“Kane?” Sue-Eye again. She’d seen he wasn’t actively typing anymore and was back to pestering him.
He shoved his chair back and faced the bed where his unruly
ichuta’a
waited. “When I want you,” he said curtly, “I’ll come and get you. When I don’t, it’s best for you if you stayed out of my way.”
She got that thin, frustrated look that meant she was cross with him, and Kane leaned his head back, feeling the slow simmer of anger unspool inside him. She was a hard little human, the kind who could close her mind away from random pains and never learn a thing by them. He’d broken ones like her before, but unfortunately, it was all too easy to break their bodies before their spirits.
“Ask your question,” he said at last. He hoped it was a stupid one, one that would allow him to give her the beating his hands itched to give.
“What is that stuff you’re making?”
“The name would mean nothing to you,” he said.
“Raven says it’s a drug.”
“If you knew, why did you ask?” Kane strolled to the bedside and touched the tip of one claw to her brow, freezing her in place as effectively as a cryo-sleeper. He pressed, dimpling the skin and then cutting through it, and watched a bead of blood form under the curve of his claw. “Do you think I enjoy interruptions?”
A trickle of red etched its way slowly down the hollow of her underbrow, around her eyes, and then down her cheek like a crimson tear.
She was perfectly motionless.
Kane cocked his head to one side. “Do you think I ask questions that I don’t want answered?” he asked, steel in his voice. He drew his claw down, cutting through the strip of hair above her eye and stopping again just above the softness of her eyelid.
“No,” she whispered.
He could always count on a threat to her eyes to get her cooperation. He was beginning to suspect she’d been injured there before, and maybe only had one good one. If he knew for sure which it was, he’d concentrate on targeting just it, and maybe
then
she’d train up for him.
“Do you think I enjoy interruptions?” he asked again, playing at patience.
“No.”
“Then, and again you force me to repeat myself, if you knew what I was making, why did you ask?”
“Raven only told me it was drugs. I didn’t know what it was.”
She was starting to sweat from the effort of holding so still.
Kane took his claw away and put it to her lips. He waited, and after a few seconds, she opened her mouth to suck her blood from his claw. “It’s a drug,” he said, feeling her tongue swirl cautiously around his finger. It was an agreeable sensation, like the look of that red tear below her unblinking eye. “What difference would it make if you knew the name of it?”
“None,” she said.
“Then don’t ask stupid questions.”
“I wanted to help.”
“Did you?” Kane returned to his chair and sat down, crossing one ankle over the other as he stretched out. “And how did you think to do that? Did you think if you knew the name, you’d suddenly know how to make it?”
“I know it’s made from people,” Sue-Eye said. She still hadn’t reached up to wipe away the blood he’d drawn. “And I know you’ve got a lot of empty bottles.”
Kane considered her, his stalking smile gradually fading. “What did you have in mind?” he asked at last.
“To help you find good places to hunt,” she said. Her eyes slipped away from his for the first time, towards Raven. “Humans know where humans go,” she said. “We could be helping you hunt faster.”
There was a great deal of emphasis in her words, not enough to be open accusation, but enough to send Kane’s gaze inquiringly toward his Raven.
The barb in Sue-Eye’s remarks wasn’t escaping anyone’s notice, it seemed. Raven frowned and drew her knees up before her like a shield. “He knows what he’s doing,” she said. “If he wanted my help, he’d ask for it.”
Kane looked back at Sue-Eye. He was not smiling at all now.
“It’s not your fault,” Sue-Eye told Raven. She returned her gaze to Kane. “I’ve been a bitch a lot longer than her. I know how it’s done. I know it’s our job to anticipate.”
Raven did just fine anticipating the things that mattered, but Kane refused to say so. He wasn’t going to defend a human and he sure as fuck wasn’t going to argue with one.
His cold and silent stare seemed to unsteady Sue-Eye. She dropped her gaze, curling onto her hands and knees in a submissive posture. “The haul you got at Charlie’s was a good one,” she said. “I can help you find another one just as good. One where you can kill easy and no one will interrupt you. If you want to know, just ask me.”
She clearly thought she was being discreet, but Kane recognized a slave shifting for leverage when he saw it. Her invitation was no more or less than a crudely-disguised bid for power, and he didn’t like the way she’d maneuvered Raven into the conversation first. A pretense that artful deserved a second thinking-over. His
ichuta’a
was more than merely irritating, it would seem. She was dangerous, or she thought she was, and it amounted to the same thing, really.
“What are you wanting in exchange?” Kane asked, his voice no more than a growl. His hands, clasped until now behind his head in a posture of indulgence, silently unlocked and curled into killing claws.
“I only want to make you happy. If I please you, you’ll let me live.”
It was a good answer. In fact, by accident or by devious design, it was the only answer she could have given that would have saved her from an immediate and very difficult death. Kane continued to stare her down and she continued to kneel without meeting his eyes. He shifted his gaze to Raven, and she was frowning back at him, searching his face with a clear, if silent, demand to know if he was really stupid enough to believe her. Sue-Eye, the perfect example of acquiescence. Raven, the very picture of defiance.
But the empty vials in his chemist’s pack had a way of drawing his eye, too, and that was the image he allowed to persuade him. He was not convinced, but he allowed himself to be placated.
“All right then.” Kane turned away from both his humans and found his human footcovers. “Clean your face and get dressed. If you want to hunt,
ichuta’a
…let’s hunt.”
*
Tammy Trent stood in the claustrophobic box office at the Hillmark MoviePlex with her finger on the Close Out button, waiting out the last five minutes of her shift. It had been a long one. She’d come on at five and it was now eleven, which didn’t seem so long just by the numbers, but when you added in the heat and the boredom, then it was plenty.
Ideally, the night crew had to have at least one person at each station until twenty minutes after the last show started, but the candy girl had already gone home for the night because she was a lazy bitch. And there was no point in complaining to the night supervisor about it, because he’d gone home with the candy girl.
Oh well. It wouldn’t be the first time Tammy had closed up shop all by herself, and anyway, she wasn’t completely all by herself. There was Gavin, the projectionist, upstairs keeping all four films running smoothly for the benefit of all fifty-eight of their current patrons.
The MoviePlex always ran three new releases and a retread. The new releases all sucked:
Big Man on Campus
, the latest college-crowd pleaser, was nothing but a music video with poop jokes so god-awful that not even the copious amounts of bare tits and pantied asses could coax people in to look at it with any great success.
Eternal Night
was some serial-killer-in-space thing, full of aliens and tentacles and explosions and more bare tits and pantied asses, except of course, that the panties were shinier and more space-age. Finally, there was
Take it to the Street
, which was yet another gang-boy-becomes-rap-star thing, full of swearing and sex and drugs and shootings, and completely oblivious to the fact that there were no black people in Hillmark (that Tammy knew of), and certainly there were no ghettos (the half-dozen rundown trailer parks filled with filthy children, drunken adults, and half-feral dogs, for some reason, did not count), so naturally, it was tanking big time. This week’s retread was
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, and more than half of the night’s crowd was in there, watching Indiana Jones leap around like a little girl at the sight of snakes.
In the olden days, Gavin told her, movies wouldn’t even start unless there were at least ten people in watching them. Nowadays, the movie ran even if the auditorium was empty. He called it a huge waste of time and money. Tammy didn’t really care. The only thing she really cared about right now was ticking down those last five, no, four more minutes until she was done for the night and out of this stuffy old box.
There was a fan in the box office with her, an ancient rotary with ribbons and rubber bands tied to the grate so the breeze would be pretty as well as soothing, but it didn’t really do much more than push the heat back a little. In the evenings, the sun bored down right through the glass and turned Tammy’s room into an oven. After six hours in that roasting pan, Tammy could almost smell cooked pork instead of just sweat. She couldn’t wait to get out of here and go upstairs were it was only muggy instead of openly boiling. Maybe on the way home, Gavin would stop and get her a milkshake or something. The McDonald’s in Kimsey was open all night. He might tease her about it a little bit, but she bet if she offered to let him have some (maybe served up in dribbles over her boobs) he’d buy it for her.
“Excuse me.”
Tammy looked up from her dreamy-eyed trance, staring at her computer screen and thinking of milkshakes, and wouldn’t you just know it? Customers.
There were three of them. The one at the window was a girl maybe Tammy’s age, just out of school, in other words, but there was no way she was a local. She had hair the color of a supermarket eggplant, with two white strips on either side of her face. Her eyebrows and her ears were pierced, and Tammy could see some suspicious bumps under the thin cotton t-shirt she wore that looked like her boobs were pierced, too. She looked nice enough, Tammy supposed, but a girl who would get pierced like that would probably pierce other things, too, and there was only one thing a girl like that would ever be good for. Everybody knew that.
The other two were just as south-bound, in Tammy’s opinion, if not as open about it as the purple-haired girl. There was another girl, a lot older than the pierced one, with straw-blonde hair just growing in dark, who looked like she’d be right at home on the back of one of the choppers that occasionally rolled through in the summertime. The tall man who stood with her looking over the coming attractions posters didn’t look much like a biker, but he did look kind of creepy. Long black coat open to his bare chest, wide-brimmed hat hiding most of his face, hands in his pockets…if he pulled a machete out of thin air right now, he’d make a damn good slasher killer for one of the teenybopper movies.
All of these thoughts passed serenely through Tammy’s head in the time it would take to blink an eye and none of them showed on her face. She was small-town born and bred, and she would be both surprised and hurt if anyone were to indicate she was at all judgmental. She’d been a chubby child and a fat teenager, and she believed that it had made her one of the most tolerant people in the whole world. She would never have
told
the three people before her that they were going to Hell. They probably got enough of that sort of thing from snotty church people all the time. Tammy was nice. Tammy just smiled and said, “Welcome to MoviePlex, how can I help you?”
The purple-haired girl looked up at the show times panels and bit her lip.
“Everything’s started,” Tammy said helpfully. “But
Eternal Night
started the soonest ago. It’s all about killer aliens and stuff. Do you like science-fiction?”
Both girls turned at the same time and looked at the man. He continued to inspect the movie posters. Pierced-Girl turned back to Tammy. “Can we have three for that one, please?”
Tammy rang them up, tore their tickets, and sent them in. The tall man glanced at her as he walked by. He smiled.
A chill crawled up Tammy’s spine and she felt her hair trying to prickle and stand up. His eyes beneath the wide-brimmed hat he wore looked like holes burned in a blanket. It was an awful look, one that, just for a second, didn’t even make him look human. She didn’t breathe easy again until he’d gone all the way in and the door shut behind him.
Tammy took several breaths, scolding herself silently for getting goosy over something as stupid as a guy’s eyes, even eyes as awful as his. He’d been smiling, hadn’t he? She watched from the box office to see if they were going to want candy or something, because it would mean her having to go out and get it, but they went right on in without even looking at the concessions counter. She hit the Close Out key and popped the till out of her drawer. Her monitor went dark, the ticket printer silenced, and she got ready to go.
She left the box silent behind her and walked her money quickly across the lobby to the cash office. The night supervisor had given her the key, as he usually did on the nights he went home with that lazy-bitch candy girl, and Tammy let herself in. The safe was open, stacks of money in plain sight, but there were cameras here to keep her honest, and even if there hadn’t been, Tammy would have been honest anyway. Tammy was a church-goer.
With the day’s tickets bagged out and the money locked up, Tammy signed out for the night and finally went upstairs. The sound of explosions, barking dogs, screams, and the full orchestration of Indiana Jones enveloped her at once. Gavin really cranked up the Dolby at night; it was when all the kids came out and kids liked noise. Besides, it masked any thumping around
they
might make. There was an old couch in the open corner that the employees called a ‘lunch room’ and if anybody knew how many times Tammy had been on it with her hand down Gavin’s pants, no one would ever be able to eat there again.
Tammy giggled at the thought, her mood lightening a little. Gavin didn’t mind driving her home if she fooled around with him first, and he said he liked big girls. He liked her big boobs anyway, and she knew she liked his…his thing. She’d been a virgin when she’d met him—a two-hundred pound virgin who always knew she’d stay a virgin and told herself she didn’t care because anything else was sinful—but he fixed that for her. He was old and he smelled like cigarettes, but the feel of his beard scratching at her body and that sliding, slippery hard-on stuck in her was better than anything she could do herself. Sometimes it felt so good, she actually peed herself a little or something. She loved when that happened. She loved
him
when that happened, but he didn’t like her to say so. And anyway, only snotty old churchies really believed that things like that were sinful.