Heat (48 page)

The blonde held out her bound wrists and Kane slit them apart with one claw. As he loaded the funny little air gun he used for injecting, he remarked, “I appreciate your candor, human, and I’ll give it back to you. I will kill you the instant I suspect that you are…playing me. I’ll kill you if you slow me down. I’ll kill you if you anger me. I’ll kill you if you provoke me, inconvenience me, or bore me. Understand that.”

“Check, chief.”

“This—” Kane’s hand came down on Raven’s thigh and squeezed. “—is mine. I’ll kill you if you threaten her. You’re here for me to fuck for a few days.
Her
, I mean to keep.” He squeezed again, a warning Raven felt as comfort as she tried quietly to coax the redhead to speak.

Kane nodded once, shoved her head to once side, and injected her in the base of her neck. It raised a thin red circle, but that was all.

“My name is Sue-Eye,” said the blonde biker.

“I don’t care,” he replied, and turned his attention back to his computer and the vials of brain juice he’d collected.

“You can call me whatever you want.”

“Yes. I can. Raven, what is she saying?”

The redhead hadn’t said anything. Raven shrugged an answer, her arms still around the biker’s shoulders.

Kane nodded, as if this were the answer he expected. “Go sleep then.”

Raven stood up and moved back toward the bench, fully expecting to hear the brittle crack of the redhead’s skull being broken open for harvest. Instead, she heard Kane asking in a low voice if the biker wanted to see the sun come up.

“Yes, sir,” the redhead sniffled.

“Go and bring me every bit of money in this room. Put it here on the table. If there’s blood on the money, clean it off. Then I want you to take the fuel out of those vehicles and put it into the car I came in until it is fully fueled. I will be watching you, and I will catch you if you run and make you wait for hours before I finish killing you. Understand me, human.”

“Yes, sir,” she said again, a breathless whisper.

“Look at me. Look right at me. That’s right. If you behave yourself and obey me, I will leave you here alive in the morning. I have done it before.”

Virtually the same speech he’d given to Raven. She relaxed a little, sliding into the booth and stretching out there, making a pillow of her hands. She was reasonably sure the redhead would be alive in the morning, or at least, if she weren’t, it would be her own fault.

“And you, go sleep.”

Raven heard footfalls and the creak of leather approach her, and then the shuffling sounds of a body settling into the same booth. She opened her eyes and saw the biker looking at her underneath the table. They stared at each other as Kane sat working at his lab and the redhead went around picking the pockets of the dead.

“Hi,” the biker breathed.

Raven chewed her lip. “Hi.”

“I’m Sue-Eye.”

“I’m Raven.”

“Sleep,” Kane commanded, without turning.

He means it
, Raven tried to say telepathically.

Sue-Eye spoke silence as well she spoke posture. She closed her eyes at once.

Raven lay awake and listened to the low tak-tak-tak of Kane’s claws at his computer, the faint humming and bubbling of his chemicals and tools as he built his drug, and eventually, the thick snapping and gurgling pleas as he returned to the work of harvesting. She slept.

*

“Up.”

Raven jerked awake, struck her head on the side of the table, and struggled upright.

Kane, satisfied that she wouldn’t fall back to sleep, moved away from the booth and shouldered his pack. There were six more strange bikers on the floor, one of them a woman. Blood was now so thick around the center table that it hadn’t soaked into the floorboards, hadn’t even dried to a crust. The redhead was sleeping with her head on her folded arms, strands of her hair lying in a clotted puddle of the biker chief’s bloody brain matter. Sue-Eye was standing near the bar, looking solemn and very alert.

“Get your head together and drink something,” Kane said, striding towards the table where the redhead sat sleeping. “I want to get moving.”

He only had to touch her and the redhead came up with a shriek, arms slapping wildly all around her.

Raven flinched instinctively, dead certain she was about to see the girl’s head fly across the room, but Kane actually burst out laughing, stepping back with one arm up to fend off the biker’s puny blows.

“All right, that’s enough,” he said, still grinning. He caught one of the redhead’s wrists and she grew instantly still, staring up at him and shivering, white as milk. “Up,” Kane said, and gently towed her from her seat, only to take the chair for himself and pull her back down onto his lap. He put his arm around her, smiling like a shark and holding her pinned in his eyes, and then took out the funny spray-thing he kept in his pack.

“You said you’d let me live,” the redhead whimpered.

“This isn’t going to kill you,” Kane replied, and pushed the thing into her arm. It hissed as it performed its injection, and left a dime-sized red circle behind. “Now. Look at me, human. Right at me. That’s it. Listen well. I am going to leave very soon and I am leaving you behind. I understand that this means you will soon have the opportunity to tell others what has happened here tonight. No, keep looking at me,” he interjected as the redhead started to look spacily around the blood-soaked room. “Can you guess what I just put into your body?”

The biker gave him a miserable and blank-eyed look. “Poison?”

“No. I put something in you so that I can find you again, if I should, for example, turn on the TV and discover that the lawmen of your world are seeking for me or my Raven. Because if I see that, human, I am going to know exactly who told them who to look for.”

The redhead clasped her hands together and nodded, her eyes welling with silent tears.

“And if I have to come for you, I promise—” Kane put the scalpel-pen back in his pack and laid his empty hand over the biker’s belly, his eyes never wavering from hers. “—this little one will be walking and talking before I let you die of the things that I will do to you.”

The redhead squeezed her eyes shut and kept nodding.

“Very good.” Kane lifted her off his lap and set her on her feet again, giving her a careful tap on the ass to send her on her way. As the redhead walked woodenly to the door, he stood and looked over at Raven and Sue-Eye, still standing close together by the bathroom door.

Kane reached out the bottle of antibiotics he’d made for Raven and tossed it to her, saying, “Clean up together. Very clean, Raven,” he added, closing his pack and shouldering it. “But don’t make me wait too long.” He glanced at the sky as he passed the window, and paused a few moments, his head cocked. “I think it’s cooler today,” he remarked, and went out into the parking lot.

“Cooler, huh. What’s the weather got to do with it?” Sue-Eye asked, following Raven to the bathroom.

“He doesn’t like the heat,” Raven answered after a pause. She peed quickly and scrubbed at herself as best she could with a handful of paper towels before changing her tampon. She took her time with her piercings, carefully daubing them down wherever she suspected she still had leavings from the previous night’s events, and then rubbing in a good handful of Kane’s antibiotic juice.

Sue-Eye watched for a little while, then ran a little water in the sink and helped. Her hands were like leather, worn and rough to the touch, but she was gentle with them. Kane would probably appreciate that.

“When it gets really hot, he gets…horny, I guess, for lack of a better word,” Raven continued.

Sue-Eye nodded grimly. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You think you do, but you really don’t. He’ll need to get off about ten times in order to really get off. And I think it hurts when he does. At least, I know it hurts when he can’t, so he’s pretty much in a bad mood if he’s got to wait. And he’s…well, trying to work, you know, so anything that distracts him from that is not a good thing.”

“Can I ask you something?”

Raven regarded her warily. “Yeah.”

Sue-Eye’s gaze was almost as sharp as Kane’s could be, and her voice, although devoid of overt accusation, was flat and intense. “Why doesn’t he just fuck you anyway? So you’ve got your period, so what? It won’t kill him, and it won’t kill you.”

“I know. I think he just thinks it’s gross. Maybe his kind don’t have periods.”

“Maybe.” Sue-Eye stared her down a little longer. “Why’d you let him think taking it up the ass could make your period worse, or hurt you, or whatever?”

“Just…” Raven trailed off, looked away, looked back. “Just to have him think something that I knew was wrong. Like a secret. And to keep him…you know, from being so rough.”

Sue-Eye nodded, but it was a slow nod, and Raven couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “What’s he doing with the people he kills?”

“Making drugs.”

“Is he going to kill me?”

“I don’t know.” Raven moved her shoulders in a helpless shrug. “He says he’s going to keep me, but I don’t know that, either. Maybe. What do you want from me?”

“Ever fucked a girl before?”

The abrupt shift of questioning took Raven slightly off-guard. She offered the blonde biker a lop-sided smile. “Last night.”

“I think he got turned on by it,” Sue-Eye said seriously. “We should do some of that.”

Raven only shrugged. She knew Kane well enough by now to know Sue-Eye was right, but that didn’t mean she wanted to do anything about it.

Sue-Eye spread her hands slightly, but the accusation in her eyes robbed the gesture of any real empathy. “I want to live through this. Pretend you like it, okay? You don’t have to do me unless he says so, you just writhe around a lot and make him horny.”

“He’s not going to give a damn if it’s hot,” Raven told her. “I’m not kidding. You’ll just piss him off if you play games.”

“Fair enough. But he’ll like it at night when it’s cooler, and that’s when he’ll be wondering whether or not to keep me or kill me. So you go along with it, because if you rat me out, honey, I’ll rat you right back.”

Raven stared at her, feeling a chill shiver down through her stomach to the soles of her feet. Sue-Eye continued to stare for a little while longer, then nodded once, turned, and marched out to join Kane. Raven washed her face slowly, studying the trapped-animal look her own eyes presented her with, and tried to think. Did she have a friend now or an enemy? She didn’t know, but she didn’t like the way the little circle of her and Kane now suddenly had to expand to admit this new stranger. Life was like a bone Kane held over them, and now it felt horribly like a bone this Sue-Eye didn’t want to share.

A
nother day, pulling him by force from sleep with the itching and aching of his tsesac before the sun was even high. Tagen struggled upright against the sodden skin of his sheets and clapped a hand to his brow. When he drew it down over his face, sweat came off him in streams.

He had already lost one struggle to Heat this morning, but he was not ready to succumb to it again. He would battle with it. Escape to a cold shower, hide in the shade downstairs, try to ignore the urgent demands of his body until he surrendered in fury and in secret.

Battle, yes, but there could be no victory. He would be defeated sooner or later, and he would have to hide, muffling himself with pillows while he struggle to empty himself of burning seed before Daria—

Tagen’s frustration exploded him in a snarl and he threw an arm over his eyes to mask them. Why wait? Why torture himself for hours yet to avoid raising her alarms? He terrified her already. No amount of respectful distance was ever going to woo her to him.

Damn her.
Damn
her! She could not disguise her body’s cravings, but at least for her, they were only cravings. She had crept behind his door and stolen sight of him as he dressed, but she did not come to him. She sat beside him in a halo of mating musk, looking, lingering, but would not touch him. And of course, she had run from his first cautious overture and shut herself in the utility room.

So that left him here, alone in his borrowed bed with the thought of her burning behind his closed eyes. Dark fantasies and frustration, and those alone until either Heat was done or E’Var found. He would not make a slave of her just to have flesh. To force a female was high among the most contemptible crimes Tagen could imagine, but it was more than morality that restrained him. Somewhere inside her, and not very deeply buried, Daria Cleavon believed he would attack her. Heat-ravaged though he was, he would not prove her right.

But it was her he had thought of when Heat first took him this morning. It was her musk he had remembered and her body he had imagined. It was her name that had burst incandescent in his mind as his true-cum emptied and Heat was relieved for a few more precious hours. It was her who had followed him into dreams, to mate with him again and again.

And it was her step in the hall right outside that he heard now, rousing him from his fitful doze. She went into the bathroom and rattled around, loudly sterilizing every surface until the acidic scent of disinfectant came through the cracks in Tagen’s door. He listened, knowing he would have to go into that room soon enough. He was getting a headache already.

She finished shortly and went back downstairs, but not without hesitating. The day was wearing on and he had not emerged from his room. Soon, she would come knocking, offering him food and drink he could not taste, infuriating him with her nearness, her desire, and her fear. He had to get up before she trapped him here, with pools of his seed still warm on his bedding.

Tagen rose, gathered fresh clothing from his sparse stores, and went to the newly-aseptic privy to clean himself and his sheets. He could not bear to fully dress afterwards; the human’s pants alone covered him, and if his bare chest bothered Daria, so be it. Let her be bothered for a change.