Still, Sue-Eye was calm. She knew her way around pure mean, she knew it blindfold. Every man she’d ever known, from her dad right on down the line, had been bred from that poison stock. She wasn’t afraid of the beatings she was sure would come, any more than she was afraid of the big man’s prick. Kane wasn’t human, but then, neither was anyone else swinging tackle between his legs, strictly speaking. He’d use what he wanted to use, his fists or his dick, it made no difference. She’d take it like a champ and beg for more, and he’d keep her when the check came due. They always did.
The purple-haired pony driving the car could be a problem. The big man had a soft spot for her, and judging by last night’s performance, he only had room enough for one soft spot.
That was fine. Sue-Eye had rode in the Pack six years as no one’s bitch, and she alone of all the girls who had ever come that way could say that. Killers had no loyalty, but they had politics, and Sue-Eye knew all the ins and outs of social climbing in a killer’s world. Before Little Miss Don’t-Touch-Me-I’m-Bleeding finished waving goodbye to her Aunt Flow, Sue-Eye intended to be wearing the big man’s tags.
Kane had turned them east after leaving Charlie’s Bar, and while his bitch drove, the big man dozed, his arms folded (the claws of his right hand still stained the ugly brown of dried blood) and his chin lowered to the smooth plane of his chest. He slept light, his eyes sliding open and instantly alert at the slightest of Sue-Eye’s movements. After two hours of this, he raised his head and leaned forward to look up the road.
“Do you want to stop?” Raven asked immediately.
“Briefly.” Kane’s gaze slicked back, black as oil, to run over Sue-Eye’s body. “We need water. Food. Different clothes for my
ichuta’a
. Then I want you take us back to the mountains.”
“We’re headed that way already,” Raven said.
“Good. It was cooler there. And I can do a little work—” His claws grazed over the top of his pack. “—before I have to hunt again.”
“What kind of clothes?” Raven asked. She was switching lanes, getting ready to pull off into the slat-board row of buildings that passed for a strip mall out here on the edge of nowhere.
“The kind you wear.” Kane eyed Sue-Eye’s jeans with an oddly impersonal irritation and grunted. “The kind I can get into.”
Raven parked at the end of the lot, switched off the engine and handed Kane back the keys. She picked up a t-shirt from the seat beside her and shrugged into it, setting her piercings to a muffled jingle, and then got out of the car. “I’ll be right back,” she said.
“I’ll be watching.” The warning in his voice was evident, but had the ring of habit to it. He settled back into his seat and watched Raven walk away, his claws flexing lightly on his biceps.
“You’re not afraid of her taking off?” Sue-Eye asked, trying for a tone of idle curiosity.
He didn’t answer, although he did rest his black eyes briefly and without expression on hers before returning to his watch.
The girl could be in there right now, telling the pop-eyed old farts who ran the place that the guy in the dark blue Nissan had a gun and was holding hostages, but clearly, Kane wasn’t going to hear it. Too soon, too soon to start picking at his rosy picture. Besides, Sue-Eye didn’t really think Raven would rat them out. The bitch knew too well what her man was capable of.
And here she came, rattling back across the parking lot with her rusty cart full of water bottles and two plastic sacks. She put everything in the front passenger seat, grimacing a little under the weight of the water (Kane shifted a little straighter in his seat, frowning), and then passing one of the sacks back to them. “They didn’t have much for food. I got beef jerky and granola bars.”
Kane went straight for the meat as Raven came back around and got behind the wheel. His teeth were sharklike, double rows of killing wedges, made for tearing throats and drinking blood. Sue-Eye faced front, listening as he ate.
After that, it was a three-hour drive east and into the mountains. The space around them got closer, choked in trees tall enough to block the climbing sun. The towns got further and further apart, and when they did run across one, there were a lot more antique stores and restaurants with words like ‘Tavern’ and ‘Cascade’ in their names. Tourist towns. Vacation towns. Places for rich people to come and look pretty while they hunted and shopped and looked at the lake.
“Stop here,” Kane said, when they came to one of these, a little six-street-square piece of nothing called Valley Springs. Sue-Eye couldn’t see a single person under fifty on the sidewalk.
Raven bit her lip as she scanned the quaint little shops for a hotel, and then turned up a side road, following a blue sign with the word Resort on it. There was a double row of cabins in a cute little park, and Sue-Eye knew they were in rich country when she saw how green the grass was. But there weren’t that many cars in the lot and she doubted they’d be turned away, even when they saw the color of Raven’s hair and the studs on Sue-Eye’s jacket. Raven parked the car, and Sue-Eye reached for the door latch.
Without warning, Kane’s hand closed in her hair and her head was wrenched back painfully. She opened her mouth, a ‘back off, motherfucker’ leaping instinctively to her throat in what would have been the very worst response, but her voice died.
She could see nothing but the claw that hung a hair’s breadth from her right eye. It was too close for her to bring it into focus, but she could feel it, she could feel the air itself bouncing off the reality of it and blowing back on her open eye. His face was somewhere beyond the claw, but she couldn’t look to see where. He was going to cut her good eye right out of her head.
“When I do this,” Kane said, very softly, from somewhere in the car, “you are going to feel it. You are going to feel your eye dimple just before I pop it. You are going to feel the heat of its guts pouring down your cheek. I may even make you drink it. Do you hear me, human?”
Yes
. She couldn’t say it. She could barely mouth it.
“You’re going to feel it tug free of its tether. It’s going to hurt. Not much, I understand, not at first. Not until the cord snaps and I hold it free in my hand. It won’t bleed that much. You can’t die from it. Hear me, human. I can take them both and you will live.”
Yes
.
Kane’s hand lowered and now she could see him, now the breath was scraping hoarsely in and out of her. Her eyes itched. She had to fight to keep from reaching up to rub at them.
He said, “We’re going in there. And that’s going to give you a great deal of power over me. But nothing you say, nothing you do, is going to stop me from taking your eyes. If I have time to do nothing else, I will still do that. Do we have an understanding?”
Her voice was still gone. She nodded instead.
“Good.” His eyes on her were black holes that mercy had never touched. “Stay close and keep quiet and you’ll live through this.” He opened his door and climbed out, snapping his fingers once as he went.
Sue-Eye followed him, her legs shaking and strengthless. ‘Be calm,’ she told herself. ‘He’ll hit you if he wants to hit you. He’ll fuck you if he feels like fucking. You’ve had a hundred men like him. They all say they’re going to kill you and none of them ever mean it.’
But none of them had ever threatened to cut out her eyes and feed them to her.
Kane’s arm came around her shoulders, a weight of warning. She could feel the lump of his gun pressing against her side. He waved Raven on ahead of them, and they walked a slow and measured pace across the lot to the resort’s office.
Sue-Eye was right. The clerk did look at Raven’s hair and he did look at Sue-Eye’s jacket. He looked longest at Kane, towering over both of them and gazing back at the clerk with a calm and smiling eye, but in the end, he filled out their registration forms without any show of hesitation. The kitchens were open until ten. The pool was available all night, but lifeguards were on duty only until six. Cabin eight. Have a nice day.
It was stuffy as hell inside the cabin and even hotter than it was outside. Sue-Eye went to the nearest window, but it was painted shut and impossible to move. There was an ancient air conditioner set into the wall, and when Raven switched it on, it spat out a cloud of dust and two dead houseflies, but no cold air. The furniture was nice and the curtains were clean, but a dump was a dump for all of that.
“I can’t believe how much they’re charging for this place,” Raven muttered, and gave Kane a helpless look. “Do you want to keep driving?”
“No.” Kane peered into the closet and then the bathroom, one hand rubbing at his crotch. “You need to rest.”
Oh right. Rest because of her period. Sue-Eye cast Raven a contemptuous glance and the bitch dropped her eyes.
“I can keep going,” Raven said, blushing just a little.
“I said, no.” Kane’s voice was stone, his eyes, steel. “You’re bleeding. I can smell it on you. And you’re hurt. I can see you griping at your belly when you think I’m not looking. So lie down. We’ll stay.”
“But—” Raven looked helplessly at the defunct A/C unit.
“Why do you think I got her?” Kane pointed at Sue-Eye, glowering and drumming his claws on the top of the thoughtfully-provided table. “Now are you going to lie down or do I have to knock you down?”
Raven sat on the foot of the bed, obedient as a poodle. She glanced once at Sue-Eye, her cheeks turning a shamed pink, and then she stripped off her t-shirt and lay down.
Kane’s hand closed over Sue-Eye’s arm and he towed her back outside. He took her back to the car and put the case of water into her arms. “I want you to drink as much of this as you can,” he said, taking the plastic sacks with their meager food and her new clothes for himself. “Not as much as you want. As much as you can.”
She nodded, and he gave her shoulder a shove and sent her on ahead of him back to the cabin. She put the water on the dresser next to the TV and tore the thick plastic open so she could get one of the bottles. It was warm and tasted stale, but she drank it, watching Kane out of the corner of her eye the whole time.
Kane set his pack on the table, slid his finger down the seam to open it, and tinkered with the computer that unfolded. He went to Raven’s side with the knife-edged syringe-thing and bent over her. “Is this much pain normal?” he asked.
Christ, like she had cancer or something.
“I’m okay,” she heard the bitch say. “Really.”
“Arguing with me is a good way to break a bone,” he replied, and Sue-Eye heard, beneath the overt threat of the words, a tone of real affection. “Be still.” He took the blood he’d drawn back to the table and sat down as he stuck it into the top of his computer.
Sue-Eye stood by the TV, working at her water bottle and watching both of them. She could still feel air itching between his claw and her naked eye. She could still smell the coppery stink of blood curdling in the heat as it soaked into Charlie’s floorboards. She was drifting along behind the killer. She had to get back on solid ground.
“You hungry?” Sue-Eye asked, addressing the bitch. The best way into dark places was on tip-toe; the best way to earn the monster’s trust was through his bitch. “I never been in a place with room service before. Bet you they put on a mean spread. And no offense because I know you did your best, but granola bars aren’t going to help you much.”
She put a little extra stress on the ‘you’ in that last remark, knowing that Kane would hear it, knowing he’d think whatever he thought about the girl’s bleeding and wonder what she needed to be eating.
Raven smiled, a pitiful shine of gratitude and relief. ‘Sure thing, sugar,’ thought Sue-Eye stonily. ‘I’ll keep all kinds of secrets for now. He wouldn’t turn on you anyway. Not until he gets to know me better.’
“I’m starved,” Raven said. “And I could really use a Coke.” Her eyes went suddenly to Kane, who was loading a vial into the gadget he’d used to ‘clean’ Sue-Eye with the night before. “Am I sick?” she asked, alarmed.
“Just a precaution.”
“It’s not…” Raven’s voice took on a note of unease and she pressed herself back a few inches into the headboard almost without seeming to be aware of it. “It’s not that…pain stuff you gave me, is it?”
Sue-Eye glanced at Kane in time to see him grin broadly. The expression was strangely at home on his killer’s face, and made him, just for that instant, more formidable than ever. There was nothing more intrinsically terrifying to Sue-Eye’s mind than the Devil with a sense of humor.
“So you
do
remember that.” Kane stood up and went to the bed, moving with a panther’s step and a wicked smile. He snapped his teeth and Raven flinched hard, prompting hearty laughter. “But no. No, it isn’t. Maybe later,” he said.
Kane emptied the contents of his instrument into Raven’s arm and then sat on the edge of the bed, studying her piercings one at a time.
Sue-Eye found the kitchen’s number and a printed menu on a card by the phone and dialed. She ordered steaks for her and Raven, and a surf and turf for Kane (nothing but the best for the Alpha male), along with a pitcher of Coke for the bitch. The cost was obscene, but they had plenty of cash after stripping the Pack at Charlie’s. When she hung up the phone, Kane was staring at her.
Being under that empty eye was like being under a knife. His face was hard, indifferent; he studied her body with a penetrating and impersonal attention utterly devoid of even the most abstract form of lust. His hand was at his groin, the claws flexing sometimes, the heel of his palm sometimes pushing at the bulge concealed there in a gesture of angry constraint. She’d been fucked by men before who didn’t care who they had as long as she had two tits and a tight snatch, but she’d never seen such a chilling lack of interest in any man’s eyes before.
“Let me look at you,” he said finally.
Sue-Eye shrugged out of her jacket—too hot to wear anyway—and pulled her top off. Her bare breasts were fuller than Raven’s, still firm in spite of the years’ hard use, and the crawling of her skin under Kane’s gaze had pushed her nipples out stiff as spikes.
For the first time, Sue-Eye saw a man who wasn’t the least bit interested in tits. Kane’s eyes went directly to the bleeding heart tattoo between them and his expression darkened.