Heat (61 page)

She should go check on him now, while he was…done. Make him drink. Maybe get him to the shower long enough to change his sheets. He’d been swimming in that bed; sweat had pooled, literally pooled, in the folds draping him. It was probably an old wives’ tale that you could get pneumonia from being wet all the time, but it couldn’t be healthy, either.

Daria didn’t move. He’d told her to leave him alone. He was already thoroughly miserable, he didn’t need the humiliation of having her constantly checking up on him. She knew all about the value of pride when a person didn’t have anything else to hold on to.

But she found herself thinking back to her memories, splintered and surreal as they were, of their first meeting. She, drugged and babbling, throwing up in the sink while he held her hair. How he’d put her in the shower and cleaned her up over her wailing protestations. He’d taken care of her, because she needed help and never mind her pride. He’d never brought it up again, and she’d sobered up and hadn’t died of shame. Because pride was fine, but in the end, no one really wanted to be left alone when they were lying on the bathroom floor with pissed pants.

Daria got up.

The hall back to Tagen’s room was eighteen feet long. She’d measured it before, she knew. When she’d nerved herself to come up here before, her heart slamming in her ears, terrified that she would be interrupting him, the hall had stretched out the length of a football field. She’d thought she had a thousand chances to turn back. She’d thought it had taken a whole hour just to get there. Now, it seemed she took only two steps and she was there. She tapped timidly to no reply, and then pushed the door open.

He lay crossways on his stomach on the bed, the sheet around his hips, one arm dangling over the side and his hair in limp strands across his face. He didn’t move when she said his name. She could hear him breathing, but the sound was shallow and uneven.

He said he couldn’t die from this. He said.

Daria went to him. She picked up the empty glass that lay close to his hanging hand and put it on the tray. The arm itself had a horrid feel, hot and slick and heavy. His skin, thick and perfectly hairless, didn’t even feel like skin. It probably never did, really. She’d never touched him before.

She rolled him onto his back with effort, giving the sheet a tug to preserve his modesty. He groaned, kicking slowly and curling his claws into the mattress, and finally opened his eyes. They were glassy, unfocused. He spoke, a hoarse and incomprehensible string of alien words that ended in a question.

“Can you stand up?” she asked.

He looked down at himself and then up at her. “No,” he said. He sounded confused.

“Hold on to me,” she said, offering her arms.

He drew back at once, his nostrils flaring.

“Come on,” she said softly. “Ten steps down the hall to a cold shower. I’ll change your bed for you.”

He dropped his eyes to the sheets wrapping his waist and dragged the back of his hand across his brow. His shoulders straightened, but he still would not meet her gaze. “No,” he said, sounding as though he’d scraped the dignity for that one word from the dried-out bottom of his soul.

She let her arms fall to her sides and just stared at him, feeling helpless. “I can bring dry sheets in,” she said. “And you can change them.”

His jaw ticced. Long minutes crawled by.

He sighed. “Very well. Then leave me.”

Daria retreated to the linen closet and returned to find him sitting up and drinking straight from the pitcher. Most of the ice had melted.

“Leave them,” he gasped, letting the pitcher rest against his stomach. “And go.”

“Are you sure you don’t need help?”

He laughed. It was a singularly harsh and humorless sound. “Help?” Out came another stream of his own language and when it ended, he was sagging forward and out of breath.

Daria set the sheets at the foot of his bed.

“Go,” Tagen said quietly. “I do not require your help.”

“I’m really worried about you.”

“Yes,” he said, and only that. It was the most passive answer she could have imagined, and the most ominous, but there was no way to counter it.

“Okay then,” she said lamely. She backed toward the door. “I’ll…bring up more water in a few hours. And if you need anything…”

He shut his eyes.

Daria let her voice trail away, her eyes burning. All this because of the weather. All this because he’d had the dumb luck to hook up with someone who didn’t have an air conditioner or a swimming pool or the goddamn nerve to just sleep with him already.

So do it. Strip down. She probably wouldn’t have to do more than unbutton her fly before he got the idea. The thought of having sex with an alien was probably abhorrent to a straight-laced military man like Tagen, but she didn’t think he had it in him to object for long. And then…and then it would be done. It wouldn’t be that bad. She was no vestal virgin, for Christ’s sake. She knew where all the parts went. She’d thought about it. Why couldn’t she do it?

The silence seemed to register with him at last. He looked up at her wearily and tried to smile. The effect was heart-rending and he must have known it because he stopped after only a few seconds.

“I have endured Heat before,” he said with a sigh. “I think this is no worse. It only seems so because I am on Earth.” He scowled briefly and then composed himself again. “I know you are concerned for me and I do appreciate it, but I do not wish you to see me like this.” He paused, searching her face, and then added, “And you must never touch me, Daria. Never.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I know you’d never hurt me.”

“Yes,” he said softly. His eyes never wavered. “I would.”

Eyes welling, Daria stepped into the hall and shut the door. She said nothing more.

There was nothing left to say.

“T
urn us in,
ichuta’a
.”

“What, here?”

Raven dragged herself out of the bored doze that kept her occupied for the long car ride. She rubbed at her eyes, pushing herself out of the fetal curl that fit her into the backseat and looked around, blinking until the sunlight no longer blurred her vision. Not that there was a lot to see. There were trees on every side of them, and only a few other vehicles in sight, most of them long-haul trucks. Back in the boonies. And Kane wanted to pull over.

“There.” Kane extended a claw, pointing to a pair of parallel ruts leading away from the road.

Sue-Eye slowed and turned in, but she just couldn’t leave it at that. Some people were like that. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, Kane,” the blonde said now, her tones faintly tinged with exasperation. “What do you expect to find?”

Kane aimed a dark glare at her and Raven had the distinct feeling that if Sue-Eye weren’t driving, she’d be catching one upside the head right now. “I expect,” he said sharply, “to find the riders in the two cars that turned up that way. I’ve been watching the road,
ichuta’a
. What the fuck have you been doing?”

“Watching the moving cars on the road,” Sue-Eye said, mildly enough, but with a certain hard set to her jaw. At times like these, Raven had real trouble understanding how she could have lived so long with a gang as nasty as the one Kane had killed back at that bar.

Although she wasn’t sure whether she’d be defusing the situation or exacerbating it, Raven cleared her throat and said, “There’s probably a boat launch out there or something.”

“Yeah? Then they’ll all be out on the water and not up where we can get at them.” Sue-Eye winced as the car bounced over the uneven ground. Kane must have hit her someplace pretty bad. And he was going to hit her someplace even worse if she didn’t shut up, couldn’t she see that?

“So?” Raven asked in her best peace-making voice. “We’ll go swimming until they come out.”

Kane sent an amused glance back at her, but his faint smile vanished when he saw her hand at her belly. She took it away fast, but she knew the damage was done.

“I’m feeling a little better,” she said quickly, hoping to avert a total disaster.

“Then why are you sleeping so much?” he countered, baring his teeth at her. “Don’t lie to me, Raven, I’ll know it every time.”

She supposed she ought to let it be. He had to be hungry. Thirsty. Tired of riding around in cramped cars with nothing to do but listen to Sue-Eye’s passive-aggressive complaining and think about how hot it was outside. He was in an itchy mood and well past ready to start smacking, so it was just safer to sit still and leave him alone.

Of course, all that being true, he wasn’t likely to calm down on his own. He’d just sit there, simmering his way up to a full boil, and when he got there, well, Raven was the only one in reach he could hit without crashing the car.

She leaned forward and slid her hand down his chest in a gesture she hoped was a placating one. Or at least, distracting. “I’m not lying,” she said in his ear. “A little better means just that. Better. A little.”

He growled, but the hard muscles under her palm relaxed. “I want you well.”

“So do I.” She curled her fingers to scratch at him ever so slightly, watching his face intently in the rearview mirror to see how he received it.

His expression never changed, but he closed his hand over hers and guided it down to his crotch. He rubbed her on him, growling low in his throat, and then let go suddenly and pushed her back into her seat. “No, leave me alone,” he said, but not in a mean way. “I need my head on straight. Stop us,
ichuta’a
. We’ll walk from here.”

“We can’t stop here, we’re blocking the path.”

Raven winced preemptively (all that calming-down wasted) and Kane roared out at full voice, “Stop the fucking car!”

Sue-Eye stopped, and in the same instant as the engines died, Kane’s fist flew out, socking the blonde a damned good one in the ear and knocking her into the driver’s door.

“If I have to cut out your tongue to get you to stop arguing with me, then that’s what I’ll do,” he snarled. “I
want
to block the path because I
don’t
want to be interrupted. I’m going to be killing people and unless you want to be one of them, you’d better confine your words to me to ‘yes, Kane’ until I’m goddamn well done! Do we have an understanding,
ichuta’a
?”

“Yes, Kane.” She didn’t look at him. She stayed huddled against her window, staring straight ahead and holding her ear.

“Good.” He yanked the car’s keys from the ignition and kicked his door open, admitting a billow of suffocating heat as he left. “
Charak tiven kha y soc-se ichuta’a
!” he spat and slammed the door with a rifle-like bang.

Sue-Eye didn’t move. She was breathing steady but hard and her eyes were fixed and unblinking.

In the interests of peace, Raven supposed she should say something, but all she could think of to say was ‘idiot’, and that wouldn’t help. She opened up her door instead, and Sue-Eye slowly did the same.

Walk. Ugh.

The heat of day, even here in the shaded woods, was staggering. Raven swung her legs out and set her feet on the sun-cracked earth, but then had to just sit there and work up the strength to stand. Her stomach was doing flip-flops and the cramps just made it worse. Walk from here? How far? The road curved out of sight a few dozen feet away and Raven could hear the muffled thump of a heavy bass beat somewhere in the distance, but no other people-sounds. And Kane wanted to walk? Raven figured she had about a quarter mile in her before she barfed everything up but her toenails and then died.

A shadow fell over her. She looked up into Kane’s narrowed eyes and stood up fast. Too fast. The blood dropped from her face, cold sweat prickled up all over her brow, and she stumbled against the side of the car, waiting to see whether she was going to faint or just throw up.

“Say it again,” she heard Kane say darkly. “Say how normal this is.”

Her own temper rose and popped like a black bubble. “I’d be fine if it wasn’t so fucking hot!” she snapped.

A stupid thing to say, maybe, but Kane merely grunted and looked upwards, making the sun the target of his bared teeth instead of her. It emboldened her.

“If…If I promise not to go anywhere,” she began hesitantly and he focused on her at once, his black eyes narrowing. “If I swear I won’t leave the car, can’t I just wait here?”

She didn’t honestly expect him to agree, but to her surprise, he actually seemed to consider it. He looked her over, hooking the thumbclaw of his hands through the waistband of his pants and tapping the talons of one foot on the hard-baked ground. Just as he opened his mouth, Sue-Eye suddenly spoke up.

“Are you crazy?” She was staring at Raven with the same disbelief she might have shown if Raven had asked Kane’s permission to juggle chainsaws. “Out here in the woods stinking like blood with wolves and bears running around?”

Raven’s jaw dropped. For a moment, she was utterly incapable of speech, even though she knew it wasn’t the best way to react with Kane studying her so closely. When her voice finally did return, it came with a coarse breathiness, as if her anger were physically choking her. “Wolves? Fucking
wolves
?”

“They can smell blood and they eat people,” Sue-Eye said sagely. She came around the front of the car to stand at Kane’s side. “They’re all over these woods and you know it.”

Kane glanced around at the trees.

Raven’s mouth opened and closed a few times, her mind spinning with the ridiculousness of this argument. “So I’ll stay in the car,” she said at last.

“You’ll die of heatstroke.”

“I’ll crack a fucking window!”

“And the wolves will smell you,” Sue-Eye said evenly, without hesitation. “Or a bear will. A bear could pull the top right off that car.”

The fact that a bear could indeed do that, coupled with the remote possibility that bears might actually be lurking somewhere in these woods, combined to fill Raven with a shaking, helpless fury. “They will not smell me, you bitch!”