hastily-chosen words, something about keeping quiet, she wasn’t really paying attention to herself. Kane stumbled, regrouped slashing, and heaved the cop into a tree. He was shaking, she could see it from here.

She couldn’t watch. She ducked away, hands over her eyes, and listened. If she could get up, she’d leap out there and take the cop’s eyes out. But she couldn’t. She could barely crawl.

The lady beside her suddenly gasped. Raven took her hands away from her face hopefully. The cop was on his back on the ground, his hands locked around Kane’s wrists, straining to keep the claws away that were steadily sinking towards his throat. Raven clenched her own hands into fists, her stomach like a tiny lump of molten lead, helpless.

“Don’t move!” the lady whispered. She looked around wildly, seized a length of charred branch from some ancient and illegal campfire, and leapt to her feet.

Raven grabbed at her ankle, holding her in place. “Don’t leave me!” she hissed desperately. “I’m hurt!”

The lady hesitated, her hand flexing on her impromptu weapon. Bark sifted off between her fingers. The stupid thing probably wouldn’t even last more than one whack before turning itself into kindling. “I have to help,” the lady said. “Tagen needs me.”

Raven burst into tears. It wasn’t hard. She was still all fucked-up-feeling from the crash, she hurt all over, and Kane was fighting for his life just a few feet away. This numb bitch and her rotten stick might actually make the difference between him winning and losing and Raven couldn’t do anything. “Please!” she cried. “Please, don’t!”

Beyond the bushes, Kane suddenly roared and Raven clapped a hand to her mouth, realizing too late that he’d heard her. He broke free of the cop’s hold and even as Raven screamed for him to stop, he turned and lunged toward her.

The cop had only to catch hold of Kane’s leg and pull. It probably didn’t even take that much effort. Kane hit the ground with quaking force, his breath knocking up a cloud of red earth and pine needles as it barked free of him. The cop was on him in an instant as Raven wailed. He took something from his belt—that handy little hissing gadget Kane had used on her so often—and drove it down into Kane’s neck like it was a knife instead of an air-gun.

The fight went out of him so immediately, so completely, that it was as though the cop had found Kane’s on/off switch and flicked it. The powerful body that had been fighting to rise dropped with a muffled whump back onto the ground and went limp. Kane’s eyes met Raven’s through the thicket, but there was only a glimmer of recognition in them. One claw twitched. That was all. The shark-black eyes rolled back and closed.

T
here is no silence so complete as the one that follows a fight.

Raven stared at Kane where he lay facedown, her hands fluttering to her face, her throat, her arms, and finally clenching at the dry soil. “Is he dead?” she whispered. The only part of her that was not numb was the stomach that fought to vomit out all the horror congealing in her.

“No.” The cop gained his feet, leaning heavily on Kane’s motionless body to do so. He looked at her. It was a hard look, a cop’s look, the kind that saw through every shade of bullshit. “You belong to him,” he said.

Se ven garrug-ta.

Raven’s eyes welled with fresh tears. She bent her head and brayed.

The lady’s arms were around her at once and she hissed some sort of admonition to the cop that Raven could not hear over the force of her tears. But the cop’s voice she heard; it rolled above her like God’s own thunder, every bit as commanding in its own way as Kane’s.

“You said yourself E’Var could never have gone so far without aid. Who do you think has aided him all this time if not her?”

The surviving element in Mary Frances Carter that had once made her lie down with the taste of the Devil in her mouth now took control of her again. She flung out her arms, exposing the mosaic of blood and metal and bruises that her body had become after the crash and screamed, “
Look what he’s done to me
!”

The cop stepped back, the grim animosity slapped utterly free of his face. He looked at her, and she followed his eyes down across the mottled canvas she’d become. He saw the bruises, no doubt. She saw silver and gold and Kane’s own name marking her flesh. Her arms closed around herself again and she folded over, touching her head to the dry ground. She squeezed her eyes shut and sobbed.

“We can’t leave her here, Tagen,” the lady said quietly. “She’s hurt, we’re in the middle of nowhere…and people are looking for her.”

Raven peered up through the broken veil of her matted hair and watched the cop rake his claws through his hair as he glared down at her. She tried to look as bereft as possible. It didn’t require much acting.

The cop shot a black look down at Kane’s still and silent body, bared his teeth, and finally sighed and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “Bring me my pack.”

Raven’s good leg twitched, trying to obey the command she’d heard aimed at her so many, many times. She pressed her brow to the ground again and listened to the lady rise and limp away.

Silence. She heard her heart drumming, setting the beat for all her aches to throb by. She heard the hoarse wind of her breath, deafening in her ears. She stared into the earth, shivering in the heat.

A soft rustle beside her. She turned her head just a little and saw the cop’s knee and one hand dangling relaxed across it. She looked up and he was looking down. She wouldn’t have thought there could be eyes any scarier than Kane’s, but she was looking at them now. Kane’s eyes hid all his secrets. The cop’s eyes showed every cold doubt openly.