Without warning, he yanked back and out (casting one swift glance downwards; no blood) just to punch into her again. She shrieked and tried to scramble away, her hips humping at the bed in her efforts to escape him.
Kane reared back and began to ride her, both hands on her hips now, letting her flee a little ways just for the pleasure of yanking her back, sliding her up and down his pumping cock, falling into the rhythm of thrust and draw. Sometimes he caressed her, drawing the backs of his hands down from the nape of her neck, down the bare shadow of her spine. Sometimes he struck her, beating out cracks like gunplay on her flanks when her struggles waned. He fucked her, hard and fast and steady. He savored the fucking, thinking with the rational part of his mind that this was better than anything he’d ever had, even with that fine female, Tari’i Sunorrok. And just why that should be, he didn’t know, since Raven surely didn’t have her heart in it at the moment.
No, it wasn’t the way she was moving, and it wasn’t just the grip and the pull of her. It was all of her, all his Raven, and the knowledge that she was his. He bent swiftly and savaged Raven’s shoulder in a bite, feeling a sudden swell of affection for her, then reared back and split the night with her screams again.
K
ane came around slow, his mind calm and syrupy with sleep. Light was coming in around the heavy drapes, and with it, the ever-present heat. He should get up now, switch on that rattling bastard of a climate-regulator, and avoid Heat for a few precious hours. It was a tempting thought to stay where he was another day, but time was trickling by as steadily as it ever did, and he knew he had to hunt.
Later, he thought. Later.
His hand splayed flat against Raven’s belly and he felt the metal he had put in her beneath his touch. He smiled, his eyes still shut, and pulled her against him. His Raven. His fascinating, ferocious, fuckable little Raven.
The scent of blood was in his nostrils. Kane opened his eyes and looked down, seeing first the deep lacerations on her shoulder where he’d bit her the night before. He really had to remember not to do that again. And he’d better do something about it now, he realized. With all the metal he’d put in her, she’d probably take very easy to infection.
He sat up and threw back the thin bedding, meaning to fetch his pack and stir up some antibiotics, and his whole body locked up tight.
There was blood on the sheets. Blood all over the sheets, spreading out from Raven’s hips.
Kane’s voice ripped from him in a roar, snapping Raven out of sleep. She started to roll towards him, but he was already in motion. He seized the bedding and tore it away from her in shreds, then pushed her back on her face and tried to see how bad the damage was. He had no surgical gear, none at all. Damn him, she was going to bleed out and die!
“What the—?” Raven reached down between her thighs and looked at the blood painting her fingers. “Oh,” she said.
“Lie still,” Kane told her, his heart racing. What did he have? What could he use? There wasn’t so much blood, really. It was still wet, she must have been bleeding all night, but it wasn’t a heavy flow. There had to be a way to dress the wound. To cauterize and close it, if nothing else.
“Kane, it’s okay,” Raven was saying. “This is normal.”
He gaped at her. His N’Glish was good, but that just couldn’t be what she’d meant to say.
“It’s not what you think,” she said, and gently pulled out of his grip. “This doesn’t have anything to do with last night. This is something else.”
Something else. Kane’s thoughts leapt first to disease, to the hemorrhagic fevers the mining laborers often caught.
That
he could fix. He sprang from the bed for his pack. When he turned around, Raven had wiped herself clean with a handful of sheets and had spread her thighs to show him the source of the bleeding.
Kane stared, physically dizzied by confusion. Slowly, he put his pack back on the hotel table. “Did…did something tear?” he asked. His eyes flicked to the bed, but he saw no metal ornaments free on the sheets.
“No,” she said. “It’s normal.”
He couldn’t process that, couldn’t understand how his clever Raven could even say something like that. “Bleeding is not normal,” he argued. “It’s never normal.” He regarded her with growing suspicion. “What are you hiding from me?” he demanded. And what had she exposed him to, knowing this disease was rooted inside her as he fucked her?
She saw the expression on his face and seemed thrown by it. She looked down at herself, daubed again at the slowly-welling blood, and then looked around the room as though for help. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” she said. “But I can prove it.”
“How?”
Raven got up from the bed and started to dress herself. “You’re going to have to trust me, Kane. This is perfectly normal, and I can prove it.”
Kane followed her into the privy and watched, his guts in turmoil, as she wadded up tissues and staunched the flow of blood. She looked nervous, he thought, but how much of that was due to the hemorrhaging and how much to him, he couldn’t know. “Prove it,” he said finally.
“I can’t here,” she said. “We need to go to the store.” She turned to face him, her gaze steady and her chin bravely raised.
“If you’re lying to me, I am going to rip you open,” he said quietly, and he meant every word. His affection for her had congealed into a molten weight in his gut. The scent of blood was cloying in his nostrils; it was the smell of betrayal. If this was disease, then she’d hidden it from him hoping to have her vengeance by infecting him, and he meant to see her repaid.
She swallowed hard, but she never dropped her gaze. “I know.”
Kane held her with his eyes a minute longer, and then he turned and swiftly stalked away to dress. He shouldered his pack and went to the door, snapping his fingers for her to follow.
The heat of day beat down on him in a fury, but Kane scarcely felt it beyond his own churning emotion. He was primed for rage, holding it at arm’s reach by the merest shred of will. He did not believe her. He could not believe her. But he saw no lie in her eyes.
Kane sat silent and grim as death as Raven drove them away from the motel. He stared into the side of her face, tasting her edgy fear and her blood in every slow breath he took.
The place she called a ‘store’ was a great warehouse of a building, cool inside and brightly-lit, and stocked to the bursting point with goods, much of it food. Raven led him past several aisles of bright packages. She did not look around at him; her step was steady and sure. She glanced up at the director boards hanging over each double-row of shelves and finally aimed herself down one, Kane right on her heels.
At the very end of the aisle, she stopped. She took a thin, blue-colored box off the shelf before her and handed it to him. It hadn’t seemed to occur to her that he might not be able to read human, and in point of fact, Kane could, but it took a considerable effort to turn the alien characters before him into readable words. “Security plus,” he muttered, his eyes narrowed almost to slits as he grappled with the sideways writing. “Flexible to prevent leaks. Un…scented.”
He blinked several times, puzzling over the meaning of the words, and turned the box over in his hands. There was an image of a flower on the front, which was no help at all.
Raven took a different package from the shelf and opened it. She removed a small bit of paper and unfolded it, then showed it to him. There was a cut-away diagram of a human’s hips, clearly depicting a female’s genitals and hands as she inserted a torpedo-shaped object.
“What the hell?” It was all he could think of to say. He looked at Raven accusingly. “What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s called a period,” she said patiently. “It’s normal. It happens once a month, for about five days. I could tell you all about why, but you wouldn’t know any of the words. It’s completely normal. All this stuff here is sold, right out in the open, for us girls to use when it happens.”
“It…” He looked back down at the box in his hands. The flower on its face still baffled him. “It has nothing to do with what I did to you?”
“No.” Raven took the box from him and put it back on the shelf. She kept the one she’d opened under her arm. “It would have happened anyway.”
Kane inspected her closely. She didn’t seem pallid, or in great pain. He began to think she was actually telling the truth, for all that she was bleeding. “Are you all right?” he asked cautiously. “Is it safe to move you?”
She paused in the act of browsing the shelves for another box. When she looked at him, her eyes were strangely guarded.
He showed her his open hands. “I won’t kill you if it isn’t,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Will you die if I move you?”
“No,” she said, and slowly stood up. “I just have to be a little careful, that’s all.”
“Then you
can
die from it.”
She shrugged and dropped her eyes.
So it was dangerous. Kane looked hard at her skirt, as though he could see through it to the body beneath. Five days. He didn’t like the idea of waiting around in one place while she rested, but he didn’t want to put any more strain on her bleeding body than she could recover from. He’d done too much to her already, he knew. The piercings, all that invasive metal. The sex, the rough way he’d taken her. And he’d
known
better, damn him, he’d known it could kill a human! Now she was bleeding. Normal, she said, but there was such a thing as a trigger event.
But Heat was uncompromising, and the weather showed no signs of cooling. Kane was feeling the urge to hunt, to get his business done and get off this planet while luck was still with him. He couldn’t hunt without exposing himself to Heat; he couldn’t purge himself of Heat’s effects with Raven in this state, not unless he wanted to risk killing her.
For the first time, it came home to him exactly how it had felt to see that blood on the bedding, to think that he had killed her. Everything that followed, even his anger, had sprung from the same source, and if it had not been exactly fear, it had not been far from it. He didn’t want to lose her, and that being the truth, he needed to be careful.
“Get what you need,” he told her, already decided. He would let his Raven rest, build her strength as she struggled with this…period of hers. He would find another female for himself.
*
Fat Joey was just coming back to the center table with beers for the boys and so just happened to be looking out the window when the car pulled into Charlie’s lot and stopped. It didn’t park—that would have been strange enough—it just stopped, right there in the middle of the lot. It was blocking half a dozen bikes and both gang-owned cars, the SUV old Cook smuggled guns in and Heck’s busted-up Pontiac.
This car was fairly clean and fairly new, and was instantly and easily identified as not belonging to anyone in the Pack. Fat Joey, watching the car with the last full minute of completely relaxed interest he would ever experience, expected it to roll back and pull out again in the opposite direction. When the car’s engine actually stopped and a man stepped out of the passenger door, Fat Joey heard a low rumble of amusement from the brothers and knew he wasn’t the only one watching.
So this was good, he thought, setting down his beers and lowering his bulk into the comfortable recesses of his seat. It was hot as hell, even with Charlie’s ancient A/C grinding away in the window, and the boys were restless. Too hot to work, too hot to ride, hot enough that some of the low dogs had begun to bite at each other. Nothing rough yet, no knives, but that would change as soon as someone stupid went after one of the big dogs. A fight like that would be unthinkable in early spring or even winter—the Pack had been snowed in at Heck’s place for two and a half weeks once with no bloodshed—but it always seemed to happen in the summer. It was just the heat. The fucking heat.
Fat Joey glanced around the tables and booths at Charlie’s, taking a head count without consciously adding up numbers. He couldn’t have said how many of the Pack were present, but he knew they weren’t all there. Maybe a dozen low dogs, scrabbling at each other along the walls in the booths, ten brothers scattered out on the tables, and in the center of the bar, the Big Four: Fat Joey, Ratchet, the Cow-Boy, and Top Dawg himself, holding court over all. Apart from that, there were two bitches: Sue-Eye, who was almost as good as a brother when she had a knife in her hand, and Sheb’s bitch, Cammy. Sheb was down in So-Cal on a run, which made her the Dawg’s problem to pass out and he hadn’t named anyone yet, so Cammy was hanging close to the center table, not quite underfoot but close to it.
And then there was Charlie, tending bar and keeping one eye on the window and one hand close to the place he kept his shotgun. Old Charlie had been a brother, back in the day, and rode 66 with the Aces while the Dawg was still pissing diapers, and he was worth ten low dogs if it came to a fight. There were three bar whores working the booths in the heat, two of them former Pack-bitches, but Fat Joey didn’t count them. If it came to trouble, they might be allowed to jump in and spit on what was left of the guy when the Pack was done with him, but more than likely they’d be too busy spreading snatch for the victors.
Summer was like that—long days of nothing until your brains were half-baked and razor-edged with temper and then a quick fight, a good fuck, and back to nothing again. At least this time it was a stranger and not some Pack battle that could come back to kick you in the ass when summer was over and it was time to be brothers again.
The fella that had stepped out of the car was, at first glance, a joker in desperate need of getting the shit kicked out of him—a fucking weekend road warrior in oversized boots, black leather pants and a long leather coat that hung open on his bare chest. He wore a snap-brim fedora that shaded most of his face, especially the eyes. He had long faggoty hair, somewhere between yellow and brown, fine enough to snap out in the wake of each passing car. He wore his beard in that fucked-up fashion Fat Joey could distantly remember from history books, the kind that grew in low at the jaw, but left the chin completely bare. He looked like a movie-poster for one of those after-the-bomb shit-flicks.