Heat (7 page)

Kane didn’t understand very much of that, but he knew the word ‘die’. Bemused, he flexed his talons against the human’s throat…the human he had pressed flat and completely helpless and who had just threatened to kill him. This was just about the worst human he could have possibly run across if he wanted to take one captive.

On the other plate, she was the first female he’d seen in five days, and if he had to wait another five days to find another one, he was going to die. If not from Heat, then because he had ripped himself open in a maddened frenzy and bled to death.

Kane let her clothing fall back in place. He took his foot off her and seized her by the hair before she could do more than scramble into a half-seated position. He hauled her to her feet and said, “We need to have an understanding.”

He would have said more, but just then, two white lights streamed into the woods. A groundcar was coming.

The human slapped at his arm, and then at his chest, and finally twisted around and kicked him in the groin.

The groundcar slowed and stopped, exactly where it had stopped before. That was no coincidence. The humans had returned for the female.

The female kicked him in the groin again, harder this time. He thought he might bruise. Distractedly, he said, “I am going to break your arm if you keep provoking me like that. Behave yourself.”

“Motherfucker!” she snarled, and bit his hand.

Kane hissed and slapped her across the face with very nearly all his strength. She banged back into a tree and he got her by the hair again and dragged her forward. He shook her once, just to get her attention, and then showed her his claws. “I need every part of you but your face,” he said, and then slashed the bark from the tree behind her.

She had gone limp, her eyes huge. She stared at him, really seeing him, and he glared back at her and let her see everything he was. Shock became eclipsed by fear in a thunderstrike of recognition.

It was about fucking time.

There were voices coming from the road. The humans, calling for their escaped prey. “Hey, Raven! Come on! You’ll die out here! Don’t be stupid!”

Kane understood every word, save one. “Raven,” he murmured, and the female in his grip eyed him warily. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

She didn’t answer immediately, but at last, she nodded.

Kane watched the humans pace around the edge of the road. The lights of the groundcar were still on; they searched slowly, but they were coming this way. He glanced back at his female, considering his options.

“If you try to run from me, I will kill you,” he said finally. “If you warn them that I am here, I will kill you. Now. I’m going to let go of you, and you are going to want to run.” He leaned close to her, close enough for her to see the points on his teeth, if she were so inclined. “And you are going to want to fight that urge, Raven, because I’m much faster than you are. And I’m in a really rotten mood.”

He released her.

She stood there.

“Where are you?” one of the humans shouted. It sounded like Kane’s wasn’t the only temper fraying here tonight. “Bitch, are you really this stupid? You’re going to die out here!”

“Go to them,” Kane ordered, and slipped back into the shadows.

She did not react right away. She seemed frozen in place, her eyes like pools of starry night as she watched him go. Just when Kane had decided that she wouldn’t move at all, that he’d managed to fuck up another female just like the yellow-haired one, she raised her voice and called, “I’m over here!”

The humans both turned in her direction, and Raven went towards them, her eyes darting back to the trees where she no doubt thought Kane was hiding, never realizing that he kept pace with her as she returned to the groundcar.

“I’m right here,” she said again, stepping out onto the roadside. She even tried to smile as the male humans advanced on her. “Got carried away, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” one of the males said angrily. “You almost broke my nose, you numb cunt.”

“Hey, come on,” said the other, more placating if less sincere. “Lighten up. I got kicked in the balls and I’m still smiling. You just owe me a little more, right, Raven? Come on. Let’s get in the car.”

All their attention was fixed on Raven. Neither one of them glanced around as Kane came up behind them. He caught the largest one, pulled him back, and tracheated him in one swift motion. The second human kept walking for a few steps, still making his coaxing noises at the female he was trying to trap. Not until the silenced human hit the ground, rasping and clawing at his open throat, did he turn around.

Kane was ready for an attack, but did not anticipate the human’s choice of target.

“You set us up!” the human shouted, and lunged at Raven.

She was quick, dodging the punch he aimed at her and taking it on the shoulder instead of the eye. And then, to Kane’s astonishment, she attacked back, laying the human’s face open with her flimsy claws and then kicking him in the groin. She spat on the male’s face when he dropped to his knees, and yelled, “That’s for calling me names!”

Urak’s ghost spoke up in his rough, amused whisper, ‘Boy, you could not have picked a worse slave if you’d custom-ordered one from the unsuitable-slave store.’

There were things Kane needed to say to her, and things he needed to do before the sun rose and started its hellish work on him, but he put those things aside for now. It was time to make a few things clear.

Kane stepped over his muted human and got a handful of the other male’s hair. Raven gave him room, breathing hard, now directing her furious gaze at him as well as at the fallen humans. Kane didn’t mind. He wanted her to be looking at him.

He hooked the claws of one hand under the knob of bone at the base of the human’s skull and broke it off with a wet crack. He didn’t take his eyes off her; if she ran, it would be now, and he had to be ready.

The female paled, so rapidly and so completely, her face almost seemed to start glowing. She gave back a pace, her eyes huge as she stared at the chunk of bone in his hand, but she didn’t run.

Kane grunted and tossed the chunk of bone to the ground between her feet. She backed up again, bumping hard into the side of the groundcar, and clapped a hand to her mouth.

“We need to have an understanding,” Kane said again, and slung his pack off his shoulder. He took his harvester, loaded the first empty ampule, and took what he needed from the human’s exposed brain. Several drops of pale liquid collected in the bottom of the ampule, and Kane ejected the spent gland. It struck the side of Raven’s leg and she slapped at it with a coarse crowing sound. Kane waited until she was done brushing and cleaning at her hands, and then quietly said, “Bring me the other one.”

She looked at him, her eyes wide.

Kane waited, silently counting the seconds until she obeyed. Thirty-three in all. She was going to need some serious training.

She went to the muted male and tugged at his clothing ineffectively. After a few stops and starts, she got a good grip on his arm and dragged him, still weakly struggling, over to where Kane waited.

He harvested the male, held the vial up to the light of the groundcar to assess its volume, and then packed it away. Calibrating the computer to accept human readings was the work of mere seconds this time around, and then Kane was ready. He looked at his female. “Come here,” he said, and snapped his fingers.

She clasped her hands together, shifting her weight from foot to foot, and finally came.

The instant she was within reach, Kane exploded up from the ground, grabbed her by her throat and threw her violently against the roof of the groundcar (but not too violently, oh no, even Kane could be careful). He put his face right next to hers and snarled, “Do I look like I enjoy waiting?”

She screamed, kicking and thrashing blindly at him.

Kane punched her in the stomach (but carefully, oh so carefully), and she arched away from him, making a gasping, retching sound. He thumped her head once on the groundcar’s roof, and then said, “Do I?”

“No!” she managed to say. Her hands were on his chest, half-clutching and half-pushing.

He set her on her feet and went to stand in the light of the groundcar. He faced her grimly and snapped his fingers as he dropped to one knee.

She came, but not eagerly, and tried to resist him when he closed his hand around her wrist. He punched her in the belly and yanked her down when she barked out her breath, flipping her as she fell to catch her legs in a vise of his. He twisted one arm behind her and reached into his pack for the scanner.

She went still as death at once. “What is that?”

“I need to look at your blood,” he told her, and inserted the tip of the scanner. “You’re no good to me if you aren’t clean.”

She watched the blood collect through the clear sides of the scanner, her face white and plainly frightened. “I don’t really have that stuff I told you,” she whispered.

He made no reply, but he did let her slide out of his grip and sit down on her own power as he watched the monitor. At last, an electronic chime sounded, the ready-mark changed from gold to green, and letters spilled out in orderly rows. Kane read, his eyes narrowing.

She wasn’t clean. She was marginally malnourished and the toxic leavings of many drugs were there, as well as the disease Urak called the Creeping Waste, and that was a nuisance. On the other plate, there wasn’t anything wrong with her that couldn’t be fixed. It would take time, though. The Creeping Waste wasn’t as contagious to Jotan as it was to humans, but it was still deadly and unlike the human strain, it couldn’t be cleansed completely. Anyone stupid enough to swap fluids with the infected could find themselves suffering the result for the rest of their dramatically shortened life. Kane would have to fix it before he could mate with her, fixing it would take seventeen hours at the very least, and in the meantime, the sun would be burning down and filling his tsesac with hell.

Kane ran his eyes up and down the female’s body, weighing the urgency of his need against the frustration of having to stumble along for damned near a whole day with a female he couldn’t even fuck. And for the first time, Kane noticed her hair.

There were two stripes of white framing her face, but the rest was dark, and up until now, between one thing and another, that was all he had really noticed. Here, now, in the light of the groundcar and with time to catch his breath and think, Kane saw that what he had seen merely as ‘dark’ before was actually purple. A deep, dark, amazing shade of purple.

He’d never seen a human with purple hair before. The sight of it completely interrupted his chain of increasingly furious thought and he reached out to take some of it in hand. It flowed soft and straight between his fingers, not quite shoulder-length, but thick and full despite that.

Still…seventeen hours was a long time to wait just to fuck a human with purple hair.

But was there any guarantee he’d find another one in the same amount of time?

He really, really liked her hair…

Kane began to craft the necessary programs, a delicate mix of cleansers, filters, and aggressive anti-viral nanozymes. It was considerably less complicated than trying to correct the yellow-haired female’s congenital glucose disorder, but it still took time, and Kane was painfully aware that there were two bodies right there by the side of the road where anyone might roll by and see them.

At last, he was done and the dermisprayer was loaded yet again. He reached out for Raven’s arm and she flinched back and tried to cover her face.

Kane raised his eyebrows slightly, and then punched her in the stomach. “Don’t do that,” he said patiently as she doubled over, “If you expect to be hit, then I start thinking you probably need to be hit. Get up.”

She did, and he gripped Raven’s wrist and injected her just above the blue trace of a vein. The nanozymes went into her flesh on a burst of air and left a faint red circle behind for her to rub at.

“There,” he said, and leaned back against the front bolster of the groundcar. He offered her a thin smile. “You and I are going to be traveling together for a little while,” he told her.

She didn’t look surprised. Not pleased by any stretch of the imagination, but not surprised. She only waited, watching him with her wary eyes.

“If you behave yourself and obey me, you are going to live to see the back of me,” he said then. It was a thing Urak had been known to say from time to time, and he had always kept his word. Urak had often told him that a certain sort of person could always see a lie, however frightened or desperate they were, and Kane knew without question that Raven was exactly that sort of person.

Raven’s eyes narrowed now, searching his, and she must have seen the truth of it somewhere inside him because she ultimately nodded and seemed to relax, just a little.

Kane tapped a claw against the metal side of the groundcar. “What is this?”

“A car.”

“Can you pilot it?”

“Yes.”

“If you try to hurt me with it, you will die.” Kane raised his hand, studded grey with human brain matter, and raked his claws slowly through the air. “Badly.”

She nodded, pale as the face of the moon.

“Good.” Kane rose, shouldering his gear, and gathered up the corpses. He went to hide them from casual scrutiny and didn’t even have to order the female to stay with him. She followed, silent and obedient, at his heels.

*

There was both food and drink in the groundcar, although neither were immediately recognizable to Kane’s eyes. The food was something she called a ‘burger’, which was at least partially meat, and Kane ate all three of them, even the ones that the humans had taken bites out of. The drinks were sweet enough to be nearly undrinkable, and most of these he forced on Raven. The nanozymes cycling through her body would make her extremely susceptible to dehydration, enough that she might easily die. He told her none of this, of course, but he made her drink every last drop of what there was in the cups she showed him.

Kane rested in the seat beside her as she drove. He didn’t trust her enough to sleep, but he dozed a little as the sun rose. It was cool inside the car, cool and even a little breezy, and Kane savored the lull in weather with numb gratitude. By the time the weather turned foul again, perhaps the female would be ready and safe.