The heat was killing him and adrenaline could only take him so far. He couldn’t keep running.
Kane let his legs carry him to a stop, let Raven slide from his arms to the ground. He put his back against a tree and leaned into it. His hands rose and pressed to his ribs, as though he were trying manually to slow his heart, stretch out his breath. Gravity pulled him down, his legs splaying out before him. He sat, talons flexing in the dry soil, and tried to orientate himself in the here and now.
He’d hit the Fleet officer’s human. A shit shot in the leg, but he’d hit her. And if his gun hadn’t run out of bullets, he’d have hit her again. He hoped the bitch bled out.
Raven lay before him, by all appearances lifeless.
He hoped he had the chance to try again before he left Earth. He wanted to kill her right before the fucker’s eyes. The Fleet fucker who had dropped his Raven.
Kane opened the panel on his wrist band and activated his locator. He was still some three hundred thirty kilometers east and north of where his ship was. Three days and then some, and that was going to be hard fucking travel with Raven and him on foot.
Raven. The slave-fucker had dropped his Raven, told him he was prepared to kill her.
Kane reached out and caught her arm, towing her into his lap. He ripped off his coat, shredding a sleeve in his fury to be free of it, and then pulled her against his sweat-oiled chest. He felt her skin on his, watched the pulse throb in her throat.
She was stunned, that was all. He needed to get a grip on himself. Now was not the time to lose control.
Kane stood up, Raven cradled in his arms. His sides still burned, his breath felt hot and raw and his muscles were weak and watery, but at least he no longer felt faint or nauseated. What he felt instead was the itching of Heat deep in his tsesac, which meant that he needed to focus up and forget about revenge long enough to get away. He started walking west.
He had a lot of ground to cover.
T
he first thing she felt, oddly enough, was the rock or root or whatever that was pressing painfully up at her underneath her shoulder blade. And that was all she felt for a while, even after her eyes opened and she saw the man above her, rocking her in hard rhythm. His was a familiar face, so much so that even though she couldn’t come up with a name right away, she wasn’t alarmed to wake up and find herself being fucked by him.
She put a hand on his sunburned and sweat-damp shoulder, and his eyes snapped open, monster-closet black and reflecting nothing. “Raven,” he rasped, and that felt right so she nodded. She was feeling more now—his weight, his heat, the sweat raining down from his body, the massive club pushing in and out of her—and all of it was fine and familiar. Her eyes slid shut, dozing, and she didn’t open them again until he was finished.
His weight went away, and then she was being pulled up and against the slick plane of his chest. He whispered her name, prying her eyes open one at a time, and then bit her on the cheek, chin and throat.
“Kane,” she said and smiled with weak pride. His name was Kane. A little more lucidity snuck in and she managed to look at him. “What happened?”
He snarled explosively, but it was not directed at her. His arms tightened around her to the point of pain. “We need to go now,” he said.
She shifted, but couldn’t seem to get her limbs together enough to rise. She settled for looking around again. Trees and trees and bushes and more trees. The day was still suffocatingly hot and shrilling with the kind of high-summer insect noise that made sane men butcher their families in their beds. And somewhere, somewhere there were sirens. Lots of them. Raven’s world came a little more into focus. “Where’s Sue-Eye?”
He dismissed that with a curt shake of his head. “Back at the fair,” he said. His claws brushed along her cheek, but his gaze was elsewhere, stabbing at the shadows surrounding them. “
V’kai
showed up.”
She didn’t need clarification on that. Cop-words had the same sound in any language. “Where are we?”
He growled laughter. “Not nearly far enough away. Fucking heat!” Or maybe he meant Heat. Hard to tell sometimes.
“We need to get a car.” Raven tried again to rise and this time, she succeeded. His hand stayed with her, steadying and strong, until she found her balance. Just standing there, she could feel her head clearing, as if the fugue that had settled on her was susceptible to gravity and could be poured out onto the ground as long as she wasn’t lying on it. She swiped limp strands of hair out of her eyes and looked down at Kane with new clarity. “Do you know where we’re going?”
“That way.” He pointed with confidence, but there was a certain frustration in his eyes that showed he appreciated the unhelpfulness of his reply. “And it’s one
fuck
of a far walk off.” He got up, fastening his pants in curt, angry movements. “You can tell me you told me so if you want to,” he added bitterly.
She glanced at him, sorely tempted, and then shook her head. “Later,” she said. “When we’re good and out of this. I’ll probably even smack you around a little.”
He gave her a sharp sidelong look, and then showed his teeth in a brief, rueful grin. “Deal. Now get moving.”
He picked up his pack and caught at her arm, but she dug in her heels and stopped him. “We can’t run in this heat, we need to get a car.” She stared intently at the forest, trying for her bearings in futility. The sirens she heard weren’t moving and the longer she had to listen to them, the closer they felt. “Where’s the road from here?” she asked.
Kane aimed a claw, but his expression was dark. “We’re not getting anywhere near it,” he growled. “We were seen, Raven.
V’kai
and your law both. We were goddamn good and well seen and the last thing I’m going to do is walk out in front of them and let them see us again.” He glanced at the trees and then back at her, scowling. “It’s slower this way, but it’s safer.” He tried to move off with her in hand again, and again, she dug in and refused to budge.
“No, it’s not.” She pulled all the way out of his grip and he let her go, his head cocked and an expression of frustration growing on his face. “If your
v’kai
guy gets to his ship before we do, he’ll just be waiting for us out in space. Could you take him in a firefight?”
Right around the words ‘waiting for us’, Kane’s eyes went wide enough for a thin white ring to show their edges. By the time she finished her pointed question, they were narrowed nearly to slits. “No,” he said, and bared his teeth again. “I don’t even think the fucking thing
has
guns.”
“We’ve got to get a car,” she insisted. “Now.”
Kane snarled, but he was nodding. “Not here,” he said. “If we come out of the woods on that road, your
v’kai
will be waiting to take us down.” He shot a glance unerringly back at the siren-sounds. “
Chok
.”
Raven conceded the point with a nod and rubbed at her temples, trying to shake a thought free. “Okay,” she said finally. “We’ll keep going this way. We’re not that deep into the woods, we might run into a crossroads. If nothing else, it’ll get dark and we can find a house or something. Kane…how did this
v’kai
guy know where to find you? Are you wearing something?”
“Wearing…what?” Suddenly, his frustration washed out and he stared down at her, showing the whites of his eyes for the second time in as many minutes. Then they were gone again and Kane gazed away into the trees, his face closed. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It’s possible. I didn’t think they did anything like that, but…they keep prisoners unconscious to control them.”
There was no expression whatsoever on his face as he made this calm admittance. Somehow, that was the scariest she’d ever seen him look.
“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “It’s easy enough for someone to follow a trail of bodies.”
Kane grunted and adjusted the pack strap that lay over his shoulder. He started walking and she followed. “What made you even think of something like that?” he asked sourly.
She tried to avoid an answer with a shrug, but when he frowned at her, she said, “Your
v’kai
guy came to the fair before anyone knew we’d been killing people there.”
He spat out one of his alien curses, looking baffled and furious. Mostly furious. “But if that were true, he’d know I was here now.” He let that hang in the air for a while. “I shot his
ichuta’a
. With any luck, she’ll die. Hopefully, that’ll slow him up, even if he does have some kind of
sacrat
sunk in me.”
“You’re assuming he’s the only one.”
Kane shot her a third white-ringed stare. Without another word, he scooped her up and over his shoulder and started running.
*
There was a tube of dermal restorative among his medical gear, and Tagen applied it in a thick layer to Daria’s wound after determining the pellet had indeed passed completely through her thigh. There could be any amount of damage done; although soldier’s sense told Tagen it was not serious, he was no expert in human anatomy. He did not trust any of the pain medications provided by
vey
Venekus to work on humans, but he could prepare a dose of nanozymes to speed her healing and so he did.
She stirred when injected and Tagen stroked her cheek anxiously in case she wakened fully. It was unreasonably important to him that he be the first thing she saw when the neural stunner’s effects finally wore off.
But it was the blonde female who began to wake first, groaning and clutching blindly at her surroundings before falling back again. E’Var’s female. His prisoner, perhaps. Perhaps his accomplice. But a distraction now, in either case, from his injured Daria.
Tagen touched the soft hair that fanned out behind Daria’s lolling head for one last, lingering moment, and then he gathered up the other human and pulled her from the hold of the car. He lay her down in the dry grass and waited on one knee beside her, his hands clenching rhythmically on empty air, watching her fight her way out of stupor.
The blonde’s eyes opened. She stared slackly around for several seconds. Confusion sank in first, and then panic. “Kane?” she called, and looked at Tagen for the first time.
He saw recognition of his kind enter her, along with the awful understanding that she was caught. He had no sympathy for her. Prisoners do not call their keepers by their familiar names.
“Kane!” she shouted and tried to lunge away.
Tagen sprang after her, bringing her down with considerably more force than was necessary. She struggled, but she would be no match for a Jotan male even if she were not groggy from the neural stunner. He pulled binders from his gunbelt, flipped her facedown, and pinned her arms, wrist to elbow, behind her back. In seconds, he was rolling her onto her back again and snarling into her pale face, “Where is he going?”
She screamed. It was a harsh sound, a cry of pure frustration and rage, utterly devoid of fear. Her head rocked, her face purpled, and her heels gouged impotently at the earth. She screamed and gasped for air and screamed again.
Tagen had sedative, of course, but no time in which to indulge the erratic effects it provoked in humans. He elected instead to slap her.
Her lip split, not for the first time by appearances, but it did silence her immediately. She stared at him with tight-mouthed hatred, her breath shaking through her in violent pants.
“Where?” he said coldly.
“How the fuck should I know?” She made herself laugh. It was a bitter attempt. “You won’t have to follow him anyway. He’ll come for me. And he’ll rip you in half.”
“Come for you,” Tagen echoed. He stood up, solely to take his curled hands out of reach of her. “He left you, human.”
She sneered at him, mocking him from the cold place of her convictions. “He had to get away but now he’ll come—”
“He kept the female he wanted,” Tagen told her, very softly. “He is not coming back for you.”
It took a long time for that to sink all the way down to the place where her thoughts were made. With every new breath she took, the truth caught a more hurtful hold, and when she opened her mouth again, there was no sound. Tagen watched her struggle to speak, and then he watched her eyes well with furious tears.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispered finally, raggedly. “You son of a bitch. He…He was going to fix me. He promised. He—”
“Where is he going?”
“You son of a bitch!” she screamed.
Daria moaned.
Tagen turned from the interrogation at once and went to the open hatch of the groundcar where Daria lay. Her lashes fluttered and her eyes opened, calm at first, then perplexed, and then flooding with baffled pain.
“Ow,” she said. She clutched at him, missed, and gripped the side of the groundcar instead. “Oh owww! Oh, what’s hurting me?
Owww
!”
Her hand dropped to her wounded leg and came away fast. She stared at the blood marking her palm and said, “I was shot,” in wondering tones. “I remember now. He shot me.”
“Can you stand?” Tagen asked.
She looked past him to the other human still scream-sobbing her obscenities at his back. “Is that…one of his? Where’s the other one?”
E’Var’s human arched kicking off the ground to bellow, “Bitch!” at the top of her lungs. Her voice broke in the extremity of the curse. Tagen had swung around to order her to silence, but he found he did not need to; she lay with her lips pressed pale, glaring at the sky with wet and baleful eyes in seething silence.
“He took her with him,” Tagen said, returning his attention to the answering of Daria’s question.
She gazed up at him then, her brow beetling. “You mean he got away?” Her expression continued its slow slide past confusion into dismay. “You let him get away because of me?”
There were a hundred ways to answer that, a hundred excuses, a hundred reasons, but in the end, he simply said, “Yes,” and silently dared her to argue with him.